Northern Transmissions Best Albums of 2022

In sharply differing ways, thoughts of place and identity run through Fontaines D.C.’s music. Where 2019 debut *Dogrel* delivered a rich and raw portrait of the band’s home city, Dublin, 2020 follow-up *A Hero’s Death* was the sound of dislocation, a set of songs drawing on the introspection, exhaustion, and yearning of an anchorless life on the road. When the five-piece moved to London midway through the pandemic, the experiences of being outsiders in a new city, often facing xenophobia and prejudice, provided creative fuel for third album *Skinty Fia*. The music that emerged weaves folk, electronic, and melodic indie pop into their post-punk foundations, while contemplating Irishness and how it transforms in a different country. “That’s the lens through which all of the subjects that we explore are seen through anyway,” singer Grian Chatten tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “There are definitely themes of jealousy, corruption, and stuff like that, but it’s all seen through the eyes of someone who’s at odds with their own identity, culturally speaking.” Recording the album after dark helped breed feelings of discomfort that Chatten says are “necessary to us,” and it continued a nocturnal schedule that had originally countered the claustrophobia of a locked-down city. “We wrote a lot of it at night as well,” says Chatten. “We went into the rehearsal space just as something different to do. When pubs and all that kind of thing were closed, it was a way of us feeling like the world was sort of open.” Here, Chatten and guitarist Carlos O’Connell talk us through a number of *Skinty Fia*’s key moments. **“In ár gCroíthe go deo”** Grian Chatten: “An Irish woman who lived in Coventry \[Margaret Keane\] passed away. Her family wanted the words ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo,’ which means ‘in our hearts forever,’ on her gravestone as a respectful and beautiful ode to her Irishness, but they weren’t allowed without an English translation. Essentially the Church of England decreed that it would be potentially seen as a political slogan. The Irish language is apparently, according to these people, an inflammatory thing in and of itself, which is a very base level of xenophobia. It’s a basic expression of a culture, is the language. If you’re considering that to be related to terrorism, which is what they’re implying, I think. That sounds like it’s something out of the ’70s, but this is two and a half years ago.” Carlos O’Connell: “About a year ago, it got turned around and \[the family\] won this case.” GC: “The family were made aware \[of the song\] and asked if they could listen to it. Apparently they really loved it, and they played it at the gravestone. So, that’s 100,000 Grammys worth of validation.” **“Big Shot”** CO: “When you’ve got used to living with what you have and then all these dreams happen to you, it’s always going to overshadow what you had before. The only impact that \[Fontaines’ success\] was having in my life was that it just made anything that I had before quite meaningless for a while, and I felt quite lost in that. That’s that lyric, ‘I traveled to space and found the moon too small’—it’s like, go up there and actually it’s smaller than the Earth.” GC: “We’ve all experienced it very differently and that’s made us grow in different ways. But that song just sounded like a very true expression of Carlos. Perhaps more honest than he always is with himself or other people. All the honesty was balled up into that tune.” **“Jackie Down the Line”** GC: “It’s an expression of misanthropy. And there’s toxicity there. There’s erosion of each other’s characters. It’s a very un-beneficial, unglamorous relationship that isn’t necessarily about two people. I like the idea of it being about Irishness, fighting to not be eroded as it exists in a different country. The name is Jackie because a Dubliner would be called, in a pejorative sense, a Jackeen by people from other parts of Ireland. That’s probably in reference to the Union Jack as well—it’s like the Pale \[an area of Ireland, including Dublin, that was under English governmental control during the late Middle Ages\]. So it’s this kind of mutation of Irishness or loss of Irishness as it exists, or fails to exist, in a different environment.” **“Roman Holiday”** GC: “The whole thing was colored by my experience in London. I moved to London to be with my fiancée, and as an Irish person living in London, as one of a gang of Irish people, there was that kind of searching energy, there was this excitement, there was a kind of adventure—but also this very, very tight-knit, rigorously upkept group energy. I think that’s what influenced the tune.” **“The Couple Across the Way”** GC: “I lived on Caledonian Road \[in North London\] and our gaff backed onto another house. There was a couple that lived there, they were probably mid-seventies, and they had really loud arguments. The kind of arguments where you’d see London on a map getting further, further away and hear the shout resounding. Something like *The Simpsons*. And the man would come out and take a big breath. He’d stand on his balcony and look left and right and exhale all the drama. And then he’d just turn around and go back in to his gaff to do the same thing the next day. The absurdity of that, of what we put ourselves through, to be in a relationship that causes you such daily pain, to just always turn around and go back in. I couldn’t really help but write about that physical mirror that was there. Am I seeing myself and my girlfriend in these two people, and vice versa? So I tried to tie it in to it being from both perspectives at some point.” **“Skinty Fia”** GC: “The line ‘There is a track beneath the wheel and it’s there ’til we die’ is about being your dad’s son. There are many ways in which we explore doom on this record. One of them is following in the footsteps of your ancestors, or your predecessors, no matter how immediate or far away they might have been. I’m interested in the inescapability of genetics, the idea that your fate is written. I do, on some level, believe in that. That is doom, even if your faith is leading you to a positive place. Freedom is probably the main pursuit of a lot of our music. I think that that is probably a link that ties all of the stuff that we’ve done together—autonomy.” **“I Love You”** GC: “It’s most ostensibly a love letter to Ireland, but has in it the corruption and the sadness and the grief with the ever-changing Dublin and Ireland. The reason that I wanted to call it ‘I Love You’ is because I found its cliché very attractive. It meant that there was a lot of work to be done in order to justify such a basic song and not have it be a clichéd tune. It’s a song with two heads, because you’ve got the slow, melodic verses that are a little bit more straightforward and then the lid is lifted off energetically. I think that the friction between those two things encapsulates the double-edged sword that is love.” **“Nabokov”** GC: “I think there’s a different arc to this album. The first two, I think, achieve a sense of happiness and hope halfway through, and end on a note of hope. I think this one does actually achieve hope halfway through—and then slides back into a hellish, doomy thing with the last track and stuff. I think that was probably one of the more conscious decisions that we made while making this album.”

"2020’s A Hero’s Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London’s iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as “the damnation of the deer”; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer."

Alvvays never intended to take five years to finish their third album, the nervy joyride that is the compulsively lovable Blue Rev. In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock. Global lockdowns notwithstanding, circumstances both ordinary and entirely unpredictable stunted those sessions. Alvvays toured more than expected, a surefire interruption for a band that doesn’t write on the road. A watchful thief then broke into singer Molly Rankin’s apartment and swiped a recorder full of demos, one day before a basement flood nearly ruined all the band’s gear. They subsequently lost a rhythm section and, due to border closures, couldn’t rehearse for months with their masterful new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell. At least the five-year wait was worthwhile: Blue Rev doesn’t simply reassert what’s always been great about Alvvays but instead reimagines it. They have, in part and sum, never been better. There are 14 songs on Blue Rev, making it not only the longest Alvvays album but also the most harmonically rich and lyrically provocative. There are newly aggressive moments here—the gleeful and snarling guitar solo at the heart of opener “Pharmacist,” or the explosive cacophony near the middle of “Many Mirrors.” And there are some purely beautiful spans, too—the church- organ fantasia of “Fourth Figure,” or the blue-skies bridge of “Belinda Says.” But the power and magic of Blue Rev stems from Alvvays’ ability to bridge ostensible binaries, to fuse elements that seem antithetical in single songs—cynicism and empathy, anger and play, clatter and melody, the soft and the steely. The luminous poser kiss-off of “Velveteen,” the lovelorn confusion of “Tile by Tile,” the panicked but somehow reassuring rush of “After the Earthquake”. The songs of Blue Rev thrive on immediacy and intricacy, so good on first listen that the subsequent spins where you hear all the details are an inevitability. This perfectly dovetailed sound stems from an unorthodox—and, for Alvvays, wholly surprising—recording process, unlike anything they’ve ever done. Alvvays are fans of fastidious demos, making maps of new tunes so complete they might as well have topographical contour lines. But in October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes. And then, as Everett has done on recent albums by The War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves, he spent an obsessive amount of time alongside Alvvays filling in the cracks, roughing up the surfaces, and mixing the results. This hybridized approach allowed the band to harness each song’s absolute core, then grace it with texture and depth. Notice the way, for instance, that “Tom Verlaine” bursts into a jittery jangle; then marvel at the drums and drum machines ricocheting off one another, the harmonies that crisscross, and the stacks of guitar that rise between riff and hiss, subtle but essential layers that reveal themselves in time. Every element of Alvvays leveled up in the long interim between albums: Riley is a classic dynamo of a drummer, with the power of a rock deity and the finesse of a jazz pedigree. Their roommate, in-demand bassist Blackwell, finds the center of a song and entrenches it. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan joined Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley to write more this time, reinforcing the band’s collective quest to break patterns heard on their first two albums. The results are beyond question: Blue Rev has more twists and surprises than Alvvays’ cumulative past, and the band seems to revel in these taken chances. This record is fun and often funny, from the hilarious reply-guy bash of “Very Online Guy” to the parodic grind of “Pomeranian Spinster.” Alvvays’ self-titled debut, released when much of the band was still in its early 20s, offered speculation about a distant future—marriage, professionalism, interplanetary citizenship. Antisocialites wrestled with the woes of the now, especially the anxieties of inching toward adulthood. Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become. The spinster with her Pomeranians or Belinda with her babies? The kid fleeing Bristol by train or the loyalist stunned to see old friends return? “How do I gauge whether this is stasis or change?” Rankin sings during the first verse of the plangent and infectious “Easy on Your Own?” In that moment, she pulls the ties tight between past, present, and future to ask hard questions about who we’re going to become, and how. Sure, it arrives a few years later than expected, but the answer for Alvvays is actually simple: They’ve changed gradually, growing on Blue Rev into one of their generation’s most complete and riveting rock bands.

Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was.   The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.  All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”  The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. 

Part of the appeal of Alex G’s homespun folk pop is how unsettling it is. For every Beatles-y melody (“Mission”) or warm, reassuring chorus (“Early Morning Waiting”) there’s the image of a cocked gun (“Runner”) or a mangled voice lurking in the mix like the monster in a fairy-tale forest (“S.D.O.S”). His characters describe adult perspectives with the terror and wonder of children (“No Bitterness,” “Blessing”), and several tracks make awestruck references to God. With every album, he draws closer to the conventions of American indie rock without touching them. And by the time you realize he isn’t just another guy in his bedroom with an acoustic guitar, it’s too late.

“God” figures in the ninth album from Philadelphia, PA based Alex Giannascoli's LP’s title, its first song, and multiple of its thirteen tracks thereafter, not as a concrete religious entity but as a sign for a generalized sense of faith (in something, anything) that fortifies Giannascoli, or the characters he voices, amid the songs’ often fraught situations. Beyond the ambient inspiration of pop, Giannascoli has been drawn in recent years to artists who balance the public and hermetic, the oblique and the intimate, and who present faith more as a shared social language than religious doctrine. As with his previous records, Giannascoli wrote and demoed these songs by himself, at home; but, for the sake of both new tones and “a routine that was outside of my apartment,” he asked some half-dozen engineers to help him produce the “best” recording quality, whatever that meant. The result is an album more dynamic than ever in its sonic palette. Recorded by Mark Watter, Kyle Pulley, Scoops Dardaris at Headroom Studios in Philadelphia, PA Eric Bogacz at Spice House in Philadelphia, PA Jacob Portrait at SugarHouse in New York, NY & Clubhouse in Rhinebeck, NY Connor Priest, Steve Poponi at Gradwell House Recording in Haddon Heights, NJ Earl Bigelow at Watersong Music in Bowdoinham, ME home in Philadelphia, PA Additional vocals by Jessica Lea Mayfield on “After All” Additional vocals by Molly Germer on “Mission” Guitar performed by Samuel Acchione on “Mission”, “Blessing”, “Early Morning Waiting”, “Forgive” Banjo performed by Samuel Acchione on “Forgive” Bass performed by John Heywood on “Blessing”, “Early Morning Waiting”, “Forgive” Drums performed by Tom Kelly on “No Bitterness”, “Blessing”, “Forgive” Strings arranged and performed by Molly Germer on “Early Morning Waiting”, “Miracles”

