NPR Music's 50 Best Albums of 2022

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.

“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.

“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy-yet-referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and *Yeezus*-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.\" Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish-yet-austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far.

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. 

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?’”

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.

Long before he made his name at jazz’s vanguard, editing together off-the-cuff live sessions like a hip-hop beatmaker, drummer, and producer, Makaya McCraven set out to create a comprehensive record of his collaborative process—a testament to the intuition of improvisation. Its sessions recorded over the course of seven years, between multiple projects and releases, *In These Times* is McCraven’s sixth album as a bandleader, and it showcases the virtuosic instrumentalists he has spent his career building an almost telepathic bond with—bassist Junius Paul and guitarist Jeff Parker among them. It’s also the warmest and most enveloping album he’s produced to date. Frenetic beat-splicing might underpin the polyrhythms of tracks such as “Seventh String” and “This Place That Place,” but the soft melodies played by Parker and harpist Brandee Younger always permeate—a reminder of the clarity of the moment of creation, rather than its post-production manipulation. Indeed, *In These Times* is a reflection of the past decade of McCraven’s instrumental expertise, but it’s also a powerful reminder of the freedom inherent in this time, in the here and now of making music together, when the artist lets go and surrounds us with the ineffable beauty of collective creation.

In These Times is the new album by Chicago-based percussionist, composer, producer, and pillar of our label family, Makaya McCraven. Although this album is “new," the truth it’s something that's been in process for a very long time, since shortly after he released his International Anthem debut In The Moment in 2015. Dedicated followers may note he’s had 6 other releases in the meantime (including 2018’s widely-popular Universal Beings and 2020’s We’re New Again, his rework of Gil Scott-Heron’s final album for XL Recordings); but none of which have been as definitive an expression of his artistic ethos as In These Times. This is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records. And his patience, ambition, and persistence have yielded an appropriately career-defining body of work. As epic and expansive as it is impressively potent and concise, the 11 song suite was created over 7+ years, as McCraven strived to design a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter original compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” that he’s honed over a growing body of production-craft. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in 5 different studios and 4 live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work from home. The pure fact that he was able to so eloquently condense and articulate the immense human scale of the work into 41 fleeting minutes of emotive and engaging sound is a monumental achievement. It’s an evolution and a milestone for McCraven, the producer; but moreover it’s the strongest and clearest statement we’ve yet to hear from McCraven, the composer. In These Times is an almost unfathomable new peak for an already-soaring innovator who has been called "one of the best arguments for jazz's vitality" by The New York Times, as well as recently, and perhaps more aptly, a "cultural synthesizer." While challenging and pushing himself into uncharted territories, McCraven quintessentially expresses his unique gifts for collapsing space and transcending borders – blending past, present, and future into elegant, poly-textural arrangements of jazz-rooted, post-genre 21st century folk music.

“I want to love unconditionally now.” Read on as Steve Lacy opens up about how he made his sophomore album in this exclusive artist statement. “Someone asked me if I felt pressure to make something that people might like. I felt a disconnect, my eyes squinted as I looked up. As I thought about the question, I realized that we always force a separation between the artist (me) and audience (people). But I am not separate. I am people, I just happen to be an artist. Once I understood this, the album felt very easy and fun to make. *Gemini Rights* is me getting closer to what makes me a part of all things, and that is: feelings. Feelings seem like the only real things sometimes. “I write about my anger, sadness, longing, confusion, happiness, horniness, anger, happiness, confusion, fear, etc., all out of love and all laughable, too. The biggest lesson I learned at the end of this album process was how small we make love. I want to love unconditionally now. I will make love bigger, not smaller. To me, *Gemini Rights* is a step in the right direction. I’m excited for you to have this album as your own as it is no longer mine. Peace.” —Steve Lacy

Tibetan Buddhists often meditate on bardo, a transitional state between life, death, and rebirth. The sense of hovering between the end and a new beginning runs through *The Blue Hour*, a cycle of 40 songs co-written by Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider for singer-songwriter Nova and A Far Cry, the Boston-based, self-conducted chamber orchestra. The work takes its lyrics from “On Earth,” a long poem by Carolyn Forché that recounts the thoughts of a dying woman and uses them to cultivate genuine feelings of universal empathy. Its miniature movements include heartfelt ballads, echoes of Bach and Abbess Hildegard (in Caroline Shaw’s mesmerizing *Firmament*), haunting laments, operatic cadenzas, punchy incantations, and much else, the whole proving greater than the sum of its considerable parts.

“You can’t come get this work until it’s dry. I made this album while the streets were closed during the pandemic. Made entirely with the greatest producers of all time—Pharrell and Ye. ONLY I can get the best out of these guys. ENJOY!!” —Pusha T, in an exclusive message provided to Apple Music

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.

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”

Samuel Barber’s *Knoxville: Summer of 1915* is the centerpiece of *Walking in the Dark*, American soprano Julia Bullock’s debut solo album. Her impassioned interpretation plumbs the mix of comforting nostalgia and existential longing Barber writes into the music. Bullock’s couplings are fascinatingly varied. Her version of “Brown Baby,” recorded by Nina Simone and others, has both tenderness and a roiling sense of outrage, while the Connie Converse song “One by One” distills a rare combination of poise and poignancy. The gospel-tinged “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” highlights Bullock’s acute response to words, and her rapt account of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” brings the album to a breathtaking conclusion.

Chicago rapper/producer Saba’s first full-length since 2018’s critically acclaimed *CARE FOR ME* looks existentially inward instead of projecting outward. Whereas its predecessor was often perceived through the lens of grief, with his cousin John Walt’s tragic death weighing considerably on the proceedings, his third album explodes such listener myopia with a thoughtful and thought-provoking expression of American Blackness. Though its title might suggest scarcity on a surface level, these 14 songs exude richness in their textures and complexity in their themes. “Stop That” imbues its gauzy trap beat with self-motivating logic, while “Come My Way” gets to reminiscing over a laidback R&B groove. His choice of collaborators demonstrates a carefully curated approach, with 6LACK and Smino bringing a sense of community to the funk-infused “Still” and fellow Chicago native G Herbo helping to unravel multigenerational programming on the gripping “Survivor’s Guilt.” The presence of hip-hop elder statesman Black Thought on the title track only serves to further validate Saba’s experiences, the connection implicitly showing solidarity with sentiments and values of the preceding songs.

