Piccadilly Records' Top 100 Albums of 2020

ALL MUSIC - (* * * *) "It takes skills to make a record this smooth and soft without it ever being boring or sounding trite. Noir has those skills and AM Jazz is another example of his abilities as a songwriter, performer, and above all, maker of fine recordings."  MOJO - (* * * *) "While relatively straitlaced on hooky earworms Good Mood and Hexagons, it vanishes into a netherworld of hypnotic minimalism amid Tol Circle's warped Mantovani exotica and the title-track's spaced-out disco frug." UNCUT - (* * * *) "Some of his most seductive melodies to date." Q - (* * * *) "A lovely, soothing aural balm."

Since her days fronting Moloko beginning in the mid-’90s, Róisín Murphy has been dancing around the edges of the club, and occasionally—for instance, on the 2012 single “Simulation” or 2015’s “Jealousy”—she has waded into the thick of the dance floor. But on *Róisín Machine*, the Irish singer-songwriter declares her unconditional love for the discotheque. Working with her longtime collaborator DJ Parrot—a Sheffield producer who once recorded primitive house music alongside Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk in the duo Sweet Exorcist—she summons a sound that is both classic and expansive, swirling together diverse styles and eras into an enveloping embrace of a groove. “We Got Together” invokes 1988’s Second Summer of Love in its bluesy, raving-in-a-muddy-field stomp; “Shellfish Mademoiselle” sneaks a squirrelly acid bassline under cover of Hammond-kissed R&B; “Kingdom of Ends” is part Pink Floyd, part “French Kiss.” The crisply stepping funk of “Incapable”—a dead ringer for classic Matthew Herbert, another of her onetime collaborators—is as timeless as house music gets. So are the pumping “Simulation” and “Jealousy,” which bookend the album, and which haven’t aged a day since they first burned up nightclubs as white-label 12-inches.

The Orielles release their brand new album 'Disco Volador' via Heavenly Recordings on February 28th, 2020. The first pressing is translucent orange vinyl edition with a groovy green splodge is now available & standard CD. All vinyl comes with a download card and code. We also have a limited number of signed editions of this first pressing as well as CDs available. 'Disco Volador' sees the 4-piece push their sonic horizon to its outer limits as astral travellers, hitching a ride on the melodic skyway to evade the space-time continuum through a sharp collection of progressive strato-pop symphonies. Voyaging through cinematic samba, 70s disco, deep funk boogies, danceable grooves and even tripping on 90s acid house, Disco Volador is set to propel The Orielles spinning into a higher zero-gravity orbit. Written and recorded in just 12 months, it captures the warp-speed momentum of their post-Silver Dollar Moment debut album success; an unforgettable summer touring, playing festivals like Green Man and bluedot, Disco Volador’s library catalogue vibes stem from a band lapping up and widening their pool of musical discovery whether nodding to Italian film score maestros Sandro Brugnolini and Piero Umiliani, or the Middle Eastern tones of Khruangbin and Altin Gün. The album features the bands new single ‘Come Down On Jupiter’ and follows the critically acclaimed debut ‘Silver Dollar Moment.’

There aren’t many bands who undergo drastic sonic transformations *before* they’ve released their debut album. But Working Men’s Club’s music reflects the restless, push-it-forward energy of their leader Sydney Minsky-Sargeant. Originally a trio dealing in jerky New Wave, the band’s direction was diverted when Minsky-Sargeant took charge of the creative reins during the making of this self-titled debut. “I wanted to make a dance record, but I didn’t want to pigeonhole it as just being a dance record,” Minsky-Sargeant tells Apple Music. The frontman’s knack for snarling melodies remains, now beefed up with a sound that harks back to the dance floors of late-’80s Manchester, a heady mix of pulsing beats, acid house pianos, and bold synths. “I started off writing music on my own, then it became more collaborative, then back to being solo again,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “I’m grateful that I was given a chance to do it on my own, because that was always the route it was going.” Here, Minsky-Sargeant makes sense of the record, track by track. **Valleys** “The way that it starts very barren, selectively adding overt components and instrumentation, I thought it was a good buildup to the start of the record and a good opening track. It\'s about where I\'m from and how isolating it can feel to be in a small town in the North of England sometimes. It\'s quite a secluded, claustrophobic place sometimes. But I think everyone can relate to that in some way, wherever you live.” **A.A.A.A.** “It’s a funny tune. It blew me away how Ross Orton \[producer\] interpreted it and then how he made it. It was just a bass guitar and the same drumbeat, but with more brutal and normal-sounding drums. All the elements were there, but we chose to interpret it more electronically. Ross was using the synths to make drum sounds, and then we basically made that tune all on one synthesizer, which was really cool, and showed how minimal it could be.” **John Cooper Clarke** “I think John Cooper Clarke is a Northern icon. One of the last survivors of that era, going back into that period of time where he lived with Nico and lived in Hebden Bridge, which is down the road from me. He\'s just a proper punk, and one of the last remaining punks there is. Now Andrew Weatherall\'s dead, and people like that have fallen, he\'s still going. He just does it how he wants to do it, and I think that\'s quite admirable, as a creative.” **White Rooms and People** “It’s the poppiest, most indie-sounding tune on the record. It\'s hooky and captures that era of what we were doing when we started—but it\'s reinterpreted and much glossier. It feels like an older song to me. We did go back and reimagine it and put electronic drums on it, which I think really beefed it up and made it fit with the record.” **Outside** “This was an old demo of mine and we just made it sound better. It was the first tune that we did because we didn\'t know how to tackle it. We sped it up and just tried to really produce it, and it worked. It\'s quite a joyous tune, when the rest of the album is quite dark.” **Be My Guest** “I feel like there\'s two sides to this record and this is the first tune on the B-side. It’s the side of the record where it becomes more aggressive in stages. And this, I guess, is the most kind of nasty, brutal tune that there is on the record. It\'s all about the guitars for me, because I was really set on making sure that, especially that bit after the chorus where it goes into that big drop into those really high-pitched guitars, it just had to really carry.” **Tomorrow** “It\'s one of the last tunes I wrote before recording. It’s quite repetitive, maybe obnoxiously repetitive. I think when you\'re making that sort of repetitive music, it has to build throughout the backing. I guess it’s quite a polished, nice song in regard to the rest of the album. It’s more on the poppier side of things.” **Cook a Coffee** “We had to come back to this because the initial recording we did was really bare. I\'m pretty sure even the guitars might have been out of tune or something, so we went back and redid all the guitars, and put more synths on. We had to revisit it and beef it up. But we definitely got there in the end. Those synths at the end make it more anthemic and pulled it all together.” **Teeth** “When we put ‘Teeth’ out as a single, there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion over which mix would go out. Me and Ross had worked quite closely on this tune together, and for me and him, the wrong mix went out. So as soon as we got in the studio, it was like, ‘We\'ve got to change that mix for the record.’ And we did. It just drives it a lot more. It makes it a lot more cinematic than just guitars on top of synths. When we do stuff it\'s all so finely tuned, everything has its own place.” **Angel** “We play this second to last when we play it live, but in terms of the album, it had to be the last tune. I think it\'s just quite a pompous way to end it, isn\'t it? It\'s quite ridiculous. Whenever you read books about records and how they were done, it always seems that the last song\'s the last song that they recorded. And it felt like during the process of recording the album, we were putting it back–we knew it was maybe going to be a bit harder to capture. But it was actually fine. It was a nice way to end the recording process.”

Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”