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Traditionally, a band releases their debut album and heads out for an extended stretch on the road, honing their live chops, twisting their songs into new shapes. But when Black Country, New Road released *For the First Time* in February 2021, that route was blocked off by the pandemic. Instead, the London-based band set out to tweak and tamper with their experimental post-rock sound for a transformative second album. They might not have been able to travel, but their music could. “By the time the first album came out, those songs had existed for so long that we were very keen to change the way we wrote music,” bassist Tyler Hyde tells Apple Music. The material that makes up their second record, *Ants From Up There*, soon came to life, the group using the labyrinthine “Basketball Shoes,” which had been around before their debut, as a springboard. “We wanted to explore the themes we’d created on that song,” says Hyde. “It’s essentially three songs within one, all of which relatively cover the emotions and moods that are on the album. It’s hopeful and light, but still looks at some of the darker sides that the first album showed.” The resultant record sees the band hit hypnotic new peaks. *Ants From Up There*, recorded before the departure of singer Isaac Wood in January 2022, is less reliant on jerky, rhythmic U-turns than their debut (although there is some of that), with expansive, Godspeed You! Black Emperor-ish atmospherics emerging in their place. “Fundamentally, we relearned an entirely new style of playing with each other,” says drummer Charlie Wayne. “We learned a lot about how to express ourselves just for each other rather than for anything else going on externally.” Here Hyde, Wayne, and saxophonist Lewis Evans take us through it, track by track. **“Intro”** Lewis Evans: “This uses the theme from ’Basketball Shoes,’ compressed into these little micro cells and repeated over and over again. It’s just a straight-up, impactful welcome to the album.” **“Chaos Space Marine”** Tyler Hyde: “In this song, we allowed ourselves to get out all the stupid, funny joke style of playing. It was just our way of saying yes to everything. There are many things across the album—and in previous songs from the last album—that are seemingly good ideas, but they’ve come about through a joke. I think the rest of the album is much more considered than that. It’s our silly song. It’s a voyage. It’s a sea shanty. It’s a space trip.” **“Concorde”** Charlie Wayne: “I love how it follows the same chord progression the whole way through, and it’s driven but very soft. It’s got real moments of delicacy, and it’s a song that we all thought quite a lot about when we were getting it together. When you’re restricted to that one-chord sequence, you want it to feel as though it’s going somewhere and progressing, so the peaks and troughs have to be considered.” **“Bread Song”** LE: “It’s like two different songs in one. You’ve got this really quite flowing and free track in a melodic and conventional harmonic way, but rhythmically free and flowing accompaniment to Isaac’s vocals. It feels quite orchestral, and the way that we all play together on this recording is so in sync with each other. We were listening to each other so much, so the swells that one person starts making, people start responding to, and everybody is swelling at the same time and getting quieter at the same time. Then it turns into this almost Soweto, kind of township-style pop tune at the end. It’s a really fun ending to an intense, emotional tune.” **“Good Will Hunting”** LE: “This is another slightly silly one, and it’s got a really silly ending which actually never made the cut on the album, but it’s heavily driven by the riff on the guitars. I think at the time we were listening to quite a bit of Kurt Vile, especially rhythmically. I can remember a conversation about when we wanted the drums to come in and to be super straight, super driven. Then for the choruses, rhythmically, to completely flip and not feel like they were big at all. So for both the choruses, the drums are just tiny.” **“Haldern”** TH: “We were playing at Haldern Pop Festival in north Germany during lockdown. We’d just been allowed to fly for work purposes, and we were doing this session. We did two performances there, and the second one was a livestream, and we weren’t allowed to play songs that weren’t released. At the time, that left us with not very much that we weren’t already bored with, so we decided to do some improv. It was a very lucky day where we were all very in sync with one another. So ‘Haldern’ was totally from improv, which is not how we write ever.” **“Mark’s Theme”** LE: “This is a tune written kind of for my uncle who passed away from COVID in 2021. I wrote it on my tenor saxophone as soon as I found out. I just started playing and wrote that. It’s a reflection on him and my feelings towards him passing away and everything being really bleak. He was a massive fan and supporter of the band, so it felt right to put that on the album and to have his name remembered with our music.” **“The Place Where He Inserted the Blade”** CW: “For me, this is about as far away as we went from the first album. Aesthetically, where the first album has moments of real dissonance and apathy, ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’ is very warm and rich and quite uplifting. I think it strikes right to the heart of what the album is for me, which is fundamentally being in the room, making music with my friends.” **“Snow Globes”** LE: “This is another tune where we really thought about what we wanted from it before we wrote it. We had examples of things we liked, and one of them was Frank Ocean’s ‘White Ferrari.’ We liked the idea of it almost being like two different bands \[playing\] at the same time. So you’ve got this quite simple but quite heart-wrenching, fugal-sounding arrangement of all the instruments with a drum solo that is just crazy and doesn’t really relate too much to what is going on in the other instruments. We react to the drum solo, but he doesn’t react to us. It’s that kind of idea.” **“Basketball Shoes”** TH: “It’s essentially a medley of the whole album. It’s got literal musical motifs that are repeated on different songs in the album. It touches on all the themes that we’ve been exploring, and it’s the most climactic song on the album. It wouldn’t really make sense to not finish with it, it’s so exhausting. It’s such a journey. I think you just wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to anything that followed it because you’d be so wiped out after listening to it.”

Black Country, New Road return with the news that their second album, “Ants From Up There”, will land on February 4th on Ninja Tune. Following on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of their acclaimed debut “For the first time”, the band have harnessed the momentum from that record and run full pelt into their second, with “Ants From Up There” managing to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before, as well as a natural progression. Released alongside the announcement the band (Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Charlie Wayne, Luke Mark, Isaac Wood, Tyler Hyde and Georgia Ellery) have also today shared the first single from the album, ‘Chaos Space Marine’, a track that has already become a live favourite with fans since its first public airings earlier this year - combining sprightly violin, rhythmic piano, and stabs of saxophone to create something infectiously fluid that builds to a rousing crescendo. It’s a track that frontman Isaac Wood calls “the best song we’ve ever written.” It’s a chaotic yet coherent creation that ricochets around unpredictably but also seamlessly. “We threw in every idea anyone had with that song,” says Wood. “So the making of it was a really fast, whimsical approach - like throwing all the shit at the wall and just letting everything stick.” Their debut “For the first time” is a certain 2021 Album of the Year, having received ecstatic reviews from critics and fans alike as well as being shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Released in February to extensive, global, critical support - perhaps best summed up by The Times who wrote in their 5/5 review that they were "the most exciting band of 2021" and The Observer who called their record "one of the best albums of the year" - the album made a significant dent on the UK Albums Chart where it landed at #4 in its first week, a remarkable achievement for a largely experimental debut record. The album also reached #1 on Any Decent Music, #2 at Album Of The Year and sat at #1 on Rate Your Music for several weeks, remaining the record to generate the most fan reviews and site discussion there this year. Black Country, New Road were also declared Artist Of The Week and Album Of The Week by The Observer, The Line Of Best Fit and Stereogum, and saw features, including covers and reviews, from the likes of Mojo, NPR, CRACK, Uncut, The Quietus, Pitchfork, The FADER, Loud & Quiet, The Face, Paste, The Needle Drop, DIY, NME, CLASH, So Young, Dork and more. With “For the first time” the band melded klezmer, post-rock, indie and an often intense spoken word delivery. On “Ants From Up There” they have expanded on this unique concoction to create a singular sonic middle ground that traverses classical minimalism, indie-folk, pop, alt rock and a distinct tone that is already unique to the band. Recorded at Chale Abbey Studios, Isle Of Wight, across the summer with the band’s long-term live engineer Sergio Maschetzko, it’s also an album that comes loaded with a deep-rooted conviction in the end result. “We were just so hyped the whole time,” says Hyde. “It was such a pleasure to make. I've kind of accepted that this might be the best thing that I'm ever part of for the rest of my life. And that's fine.” Black Country, New Road's live performances have already gained legendary status from fans and has seen them labelled "one of the UK's best live bands" by The Guardian. After the success of their livestream direct from London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, stand-out performances at SXSW and the BBC 6 Music Festival, and following a sold-out UK tour this summer, high-profile festival appearances, and a 43 date UK & EU tour to follow in the Autumn with sold out US dates next year, the London-based seven-piece today announce further UK & IE dates in support of the album for April 2022, preceded by their biggest London headliner to date at The Roundhouse in February. Black Country, New Road Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, will be available as part of the Deluxe LP and CD versions of ‘Ants From Up There’. Fans who pre-order any format of ‘Ants From Up There’ from the Black Country, New Road store, their Bandcamp page and the Ninja Tune shop, will be able to gain access to the pre-sale for the 2022 UK headline tour dates. The full set of dates are as follows: 22/10/2021 - Rotondes, Luxembourg 23/10/2021 - Bumann & Sohn, Cologne – DE (SOLD OUT) 24/10/2021 - Botanique Orangerie, Belgium – BE (SOLD OUT) 25/10/2021 - Le Trabendo, Paris - FR 27/10/2021 - Le Grand Mix, Tourcoing - FR 28/10/2021 - Lieu Unique, Nantes - FR 29/10/2021 - Rockschool Barbey, Bordeaux - FR 1/11/2021 - Teatro Duse, Bologna - IT 2/11/2021 - Auditorium Della Mole, Ancona - IT 05/11/2021 - Circolo della Musica, Turin - IT 06/11/2021 - Bogen F, Zürich - CH (SOLD OUT) 08/11/2021 - Underdogs', Prague - CZ (SOLD OUT) 09/11/2021 - Frannz Club, Berlin - DE (SOLD OUT) 10/11/2021 - Hydrozagadka, Warsaw - PL (SOLD OUT) 11/11/2021 - Transcentury Update Warm Up @ UT Connewitz Leipzig - DE 12/11/2021 - Bahnhof Pauli, Hamburg - DE 14/11/2021 - Le Guess Who? Festival, Utrecht - NL 16/11/2021 - Paradiso Noord, Amsterdam - NL (SOLD OUT) 20/11/2021 - Super Bock En Stock, Lisbon - PT 21/11/2021 - ZDB, Lisbon - PT (SOLD OUT) 29/11/2021 - Chalk, Brighton - UK (SOLD OUT) * 30/11/2021 - Junction 1, Cambridge - UK (SOLD OUT) * 01/12/2021 - 1865, Southampton - UK * 03/12/2021 - Arts Club, Liverpool - UK (SOLD OUT) * 04/12/2021 - Irish Centre, Leeds - UK (SOLD OUT) * 06/12/2021 - O2 Ritz Manchester, Manchester – UK * (SOLD OUT) 07/12/2021 - Newcastle University Student Union, Newcastle Upon Tyne - UK * 08/12/2021 - SWG3, Glasgow - UK * 09/12/2021 - The Mill, Birmingham - UK * (SOLD OUT) 10/12/2021 - The Waterfront, Norwich - UK * 12/12/2021 – Marble Factory, Bristol – UK (SOLD OUT) * 13/12/2021 - Y Plas, Cardiff - UK * 15/12/2021 - Whelan's, Dublin - IE (SOLD OUT) * 08/02/2022 - Roundhouse, London - UK 18/02/2022 – DC9 Nightclub, Washington, DC – US (SOLD OUT) 19/02/2022 – The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA – US (SOLD OUT) 22/02/2022 – Sultan Room, Turk’s Inn, Brooklyn, NY – US (SOLD OUT) 23/02/2022 – Elsewhere, Brooklyn, NY – US 25/02/2022 – Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia, PA – US (SOLD OUT) 26/02/2022 – Bar Le Ritz, Montreal, QC – CAN 28/02/2022 – Third Man Records, Detroit, MI – US 01/03/2022 – Lincoln Hall, Chicago, IL – US 03/03/2022 – Barboza, Seattle, WA – US (SOLD OUT) 04/03/2022 – Polaris Hall, Portland, OR – US 05/03/2022 – The Miniplex, Richard’s Goat Tavern, Arcata, CA – US 06/03/2022 – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – US 08/03/2022 – Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA – US (SOLD OUT) 09/03/2022 – Regent Theater, Los Angeles, CA – US 06/04/2022 - The Foundry, Sheffield - UK 07/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Oxford - UK 09/04/2022 - Liquid Room, Edinburgh - UK 10/04/2022 - The Empire, Belfast - UK 11/04/2022 - 3Olympia, Dublin - IE 13/04/2022 - Albert Hall, Manchester - UK 14/04/2022 - Rock City, Nottingham - UK 16/04/2022 - Concorde 2, Brighton - UK 17/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Bristol - UK 02/06/2022 – Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona - ES 08/07/2022 - Pohoda Festival, Trencin – SK * - with Ethan P. Flynn Pre-sale to The Roundhouse show and April 2022 UK / IE dates available from Tuesday 19th October at 9am BST. Tickets go on general sale on Friday 22nd October at 9am BST.

Black Thought may be best-known as part of The Roots, performing night after late night for Jimmy Fallon’s TV audience, yet the Philadelphia native concurrently boasts a staggering reputation as a stand-alone rapper. Though he’s earned GOAT nods from listeners for earth-shaking features alongside Big Pun, Eminem, and Rapsody, his solo catalog long remained relatively modest in size. Meanwhile, Danger Mouse had a short yet monumental run in the 2000s that made him one of that decade’s most beloved and respected producers. His discography from that period contains no shortage of microphone dynamos, most notably MF DOOM (as DANGERDOOM) and Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green (as Gnarls Barkley). Uniting these low-key hip-hop powerhouses is the stuff of hip-hop dreams, the kind of fantasy-league-style draft you’d encounter on rap message boards. Yet *Cheat Codes* is real—perhaps realer than real. Danger Mouse’s penchant for quirkily cinematic, subtly soulful soundscapes remains from the old days, but the growth from his 2010s work with the likes of composer Daniele Luppi gives “Aquamarine” and “Sometimes” undeniable big-screen energy. Black Thought luxuriates over these luxurious beats, his lyrical lexicon put to excellent use over the feverish funk of “No Gold Teeth” and the rollicking blues of “Close to Famous.” As if their team-up wasn’t enough, an intergenerational cabal of rapper guests bless the proceedings. From living legend Raekwon to A$AP Rocky to Conway the Machine, New York artists play a pivotal role here. A lost DOOM verse, apparently from *The Mouse and the Mask* sessions, makes its way onto the sauntering and sunny “Belize,” another gift for the fans.

Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.

Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years –both in and out of lockdown –these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.