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

As founding director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington has sought to expand the jazz canon, in part by creating a repository of works by women composers. The book *New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers* is a major step in that direction. With the album *New Standards, Vol. 1*, Carrington begins her effort to record every tune that she and her colleagues have compiled. Co-produced by guitarist Matthew Stevens, the album covers a wide aesthetic range, richly representative of jazz in its time, from tonal harmony to free improvisation, from ballads to driving grooves and much in between. The featured composers are also diverse, from the late and unheralded Sara Cassey (“Wind Flower”) to the iconic Abbey Lincoln (“Throw It Away”); from such veterans as Carla Bley (“Two Hearts \[Lawns\]”), Marilyn Crispell (“Rounds”), and Eliane Elias (“Moments”) to younger blood including Anat Cohen (“Ima”), Brandee Younger (“Respected Destroyer”), Marta Sanchez (“Unchanged”), Gretchen Parlato (“Circling”), Shamie Royston (“Uplifted Heart”), and Patricia Zarate Perez (“Continental Cliff”). The stellar core quintet grows to include many guests: standouts include Somi and Melanie Charles in a shared vocal feature on “Throw It Away” and Julian Lage in an increasingly rare acoustic guitar turn on “Ima.”

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.

Listeners expecting the stylish soul-funk of Sault’s 2020 albums *Untitled (Rise)* and *Untitled (Black Is)* might be momentarily thrown by the cosmic choral-and-orchestral suite of *Air*, but thematically, it fits: Like all their music, *Air* is, at heart, a study of Black artistic traditions, in this case early-’70s Alice Coltrane (“Solar”), the soulful ambience of Stevie Wonder’s *Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants* (“Heart”), even a little of the modern-classical side of artists like Anthony Braxton. And as sci-fi as the sound can seem, the core feeling is one of uplifting Earth—a message confirmed as equally by the skyward arc of the strings as by the prayer-like recitation on “Time Is Precious.” Or, as producer Inflo tells Apple Music, not fantasy, but “art in reality”—air.

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.

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.

When Ahmed Ololade put out his *Ololade Asake* EP in February 2022, few people knew what to expect from an eclectic artist whose Olamide-assisted “Omo Ope” remix had announced his belated arrival to mainstream audiences. In the seven months between *Ololade Asake* and the release of this, his debut album, the Lagos-based artist scored further hits and seized control of the Afropop zeitgeist with his dizzying mix of street-inspired lyricism, signature chanted vocals, and a fascinating fusion of amapiano, hip-hop, and Fuji instrumentals. *Mr. Money With The Vibe* sees Asake lean into the larger-than-life persona that songs like “Sungba” and “PALAZZO” established. He details his new realities with swagger—contemplating romance, life, and his position in the game over beats delicately crafted by close creative ally Magicsticks. His flair for experimenting within the amapiano framework continues here as he loops the call-and-response pattern of classic Afrobeat over the log drums, sax, and piano on “Organise.” Elsewhere, he brings back a revamped version of blog-era favorite “Joha” and offers a soulful ode to the grind on “Nzaza.” Russ joins for a cautionary tale on “Reason,” and a blistering remix of “Sungba” sees Burna Boy make an appearance here—but the narrative of *Mr. Money With The Vibe* belongs to Asake alone as he continues to blaze a new path for street-pop.

DJ Drama and Jeezy—who became famous as Young Jeezy—were equally important to trap music becoming the dominant sound of hip-hop in the mid-aughts. Though trap is less of a powerhouse in 2022 than it was then, *SNOFALL*, a project released almost 20 years after their first pairing (2004’s *Tha Streetz Iz Watchin’* mixtape), confirms that together they are as capable as they ever were of producing—to borrow a phrase common in Drama parlance—quality street music. *SNOFALL* itself sounds a great deal like their earliest collaborative work. The project features the very producers who helped him define their shared era, names like D. Rich, Cool & Dre, J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, and Don Cannon. And Jeezy is as pugnacious an MC as he ever was, if slightly wizened. Here he opts less for flexing on detractors than educating the legions of younger G’s he once took so much pride in motivating to chase paper. He uses songs like “Street Cred” to instill a vision of legal hustling, warning them that “street cred” never paid any of his bills, fed his family, took him out of the country for months at a time, or helped him close a million-dollar deal. None of which is to say that the balling has slowed in any way, shape, or fashion. Look no further than “Still Havin,” “Grammy,” or “My Accountant” for an understanding that the Jeezy brand is still and will always be “rich gangsta shit.”

Rather than a set of songs, think of Colombian-born, Berlin-based artist Lucrecia Dalt’s eighth album, *¡Ay!*, as a room cast in sound: smokey, low-lit, seductive but vaguely threatening; a place where fantasy and reality meet in deep, inky shadow. Dalt’s takes on the bolero, son, ranchera, and merengue that form the romantic spine of Latin pop are genuine enough to feel folkloric and off-kilter enough to conjure the art and experimental music she’s known for—a contrast that pulls *¡Ay!* along on its hovering, dreamlike course. Squint and you can imagine hearing “Dicen” in a dusty bar somewhere or swaying to “La Desmesura” or “Bochinche.” But like the great exotica artists of the ’50s, Dalt teeters between the foreign and the comforting so gracefully, you don’t recognize how strange she is until you’re in her pocket. *¡Ay!* is lounge music for the beyond.

Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began.

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.

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.’”

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.