It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever wanted to get back in touch with the things that bring meaning to their lives after touring extensively in support of 2018’s full-length debut *Hope Downs*. The Melbourne five-piece has always approached their music with a keen sense of geography. On *Hope Downs*, singer/songwriter/guitarist Joe White and singer/songwriter/guitarists Fran Keaney and Tom Russo, who split songwriting duties, told stories about characters in distress in settings both familiar and remote—from the beautiful stretches of the Aeolian Islands in Sicily to the vast iron ore mines in Western Australia. On their second studio LP, *Sideways to New Italy*, they\'re also looking within themselves to connect with their feelings and emotions. “We went into the interior geography rather than writing about the outside,” says Russo. “It took us back to our formative places, and the places that we grew up and the places that we never guessed that we had idealized from a distance.” It also helped them recapture the excitement of being in a band together. “We wanted to carry through the positivity we always had when we started this band before we started touring,” says Keaney. “All together in the same room, not writing the songs until we\'ve actually had a chance to rip them apart and take them in different directions.” Here, Keaney, Russo, and White walk us through the album track by track. **The Second of the First** Fran Keaney: “That was one of the earlier ones that we wrote or started writing. And it informed the path that we would take for the rest of the album, which is that we found something that we were really excited about. I had a few chords for it and a rough idea for a song, and I brought it to the band, but then we ended up just taking it down a different path and left that song for dead. We had this jam that we were really excited about, but that\'s all it was. It was just two chords, and we just stuck on it, you know, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then just recorded it on an iPhone and then sat with it for a while and tried to work out what that new song might be.” Tom Russo: “We were going back to our roots of bringing in whoever is at hand to help do little bits and pieces on the album. And Joe\'s girlfriend, and one of our best friends, we got him to come in and do a spoken-word part. And that\'s not to our original spirit where we used to do that without first recording through it, just throwing the kitchen sink at it.” **Falling Thunder** Russo: “It’s about the constants of change, when you find yourself the next year in the same season. It’s written in that point where fall turns into winter. And I find that to be a really reflective time. Everyone else was on holiday in Europe, taking some time off. And I was just riding around in the tour van for a few days throughout Europe with our tour manager and our tech, which was a great experience, getting ferried around like that. I was in the van on my own, and I remember chewing the bones of this song, on my computer, in the back of a tour van watching Germany and the Midlands going by. When we eventually took it back to the band, we really pulled it apart and ended up surgically connecting two different songs.” Keaney: “Normally when we would do an operation like that, the body ends up rejecting the prosthetic, but this one was a complete success. We try to relate to our handsome monsters, our beautiful monsters. There’s a lot of—I know the metaphor is getting a bit weird—limbs on the cutting room floor. We can be brutal now. We\'re all very much open to collaborating, and while we do have a personal connection to ideas that we put in, everybody accepts that everything\'s up for grabs and everything\'s up to be moved around. So I think we\'ve got better at that over time. So yeah, there\'s a lot of carnage.” **She’s There** Joe White: “‘She\'s There\' was definitely one of those songs that just fell out of my hands really quickly on the guitar. I just knocked up a really quick demo on my computer at home. We went into pre-production with our producer Burke \[Reid\], who quickly informed us that whatever I created that day was a bit too confusing and a bit too odd. I think we were trying to push some boundaries of what\'s cool and what\'s normal and what\'s adventurous, so I guess an attitude we tried to take into this record was to not try to use the same verse-chorus-verse song structures that we\'ve used before. We hadn\'t really considered that idea of the listener, just going in it as this cool, weird pop song that can just jump around all different parts and do whatever it wants. Turns out maybe that isn\'t the case, but in the end, it informed what we have now. I feel like I used my brain more than I ever used it before, and I\'d go to sleep thinking about songs and then wake up in the morning with those songs in my head.” **Beautiful Steven** Russo: “I was thinking about the places that shaped me and shaped us. It\'s loosely set at the small, pretty tough Catholic boys\' school that Fran, Joe \[Russo, RBCF bassist\], and I went to. It would have been better to be in a co-ed school with boys and girls; there\'s something strange about getting a whole bunch of teenage boys together in like a concrete box. It\'s a bit of an unrequited love song from a teenage boy to their best friend.” **The Only One** White: “It started on my phone trying to make a synth-pop banger. I pulled the chords out of that and started playing it on the guitar. And then it turned into this kind of sad country song. So it was living in these two worlds. I think I went to bed one night while we were recording, watching *Stop Making Sense*, that live Talking Heads video-like concert. I liked the way that they introduced the elements, just one by one, and how they still managed to get so much groove, so much working for the song with so few elements. I had a little minor epiphany and thought, ‘Oh, all right. Maybe that is how we approach this song.’” Keaney: “I remember the very start and the very end of recording it. It was late at night and Marcel \[Tussie, RBCF drummer\] was probably pretty exhausted and he had his top off. So he was just walking around in his shorts, like he’s a man on a mission. He was losing his mind a bit. He was in his room, almost like he was boxed in a zoo, and Burke was playing around with all these drum sounds. I think he ended up using a plastic paint tub for one of the toms.” **Cars in Space** Keaney: “It\'s set at the time of the breakup between two people, and all that time before the breakup, when there are all the swirling thoughts and meandering words that happened at that time. When we were recording it, Burke said that he can see the rising and falling of the song, which is what happens in the verses. When it shifts between the chords and the hi-hats come up and the electric guitars move in and out, it\'s sort of the waves of \'Am I going to say it now? Is she going to say it now?\' For a long time, we tried to preserve the idea that it would be in two parts, that it would be \'Cars in Space\' and \'Cars in Space II.\' The first had another chorus on it, but then once you got to II—which is now the outro of the song—it just didn\'t make sense. You\'re on this journey, and it feels like watching a Hollywood movie and then having another 45 minutes stuck on the end. That was sort of the idea why we couldn\'t really keep it as a song in two parts, so we ended up abandoning that idea.” **Cameo** Keaney: “The setting of the song was inspired by a place in the city of Darwin. We played at the Darwin Festival, and then there was this after-party at the park just next to it. It was a really cool scene. It sort of felt like we were in *Priscilla, Queen of the Desert*. There were all these different types of people, all congregated in Darwin. There\'s someone that I liked there, and then nothing happened. As I walked back home, I let my mind go down the alternative path of just being with that person, reaching through to eternity with that person. This is an absurd sort of an idea, a bit like letting your mind wander.” **Not Tonight** Keaney: “My auntie, a few years ago, was talking about how she hated the song ‘Miss You’ by The Rolling Stones. Because it reminded her of when she was a kid. Her older brother, my uncle, would start to get ready to go out to parties or going out on a Saturday night rather than staying at home and watching TV and being in a warm house. He would be in the next room listening to ‘Miss You’ while he was putting on some cheap fragrance and putting on his cowboy shirt, getting ready to go out and drink booze and maybe get into a fight, that sort of thing. It always made her nervous and worried. And I could see that so vividly in my head. I thought that that would be a nice place to set a song.” Russo: “It started out as a country punk song. We tried to do surgery because it didn\'t quite sit right. There was a mix between both, and some parts which were almost like \'90s radio rock. And that didn\'t sound like us—it was too powerful. It had a bit of an identity crisis for a long time. Joe knocked the cowbell against it to give it that weird country disco swing. And that was the last thing, so we were all dancing around like, \'This is the end of the album,\' like a celebratory cowbell. It\'s my first cowbell recording experience, and possibly my last. I\'ve heard about this rule that you\'re only allowed to record a cowbell once in your life. So we\'ve used up that ticket already. I think it\'s the right song to use it on.” **Sunglasses at the Wedding** Keaney: “I did this thing that Mick Jones from The Clash does. Apparently, he writes the lyrics first, and then he just looks at the words and tries to find melody, tries to find the song in the words. There\'s all those really good soul songs about weddings and marriage. And I really like the tug of those, like \[*singing*\] \'Today I meet the boy I\'m going to marry\' and \'Going to the chapel, I\'m going to get married.\' I like those songs that are set at a wedding or near a wedding; it\'s such a momentous day. So I wanted to somehow try and carry that across. It\'s a bit dreamlike.” White: “The last thing we added to the song was that really sort of bubbly, nasally electric guitar that washes over the whole thing that, again, puts it back into that dream world. So it does make it feel like it\'s got a breath, a change of pace on the album, that also takes you into a different headspace.” **The Cool Change** Russo: “It\'s another one that\'s a bit of a mix of fact and fiction. It\'s someone remembering someone who comes in and out of their lives. In places like Australia, there\'s always someone whose ego kind of outgrows their town, and they go to other places to be bigger than they can be there. So they might go to LA or New York or London to be a star in one of the fields. It\'s about a person like that, but then they keep coming back to their old relationship and they\'re never going to love anyone else more than they love themselves. It\'s based on an amalgamation of a few people; I feel everyone knows someone like that. Musically, it was like a weird, folky little number. We didn\'t really know what to do with it; it was a bit countryish and it didn\'t really fit in our world. We looked at amping it up a bit, making it a bit faster, and then it suddenly turned into this sleazy LA country-rock number. But a good kind of sleazy, like riding a motorbike down the freeway.” White: “The backwards guitar helps fight that element. I just took my lead guitar track and chopped it up and reversed some of it and stuck it back in certain spots. That immediately just takes it to that *Sweetheart of the Rodeo* \[The Byrds’ 1968 album\] psych-folk kind of thing. But I\'ll also say that drumbeat is not bad at all. It lives between those worlds.”

On their second record, Sideways to New Italy, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have turned their gaze inward, to their individual pasts and the places that inform them. From a town in regional Australia that serves as a living relic to how immigrants brought a sense of home to an alien place, to the familiar Mediterranean statues that dot the front lawns of the Melbourne suburbs where the band members live, the inspiration for the record came from the attempts people make at crafting utopia in their backyard (while knowing there is no such thing as a clean slate). In searching for something to hold onto in the turbulence, the guitar-pop five-piece has channelled their own sense of dislocation into an album that serves as a totem of home to take with them to stages all over the world.

After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”

