NPR Music's 36 Favorite Albums of 2022 (So Far)

Learning to channel her intensity in lockdown was where Amber Mark began to fuse together ideas for her much-anticipated debut album, *Three Dimensions Deep*. “It was like putting pieces of a puzzle together,” the singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “I had these songs. I didn’t have a concept or know exactly where I wanted to go with it all. So, on a paper to-go bag, from some food I had got delivered, I began to section it out into three clear parts.” For her deeply ruminative record, Mark soars through a galaxy of stirring anthems, helmed primarily by producer Julian Bunetta (a key part of One Direction’s hitmaking machine). “He’s my sensei,” she says, “and one of the only producers that I work with. My anxiety means I tend to make music by myself, but I left my comfort zone for this album. I used to be very against the idea of writing camps, but trusted Julian, and agreed to do one, which was so amazing.” On her endearing quest for healing, Mark embraces stages of grief (“One”), loss (“Healing Hurts”), and deep insecurity (“On & On”), advancing her sound and herself under the sharp light of futurist-feel R&B. “There’s been so much growth involved whilst making this album,” she says. “Just through the different points in my life—losing my mother, moving around. But since 2020, I’ve just been seeing the world differently.” Read on for her insights on each track from her debut album. **“One”** “I started really questioning myself at the start of 2019. You go into business with others, and you won’t always agree on things. So, this song initially came from a state of anger; I was angry, and I wanted to get it out. I’ve been attracted to the idea of rap-singing more, and lyrically, this is the perfect song to dip my toe in with and experiment.” **“What It Is”** “I’m a sucker for big, very in-your-face harmonies. I had just seen the Bee Gees film \[*The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart*\] and was so inspired by their journey. I remember writing this in one day. It’s a very bold song for me, and it started with writing out what this album means, conceptually.” **“Most Men”** “I wanted to express on the conversations you have with friends, trying to console them after a breakup, after something fucked up went down. And it’s always advice that I give to myself: ‘You need to be able to find happiness on your own—find the joy of being alone in these moments.’” **“Healing Hurts”** “I had just gone through a breakup, and I’m kind of processing on this song. After my mom passed away, that period showed me that time is the ultimate healer. And, as I know that, I know I’ll move on from this and get over the heartbreak. But right now, I’m in my bed, and I’m emotional!” **“Bubbles”** “This is also quite specific to the breakup—the aftermath. ‘Push those feelings aside, go out, and have fun.’ We wrote this at the \[writing\] retreat—where we all became close really quickly. We had dinners and got to know each other. It was like taking a vacation with great friends, except they would all be doing tequila shots. I used to, in my late teens, early twenties, but the idea doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I’m *always* down for a glass of bubbles, though, and somehow that became the joke of the trip.” **“Softly”** “When I was younger, living in Nepal, I had a very, very intense Craig David obsession. The beauty stores sold bootleg CDs there, and I bought his first two albums. I heard \[2001 single\] ‘Rendezvous’ quite recently on a summer day in New York and fell in love with it again. That synthesized harp is such a big staple of the early-’00s sound. I was like, ‘I need to sample this shit! We have to bring this back.’” **“FOMO”** “I was starting to have a little bit of cabin fever whilst \[writing\], a little frustrated at not getting anywhere. Looking at my friend’s \[Instagram\] Stories—they’re out, having fun, doing shit, and I’m missing all these amazing opportunities to be with them. So, I ended up getting inspiration from that—staying home and wrote this song about it.” **“Turnin’ Pages”** “This is where we really start to address my inner turmoil. This is the next chapter.” **“Foreign Things”** “Because the feeling of running away and leaving life behind is something that’s *so* tempting—this is about being faced with those problems, head-on, when you can longer hide or escape from them.” **“On & On”** “This song is a long-standing favorite of mine on the album. This touches on a lot of old insecurities and the ways I was dealing with them, which was not working. So, in need of a sign, this is where my mom comes into play: She would always say, ‘You have to surrender to the issues that you’re dealing with.’” **“Out of This World”** “This is the introduction to section three, essentially. Another ‘mom’ song, but here, things start getting a little spacey, sonically. The song is from her perspective, and it’s her talking to me, trying to console me.” **“Cosmic”** “I love playing with the idea of higher dimensions, associating them with the afterlife or the soul, because so many scientists have theories that prove they exist. They have the math for it but can’t portray it. So, I’m tapping more into the spirituality of science here.” **“Darkside”** “OK, I am *obsessed* with super-cheesy ’80s sounds, especially the really wet snares. And I was inspired by a really beautiful song I Shazamed in my yoga class. I went home, sampled it, and that was the start of this track. In my head, the approach was, ‘How can I make this sound like a really weird Prince, Phil Collins, and Michael Jackson love child?’” **“Worth It”** “I wrote this after releasing \[2020 single\] ‘Generous.’ People loved it, but I also received comments like, ‘Ah, it’s a different sound!’ ‘It’s not the same Amber Mark. I miss \[2017 EP\] *3:33am* Amber.’ So, I made a beat, thinking, ‘Oh, y’all want old Amber Mark? Fuck y’all. I’m going to make a beat that sounds exactly like her.’ I was giving them what they wanted…in an angry way.” **“Competition”** “This is another from a writing camp. On one of the nights, we decided to separate into teams and play a game. We had to write a song in 30 minutes, and I was also the judge, which was weird, as I was playing. But this song we ended up choosing as the best. It’s all about how it’s not actually competition. Wouldn’t it be better if we all work together?” **“Bliss”** “This is the comedown from the out-of-body experience, sonically. It’s about that euphoric state that you never even imagined possible. I was really falling in love at the time we wrote this. I’d never experienced anything like it. I wanted to talk about it. I mean, I didn’t even know this stage even existed.” **“Event Horizon”** “We were in mixing mode \[on the album\] when I wrote this. A really close friend of mine, Lincoln Bliss, sent me some stuff he had worked on to a BPM; I ask all my really talented musician friends to just send me shit I can try to make a beat from. He wrote this beautiful guitar riff that sounded like a lullaby. Normally, I sing gibberish for a few hours before I start writing. I tried to come up with the melody, but I wanted it to feel like a dream state. So, I’m also musing on some key questions I have about the universe. And finally, I ask, ‘What is the end when there is no time?’”

