OOR's Best Albums of 2021

“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”

When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

“It wasn\'t forced, it wasn\'t pressured, it wasn\'t scary,” Billie Eilish tells Apple Music of making *Happier Than Ever*. “It was nice.” Once again written and recorded entirely with her brother FINNEAS, Eilish’s second LP finds the 19-year-old singer-songwriter in a deeply reflective state, using the first year of the pandemic to process the many ways her life has changed and she’s evolved since so quickly becoming one of the world’s most famous and influential teenagers. “I feel like everything I\'ve created before this, as much as I love it, was kind of a battle with myself,” she says. “I\'ve actually talked to artists that are now going through the rise and what I\'ve said to them is, ‘I know what it\'s like, but I also don\'t know what it\'s like for you.’ Because everybody goes through something completely different.” A noticeable departure from the genre-averse, slightly sinister edge of 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*, much of the production and arrangements here feel open and airy by comparison, inspired in large part by the placid mid-century pop and jazz of torch singer Julie London. And whether she’s sharing new perspective on age (“Getting Older”), sensuality (“Oxytocin”), or the absurdity of fame (“NDA”), there’s a sense of genuine freedom—if not peace—in Eilish’s singing, her voice able to change shape and size as she sees fit, an instrument under her control and no one else\'s. “I started to feel like a parody of myself, which is super weird,” she says. “I just tried to listen to myself and figure out what I actually liked versus what I thought I would have liked in the past. I had to really evaluate myself and be like, \'What the hell do I want with myself right now?\'” It’s a sign of growth, most striking in the clear skies of “my future” and the emotional clarity of the album’s towering title cut, which starts as a gentle ballad and blossoms, quite naturally and unexpectedly, into a growing wave of distorted guitars and distant screams. Both sound like breakthroughs. “There was no thought of, ‘What\'s this going to be? What track is this?’” she says of the writing process. “We just started writing and we kept writing. Over time, it just literally created itself. It just happened. It was easy.”

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”