A few years before the release of *Songs of an Unknown Tongue*, Zara McFarlane travelled to her ancestral home of Jamaica. It was a research trip for a musical she was writing about an old Jamaican legend: The White Witch of Rose Hall—a twisted love story about a white woman who learns obeah, kills her lovers and enslaved peoples before eventually being killed by an enslaved labourer. This experience—travelling the country, conducting field research and interviews—sowed the seeds for this, her extraordinary fourth album. “It’s allegory of my personal journey exploring how the effects of colonialism resonates within my life today being Black and British,’’ Zara—who grew up in Dagenham, east London— tells Apple Music over the phone. Across the album’s 10 tracks we journey through semi-imagined histories spanning pre-colonialism, through enslavement and (the official) emancipation, to the present afterlife of slavery. It\'s not a linear timeline. McFarlane performs a kind of historical wake work here: Tending to unacknowledged histories, the living and the dead, the spirit and material worlds. “The story of the White Witch is set on the cusp of emancipation around 1834,” she says. “There were uprisings leading up to that moment, and I wanted to know what was happening musically at that time and to draw from those traditions. Most people think about ska as the beginning of Jamaican music, but there’s so much more, especially on the folk side.” Sonically, she encountered living folk traditions that largely came via enslaved peoples, and later indentured labourers from Africa and Asia. These rhythms—including Bruckins, Kumina, Ettu and many others—formed the basis of the album. “I wanted to make an album that was led by rhythm, percussion and vocals,” she says. She worked with celebrated producers and instrumentalists, Kwake Bass and Wu Lu to explore electronic expressions of these folk forms. It is an album of self-affirmation and witnessing, using music as a site for retrieving and pushing back on colonial histories. Here’s Zara’s track-by-track guide. **Everything is Connected** “This track was inspired by the cotton tree—it\'s vast and can grow ridiculously high. Mythically, it’s a place that holds the spirit of death through the creatures that live in it. Often these traditions are held by these trees in communion between sets of spirits. You hear those voices in that song, with the whispers I sing. These are the whispers of history and of those ancestors. This whole album takes you on a journey, from freedom and enslavement to emancipation. This part of the album is saying that everything is connected: it\'s exploring the idea of the cycle of life, the fact that life and death exist together in the same space.” **Black Treasure** “’Black Treasure’ is us: Black people. But on a wider level, it\'s speaking to everyone. To the essence of who you are. I primarily wanted it to be an anthem for Black people to feel empowered by. It’s also a reflection on the fact that the connotation of Black is always negative in the British language and in the media. I’m saying that Black is my history, my culture, my skin, my soul, my thoughts, my music, my words. All of it is treasure. Museums are filled with Black treasures—despite the fact that we’re called primitive and barbaric, so I\'m exploring ideas of voyage, treasure hunting and the British Empire. I’m making comment on the taking that’s been done. The way that I like to write is that I like to have two parallel things happening at the same time—so this track could be about not being taken seriously in a relationship, not being treated as treasure. From the angle I’m writing from, I’m saying that I’m Black treasure and I don’t need you to tell me that. It\'s also speaking specifically to Black women, as we are not always celebrated. We are treasure.” **My Story** “I had this vision of seeing myself walking down the street. I met a book that told me it had lost its pages, and asked me to help it find them, so I did. I realised it was my story. It represents Black history: the seeking that I have done and want to continue to do to understand what happened, and to better understand my identity. It\'s about recognising and acknowledging and owning the past: I don\'t think that happens here in this country. When I was researching in Jamaica I found that the histories were spoken about in a different way—people were much more vocal and open about it. It\'s their reality and they live it. It was interesting to meet those people and ask myself how I might do that in the same way. In the UK we don’t recognise Britain’s association with slavery. I think about it sheepishly: can I even talk about it? So, to me the song is about finding a way to own and acknowledge those histories and move forward with it. Musically, it\'s based on the revivalist tradition, which is related to Chrisitianity and has a religious context to it. I like the upbeat side to it: with church music you’re praising and uplifting, so it\'s got a driving rhythm to it.” **Broken Water** “I made a conscious decision that I wanted the melody to feel disjointed. I heard the tracks as disjointed sentences with a kind of call and response. The sentences are constructed across two voices: You can’t get the full message without the two voices together. I wanted an element of dissonance—that feeling and that mood. It\'s about that sense of displacement after travelling across the waters, and the loss that people went through. This track has a nyabinghi rhythm, there’s a religious connotation here, too. Christianity was a tool for enslavement—enslaved people weren’t allowed to practice their traditions and Christianity was taught to hold them down. The track is also fragmented lyrically—and that speaks to the idea of languages being broken down and lost.” **Saltwater** “This is one of the ballads on the album—at this point in the story, we’re in enslavement. I use the imagery of being abandoned and stranded on an island. I chose to talk about these feelings in the context of a relationship. Saltwater is reference to the ocean tears from the frustration of feeling trapped. With the instrumentation, melodically, the synth sound that you hear is directly related to the Bruckins party rhythm. I love what Kwake did with this version: it\'s so open and spacious, it feels like water. There is a sense of loss because you don’t have the driving force of the rhythm to hold you down, so there’s that sense being stuck out in the middle of nowhere and feeling alone, either by yourself or in the context of the relationship.” **Run of Your Life** “Here we’re escaping from slavery—it’s the thing that’s going to get you to freedom in order to have a life. It\'s a mantra to keep pushing forward through adversity in general. I grew up in a single parent household, and learnt from the women around me to keep pushing forwards. This track is played on a drum machine. Kwake and Wulu recorded the percussion live and created a MIDI imprint and then used purely electronic sounds. It\'s basically about an escape to freedom.” **State of Mind** “This is based on the Kumina rhythm and tradition. Kumina was developed as neo-traditional African practice among freed peoples, and the indentured labourers who came to Jamaica after emancipation. The rhythm has a hypnotic trance like effect, and can cause people to do superhuman feats, like walking up trees. I love the idea of the hypnotic trance, and the idea of the heartbeat. For me, this song is about the power of the rhythm and how it can have an effect on one’s state of mind. I wanted to use it as a channeling force for healing and guidance. For Kwake, it was also a homage to ‘90s dance as well, he liked the beat and the pulse of that sound—that whole scene was almost spiritual for some people! The drums in Kumina celebrations are said to be particularly important because of the control they have over the spirit. That was partly how I wanted to use this as well. I wanted to draw from that in a positive way.” **Native Nomad** “At this point, we’ve come out of ‘Run of Your Life\', where you’ve been escaping to freedom, into ‘State of Mind’ where you’re now on the other side and you’re asking where you go and what to do—you need to channel and get into a process of healing and guidance to be able to move forwards. ‘Native Nomad’ is about being in this new place and space and trying to fit in and understand what freedom is—you’re asking yourself how life then continues. Here, I’m literally writing about my experience of not fitting in as an English person, and not fitting in as a Jamaican person. It\'s about diaspora and how that feeling of displacement lingers across generations: This affinity with both worlds, and a yearning to go back to a homeland that was never our homeland. But it\'s ultimately about accepting who you are.” **Roots of Freedom** “This track takes us back to the idea of the tree again. This time it\'s about sowing seeds, and we are the seeds. We’ve accepted where we are now \[at this point in the story\]—we’re free. In being free we have the chance to improve the future for others. It\'s the idea of moving forward and the importance of a sense of unity for people: Black people, but also people throughout the world. It\'s about sowing the seeds for positive change. We own our future and we aren\'t limited. In leaning on history, we have the power to move better to move our forwards with strength.” **Future Echoes** “This track is about emancipation. We’re free. ‘Roots of Freedom’ is channeling freedom and getting the strength to move forward. ‘Future Echoes’ is also based on the Bruckins party tradition. It\'s about the future. What happens next. How we move forward. It\'s also about your relationship with yourself, and owing everything that has happened. Past hurts, future dreams, and directing the narrative of our own stories. It points to the fact that Black histories have always been told incorrectly: I’ve had to relearn my history. This track is about owning my story. I don’t need someone else to tell me my story: I’ve come through all of this. My history, my narrative, \[so now it\'s about\] my future for myself. It\'s a celebration of self-acceptance and rewriting the narrative. We realised that we’re not alone, and never have been.”

Brownswood are delighted to present Zara McFarlane’s, Songs of an Unknown Tongue a masterful work that underlines her continuous growth as an artist. Zara’s fourth studio album pushes the boundaries of jazz adjacent music via an exploration into the folk and spiritual traditions of her ancestral motherland, Jamaica. The album is a rumination on the piecing together of black heritage, where painful and proud histories are uncovered and connected to the present. Partnering with cult South London based producers Kwake Bass and Wu-lu, Zara has created a futuristic sound palate, electronically recreating the pulsing, hypnotic rhythms Kumina and Nyabinghi – and the music played at African rooted rituals like the emancipation celebration Bruckins Party, and the lively death rites of Dinki Minki and Gerreh. These richly patterned electronic rhythms are balanced throughout by McFarlane’s distinctive, clear vocal tones, and vivid song writing. Zara’s critically acclaimed third studio album ‘Arise’ met with universal critical praise, and was supported by an impressive live tour performing at festivals such as Love Supreme, Field Day and SXSW. Zara is the winner of multiple awards including a Mobo, 2 Jazz FM Vocalist of the Year Award (2018 & 2015), an Urban Music Award, and Session of the Year at Worldwide Awards. Drawing respect from a wide range of artists, Zara has collaborated with Gregory Porter, Shabaka Hutchings, Moses Boyd and Louie Vega. These new sonic explorations signal an exciting direction of travel for this innovative founding member of the UK’s vibrant homegrown jazz scene.

From thrilling affairs that dissolve into sweaty desperation (Night Chancers) to the absurd bloggers, fruitlessly clinging to the fag ends of the fashion set (Sleep People), via soiled real life (Slum Lord) social media – enabled stalkers (I’m not Your Dog) and new day, sleep – deprived optimism (Daylight), the record’s finely drawn vignettes, are all based on the corners of world Dury has visited. Baxter says “Night Chancers is about being caught out in your attempt at being free”, it’s about someone leaving a hotel room at three in the morning. You’re in a posh room with big Roman taps and all that, but after they go suddenly all you can hear is the taps dripping, and all you can see the debris of the night is around you. Then suddenly a massive party erupts, in the room next door. This happened to me and all I Could hear was the night chancer, the hotel ravers”.

Over the last decade, Khruangbin (pronounced “krung-bin”) has mastered the art of setting a mood, of creating atmosphere. But on *Mordechai*, follow-up to their 2018 breakthrough *Con Todo El Mundo*, the Houston trio makes space in their globe-spinning psych-funk for something that’s been largely missing until now: vocals. The result is their most direct work to date. From the playground disco of “Time (You and I)” to the Latin rhythms of “Pelota”—inspired by a Japanese film, but sung in Spanish—to the balmy reassurances of “If There Is No Question,” much of *Mordechai* has the immediacy of an especially adventurous pop record. Even moments of hallucinogenic expanse (“One to Remember”) or haze (“First Class”) benefit from the added presence of a human voice. “Never enough paper, never enough letters,” they sing from inside a shower of West African guitar notes on “So We Won’t Forget,” the album’s high point. “You don’t have to be silent.”

Released on Juneteenth 2020, the third album by the enigmatic-slash-anonymous band Sault is an unapologetic dive into Black identity. Tapping into ’90s-style R&B (“Sorry Ain’t Enough”), West African funk (“Bow”), early ’70s soul (“Miracles”), churchy chants (“Out the Lies”), and slam-poetic interludes (“Us”), the flow here is more mixtape or DJ set than album, a compendium of the culture rather than a distillation of it. What’s remarkable is how effortless they make revolution sound.

Proceeds will be going to charitable funds

Matthew Halsall unveils new band and announces ‘Salute to the Sun’ his new album on Gondwana Records Composer, trumpeter, producer, DJ and founder of Gondwana Records, Matthew Halsall has always worn many hats. But at the heart of everything that he does Halsall is first and foremost an artist and a musician. A trumpeter whose unflashy, soulful playing radiates a thoughtful beauty and a composer and band-leader who has created his own rich sound world. A sound that draws on the heritage of British jazz, the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, as well as world music and electronica influences, and even modern art and architecture, to create something uniquely his own. A music that is rooted in Northern England but draws on global inspirations. Salute to the Sun is his first album as a leader since Into Forever (2015) and marks the debut of his new band. A hand-picked ensemble featuring some of Manchester’s finest young musicians: Matt Cliffe flute & saxophone, Maddie Herbert harp, Liviu Gheorghe piano, Alan Taylor drums and Jack McCarthy percussion as well as long-time Halsall collaborator, bassist, Gavin Barras who has been at the heart of Halsall’s bands for over a decade. For Matthew it was important to have a band based locally and able, pre-Covid, to meet and play each week, and who also performed a sold-out monthly basement session at Yes in Manchester. The album draws energy from these sessions and inspiration from themes and ideas that have inspired Halsall through the years (on albums such as Oneness, Fletcher Moss Park and When the World Was One) ideas of ecology, the environment and harmony with nature. “I feel Salute to the Sun is a positive earthy album. I wanted to create something playful but also quite primitive, earthy and organic that connected to the sounds in nature. I was listening to lush ambient field recordings of tropical environments such as jungles and rainforests and found myself drawn to percussive atmospheric sounds which replicated what I was hearing (bells / shakers / chimes / rain sticks) and I started to experiment with more wooden percussive instruments such as kalimba and marimba”. Salute to the Sun features lush wholly improvised tunes inspired by ambient rainforest and jungle field recordings, deeply soulful tunes built around hypnotic harp and kalimba patterns, deep Strata-East inspired spiritual jazz grooves and some of Halsall’s most beautiful playing and inspiring healing melodies yet recorded. The album was recorded at the band’s weekly sessions, using Halsall’s own recording set-up, giving the recordings a relaxed vibe and unforced energy that really lets the music breath. The album is also very much a family affair as Halsall’s brother Daniel Halsall, artistic director of Gondwana Records, was an important presence at the sessions and co-produced the album. It is also his memorable artwork that adorns the cover of Salute to the Sun, an album beautifully designed by legendary designer Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic, who also created the covers for the recent archival releases Oneness, Sending My Love and Colour Yes and is one of Halsall’s favourite designers. Together Daniel Halsall and Ian Anderson have designed all of Matthew’s seven albums to date, so it felt extra-special to bring them together for, Salute to the Sun, an album that Halsall was determined to present in the very best way possible. The album was mixed with another long-time collaborator, George Atkins at 80 Hertz in Manchester, who works tirelessly with Halsall to perfect the sound and was mastered by noted engineer Peter Beckmann who brings an added depth to the sound specially around the bass notes as well as Halsall’s trumpet. The magnificent double vinyl was cut as a Half Speed master by Barry Grint at Alchemy Mastering for the best possible analogue experience. The result is arguably Halsall’s most beautiful and complete recording to date, playful, charming and imbued with the warmth of the sun and the energy of life. All prices shown are “NET of VAT” (Value Added Tax). VAT will be calculated and added at the checkout. You will be charged the appropriate rate which will vary depending on the country. This release was uploaded at 24 bit / 88.2 kHz and available in FLAC, WAV, AIFF or MP3 and available in FLAC, WAV, AIFF or MP3.