Early adopters of Memphis spitter and recent CMG signee GloRilla will recognize the title of the MC’s debut EP, *Anyways, Life’s Great...*, as a quip from her breakout hit “F.N.F (Let’s Go).” But if the bars on the rest of the EP are any indication of what the woman born Gloria Hallelujah Woods has in store for fans, she’ll have project titles until her dying days, and plenty of demand for them. Woods, who was still riding high from the success of “F.N.F (Let’s Go)” as well as the Cardi B collaboration “Tomorrow 2” upon the release of *Anyways, Life’s Great...*, has a gruff rhyme style that strikes a perfect balance between bravado and relatability, something she attributes to taking the time to develop who she was on the mic. “My normal voice, it ain\'t all soft and stuff, like a normal female voice,” she tells Apple Music. “So when I first started rapping, I used to try to sound girly. I really just had to find myself, find my voice and how I rap. And I really got a Memphis sound, too.” For the well-informed, that much is apparent from her accent and the way she punctuates some of her statements with “mane,” as she does frequently across the EP. What she also does is tell fair-weather fans about themselves (“No More Love”), take disappointing sexual partners to task (“Nut Quick”), celebrate how far she’s come as an artist (“Blessed”), and take off her cool to get vulnerable (“Out Loud Thinking”). Runaway success like the kind GloRilla first encountered with “F.N.F (Let’s Go)” has been the downfall of plenty a promising MC, but to let her tell it, having a hit right out of the gate only gave her a blueprint for success. “I learned to rap how I feel and to keep putting out that real authentic shit,” she says of “F.N.F”\'s reception. “And to continue to smoke weed, because I was high as a motherfucker when I wrote that song.” Below, GloRilla sheds even more light on a few key tracks from *Anyways, Life’s Great...*. **“PHATNALL”** “Out here in Memphis—a lot of people do this all over the world—when people die, they get their names tatted on their face. So I’m like, my ex is really dead to me. They so dead to me, I might get their name tatted on my face.” **“Tomorrow 2” (feat. Cardi B)** “My team was tryna surprise me \[with a Cardi guest verse\], but I ended up finding out because I was texting her to get on another song and she ended up telling me! She sent me the verse and I was like, ‘Oh my god! She killed this.’\" **“Blessed”** “I made ‘Blessed’ after I had linked with \[CMG founder Yo\] Gotti. We was in New York—this was before we had went public about the signing—and I was just feeling super blessed. Like that was a time when everything was just happening for me. My life was changing. And that’s just how I came up with that. Just in the studio, high, smoking weed.” **“Nut Quick”** “There\'s a lot of dudes out here that nut quick. They be cool and all, they just got sexual problems. I know a lot of females feeling me. Like, you cool, but you just nut quick.” **“F.N.F (Let’s Go)”** “A lot of times I record something and I’ll be like, ‘Ooh, this the one.’ I say that about a lot of my songs. ‘F.N.F,’ it just really happened to be *the one*. So when that song blew up—when I first posted the trailer—I started seeing a change then.” **“Out Loud Thinking”** “I was going through a really rough time in my life when I recorded this song. I remember I was in line at the drive-through at Taco Bell mixed with KFC. I was just playing a beat and I shed a couple tears and thought of writing that song.”

The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017’s breakthrough double-album Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019’s acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single “Fantas”, where a haunting melody hurtling towards its supernova climax felt like witnessing the life and death of a burning star. Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet — a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. The Spirit Exit opens and we fall in. Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri’s time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer’s first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan’s two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D’Avila’s foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit, imbuing a life and death gravity into the composer’s most perception-altering music to date. More than any release before it, Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri’s densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they’ve always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer’s web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri’s great passion and obsession — she thinks of them as knots she’s trying to untangle, existential metaphors formed through tensely spiraling arpeggios — and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. Parts of one song can haunt another. The synth progression unraveling through “Knot Of Spirit” is reborn on “Broken Melody”, an explosive peak with vocals that flash like a lightning storm. The sweeping “At Your Gamut” perfects the producer’s dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through “Terminal Clock” — an otherworldly sound rushing across what feels like the artist’s first track for a dancefloor. Caterina Barbieri’s music has always transported listeners, its perpetual movement achieved through complexities that needn’t be solved, but simply felt. Spirit Exit articulates that endless ascension — destination unknown, resolution always just out of reach — with a newfound humanity. It’s the result of a one-of-a-kind artist deeply reflecting on what music means to them, only to return with an even greater understanding of what it can be. As the album closes on “The Landscape Listens” — a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” — it brings to mind the full line of Emily Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain slant of light”. “When it comes — the landscape listens / Shadows — hold their breath.” Spirit Exit is a special kind of seance, an album so otherworldly and inexplicably moving it leaves even its ghosts in a stunned silence.

Nancy Mounir’s debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album—whose title means “Promenade of the Souls'' in Arabic—explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir’s own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own ambient arrangements over voices haunted with passion and desire as she creates a sound that is warmly familiar but utterly new. On the album, Mounir slips into the gaps left by the lost frequencies of the aging recordings, finding space for counterpoint and harmony in a traditional sound built on monophony. Elegant melodies unfold in measured gestures as Mounir—who plays most of the instruments herself —revels in the plaintive intonations and brash lyrics of the departed singers. With layers enmeshed together, it’s at times hard to pin down when the past ends and the present begins, but beneath it all is a liberating attitude of defiance that feels timeless. Nozhet El Nofous is brilliant in the way it explores the techniques and perspectives of a more freewheeling time period in Arabic music, before Arabic maqam (modal systems) and other musical foundations were standardized by the Middle East’s cultural power brokers in the early 1930s. As she summons a rich, atmospheric landscape of tone and texture, Mounir engages an older generation of musical rebels in a creative dialogue across time and space—and the results are stunning in their ambition and beauty.

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.

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.