“I like to prepare myself and prepare the surroundings to work my music,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music about his process. “But when I get a good idea that I want to work on in the future, I hold it until that moment.” After he blessed his fans with three projects in 2020, including the forward-thinking fusion effort *EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO*, one could forgive the Latin superstar for taking some time to plan his next moves, musically or otherwise. Somewhere between living out his kayfabe dreams in the WWE and launching his acting career opposite the likes of Brad Pitt, El Conejo Malo found himself on the beach, sipping Moscow Mules and working on his most diverse full-length yet. And though its title and the cover’s emoting heart mascot might suggest a shift into sad-boy mode, *Un Verano Sin Ti* instead reveals a different conceptual aim as his ultimate summer playlist. “It\'s a good vibe,” he says. “I think it\'s the happiest album of my career.” Recorded in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the album features several cuts in the same elevated reggaetón mode that largely defined *YHLQMDLG*. “Efecto” and “Un Ratito” present ideal perreo opportunities, as does the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Rauw Alejandro team-up “Party.” Yet, true to its sunny origins, *Un Verano Sin Ti* departs from this style for unexpected diversions into other Latin sounds, including the bossa nova blend “Yo No Soy Celoso” and the dembow hybrid “Tití Me Preguntó.” He embraces his Santo Domingo surroundings with “Después De La Playa,” an energizing mambo surprise. “We had a whole band of amazing musicians,” he says about making the track with performers who\'d typically play on the streets. “It\'s part of my culture. It\'s part of the Caribbean culture.” With further collaborations from familiars Chencho Corleone and Jhayco, as well as unanticipated picks Bomba Estéreo and The Marías, *Un Verano Sin Ti* embodies a wide range of Latin American talent, with Bad Bunny as its charismatic center.

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. 

The award for “strangest boy band of the pandemic era” goes to Drain Gang, the collective of Swedish misfits who’ve attained cult status for their transcendent mix of cloud rap and hyperpop. To record *Crest*, vocalists Bladee and Ecco2k and producer Whitearmor holed up in a remote Swedish beach cabin, near where Ingmar Bergman filmed his 1957 classic *The Seventh Seal*; 60-some years later, the Gang poses similar questions about life, death, and the existence of God, with choruses that feel like prayers and lyrics like “We think we exist, that’s we why suffer, do we not?/Give it to me raw, death is beautiful” (on the nine-minute epic “5 Star Crest \[4 Vattenrum\]”). Slather these existential koans in Auto-Tune, add the ecstatic sounds of a Y2K rave, and you’ve almost got the Drain Gang recipe. But there’s something else there, too: a sweet, sincere yearning for something bigger than themselves.

There’s an expansive, uplifting quality to caroline’s 2022 debut, the sense of a large group of people—eight, in this case—together in a room, breathing as one. Cozy as the music can feel, it’s an unusual blend: the woodsy, rustic quality of ’70s British folk, the grandeur of classic Midwestern emo, the abstractions of post-rock and free improvisation. By either grace or design, the closest metaphors are found in nature: a blossoming dawn (“Dark Blue”), crashing waves (the chaotic finale of “Natural death”), ice thawing in sun (“Skydiving onto the library roof”), and wind rippling through grass (“zilch”). Together, they ebb, flow, fray, and coalesce—emphasis on *together*.

UK eight-piece caroline’s eponymous debut album often cascades with force like an avalanche, squalling and rumbling on the edge of all-out collapse. At other points they slip back into impossibly fragile moments of quiet – a simple bassline or a rattle of snare the only sound amid a dark sea of silence. caroline know exactly the right balance between restraint and release. These songs are expansive and emotive pieces, their rich palette drawing on a mixture of choral singing, Midwestern emo and O’Malley and Llewellyn’s roots in Appalachian folk. “Sometimes things sound much better when there’s empty space,” says Llewellyn. “Sometimes you might populate [a song] with too many things and forget that an element on its own is enough.” Elsewhere on the record the band have employed a collage-like technique, combining snippets of lo-fi recordings from a myriad of different locations – a barn in France, the members’ bedrooms and living rooms, the atmospheric swimming pool in which they also filmed sublime live sessions for ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Skydiving onto the library roof’ – with more traditional group sessions at the Total Refreshment Centre and their studio in Peckham. The growth that began as a scrappy guitar band above a pub many years ago is still continuing. caroline’s astounding debut album is merely the first step.

Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, has released five albums in the last decade—and each one is an expansion of and challenge to his indie-folk instrumental palette. From the stark rock/folk contrasts of *Fear Fun*’s ballads and anthems to the mariachi strains of *I Love You, Honeybear*’s love notes to the wry commentary and grand orchestrations of *Pure Comedy* and *God’s Favorite Customer*, Tillman has a penchant for pairing his articulate inner monologue with arrangements that have only grown more eclectic and elaborate. *Chloë and the Next 20th Century* builds on all of the above—the micro-symphonies, the inventive percussion, the swift shift from dusty country-western nostalgia to timeless dirges plunked out on a dive-bar piano. A swooning sax solo in a somber jazz number (“Buddy’s Rendezvous”) is immediately followed by the trill of a psychedelic harpsichord (“Q4”); “Goodbye Mr. Blue” recalls the acoustic inclinations of his early work, and warm strings wash over the record, from its first single, the romantic “Funny Girl,” through “The Next 20th Century,” the album’s sardonic closer, which resurfaces the ever-simmering existential dread of *Pure Comedy*. “If this century’s here to stay,” he sings on the track, “I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the love songs/And the great distance that they came.”

Father John Misty returns with Chloë and The Next 20th Century, his fifth album and first new material since the release of God’s Favorite Customer in 2018. Chloë and the Next 20th Century was written and recorded August through December 2020 and features arrangements by Drew Erickson. The album sees Tillman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson resume their longtime collaboration, as well as Dave Cerminara, returning as engineer and mixer. Basic tracks were recorded at Wilson’s Five Star Studios with strings, brass, and woodwinds recorded at United Recordings in a session featuring Dan Higgins and Wayne Bergeron, among others. Chloë and The Next 20th Century features the singles “Funny Girl,” “Q4,” “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” and “Kiss Me (I Loved You),” and will be available April 8th, 2022 worldwide from Sub Pop and in Europe from Bella Union.