Time and how we spend it has long interested Ian MacKaye. He screamed about its passage in Minor Threat (“Why is everybody/In such a fucking rush?”), and one of Fugazi’s first songs mused on his anxiousness in starting a new band (“My time is water down a drain”). With Coriky, he is a family man with nothing to prove. The band—MacKaye on guitar and vocals, his wife (and partner in The Evens) Amy Farina on drums and vocals, and ex-Fugazi, current Messthetics bassist Joe Lally on bass)—has existed and played since 2015 but is only releasing a record now, so they sound like a veteran trio rather than newbies. The harmonies resonate like a family band, which it is. MacKaye’s guitar is simple and smart, minimalist in the way of a player who wants to convey an idea and no more; Lally is supple and subtle. Farina is rolling and smart, her solo vocals reflective of her ’90s act The Warmers. The single “Clean Kill” reflects on those who make drone strikes; “Too Many Husbands” reflects on the strictures of childhood education. MacKaye’s Dischord label has always positioned itself as a folk label—the chronicle of a group of people, mostly born in the 1960s, over time. This is the most recent iteration: adult rock for savvy adults.

Coriky is a band from Washington, D.C. Amy Farina plays drums. Joe Lally plays bass. Ian MacKaye plays guitar. All sing. Formed in 2015, Coriky did not play their first show until 2018. They have recorded one album. They hope to tour.

As the 2020 lockdown commenced in Britain, Tim Burgess found an effective way to entertain a nation in isolation. Every night, Twitter gathered at #TimsTwitterListeningParty to play appointed albums while the artists and collaborators shared anecdotes from making those records. Apart from generating calls for the Charlatans frontman to be knighted for services to keeping spirits up, the virtual gatherings spotlighted his bottomless enthusiasm and curiosity for music. Also emerging during the COVID-19 outbreak, his fifth solo album is another vivid reflection of that personality: exuberant, adventurous pop that, even in its darkest corners, is warm-souled and melodic. Largely written by Burgess in pre-lockdown solitude in Norfolk, the album freewheels through chamber pop, drone rock, piano balladry, and psych, finding lyrical inspiration everywhere from America’s West Coast (“Lucky Creatures”) to an escalator in a London drugstore (“The Mall”). On the self-searching “Timothy,” it’s that faith in words and melody that shines through again: “When the music starts it fills my heart/Oh, those songs/Make us strong.” *I Love the New Sky* is just one more exhibit in the case for Burgess being crowned a national treasure.

Of the many meanings behind *Dark Matter*—London jazz drummer Moses Boyd’s debut LP—the most vital comes from above. “It’s astronomy,” Boyd tells Apple Music, “this invisible fabric that brings us all together. *Dark Matter* isn’t meant to be a negative record; it\'s meant to unify, to make people think.” It’s also the rare political record that doesn’t lean entirely on lyrics. As both a producer and bandleader—contributors include Poppy Ajudha, Obongjayar, Joe Armon-Jones, and Nonku Phiri—Boyd wanted to capture the gravity of our current moment in both rhythm and atmosphere, by combining elements of Bjork’s *Vespertine* and Aphex Twin’s *Selected Ambient Works* with the funk of James Brown and Tony Allen. “I wanted nuance,” he says of the album\'s many textures. “That air and earth feeling. Floaty bits that are kind of beautiful, but thickness and weight, where it\'s like, if I put this on, it\'s going to hit me right in my stomach, and it\'s going to move me. I don\'t see myself as overtly political, but I guess I am. I\'m just responding to what\'s going on around, which maybe all art should do.” Here, he walks us through his debut, track by track. **Stranger Than Fiction** “I had just come back from holiday in Sri Lanka with my family to what was going on in the UK—so from palm trees and beaches to Brexit. At the moment, in the world, you can pick a country and look at what’s happening and just be like, ‘Is this actually real?’ I wanted to mirror what\'s going on around me musically. When you listen to it, it’s like, ‘What is real, what\'s not? Is that a real drum kit? Is that not a real drum kit?’ I wanted to really blur the lines and make people have to really listen carefully to decipher what\'s real and what\'s not. That was my musical metaphor for something stranger than fiction, which is also just referencing what\'s going on in politics, in nature, in life—full stop.” **Hard Food (Interlude)** “Amongst all of this craziness, you realize there\'s so much you have in common with the person next to you. Hard food is a Jamaican term—it\'s a type of dish that might consist of boiled dumplings, boiled plantains, a really hearty meal that brings people together. I’d reached out to \[jazz composer/bassist\] Gary Crosby, one of my mentors. That recording is our conversation. He\'s grown up with his own struggles and challenges in the UK. He used this analogy of ‘I’m from West Indian background and I defy anyone, from anywhere in the world, whether they know about my food or not: If they\'re hungry they\'re going to eat it, and they\'re going to enjoy it, and it will fill them up.’ He was trying to say, ‘Look, we\'re all similar. We all want the same things in life. We\'re not different to each other. There\'s far more that unites us than separates us.’” **BTB** “‘BTB’ is one of only two tracks that are complete live takes. BTB stands for ‘blacker than black,’ another play on dark matter. Just being me, and my experience being a young black person in England—it’s a celebration of culture. I\'m from the West Indies, and I really wanted to have my sort of take on those sounds and those rhythms. So it\'s very sort of soca, calypso-driven. Also quite dark—you couldn\'t play that at carnival, but it makes sense to me, as somebody that\'s grown up in that culture, but not necessarily born in it and from it. It might be like being born in New York, but your family is from Puerto Rico. You have a very different reference in the way you visualize and present your culture.“ **Y.O.Y.O** “‘Y.O.Y.O’ stands for ‘you\'re on your own,’ and ‘yo-yo’ in the sense of just like a yo-yo goes up and down and round and round, and if you listen to the drum beat, it\'s like a cycle of a loop. But when I was making this music, I was thinking like, \'Man, all of this is going on. You really are on your own in this world.\' And I don\'t necessarily think that\'s a bad thing. When it sort of hit me, it was like, ‘That at first is very sad, but it\'s also very liberating.’ You are in control. You go as far, or as close, as you want to go. You can\'t rely on anyone but your own brain and yourself, and in that there is power. It was influenced by sad things I was seeing around me, but out of that came positivity.\" **Shades of You** “I had the bassline and the drum beat, but I felt I’d given as much as I could to the song and it wasn\'t done yet. I was thinking about vocalists, and I\'m quite good at kind of hearing somebody\'s voice on it. That was it—I heard Poppy’s voice. I just knew she\'d understand it musically. And as I sort of explained it to her, she went away and came back without any direction from me. I’ve known her for a long time, I’m a big fan of what she does, and I wanted to try and push to see if she could try something different to maybe what you\'ve heard from her, because I\'ve seen her do loads of interesting things that aren\'t recorded or aren\'t on YouTube, and I just wanted to kind of get somebody that would get it, and I think she did.” **Dancing in the Dark** “What\'s the word when someone can read your mind? Telepathic. I had this loop, and even before I exhausted my part on it, I just heard Steven Obongjayar. He’s got this kind of raspy tone that could just cut through and make it kind of feel almost like Afrobeat and punk rock. We got in a studio together, and I played it to him, and then after two seconds he was like, ‘Man, can I have this for my album?’ After about an hour arguing: ‘No, you can\'t have it.’ What was crazy was that I had not explained anything to do with *Dark Matter*, or the subjects. He just got it. I was like, ‘Man, look at that. There\'s something going on. There\'s something in the air.’” **Only You** “I was talking to Theon Cross, who\'s a tuba player, and I remember playing him some sketches. He’s like, ‘Moses, man, why do you never feature on your music?’ And I think because I write it, because I produce it, because I help mix it, because I\'m putting it together, to me, it just feels a bit weird to then have solo stuff. And also, I don\'t want it to sound like a drummer\'s record. I don\'t want it to sound like you can tell who I am on the record. But he managed to convince me. I was in the club and I had an idea: I love listening to techno and garage, but why do I never hear a drum? I know it sounds weird, a drum solo through a sound system. But I didn\'t want it to be like a typical feature—here’s the song and it\'s framed just for me. I wanted it to kind of exist in its own sort of texture, to take you on this journey. Like you could close your eyes and sort of vibe to in a club. Maybe I got it, maybe I didn\'t. But that was the vibe.” **2 Far Gone** “There\'s an album by Herbie Hancock called *Inventions & Dimensions*, and Herbie doesn\'t need help, but it just showcases him so well. It\'s got these incredible grooves, and he\'s just going at it on the piano. I was like, ‘How do I do that with my thing?’ I remember going around to \[composer/producer\] Joe \[Armon-Jones’\] house and he had recently got a little upright piano in his front room. Typically, if you go to a studio and you record piano, they\'ll have really good stereo mics, and it\'s really pristine, and everything\'s got to be good. What was great about this one was he just had this one microphone and it wasn\'t the best microphone. He just put it somewhere and did one take at this upright. People were walking around the house—it was so rough and ready. But it worked so perfectly. Even when I was trying to mix it, the rawness of it sounded so great.” **Nommos Descent** “A lot of this stuff started as me really experimenting with loops. That one wanted a vocal. On a trip to South Africa last year, I was working with a friend of mine, Nonku Phiri. She\'s from Cape Town, but she lives in Jo’burg, and her father was a musician on *Graceland*, back with Paul Simon, so she knows everybody. While I was hanging out with her, a lot of the music she was showing me, people like Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a lot of folk music, vocal music, really fit the sound I was going for when I was experimenting. So when I got back to England, I sent her the track. Even if I took all the music away—I might do that one day—and just release her vocals, it would be so beautiful. It’s referencing the Nommos people, really talking on the element, the metaphor. \'Dark matter\' is a reference for the plight of the diaspora, black people, and sort of how we\'ve come from greatness and whether you choose to do with that what you will. What was cool: We\'re never actually in the same room. I sent the music to her and she did her thing, and it just worked.” **What Now?** “It\'s easy to feel helpless, but I\'m not really like that—I’m very solution-based. There\'s no point in sort of posing the statement without thinking about a solution. \[\'What Now\'\] was a nice summary for me, because I wanted it to be very meditative. It’s that real strong mix of trying to have the acoustic and the electronic worlds coexist without battling each other. You’ve got this 808 sort of vibe going, as well as horns that sound like they\'re almost suffocated. I was messing a lot with modular synths, and I think I sampled a note on a piano and sort of held it and saturated it a bit. I remember just listening to it in my home setup, and it just put me in this real trance. I think music has that power to cleanse and make you recollect, think, hope—all that stuff. Across the whole album, I could\'ve just recorded things in a very normal, clean fashion, but it was more about how do I get that vibration? How do I get that texture, that tone? And I wanted to end the record on that sort of note: ‘Well, where are we going from here?’”