Jake Lenderman lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He plays guitar in the indie band Wednesday, sometimes fishes on the Pigeon River, and creates his own music as MJ Lenderman. His latest solo release with Dear Life Records is titled Boat Songs. Lenderman describes the album as his most “polished” sound to date, built around songs that “chase fulfillment and happiness”—whether that means buying a boat, drinking too much, or watching seeds fall from the bird feeder. Boat Songs is the followup to Lenderman’s 2021 label debut, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, and subsequent release, Knockin’, with Dear Life Records, both of which were critically acclaimed for their off-the-cuff alternative country sound. But with Boat Songs, Lenderman emerges confident as ever, an innovative yet unassuming artist, straightforward and true. Recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun with Alex Farrar and Colin Miller, Boat Songs is the first album Lenderman made in a professional studio. WWE matches and basketball games were silently projected on the studio walls during recording sessions. And you can hear their power in these ten unapologetically lo-fi tracks, each brimming with pent-up energy and the element of surprise. A clavichord honks throughout ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat’ with the playfulness of a live Dylan/Band set. ‘SUV’ screams with My Bloody Valentine distortion. When Xandy Chelmis beautifully bends his steel guitar on ‘TLC Cage Match’ you can't help but think of Gram Parsons. And ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’ howls with the intensity of Crazy Horse era Neil Young. Boat Songs is fearless and it’s exciting. It challenges the perception of what modern day country music is supposed to be and where it can go. But no matter where Boat Songs goes sonically, the album is deeply rooted in Lenderman’s natural gifts as a storyteller. Someone once asked Hank Williams what made country music successful and he said, “One word: sincerity.” Filled with everyday observations ripped straight from his journal, Lenderman’s lyrics are sincere in their absurdities, with the vulnerability and honesty of Jason Molina and Daniel Johnston. There are moments of humor (‘Jackass is funny like the Earth is round’), admission (‘I know why we get so fucked up’), and recognition of beauty others might not stop to see (‘Your laundry looks so pretty...relaxing in the wind’). Read alone on the page, ‘Hangover Game,’ ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat,’ and ‘Dan Marino,’ stand out as perfect little poems, unpretentious and real. Simply said, these songs are unforgettable. Or you could also say it like this: listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch. The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again. But it don’t matter how many times you’ve heard them, because they're from the heart—and in the end they always make you feel alive again. --Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

A couple of years before she became known as one half of Wet Leg, Rhian Teasdale left her home on the Isle of Wight, where a long-term relationship had been faltering, to live with friends in London. Every Tuesday, their evening would be interrupted by the sound of people screaming in the property below. “We were so worried the first time we heard it,” Teasdale tells Apple Music. Eventually, their investigations revealed that scream therapy sessions were being held downstairs. “There’s this big scream in the song ‘Ur Mum,’” says Teasdale. “I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” That mix of humor and emotional candor is typical of *Wet Leg*. Crafting tightly sprung post-punk and melodic psych-pop and indie rock, Teasdale and bandmate Hester Chambers explore the existential anxieties thrown up by breakups, partying, dating apps, and doomscrolling—while also celebrating the fun to be had in supermarkets. “It’s my own experience as a twentysomething girl from the Isle of Wight moving to London,” says Teasdale. The strains of disenchantment and frustration are leavened by droll, acerbic wit (“You’re like a piece of shit, you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat,” she chides an ex on “Piece of shit”), and humor has helped counter the dizzying speed of Wet Leg’s ascent. On the strength of debut single “Chaise Longue,” Teasdale and Chambers were instantly cast by many—including Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Florence Welch—as one of Britain’s most exciting new bands. But the pair have remained committed to why they formed Wet Leg in the first place. “It’s such a shame when you see bands but they’re habitually in their band—they’re not enjoying it,” says Teasdale. “I don’t want us to ever lose sight of having fun. Having silly songs obviously helps.” Here, she takes us through each of the songs—silly or otherwise—on *Wet Leg*. **“Being in Love”** “People always say, ‘Oh, romantic love is everything. It’s what every person should have in this life.’ But actually, it’s not really conducive to getting on with what you want to do in life. I read somewhere that the kind of chemical storm that is produced in your brain, if you look at a scan, it’s similar to someone with OCD. I just wanted to kind of make that comparison.” **“Chaise Longue”** “It came out of a silly impromptu late-night jam. I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I stay over, she always makes up the chaise longue for me. It was a song that never really was supposed to see the light of day. So it’s really funny to me that so many people are into it and have connected with it. It’s cool. I was as an assistant stylist \[on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ video\]. Online, a newspaper \[*The New York Times*\] was doing the top 10 videos out this week, and it was funny to see ‘Chaise Longue’ next to this video I’d been working on. Being on set, you have an idea of the budget that goes into getting all these people together to make this big pop-star video. And then you scroll down and it’s our little video that we spent about £50 on. Hester had a camera and she set up all the shots. Then I edited it using a free trial version of Final Cut.” **“Angelica”** “The song is set at a party that you no longer want to be at. Other people are feeling the same, but you are all just fervently, aggressively trying to force yourself to have a good time. And actually, it’s not always possible to have good times all the time. Angelica is the name of my oldest friend, so we’ve been to a lot of rubbish parties together. We’ve also been to a lot of good parties together, but I thought it would be fun to put her name in the song and have her running around as the main character.” **“I Don’t Wanna Go Out”** “It’s kind of similar to ‘Angelica’—it’s that disenchantment of getting fucked up at parties, and you’re gradually edging into your late twenties, early thirties, and you’re still working your shitty waitressing job. I was trying to convince myself that I was working these shitty jobs so that I could do music on the side. But actually, you’re kind of kidding yourself and you’re seeing all of your friends starting to get real jobs and they’re able to buy themselves nice shampoo. You’re trying to distract yourself from not achieving the things that you want to achieve in life by going to these parties. But you can’t keep kidding yourself, and I think it’s that realization that I’ve tried to inject into the lyrics of this song.” **“Wet Dream”** “The chorus is ‘Beam me up.’ There’s this Instagram account called beam\_me\_up\_softboi. It’s posts of screenshots of people’s texts and DMs and dating-app goings-on with this term ‘softboi,’ which to put it quite simply is someone in the dating scene who’s presenting themselves as super, super in touch with their feelings and really into art and culture. And they use that as currency to try and pick up girls. It’s not just men that are softbois; women can totally be softbois, too. The character in the song is that, basically. It’s got a little bit of my own personal breakup injected into it. This particular person would message me since we’d broken up being like, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you. I dreamt that we were married,’ even though it was definitely over. So I guess that’s why I decided to set it within a dream: It was kind of making fun of this particular message that would keep coming through to me.” **“Convincing”** “I was really pleased when we came to recording this one, because for the bulk of the album, it is mainly me taking lead vocals, which is fine, but Hester has just the most beautiful voice. I hope she won’t mind me saying, but she kind of struggles to see that herself. So it felt like a big win when she was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to sing. I’m going to do this song.’ It’s such a cool song and she sounds so great on it.” **“Loving You”** “I met this guy when I was 20, so I was pretty young. We were together for six or seven years or something, and he was a bit older, and I just fell so hard. I fell so, so hard in love with him. And then it got pretty toxic towards the end, and I guess I was a bit angry at how things had gone. So it’s just a pretty angry song, without dobbing him in too much. I feel better now, though. Don’t worry. It’s all good.” **“Ur Mum”** “It’s about giving up on a relationship that isn’t serving you anymore, either of you, and being able to put that down and walk away from it. I was living with this guy on the Isle of Wight, living the small-town life. I was trying to move to London or Bristol or Brighton and then I’d move back to be with this person. Eventually, we managed to put the relationship down and I moved in with some friends in London. Every Tuesday, it’d get to 7 pm and you’d hear that massive group scream. We learned that downstairs was home to the Psychedelic Society and eventually realized that it was scream therapy. I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” **“Oh No”** “The amount of time and energy that I lose by doomscrolling is not OK. It’s not big and it’s not clever. This song is acknowledging that and also acknowledging this other world that you live in when you’re lost in your phone. When we first wrote this, it was just to fill enough time to play a festival that we’d been booked for when we didn’t have a full half-hour set. It used to be even more repetitive, and the lyrics used to be all the same the whole way through. When it came to recording it, we’re like, ‘We should probably write a few more lyrics,’ because when you’re playing stuff live, I think you can definitely get away with not having actual lyrics.” **“Piece of shit”** “When I’m writing the lyrics for all the songs with Wet Leg, I am quite careful to lean towards using quite straightforward, unfussy language and I avoid, at all costs, using similes. But this song is the one song on the album that uses simile—‘like a piece of shit.’ Pretty poetic. I think writing this song kind of helped me move on from that \[breakup\]. It sounds like I’m pretty wound up. But actually, it’s OK now, I feel a lot better.” **“Supermarket”** “It was written just as we were coming out of lockdown and there was that time where the highlight of your week would be going to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, because that was literally all you could do. I remember queuing for Aldi and feeling like I was queuing for a nightclub.” **“Too Late Now”** “It’s about arriving in adulthood and things maybe not being how you thought they would be. Getting to a certain age, when it’s time to get a real job, and you’re a bit lost, trying to navigate through this world of dating apps and social media. So much is out of our control in this life, and ‘Too late now, lost track somehow,’ it’s just being like, ‘Everything’s turned to shit right now, but that’s OK because it’s unavoidable.’ It sounds very depressing, but you know sometimes how you can just take comfort in the fact that no matter what you do, you’re going to die anyway, so don’t worry about it too much, because you can’t control everything? I guess there’s a little bit of that in ‘Too Late Now.’”

As the child of an Air Force engineer, Bartees Strange moved around a lot; as an adult, he’s exhibited a similar propensity for uprooting his life, as he’s shifted his career course from college football prospect to press secretary in the Obama administration to indie-rock raconteur. But even as the D.C.-based singer/songwriter/producer has found his true calling in music, he’s remained a restless soul. His 2020 debut, *Live Forever*, introduced an artist equally comfortable with bedroom-pop confessionals, scrappy punk-powered salvos, synthesizer experimentation, and trap-schooled flows. But those discrete elements were skillfully threaded together by Bartees’ outsized emotionalism and lyrical oversharing. With his inaugural album for the iconic 4AD imprint, *Farm to Table*, Bartees doubles down on his mission to make you feel it all, all at once. In true write-what-you-know fashion, the album is a document of Bartees’ sudden entry into the spotlight, as a touring musician longing to be with his partner and as a Black man navigating both the largely white world of indie rock and the tumultuous racial politics of 2020s America. “What I\'m trying to say with all these feelings, and all these sounds, and all these thoughts, is I\'m just a person,” Bartees tells Apple Music. “All of it is coming from one vessel. What I\'m asking for is people to just listen to me fully, and hear what I\'m trying to say with all of this—because you may find something in it that relates to you.” Here, Bartees takes us through *Farm to Table*, one course at a time. **“Heavy Heart”** “When *Live Forever* came out, I was feeling a weird survivor\'s guilt around the success of the album, because it happened right as everything was just taking a huge downturn: The stock market crashed, and then the pandemic happened, and then my granddad died, and then all my friends were losing their jobs and getting COVID and there were no vaccines out...and I was experiencing the greatest moment of my life! I couldn\'t talk about it to anyone without feeling horrible. So this song is saying, ‘You\'ve got to let the guilt go. You got to let the heavy heart go. Life is bigger than that—you can enjoy it even when things are dark.’” **“Mulholland Dr.”** “I wrote this song when I was in LA, and I felt like I went through the full stages of grief with LA. I was like, ‘Damn, LA is the greatest city in the world! The weather\'s perfect! Everyone\'s so pretty!’ And the whole way that LA functions is ruining LA—you have the forest fires, extreme heat, the droughts, and people pumping water from Colorado up into the Hollywood Hills for their mansions, and you have all these homeless folks. This place is so pretty and so dark and evil at the same time. These people don\'t care about shit, and I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad, but they seem happy—and I\'m not!” **“Wretched”** “This song is basically a thank-you to the people who stood by me and always supported me, even when I was just kind of figuring it out and I didn\'t know who I was or what I was doing. But there were always people who said to me, \'Trust your gut—go with what you think works. Life is short, be happy.\' Even when I thought I wasn’t worth anything and I thought I was wretched, there were some people who would always check in with me. It\'s a big thank-you in a huge dance track.” **“Cosigns”** “There\'s two sides to success. People will be like, \'Yo, Bartees is crushing it!\' And I feel the same way: \'Yo, I\'m out here with the people I\'ve always looked up to and admired for years as songwriters, and I\'m finally getting to meet them and party with them and write with them and tour with them.\' But at the same time, it awakens this other side of me, which is fiercely competitive—I\'m wanting what they have, and more. And I kind of always worry, \'Will I ever be satisfied? What do I really want? Do I really want to be the biggest thing I possibly can be? Do I really want to tour 320 days a year?\' Those are things you have to weigh against the competitiveness and the drive.” **“Tours”** “This song is kind of about turning into your parents. My dad was in the military, and he would go on tour—he\'d be gone for a couple months, and we would all miss him. And I remember just thinking, \'Damn, when I grow up, I\'m never gonna be gone this much!\' And now, I look at my life, and it’s like, I\'m going to be gone more. I\'ll probably have a family and I\'ll be like my dad, saying, ‘Goodbye—see you in a couple of months,\' and rolling out. But as I\'ve gotten older, I understand why he did it—because he loves it. He wanted us to see him doing something that he loves to do, and I appreciate that more now.” **“Hold the Line”** “With this song, I knew I didn\'t have anything new to offer \[about the murder of George Floyd\]. That\'s kind of the point of the song: I don\'t have a solution. I don\'t know what it looks like in a world where things like this don\'t happen anymore, because I, nor anyone, has ever seen it. But I do know that it\'s wrong, and that it\'s hard, and it hurts every single time. And I remember seeing that young girl, Gianna Floyd, talking to the media about how her dad died. A lot of Black kids don\'t get to be kids—it\'s taken away so early. And my heart just went out to her in that moment, because I was watching her childhood just dissipate before our very eyes, knowing her life is never going to be the same, in so many ways. I live in D.C. and I was watching all of the protesters marching together, trying to hold the line. But we don\'t even know what we\'re really fighting for. We\'re just all hurting. And that\'s what that song is about: It\'s just a collective feeling of pain and sorrow, but knowing that we have to stick together no matter what. Even if we don\'t know what it looks like when it is all better, we do know that we all need to be together for it to get better.” **“We Were Only Close for Like Two Weeks”** “I was in LA, and I met this girl, and we were talking about this artist. And she\'s like, \'Oh, my god—I love him. We were soooo close, for, like, two weeks.\' And I was like, \'What? Is that even real?\' So I started thinking and realized, ‘I guess there are some people I can say in my life where, for a month, we were tight.’ And I was just kind of meditating on that and created a song that happens in a different time period to where I am currently.” **“Escape This Circus”** “This song is a kissing cousin to \'Mulholland Dr.\' That song is calling out all these issues and being like, ‘I don\'t really know what to do with all this, but the world is falling apart and some people are dancing in the sun.’ I end the song by saying, with all this stuff going on, the only thing you can do to change the world is to start with yourself—start with your community. I\'m saying, ‘That\'s why I really can\'t fuck with you all.’ I don\'t want to act that I care about going to the march or donating money to the Sierra Club—all these things that we think are changing the world is not going to do more than you taking like an active role in your community and in your own life and with your own mental health and the things that you could actually control.” **“Black Gold”** “This is about when I left Oklahoma and moved to the East Coast. And it was just a moment where nobody wanted me to leave, but I knew I had to leave. I don\'t think I understood what I had when I left, I was just kind of pissed off—like, ‘Why am I here? I fucking hate this!’ But everything that was there is what made me who I am, and the more that I learned to appreciate my gifts, and who I was, the more I felt bad about how I left town, and the things I said and how I made people feel about staying there. I wasn\'t very thoughtful. This song is me looking back and reflecting on something I wish I would have handled better.” **“Hennessy”** “You go through all these peaks and valleys of the album, some of which are very personal and some of which are very glassy and super-produced. And you get to the end with this song, and it\'s just kind of a torn-up, broken little thing. It\'s very human, and I wanted it to be that way, because I feel like it\'s so easy for people to look at Black artists and say, \'Oh, he\'s one thing—he\'s a rock person,\' or \'he\'s a rapper.\' And I\'m kind of playing with this idea by singing, \'And they say Black folks drink Hennessy\'—like, this is what they do. And I\'m saying, I want you to see me for who I really am: a person that contains just as many feelings as you may feel.”