Life on Earth is a departure for the New Orleans-based Segarra (they/she). Its eleven new “nature punk” tracks on the theme of survival are music for a world in flux—songs about thriving, not just surviving, while disaster is happening. For their eighth full-length album, Segarra drew inspiration from The Clash, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Bad Bunny, and the author of Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown. Recorded during the pandemic, Life on Earth was produced by Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver, Kevin Morby). Life on Earth has received critical praise already, appearing on most anticipated records of 2022 lists by NPR, Pitchfork, the Guardian, Stereogum, the Observer, Vulture, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, the Evening Standard, and the Irish Times, among others. The Guardian says, “What’s most impressive about Life on Earth is the way Segarra metabolises bleak and disturbing subjects into songs that brim with hope, beauty and cheer,” while the Observer says, “Hurray for the Riff Raff promises a manual for Life on Earth, a ‘nature punk’ album for tough times,” and NPR’s Ann Powers says, “If you need some music to take you forward in this strange winter, I think Life on Earth is gonna do it for you.” Mojo, in its four-star review, calls it “a remarkably delicate, tender record full of gentle empathy, of lines that ring with the truth of shared experience. Hurray for The Riff Raff might not be able to save the world, but Life on Earth is a compassionate, humane record at a time when it can only be a gift.”

The caveat with mentioning the 30 years of history John McEntire and Sam Prekop shared before making *Sons Of* is that the album doesn’t exactly sound like anything they’ve done before. McEntire is the drummer of the adventurous, anything-but-rock band Tortoise and the Prekop-fronted Sea and Cake; Prekop is a singer-songwriter who rebutted the harshness of ’90s indie rock with music influenced by lounge jazz and bossa nova. *Sons Of*, by contrast, is made up of four lengthy synth improvisations combining early house, indie pop, and the spacey, ruminative side of IDM. The connective tissue is in the approach, which is somehow adventurous but gentle, experimental but restrained. And while everything here has narrative momentum, their shared language is thick enough that they sound better the longer they go (the sunglasses-indoors sci-fi of “Ascending by Night” and the 24-minute “A Yellow Robe”).

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.

“I had a responsibility to give people what they were asking for, especially during the pandemic,” Robert Glasper tells Apple Music. “They wanted another *Black Radio*, so I had to deliver.” The pianist, composer, songwriter, and producer has spent the past decade pushing the boundaries of what constitutes jazz music, combining its acoustic instrumentation with hip-hop swagger, R&B melodies, and an ear attuned to improvisation. Ten years after the first *Black Radio* album, he returns to the genre-hopping, collaborative format, producing 13 tracks that seamlessly transition from the power of Amir Sulaiman’s poetry on opener “In Tune” to an elegantly downbeat version of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” to the funk of “Why We Speak” with Q-Tip and Esperanza Spalding. Here, Glasper talks through all the collaborations, track by track. **“In Tune” (feat. Amir Sulaiman)** “I was scoring a Dave Chappelle documentary, and in the film, Amir performs a poem that floored me. I’ve never had a poem reach me that way. I was in tears. I immediately asked Dave to connect us, and we had a short conversation about what I was looking for. Two days later, he came back with this incredible poem that opens the record. A lot has happened in the 10 years since the first *Black Radio*, and a whole lot has happened for Black people in America in the last two years. I felt like I had to address the elephant in the room with this track and with ‘Black Superhero.’” **“Black Superhero” (feat. Killer Mike, BJ The Chicago Kid & Big K.R.I.T.)** “BJ is my bro, but this is the first time we’ve done something together on wax. He came to the studio, and I was just playing around and testing the keyboard and he said, ‘That sounds like some superhero shit,’ so I kept playing and the concept started from there. After that, I wanted to pick rappers that teach us. I wanted them to say something that spoke to this moment. I knew K.R.I.T. and Killer Mike would do it justice.” **“Shine” (feat. Robert Glasper, D Smoke & Tiffany Gouche)** “‘Shine’ came out of a jam session. I was playing drums and my drummer was playing keys and we came up with this riff that I then looped. I refined it on keys and added bass and then sent it to D Smoke to see what he thought. He sent me back a draft the next day. The song is all about self-love and knowing that you’re enough. That’s something I feel like a lot of hip-hop songs don’t talk about, and especially during the pandemic, people needed to hear that.” **“Why We Speak” (feat. Q-Tip & Esperanza Spalding)** “A lot of my music starts off with jam sessions. I have my guys come over and we throw down some vibes and see what sticks. We came up with this joint and, immediately, I thought of Esperanza. I sent it to her and a few days later, she sent it back, and I thought something was wrong with the mic. She never told me she was writing it in French! I thought it was so dope, though, and I realized it sounded like something that would fit Q-Tip too. I used to play in his band, but I’ve never had him rock on an album, so it was perfect.” **“Over” (feat. Yebba)** “Yebba was part of the *Fuck Yo Feelings* sessions. She’s become like a little sister to me since, and I knew I had to have her on the record. While we were at Electric Lady Studios, listening to her latest album, we jammed and came up with this pattern and the skeleton of the song. That was in early 2021, and a few months later, we got back to LA and finished up here at my studio. Her voice is so beautiful, and I’m so happy we got to make this one together.” **“Better Than I Imagined” (feat. H.E.R. + Meshell Ndegeocello)** “I scored a film called *The Photograph*, which came out in February 2020. H.E.R. sang the ending song for the movie, and at the premiere, she told me she was so inspired by my score that she wanted to write something together. We literally went from the movie theater to the studio and wrote ‘Better Than I Imagined.’ It wasn’t planned for any project, but it did so well when I put it out, it planted the seed for the rest of *Black Radio III*.” **“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (feat. Lalah Hathaway & Common)** “I have this thing with Lalah. On the first *Black Radio*, she did a cover of ‘Cherish the Day’ and killed it. The next time, I was like, ‘Let’s do Stevie Wonder’s “Jesus Children of America.”’ She recorded it in one take, and it won a Grammy. So why not keep it going? I’ve always loved ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’—I don’t think I would trust a person who doesn’t like that song—but I don’t know anyone who has made a version of it. I redid it in my own vibe, and Common loved it so much, he invited himself on it too!” **“Everybody Love” (feat. Musiq Soulchild & Posdnous)** “My DJ, Jahi Sundance, and I wanted to make a house EP together, and this was the first song we wrote for it. I sent it to Musiq Soulchild, who I have known for a long time, and he came up with his joint in three days. I’ve never done a house song and neither has he, so it was new for both of us. It has a party vibe, and when it comes to party rappers, I always think of De La Soul and Posdnuos. I knew he would kill it, and he delivered.” **“It Don’t Matter” (feat. Gregory Porter & Ledisi)** “I have wanted to produce an R&B album with Gregory for a while now, and when his tour with Ledisi got canceled, I called them both up. I was luckily able to get them in the studio because the COVID restrictions had eased at that point, and they wrote it to fit their voices. They’re both so powerful and definitely have their own sound, so this felt like a match made in heaven.” **“Heaven’s Here” (feat. Ant Clemons)** “I went to Snoop Dogg’s birthday party and on my way out, Ant Clemons stopped me and introduced himself. Terrace Martin told me that he’s high-level and that we should work together. Fast-forward to the next week and we started writing songs. We wrote four or five tracks since he was working with Justin Timberlake on his new album and Usher too. This was one we were going to give to Usher, but it didn’t work out with the timing. I love it so much, I had to put it on *Black Radio*.” **“Out of My Hands” (feat. Jennifer Hudson)** “Jennifer came to one of my shows with my homegirl Kelly Rowland, who I know from Houston. They both sat in with me onstage, and I knew I had to get Jennifer on something. When I wrote this song, I heard her voice on it. It took us a little while to get together, but she performed it perfectly.” **“Forever” (feat. PJ Morton & India.Arie)** “PJ worked with me on *Black Radio 2* back in 2013, and he wrote the song ‘Worries,’ which Dwele sang. I love matching people up who’ve never recorded together, since it makes the song become more special. I knew PJ and India would sound perfect together, and we luckily managed to make this more of a back-and-forth process to make it feel like a duet where we were in the studio at the same time.” **“Bright Lights” (feat. Ty Dolla $ign)”** “I’ve jammed with Ty before. He is a legend who changed the game up, and I wanted to do something with a modern, pop-R&B vibe because that’s where Ty thrives. It’s different from any of the other *Black Radio* tracks that I’ve made, and so I wanted to end the album with this one because it has such a unique feel.”