Over the course of her first four albums as The Weather Station, Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman has seen her project gradually blossom from a low-key indie-folk oddity into a robust roots-rock outfit powered by motorik rhythms and cinematic strings. But all that feels like mere baby steps compared to the great leap she takes with *Ignorance*, a record where Lindeman soundly promotes herself from singer-songwriter to art-rock auteur (with a dazzling, Bowie-worthy suit made of tiny mirrors to complete the transformation). It’s a move partly inspired by the bigger rooms she found herself playing in support of her 2017 self-titled release, but also by the creative stasis she was feeling after a decade spent in acoustic-strummer mode. “Whenever I picked up the guitar, I just felt like I was repeating myself,” Lindeman tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was making the same decisions and the same chord changes, and it just felt a little stale. I just really wanted to embrace some of this other music that I like.” To that end, Lindeman built *Ignorance* around a dream-team band, pitting pop-schooled players like keyboardist John Spence (of Tegan and Sara’s live band) and drummer Kieran Adams (of indie electro act DIANA) against veterans of Toronto’s improv-jazz scene, like saxophonist Brodie West and flautist Ryan Driver. The results are as rhythmically vigorous as they are texturally scrambled, with Lindeman’s pristine Christine McVie-like melodies mediating between the two. Throughout the record, Lindeman distills the biggest, most urgent issues of the early 2020s—climate change, social injustice, unchecked capitalism—into intimate yet enigmatic vignettes that convey the heavy mental toll of living in a world that seems to be slowly caving in from all sides. “With a lot of the songs on the record, it could be a personal song or it could be an environmental song,” Lindeman explains. “But I don\'t think it matters if it\'s either, because it\'s all the same feelings.” Here, Lindeman provides us with a track-by-track survey of *Ignorance*’s treacherous psychic terrain. **Robber** “It\'s a very strange thing to be the recipient of something that\'s stolen, which is what it means to be a non-Indigenous Canadian. We\'re all trying to grapple with the question of: What does it mean to even be here at all? We\'re the beneficiaries of this long-ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history—so to sing \'I never believed in the robber\' sort of feels like how we all were taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is: ‘People lived here.’ And then the next 265 pages are all about the victors—the takers.” **Atlantic** “I was thinking about the weight of the climate crisis—like, how can you look out the window and love the world when you know that it is so threatened, and how that threat and that grief gets in the way of loving the world and being able to engage with it.” **Tried to Tell You** “Something I thought about a lot when I was making the album was how strange our society is—like, how we’ve built a society on a total lack of regard for biological life, when we are biological. Our value system is so odd—it\'s ahuman in this funny way. We\'re actually very soft, vulnerable creatures—we fall in love easily and our hearts are so big. And yet, so much of the way that we try to be is to turn away from everything that\'s soft and mysterious and instinctual about the way that we actually are. There\'s a distinct lack of humility in the way that we try to be, and it doesn\'t do us any good. So this just started out as a song about a friend who was turning away from someone that they were very clearly deeply in love with, but at the same time, I felt like I was writing about everyone, because everyone is turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.” **Parking Lot** “What\'s beautiful about birds is that they\'re everywhere, and they show up in our big, shitty cities, and they\'re just this constant reminder of the nonhuman perspective—like when you really watch a bird, and you try to imagine how it\'s perceiving the world around it and why it\'s doing what it does. For me, there\'s such a beauty in encountering the nonhuman, but also a sadness, and those two ideas are connected in the song.” **Loss** “This song started with that chord change and that repetition of \'loss is loss is loss is loss.\' So I stitched in a snapshot of a person—I don\'t know who—having this moment where they realize that the pain of trying to avoid the pain is not as bad as the pain itself. The deeper feeling beneath that avoidance is loss and sadness and grief, so when you can actually see it, and acknowledge that loss is loss and that it\'s real, you also acknowledge the importance of things. I took a quote from a friend of mine who was talking about her journey into climate activism, and she said, ‘At some point, you have to live as if the truth is true.’ I just loved that, so I quoted her in the song, and I think about that line a lot.\" **Separated** “With some of these songs, I\'m almost terrified by some of the lyrics that I chose to include—I\'m like, \'What? I said that?\' To be frank, I wrote this song in response to the way that people communicate on social media. There\'s so much commitment: We commit to disagree, we commit to one-upping each other and misunderstanding each other on purpose, and it\'s not dissimilar to a broken relationship. Like, there\'s a genuine choice being made to perpetuate the conflict, and I feel like that\'s not really something we like to talk about.” **Wear** “This one\'s a slightly older song. I think I wrote it when I was still out on the road touring a lot. And it just seemed like the most perfect, deep metaphor: ‘I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.’ I\'m always really happy when I can hit a metaphor that has many layers to it, and many threads that I can pull out over the course of the song—like, the world is this garment that doesn\'t fit and doesn\'t keep you warm and you can\'t move in. And you just want to be naked, and you want to take it off and you want to connect, and yet you have to wear it. I think it speaks to a desire to understand the world and understand other people—like, \'Is everyone else comfortable in this garment, or is it just me that feels uncomfortable?\'” **Trust** “This song was written in a really short time, and that doesn\'t usually happen to me, because I usually am this very neurotic writer and I usually edit a lot and overthink. It\'s a very heavy song. And it\'s about that thing that\'s so hard to wrap your head around when you\'re an empathetic person: You want to understand why some people actively choose conflict, why they choose to destroy. I wasn\'t actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song; I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it\'s not cool.” **Heart** “Along with \'Robber,\' this was one of my favorite recording moments. It had a pretty loose shape, and there\'s this weird thing that I was obsessed with where the one chord is played through the whole song, and everything is constantly tying back to this base. I just loved what the band did and how they took it in so many different directions. This song really freaked me out \[lyrically\]. I was not comfortable with it. But I was talked into keeping it, and all for the better, because obviously, I do believe that the sentiments shared on the song—though they are so, so fucking soft!—are the best things that you can share.” **Subdivisions** “This was one of the first songs written before the record took shape in my mind and before it structurally came together. I think we recorded it in, like, an hour, and everyone\'s performance was just perfect. I like these big, soft, emotional songs, and from a craft perspective, I think it\'s one of my better songs. I\'ve never really written a chorus like that. I don\'t even feel like it\'s my song. I don\'t feel like I wrote it or sang it, but it just feels like falling deeper and deeper into some very soft place—which is, I think, the right way to end the record.”