For his band’s fifth LP, Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee took inspiration from working with DJ/producer (and fellow Michigan native) Matthew Dear. “He comes from a completely different world and has a completely different way of making songs,” Ahee tells Apple Music of Dear, with whom he collaborated on the latter’s 2018 album *Bunny*. “I thought that it\'d be cool to bring other people into Protomartyr to try to get some new perspectives. I wanted to approach things like a jazz record, but one where there\'s no real lead instrument. Everything blends together and flows in a way I haven\'t heard very much in rock music—nothing stands above anything else.” Featuring contributions from Nandi Plunkett (vocals), Jemeel Moondoc (alto saxophone), Izaak Mills (bass clarinet, saxophone, flute), and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), *Ultimate Success Today* finds the Detroit post-punk outfit adding new textures and tones to some of Ahee and frontman Joe Casey’s most urgent and upsetting work to date. “I was sick, and I don\'t know if that\'s just because I\'m getting old and you get sick when you get old, but you start feeling every ache and pain that you\'ve been putting off,” Casey says. “And if there was anything that I was putting off writing, anything that I was like, ‘Oh, someday I would like to do that,’ I was definitely going to try to push it and make sure it was on this record.” Here, Ahee and Casey take us inside every song. **Day Without End** Greg Ahee: “We wanted to try something a little bit different and open with this thing that\'s just a repetitive build. We\'ve always, in my mind, been pretty good at building tension and building it to where it almost releases, but you never really get that satisfaction. The whole idea of this song is building tension and then just stopping it—I feel like that sums up what we like to do as a band.” Joe Casey: “Lyrically, it was just an easy way for me set the tone for the album. When people are describing us, ‘dark and gloomy’ is kind of a go-to, which I think is wrong. And the idea of having a summer album—or an album about light that still had some dark themes to it—was kind of my goal. This song is about a day when the sun never goes down—quite disturbing. I’ve suffered from not being able to go to sleep, and there\'s nothing more sickening than lying in a bed, being there all night trying to fall asleep, and the sun starts coming up and you hear birds chirping. The world has reset and you have not.” **Processed by the Boys** JC: “People have—for good reason—been focusing on that line ‘A foreign disease washed up on the beach.’ And I feel kind of bad to then go, ‘Yeah, but the song says all these things that you think are going to be the end of the world—a foreign disease or someone stabbing you—are not really what brings down society.’ What brings down society is corrupt governments or a police force having too much power—the boys running amok. You don\'t want the annoying guy that you knew in high school to be in charge, but as you get older, you realize that the idiots that you knew in high school are the people that are now in charge, and it becomes a very frightening, frightening thing. ‘Processed’ is also one of those words that institutions use that can mean so many different things. Processed meat. When you get any sort of paperwork, when you\'re trying to apply for unemployment or you\'re trying to apply for health insurance, you have to wait till your documents get processed. I don\'t like how dehumanizing that is.” **I Am You Now** JC: “The main thing about ‘I Am You Now’ is just how corporations will—or anybody—will take people that are marginalized or suffering, and then draw them into this world and make them feel like they\'re important by selling things to them. And how the person that is suffering will immediately be turned into a symbol for the status quo: ‘Oh, as long as somebody\'s selling something to me, I must be included.’ It’s probably one of the more raucous songs on the album. I like songs I have to fight against. Like, ‘Okay, Greg\'s guitar is fighting for space—I need to fight for my space.’ We\'re kind of doing a back-and-forth like that. Those are all some of my favorite songs.” GA: “When I write a riff, I’m always conscious that it\'s going to either be a thing where Joe needs to find a way to sing over it or we\'re going to have that back-and-forth. And pretty early on with this one, it was clear that it was going to be a back-and-forth. We were playing around with this idea of all of us fighting against each other, but also trying to make a really tight piece of music.” **The Aphorist** JC: “I don\'t think the band, on our first record \[2012’s *No Passion All Technique*\], would have thought to even consider doing something like this. Now, I feel confident enough, after five albums, that, like, ‘Okay, I\'m going to try as best I can to sing it.’ And I\'m glad for the opportunity, especially after something like ‘I Am You Now.’ This is definitely one of those songs about writing songs. To me, shouting slogans is stupid. The first verse is a poem my brother wrote that I adjusted a little bit. I always liked my brother Jim; I always like to go to him for writing advice or if I\'m stuck on something. That was a song that we were working on for a while where the slight tempo changes would completely alter it, so it was hard to find the tone that would work for it. I was trying lots of different things and Jim was like, ‘Oh, I got this poem,’ and it fit the vibe of the record and what I was going for—the impermanence of things. That helped lock it in.” GA: “That was a really hard one for us to get tight with as a band, because of the time signature, and if we would have played that song even a couple BPMs too fast, I couldn\'t play that riff. It took a while to just play that song over and over again before we really got it.” **June 21** JC: “June 21 is the beginning of summer. It was actually kind of written around that time, too. You know it\'s summer \[in Detroit\] when you just hear the cars starting to drive fucking insane on the expressways. Everybody usually thinks that summer is a great time of year, but if you\'re physically and mentally diminished, summer is rough as any other season.” **Michigan Hammers** JC: “The song’s about workers, and the line about Veracruz is about mules. Because in the Mexican-American War, the army used lots of them. And off the coast of Veracruz, they couldn\'t get close enough to shore, so they just threw all the mules off the side of the boat. The ones that could swim to the shore, they used—but over half of them drowned. America won that war, and afterward, Ulysses S. Grant was celebrating the victory, so he went on a camping trip outside of Mexico City and he had a bunch of mules carrying stuff, one of which fell down the side of the mountain. They were like, ‘Well, that mule’s dead,’ and they continued to the top of the mountain. Then, two days later, the mule just showed up. It had climbed back up to the top of the mountain. It shows the reliance of these animals. Musically, it was another kind of rocking song and I wanted to write a rallying song about something fictional so it wouldn\'t be weighed down with any sort of meaning. I wanted it to be free of specificity.” GA: “A lot of times, Joe will take lyrics and just talk about it and joke about it with us. In the studio’s kitchen, they had magnet fridge poetry, and somebody put together, like, ‘champagne bath, half empty.’ Joe was like, ‘Oh, that\'s like the saddest four-word short story that I\'ve ever read.’ And then a variation of that ended up in the song.” **Tranquilizer** GA: “We knew we wanted some fucking freaky jazz saxophone on that one, and we wanted to get someone that really comes from that world, and Jemeel does. That song has almost no guitar. It was kind of supposed to be based around ‘If There\'s a Hell Below We\'re All Going to Go,’ by Curtis Mayfield, where it\'s just like a distorted, driving bassline that never changes and then all these things kind of float on top of it and then it kicks off in this kind of dramatic way. It was originally combined with ‘Modern Business Hymns’ and we ended up splitting those into separate songs—partially because we thought they were both solid enough on their own, and partially because the moods of them are very different. But I wanted to still have a connection between them, so the bassline that plays throughout ‘Tranquilizer’ is the same as the outro of ‘Modern Business Hymns.’ But in ‘Modern Business Hymns,’ you almost can\'t tell because it\'s kind of pretty. ‘Tranquilizer’ is menacing.” JC: “That was definitely one where I had to kind of go back to the idea of not overthinking lyrics. Because I really wanted to try to capture the feeling of when you\'re in pain. Writing about pain is impossible to do, because it is such an unthinking feeling. You’re not thinking about it. You\'re not having heady thoughts when you\'re in pain. You\'re immediately kind of reduced to very animalistic thoughts and fears, and I wanted to keep it that way. It\'s less about the words and more about the feeling of saying them almost. Once Greg explained the connection between this and the next song, it was easy to take the idea that you\'re dealing with pain until you take something to dull it or kill it. Because then on the next song, the first line is ‘Once the tranqs had hit.’ So it\'s like once you have gotten rid of the pain, then your mind can kind of formulate more thoughts about it.” **Modern Business Hymns** JC: “I always wanted to write a science fiction song, or a song about the future, but it\'s easier said than done. You don\'t want to make it too cheesy. So I wanted to kind of tie it into dreams, where when you\'re thinking about your future, if things are going well, you can imagine it as very bright. But when things are going very bad, the future can be just as dire as what you\'re going through. In the past, I\'ve sometimes maybe wanted to double my vocals during the chorus, and this was definitely one that I\'m like, this song will work if there\'s a female vocalist in the song, and I wanted it to be more of a duet. It ended up being maybe less of that, but I\'m glad. I think Nandi makes the song. Her voice has a purity to it that I don\'t think people would expect to be in a Protomartyr song. For some reason, I feel like it elevates it in a way that I would have never imagined before I heard it.” **Bridge & Crown** JC: “I have a friend who is studying to be a dentist, and she is always trying to throw in different dental ideas. And the thing that she gave me for this song that really sealed it for me was the four different kinds of patients. That\'s something that you\'ll learn, I guess, if you study to be a doctor or a dentist or anything, is the different attitudes patients will have. It was a perfect way to get into talking about dealing with mortality, specifically your own mortality. The thing that will survive long after you\'re gone is your dental work. Out of all the songs, that was the one where the lyrics came the easiest for me.” GA: “I had written it start to finish, just on my phone. I think I was on an airplane and just messing around with how to structure it and trying different things. And it sounded insane. I made some really crazy drumbeats on it where I had just layered three different drum machines on top of each other. I brought it to the band and \[drummer\] Alex \[Leonard\] somehow learned how to play it, which he\'s actually really good at—when we just drum something that seems impossible, he can oftentimes figure out a way to make it work. It ended up being one of the craziest songs, because it wasn\'t really meant to be played.” **Worm in Heaven** GA: “When I was writing those chords, I was kind of just trying to write a country song. But it\'s also one of those things where immediately in writing it, I was like, \'This is the last song on the album.\' But unlike that first song, you actually get the tension released by the end. It still cuts off as drastically as the first song does, but not before actually reaching a point where you feel like this tension that\'s been building the entire album finally has some sort of resolution and the song is able to actually explode.” JC: “It has a certain stillness to it, a confidence to it. The guitar takes a while to really announce itself, which isn’t something we would have necessarily felt comfortable doing before. I didn\'t have the lyrics until right before we recorded it. I really wanted to have the last thing be very of-the-moment, and I think, with that one, I wrote half of it up in my room at the studio ten minutes before it was time to record the vocals, and finished the second half of the lyrics in the booth as we were recording it. It’s happened a couple times on different albums where I just feel like the music is so beautiful that the lyrics have to kind of rise to the occasion for it. I don\'t want to get too corny about it, but it was like, ‘All right, no matter what happens to this record, this is kind of the point that we\'ve been building, this moment.’ And it worked for me.”