Harry Styles’ third solo album, *Harry’s House*, is the product of a chain reaction. Had the pandemic not thrown his world into a tailspin in early 2020, he would’ve continued to tour behind *Fine Line*, his critically adored sophomore album, and played its songs hundreds of times for sold-out crowds around the world. A return to the studio was planned, of course, but when COVID-19 canceled those plans too, Styles faced an empty calendar for the first time in a decade. The singer opted to use this free time carefully, taking a solo road trip through Italy and visiting with family and friends for rare long, drawn-out stretches. It was an important moment of reevaluation. “You miss so many birthdays,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And eventually it\'s just assumed you\'re unable to be at stuff. Finally I was like, ‘I want to balance my life out a bit. Working isn’t who I am, it\'s something I do. I want to be able to put that down.’” His upbeat, lightly electronic third LP riffs on the concept of home, viewing it less as a geographical location and more as a state of mind—his mind. “Imagine it’s a day in my house, a day in my mind,” he said. “What do I go through? I’m playing fun music. I’m playing sad music. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff.” Because of the pandemic, Styles recorded the songs with a small handful of longtime friends and close collaborators who gathered in a single room to drink wine, write, and play. That intimacy is reflected in the songs, which are conversational and casually confessional, as if he’s thinking out loud. Blending vintage folk rock with flickers of disco and a generally more relaxed sensibility, they illustrate a turning point in Styles’ career as he transitions even further towards career singer-songwriter. “For a while it was, how do I play that game of remaining exciting?” he says. “But I finally had a moment where I felt like, ‘Okay, I’m not the young thing, so I would like to really think about who I want to be as a musician.’” Read on for the inside story behind a handful of standout selections from *Harry’s House*. **“Music for a Sushi Restaurant”** “After *Fine Line*, I had an idea of how I thought the next album would open. But there\'s something about ‘Sushi’ that felt like, ‘Nah, *that\'s* how I want to start.’ It becomes really obvious what the first song should be based on what you play for people when they’re like, ‘Oh, can I hear a bit of the music?’ It\'s like, how do you want to set the tone?” **“Daylight”** “We were like, ‘We have to find a way to stay awake and finish this, because if we all go to bed, then this won’t turn out the way it would if we finished tonight.’ So we powered through, finished it, and went down to the beach as the sun was coming up and it was like, ‘Okay. Yeah.’ It felt correct that we\'d finished it in that place. Life, and songs in particular, are so much about moments. In surfing, for example, sometimes you don\'t get the wave and sometimes the wave comes and you haven\'t practiced. But every now and again, the wave comes and you’re ready, you\'ve practiced enough that you can ride it. Sometimes when the songs write themselves like that, it feels like, ‘Okay, there\'s a reason why sometimes I sit out there, falling off the board a bunch. It\'s for this moment.” **“As It Was”** “‘As It Was,’ to me, is bittersweet. It’s devastating. It\'s a death march. It’s about metamorphosis and a perspective change, which are not necessarily things you have time with. People aren’t like, ‘Oh, we\'ll give you a couple more days with this moment and let you say goodbye to your former self,’ or whatever. No. Everyone is changing, and by the time you realize what’s happened, \[the moment\] is already gone. During the pandemic, I think we all at some point realized that it would never be the same as it was before. It was so obvious that it wouldn’t. You can\'t go backwards—we can’t as a society and I can’t in my personal life. But you learn so much in those moments because you’re forced to face things head-on, whether they’re your least favorite things about the world or your least favorite things about yourself, or all of it.” **“Matilda”** “I had an experience with someone where, in getting to know them better, they revealed some stuff to me that was very much like, ‘Oh, that\'s not normal, like I think you should maybe get some help or something.’ This song was inspired by that experience and person, who I kind of disguised as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book. I played it to a couple of friends and all of them cried. So I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something to pay attention to.’ It\'s a weird one, because with something like this, it\'s like, ‘I want to give you something, I want to support you in some way, but it\'s not necessarily my place to make it about me because it\'s not my experience.’ Sometimes it\'s just about listening. I hope that\'s what I did here. If nothing else, it just says, ‘I was listening to you.’” **“Boyfriends”** “‘Boyfriends’ was written right at the end of *Fine Line*. I\'d finished the album and there was an extra week where I wrote ‘Adore You,’ ‘Lights Up,’ and ‘Treat People With Kindness.’ At the end of the session for ‘Lights Up,’ we started writing ‘Boyfriends,’ and it felt like, ‘Okay, there\'s a version of this story where we get this song ready for this album.’ But something about it just felt like, no, it’ll have its time, let\'s not rush it. We did so many versions of it. Vocal. Acoustic. Electric guitar. Harmonies on everything, and then we took them out for chunks and put them back in for chunks. You try not to get ahead of yourself when you write a song, but there was something about this one where I felt like, ‘Okay, when I\'m 50, if I\'m playing a show, maybe there\'s someone who heard me for the first time when they were 15 and this is probably the song they came to see.’ Because I\'m learning so much by singing it. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m hearing you.’ It’s both acknowledging my own behavior and looking at behavior I\'ve witnessed. I grew up with a sister, so I watched her date people, and I watched friends date people, and people don\'t treat each other very nicely sometimes.” **“Cinema”** “I think I just wanted to make something that felt really fun, honestly. I was on a treadmill going, ‘Do-do-do-do-do-do.’ I tend to do so much writing in the studio, but with this one, I did a little bit here and then I went home and added a little bit there, and then kind of left it, and then went into the studio to put it all together. That was a theme across the whole album, actually: We used to book a studio and be like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got it for two months, grind it out.’ But some days you just don\'t want to be there, and eventually you\'ve been in the studio so long, the only thing you can write about is nothing because you haven\'t done anything. So with this album, we’d work for a couple of weeks and then everyone would go off and live their lives.” **“Love of My Life”** “‘Love of My Life’ was the most terrifying song because it\'s so bare. It\'s so sparse. It’s also very much in the spirit of what *Harry\'s House* is about: I wanted to make an acoustic EP, all in my house, and make it really intimate. It’s named after \[the Japanese pop pioneer Haruomi\] Hosono, who had an album in the \'70s called *Hosono House*. I immediately started thinking about what *Harry’s House* might look like. It took time for me to realize that the house wasn\'t a geographical location, it was an internal thing. When I applied that concept to the songs we were making here, everything took on new meaning. Imagine it\'s a day in my house or a day in my mind. What do I go through? I\'m playing fun music. I\'m playing sad music. I\'m playing this, I\'m playing that. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff. And it’s all mine. This is my favorite album at the moment. I love it so much. And because of the circumstances, it was made very intimately; everything was played by a small number of people and made in a room. To me, it\'s everything. It\'s everything I\'ve wanted to make.”

Melbourne producer and bandleader Mike Katz—aka Harvey Sutherland, the name under which Katz has released music since 2013—refers to his debut album *Boy* as “neurotic funk.” Certainly there’s plenty of dance and electro-funk to be heard here, particularly on his collab with boogie legend DāM FunK on “Feeling of Love” and the slap-bass-heavy “Michael Was Right About You” (featuring Katz on vocals). The neurotic part of the equation comes from the fact that Katz penned the album in between touring, recording, and visits with his psychotherapist. There’s a jitteriness to the jazz-funk of “Age of Acceleration,” which reflects on the chaotic events of 2022, while the rock ’n’ roll-meets-dance of “Type A” (featuring Jack “sos” Summers of Melbourne punkers CLAMM) boasts the lyric “My insecurity is all genuine.” Krautrock infiltrates the title track and opener “Jouissance,” the latter also influenced by Melbourne producer and composer Kirkis, reinforcing the sense that this is dance music with soul, heart, and a nervous twitch.