As The War on Drugs has grown in size and stature from bedroom recording project to sprawling, festival-headlining rock outfit, Adam Granduciel’s role has remained constant: It’s his band, his vision. But when the pandemic forced recording sessions for their fifth LP *I Don’t Live Here Anymore* to go remote in 2020, Granduciel began encouraging his bandmates to take ownership of their roles within each song—to leave their mark. “Once we got into a groove of sending each other sessions, it was this really cool thing where everyone had a way of working on their own time that really helped,” he tells Apple Music. “I think being friends with the guys now and collaborative for so many years, each time we work together, it\'s like everyone\'s more confident in their role and I’m more confident in my desire for them to step up and bring something real. I was all about giving up control.” That shift, Granduciel adds, opened up “new sonic territory” that he couldn’t have seen by himself. And the sense of peace and perspective that came with it was mirrored—if not made possible—by changes in his personal life, namely the birth of his first child. A decade ago, Granduciel would have likely obsessed and fretted over every detail, making himself unwell in the process, “but I wasn\'t really scared to turn in this record,” he says. “I was excited for it to be out in the world, because it\'s not so much that you don\'t care about your work, but it’s just not the most important thing all the time. I was happy with whatever I could contribute, as long as I felt that I had given it my all.” Here, Granduciel guides us through the entire record, track by track. **“Living Proof”** “It felt like a complete statement, a complete thought. It felt like the solo was kind of composed and was there for a reason, and it all just felt buttoned up perfectly, where it could open a record in kind of a tender way. Just very deliberate and right.” **“Harmonia’s Dream”** “It’s mostly inspired by the band Harmonia and this thing that \[keyboardist\] Robbie \[Bennett\] had done that was blowing my mind in real time. I started playing those two chords, and in the spur of the moment he wrote that whole synth line. We went on for about nine minutes, and I remember, when we were doing it, I was like, ‘Don\'t hit a wrong note.’ Because it was so perfect what he was just feeling out in the moment, at 2 am, at some studio in Brooklyn. I was so lucky that I got to witness him doing that.” **“Change”** “I had started it at the end of 2017’s *Deeper Understanding* and it was like this piano ballad in half-time. Years later, we’re in upstate New York, and I\'m showing it to \[bassist\] Dave \[Hartley\] and \[guitarist\] Anthony \[LaMarca\]. I\'m on piano and they\'re on bass and drums and it\'s not really gelling. At some point Anthony just picks up the drumsticks and he shifts it to the backbeat, this straight-ahead pop-rock four-on-the-floor thing. It immediately had this really cool ‘I\'m on Fire’ vibe.’” **“I Don’t Wanna Wait”** “\[Producer-engineer\] Shawn \[Everett\], for the most part, puts the vocal very front and center on a lot of songs, very pop-like. I think as you get more confident in your songs it\'s okay to have the vocals there. But for this one I was thinking about Radiohead, like it would be cool if we just processed the vocals in this really weird way. I wanted to have fun with them, because we’ve already got so many alien sounds happening with those Prophet keyboards and the moodiness of the drum machine. I wanted to give it something that felt like you were sucked into some weird little world.” **“Victim”** “Ten years ago if we had had this song, we wouldn\'t have a chorus on it—it would just be like a verse over and over. Now I feel like we\'ve progressed to where you have this hypnotic thing but it actually goes somewhere. We’d had it done, but the vocals were a little weird. I told Shawn I wasn’t sure about them, because this song had such a vibe. When he asked me to describe it in one word, I was like, ‘back alley,’ like steam coming out of a fucking manhole cover or something. And then he puts his headphones on and I see him work in some gear for like 30 minutes—and then he turns the speakers on. I was like, ‘Oh, dude. That\'s it.’” **“I Don’t Live Here Anymore”** “I\'ll be the first to say it has that \'80s thing going, but we kind of pushed it in that way. At one point Shawn and I ran everything on the song—drums, the girls, bass, everything—through a JC-120 Roland amplifier, which is like the sound of the \'80s, essentially. I saw it just sitting there at Sound City \[Studios in Los Angeles\]. We spent like a day doing that, and it just gave it this sound that was a familiar heartbeat or something. It sounds huge but it also felt real—in my mind it was basically just a bedroom recording, because everything was done in my tiny little room, directly into my computer.” **“Old Skin”** “I demoed it in one afternoon, in like 30 minutes. Then I showed it to the band, and from the minute we started playing, it was just so fucking boring. But I knew that there was something in the song I really liked, and we kept building it up and building it up, and then one day, I asked Shawn to mute everything except the two things I liked most: the organ and the single note I was playing on the Juno. I brought the drums in at the right moment and it was like, \'Oh, that\'s the fucking song.’ Lyrically, I felt like it was about the concept of pushing back against everything that tries to hold you down—and having a song about that and then having it be as dynamic as it is, with these drums coming out of nowhere, it just feels like a really special moment. It’s my favorite song on the record, I think.” **“Wasted”** “This song was actually a really early one that I kind of abandoned—I sent it to \[drummer\] Pat \[Berkery\] because I knew there was a song there but the drums were just very stale. I didn\'t know any of this, but the day that he was working out of my studio in Philly was the day that his personal life had kind of all come to a head: He was getting divorced from his wife of 15 years. He did the song and he sent it back to me and it was fucking ferocious. It just gave new life to it. Springsteen always talks about Max Weinberg on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and how it’s Max\'s greatest recorded performance. I said the same thing when I heard this: ‘It’s Pat’s greatest recorded performance.’” **“Rings Around My Father’s Eyes”** “I\'d been strumming those open chords for a couple years—I had the melody and I had that opening line. I wanted to express something, but I wasn\'t 100% sure how I was going to go about doing it—part of the journey was to not be embarrassed by a line or not think that something is too obvious and too sentimental. As time went on with this record, I became a dad, and I started seeing it from the other side. It’s not so much a reflection on my relationship with my own dad, but starting to think about being a dad, being a protector.” **“Occasional Rain”** “As a songwriter I just love it because it\'s really concise. Lyrically, I was able to wrap up some of the scenes that I wanted to try and talk about, knowing where it was going to go on the record. I just think it\'s one of those songs that\'s a perfect closer. It\'s the last song in our fifth album. It\'s like, if this was the last album we ever made and that was the last song, I\'d be like, ‘That\'s a good way to go out.’”

