People's Top 10 Albums of 2023

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

Who, exactly, *is* Miley Cyrus? Is she the country music progeny turned former child star turned pop provocateur, twerking on awards shows and throwing middle fingers to critics? Is she the hopeful young balladeer, lending her naturally emotive voice to Top 40 anthems like 2009’s “The Climb”? Or is she the rock star in hiding, getting trippy with The Flaming Lips on their collaboration *Dead Petz* and channeling her inner Joan Jett on 2020’s *Plastic Hearts*? While her shifting identities can distract from her formidable musicianship, it is exactly this restless, chameleonic nature that makes Cyrus one of our more engaging and enduring pop stars. On eighth LP *Endless Summer Vacation*, Cyrus finally finds a way to bring these seemingly disparate parts together. She tapped four producers to help helm the album, each with an ear toward one of Cyrus’ primary lanes. Greg Kurstin (Adele, Maren Morris) brings his trademark gravitas to the cutting but compassionate breakup ballad “Jaded.” Kid Harpoon, who recently took home a Grammy for Harry Styles’ *Harry’s House*, has fingerprints all over the LP, as on powerhouse opener “Flowers,” Cyrus’ biggest single since 2013’s “Wrecking Ball.” Tyler Johnson, a fellow Nashvillian with credits ranging from Taylor Swift to Toni Braxton, pairs well with Cyrus, his own catholic tastes dovetailing nicely with hers. Mike WiLL Made-It, a longtime Cyrus collaborator, jumps in on tracks like the Brandi Carlile feature “Thousand Miles,” which feels country-adjacent but ultimately transcends genre, and the dark, industrial Sia collab “Muddy Feet,” which boasts one of the LP’s most biting lyrics: “You smell like perfume that I didn’t purchase.” Lines like that may provoke curiosity into Cyrus’ personal life—she’s made no effort to conceal that much of the material was inspired by her divorce from Liam Hemsworth—but the music itself is sturdy enough to transcend tabloid fodder. There are also other notable—and at times unexpected—co-writers on the LP. Cult-favorite indie filmmaker Harmony Korine (*Spring Breakers*, *Kids*) is credited on the woozy, gauzy “Handstand,” which lyrically references one of his paintings, “Big Twitchy.” Acclaimed R&B/electronic artist James Blake joins on album highlight “Violet Chemistry,” which feels like a spiritual and sonic cousin of Taylor Swift’s *Midnights* cut “Lavender Haze.” Country artist and songwriter Caitlyn Smith, who co-wrote the *Plastic Hearts* standout “High,” contributes to “Island,” a groovy, low-key banger about the double-edged sword of independence. Cyrus closes *Endless Summer Vacation* with a demo version of “Flowers,” the kind of bonus track that can, more often than not, function as little more than filler. In this case, though, the contrast between the song in its infancy and its buoyant, assertive final form is striking and emotional. The hard-won strength of the studio version is there, but it\'s drenched in a raw, gritty sadness that sounds painfully real. In its studio incarnation, you can hear that Cyrus buys what she’s selling, that she’s not only content to be her own companion but actually prefers her own company. In this demo, though, her words seem to function more as a compass than a proclamation, a hopeful road map out of the woods of heartbreak. For an artist whose musical talent is often overshadowed by her offstage antics, this glimpse into Cyrus’ creative process is a welcome one, and a fitting way to end her most fully realized album yet.