Building on the widespread acclaim of his 2020 Blue Note debut *Omega*, alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins delivers another momentous statement with his sophomore release, *The 7th Hand*. For the most part a showcase of the same incendiary quartet with pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Darryl Johns, and drummer Kweku Sumbry, this outing also includes a collaboration with another of Sumbry’s projects, the Farafina Kan Percussion Ensemble, on “Don’t Break,” and two tracks (including the radiant “Witness”) featuring flutist Elena Pinderhughes, known for her work with Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. Wilkins envisioned this album as an interconnected suite, with episodes ranging from the tripwire rhythm of “Emanation” and the uptempo fury of “Lighthouse” to the hypnotic melodies of “Shadow” and “Fugitive Ritual, Selah.” The final track, lasting nearly a half hour, sends the quartet into a whole other zone of freely improvised, slowly building heat.

Between melancholy and hope. Among friends. Made with Elektron Octatrack and Analog Four, Ciat Lonbarde Cocoquantus, Microphonic Soundbox, Cooper FX Generation Loss, OTO Bim and Bam. Recorded Straight to 1/4" tape in single takes.

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.

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

“The letter X marks the spot, crosses over, literally with a cross. It’s the former, the ex-. The ex-lover known simply as “an ex”. Ex- is the latin prefix meaning “out”. Exterior, an exit. Extraordinary. Excellent. It’s exciting. Generation X. X-files. X is the unknown. X is Extreme“ Extreme is Molly Nilsson’s tenth studio album. Recorded in 2019 and throughout the 2020 global pandemic at home in Berlin, Extreme is a departure for Nilsson, an explosion of angry love. It’s an album of anthems for the jilted generation, soaked with joy and offering solace, bristling with distorted, Metal guitars and planet-sized choruses that bring light to the dark centre of the galaxy. It’s an album of the times, by the times and for the people. It’s a record about power. About how to fight it, how to take it and how to share it. Absolute Power explodes with massive guitars, double kick beats and the instantly iconic line “It’s me versus the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.” Nilsson’s performance itself portrays absolute power in its confidence but the song is a call-to-arms, an entreaty to grasp the here and now, to take the power back. It’s Nilsson pacing the ring and we’re instantly in her corner. Earth Girls takes familiar Molly Nilsson themes - female empowerment and subverting the patriarchy - but casually throws in one of the choruses of her career. “Women have no place in this world” she sings, but it’s the world that isn’t good enough. Stadium-sized but still warmly hazy, Earth Girls has its fists in the air, glorifying in harmony, almost ecstatic in its feeling good. Nilsson’s Springsteen-level conviction and righteousness bleeds through the speaker cones, the cognitive dissonance between the song’s cadences and angry lyrics redolent of Bruce in his prime. Female empowerment isn’t always an angry energy on Extreme, however. On Fearless Like A Child, Nilsson’s anthem to the female body and women’s sovereignty of it, she croons over a mid-80s blue-eyed Soul groove. It sets a nocturnal scene as the narrator surveys her past and her surroundings. Before we’re fully submerged in a dreamlike, Steve McQueen-era Prefab Sprout poem to learning from your mistakes the song erupts into one of those lines only Molly Nilsson can get away with: “I love my womb, come inside I feel so alive” she fervently sings. Against the backdrop of ever-encroaching, conservative rulings on women’s reproductive rights in places like Texas, it’s simultaneously angry and full of love. Every song on Extreme is a gleaming gem in a pouch of jewels. On Kids Today, Nilsson is the voice of wisdom, archly commenting on the eternal struggle between youth and authority. Wisdom infuses Sweet Smell Of Success with a transcendent love that forgives the narrator’s shortcomings and celebrates the moment, it’s a letter to the author from the author that asks “what is success” and concludes that this is it, this song, this moment. It’s a rare moment of simple reflection that is generous in its insight to Nilsson’s inner life. “Success” is a tool of power and we don’t need it… We need power tools and there are moments on Extreme where it feels like Nilsson is showing us how to find them. It's an open conversation through out Extreme. She’s a warm, comforting presence through out the album and specially on these songs of encouragement, songs perhaps sang to a younger Molly Nilsson or, really, to whomever needs to hear them. “They’ll praise your efforts, they’ll call you slurs a rebel, a master, an amateur / Merely with your own existence, you already offer your resistance.” On Avoid Heaven she’s even more direct, pleading with us to avoid concepts of purity and to embrace the glorious, ebullient, emotional mess we’re often in as a method of upending the power structures who need things to be perfect. They Will Pay brings back the big, distorted power chords in the form of a agit-punk, pop slammer. Of course, when Molly Nilsson does punk pop we get the catchiest chorus this side of The Bangles or The Nerves. It’s rendered in an off the cuff, throwaway manner that is just perfect in its roughness. However, it’s on Pompeii that Nilsson delivers the album’s epic, emotional heartbreaker. Like 1995 on Nilsson’s album Zenith, or Days Of Dust on Twenty Twenty, the lyrics of Pompeii are heavy with a transcendent sadness, an aching poetry that cuts to the truth of the heart like the best Leonard Cohen lines, though here delivered with an uplifting, life-affirming love. It contains the most personal moments of Extreme, a song lit by the dying embers of romance. Yet it’s here where the alchemy at the base of all Nilsson’s best work is found. Turning small nuggets of personal truth into big, generous universal moments that invite everyone to cry, to love and to fight the power. In an album of jewels, it might be the shining star. Molly Nilsson’s biggest, boldest and most vital album to date, Extreme is about power. Against the love of power and for the power of love.