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

The Pakistani musician began writing her second album, and then her younger brother died. And so, instead of the dark, edgy dance record she’d intended on making, Aftab turned to the Urdu ghazals she grew up with—an ancient form of lyric poetry centered around loss and longing. On *Vulture Prince*, Aftab makes the art form her own, trading the traditional percussion-heavy instrumentation for heavenly string arrangements (harp, violin, upright bass); she even ventures into reggae territory on “Last Night,” a slinky rendition of a Rumi poem. She translates another poem, this time by Mirza Ghalib, on “Diya Hai,” the last song she performed for her brother Maher, and a haunting expression of all-encompassing grief.

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

As a producer and multi-instrumentalist, Aaron Dessner has worked alongside a number of magnetic vocalists: Matt Berninger, Sharon Van Etten, Justin Vernon, and, most famously, Taylor Swift, on 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But on his second LP as one-half of Big Red Machine (a sprawling collaboration with Vernon that began in the late 2000s with a song that became their namesake), he’s finally taken the mic himself. “I’m not naturally somebody who seeks the spotlight or wants to be lead singer,” he tells Apple Music. “I like the process of making and engineering and producing stuff, getting lost in the weeds. I’ve almost been a ventriloquist or something, trying to create emotional worlds for other people to inhabit. But I think I did realize that there’s another step, artistically, that I needed to take.” The decision to step into the foreground began, in part, with a nudge from both Swift and Vernon—after each heard a song Dessner had recently written about his twin brother (and fellow National guitarist), Bryce. “It just started happening,” he says of the transition. “I was lucky to be getting a strong push from these crazy-talented singers, who were all saying, ‘Don’t hide your voice.’” And though *How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?* offers a stage to more lead vocalists than ever before (Anaïs Mitchell and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold among them), it’s an album that feels like Dessner’s—more personal, less opaque. Where Big Red Machine’s debut LP was, as Dessner says, a “wild” and “fairly cryptic” set of mostly electronic smudges and smears and sketches (all fronted by Vernon), its follow-up is traditional by comparison, its more song-oriented approach inspired by Dessner’s time playing with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. “I wanted to be more intentional about it, but to create this feeling where there’s room for improvisation and the paint is always wet somehow,” he says. “I tried to make stuff that’s open and had this warmth, and always had this experimentation in it, too. I think we were successful on that.” Read on as Dessner takes us inside a number of the album’s key tracks. **“Latter Days” (feat. Anaïs Mitchell)** “I’d recorded the instrumental and when Justin heard it, the very first thing that he did is whistle. There was a microphone that picked him up. And we just kept it as a sort of improvised vocal melody that I wrote words to. I’ve always liked that about records, where there’s things that you don’t clean up, even though it’s slightly out of tune. If you listen closely, you’ll hear crickets and frogs on certain songs because the doors were open. That’s kind of how I think about Justin whistling.” **“Phoenix” (feat. Fleet Foxes & Anaïs Mitchell)** “I feel like Robin’s voice is timeless. I had written ‘Phoenix’ and Justin wrote the chorus melodies, and I just sent it to Robin as kind of a work in progress, imagining this multitude of voices could be a dialogue between different singers. He was really into it and moved and inspired. He wrote the song essentially as a dialogue between him and Justin, recalling the only conversation they ever had in person, which was backstage at a venue in Phoenix, Arizona, 10 years ago at a loading bay dock. That’s literally what it’s about, and when Anaïs Mitchell heard it, she rewrote Justin’s chorus