Close your eyes during Melbourne combo Mildlife’s second album and you can almost see it: the swirl of stars unspooling in deep purple space, the shag carpet of Milky Way dust, the giant mirror ball of the moon. Connecting the dots between ’70s fusion, ’90s acid jazz, and modern salvage-seekers like Tame Impala and Daft Punk, *Automatic* is a fun, transportive record, playful enough to avoid feeling heavy (the robo-voiced mantras of “Vapour,” the scat-sung middle section of “Memory Palace”) but genuine enough in its commitment to kick when it wants to (the hard-swung groove of “Downstream,” the Floyd-like spaciness of “Citations”). They play to each other like jazz and to their audience like disco. And no matter how high they fly, the groove remains terra firma.

When Mildlife’s debut album, Phase, was released in 2018 it didn’t so much explode on to the scene as ooze. Their mellifluous mix of jazz, krautrock and, perhaps more pertinently, demon grooves, was the word of mouth sensation of that year among open-minded DJs and diggers searching for the perfect beat. Their emergence was backed up by European tours that demonstrated a riotously loose-limbed approach to performance that was every bit as thrilling as Phase’s tantalising promise. What was more impressive was how lightly they wore influences that took in Can, Patrick Adams and Jan Hammer Group, while primarily sounding precisely like Mildlife. By the end of 2018 they’d been nominees for Best Album at the Worldwide FM Awards (Worldwide’s Gilles Peterson was a notable champion) and won Best Electronic Act at The Age Music Victoria Awards back home in Melbourne. Their progress post-Phase was cemented with a UK deal with Jeff Barrett’s Heavenly, who released How Long Does It Take? replete with Cosmic doyen Baldelli and Dionigi remixes, while last year they were officially anointed by DJ Harvey when he included The Magnificent Moon on his Pikes compilation Mercury Rising Vol II. With Automatic, the band have made a step-change from their debut. It’s more disciplined, directional and arguably more danceable. As on Phase, they are unafraid to let a track luxuriate in length without ever succumbing to self-indulgence. The arrangements, tightly structured thanks to Tom Shanahan (bass) and Jim Rindfleish’s fatback drumming, permit space for the others to add spice to the stew, topped off with Kevin McDowell’s ethereal vocals as Mildlife effortlessly glide between live performance and studio songwriting. “The recorded songs kind of become the new reference point for playing the songs live,’ says Kevin. “They both have different outcomes and we make our decisions for each based on that, but they’re symbiotic and they both influence each other. It’s usually a fairly natural flow from live to recorded back to live.” 
The centrepiece of Automatic is the title track where the band sound like Kraftwerk and Herbie Hancock on quarantined lockdown in Bob Moog’s Trumansburg workshop. It’s both a departure and quintessentially Mildlife. This is music you can dance to rather than ‘dance music’ and it’s all the better for it. 


There’s something immensely soothing about the tones and colors of *Daylight Savings*, the second album from Melbourne four-piece Surprise Chef. Founded in 2017 by housemates Lachlan Stuckey and Jethro Curtin, alongside Andrew Congues and Carl Lindeberg, the group began creating smooth, experimental, funky jazz in their Coburg share house ahead of their 2019 debut, *All News Is Good News*, and the method proved so successful, they simply kept going. What began as an homage to late jazz composer David Axelford has since led them down a unique path via instrumental jazz inspired by their leafy suburban surroundings and Australiana. That may not feel evident in the music itself, but the name—a nod to the early-2000s cooking show—and song titles like “Washing Day” and “Dinner Time” give away their affection for those simple, local moments. And though their music is instrumental, that tongue-in-cheek flair can be felt throughout. It feels as though each member of the group is wryly winking through the florid, ’80s-inspired percussion on \"Leave It, Don\'t Take It\" and the jaunty piano stabs on the title track. Somehow, it feels purposeful, nostalgic and comedic all at once, informed by the group’s noted devotion to crate-digging and experimentation. Their vinyl discoveries have inspired them to delve into funk (“Deadlines,” “New Ferrari\"), roots (“The Limp”), and Madlib-style beats tying it all together.

Daylight Savings is the second full-length album by Melbourne's cinematic soul journeymen Surprise Chef. Recorded over a weekend in Surprise Chef's DIY analogue studio (dubbed The College Of Knowledge), Daylight Savings expands on the dramatic 1970s cinematic soul sound established on their acclaimed first album, 2019's All News Is Good News. Created in Spring 2019, just as the jasmine bush in the backyard of the College Of Knowledge was coming to full bloom, Daylight Savings is filled with the optimism and hope that comes with the impending long, warm evenings after a dreary Melbourne winter.