For any band, signing to a major label at the beginning of your career is a dream come true. For LGBTQ+ Los Angeles power pop-rock trio MUNA (musicians Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson all identify as queer), it was merely their first milestone. Great freedom and success came later, when they were dropped by their label after releasing two albums and just as quickly picked up by Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. Now an independent band on their self-titled third full-length, they never sounded more confident. “\[*MUNA*\] has a lot to do with identity and agency and self-definition, the ideas that we project onto other people,” Maskin tells Apple Music. “It’s an interrogation of interpersonal relationships, and sexuality, and desire, and just trying to be a person in the world and present in your life.” Those complicated ideas are articulated with an eclectic musical nuance, from the country-folk of “Kind of Girl” and the Peter Gabriel-indebted “Solid” to the jagged, Robyn-esque synth-pop of “What I Want” and the playful pop of “Silk Chiffon.” “Music helps us feel less alone in our human experience, and I think we want people to feel that,” Gavin says. “There’s a hope that these songs can foster moments of connection and joy for people, like for our queer community—we want these songs to be a soundtrack to new experiences that aren\'t full of torment.” Below, MUNA walks Apple Music through their new album, track by track. **“Silk Chiffon” feat. Phoebe Bridgers** Naomi McPherson: “The song has been kicking about since the end of 2019. Katie wrote it, and at the time it was just the pre-chorus. The bridge lyrics were in the place of the chorus. It was synth-ier, but Jo and I had the instinct to make it feel like opening credits of a late-\'90s, early-aughts rom-com. We had been kicking around the idea of having someone feature on the second verse, and Phoebe came to mind—this was prior to us signing to her label. She loved the song and was so stoked to hop on it, which made us feel so, so good.” **“What I Want”** Katie Gavin: “This was a song that started as actually a Zoom co-write. I did it with Leland, who is an amazing songwriter and artist in his own right, and who has also done a lot of work on songs in the universe of *RuPaul\'s Drag Race*. I had a couple beats from Naomi, and I took them into the session and we both liked that one. After the session, I sent a demo to Naomi and Jo, and I remember Naomi freaking out and knowing that it was going to be a banger and wanting to work on it. I was a little bit scared of the song initially because of how much of a banger it is. There are strings in the chorus that were very inspired by \'Toxic,\' the classic Britney song.” **“Runner’s High”** NM: “MUNA’s anti-running song. The funny thing about this track is, I think, that the beat came about in the most peculiar way. During 2020, a friend of ours was letting us use her studio for very cheap, and we were trying to take making music very seriously. We wanted to do something where it\'s like, we had no songs that we were currently working on, so we came up with a game called \'the five-minute game,\' where each of us had to make a part in a five-minute period, and then someone else adds a part on top. The start of this song came from that game. And I don\'t think I\'ve ever heard a song that has this specific metaphor; obviously, it is one of a kind and the song slaps. So, you can run to it. We won\'t, but we hope that people do.” **“Home by Now”** Josette Maskin: “This came about in a pretty classic MUNA way. All the songs have different trajectories and paths, but this one was something that Katie wrote when we were on tour with Phoebe in the fall of 2021. We sometimes find that being on the road can be pretty inspiring. When you\'re away from your stuff and you don\'t have the obligation to work on an album that has a pending deadline, it can take you out of your element and inspire you in a way.” **“Kind of Girl”** KG: “For songs that I start on my own, there\'s two categories: I did it on Ableton, which was \'Home by Now,\' or I did it on an acoustic guitar, which is \'Kind of Girl.\' \'Kind of Girl\' I wrote in a bathtub. I wrote it from start to finish, chronologically, first the pre-chorus, then the chorus. I was thinking about the power that the words we choose to identify with have on the way that our story unfolds. How those affect what we think is possible and not possible and what we think is fixed or unfixed. We recorded just a bunch of layers of acoustic guitar and Josette\'s slide through a toy amp and built this world out.” **“Handle Me”** JM: “Katie wrote this song in January 2020. When we first did this song, Naomi and I were thinking a lot about, funny enough, 311—there’s a guitar part based on those early-2000s songs, something that would be on *The O.C.* Naomi felt really inspired about changing the drums and then I played the guitar part slightly differently and we tried to make it more of a lo-fi sexy track. I really fought for the song to be on the record, because I was like, ‘Oh, we don\'t really have a song in our discography that is sexy in this specific way.\' It shows a different side of MUNA.” **“No Idea”** NM: “‘No Idea’ started at the top of 2020. At the time we were toying with the idea of the third record being an alternative reimagining of the past wherein we were the biggest boy band in the late \'90s and early 2000s. But we are ourselves, and gay, we cast ourselves into that canon. I think of \'No Idea\' as our \'90s Max Martin moment meets a little bit of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk. Katie had written the song, it was pretty finished, but there wasn\'t a second verse. We had a session with Mitski; she came over to me and Jo’s apartment at the time, and we talked about disco. She thought the song was hot and fun to work on; she gave us a kick into the direction that the song found itself in.” **“Solid”** NM: “‘Solid’ has been around since 2018, 2017, I think. It just didn\'t have a place on the second record. It was in the archive for a bit and then it reappeared. It is one of my favorites. We’re always super inspired by \'80s music. I mean, who doesn\'t, that makes pop music nowadays? That artistic innovation, computerized sound, and synthesized sound. It was just fun to work on after all these years. It bops.” **“Anything But Me”** KG: “I wrote this song in my car. I had my laptop, and I was eating a burrito, and I came up with the first lines of the song and I was just like, ‘That\'s so stupid, but it\'s stupid in a way that\'s almost brilliant.’ This song is in 12/8, a really specific groove, and it has a buoyant energy. I had written the verse and the pre-chorus and had the basic groove down, and I sent it to Naomi and Jo. Naomi was like, \'There needs to be a section after the pre-chorus where you\'re doing something very like Shania \[Twain\] with the word “me,” holding it out and having a moment with it.\' We fleshed it out from there. When Jo and Naomi were working on it, they had some influence from Mariah Carey.” **“Loose Garment”** NM: “‘Loose Garment’ started because I was looking at furniture and I made a beat and called it ‘Teak Wood Nine.’ I sent Katie a bunch of beats that had wood and furniture names. We all love Imogen Heap and her collaboration with Guy Sigsworth. The band Frou Frou, they\'re a touchstone for us, both her solo project and that band; it felt like maybe \[the song\] could live in that universe. We switched the beat up and gave it a pulsating feel that motivated the song. It’s definitely a sad one. Cynthia Tolson killed it. She played strings on it and just went off.” **“Shooting Star”** KG: “This song was written literal weeks before we turned in the album. That\'s very MUNA. I always write until it is pencils down. I had written this on acoustic guitar, and it was this folky bassline guitar part that really turned Josette off, and I remember I wanted it. We always intended for this to be a 10-song record. There\'s a certain kind of guitar that we got obsessed with using, and I feel like we associate it a lot with the sound of music in LA: It\'s a rubber-bridge, vintage acoustic guitar, and Jo reworked the guitar part into something that was better. It was Naomi\'s idea to have kind of this Coldplay moment at the end where the song explodes into this more cathartic beat and arrangement, and that was really, I think, a big moment for that song as well.”

MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms, could have made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Since MUNA — lead singer/songwriter Katie Gavin, guitarist/producer Naomi McPherson, guitarist Josette Maskin — began making music together in college, at USC, they’d always embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience: the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But sometimes, for MUNA, after nearly a decade of friendship and a long stretch of pandemic-induced self-reckoning, the most radical note possible is that of bliss. MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is a landmark — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. It’s marked by a newfound creative assurance and technical ability, both in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace. Here, more than ever, MUNA musters their unique powers to break through the existential muck and transport you, suddenly, into a room where everything is possible — a place where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof, and self-consciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.