For all the different forms his music has assumed over the years—glam, chamber-folk, yacht rock, dream-pop—you can readily identify any Destroyer song the instant that Dan Bejar opens his mouth to dispense his cryptic yet deliciously dramatic narratives. And no record in his long, winding career puts that theory to the test as gleefully as *LABYRINTHITIS*, an album that’s essentially the musical manifestation of his famously frizzy, mad-scientist hairdo: It’s bursting with wild sonic ideas that shoot off in every direction, yet it’s always unmistakably him. After luring us in with the warm, shoegazey synth drones and subaquatic bass throb of “It’s in Your Heart Now,” *LABYRINTHITIS* traps us in its maniacal maze and dares us to find a way out: “June” deviously blurs the line between polyrhythmic post-punk and ’80s adult-contemporary pop before free-falling into a bizarre, voice-modulated spoken-word breakdown; “Tintoretto, It’s for You” is part louche cabaret strut, part festival-EDM meltdown. But *LABYRINTHITIS*’s boldness of vision also yields rousing moments of release (“Suffer,” “It Takes a Thief”) that infuse the pop elegance of 2011’s *Kaputt* with a little extra *kapow*. The instrumental title track provides a welcome mid-album reprieve in which the band crafts a Boards of Canada-worthy pastorale, complete with the comforting sounds of chattering children.

The irony of Sophie Allison calling her second Soccer Mommy album *color theory* is that the title would be a better fit for her third, *Sometimes, Forever*. Not only is this record more stylistically varied on a track-to-track level—the flinty, classic indie rock of “Bones” and “Following Eyes,” the industrial tilt of “Darkness Forever,” the country vibe of “Feel It All the Time”—but it amplifies the internal mixings that make Allison’s songs vivid: beauty and dissonance (“Unholy Affliction”), romance and violence (“I cut a piece out of my thigh/And felt my heart go skydiving” on “Still”), bitter wisdom and wide-eyed innocence (“Feel It All the Time”). She’s a devoted student of the ’90s, to be sure—but one who’s rapidly outgrowing her influences, too.

Sometimes, Forever, the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length, cements Sophie Allison’s status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. The album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that made earlier songs so easy to obsess over. To support her vision Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, whose recent credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd’s Dawn FM.

London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.

When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.

For fans of ’90s indie rock—your Sonic Youths, your Breeders, your Yo La Tengos—*Versions of Modern Performance* will serve as cosmic validation: Even the kids know the old ways are best. But who influenced you is never as important as what you took from them, a lesson that Chicago’s Horsegirl understands intuitively. Instead, the art is in putting it together: the haze of shoegaze and the deadpan of post-punk (“Option 8,” “Billy”), slacker confidence and twee butterflies (“Beautiful Song,” “World of Pots and Pans”). Their arty interludes they present not as free-jazz improvisers, but a teenage garage band in love with the way their amps hum (“Bog Bog 1,” “Electrolocation 2”).

Horsegirl are best friends. You don’t have to talk to the trio for more than five minutes to feel the warmth and strength of their bond, which crackles through every second of their debut full-length, Versions of Modern Performance. Penelope Lowenstein (guitar, vocals), Nora Cheng (guitar, vocals), and Gigi Reece (drums) do everything collectively, from songwriting to trading vocal duties and swapping instruments to sound and visual art design. “We made [this album] knowing so fully what we were trying to do,” the band says. “We would never pursue something if one person wasn’t feeling good about it. But also, if someone thought something was good, chances are we all thought it was good. ”Versions of Modern Performance was recorded with John Agnello (Kurt Vile, The Breeders, Dinosaur Jr.) at Electrical Audio. “It’s our debut bare-bones album in a Chicago institution with a producer who we feel like really respected what we were trying to do,” the band says. Horsegirl expertly play with texture, shape, and shade across the record, showcasing their fondness for improvisation and experimentation. Opener “Anti-glory” is elastic and bright post-punk, while the guitars in instrumental interlude “Bog Bog 1” smear across the song’s canvas like watercolors. “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” and “World of Pots and Pans” have rough, blown-out pop charm. “The Fall of Horsegirl” is all sharp edges and dark corners.

Anyone encountering the gorgeous, ’70s-style orchestral pop of *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* might be surprised to learn that Natalie Mering started her journey as an experimental-noise musician. Listen closer, though, and you’ll hear an album whose beauty isn’t just tempered by visions of almost apocalyptic despair, but one that also turns beauty itself into a kind of weapon against the deadness and cynicism of modern life. After all, what could be more rebellious in 2022 than being as relentlessly and unapologetically beautiful as possible? Stylistically, the album draws influence from the gold-toned sounds of California artists like Harry Nilsson, Judee Sill, and even the Carpenters. Its mood evokes the strange mix of cheerfulness and violent intimations that makes late-’60s Los Angeles so captivating to the cultural imagination. And like, say, The Beach Boys circa *Pet Sounds* or *Smiley Smile*, the sophistication of Mering’s arrangements—the mix of strings, synthesizer touches, soft-focus ambience, and bone-dry intimacy—is more evocative of childhood innocence than adult mastery. Where her 2019 breakthrough, *Titanic Rising*, emphasized doom, *Hearts Aglow*—the second installment of a stated trilogy—emphasizes hope. She writes about alienation in a way that feels both compassionate and angst-free (“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”), and of romance so total, it could make you as sick as a faceful of roses (“Hearts Aglow,” “Grapevine”). And when the hard times come, she prays not for thicker armor, but to be made so soft that the next touch might crush her completely (“God Turn Me Into a Flower”). All told, *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* is the feather that knocks you over.

August 25th, 2022 Los Angeles, CA Hello Listener, Well, here we are! Still making it all happen in our very own, fully functional shit show. My heart, like a glow stick that’s been cracked, lights up my chest in a little explosion of earnestness. And when your heart's on fire, smoke gets in your eyes. Titanic Rising was the first album of three in a special trilogy. It was an observation of things to come, the feelings of impending doom. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is about entering the next phase, the one in which we all find ourselves today — we are literally in the thick of it. Feeling around in the dark for meaning in a time of instability and irrevocable change. Looking for embers where fire used to be. Seeking freedom from algorithms and a destiny of repetitive loops. Information is abundant, and yet so abstract in its use and ability to provoke tangible actions. Our mediums of communication are fraught with caveats. Our pain, an ironic joke born from a gridlocked panopticon of our own making, swirling on into infinity. I was asking a lot of questions while writing these songs, and hyper isolation kept coming up for me. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” is a Buddhist anthem, ensconced in the interconnectivity of all beings, and the fraying of our social fabric. Our culture relies less and less on people. This breeds a new, unprecedented level of isolation. The promise we can buy our way out of that emptiness offers little comfort in the face of fear we all now live with – the fear of becoming obsolete. Something is off, and even though the feeling appears differently for each individual, it is universal. Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain. Being in love doesn’t necessarily mean being together. Why else do so many love songs yearn for a connection? Could it be narcissism? We encourage each other to aspire – to reach for the external to quell our desires, thinking goals of wellness and bliss will alleviate the baseline anxiety of living in a time like ours. We think the answer is outside ourselves, through technology, imaginary frontiers that will magically absolve us of all our problems. We look everywhere but in ourselves for a salve. In “God Turn Me into a Flower,” I relay the myth of Narcissus, whose obsession with a reflection in a pool leads him to starve and lose all perception outside his infatuation. In a state of great hubris, he doesn’t recognize that the thing he so passionately desired was ultimately just himself. God turns him into a pliable flower who sways with the universe. The pliable softness of a flower has become my mantra as we barrel on towards an uncertain fate. I see the heart as a guide, with an emanation of hope, shining through in this dark age. Somewhere along the line, we lost the plot on who we are. Chaos is natural. But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order. These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment. And maybe that’s the beginning of the nuanced journey towards understanding the natural cycles of life and death, all over again. Thoughts and Prayers, Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood)

Porridge Radio are one of the most vital new voices in alternative music, having gone from being darlings of the DIY underground to one of the UK’s most thrilling bands in the space of less than a year. Their barbed wit, lacerating intensity and potent blend of art-rock, indie-pop and post-punk sounds like little else around, and led their 2020 album Every Bad to make the nominees list for the coveted Mercury Music Prize. For frontperson Dana Margolin, drummer Sam Yardley, keyboardist Georgie Stott and bassist Maddie Ryall – who met in the seaside town of Brighton and formed Porridge Radio in 2014 – global recognition has been a long time coming, after years of self-releasing and music booking their own tours. In those eight years, Dana has gained a reputation as one of the most magnetic band leaders around with an ability to “devastate you with an emotional hurricane, then blindside you with a moment of bittersweet humour” (NME). But if Every Bad established Dana’s lemon-sharp, heart-on-sleeve honesty, Porridge Radio’s third album takes that to anthemic new heights. Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is the sound of someone in their late twenties facing down the disappointment of love, and life, and figuring out how to exist in the world, without claiming any answers. It’s also catchy as hell. The title – which was partly inspired by a collage by the British surrealist Eileen Agar – speaks to the “joy, fear and endlessness” of the past few years. Dana’s songwriting and delivery is more confident, with the emotional incisiveness of artists like Mitski, Sharon Van Etten and Big Thief. Though it’s softer and more playful in places than Every Bad’s blowtorch ferocity, there are moments of powerful catharsis, ones that occur when you allow the full intensity of an experience to take hold. In places, that no-holds-barred rawness is on a par with bands like Deftones (their panoramic metal is a key touchstone of Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky) or American emo, elevated by Yardley’s ambitious instrumentals. “I kept saying that I wanted everything to be 'stadium-epic' - like Coldplay,” says Dana. With Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, Porridge Radio have distilled their myriad influences down like they’re flipping through their own singular dial: dreamy yet intense, gentle but razor-edged, widescreen and yet totally intimate. People tell Dana that Every Bad got them through their cancer diagnosis, their break-up, their isolated lockdown. But with their new album, the band are taking a step up and spring-boarding into a bright, exciting unknown.