“I want to get to that point where I can just write one lyric and people understand what I’m about,” IDLES singer Joe Talbot tells Apple Music. “Maybe it’s ‘Fuck you, I’m a lover.’” Those words, from the song ‘The Lover,’ certainly form an effective tagline for the band’s third album. The Bristol band explored trauma and vulnerability on second album *Joy as an Act of Resistance.*, and here they’re finding ways to heal, galvanize, and move forward—partly informed by mindfulness and being in the present. “I thought about the idea that you only ever have now,” Talbot says. “\[*Ultra Mono*\] is about getting to the crux of who you are and accepting who you are in that moment—which is really about a unification of self.” Those thoughts inspired a solidarity and concision in the way Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire, and drummer Jon Beavis wrote music. Each song began with a small riff or idea, and everything that was added had to be in the service of that nugget. “That’s where the idea of an orchestra comes in—that you try and sound, from as little as possible, as big as you can,” Talbot says. “Everyone hitting the thing at the same time to sound huge. It might also be as simple as one person playing and everyone else shutting the fuck up. Don’t create noise where it’s not needed.” The music’s visceral force and social awareness will keep the “punk” tag pinned to IDLES, but *Ultra Mono* forges a much broader sound. The self-confidence of hip-hop, the communal spirit of jungle, and the kindness of jazz-pop maestro Jamie Cullum all feed into these 12 songs. Let Talbot explain how in this track-by-track guide. **War** “It was the quickest thing we ever wrote. We got in a room together, I explained the concept, and we just wrote it. We played it—it wasn’t even a writing thing. And that is about as ultra mono as it gets. It had to be the first track because it is the explosion of not overthinking anything and *being*. The big bang of the album is the inner turmoil of trying to get rid of the noise and just be present—so it was perfect. The title’s ‘War’ because it sounded so violent, ballistic. I was really disenfranchised with the internet, like, ‘Why am I listening to assholes? You’ve got to be kind to yourself.’ ‘War’ was like, ‘Yeah, do it, actually learn to love yourself.’ That was the start of a big chapter in my life. It was like the war of self that I had to win.” **Grounds** “We wanted to write a song that was like AC/DC meets Dizzee Rascal, but a bit darker. It’s the march song, the start of the journey: ‘We won the first battle, let’s fucking do this. What do you need to stop apologizing for?’ That’s a conversation you need to have when all these horrible people come to the forefront. I was being criticized for speaking of civil rights–whether that be trans rights or gay rights or Black rights, the war on the working classes. I believe in socialism. Go fuck yourselves. I want to sleep at night knowing that my platform is the voice of reason and an egalitarian want for something beautiful—not the murder of Black people, homophobia at the workplace, racist front lines. We were recording in Paris and Warren Ellis \[of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman\] popped in. He sat with us just chatting about life. I was like, ‘It would be insane if I didn’t ask you to be on this record, man.’ I just wanted him to do a ‘Hey!’ like on a grime record.” **Mr. Motivator** “\[TV fitness guru\] Mr Motivator, that’s my spirit animal. We wrote that song and it felt like a train. I wanted to put a beautiful and joyous face to something rampantly, violently powerful-sounding. ‘Mr. Motivator’ is 90% lethal machine, 10% beautiful, smiley man that brings you joy. The lyrics are all cliches because I think *The Guardian* or someone leaned towards the idea that my sloganeering was something to be scoffed at. So I thought I’d do a whole song of it. We’re trying to rally people together, and if you go around using flowery language or muddying the waters with your insecurities, you’re not going to get your point across. So, I wanted to write nursery rhymes for open-minded people.” **Anxiety** “This was the first song where the lyrics came as we were writing the music. It sounded anxiety-inducing because it was so bombastic and back-and-forth. Then we had the idea of speeding the song up as you go along and becoming more cacophonous. That just seemed like a beautiful thing, because when you start meditating, the first thing that happens is you try to meditate–which isn’t what you’re supposed to do. The noise starts coming in. One of the things they teach you in therapy is that if you feel anxious or scared or sad or angry, don’t just internally try to fight that. Accept that you become anxious and allow yourself the anxiety. Feel angry and accept that, and then think about why, and what triggered it. And obviously 40-cigarettes-a-day Dev \[Adam Devonshire\] can’t really sing that well anymore, so we had to get David Yow of Jesus Lizard in. He’s got an amazing voice. It’s a much better version of what Dev used to be like.” **Kill Them With Kindness** “That’s Jamie Cullum \[on the piano\]. We met him at the Mercury Prize and he said, ‘If you need any piano on your album, just let us know.’ I was like, ‘We don’t, but we definitely do now.’ I like that idea of pushing people’s idea of what cool is. Jamie Cullum is fucking cooler than any of those apathetic nihilists. He believes in something and he works hard at it—and I like that. When I was working in a kitchen, we listened to Radio 2 all the time, and I loved his show. And he’s a beautiful human being. It’s a perfect example of what we’re about: inclusivity and showing what you love. I didn’t write the lyrics until after meeting him. It was just that idea that he seemed kindhearted. Kindness is a massive thing: It’s what empathy derives from, and kindness and empathy is what’ll kill fascism. It should be the spirit of punk and soul music and grime and every other music.” **Model Village** “The part that we wrote around was something that I used to play onstage whenever Bowen was offstage and I stole his guitar. So it had this playfulness, and I wanted to write a kind of take-the-piss song. I’m not antagonistic at all, but I do find things funny, like people who get so angry. I wanted this song to be taking yourself out of your own town and looking at it like it’s a model village. Just to be like, ‘Look how small and insignificant this place is. Don’t be so aggressive and defensive about something you don’t really understand.’ It’s a call for empathy—but to the assholes in a non-apologetic way.” **Ne Touche Pas Moi** “I was getting really down on tours because I felt a bit like an animal in a cage. Dudes are aggressive, and it’s boring when you see it in a crowd. Someone’s being a prick in the crowd and people aren’t comfortable—it’s not a nice feeling. So I wanted to create that idea of a safe arena with an anthem. It’s a violent, cutting anthem. It’s like, ‘I am full of love, but that doesn’t mean you can elbow me in the face or touch my breasts.’ We can play it in sets to give people the confidence that there is a platform here to be safe. I said to Bowen, ‘I really wish there was a woman singing the chorus, because it’s not just about my voice, it’s more often women that get groped.’ A couple of days later, we were in Paris recording Jehnny Beth’s TV show and I told her about this song. It was a nice relief to have someone French backing up my shit French.” **Carcinogenic** “Jungle was a movement based around unity—very different kinds of people getting together under the love of music. It was one of the most forward-thinking, beautiful things to happen to our country, \[and it\] was shut down by police and people who couldn’t make money from it. I wanted to write a song that was part garage rock, part jungle, because both movements have their part to play in building IDLES and also building amazing communities of people and great musicians. Then I thought about jungle and grime and garage and how something positive gets turned into something negative with the media. Basically, any Black music that creates a positive network of people and communities, building something out of love, is dangerous because it’s people thinking outside the box and not relying on the government for reassurance and entertainment and distraction. So then it got me thinking about ‘carcinogenic’ and how everything gives you cancer, when really the most cancerous thing about our society isn’t anything like that, it’s the class war that we’re going through and depriving people of a decent education, decent welfare, decent housing. That’s fucking cancer.” **Reigns** “This was written around the bass, obviously. Again, another movement—techno—and that idea of togetherness and the love in the room is always apparent. Techno is motorik, it’s mesmeric, it is just a singularity—minimal techno, especially. It’s just the beat or the bassline and that carries you through, that’s all you need. Obviously, we’re a chorus band, so we thought we’d throw in something huge to cut through it. But we didn’t want to overcomplicate it. That sinister pound just reminds me of my continual disdain for the Royal Family and everything they represent in our country, from the fascism that it comes from to the smiley-face racism that it perpetuates nowadays.” **The Lover** “I wanted to write a soul song with that wall-of-noise, Phil Spector vibe—but also an IDLES song. What could be more IDLES than writing a song about being a lover but making it really sweary? When I love someone, I swear a lot around them because I trust them, and I want them to feel comfortable and trust me. So I just wrote the most honest love song. It’s like a defiant smile in the face of assholes who can’t just accept that your love is real. It’s like, ‘I’m not lying. I am full of love and you’re a prick.’ That’s it. That song was the answer to the call of ‘Grounds.’ That huge, stabby, all-together orchestra.” **A Hymn** “Bowen and I were trying to write a song together. I had a part and he had a part. Then my part just got kicked out and we wrote the song around the guitar line. We wanted to write a song that was like a hymn, because a hymn is a Christian, or gospel, vision of togetherness and rejoicing at once for something they love. I wanted to write the lyrics around the idea that a hymn nowadays is just about suburban want, material fear. So it’s like a really subdued, sad hymn about materialism, suburban pedestrianism. And it came out really well.” **Danke** “It was going to be an instrumental, a song that made you feel elated and ready for war—and not muddy it with words. A song that embodies the whole album, that just builds and pounds but all the parts change. Each bit changes, but it feels like one part of one thing. And I always finish on a thank you because it’s important to be grateful for what people have given us—so I wanted to call the song ‘Danke.’ Then, on the day of recording it, Daniel Johnston died. So I put in his lyrics \[from ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’\] because they’re some of the most beautiful ever written. It fits the song, fits the album. He could have only written that one lyric and it’d be enough to understand him. I added \[my\] lyrics \[‘I’ll be your hammer, I’ll be your nail/I’ll be the house that allows you to fail’\] at the end because I felt like it was an offering to leave with—like, ‘I’ve got you.’ It’s what I would have said to him, or any friend that needed love.”

“We’d made two very sample-heavy records in a row,” Avalanches founding member Robbie Chater tells Apple Music. “We just felt very liberated to make a left turn and to go anywhere and do anything.” The Melbourne group’s third album is still rich with endless samples—the trademark that made them crate-digging heroes with their 2000 debut *Since I Left You* and 2016’s *Wildflower*—but this time their focus is more on live collaboration. Guest artists abound, including Jamie xx, Karen O, Rivers Cuomo, Perry Farrell, Denzel Curry, Sampa the Great, Leon Bridges, and Johnny Marr. Each was tasked with putting their slant on the big ideas characterizing the album: life, God, spirituality, the human voice, mortality. The Avalanches also took inspiration from the Golden Record, a 1977 collection of music and terrestrial sounds compiled by astronomer-scientist Carl Sagan and writer-producer-director Ann Druyan (whose image is on the cover of this album) to be carried into space as part of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. “It all came from a personal inward journey that expanded throughout the whole universe,” says keyboardist Tony Di Blasi on the chosen themes. “There’s a saying: ‘So within, so without.’ What is here is also out there. So it all expanded just from our own personal journeys.” For all its grand subject matter, however, *We Will Always Love You* is a warm, gentle listen, and The Avalanches’ most reflective work to date. “It’s a bit of a shining light in dark times,” says Di Blasi. “And that’s the mood we were trying to set, for it to be light.” Below, Di Blasi and Chater talk through 10 of the album’s 25 tracks. **We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)** Robbie Chater: “That vocal sample by The Roches \[‘Hammond Song’\] is absolutely incredible. With *Since I Left You*, those samples were from junk-store records and were forgotten pieces of flotsam and jetsam that we would turn into something new. But The Roches’ song was already so beautiful. We were exploring different kinds of devotional music, gospel music and Christian music, and although that’s not what The Roches do, it has those massed voices of the sisters singing together. And we were reading about Ann Druyan’s story in compiling the Golden Record, and the way the sound of her heartbeat and brainwaves are the sound of a young woman in love and are captured on that record and are forever floating out there. And then you have these sisters singing ‘we will always love you’ and it’s like, you can build an album around that.” **The Divine Chord (feat. MGMT & Johnny Marr)** RC: “I have a sneaking suspicion it’s about heartbreak from \[MGMT vocalist\] Andrew VanWyngarden’s point of view, although we’ve never spoken about it directly. I think I was just drawn to the very first line when he sings, ‘I still remember you.’ To me that said so much. Because sampling plays with time and remembering voices from the past, and when he sung that line I thought, ‘This is going to work.’ We were lucky enough Johnny Marr wanted to contribute. The Smiths are a huge part of my childhood and my youth. The day Johnny Marr’s guitar part came through with a note saying, ‘Guys, this is a brilliant track,’ it was just like, okay, I can die happy.” **Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)** RC: “It came about through spending a lot of time in LA. Leon was there, I was there, and then we got to work at Sunset Sound studios in the same room Prince had recorded, so of course Leon and me were both freaking out about that. It was an incredible experience, and I’m just so grateful that people came to this record so open. They’re big themes, and I don’t think just anyone could have walked in and embraced that and tapped into something very personal and sincere in their own lives. It’s pretty incredible that people are prepared to be so intimate. The vocals definitely aren’t just dialed in and plonked on top of the track.” **Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell)** Tony Di Blasi: “That was one of those really surreal events where we’re in the taxi on the way to Perry Farrell’s house in Santa Monica and we get a text saying, ‘Do you guys like Indian food and is there anything you don’t eat?’ And we arrive and there’s Perry Farrell and just his look and his voice are so unique. It’s just one of those things where you’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually happening.’ Before we even started, we just sat there for an hour and got to know each other and ate this wonderful food and this amazing ice cream. And then we ended up going down to record the vocals, and he’s just so open and creative. He was making up lines as he was walking around the house and singing them out really loud and I was just sitting there and I looked at Robbie like, ‘That’s Perry Farrell up there making up these melodies to one of our songs, and we’re in his home.’ Moments like that hit you.” **We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy & Mick Jones)** TDB: “It’s a bit of an oddball one. And the cast of characters in it is Karen Carpenter, Cola Boyy, and Mick Jones’ voices all together. It’s wild, but it’s also so beautiful, the way it’s sung. It’s hitting that spot between the happiness and the sadness, which is a beautiful feeling.” RC: “Even though it’s one of the least Avalanchesy-sounding ones, I just love it. It works on different levels. Karen’s voice is so beautiful and her story’s so sad and there’s all that history and meaning, and then there’s Mick Jones and Cola Boyy, who’s one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, and a great friend, a true anarchist, but it’s great the way it ties in around Karen’s voice. ‘We go on hurting each other’ says so much, especially the way the world is today. That line makes me quite sad.” **Take Care in Your Dreaming (Denzel Curry, Tricky & Sampa the Great)** RC: “It’s kind of a melancholy song. Sometimes it sounds upbeat to me and sometimes it doesn’t. It was an incredible moment in the studio from Denzel Curry. We spoke quite deeply about my personal journey and what the song meant to me and unfulfilled dreams and a journey from darkness to light. And to see someone around strangers be open and vulnerable and really tell a story from the heart was really moving to watch him do that.” TDB: “And he just wrote that on the spot too. There are these moments where you go, ‘Wow, this guy from nothing has created that.’ And it wasn’t until quite later, when we really listened to the lyrics, that we realized how much he’d opened himself up in that song and talked about all these really personal, horrible things that had happened to him.” **Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile)** RC: “Kurt is one in a million. I remember listening to some of his records back in dark times and they sort of got me through. I had a few paragraphs written down in an email about what this record is about, and some people would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe we should work together in the future.’ But he was just one of those people who said, ‘I’ve got it,’ and then gave his own slant on it. It’s got this rambling preacher spoken-word vibe. I didn’t expect to get that back from him.” TDB: “I remember going over to Robbie’s place and he said, ‘I’ve got this vocal from Kurt Vile, let me know what you think of it,’ and he played it and I just remember going, ‘This is one of the best things I’ve ever heard.’ It sounded perfect from the get-go. I was so blown away and just said, ‘Play it again.’” **Dial D for Devotion (feat. Karen O)** RC: “That was lovely. That was done remotely. They’re some of \[late Silver Jews frontman\] David Berman’s words. She was kind enough to go out on a limb with words that weren’t her own. It was lovely getting the recording back because it’s almost like I could hear someone doing the dishes in the background and then I could hear a dog barking outside. And not anyone could have done that.” **Running Red Lights (feat. Rivers Cuomo & Pink Siifu)** TDB: “We got a spreadsheet, I think Rivers’ assistant had sent it, with three different lyrical ideas. And we were like, ‘We’d love to hear the melodies that go along with them,’ so he ended up singing all three melodies and was like, ‘Let us know which ones you want.’ And we said, ‘Can we have them all?’ We got to meet Rivers when he was in Australia; Weezer were playing with Foo Fighters. We were googling all these amazing bars to take him to, cool places Melbourne has to offer, and we had a list of things we were going to do with him. It ended up raining, so we just took some umbrellas out of the hotel he was staying in and all he wanted to do was walk around in the rain. And then we went to a Starbucks and drank coffee for an hour and walked back and that was it. And that ended up being heaps cooler than anything we could have planned.” **Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry & CLYPSO)** RC: “Our friend Jamie xx worked on that track with us, which was such a wonderful experience. We have a common love of working with samples, so it was a dream come true. I would send him lots and lots of demos for fun, and he used to call that track the banger; he was always like, ‘I love the banger. Send me the banger, I want to work on the banger.’ And he must have heard something in it, because it was quite slow before he got his hands on it. You can hear it speeding up as he’s trying to put some more energy into it. And of course working with CLYPSO from Sydney, it feels like we’ve made a great new friend.” TDB: “And of course there’s Neneh Cherry, who we met maybe six months before she recorded with us. It was backstage after her show, and there’s always lots of people there. We know what it’s like: Everyone’s trying to talk to you, and you can be like, ‘I just want to relax, I just played a show.’ But to everyone she was so welcoming and kind. They’re the type of people we want to work with.”