In the context of Nilüfer Yanya’s second album, the word “painless” has a few different meanings. “I was enjoying the process of making the record, and thinking, ‘Why do you have to beat yourself up in order to make something?’” the London singer/guitarist tells Apple Music. “Obviously, you have to work hard, but often the idea of really struggling is something that people inflict on others, just because it\'s the idea they sell to them, like, ‘Oh, you need to go through this.’” Yanya felt that she hadn\'t given herself enough time and space to make her 2019 debut, *Miss Universe*—a record based loosely, and playfully, around the concept of self-help and wellness, and what happens when you get too in your head about things. So, in the thick of the pandemic, she eased into making *PAINLESS*, writing the songs more collaboratively—mostly with producer Will Archer—than she had been used to. “I kind of felt a bit like, ‘Am I cheating?’ Because you\'re sharing the work, it feels lighter,” she says. \"But then because of that, I kind of delved in deeper and it got a bit darker.” (The album title actually comes from the “shameless” lyric “Until you fall, it\'s painless.”) Those depths can be felt both in Yanya\'s vocal dynamics and the sense of urgency that underpins much of the album, particularly on opener “the dealer” and “stabilise,” the first single. “I think the rhythm plays a big part in these songs,” Yanya says. “You feel like there needs to be an escape somewhere.” Here Yanya talks through *PAINLESS*, track by track. **“the dealer”** “It\'s like when someone\'s hiding behind their layers, or not being honest, but then also you\'re not being honest with yourself. My favorite lyric is \'I hope it\'s just the summertime you grew attached to,\' because it\'s like you\'re lying to yourself. You’re not saying, \'Oh, it was this person that made the difference, or it was this person that I miss.\' You\'re just saying, \'I had a great time,\' and you\'re not being honest about why.” **“L/R”** “\[Producer\] Bullion played me this beat, and it had this pitched drum in it. It just made me feel really happy and warm. It had this kind of marching feeling to it, which I really liked. It took us like a year to finish it, but the initial idea came really quickly. I like the almost spoken element to it, because it sounds like you\'re speaking rather than singing, but then the chorus is very much singing—and it took a while to get that right. It\'s kind of about so many things. In my notebook at the time, I\'d written, \'Do less things\'—like, less is more. That was my thinking behind the song: trying to enjoy simple things and not overcomplicate things.” **“shameless”** “It\'s a really intimate song. I felt like it was about someone that\'s trying to run away from stuff in their life, but they kind of don\'t have much hope. The vocals are very celestial—not something I really experimented with in the past. At first, I was going to kind of speak the words, but it needed a lighter touch, like something even more delicate.” **“stabilise”** “That was the first one me and Will did together. All the others kind of grew off that song. It\'s about environments and the way they impact you, and not being able to escape your environment, taking it with you wherever you go. And it kind of becomes your cage or the way you view things. You know when you\'ve been somewhere too long and then it\'s hard to imagine the world another way? Definitely a very lockdown song.” **“chase me”** “I really liked the line \'Through corridors your love will chase me,\' because it was like the safe feeling you can get when you know you are loved, but you don\'t necessarily want it. It\'s almost like an ego song for me. It\'s very confident.” **“midnight sun”** “I was digging into more of an overall feeling and a mood. I feel like it\'s a song about confidence and finding your own voice in order to speak up, whether that\'s about your own feelings or bigger issues: ‘I can\'t keep my mouth shut this time. I can\'t keep my head down. I\'m not going along with this anymore.’” **“trouble”** “That song is so sad—in a beautiful way, if I may say so. It also felt like quite a brave one for me because it\'s very different. When I was writing, I was like, \'Am I doing a straight-up pop song?\' It\'s not. I think it definitely has that take on it. The vocals needed to be more intimate. Like one voice, and it just all keeps spilling out. It\'s quite challenging to sing. ‘Trouble’ is one of those words—I think I heard it in a Cat Stevens song—\'Trouble, set me free\'—and I really loved the way it was being referred to almost like a person. In the lyrics here, it\'s something that\'s quite persistent and it\'s not going away. Something\'s definitely broken that you can\'t fix.” **“try”** “This one is about getting better, and feeling the need to connect on a deeper level, finding new depths and making new connections, but becoming confused, tired, and dejected with the effort it takes.” **“company”** “It\'s about giving up and you\'re not in a happy place. Originally it started out as, like, you\'re in a relationship that you are just really not sure about and you\'re trying to give signs across that you\'re trying to get rid of someone. But I think the song now is definitely about your inner demons, and they\'re not really going away.” **“belong with you”** “I did this with Jazzi Bobbi, who\'s in my band. She does more electronic stuff, so that definitely comes into play. I feel like builds are always my favorite things in songs, and at the beginning we actually tried to overcomplicate the song and there was like a whole other section and it changed tempo and it just wasn\'t working. And I was like, \'We just need to keep building and that\'s it.\' What it\'s about is like you\'re tied into something, but you know you\'re too good for it or you want to leave. I feel like these are all the songs, in a way. It’s like, escape—but you can\'t escape.” **“the mystic”** “It\'s about watching other people get on with their lives and feeling like you\'re being left behind. I spend a lot of time doing music, so that\'s where I put all my energy, and I was like, \'Oh, I thought we were all still doing that.\' Other people have got other plans and you\'re like, \'Oh, you\'re a grown-up. You\'re going to move in with your boyfriend,\' or, \'Oh, you can drive now.\' The verse is really sad, because it\'s about watching that happen, and feeling very insecure and unconfident.” **“anotherlife”** “For me, this has a completely different energy. It\'s kind of like you\'re admitting you\'re lost now, but in a parallel universe or in the future, you won\'t always be lost. It\'s not always bad to be in that kind of lost, super-emotional, flung-out state. I find sometimes when something bad happens and you get really upset, it\'s kind of— I don\'t want to say cleansing, but you see things with this new kind of brilliance and clarity. And that\'s kind of a beautiful moment.”

Nilüfer Yanya runs head first into the depths of emotional vulnerability on her anticipated sophomore record PAINLESS. Recorded between a basement studio in Stoke Newington and Riverfish Music in Penzance, the record is a more sonically direct effort, narrowing her previously broad palette to a handful of robust ideas. Yanya's debut album Miss Universe (2019) earned a Best New Music tag from Pitchfork and saw support tours with Sharon Van Etten, Mitski and The XX.