lyrics, almost like a response to Robin. It’s very much the process of this record, the exchange of ideas.” **“Birch” (feat. Taylor Swift)** “It’s actually a beat that The National’s drummer, Bryan Devendorf, made in his basement. He will make these kind of loopy, trippy beats in his basement on a drum machine, and then send them to me as a Voice Memo. I wrote music to it and developed it and played all the parts to it and made it. It was during a time where I wasn’t doing that well, actually—maybe in fall 2019. I sent it to Justin, and good friends sometimes know when you’re going through something and maybe he felt that. He wrote the words and melody to it and as we recorded and developed it, we played it for Taylor at some point, towards the end of *folklore*. She really loved the song, and heard harmonies, and then kind of helped to lift further into some heavenly place.” **“Renegade” (feat. Taylor Swift)** “We wrote ‘Renegade’ after we finished *evermore*— I was really specifically writing music for Big Red Machine, and I think Taylor was, too. When she sent me ‘Renegade,’ it was literally another bolt of electricity. Thematically, it’s this idea of the way fear and anxiety and emotional baggage get in the way of loving, or being loved. I can just really relate to it in a very deep way. It did feel very connected to other songs and other characters in the record. But also, just the clarity of her songwriting and her sense of melody and rhythm and her diction: It’s just astonishing. She’s able to make a Voice Memo sound almost like it’s a finished record.” **“The Ghost of Cincinnati”** “It’s about the feeling of someone that’s empty, overextended to the point where they feel empty and hollow, like a ghost. They’re still alive, but they kind of feel like they’re running on fumes and searching for a remedy through fleeting memories and fleeting images of the past. It’s a sense of catharsis just by giving voice to a feeling that might be bleak. It kind of helps you get over it.” **“Easy to Sabotage” (feat. Naeem)** “It’s literally two bootlegs stitched together, two live recordings—one from Brooklyn at Pioneer Works and one from LA at the Hollywood Palladium. It was purely improvised, and then we took it and made a song out of it. It does relate more to the spontaneous, structured improvisation of the first Big Red Machine record, but I think it’s also a link between the past and the future of whatever this is.” **“Hutch” (feat. Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan & Shara Nova)** “I wrote a sketch inspired by my friend Scott Hutchison from Frightened Rabbit, who passed away. It’s this dark, kind of spiritual, kind of gothic piano piece. I’d produced the last Frightened Rabbit record, and it was just very shocking. He’s not the first friend I’ve lost that way, but it’s just really hard, obviously, and sad. You wonder how did it get so bad, or did I check in enough, or did I miss signs, or did I not take it seriously enough? That was the sentiment, but we wanted it to feel cathartic and have this heavenly lift to it. Lisa Hannigan and Sharon Van Etten and Shara Nova sing so beautifully on it. They added their parts and really lifted it like this angelic choir almost.” **“Brycie”** “I remember I wrote the music backstage in Washington, D.C. It was clear to me, in my head somehow, that it was about my brother. I think even the way that I was playing the guitar was how he and I play the guitar together, kind of—these interlocking, twin, mirrored guitar parts. That’s actually me and him playing together on the song, too. There are so many times in my life where he helped me get through a difficult time, where he refused to let me fall, and that’s what it’s about. It’s a love letter to him, thanking him for keeping me above the ground and hoping he’ll be there when we’re old. And when I wrote it, it was the first clue of what this record would become. It’s about looking at your childhood and searching for meaning in it—that time before you’ve lost innocence and before you’ve taken on the pressure and anxiety and uncertainty of adulthood. Just that feeling of ‘how long do you think it’s going to last?’”

There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.