“I wanted this album to have the causal intimacy and lack of a defined concept that a diary might have,” Cécile McLorin Salvant tells Apple Music. “It is about capturing the moments I was living in and reflecting their nuances.” Grammy winner and MacArthur Fellow Salvant has released five albums since her 2010 debut that have marked her as one of the foremost voices and minds in contemporary jazz. Her sixth release, *Ghost Song*, is no less considered. Taking a diaristic approach to recording her time in the coronavirus lockdowns, Salvant produces 12 tracks that encompass everything from startling versions of Kate Bush, Kurt Weill, and Gregory Porter songs to originals that effortlessly switch her voice from soft balladry to metallic precision and chromatic fragmentations. “People think that I sing love songs, but more and more I’m realizing that I sing about yearning and the imagination that comes from wanting something and not having it. That’s really when we’re at our most creative,” Salvant says. Here, she talks through all of *Ghost Song*’s tracks. **“Wuthering Heights”** “My first period of deep obsession with Kate Bush was when I was about 16 and my big sister showed me ‘Wuthering Heights.’ During the pandemic, I started listening to it again and it suddenly occurred to me that I could do a version of the song. At the same time, I was listening to all kinds of ornamental vocal music, and this Irish song—‘Cúirt Bhaile Nua’ by Treasa Ni Mhiollain—that was sung in the Sean-nós a cappella style was on repeat on my phone. ‘Wuthering Heights,’ therefore, came out as a mash-up of these two things that I was obsessing over.” **“Optimistic Voices”/“No Love Dying”** “This was my pianist Sullivan Fortner’s idea, because the end of the *Wizard of Oz* song ‘Optimistic Voices’ sounds like the beginning of Gregory Porter’s ‘No Love Dying.’ He thought it would work well together, musically, and then I also realized how they are both incredibly hopeful songs. They are sung at the end of someone’s rope, when there’s absolutely no reason to be hopeful and then, suddenly, you have a flash of optimism. I’ve also always wanted to sing a Gregory Porter song, since he is an incredible songwriter. ‘No Love Dying’ is such an effective song, and it’s so moving in its underpinning of melancholy.” **“Ghost Song”** “The starting point of the album was ‘Ghost Song,’ which I wrote two or three years ago. It felt like a song that I already knew and that I was remembering. I didn’t intend for the album to touch so frequently on death, but this track is a denial of it. It’s the idea that nothing dies, since there are always things that linger. It’s piggybacking on ‘No Love Dying,’ since we’re continuing the motif that nothing can vanish.” **“Obligation”** “This is inspired by my friend Robyn O’Neil, who I discovered through a podcast she makes called *Me Reading Stuff*. She has the best taste in poetry and literature that I’ve ever encountered, and she also ends with a statement, which is that ‘expectations are premeditated resentments.’ That statement is a great mantra to go through life with. It had been going through my head for a long time and this song came out of it.” **“Until”** “‘Until’ is also something that Sullivan Fortner suggested to me, since he had heard the song while watching the rom-com *Kate & Leopold*, starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman, and Sting wrote ‘Until’ for the credits. Sullivan knew I would love it, and so he made this great arrangement for it. I love how evocative Sting is in talking about time in a way that doesn’t feel clichéd. The idea of catching the world in an hourglass is beautiful, and then it inspired the imagery for the next song, ‘I Lost My Mind.’” **“I Lost My Mind”** “‘I Lost My Mind’ feels like catharsis because it’s really nice to be able to say, ‘I feel like I’m losing my mind.’ It’s a great disclaimer when you’re making anything to say that if you don’t like it, don’t worry, I don’t know where my mind is anyway—can you help me find it? There’s almost something exciting about that feeling where you’re slipping away from yourself. It’s extremely scary, but it also feels good not having to explain things through reason and logic.” **“Moon Song”** “This song heralds the rest of the album, which is not mind-based. It’s based on a place that I don’t understand. A lot of songwriting comes from that place and it’s what I gravitate towards—the tug-of-war between wanting to be completely clear and understood but also not understanding your own self. It’s a sister song to ‘Ghost Song’ because it’s about the wanting of the thing, not what happens once you have it. It is a love song to the moon. You’ll never get it, but you can gaze at it, and you can imagine what it’s like to be on it.” **“Trail Mix”** “I was messing around on the piano and Sullivan Fortner heard me and said, ‘You should record that.’ It was a green light from one of my favorite musicians, and even though I’ve never recorded a song where I’m just playing the piano, it ended up being fun and it lightened the record up a little bit. It is me pushing myself to do something that I’ve never done before, and if this album is a diary, then it would not be complete without ‘Trail Mix’ in it.” **“The World Is Mean”** “I am a Kurt Weill obsessive. I love his music and *The Threepenny Opera*. His sense of humor matches mine totally. ‘The World Is Mean’ is making fun of its own cynicism, and I love the duality of singing two characters—one who’s asking for some joy and the other who is saying that the world is mean and it can’t be helped. I still have fun singing this song, and I’ll never tire of it, since it’s so strange-sounding.” **“Dead Poplar”** “This is a love letter that Alfred Stieglitz wrote to Georgia O’Keeffe, and I set it to music, mainly because I wanted to remember it and I feel like songs are the best way to memorize anything. I had these quotes from Alfred Stieglitz stuck on my piano for weeks and eventually I started hearing music with them. I love Georgia O’Keeffe and I like the idea of joining him in serenading her. He is spot-on in distilling what it feels like to be in a relationship with someone, and then he ends it with the image of this dead poplar against a dark sky. It’s pure poetry.” **“Thunderclouds”** “I was trying to be grateful for everything that was happening to me and saying thank you to even the horrible stuff when I wrote ‘Thunderclouds.’ I was at a place where I was finding gratitude even in things that I was complaining about. The pandemic was a rough period for all of us, and that’s ‘Thunderclouds’ in a nutshell. The thundercloud itself is such a beautiful thing, but it’s also an announcer of doom—I wanted to capture that.” **“Unquiet Grave”** “‘Unquiet Grave’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ are one track that we split up, and they mirror each other. ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a song about a ghost that comes to visit at the window and haunts the living, while ‘Unquiet Grave’ is about a person who was alive and who goes to haunt the dead in the graveyard. I like the idea of bothering the ghost and the ghost is telling you to go live your life. ‘Don’t stay here in the past in your nostalgia,’ it says. It was really important to end the album on that note.”