Zach Bryan has very quickly achieved Ubiquitous Pop-Mythology Origin Story status. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter’s trajectory, from Navy cadet with a preternatural talent for storytelling and a YouTube following to honorable dischargee with a massive grassroots following to, now, major-label superstar selling out 100 or so arenas a year, was both dizzyingly fast and seemingly preordained. His self-titled follow-up to 2022’s triple-LP Warners debut *American Heartbreak* doesn’t necessarily advance Bryan’s story or status so much as cement it, moving past the introduction phase into something more permanent and more meaningful. One way or another, Zach Bryan—and *Zach Bryan*—is going to be with us for a while. The album—a lean 16 tracks compared to *Heartbreak*’s 34—begins with a double-barrel mission statement. The first is the spoken-word opening track, “Fear and Friday’s (Poem),” which distills Bryan’s everyman charm and philosophy into a benediction (“I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common/They are overdone and glorified and always leave you wanting”). This is followed immediately by a Hendrixesque “Star-Spangled Banner” guitar lick and the shout-along bravado of “Overtime,” complete with horn section and empowered nods to his aforementioned mythology: “They said I\'s a wannabe cowboy from a cutthroat town/With tattooed skin and nobody around/Your songs sound the same, you\'ll never make a name for yourself.” Bryan’s three-year whirlwind of making a name for himself has only sharpened his eye for detail—the songs only sound the same in that they all share this quality. A slick turn of phrase like “If you need a tourniquet or if you want to turn and quit/Know that I\'ll be by your side” is delivered like someone who knows what he\'s doing. The songs comfortably inhabit traditional country, Americana, and, on relative barn burners like the veteran’s tale “East Side of Sorrow” and “Jake’s Piano - Long Island,” at least one boot in Springsteen-anthem story-song terrain. And at a moment when country music, possibly more than any other genre, is roiled by reactionary entrenchment in the face of long-overdue advancement, Bryan has managed to stake himself to the center without alienating anyone or, chiefly, himself. He preaches love and tolerance and sings about hard drinking and ’88 Fords, and they don’t sound like opposing energies, because why should they? He goes toe-to-toe with Nashville-outsider kindred spirit Kacey Musgraves on “I Remember Everything,” and even the most intimate songs, like the solo acoustic closer “Oklahoman Son,” sound built for the back row, which gets further away each tour leg. The sum of these parts is nothing less than a confident, headstrong star turn from someone who seems a little ambivalent about stardom, at least on any terms other than his own.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

“No, I\'m not the same/I think I done changed,” Janelle Monáe raps with a swagger on “Float,” the opener for her fourth LP, *The Age of Pleasure*. Over powerful brass—courtesy of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80—and heavy-lidded 808s, the singer-songwriter introduces listeners to another side of herself where she embraces the present. “Those lyrics for \'Float,\' I was like, I have to put this out now,” she tells Apple Music. “This is exactly, how do I honor how I\'m feeling and who I am now. I\'m not thinking about the future, but right now, because this is all we have right now.” Where Monáe\'s previous records were character-driven—set in a complex futuristic world filled with androids—and explored themes about power, race, and humanity, *The Age of Pleasure* highlights a new era of liberation that sheds her Afrofuturist persona in favor of an unmasked exploration of her own sensuality and deservedness to feel good above all else. Monáe creates a safe space within the album\'s 14 tracks where people can relax into themselves and express their queer identities, sexuality, and unapologetic Blackness. “We had an Everyday People Wondaland party, and I was like, *Oh, this is who I want to make music for*,” she says. “This moment right here, I want to make the soundtrack to this lifestyle. They get it. This is what we fight to protect. All of my work that centers around protecting my communities that I\'m a part of, from the LGBTQIA+ communities to being Black to all of that.” *The Age of Pleasure* is a love letter to the Pan-African diaspora. Monáe trades in her previous albums\' New Wave indie-electronic beats for an effortless fusion of jazz, dancehall, reggae, trap, and Afrobeats. The first half features tightly produced jazz- and funk-inspired tempos and rhythms over which she flexes her accomplishments (“Champagne Shit”) and proudly celebrates herself (“Float,” “Phenomenal,” “Haute”). The album\'s second half switches gears with midtempo, reggae-influenced sounds and Monáe indulging her carnal desires. “I like lipstick on my neck/Hands around my waist so you know what\'s coming next/I wanna feel your lips on mine/I just wanna feel/A little tongue, we don\'t have a long time,” she sings on “Lipstick Lover,” a seductive, summery groove that is a joyous celebration of queer Black sexual liberation. She uses water metaphors to underscore her euphoric pleasure-seeking on “The Rush” and “Water Slide,” while “Only Have Eyes 42” is an ode to polyamory, with more than one lover at the center of Monáe\'s affections. Ultimately, on *The Age of Pleasure*, Monáe taps into her “free-ass motherfucking spirit,” as she calls it, and delivers an album that honors the space that she\'s currently in—unabashed and proud of who she is. “My friends have gotten an opportunity to see a different side of me that nobody gets to see, and this album, this moment that I\'m having, I\'m allowing myself to show that version of Janelle that friends get to see all the time,” she says. “I want to own all of me and be all of me.”