With her incisive lyrics and gift for harnessing classic UK garage samples, PinkPantheress very quickly became one of 2021’s breakout stars. Her debut mixtape, *to hell with it*, is a bite-size collection of moreish pop songs and a small slice of the 20-year-old singer and producer’s creative output over the nine months since her first viral TikTok moment. “I basically put together the songs that I put out this year that I felt were strongest,” she tells Apple Music. “I sat in the studio with my manager and a good friend from home whose ear I trust, and I said, ‘Does this sound cohesive to you? Are the songs in a similar world?’” The world of *to hell with it* is one of sharp contrasts existing together in perfect balance: sweet, singsong vocals paired with frenetic breakbeats, floor-filler samples through a bedroom pop filter, confessional lyrics about mostly fictionalized experiences, and light, bright production with a solidly emo core. “They’re all vividly sad,” PinkPantheress says of the 10 tracks that made the cut. “I think I\'ve had a tendency, even on a particularly happy beat, to sing the saddest lyrics I can. I paint a picture of the actual scenarios where someone would be sad.” Here, the Bath-born, London-based artist takes us through her mixtape, track by track. **“Pain”** “In my early days on TikTok I was creating a song a day. Some of them got a good reception, but ‘Pain’ was the first one where people responded really well and the first one where the sound ended up traveling a little bit. It didn\'t go crazy, but the sound was being used by 30 people, and that got me quite excited. A lot of people haven’t really heard garage that much before, and I think that for them, the sample \[Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 single ‘Flowers’\] is a very palatable way to ease into garage breakbeats, very British-sounding synths, and all those influences.” **“I must apologise”** “This track was produced by Oscar Scheller \[Rina Sawayama, Ashnikko\]. I was trying to stay away from a sample at this point, but there’s something about this beat \[from Crystal Waters’ 1991 single ‘Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)’\] which drugged me. When we started writing it, Oscar gave me the idea for one of the melodies and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this actually is probably going to end up being one of my favorite songs just based off of this great melody that he\'s just come up with.’” **“Last valentines”** “My older cousin introduced me to LINKIN PARK; *Hybrid Theory* is one of my favorite albums ever. I went through the whole thing thinking, ‘Could I sample any of this?’ and when I listened to ‘Forgotten’ I just thought: ‘This guitar in the back is amazing. I can\'t believe no one\'s ever sampled it before!’ I looped it, recorded to it, mixed it, put it out. This was my first track where it took a darker turn, sonically. It really is emo through and through, from the sample to the lyrics.” **“Passion”** “To me, a lack of passion is just really not enjoying things like you used to—not having the same fun with your friends, finding things boring. I haven’t experienced depression myself, but I know people that have and I can attempt to draw comparisons of what I see in real life. Like it says in the lyrics, ‘You don’t see the light.’ I think I got a lot more emotional than I needed to get, but I\'m still glad that I went there. The instruments are so happy, I feel like there needed to be something to contradict it and make it a bit more three-dimensional.” **“Just for me”** “I made this song with \[UK artist and producer\] Mura Masa. I was sat with him, just going through references, and he started making the loop. I’ve never said this before, but I remember being like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write anything good to this,’ and then it just came, after 20 minutes of sitting there wondering what I could do. The line ‘When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?’ just slipped off the tongue.” **“Noticed I cried”** “This is another track with Oscar Scheller and the first song I made without my own production. I held back a lot from working with producers, because I like working by myself, but Oscar is really good, so it ended up just being an easy process. He understood the assignment. I think it’s my favorite song I’ve ever released. It’s the top line, I’m just a big fan of the way it flows. I hope that people like it as much as I do.” **“Reason”** “Zach Nahome produced this track. He used to make a lot of garage, drum ’n’ bass, jungle, but his sound is quite different to that nowadays. So this was a bit of a different vibe for him. We made the beat together. I told him what kind of drums I wanted, what kind of sound and space I wanted, and he came up with that. With garage music, I just enjoy the breakbeats of it, the drums. It’s also quintessentially British. We birthed it. I think it’s always nice to go back to your roots.” **“All my friends know”** “I wanted to try something a bit different, and there were a few moments with this one where I wasn’t sure if I really liked it or not. After I stopped debating with myself it got a lot easier to enjoy it and I ended up feeling like it could actually be a lot of people’s favorite. The instrumental part of it is really beautiful; both producers—my friends Dill and Kairos—did a good job. It’s sentimental in a musical sense, and it’s sentimental in a personal sense as well.” **“Nineteen”** “This is a song that stems from personal experience, and kind of the first time in any of my songs where I’m like, ‘I’m actually speaking the truth here, this actually happened to me.’ Nineteen was a year of confusion, emotional confusion. I didn’t want to do my uni course, I wanted to do music. I didn\'t want people to laugh at me. I didn\'t want to tell myself out loud and then have it not happen. Internally, I was very sure and certain that it was going to happen, just because I\'m a big believer in manifestation. So 19 was that transition year. Once I\'d settled down and started doing what I loved, I felt a lot more comfortable, and actually, a lot more safe.” **“Break It Off”** “‘Break It Off’ was, I guess, my breakthrough track. It was the first time my name was being chucked around a fair bit. I fell in love with the original \[Adam F’s 1997 single ‘Circles’\] and I just wanted to hear what a top line would sound like on the track. So I found the instrumental, played around with it a little bit, and then sang on top. I think it got 100,000 likes on TikTok when I wasn’t really getting likes in that number before. The lyric is really tongue-in-cheek, and I think a lot of people on TikTok like tongue-in-cheek.”