In the eight years since their last album, punk supergroup OFF! has gone through a significant lineup shift. Vocalist Keith Morris (also of the Circle Jerks) and guitarist Dimitri Coats remain, but they’re joined on *Free LSD* by new drummer Justin Brown (Thundercat) and bassist Autry Fulbright II, formerly of …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. And while the music maintains the short-sharp-shock tactics OFF! is known for, *Free LSD* is peppered with jazz-skronk interludes and features a lyrical direction that was birthed out of *Blowmind Show*, Morris’ podcast with Thelonious Monster drummer Pete Weiss. “These songs are based on conspiracy theories,” Morris tells Apple Music. “And ultimately these conspiracy theories come back to our government or to heads of corporations or to scientists who are on the wrong track. I’m mostly talking about evil, greedy people who only want us to buy stuff. And they’ve dragged us along with them. I would love to be an optimist, but we’ve dug ourselves into a hole that’s going to be extremely difficult to get out of.” Below, he discusses some key songs from the album. **“War Above Los Angeles”** “In our unidentified flying object research, Pete and I came upon an incident that happened…well, before we had rockets—because if we’d had rockets, we would’ve fired them upon this thing. So, a big silver object is moving through the sky at a snail’s pace. They don’t know what it is. And, of course, when they don’t know what something is, they send the military to start firing upon it with guns and tanks. So it flies over Los Angeles and heads out over the ocean around Santa Monica Bay. It goes out a mile or two, turns around, and comes back. And then it disappears.” **“Kill to Be Heard”** “Dimitri and I were listening to a lot of Ravi Shankar. When George Harrison went on a spiritual quest to India, he learned to play sitar, and he couldn’t have had a better instructor than Ravi Shankar, who was one of the greatest sitar players to ever live. He had an Indian orchestra playing tablas and sitars and other instruments from that part of the world. Dimitri picked up on bits and pieces of that stuff and turned them into riffs for our songs. I think you can really hear the Ravi Shankar in this song.” **“Murder Corporation”** “We wouldn’t have NASA if it wasn’t for Wernher von Braun. At the end of World War II, there was a mad scramble between us and the Soviet Union to scoop up all of these German scientists because they were designing military capabilities—like the first fighter jet—that were much better than ours. So we got Wernher von Braun on our side, and he’s responsible for all of our rocket technology. This is a guy who was a Nazi, a member of the SS, and he becomes a key figure in NASA.” **“Suck the Bones Dry”** “One of the threads that’s happening through our songs is the everyday man versus the powerful people that want to step on us. These people are only happy when we’re buying products and pumping gas into our cars, and there’s one person per car and we’re driving a hundred miles a day to go to work. So, ‘Suck the Bones Dry’ is an us-versus-them song. We’re trained from birth to be a culture of shitheads, and the powerful will twist everything around to fit their agenda.” **“Free LSD”** “A flood of bands came out of Laurel Canyon in the ’60s, like Buffalo Springfield, Love, The Byrds, The Mamas & The Papas, and Frank Zappa’s band. Neil Young was hanging out with Mama Cass and David Crosby, and they were all doing LSD and partying. Where did that LSD come from? It’s believed that 400 million hits of free LSD were given out in Southern California. All these clubs had just opened on Sunset Boulevard, and they needed bands to play to draw people into these venues. And they all came from Laurel Canyon. It’s interesting, because The Byrds didn’t even play on some of their early songs. It’s the Wrecking Crew playing the instruments.”

Brittney Parks’ *Athena* was one of the more interesting albums of 2019. *Natural Brown Prom Queen* is better. Not only does Parks—aka the LA-based singer, songwriter, and violinist Sudan Archives—sound more idiosyncratic, but she’s able to wield her idiosyncrasies with more power and purpose. It’s catchy but not exactly pop (“Home Maker”), embodied but not exactly R&B (“Ciara”), weird without ever being confrontational (“It’s Already Done”), and it rides the line between live sound and electronic manipulation like it didn’t exist. She wants to practice self-care (“Selfish Soul”), but she also just wants to “have my titties out” (“NBPQ \[Topless\]”), and over the course of 55 minutes, she makes you wonder if those aren’t at least sometimes the same thing. And the album’s sheer variety isn’t so much an expression of what Parks wants to try as the multitudes she already contains.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.

Mike Hadreas’ music as Perfume Genius has always walked an interesting line between experimentalism and accessibility—pop for listeners more interested in “pop” as a concept than a reality. Written as a companion to a dance piece by choreographer Kate Wallich, *Ugly Season* effectively inverts the balance, situating Hadreas’ hallmarks—his romanticism, his expressivity, his startling, sometimes violent sense of drama—in the context of something that plays more like a symphony or soundtrack than a set of discrete songs. The title is a feint, of course: This is extremely beautiful music even in its dissonance, from the Philip Glass-like grid of “Teeth” and the spiderweb instrumental of “Scherzo” to the industrial roar of “Hellbent.” And just in case, he gives you something called “Pop Song”—which isn’t one, of course.

The music of Ugly Season was written for Perfume Genius and choreographer Kate Wallich’s immersive dance piece, The Sun Still Burns Here. The work was commissioned by the Seattle Theatre Group and Mass MoCA and was performed via residencies in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City and Boston throughout 2019. During this time, Perfume Genius shared two of the dance project’s compositions – ‘Pop Song’ and ‘Eye in the Wall’. “It’s the sound of dancefloor euphoria,” said Pitchfork. “The color of lights flashing as you move through a crowd, the touch of skin damp and warm against everyone else’s.” Now the entirety of the project’s original music can be heard in Ugly Season. The album was produced by Perfume Genius and GRAMMY-winning producer and long-time collaborator Blake Mills and was created in collaboration with Hadreas’ long-time partner Alan Wyffels.

Although Dry Cleaning began work on their second album before the London quartet had even released their 2021 debut, *New Long Leg*, there was little creative overlap between the two. “I definitely think of it as a different chapter,” drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “I think one of the nicest things was just knowing what we were in for a bit more,” adds singer Florence Shaw. “It was less about, ‘What are we doing?’ and more thinking about what we were playing.” Recorded in the same studio (Wales’ famous Rockfield Studios) with the same producer (PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish) as *New Long Leg*, *Stumpwork* sees Shaw, Buxton, bassist Lewis Maynard, and guitarist Tom Dowse hone the wiry post-punk and rhythmical bursts of their debut. The jangly guitar lines are melodically sharper and the grooves more locked in as Shaw’s observational, spoken-word vocals pull at the threads of life’s big topics, even when she’s singing about a missing tortoise. “When we finished *New Long Leg*, I always felt a bit like, ‘Ah, I’d like another chance at that.’ With this one, it definitely felt like, ‘Really happy with that,’” says Buxton. The quartet take us on a tour of *Stumpwork*, track by track. **“Anna Calls From the Arctic”** Nick Buxton: “It was a very late decision to start the album with this. I think it’s quite unusual because it’s very different from a lot of the other songs on the album.” Florence Shaw: “I quite liked that the album opened with a question: ‘Should I propose friendship?’ In the outro, we were thinking about the John Barry song ‘Capsule in Space,’ from *You Only Live Twice*. There’s quite a bit of that in the outro. At least, it was on the mood board.” **“Kwenchy Kups”** NB: “It’s named after those little plastic pots you get when you’re a kid—pots full of some luminous liquid, and you pierce the film on the lid with a straw.” FS: “We were at a studio in Easton in Bristol, and I wrote a lot of the lyrics on walks around the area. It’s a really nice little area, and there’s lots of interesting shops. We wanted to write a few more joyful songs, at least in tone, and the song is so cheerful-sounding. So, some of the lyrics came out of that, too, wanting to write something that was optimistic, the idea of watching animals or insects being just a simple, joyful thing to do.” **“Gary Ashby”** NB: “This is about a real tortoise.” FS: “On a walk in lockdown, I saw a ‘lost’ poster for ‘Gary Ashby.’ The rest of the story came out of imagining the circumstances of him disappearing and the idea that it’s obviously a family tortoise because he’s got this surname. It’s thinking about family and things getting lost in chaos, when things are a bit chaotic in the home and pets escape. We don’t know what happened to him. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, which is a little bit disturbing, but hopefully we’ll find out one day.” **“Driver’s Story”** NB: “We were rehearsing at a little studio in the basement at our record label \[4AD\]. It was just me, Tom, and Lewis, and we weren’t there very long, but quite a few ideas for songs came out of that. The main bit of ‘Driver’s Story’ was one. It felt different to anything we’d done on *New Long Leg*. It’s just got such a nice, oozy feel to it. FS: “There’s a bit in the song about a jelly shoe and the idea of it being buried in your guts. A photographer called Maisie Cousins does photos of lots of bodily stuff and liquids, but with flowers and beautiful things as well. I was looking at a lot of those at the time. The jelly-shoe thing is about that—something pretty, plastic-y, mixed with guts.” Tom Dowse: “It’s got my dog barking on the end of it as well. He’s called Buckley. He is credited on the record.” **“Hot Penny Day”** TD: “I’d been listening to a lot of Rolling Stones, so this is an attempt at that. We were jamming it through, and it started to take on a bit more of a stoner-rock vibe. ‘Driver’s Story’ was also meant to be a bit more stoner-rock until John Parish got his hands in it and took the drugs out of it.” Lewis Maynard: “I found a bass wah pedal in my sister’s garage. I just plugged it in and started playing, and I was like, ‘This is fun.’ I’ve unfortunately not stopped playing bass wah.” NB: “It conjures up quite a lot of imagery. I was listening to some of Jonny Greenwood’s music for the film *Inherent Vice*, and it’s got a washed-out, desert-y feel. This sounds like Dry Cleaning in an alternate, parallel universe somewhere.” **“Stumpwork”** FS: “Quite a lot of the lyrics were gleaned from this archive of newspaper clippings that I went to in Woolwich Arsenal. It’s millions and millions of newspaper clippings on different subjects. There’s a bit \[in ‘Stumpwork’\] about toads crossing roads from this little article I found about a special tunnel being built, so that toads could traverse the street without being run over.” NB: “When we were trying to figure out a name for the record, it felt like the best option. We loved it, and it was really succinct. We liked that the word ‘work’ was in the title.” **“No Decent Shoes for Rain”** TD: “This was two of those jams from the basement of 4AD. We were quite unsure about this song. We took it to show John at the pre-production rehearsals, and he really liked it, and he didn’t really have anything to say about it, which is quite unusual. A lot of people ask, ‘Why did you record with John again?’ And it’s things like that—because he notices things that are good about you that you don’t notice. I was really self-conscious that the end section sounded too trad, classic rock. It sounded like the safest bit of guitar I’ve ever written. But once he said he was into it, I started to look at it from a different way, and it grew from that.” **“Don’t Press Me”** FS: “This has some recorder on it, which I had to play at half-time because it was really fast. I was like, ‘Oh, this would be nice if it had this little bit of a recorder on.’ I tried to play it, and I was completely incapable. I’d thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be able to do this. Kids play the recorder all the time. It’s easy.’ Even at half-time, I had to have loads of goes at it. So, it’s me playing the recorder, sped up, because I have no skills.” **“Conservative Hell”** NB: “I think this song’s really important because through the course of the record there’s two different types of song. There’s these upbeat, jangle, poppy ones and then there’s slightly slower, more groovy ones. This song has two very distinct elements that we’re really happy with. It’s nice as well to be so overtly political, which is not usually our scene.” FS: “The reason it ended up being such an on-the-nose phrase is I was thinking it would be really nice to write a song that was something like ‘Conservative Hell.’ And then, after a while, I was like, ‘That’s pretty good.’ I think it almost sounds like a silly headline, but accurate too.” **“Liberty Log”** FS: “The title comes from thinking about spring rolls. They’re like little logs, aren’t they? Then, later, I was thinking about a stupid monument, something that would be a really dumb statue in a town—just a big log and it’s called the Liberty Log.” LM: “This is one of the ones we took to the studio expecting it to be a shit-ton of editing, structuring, and that John would really fuck with it. We jammed it, and it just stayed the same. This one was first-take vibes, playing it in that way, expecting it to be changed.” **“Icebergs”** NB: “I think this is quite a bleak moment for us. Definitely the most icy-sounding track on the album. It feels like a really good end to the record to suddenly have this explosion of brass come in, and then it just peters out very slowly. I like that the album ends on quite an icy tone, even though that doesn’t necessarily represent us in how we feel about things. It’s a slightly more poignant ending rather than a nice, lovely outro.”

It’s not easy to dance with one’s tongue buried deeply in cheek. But Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul effortlessly combine lean, punchy electro-pop with an unapologetically sarcastic sense of humor. On the Belgian duo’s debut album, *Topical Dancer*, the two musicians draw on their multicultural backgrounds to take sly potshots at racism, sexism, and self-doubt. On “Esperanto,” Adigéry riffs on microaggressions over plunging electric bass, and on “Blenda,” she marries a crisp, funky groove with a surprisingly vulnerable chorus: “Go back to your country where you belong/Siri, can you tell me where I belong?” Co-produced by their longtime collaborators Soulwax, the album slices neatly across the overlap between punky disco, indie dance, and underground house; ’80s avant-pop influences (Art of Noise, Talking Heads) brush up against the sing-speaking wit of contemporaries like Marie Davidson and Dry Cleaning. Some of the album’s most powerful moments transcend language entirely: On “Haha,” Adigéry’s laughter is chopped up and dribbled over an EBM-inspired beat, making for a slow-motion floor-filler that’s as surreal as it is captivating.