."..an album that gives eerily accurate shape and movement, nearly definition, to the feeling of those bright-white days." - NPR Music's 36 Favorite Albums of 2022 (so far) "...outlining the soul of a unique and quiet corner of the world in these sparse, lush pieces." NPR Music's Best Experimental Records of 2022 --- After the near death of a loved one, I came to a frozen island in the far north on Lake Superior at the end of winter. I had been feeling stuck, but this encounter with death opened up a deep awareness of the present moment in me. I worked in the morning each day when the light was best in my studio, recording daily musical sketches. In the afternoons, I walked the frozen landscape of the island, listening to the sparse sounds of late winter. I watched as the frozen lake began to thaw - slowly at first, then all at once. A mass of water full of motion emerged and stretched out to meet the sky. As things melted, small pieces of color and sound filled the emptiness. Time deepened, and I settled into a place of lightness. Inviting an awareness of death into my daily life was not all darkness, as I expected, but rather filled with dualities: light and dark, peace and chaos, presence and distance. And in periods of clarity, I could see that life is beginning in every moment. --------------------------------------------- "Although primarily Brooklyn-based, the composer, multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker Peter Coccoma prefers to spend his winters not in some warm coastal town, but in the frozen landscape of Lake Superior’s Madeline Island. Boasting a population of 300 and a square footage comparable to Manhattan, the island is sometimes accessed from Wisconsin’s mainland by the “windsled,” a fan-propelled boat on skies that glides on the ice for weeks when it is too thick for ferries to break through and too thin for cars to drive across. In February 2020, Coccoma and his partner made their customary trip to Madeline for the winter, and when the pandemic hit, they decided to stay indefinitely. This meant that he was limited to a few modest tools for musical expression: a MIDI keyboard, a Portastudio tape machine, and his laptop. His new album A Place to Begin emerged gradually from daily improvisations using digital processing, sampling, and feeding synth lines back and forth between the tape machine and his computer—creative extensions of a meditation practice which put him in greater touch with the sounds and rhythms of life on the island. The resulting work is an extended tone poem evoking the ebb and flow of Coccoma’s natural surroundings. The album’s musical process was partially inspired by an inquiry into Buddhist practice following an unsettling and revelatory life event: a loved one was given three months to live, before discovering weeks later that they had been misdiagnosed. In the wake of this experience, Coccoma became fascinated with 'maranasati'—the practice of bringing an awareness of death into one’s daily life. According to this teaching, one of the effects of becoming familiar with death is that it can shine a light back on life and the beauty of the temporal nature of all things. Coccoma explains, on the island, maranasanti became “a tool to remind me to be present and, through that, to turn outwardly to all these things around me in the natural world.” On his afternoon walks on Madeline, Coccoma found the island to be filled with sound and motion even at its most still and quiet moments. Echoing his progenitor John Luther Adams’ concept of “sonic geography,” the textures in the pieces on a place to begin function almost like points plotted on a map. Many of its subterranean synth sounds were inspired by the low frequency reverberations from beneath the frozen surface of the lake, which split the difference between whale song or the aggressive low end of an EDM track. Meanwhile, the high intoned percussion that underscores “Toward Light” mimics the knocking of the pileated woodpecker, one of Madeline’s few winter birds. Instead of functioning as a static soundscape, A Place to Begin provides a decidedly active listening experience. Coccoma’s unclassifiable electroacoustic textures ease us back and forth along the continuum between tonality and noise, while searing string gestures—courtesy of cellist Clarice Jensen (Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter) and violinist Oliver Hill—inaugurate new movements, cutting through the mix like beams of sunlight through a frozen forest canopy. On A Place to Begin, Coccoma plays the role of tour guide, leading us through his imagined landscape and gently guiding us towards its visceral extremes." -Winston Cook Wilson

The second album from Raveena Aurora is a conceptual epic whose protagonist, the titular Asha, is an ancient Punjabi princess living on an alien planet, where she is bestowed with advanced spiritual intelligence (as one does). However complicated that sounds, the Indian American artist unfurls the narrative with grace and subtlety, her feather-light falsetto floating over South Asian-inspired percussion and dreamy R&B and disco. Vince Staples drops by for a verse on the slinky, Timbaland-esque “Secret,” but the album’s most swoon-worthy moment is “Asha’s Kiss,” a collaboration with Asha Puthli—the Mumbai-born jazz-fusion singer whose “Space Talk” you’ve probably heard sampled in any number of hip-hop classics—that feels like an afternoon daydream. If that doesn’t get you in the mood for reverie, the 13-minute guided meditation (“Let Your Breath Become a Flower”) that closes the album should do the trick.

Silky-smooth vocals and alt-R&B jams ignite an assured debut LP.

S.G. Goodman’s 2020 debut album *Old Time Feeling* announced the Kentucky singer-songwriter as one of roots rock’s finest new voices. Its follow-up is no sophomore slump, further showing the depths of Goodman’s talents as a writer and performer. Recorded in Athens, Georgia, alongside co-producer Drew Vandenberg, *Teeth Marks* is an immersive listen and often surprising, with Goodman eschewing genre confines in favor of a sonic world big enough to suit her larger-than-life songs. Goodman has a knack for finding the universal in small details, as on standout “Dead Soldiers,” which was (its title slang for empty beer bottles) inspired by a friend’s battle with alcoholism. A pair of songs at the album’s center—“If You Were Someone I Loved” and “You Were Someone I Loved”—tell twin tales of the devastating effects of a lack of compassion, with particular regard to the opioid epidemic. Mixed emotions abound, too, like on “Work Until I Die,” which pairs a jaunty beat with a decidedly less playful take on labor.