Listening to Atlanta MC JID’s third studio album *The Forever Story*, it’s hard to imagine the Dreamville signee pursuing a career in anything other than rap, but according to the man born Destin Choice Route, establishing himself as one of his generation’s most clever wordsmiths was plan B. “I ain\'t always want to be a rapper, artist, or nothing like this,” he told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden ahead of the album’s release. “This wasn\'t my dream. This was just like, ‘I’m really fire at this. I\'m really gifted at this.’ I always wanted to be a football player, you feel me? That was my whole shit.” Though he’s long ago moved on from any delusions of playing the sport professionally, the voicemail tacked on to the end of album intro “Galaxy” reveals a closeness to the sport, and more specifically those who helped him learn it. “That\'s my old football coach,” JID says of the voice we hear chewing him out for not answering the phone. “He was just giving me shit. That was his whole demeanor, but it was always for the better. He was my father away from home. He was just a big part of the whole story.” *The Forever Story*, to be specific, is a deep dive into the MC’s family lore and an exploration of what growing up the youngest of seven meant for his outlook. If JID’s last proper album, *The Never Story*, was an introduction to his lyrical prowess and a declaration that he had a story to tell, *The Forever Story* is an expansion of that universe. “*Never* came from a very humble mindset,” he says. “It was coming from, I *never* had shit. *The Forever Story*\'s just the evolved origin story, really just giving you more of who I am—more family stories, where I\'m from, why I am kind of how I am.” He tells these stories in grave detail on songs like “Raydar,” “Can’t Punk Me,” “Kody Blu 31,” and “Can’t Make U Change” and then includes collaborations with heroes-turned-peers (“Stars” featuring Yasiin Bey, “Just in Time” with Lil Wayne) that acknowledge a reverence for his craft. He raps about his siblings on songs like “Bruddanem” and “Sistanem,” but it’s “Crack Sandwich,” a song where the MC details an encounter in which his family fought together, that seems the most like a story JID will enjoy telling forever. “We were all together like Avengers and shit,” he says. “Back-to-back brawling in New Orleans. It was crazy.”