On “Tick Tock,” the second track on *Warm Chris*, Aldous Harding asks, “Now that you see me, what you gonna do? Wanted to see me.” The New Zealand singer-songwriter’s lyrics have always been veiled and poetically cryptic—and she’s made a point of not explaining the meaning behind any of it. But her fourth album feels assured and open in a way that makes you wonder whether the question is directed at an audience that\'s been wanting to learn more about this singular artist. There’s a lot to see here, and like a well-directed film, it benefits from multiple replays, with more nuances and hidden meanings uncovered on each listen. Across her four albums, you’ll notice a linear emotional evolution. Speaking to Apple Music in 2019 about her then-new album *Designer*, she said, “I felt freed up… I could feel a loosening of tension, a different way of expressing my thought processes.” The journey clearly continued. *Warm Chris* is as intimate and curious as ever, but it’s more grounded, more confident. If the tension was loosening on *Designer*, here, Harding has grown accustomed to the relaxed space and made herself at home. The album seems to deal primarily with connections and relationships. She reflects on a lost love during opener “Ennui” (“You’ve become my joy, you understand… Come back, come back and leave it in the right place”), hunts for faded excitement on “Fever” (“I still stare at you in the dark/Looking for that thrill in the nothing/You know my favorite place is the start”), comically complains on “Passion Babe” (“Well, you know I’m married, and I was bored out of my mind/Of all the ways to eat a cake, this one surely takes the knife… Passion must play, or passion won’t stay”), and accepts an ending on “Lawn” (“Then if you\'re not for me, guess I am not for you/I will enjoy the blue, I’m only confused with you”). On the whole, *Warm Chris* feels light and folksy, and the music is relatively simple—though not without its surprises. There are brass embellishments here, a psychedelic guitar solo there, even a brief foray into forlorn vintage blues on “Bubbles.” It leaves space for Harding’s voice to remain in the spotlight. Her vocal acrobatics are as strange and versatile as ever—she can shift from breathy, dramatically deep bass to ultra-fine, ultra-high falsetto in moments, sometimes for only a word at a time. She sounds innocent and paper-thin on the gentle “Lawn,” lively—and inflected with an unusual accent—on “Passion Babe.” Her delivery is so pronounced and hyperbolic on the heart-wrenching “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” that it sounds like something out of a musical. And album closer “Leathery Whip” feels inspired by The Velvet Underground, complete with a deep Nico drawl (occasionally flipping to a Kate Bush-style nasal tone), backing harmonies, a jangling tambourine, and a cheeky refrain: “Here comes life with his leathery whip.”

An artist of rare calibre, Aldous Harding does more than sing; she conjures a singular intensity. The artist has announced details of Warm Chris new studio album, the follow-up to 2019’s acclaimed Designer. For Warm Chris, the Aotearoa New Zealand musician reunited with producer John Parish, continuing a professional partnership that began in 2017 and has forged pivotal bodies of work (2017’s Party and the aforementioned Designer). All ten tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, the album includes contributions from H. Hawkline, Seb Rochford, Gavin Fitzjohn, John and Hopey Parish and Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods).

The New Yorker has finally gotten his flowers as one of the finest MCs in the contemporary underground after a cool couple decades grinding it out with his label, Backwoodz Studioz; 2021’s *Haram*, from Woods’ Armand Hammer duo with E L U C I D, felt like a high watermark for a new NY scene. On *Aethiopes*, Woods’ first solo album since 2019, he recruits producer Preservation, a fellow NY scene veteran known for his work with Yasiin Bey and Ka; his haunted beats set an unsettling scene for Woods’ evocative stories, which span childhood bedrooms and Egyptian deserts. The guest list doubles as a who’s who of underground rap—EL-P, Boldy James, E L U C I D—but Woods holds his own at the center of it all. As he spits on the stunningly skeletal “Remorseless”: “Anything you want on this cursed earth/Probably better off getting it yourself, see what it’s worth.”

DIGITAL VERSION OF THE ALBUM DROPS ON APRIL 8, 2022. Aethiopes is billy woods’ first album since 2019’s double feature of Hiding Places and Terror Management. The project is fully produced by Preservation (Dr Yen Lo, Yasiin Bey), who delivered a suite of tracks on Terror Management, including the riveting single “Blood Thinner”. The two collaborated again on Preservation’s 2020’s LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, which featured a memorable billy woods appearance on the song “Lemon Rinds”, as well as the B-side “Snow Globe”.

Like AC/DC before them, Beach House’s gift lies in managing to make what feels like the same album a hundred different ways. Even the new inflections on *Once Twice Melody*—the string section of “ESP,” the rhythmic nods to hip-hop (“Pink Funeral”) and Italo-disco (“Runaway”)—fit immediately into their plush, neon-lit world. And while specific moments conjure specific eras (“Superstar” the triumph of an ’80s John Hughes movie, “Once Twice Melody” a swirl of ’60s surrealism), the cumulative effect is something like a fairytale rendered in sound: majestic, inviting, but dark enough around the edges to keep you off-balance. And just like that (snap), they do it again.

Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions. Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell. The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

If The Smile ever seemed like a surprisingly upbeat name for a band containing two members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, joined by Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner), the trio used their debut gig to offer some clarification. Performing as part of Glastonbury Festival’s Live at Worthy Farm livestream in May 2021, Yorke announced, “We are called The Smile: not The Smile as in ‘Aaah!’—more the smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” To grasp the mood of their debut album, it’s instructive to go even deeper into a name that borrows the title of a 1970 Ted Hughes poem. In Hughes’ impressionist verse, some elemental force—compassion, humanity, love maybe—rises up to resist the deception and chicanery behind such disarming grins. And as much as the 13 songs on *A Light for Attracting Attention* sense crisis and dystopia looming, they also crackle with hope and insurrection. The pulsing electronics of opener “The Same” suggest the racing hearts and throbbing temples of our age of acute anxiety, and Yorke’s words feel like a call for unity and mobilization: “We don’t need to fight/Look towards the light/Grab it in with both hands/What you know is right.” Perennially contemplating the dynamics of power and thought, he surveys a world where “devastation has come” (“Speech Bubbles”) under the rule of “elected billionaires” (“The Opposite”), but it’s one where protest, however extreme, can still birth change (“The Smoke”). Amid scathing guitars and outbursts of free jazz, his invective zooms in on abuses of power (“You Will Never Work in Television Again”) before shaming inertia and blame-shifters on the scurrying beats and descending melodies of “A Hairdryer.” These aren’t exactly new themes for Yorke and it’s not a record that sits at an extreme outpost of Radiohead’s extended universe. Emboldened by Skinner’s fluid, intrepid rhythms, *A Light for Attracting Attention* draws frequently on various periods of Yorke and Greenwood’s past work. The emotional eloquence of Greenwood’s soundtrack projects resurfaces on “Speech Bubbles” and “Pana-Vision,” while Yorke’s fascination with digital reveries continues to be explored on “Open the Floodgates” and “The Same.” Elegantly cloaked in strings, “Free in the Knowledge” is a beautiful acoustic-guitar ballad in the lineage of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and the original live version of “True Love Waits.” Of course, lesser-trodden ground is visited, too: most intriguingly, math-rock (“Thin Thing”) and folk songs fit for a ’70s sci-fi drama (“Waving a White Flag”). The album closes with “Skrting on the Surface,” a song first aired at a 2009 show Yorke played with Atoms for Peace. With Greenwood’s guitar arpeggios and Yorke’s aching falsetto, it calls back even further to *The Bends*’ finale, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” However, its message about the fragility of existence—“When we realize we have only to die, then we’re out of here/We’re just skirting on the surface”—remains sharply resonant.

The Smile will release their highly anticipated debut album A Light For Attracting Attention on 13 May, 2022 on XL Recordings. The 13- track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contempoarary UK jazz players including Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde. The band, comprising Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, have previously released the singles You Will Never Work in Television Again, The Smoke, and Skrting On The Surface to critical acclaim.

On the cover of Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong*, the singer-songwriter gazes into the mid-distance, the sky behind her red-hot from wildfires. The home she stands before is her own in LA, where she witnessed blazing fires up close in 2020 and sheltered with her family during the global pandemic. It is also where *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* was crafted, the album becoming Van Etten’s attempt to make sense of the pandemic years, our unequal world, and the shaky future she’s raising her son into. “Up the whole night/Undefined/Can’t stop thinking ’bout peace and war,” she sings on “Anything,” a soaring ballad on which she also explores the numbness induced by the monotony of the pandemic. But *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* isn’t just about the collective experience of recent events. Here, Van Etten is also a mother assuaging guilt that her career keeps her away from home (“I need my job/Please don’t hold that against me,” she sings to her son on “Home to Me”), a partner trying to keep intimacy alive (“Come Back,” a track reminiscent of Van Etten’s “Like I Used To” collaborator and indie peer Angel Olsen), and a citizen of the world who’ll do what she can to make it a better place: “Let’s go march/I’ll go downtown,” she sings on the shimmering, anthemic “I’ll Try.” There’s much of what you might expect from a Van Etten record: acoustic guitars, lonesome minor-chord vocals, driving drums, and the jagged electro-pop of 2019’s *Remind Me Tomorrow* (see the hooky “Headspace” or the self-forgiveness anthem “Mistakes”). But despite it being constructed in a shrunken world, this is also an album on which one of America’s foremost singer-songwriters pushes her sound—and voice—to astonishing new heights. That perhaps reaches a peak on “Born,” which begins as a slow-marching piano moment before exploding into a stop-you-in-your-tracks album centerpiece on which Van Etten’s vocals sound not unlike a celestial choir amid swirling synths and cascading, cathartic drums. Like many of this record’s tracks, “Born” is gargantuan and rich, but elsewhere things are more simple. On the raw, delicate “Darkish,” for example, Van Etten includes the birdsong she (and so many of us) heard during lockdown, a poignant reminder of the quietest days of the pandemic. *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* might have been shaped by moments of crisis, but it isn’t colored with despair. Just as something like a smile hovers across her expression on *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong*’s cover, optimism breaks through across this record. “Better stay light/I’m looking for a way,” she sings on opener “Darkness Fades,” before offering her ultimate worldview on “Darkish”: “It’s not dark/It’s only darkish.” We’ve been going about this all wrong, Van Etten seems to be saying, but there’s still time for that to change.

Sharon Van Etten has always been the kind of artist who helps people make sense of the world around them, and her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, concerns itself with how we feel, mourn, and reclaim our agency when we think the world - or at least, our world - might be falling apart. How do we protect the things most precious to us from destructive forces beyond our control? How do we salvage something worthwhile when it seems all is lost? And if we can’t, or we don’t, have we loved as well as we could in the meantime? Did we try hard enough? In considering these questions and her own vulnerability in the face of them, Van Etten creates a stunning meditation on how life’s changes can be both terrifying and transformative. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong articulates the beauty and power that can be rescued from our wreckages. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is as much a reflection on how we manage the ending of metaphorical worlds as we do the ending of actual ones: the twin flames of terror and unrelenting love that light up with motherhood; navigating the demands of partnership when your responsibilities have changed; the loss of center and safety that can come with leaving home; how the ghosts of our past can appear without warning in our present; feeling helpless with the violence and racism in the world; and yes, what it means when a global viral outbreak forces us to relinquish control of the things that have always made us feel so human, and seek new forms of connection to replace them. Since the release of Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten has collaborated with artists ranging from Courtney Barnett and Joshua Homme to Norah Jones and Angel Olsen. Earlier releases were covered by artists like Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Big Red Machine and Idles, celebrating Sharon as a legendary songwriter from the very beginning. When the time came to return to her solo work, Van Etten reclaimed the reins, writing and producing the album in her new recording studio, custom built in her family’s Californian home. The more she faced – whether in new dangers emerging or old traumas resurfacing – the more tightly she held onto these songs and recordings, determined to work through grief by reasserting her power and staying squarely at the wheel of her next album. In fact, that interplay of loss and growth became a blueprint for what would become We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. The artwork reflects that, too, inspired as much by Van Etten’s old life as her new one. “I wanted to convey that in an image with me walking away from it all” says Van Etten, “not necessarily brave, not necessarily sad, not necessarily happy…” We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is intensely personal, exploring themes like motherhood, love, fear, what we can and can’t control, and what it means to be human in a world that is wracked by so much trauma. The track “Home To Me,” written about Van Etten’s son, uses the trademark “dark drums” of her previous work to invoke the sonic impression of a heartbeat. Synths grow in intensity, evoking the passing of time and the terror of what it means to have your child move inevitably toward independence, wanting to hold on to them tightly enough to protect them forever. In contrast, “Come Back” reflects on the desire to reconnect with a partner. Recalling all the optimism of love felt in its infancy, Van Etten begins with the plain beauty of just her voice and a guitar, building the arrangement alongside the call to “come back” to anyone who has lost their way, be it from another person or from themselves. Hovering between darkness and light, “Born” is an exploration of the self that exists when all other labels - mother, partner, friend - are stripped back. Throughout, and as always, we are at the mercy of Van Etten’s voice: the way it loops and arcs, the startling and emotive warmth of it. What started as a certain magic in Van Etten’s early recordings has grown into confidence, clarity and wisdom, even as she sings with the vulnerable beauty that has become her trademark. Nowhere is that truer than on “Mistakes,” where Van Etten creates a defiant anthem to the mistakes we make, and to everything we gain from them. Unlike Van Etten’s previous albums, there will be no songs off the album released prior to the record coming out. The ten tracks on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong are designed to be listened to in order, all at once, so that a much larger story of hope, loss, longing and resilience can be told. This is, in itself, a subtle act of control, but in sharing these songs it remains an optimistic and generous one. There is darkness here but there is light too, and all of it is held together by Van Etten’s uncanny ability to both pierce the hearts of her listeners and make them whole again. Things are not dark, she reminds us, only darkish.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, Melbourne’s Julia Jacklin has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her debut announced those intentions, and the startling 2019 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip. Stirring piano-led opener ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’ channels the underage confusion of being told religion is profound, despite only feeling it during the spectacle of its pageantry. The gentle pulse of ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ and dreamy strings of ‘Ignore Tenderness’ betray an interrogation of consent and emotional injury. The stark ‘Less Of A Stranger’ picks at the generational thread of a mother/daughter relationship, while the hymnal ‘Too In Love To Die’ and loose jam of ‘Be Careful With Yourself’ equate true love with the fear of losing it. Recorded in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), PRE PLEASURE finds Jacklin teamed with her Canada-based touring band, bassist Ben Whiteley and guitarist Will Kidman, both of Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station. It also introduces drummer Laurie Torres, saxophonist Adam Kinner and string arrangements by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire) recorded by a full orchestra in Prague. PRE PLEASURE presents Jacklin as her most authentic self; an uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs.