“Still no album?” asks the intro to Samm Henshaw’s debut full-length—a tongue-in-cheek nod to expectations placed on the singer-songwriter from the tender age of five-years-old. “When the family came round, I’d grab everyone and make sit them down,” he tells Apple Music. “I had a small guitar and I would have my very own service, basically. I would lead worship, I was also the pastor, and choir—and with worship songs, they’re not just one style and genre. So, that’s where this all began, learning to cover all musical bases.” On *Untidy Soul*, R&B-meets-gospel for a rich serving of big-hearted tracks that provide a dutiful brief of Henshaw\'s journey. Sighted through the lens of love and eventual heartbreak Henshaw’s warm debut—featuring contributions from Josh Grant, Pop Wansel, Rahki—provides searing statements (“Thoughts and Prayers”) home truths (“It Won’t Change”) and bitter acceptance (“Still Broke”) before the winding road to redemption (“Joy”). “I know all of the ingredients that went into creating this recipe,” he says. “But I never could quite put my finger on it to describe where, or what world, this music sits in. I would get asked all the time, and it was tough, until I came across the answer myself, it’s messy, untidy soul music.” Below, Samm Henshaw talks through his personal debut album, track by track. **“Still No Album (Intro)”** “I made this with my friend, Jeff \[Benjamin\], who’s one of those people that delivers his words so funnily. A lot of the time, you can’t tell if he\'s serious or joking, but I’ve always said to myself: ‘If I have an interlude on my album, Jeff\'s going to be on one.’ This is me almost mocking myself a bit, and it\'s fun to be able to have the line: ‘Still no album?’ as we cut, straight into it.” **“Thoughts and Prayers\"** “I was taking a trip to the studio in the back of an Uber, feeling frustrated with what I was reading. I do believe in prayer, and it’s importance, but the question I asked myself, that triggered me writing this song, is ‘When people give their thoughts and prayers, do they actually think, and do they actually pray?’ It was that simple.” **“Grow”** “A lot of these songs came from a relationship I was in for three years—she was the inspiration, and was there for a lot of the creation. If I\'m the dad, she\'s for certain the mother of this album, that’s also why it took so long to finish—I wanted to go through the entire process of feeling and being. This is song is about perseverance, not giving up at the first sign of trouble, if you do every time something goes wrong, it’s likely you won’t grow. And that\'s not just about relationships, it’s life. Period.” **“Chicken Wings”** “This song, honestly, is as simple as anyone would think. I had a craving to write a song about chicken wings, and we did it!” **“Mr Introvert”** “I worked closely with \[British producer and multi-instrumentalist\] Marco Bernardis on this song, who’s absolutely killing it at the moment with his group \[Radiant Children\]. It’s about how, with my girlfriend at the time, we had this way of knowing each other, and all the *tiny* details. It was her recognising how I’m introverted, in my favourite line, that says: ‘She likes to call me Mr. Introvert / I say I only save my words for her.’” **“8.16”** “This is easily one of my favourite songs on the project. It began in a session in LA; there was myself, Wayne Hector, and Sebastian Kole—going through beats and sounds, until we found this sample. It was such an amazing, fun and simple experience. I speak about those feelings you have in the early honeymoon phase of a relationship. I wanted to make something classic and timeless about being in love.” **“Mr Introvert (Reprise)”** “It was \[UK producer\] Josh Grant\'s genius idea to split \[\'Mr Introvert\'\] in half as he’s pretty much the executive producer of the album. He showed me how it sounded, and I flipped out, it’s perfect—I love how the songs slide into one another. As it cuts off, if you wanna hear the rest of the song… we’re in control of whether you can, which I really like. It reminds me of certain hip-hop albums that I *loved* growing up, when the DJ would scratch and mix one song into the next.” **”Loved By You”** “I made this track in London with \[UK musician and producer\] Fred Cox, he’s someone I\'ve worked with since the start of my career. I sat at the piano, playing keys, and these lyrics started coming out, pure sentiments of love. We ended up getting this song finished in a day. I wasn\'t even going to put that on the album, but we released it for Valentine\'s Day \[in 2019\], on YouTube. Soon after, my manager Jackie called like: ‘Samm, you *need* to put this on the album.’” **“Take Time\" (feat. Tobe Nwigwe)** “This song had so many different versions at one point. I went to different people, like, ‘We\'ve got this hook, it’s really good, but we still need verses for this song.’ There’s parts from every person that\'s contributed to the song—Anais is the vocal you hear on the chorus, Josh Grant, Trey Campbell and we had Braxton Cook, an incredible artist and saxophonist come in and play. I didn’t know about Tobe Nwigwe for the longest time until I saw his \[NPR\] Tiny Desk performance, which is just the coldest thing ever, one of the best I’ve seen. I check him up, and realise that he follows me \[online\], I freaked out and messaged him, ‘You\'re incredible.’ We had tried a few rappers initially on this song, but we ended up landing on Tobe: who loved the concept, came through and delivered.” **”Waterbreak”** “Whilst mixing down the album, I still felt that it needed to have a weird moment where people are told to go and have a drink—inspired by those intermissions in theatres. This is Josh Grant speaking on this Interlude, and that’s Jeff\'s voice you hear at the end asking for cookies!” **\"It Won’t Change (feat. Maverick Sabre)”** “This is probably the oldest song on the album. I worked on this first with Marco \[Bernardis\], and for a long time, it was one we were struggling to write. I was with \[Columbia Records\] at this time; feeling very frustrated with our relationship and music in general. So we had Mav come through to help, and he just sang. I don’t talk enough about the part Mav plays in the change of my sound, from *The Sound Experiment II* onwards, I was with him all the time. His part was put down as a reference initially, but he sounds gorgeous on it, I didn’t want to sing it, literally. It didn’t feel like I needed to, and I’ve loved this song ever since.” **“East Detroit”** “This is where we get into a sadder realm, this is where the two characters have broken up. With my breakup: she ended it with me whilst I was away in America. Once it happened, I remember having thoughts of this entire life we were supposedly meant to live, the two of us. And now, none of that matters, there’s something about the concept that’s so amazing to write about. And the funniest thing is: I wrote this with Sebastian \[Kole\], and he came up with the ‘East Detroit’ line, I said, ’We might need to change that because we\'ve never been to East Detroit. We’re in New York, in fact!’ I was adamant that we make it literal; but I’m telling you, there was *nothing* else that sounded better!” **“Enough”** “This is a song about being content. We should always ask: If this is not what I want, then why am I doing it? Am I always going to chase the next big thing? Whatever it is, I think there\'s a problem we all have with trying to keep up.” **“Keyon (Interlude)”** “Keyon \[Harrold\] is responsible for most of the trumpet you hear across this record. I think Keyon gave us so much trumpet for song in particular that we had enough for this interlude, here.” **“Still Broke\" (feat. Keyon Harrold)** “We were in LA., I had made \'Still Broke\' and I really needed some horns on it. Keyon was in LA at the time, for the Grammys and stuff, so he pulled up and helped us finish off this record. It was very special.” **“Joy”** “When we were finishing off the album, in 2021, it just didn\'t feel compete. I always had this idea of ending the album on a \'Thoughts and Prayers (Reprise)\', but I came back to this song because it really sums the album up. If you want to know the story, and conclusion, of my debut in three minutes, this is the song to go to.”

LA-based MC Yeat might only be getting his feet wet in the rap game, but he’s already long on confidence. “Everything I’m doing is just better than you,” he sings to doubters on *2 Alivë*’s “Jus bëtter.” *2 Alivë* is the MC’s first project of 2022, after having released three in 2021 alone (*Up 2 Më*, *4L*, *Alivë*). Fans of viral selections like *4L*’s “Sorry Bout That” will recognize Yeat’s penchant for slipping in and out of vintage Young Thug flows, but if the YSL general himself takes no issue with it (Thugger appears on the album’s “Outsidë”), how could we? As a young star on the rise, Yeat chooses mostly to rap about a life full of drugs, money, and mayhem, but what he says is less important than how he says it. The rapping (and singing) here is rarely hurried and mostly delivered over what sounds like 1990s video-game-inspired production. And still, full verses can be difficult to understand, a clear reminder that even as the flagship MC of burgeoning label Field Trip Recordings and maybe the most buzzed-about MC of the post-SoundCloud generation, Yeat is but a medium for the vibes.