“I don\'t really want to tell people stories,” Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. “I want to show them. I want them to feel.” At 28, the Australian artist has more than a few stories to pick from. In the years between 2018’s *Bloom* and this, his third full-length, he’s appeared in several films and series; collaborated with artists like Charli XCX, Lauv, Jónsi, and Tate McRae; and launched a luxury lifestyle brand. But beneath those headline-makers, he simply lived his life and experienced the experiences that laid the foundations for *Something to Give Each Other*. “There’s 10 stories, 10 moments,” he says of the album, which took around two and a half years to complete. Between COVID and filming the TV series *The Idol*, he was granted a “luxury of time” he’d never had before. “It ended up serving the album really well because it gave me time to see which songs stuck around.” “I\'ve felt very hopeful and joyous and connected, but there’s a lot of vulnerability as well,” Sivan says. There’s love, sex, and heartbreak, the thrill of reemerging feelings, fleeting yet vital moments of intimacy and communication. There’s a sweaty club moment (“Rush”), balmy dance pop (“Got Me Started”—which samples Bag Raiders’ definitive 2008 hit “Shooting Stars”), gentle confessionals (“Can’t Go Back, Baby”) and sensual house (“Silly”). And it’s all told through the lens of welcome self-discovery and unapologetic, undiluted queerness. Here, he talks through the stories of each song on *Something to Give Each Other*. **“Rush”** “In the moments between Melbourne lockdowns when we were able to go out, I had these nights that were so fun, they were almost emotional. There was this overwhelming joy and euphoria. I was sober and sweating and just so grateful to be with people. And grateful for music, for life, for youth and sex and connection. So I wanted to write that moment.” **“What\'s the Time Where You Are?”** “I felt pretty emotionally dead for a while after my last relationship, and my feelings didn\'t all come back in one go. There were these little sparks I started to feel, and I was so excited when I did. I was talking to this one guy and I had a little crush for the first time in ages. At one point he messaged me saying, ‘What\'s the time where you are?’ Maybe I over-romanticized, but it was so sweet. Because he could definitely google that. But I saw it for what it was, I think: It was an effort at connection and keeping the conversation going. It sparked this idea of two people separated by a great distance, both out there living their lives, having a great time, but looking for each other in music or nights out or little texts like that.” **“One of Your Girls”** “I think this is my favorite song I\'ve ever worked on. This thing kept happening where I was being approached by guys who’d previously or historically identified as straight. They were flirting with me, saying there was something in me that they were interested in. I just felt all these different things. Firstly, I was placing them on such a pedestal. I was like, why is this so hot? And also questioning myself because I’d always end up heartbroken. I think I knew I wasn’t treating myself with the respect I deserved by being the secret or the experiment. We wrote three different choruses and ended up coming to this sad robot thing, inspired by a movie I’d seen. Even that spoke to the way I’d felt: like I was expected to be there when they wanted me, then disappear when they freaked out, then be there again when they wanted. Like this emotionless object. And yet there I was time and time again. You don\'t want to rush them through the process of figuring shit out. This isn’t me making any sort of statement—I have patience for that experience. I’m just musing to myself about it.” **“In My Room” (feat. Guitarricadelafuente)** “I met Guitarricadelafuente \[Álvaro Lafuente Calvo\] and his boyfriend in Paris at a dinner, and they were so sweet. When I got back to the hotel, I started listening to his music and I was just really, really inspired. So I messaged him that we should write sometime. We wrote the song in one day. It\'s the only collaboration on the album, and I love that it\'s with a queer artist. In my head, I\'m lying on my bed, kicking my legs, daydreaming about someone like I’m a teenager. It was a really nice way to write rather than trying to make narrative: We were both just communicating our feelings.” **“Still Got It”** “It’s about a moment where I bumped into my ex-boyfriend and realized he still had all the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place. One of my favorite lyrics on the album is ‘Said hello like an old colleague.’ It was just that weird thing where you\'re like, wow, I lived with this person, I shared so much of my life with this person, and here we are greeting each other like old colleagues. It was a moment of reflection. I love collaboration and writing with people, but sometimes it\'s really nice to just do it by yourself, say exactly what you feel and worry less about the stuff I normally love worrying about, like, ‘How many syllables is it? Does it work from a pop point of view?’” **“Can’t Go Back, Baby”** “I was pretty angry, and I\'ve never really written from an angry place. I was hurt and felt betrayed. It’s a real journey throughout the song and by the end it\'s like, ‘In the morning, I wake up with the sun across my face/In the evening, there I lay with so much love to take your place.’ That\'s not love from other people, it\'s love I have for myself, being able to show up for yourself. But sonically there’s a softness, because I still have so much care for that person, that relationship. I knew I wanted this on the album, but I was dreading writing it. When I eventually did, I was like, ‘Let\'s just record this today and then I don\'t want to look at it.’” **“Got Me Started”** “It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It was one of those moments of a spark, where someone unlocks that side of you again and you\'re like, ‘Oh, I can feel.’ I love the lyric ‘Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body/Fuck it up just like this party did tonight.’ To me, it\'s just this house party: You\'ve met someone and for whatever reason you just can’t keep your hands off each other—and how exciting it is when that happens.” **“Silly”** “We had sexiness on the album in a few different ways, but one thing we didn\'t have was *icy, cool* sexy—something that just really simmers. I was surprised by the lyrics that came. It ended up being about how someone can get you back into your feelings for them in two seconds. It almost touches on the story of ‘Still Got It.’ I\'ve sung in falsetto as a layer a lot throughout my music, but never as a lead vocal. Here, we started off with that falsetto as a layer, and I was going to track under it, but we left it alone up there. So I essentially got to duet with myself, which was so cool.” **“Honey”** “‘Honey’ started in Melbourne with \[producer\] Styalz Fuego and the Serenity Prayer. My dad taught it to me when I was a kid. One of the lines is something like ‘Give me the courage to accept things I cannot change.’ I love the idea of having these really strong feelings for someone and not knowing how to express them, and almost saying a prayer—even though I\'m very irreligious. ‘Give me the courage to say all these things I feel about you.’ It just felt very joyous, like the confetti moment at the show.” **“How to Stay With You”** “It’s really cruisy and mellow, it’s got saxophone on it. It’s about someone I met who ended up leaving, and I was a bit lost on how to stay with them, because I wanted to, but it didn’t seem possible. There was something interesting to me about putting it at the end. Throughout all the experiences and people on the album, I still have this longing and desire to find a long-term relationship. When it fades out in the outro, the last lyrics on the album are these little background vocals: ‘Starting again when I got all I wanted/Starting to feel a little bit despondent.’ I still haven\'t found the thing I\'m looking for. It doesn\'t negate these prior experiences and how beautiful they are, but I\'m still looking. I thought it was a very real way to end it. I\'m on this journey, I’m really happy and I\'m enjoying every second of it, I\'m so grateful for all the connections, and I\'m curious to see what happens next. But I don’t know what that is yet.”

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

Bebe Rexha has always been the kind of dextrous, shape-shifting pop singer who can hold her own in a room with music’s biggest talents. Her catalog is littered with A-list collaborations (Nicki Minaj, Florida Georgia Line, Travis Barker, Doja Cat, Rick Ross, and many others), and yet Rexha, with an immensely powerful voice that perfectly cracks and effortlessly soars, can’t help but steal the spotlight. It’s a wonder, then, that she isn’t yet a bigger star. Can’t people see that she’s doing the heavy lifting? On her third studio album *Bebe*, she ups the ante, teaming up with David Guetta, Snoop Dogg, and Dolly Parton; Rexha steps right up and meets them at eye level. Sliding between groovy stoner anthems, twangy folk songs, and glossy synth-pop, she somehow manages to turn them all into supporting characters. (Well, *most* of them: The Dolly duet “Seasons,” inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 song “Landslide,” feels like a genuinely even pairing, which should tell you something about just how strong a singer Rexha really is.) The rest of the album is a one-woman show in which she skillfully maneuvers between pummeling club pop and strummy pop-rock balladry. “Born Again,” a clear highlight, is proof enough that she’s among the best—and most underrated—vocalists of her generation.