Thebe Kgositsile emerged in 2010 as the most mysterious member of rap’s weirdest new collective, Odd Future—a gifted teen turned anarchist, spitting shock-rap provocations from his exile in a Samoan reform school. In the 12 years since, he’s repaired his famously fraught relationship with his mother, lost his father, and become a father himself, all the while carving out a solo lane as a serious MC, a student of the game. Earl’s fourth album finds the guy who once titled an album *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside*, well, going outside, and kinda liking it; on opener “Old Friend,” he’s hacking through thickets, camping out in Catskills rainstorms. There’s a sonic clarity here that stands apart from the obscure, sludgy sounds of his recent records, executed in part by Young Guru, JAY-Z’s longtime engineer. Beats from The Alchemist and Black Noi$e snap, crackle, and bounce, buoying Earl’s slippery, open-ended thoughts on family, writing, religion, the pandemic. Is he happy now, the kid we’ve watched become a man? It’s hard to say, but in any case, as he raps on “Fire in the Hole”: “It’s no rewinding/For the umpteenth time, it’s only forward.”

After recording *The Car*, there was, for “quite a long time, a real edit in process,” Arctic Monkeys leader Alex Turner tells Apple Music. Indeed, his UK rock outfit’s daring seventh LP sounds nothing if not *composed*—a set of subtle and stupendously well-mannered mid-century pop that feels light years away from the youthful turbulence of their historic 2006 debut, *Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not*. If, back then, they were writing songs with the intention of uncorking them onstage, they’re now fully in the business of craft—editing, shaping, teasing out the sort of sumptuous detail that reveals itself over repeated listens. “It’s obviously 10 songs, but, even more than we have done before, it just feels like it’s a whole,” he says. “It’s its own.” The aim was to pay more attention to dynamics, to economy and space. “Everything,” Turner says, “has its chance to come in and out of focus,” whether it’s a brushed snare or a feline guitar line, a feathered vocal melody or devastating turn of phrase. Where an earlier Monkeys song may have detonated outward, a blast of guitars and drums and syllables, these are quiet, controlled, middle-aged explosions: “It doesn\'t feel as if there\'s too many times on this record where everything\'s all going on at once.” On album opener “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” Turner vaults from a bed of enigmatic, opening-credit-like keys and strings (all arranged with longtime collaborator James Ford and composer Bridget Samuels) into scenes of a prolonged farewell. So much of its pain—its romance, its dramatic tension—is in what’s not said. “The feel of that minute-or-so introduction was what feels like the foundation of the whole thing,” he says. “And it really was about finding what could hang out with that or what could be built around the feel of that. The moment when I found a way to bridge it into something that is a pop song by the end was exciting, because I felt like we had somewhere to go.” For years, Turner has maintained a steady diet of side work, experimenting with orchestral, Morricone-like epics in The Last Shadow Puppets as well as lamplit bedroom folk on 2011’s *Submarine* EP, written for the film of the same name. But listen closely to *The Car* (and 2018’s *Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino* before it) and you’ll hear the walls between the band and his interests outside it begin to dissolve—the string arrangements throughout (but especially on “The Car”), the gently fingerpicked guitars (“Mr Schwartz”), the use of negative space (the slightly Reznor-y “Sculptures of Anything Goes”). “I think I was naive,” he says. “I think the first time I stepped out to do anything else was the first Puppets record, and at that moment, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is totally in its own place and it\'s going to have nothing to do with the Monkeys and what that was going to turn into.’ And I realize now that I don\'t know if that\'s really possible, for me anyway. It feels as if everything you do has an effect on the next thing.”

The most jarring part about listening to the London band black midi isn’t how much musical ground they cover—post-punk, progressive rock, breakneck jazz, cabaret—but the fact that they cover it all at once. A quasi-concept album that seems to have something to do with war (“Welcome to Hell,” “27 Questions”), or at least the violence men do more generally (“Sugar/Tzu,” “Dangerous Liaisons”), *Hellfire* isn’t an easy listen. But it’s funny (main character: Tristan Bongo), beautiful, at least in a garish, misanthropic way (the Neil Diamond bombast of “The Defence”), and so obviously playful in its intelligence that you just want to let it run over you. The first listen feels like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand. By the third, you’ll be yelling with them.

black midi’s new album Hellfire will be released on 15th July. Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.

On her expansive debut album, singer/songwriter/producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia introduces her alter ego Ethel Cain, a Southern anti-belle desperate to escape the smothering grip of familial trauma, Christianity, and the American dream. On *Preacher’s Daughter*, the Florida-reared conceptualist and recovered Southern Baptist finds a sense of freedom in darkness and depravity, spinning a seedy, sweeping, slowcore yarn of doomed love and patriarchal oppression with cinematic ambition. Cain allows the titular preacher the first word on droning opener “Family Tree (Intro),” then teases a little pop-star charm on the twangy “American Teenager,” before digging her teeth deep into sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll with the provocative pout of Lana Del Rey. She laments a lost love on the heartland heartbreaker “A House In Nebraska,” hitchhikes west on the sprawling Americana saga “Thoroughfare,” and spirals into Dante’s hell on the thunderous industrial nightmare “Ptolemaea.” Cain’s voice haunts and lingers like a heavy fog, long after she’s devoured by a cannibalistic lover—in a blaze of glam-metal guitar—on the album’s grandiose finale, “Strangers.”

“The de-evolution of man.” That’s how Viagra Boys frontman Sebastian Murphy sums up the theme of the band’s third album. “My inspirations were how divided everyone is, people’s ideas of why things are happening, and just general craziness—especially reactions to the pandemic,” he tells Apple Music. “I was also very inspired by a few documentaries about monkeys.” As always, the American-born vocalist of the Swedish punk group puts a witty and humorous spin on the subject matter, but its roots come from the genuine despair he feels viewing his home country from abroad. “I definitely use the States as a reference point because it’s a real melting pot of insanity, in my opinion,” he says. “I mean, those types of people definitely exist here in Sweden, but they’re not storming the Capitol or anything.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Baby Criminal”** “My girlfriend said, ‘I used to be a baby, now I’m just a criminal.’ She said she had that feeling once, and I could really relate to that. There’s been times in my life where I’ve excused everything I do because I was just a kid. And then it just got to this point where I’m dealing drugs and getting into trouble. I’m just a criminal. But I took a more playful twist on it—I made up a character named Jimmy, who’s this guy sitting in his basement making a nuclear reactor. That’s inspired by a true story. I think there was a kid in the States who did that when he was 14 or something.” **“Cave Hole”** “This is a freestanding interlude made by a guy called DJ Hayden. He works with our producer, and he was working side by side with us while we were recording some of these songs. He makes super-cool electronic music, and I just wanted to have a few weird interludes between the songs. I actually wanted to call the album *Cave Hole*. I like it because it reminds you of a K-hole, so I’m glad I got to fit it into the tracklist.” **“Troglodyte”** “If one of these school shooters or mass shooters were to live back in the days when we were apes, and they had these ideas of doing a mass murder or some shit like that, they wouldn’t have a chance because the other apes would just maul the shit out of them. It’s basically a mixture of me saying that we would have been better off as monkeys, and at the same time, it’s a fuck-you to a lot of these angry idiots with extreme right-wing ideas.” **“Punk Rock Loser”** “I’m painting a picture of this guy who’s a real asshole, but at the same time, I’ve been that asshole as well. It’s a song I could’ve written a couple of albums ago because I was that person. Sometimes I definitely feel like I’m a punk-rock loser. It’s like a flashback to my life five years ago. I’m making fun of it, and I’m also kind of romanticizing it in a way, like when you’re walking down the street and you feel like you’re the king of the world. I love that feeling, but it’s not often I get to feel that way.” **“Creepy Crawlers”** “This is very inspired by this dude I saw get interviewed by Channel 5 News. He started ranting about the vaccine causing kids to grow tails and animal hair. I’m like, ‘How do you know if the hair is human or animal?’ But I have a love for extreme absurdities, like stuff you would read in the *Weekly World News*—stories about two-headed babies or the idea of Hillary Clinton using adrenochrome to stay young, or the idea that the global elite are these reptiles plotting against us. So, this is me putting myself in the shoes of a conspiracy theorist.” **“The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis”** “This is based on a documentary about chimpanzees that has the same title. It’s about this trade-off that happened millions of years ago, when we were all still chimpanzees and lived up in the trees. We could count at incredible speeds to assess a threat really easily, like a pack of predators coming in. When the chimpanzees moved from the trees down to the savanna, they suddenly developed a need to communicate with each other about these threats, like, ‘There’s a lion over there—maybe don’t go there.’ So, they developed the ability to speak, and the theory is that we traded our ability to count things really fast—really good short-term memories—for long-term memories. And my idea is, that’s what fucked us. Long-term memories gave us the ability to plan murder and shit like that. Monkeys don’t think about that. They live in the now.” **“Globe Earth”** “That’s another DJ Hayden thing, and the name is obviously from flat-earthers. When they try to diss us globe-earthers, that’s what they call us. Like, ‘You fucking globe-earther.’ I love it.” **“Ain’t No Thief”** “This is about being accused of something that I obviously did, but being a bit delusional about it, which I have been in many periods of my life. Especially when I was a speed freak, I would get accused of something and I would just be like, ‘How the fuck could you think that about me?’ Like this feeling of being betrayed because someone thinks that you’re a certain way, when in fact you are that way. It’s supposed to be a bit funny.” **“Big Boy”** “We were pretty drunk in the studio at, like, 3 am, and we had this idea of sounding like a ’70s rock band recording a blues song. So, we all got in there and we’re playing our instruments and it sounded like shit. But at the same time, it was cool. We ended up adding a hip-hop beat, and I made up lyrics on the spot that were the stupidest thing I could think of—feeling like a big boy. It goes back to that feeling you had when you were a kid, but you’re an adult. Like, ‘I’m a big boy. I’ve got an apartment with a big TV’—as if that makes you a grown person. It doesn’t. You can still be very childish and pay your rent.” **“ADD”** “I wanted to write a song about ADD because it’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager. I’ve just always had this inability to concentrate, and I forget things all the time. I’ll leave the house without my keys or put something down and forget it right away. Or someone sends me an important email and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to answer this.’ And then I never do. It’s about this inability to do menial tasks—that’s what defines ADD for me. I just can’t motivate myself to do the easiest thing in the world.” **“Human Error”** “This is another DJ Hayden instrumental.” **“Return to Monke”** “I saw a meme that was just a picture of a monkey, and it said, ‘Return to Monke,’ spelled like that. I love meme culture, and especially that meme. So simple and yet so strong. When I wrote the song, I imagined us playing live and I pictured people in the crowd completely losing it and turning into monkeys—flying all over the place, throwing shit, taking off their clothes. It was inspired by Rage Against the Machine as well. I wanted to create a song that people could sing along to, like chanting in a cult. That phrase ‘leave society, be a monkey’ is just taking the piss out of these people who think the world is a big conspiracy against them. Maybe they should just leave.”