On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”

In August 2019, New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins thought she had the rest of her year fully mapped out, starting with a tour of North America as a guitarist in David Berman’s newly launched project Purple Mountains. But when Berman took his own life that month, everything changed. “All of a sudden, I was just unmoored and in shock,” she tells Apple Music. “I really only spent four days with David. But those four days really knocked me off my feet.” For the next few months, she wrote as she reflected, obsessively collecting ideas and lyrics, as well as recordings of conversations with friends and strangers—cab drivers and art museum security guards among them. The result is her sophomore LP, a set of iridescent folk rock that came together almost entirely over the course of one week, with multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman in his Brooklyn studio. “I was trying to articulate this feeling of getting comfortable with chaos,” she says. “And learning how to be comfortable with the idea that things are going to fall apart and they\'re going to come back together. I had shed a lot of skin very quickly.” Here, Jenkins tells us the story of each song on the album. **Michelangelo** “I think sequencing the record was an interesting challenge because, to me, the songs feel really different from one another. ‘Michelangelo’ is the only one that I came in with that was written—I had a melody that I wanted to use and I thought, ‘Okay, Josh, let’s make this into a little rock song and take the guitar solo in the middle.’ That was the first song we recorded, so it was just our way of getting into the groove of recording, with what sounds like a familiar version of what I\'ve done in the past.” **New Bikini** “I was worried when I was writing it that it sounded too starry-eyed and a little bit naive, saying, ‘The water cures everything.’ I think it was this tension between that advice—from a lot of people with good intentions—and me being like, ‘Well, it\'s not going to bring this person back from the dead and it\'s not going to change my DNA and it\'s not going to make this person better.’” **Hard Drive** “I just love talking to people, to strangers. The heart of the song is people talking about the nature of things, but often, what they\'re doing is actually talking about themselves and expressing something about themselves. I think that every person that I meet has wisdom to give and it\'s just a matter of turning that key with people. Because when you turn it and you open that door, you can be given so much more than you ever expected. Really listening, being more of a journalist in my own just day-to-day life—rather than trying to influence my surroundings, just letting them hit me.” **Crosshairs** “You could look at this as a kind of role-playing song, which isn\'t explicitly sexual, but that\'s definitely one aspect of it. It’s the idea that when you\'re assuming a different role within yourself, it actually can open up chambers within you that are otherwise not seeing the light of day. I was looking at the parts of me that are more masculine, the parts of me that are explicitly feminine, and seeing where everything is in between, while also trying to do the same for someone else in my life.” **Ambiguous Norway** “The song is titled after one of David\'s cartoons, a drawing of a house with a little pinwheel on the top. It\'s about that moment where I was experiencing this grief of David passing away, where I was really saturated in it. I threw myself onto this island in Norway—Lyngør—thinking I could sort of leave that behind to a certain extent, and just realizing that it really didn\'t matter what corner of the planet I found myself on, I was still interacting with the impression of David\'s death and finding that there was all of these coincidences everywhere I went. I felt like I was in this wide-eyed part of the grieving process where it becomes almost psychedelic, like I was seeing meaning in everything and not able at all to just put it into words because it was too big and too expansive.” **Hailey** “It\'s challenging to write a platonic love song—it doesn\'t have all the ingredients of heartbreak or lust or drama that I think a lot of those songs have. It\'s much more simple than that. I just wanted to celebrate her and also celebrate someone who\'s alive now, who\'s making me feel motivated to keep going when things get tough, and to have confidence in myself, because that\'s a really beautiful thing and it\'s rare to behold. I think a lot of the record is mourning, and this was kind of the opposite.” **The Ramble** “I made these binaural recordings as I walked around and birdwatched in the morning, in April \[2020\], when it was pretty much empty. I was a stone\'s throw away from all the hospitals that were cropping up in Central Park, while simultaneously watching nature flourish in this incredible way. I recorded a guitar part and then I sent that to all of my friends around the country and said, ‘Just write something, send it back to me. Don\'t spend a lot of time on it.’ I wanted to capture the feeling that things change, but it’s nature\'s course to find its way through. Just to go out with my binoculars and be in nature and observe birds is my way of really dissolving and letting go of a lot of my fears and anxieties—and I wanted to give that to other people.”

Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak were already hard at work on what would become *An Evening With Silk Sonic* when the pandemic shut down live music in early 2020, but they weren’t going to let that stop them from delivering a concert experience to their fans. “All of a sudden, my shows get canceled, Andy\'s shows get canceled,” Mars told Ebro Darden during their R&B Now interview. “This fear of ‘we’ll never be able to play live again’ comes into play. And to take that away from guys like us, that\'s all we know. So we\'re thinking, all right, let\'s put an album together that sounds like a show.” It began with the project’s lead single, “Leave the Door Open,” a syrupy-sweet piece of retro soul that Mars considers something of a backbone for the project. After its completion, he and .Paak began building out the nine songs of *An Evening With Silk Sonic*, soliciting help, in the few instances where they needed it, from friends like Bootsy Collins, Thundercat, and even Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Their access to HOF-worthy firepower notwithstanding, the pair always understood that their own combined musicality was the real draw. “We just wanted it to feel special,” Mars says. “Instead of trying to get too cute with the concept, it\'s like, what\'s more special than Anderson .Paak behind a drum set singing a song and me having his back when it\'s my turn, you know? And the band moving in the same direction? It was just like a musician\'s dream.” Below, the pair talk through some of the tracks that make *An Evening With Silk Sonic* an experience fans won’t soon forget. **“Leave the Door Open”** Bruno Mars: “Me and Andy come from the school of performing and playing live instruments. We wrote ‘Leave the Door Open’ and it was just one of those songs like, dang, I can’t believe we a part of this, and we don\'t know what it\'s gonna do, we don\'t care that it\'s a ballad or a whatever you wanna call it—to us, this just feels right and it\'s important. So no matter what, if it hit No. 1 or it didn\'t, me and Andy both know that that was the best we could do. And we were cool with that.” **“Fly as Me”** Anderson .Paak: “‘Fly as Me’ is a joint hook \[Mars\] had for a minute. He was trying to figure out some verses for it, trying to figure out the groove, and we spent some time on that.” Mars: “Andy goes behind the drum set one day and says, ‘The groove gotta be like this,’ and starts playing his groove. D’Mile is on the bass, I\'m on the guitar. After all the grooves we tried, I don\'t know what it is, there\'s something about someone in the studio, someone that you trust, saying, \'It\'s gotta be like this.’ And the groove you hear him playing, which is not an easy groove to play, was what he showed me and D. And we just followed suit.” **“After Last Night” (with Thundercat & Bootsy Collins)** Mars: “That one got a lot of Bootsy on it. And my boy Thundercat came in and blessed us. It’s just one of them songs—everything was built to be played live, so that song is one of those we can keep going for 10 minutes.” **“Smokin Out the Window”** Mars: “‘Smokin Out the Window’ was an idea we started four or five years ago on tour. It didn\'t sound nothing like how it does now, but we just had the idea. On \[.Paak’s\] birthday, I called him over. He was hysterical that night. After every take he was like, \'I\'m the king of R&B! I’m the best! Tell me I’m not the hottest in the game!\' We were going back and forth with the lines and who can make who laugh, and we end up finishing that song and he was like, \'I’m out, what we doing tomorrow?\'” **“Put On a Smile”** Mars: “I had a song that I played for Andy and I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ and he said, ‘It sucks.’ I start singing it again and he gets behind the drums and that\'s when the magic happens. So we come up with this hook and these chords and that\'s when we start cooking, when everything starts moving in the studio. The song\'s starting to sound real good now. I don’t wanna mess it up, so I call Babyface. I only call Face to know if I got something good, you know, ’cause he’ll tell me too, \'This is wack.\' For all of us to finish that record together, that was one of my favorite experiences on this album.” **“Skate”** Mars: “It\'s hard to be mad on some rollerskates. So really, that\'s kinda the essence of this album: If me and Andy were to host a party, what would that feel like? Summertime. Outside. Set up the congas and the drums and amplifiers, and what would that sound like? And this is what our best effort was: \'Skate.\'”