*Lost & Found*, guitar phenomenon Sean Shibe’s 2022 album, features an eclectic fusion of musical styles straddling 10 centuries. On paper, medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen and 20th-century renegade Julius Eastman may appear unlikely bedfellows, yet in common with all the composers on this album, they were outsiders who specialized in conjuring up alternative visions. “I was definitely trying to create a sense of wonder,” Shibe tells Apple Music, “of free flow, of living in the moment—an Arcadian kind of gentle ecstasy. *Lost & Found* captures the diversity of aesthetics, directions, and archetypes available to composers on the outer fringes who each have their own distinct ambience.” Yet over and above the music’s powerful sense of otherworldliness, these are all pieces Shibe was keen to play but felt were unsuited to the classical guitar. “I wanted to find out how far I could take them into an authentically electric world,” he explains. “These pieces have meanings that go beyond those the composer may have intended, and I felt the electric guitar was the instrument best-suited to achieve their potential.” To realize his vision, Shibe selected two classic electric guitars—a Fender and a PRS. Additionally, he employed a range of specialist pedals, from simple reverbs to the Microcosm pedal, which helped shape the album’s soundworld. “It has a huge variety of effects on it,” he enthuses. “Most notably the particle effect, which I used on Hildegard’s *O Coruscans* to make it sound more twinkly, more cosmic.” Helping out, wherever possible, were the actual composers. “When we were recording the pieces by Oliver Leith, Meredith Monk, and Shiva Feshareki,” Shibe recalls, “we bounced them back to the composers immediately for their comments and approval.” Yet above all, this bracing collection celebrates the electric guitar’s potential for revitalizing *all* musical genres. “With the electric guitar, you can add on effects pedals, turn up the volume to 11, try different amplifiers, and endlessly customize your instrument in a way that doesn’t fundamentally alter or damage it,” Shibe points out. “I believe the electric guitar has a vital role to play in the future of contemporary music, and I hope that this album makes that case.” Read on as Shibe guides us through each track on *Lost & Found*. ***O Viridissima Virga*** “Programmatically, we wanted to begin with something very simple and then bookend the album with the cosmic idea of *Buddha*. It sets the scene with where we’re going over the next couple of tracks—the children songs retain the innocence, while the Moondog pieces still play into that. It’s the gentlest track. The idea of the freshest green branch feeds into poet William Blake, whose *Songs of Innocence* initially talks about the piper piping merry tunes—a very pastoral vision.” ***Children’s Song No. 1*** “Chick Corea’s *Children’s Songs* were, of course, originally intended for children, but they occupy things that are sometimes innocent and sometimes a bit darker, which is also part of childhood experience. I came to these, initially, through the guitarist Forbes Henderson, who I know very well and who made these arrangements with Corea’s approval. The grounded, oscillating rhythmic simplicity of *No. 1* feels especially effective after the pastoral innocence of the opening Bingen.” ***Continuance*** “This is the first piece that’s multi-tracked—it’s written for four guitarists. It was composed during the first lockdown, when we were all communicating via split screens. Whereas the mysticism of the previous two pieces collude to produce something a little bit dark, Daniel’s piece is much more optimistic. The continuance idea is not ‘life goes on’; it’s more along the lines of ‘there is something in the distance that you will find.’ I think it’s very special. It’s brief but condensed in the best of ways.” ***Children’s Song No. 4*** “There was always a danger with this album that it could become too ambient. This is one of several pieces intended to bring us gently back to earth. It is also completely different to the first children’s setting. There’s something a little more cynical, darker, almost underhand about it. The atmosphere is really rather menacing, so the challenge was how to make it even more menacing! So, we’ve been quite generous with the post effects here and added quite a lot of distortion, which is something that leads us, of course, into *Sea Horse*.” ***Sea Horse*** “This is the first of three pieces by Moondog and works incredibly well on electric guitar, as well as live in concert. The seahorse appears, on the surface, to be perfectly innocent but is not quite what it seems. Although originally written for piano, I found that with an electric guitar at my disposal, I could respond freely to what the music was inspiring me to do. The results could not be more different from Moondog’s originals, which proves how truly eclectic his music is.” ***Pastoral*** “The idea here was to get people’s feet back on the ground. It’s quite close to Corea’s *Children’s Song No. 1*. One thing I’ve noticed with Moondog \[composer of *Pastoral*\] is that sometimes his endings are a bit drastic, a bit sudden, which can be fine, but I did feel that there was room here for something a little bit ‘out there’ at the end, so I added a little improvised sequence to help ease our way into *High on a Rocky Ledge*.” ***High on a Rocky Ledge*** “This track conjures up an image of the jangle of a band in a lazy bar—I was trying to evoke a sense of going to a local dive bar with crap on the TV, drinking with friends, and generally hanging out: the sensation of freedom, of laziness, of no rush. Following a declaration of childhood, music with a slightly cynical edge, and something more aggressive \[*Pastoral*\], we are now just chilled and relaxed.” ***Children’s Song No. 2*** “The *Children’s Songs* are so distinct from one another, and I wanted to discover the overriding impetus of each one. Compared to the other *Songs*, this one has a hint of darkness up until the radiant ending. The album, up to this point, has these little swells of tension, of something feeling slightly less OK, and this is just the final swell before Leith’s *Pushing My Thumb Through a Plate*. It somehow has a tense sound all of its own.” ***Pushing My Thumb Through a Plate*** “This is the point in the album at which our feet are no longer on the ground. Nightfall is approaching, and something is about to happen. It’s like the pagan end of sacred—like praying to the Madonna for healthy waters and then praying to the other Madonna for something else. This is quite an early piece by Leith and was originally written for harp, so I’ve kept it quite acoustic. Its harmonic plasticity is incredibly distinctive: I haven’t heard anything else quite like it.” ***Nightfall*** “*Pushing My Thumb Through a Plate* is meandering and levitational, so it was good to have something more grounded, like *Nightfall*, to remind us of where we are. The music begins quite logically, but then the underlying passacaglia slowly goes away and is replaced by something that is rather extraordinary. Composer Meredith Monk doesn’t grant permission to perform her music very often, so we were relieved not only to be allowed to record *Nightfall*, but also that she was very happy with the mix.” ***Peace Piece*** “This kind of grew out of the idea that, essentially, jazz musicians like Bill Evans (the composer of *Peace Piece*) writing in a classical vein is always interesting. Of the other composers on the album, Corea kind of did that, while Moondog somehow cuts it in many ways as someone who was more of the classical tradition than anything else. Evans lies on the fringes, and so too in a way does Oliver Leith—a lot of his stuff is quite poppy and slightly more ambient. Shiva Feshareki may compose classical music, but actually she’s a DJ and does dance nights and stuff like that.” ***O sacrum convivium!*** “From the moment I heard *O sacrum convivium*, I thought how well this piece would sound on the guitar. I tried to find a way of making it work on the classical instrument, but it’s just not possible. So, this represents a new direction for the album insofar that it is, from my point of view, *only* feasible on the electric guitar—not only because of its ability to sustain sounds like voices, but also because of its unique power to transmogrify things that are quite familiar.” ***Venus/Zohreh*** “I like this idea of prayer raising us up into the cosmos. *Venus/Zohreh* was written originally for string quartet or string orchestra, so its composer, Shiva Feshareki, and I had to work together on finding the right pitches for the notes. In many ways, this piece is the most acoustic of the last three tracks on the album and fits perfectly with the idea of Venus and motherhood, referencing things that have a link with faith or spirituality but don’t plainly fit into it.” ***O Coruscans Lux Stellarum*** “I wanted to come up with something that was drastically different to *O Viridissima Virga* \[Track 1\]. They have the use of a drone in common, but to be honest, that’s about it. We rendered *O Coruscans* through the particle effects available on the Microcosm pedal, and then added a lot of reverb. This is not the hellfire that the text prescribes, but it’s something a little gentler and more ambient—and the direct tonic one needs before *Buddha*.” ***Buddha*** “The score of *Buddha*, such as it is, is a music ‘egg’ and it doesn’t really have a defined structure as such—you can’t even be sure whether we are moving down the page vertically or across horizontally. I made it quite slow so that there was a lot of room to bring out the cadences that I found in Moondog’s graphic. I then emphasized that through slides and effects in order to establish some kind of dynamic system that would help create a cogent piece.”