“I like that rock ’n’ roll is simple, that it’s 12 bars—the ineptitude of it,” Jason Pierce tells Apple Music. It’s a funny statement to hear from an artist notorious for spending years meticulously fine-tuning his records and hiring enough guest instrumentalists to fill a 747. But as the Spiritualized leader has proven time and time again in his three decades of space-rock exploration, minimalism provides the clearest path to maximalism. “I like the American bands that wanted desperately to sound like The Rolling Stones, but by pure accident, it all came out wrong, and it became their own thing. They were just seeing where it goes. And I still follow that. With records, they say the devil’s in the details, and there’s thousands of details on the record. I’m trying to find a way of crushing all these things together to make something that doesn’t sound like anything else.” On Spiritualized’s ninth album, two of those details jump out at you: a woman’s voice announcing the title of the record, followed by a lunar-shuttle transmission beep—the very same effects that introduced their 1997 psychedelic-gospel masterwork, *Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space*. And much like that album’s opening track, *Everything Was Beautiful*’s first song, “Always Together With You,” builds a simple repeated melody and romantic lyric into an orchestral surge that’s a little overwhelming. It’s the first of many audio Easter eggs on an album that takes a number of sonic and lyrical cues from Spiritualized’s trailblazing ’90s-era explorations in interstellar rock, to the point that *Everything Was Beautiful* often feels like a greatest-hits retrospective made of new songs. But as much as he’s cultivated a reputation as an all-seeing auteur, Pierce insists such callbacks aren’t part of some grand design. For instance, the seeds for “Always Together With You” were actually first planted back in 2014, when an embryonic version of the song appeared on a Record Store Day compilation called *Space Project*, which featured songs incorporating recordings captured by NASA. Pierce knew he always wanted to take another pass on that hastily recorded demo, but even after embellishing it into the rapturous curtain-raiser we hear on *Everything Was Beautiful*, he still felt it was missing something—until work on the 2021 reissue of *Ladies and Gentlemen* inspired a late-game revision. “I felt like it was a big ask to have people listen to six minutes of three-note chords at the top of an album, and I couldn’t resolve that,” Pierce says. “I couldn’t find a way that I wanted to listen to it and present it. So, I did two very simple steals—the transmission beep from the Apollo landing, which is at the top of *Ladies and Gentlemen*, and the announcement of the album. Suddenly, the whole thing felt like a strange transmission—like somebody outside of the planet looking down. It adds some kind of drama to it that wasn’t there.” Such spur-of-the-moment decisions defined the creation of *Everything Was Beautiful*, which is effectively the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s *And Nothing Hurt*. (The titles form a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse-Five*.) Pierce is grateful his record company talked him out of approaching the two albums as a single piece. “My focus was too wide,” he says. “If I had tried to do the whole thing together, I think I’d still be working on it now.” By splitting the project into two separate releases, Pierce gave himself the time and space to exhale and let the songs evolve according to his gut instincts rather than some master plan. To wit, the epic centerpiece track “The Mainline Song” began life as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of longtime live favorite “Electric Mainline” (“It was almost like giving the audience an intermission,” Pierce says) only to suddenly receive lyrics late in the process and get reborn as the album’s most exultant anthem. Even the seemingly simple country ballad “Crazy” had, in Pierce’s words, “its own perverse end.” Due to budgetary constraints, Pierce’s original vision of an orchestral serenade modeled after Lee Hazlewood and Jimmy Holliday gave way to a Mellotron-backed recording, and when he couldn’t decide between two different mixes of the song, he opted to use both in separate channels. But as a result, “Crazy” transcends the realm of pure country pastiche and takes on the undefinable, otherworldly quality that’s allowed Spiritualized to maintain their own lofty orbit for more than 30 years. “Most people edit down—they have 15, 16 tracks that they edit down to eight or nine for an album,” Pierce says. “I feel like I edit up: I haven’t got enough songs to ever edit something out of the equation, so I drag everything up to be the best it could be. And as some songs get better, the bar gets raised for the others.”

As frontman James Smith and bassist Ryan Needham were holed up in Leeds, writing the songs that make up Yard Act’s debut album, the pair weren’t thinking about a record until they almost had one in front of them. Instead, they were caught up in the sort of heady, creative whirl you get from a new group flexing their songwriting chops. “We knew we were writing a lot, but there was no form or structure to it; it was just loads of ideas,” Smith tells Apple Music. “It was when we started to realize how much material we had that we said, ‘All right, now is probably the time to go in and have a go at the album.’” That spirit of artistic delirium runs right through *The Overload*, where wiry post-punk grooves and buoyant indie anthems-in-waiting frame Smith’s wry, cutting observations on life in modern Britain. “We realized there was a theme running through the songs,” recalls Smith, “an anti-capitalist slant to the whole thing. We came up with this idea of an arc about this person’s journey trying to become a success and how that pans out.” *The Overload* is a thrilling snapshot of pre- and post-pandemic life, less a black mirror to the early 2020s and more a vivid, full-color one. Here, Smith and Needham guide us through it, track by track. **“The Overload”** James Smith: “The song was originally a really pounding house track that Ryan had sent, but I heard the beat differently and put this sped-up drum-and-bass loop over the top of Ryan’s bassline. As soon as I put that on it, the energy made more sense. There’s a chopped sample break running underneath the whole thing that really completed it and gave it that manic feel.” **“Dead Horse”** JS: “I was always pretty keen on this being early on in the album. It feels like the culmination of all the early singles, finally figuring out how to write in our own style.” Ryan Needham: “I think, lyrically, James had a little bit of extreme anger around the time of the Dominic Cummings \[a former Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister caught breaking public health restrictions during the first UK lockdown\] stuff.” JS: “Yeah, it did come from that little month of anger. The bass was on groove; it was really good. And the lyrics played well—there were some good lines in there. It represented where we had got to up until that point.” **“Payday”** JS: “This was written to fit in on the album to coax the narrative along. Originally, it was a really lo-fi demo and then we lost it. When we redid it, we built in all these 909 electronic drums and then Sam \[Shjipstone\] put this really mad funk guitar on it that was exactly what it needed. It is just one of the more straight-up songs, a vehicle to get onto some of the more creative stuff. I tried to be more abstract with the lyrics—didn’t want to do the overly talky thing, so I left a lot more space in the verses so that chorus can come through a bit.” **“Rich”** JS: “It’s a really simple bassline that I was hypnotized by. It was written when Yard Act had just started doing OK. As some of these crazier offers were coming in, I could see it maybe reaching a level where we became part of the culture and made a living off it. I pondered on this idea that music is one of those things where, if it *goes*, you don’t really have control over how much money you suddenly earn out of nowhere. For so long, you are on the bottom rung and money is tight, and then, all of a sudden, the floodgates open and you can make loads of money really easy. That was it, but applied to the narrative of anyone that has an idea that becomes popular.” **“The Incident”** RN: “This was loads of fun. It’s a bit of an outlier on the record—it’s what sounds most like us live. I had been listening to loads of stuff like Omni and stuff like Elastica—this wave of what everyone was calling post-punk bands at the time. I wrote guitars for this one, everything, I got carried away.” JS: “I think you came up with some really interesting, busy basslines for this one.” **“Witness (Can I Get A?)”** JS: “This predates this lineup and lockdown in terms of the lyrics and the bassline. It was sounding quite generic, a post-punk sort of tune from the really early days where we had a couple of jams in late 2019.” RN: “Then, we tried it like the Beastie Boys.” JS: “We wanted to do a hardcore song, but that wasn’t really working either. Then, we did that sort of Suicide drum thing with it. As soon as it went like that, it always reminded me of the start of ‘Doorman’ by slowthai \[and Mura Masa\]. We just wanted a really fun song to close the first side. There’s something about one-minute songs—they are underrated.” **“Land of the Blind”** JS: “Ryan sent this drum-and-bass groove, and I was instantly really smitten with it, and I wrote the lyrics really fast. It’s one which has most of the demo vocals on it. We were in lockdown and Ryan got his girlfriend—who clearly can sing, but she doesn’t consider herself a singer and doesn’t perform or anything—to do all the backing vocals. They just come out so human. If a proper singer had done them, it wouldn’t have sounded right. It really shaped the song.” **“Quarantine the Sticks”** JS: “This was one of the last songs written for the record, another one that joins the narrative. The basslines are really good on this—they dance between different keys, which makes it really unnerving, and it’s got Billy Nomates \[post-punk singer-songwriter Tor Maries\] doing backing vocals on it as well. It’s quite melodic and quite a strange melody, and my voice wasn’t really holding it on \[its\] own. But there was a hint of something there, so we asked Tor to sing on it.” **“Tall Poppies”** RN: “It started with that simple bassline and then it just went on—I looped that bassline. I would send James a loop and then, about an hour later, I would get back something fucking epic, like ‘Tall Poppies.’ There was no craftsmanship on my part; it was basically like handing James a trowel and some bricks and he comes back with a finished wall.” JS: “There was something about the motor of the bassline. The first thing I got from it was that it felt quite reflective and suspensive. Off the back of that, I had that spark for telling the story of this person’s whole life, from cradle to grave.” **“Pour Another”** JS: “This was one of the harder ones. Ali \[Chant, producer\] didn’t really like this one. He kept pushing it away, but we were adamant it was good and there was something in it. ” RN: “I wanted to have a bit of a Happy Mondays sort of thing. The lyrics are funny, and the humor carried it in that way.” **“100% Endurance”** JS: “We thought the album was probably going to end on ‘Tall Poppies,’ and then, at the last-minute, Ryan sent this new demo over and it became ‘100% Endurance.’ I wrote all the lyrics to a WhatsApp video loop of it playing on Ryan’s speaker in the studio. That is the audio we used on the recording. The first take I recorded on my computer that I sent to Ryan. It felt like we had finally figured out the album, which was interesting because when we went in that first week, we thought we might come away with four or five tracks and then see where we were at later in the year. We didn’t expect to finish the album in a week.”

When COVID-19 lockdowns prohibited Welsh Dadaist Cate Le Bon to fly back to the United States from Iceland, she found herself returning to her homeland to create a sixth studio album, *Pompeii*, a collection of avant-garde art pop far removed from the 2000s jangly guitar indie she once hung her hat on. In Cardiff, recording in a house “on a street full of seagulls,” as she tells Apple Music, “I instinctively knew where all the light switches were and I knew all these sounds that the house makes when it breathes in the night.” Created with co-producer Samur Khouja, the album obscures linear nostalgia to confront uncertainty and modern reality, with stacked horns, saxophones, and synths. “For a while I was flitting between despair and optimism,” she says. “I realized that those are two things that don\'t really have or prompt action. So I tried to lean into hope and curiosity instead of that. Then I kept thinking about the idea that we are all forever connected to everything. That’s probably the theme that ties together the record.” Below, Cate Le Bon breaks down *Pompeii*, track by track. **“Dirt on the Bed”** “This song is very set in the house. It\'s being haunted by yourself in a way—this idea of time travel and storing things inside of you that maybe don\'t serve you but you still have these memories inside of you that you\'re unconscious of. It was the first song that we started working on when Samur arrived in Wales. It’s pretty linear, but it blossoms in a way that becomes more frantic, which was in tune with the lockdown in a literal and metaphorical sense.” **“Moderation”** “I was reading an essay by an architect called Lina Bo Bardi. She wrote an essay in 1958 called ‘The Moon’ and it\'s about the demise of mankind, this chasm that\'s opened up between technical and scientific progress and the human capacity to think. All these incremental decisions that man has made that have led to climate disaster and people trying to get to the moon, but completely disregarding that we\'ve got a housing crisis, and all these things that don\'t really make sense. We\'ve lost the ability to account for what matters, and it will ultimately be the demise of man. We know all this, and yet we still crave the things that are feeding into this.” **“French Boys”** “This song definitely started on the bass guitar, of wanting this late-night, smoky, neon escapism. It’s a song about lusting after something that turns into a cliché. It’s this idea of trying to search for something to identify yourself \[with\] and becoming encumbered with something. I really love the saxophone on this one in the instrumental. It is a really beautiful moment between the guitars and the saxophones.” **“Pompeii”** “This is about putting your pain somewhere else, finding a vessel for your pain, removing yourself from the horrors of something, and using it more as a vessel for your own purposes. It’s about sending your pain to Pompeii and putting your pain in a stone.” **“Harbour”** “I made a demo with \[Warpaint’s\] Stella Mozgawa, who plays drums on the record. We spent a month together at her place in Joshua Tree, just jamming out some demos I had, and this was one of them that became a lot more realized. The effortless groove that woman puts behind everything, it\'s just insane to me. She was encouraging me to put down a bassline. That playfulness of the bass is probably a direct product of her infectiousness, but the song is really about \'What do you do in your final moment? What is your final gesture? Where do you run when you know there\'s no point running?\'” **“Running Away”** “‘Running Away’ was another song that I worked on with Stella in Joshua Tree. It\'s about disaffection, I suppose, and trying to figure out whether it\'s a product of aging, where you know how to stop yourself from getting hurt by switching something off, and whether that\'s a useful tool or not. It’s an exploration of knowing where the pitfalls of hurt are, because you have a bit more experience. Is it a useful thing to avoid them or not?” **“Cry Me Old Trouble”** “Searching for your touch songs of faith, when you tap into this idea that you\'re forever connected to anything, there\'s a danger—the guilt that is imposed on people through religion, this idea of being born a sinner. Of separating those two things of feeling like you are forever connected to everything without that self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It’s about being connected to old trouble and leaning into that, and this connection to everything that has come before us. We are all just inheriting the trouble from generations before.” **“Remembering Me”** “It’s really about haunting yourself. When the future\'s dark and you don\'t really know what\'s going to happen, people start thinking about their legacy and their identity, and all those things that become very challenged when everything is taken away from you and all the familiar things that make you feel like yourself are completely removed. \[During the pandemic\] a lot of people had the internet to express themselves and forge an identity, to make them feel validated.” **“Wheel”** “In one sense, it is very much about the time trials of loving someone, and how that can feel like the same loop over and over, but I think the language is a little bit different. It\'s a little more direct than the rest of the record. I was struggling to call people over the pandemic. What do you say? So, I would write to people in a diary, not with any idea that I would send it to them, but just to try and keep this sense of contact in my head. A lot of this was pulled from letters that I would write my friend. Instead of \'Dear Diary\' it was \'Dear Bradford,\' just because I missed him, but couldn\'t pick up the phone.”

Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch. Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged. Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever. To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence. The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.