Ashley McBryde delivers her most ambitious project yet with *Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville*, a concept album set within a fictional town named for the late Nashville songwriter Dennis Linde, known for hits like The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” and Joe Diffie’s “John Deere Green.” Like William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the town features a recurring cast of characters, a nod to Linde’s own occasional habit of carrying characters over from song to song. “We wrote a song called ‘Blackout Betty’ and we\'ve had a good time with it,” McBryde tells Apple Music of the concept’s genesis. “I feel better. Therapy is complete. And then I\'m like, you know what? ‘Blackout Betty,’ \[*Girl Going Nowhere*’s\] ‘Living Next to Leroy,’ \[*Never Will*’s\] ‘Shut Up Sheila,’ Aaron\'s got ‘Jesus Jenny,’ Nicolette is Pillbox Patti—we have all these characters that accidentally, over the years, they\'ve popped up… What we should do is make them neighbors on purpose, and then a place to live.” The resulting collection listens like a fever-dream tour of small-town America, with McBryde’s expansive vision fleshed out by contributions from fellow artists like Aaron Raitiere, Pillbox Patti, Brandy Clark, the Brothers Osborne, and more. While *Lindeville* is an album that begs a start-to-finish listen—a compelling narrative quickly develops and sprawls outward, not unlike a novel-in-stories—standout tracks include the tender, realist “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” and a show-stopping cover of The Everly Brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved,” on which Clark, Caylee Hammack, and Pillbox Patti join McBryde in showing that at the end of the day, these small-town characters, these women, just wish to be seen. But McBryde’s doing them one better: Their voices are being heard. Below, McBryde shares insight into several key tracks on *Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville*. **“Jesus Jenny” (feat. Aaron Raitiere)** “Nobody delivers like Aaron Raitiere. I didn\'t notice this until I\'ve been working things up this week to do an acoustic show, but when Aaron sings it, we\'re all laughing and we\'re going, ‘Oh, I don\'t know if I should be laughing at this.’ And then I went to go sing it and pick it and it\'s so sad. I had no idea how sad this song was. Because when Aaron delivers, his phrasing is just absolutely his own. And I\'m like, ‘Well, if I say it that short, or if I say it this way, then it\'s going to sound like I\'m trying to sound like Aaron.’ Then when I sing the line ‘All I can do for you right now is pray that your demons go away and you get home okay’—maybe that\'s what it is that\'s making me so like, ‘Oh my god,’ is that we know that person. And up until recently, I\'ve been that girl, that people are looking at you and going, ‘Well, I hope you get home okay.’ How eye-opening.” **“The Girl in the Picture” (feat. Pillbox Patti)** “‘The Girl in the Picture’ is one of the more somber situations on the record, because that chorus ends with ‘It\'s a shame that all she\'ll ever be is the girl in the picture that won the blue ribbon at the Faulkner County Fair.’ So all we know, as we\'re writing it, is she was at this event and she had her picture taken and that photographer entered that \[photo\] into the county fair and it won the blue ribbon. It\'s also what they use for the ‘missing’ poster now. And nobody knows where she is, so right now all she is is just ‘the girl in the picture.’ We still don\'t know what happened to her.” **“Play Ball” (feat. Brothers Osborne)** “The song is about Pete, but it\'s sung from the point of view of a person who\'s an adult now who, when they were little, Pete took care of a little bit and put his arms around. We didn\'t start with that hook. We started with ‘Who is Pete?’ And so we literally started with ‘Pete chalks the ball field down at Dennis Linde Park.’ And then what else does that mean? That means he turns the sprinklers on at sunup and the lights on after dark. Okay. And then Benjy Davis is the one that comes out with ‘The grass is always greener on his side of the fence.’ And then we got tickled. I\'m like, ‘He lost his wife to cancer and a thumb to Vietnam, and jokes he used to be a hitchhiker, but not for very long.’” **“Gospel Night at the Strip Club” (feat. Benjy Davis)** “‘Gospel Night at the Strip Club’ is a title that I dreamt. I had a dream that me and Brandy \[Clark\] had all this cash in our hands and our friends were like, ‘Where have you girls been?’ And I was like, ‘Gospel night at the strip club.’ And I took that to the table and I was like, ‘It feels like Kris Kristofferson-style spoken word. I know that spoken songs aren\'t \[commercial\]. But it doesn\'t matter. We\'re not going to work that to radio. So let\'s write this.’”