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

They began by just playing the hits. In 2017, nearly eight years after Doves had last picked up their instruments together, drummer Andy Williams and his twin brother, guitarist Jez, gave bassist/singer Jimi Goodwin a call. Come over to Andy’s studio, they said, and let’s see if we can remember how to play “Black and White Town” and “There Goes the Fear”—just for fun. “It came back really quickly,” Andy tells Apple Music. “We were all laughing and having fun. As a drummer, hearing that bass—*his* bass—instantly felt very familiar, in a good sense. Pretty soon, there was a real enthusiasm and hunger from us to work together.” When they went on hiatus after 2009’s excellent *Kingdom of Rust* album, Doves were fatigued. They’d been together for a quarter of a century, serving up four albums as one of Britain’s best and more adventurous indie-rock trios—plus one before that as house specialists Sub Sub. They were never meant to disappear for a decade, but when you’ve got families and side projects (the Williams brothers as Black Rivers, Goodwin with his 2014 solo album *Odludek*), life gets in the way. “I don’t want to sound boastful, but I think there’s a chemistry between us three that you don’t run into every day,” Andy says. “That time away from each other has helped us appreciate that.” Fizzing with that chemistry, *The Universal Want* sounds like a Doves album precisely because it doesn’t sound like any other Doves album. The exquisitely measured mix of euphoria and sorrow is familiar, but by experimenting with Afrobeat, dub, and keyboards foraged from behind the Iron Curtain, the trio continues to expand their horizons on every song. “We didn’t attempt to resurrect another ‘The Cedar Room’ or ‘There Goes the Fear,’ because it’s a recipe for disaster when you chase your own tail,” says Andy. “It’s really important for us three to be excited and feel like we’re moving forward.” Let him guide you through that evolution, track by track. **Carousels** “Originally, it started life as Black Rivers and we couldn’t get it to work. We put it down for a while, then Jez had a look at it again. He’d bought a Tony Allen breakbeat album and just sampled some breaks. It just clicked—the song came alive. We felt it was a bit of a progression for us, so it felt like a good song to introduce ourselves back to people again. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a nostalgia thing. We all used to go out to funfairs as kids up here in the North West, and every summer we’d go to a place called Harlech in North Wales and there’d be a funfair near there. It’s a nostalgic look back at that era when you used to hear music for the first time, loud, on loudspeakers, and that excitement at the fair—trying to recapture that feeling. The music’s trying to push it forward, but lyrically, it’s looking back, so there’s that juxtaposition.” **I Will Not Hide** “Really fun memories of making this. Jimi loves his sampling, so when he played it to us, it was like, ‘Wow! What’s going on there?’ I couldn’t really fathom out the lyrics. I mean, I put a couple of lines in there myself, but I still don’t fully understand what it’s about. I don’t think Jimi does. But we quite like that place sometimes, where it’s almost a train of thought. Jimi’s demo stopped, I think, at chorus two. We just looked at the chords, me and Jez, and tacked the guitar section onto the end. That’s the nice thing about Doves—when people present ideas to the band, it goes through the filter of all three of us and it can change. That’s when it’s working well between us three, when someone has an initial idea and then the other two run with it.” **Broken Eyes** “Early doors, we found an old hard drive with loads of material on, stuff we hadn’t actually ever managed to finish, and this was one \[from the *Kingdom of Rust* sessions\]. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s got real heart and soul. Let’s tackle that again.’ Last time, we were maybe overcomplicating it, so we stripped it away and kept it simple. It always had a different lyric, right up until the 11th hour, actually. It had a very different vibe. Jimi sounds brilliant on this. When he did the vocal, it was hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. That’s when you know you’re on the right path. You just hit a brick wall sometimes with songs. I read a Leonard Cohen book and I think he was talking about ‘Tower of Song,’ that it took him 20 years to finish. Started it, put it down, picked it up again, kept going back to it. If a song’s got strength in it, it will keep knocking on your door. We’ve got other songs which I’m hoping we can look at again at some point. There’s a couple of things where I’ve gone, ‘Do you remember this one?’ And it was, ‘Oh no, I can’t.’ Because we’d absolutely hammered it at the time and not made it work, and no one’s ready to go back to that place.” **For Tomorrow** “Again, we had those chords for the chorus kicking round for a while but we never really had a song. The high string in the verses, we were like, ‘Oh god, look, it’s got that kind of Isaac Hayes classic soul thing we were going for.’ I know it didn’t necessarily end up that way, but that’s what we were going for in our heads. We did it live in the room, and I remember going back in the control room and going, ‘Ah, it’s just coming together.’ I’ve got really fond memories, a couple of moments of like, ‘Yeah.’ It’s a really fun one to play on the drums.” **Cathedrals of the Mind** “Initially it was from a Black Rivers session—another song that, down the line, Jimi heard and really loved and worked on with us. We were booked to go to Anglesey, me and Jez, in 2016. We were due to set off at nine in the morning, but at six o’clock, my wife wakes me up and says, ‘Bowie’s passed.’ I couldn’t take it in—like the whole world, I guess. I remember driving to Anglesey with 6 Music on, they cleared their schedule and were just talking about Bowie. We got to Anglesey and it was like, ‘Fucking hell.’ I’m not saying we wrote this song for him, but I think it was an unconscious thing. Jez had some chords and I tried a couple of different grooves. It didn’t work, and I tried that sort of dub groove, and that was the start of the song. The lyrics, as well—‘In the back room/In the ballroom/I hear them calling your name…/Everywhere I see those eyes.’ I think we were referencing the passing of such a musical icon. He was such a towering figure, cultural figure. Him passing felt like your own mortality, essentially.” **Prisoners** “It’s the love affair with northern soul that we’ve had for years. Very English lyrics. The Jam was one reference when we were doing the lyrics, ‘Town Called Malice.’ It was written way before the situation we’re in \[2020’s lockdown\], but it’s got some sort of resonance. We’ve all been stuck in our houses and we’re only just starting to come out. But it’s also got a sense of hope. The chorus is ‘We’re just prisoners of these times/Although it won’t be for long.’ So there is a sense of hope with that. We let everybody know our struggles, I guess, but it’s good to have a sense of hope in there.” **Cycle of Hurt** “Jez came with that \[robotic voice\] sample and those chords. They’re probably the most direct lyrics \[on the album\]. It’s referencing a relationship really, and just trying to get out of a cycle of hurt—a cycle of thought that you’re trapped in. They’re quite collaborative, these lyrics. A lot of them that are \[about being\] just locked in a cycle of your own thought, really, and trying to break free from that. There’s definite references to trying to keep your own mental health on track. Looking back on it, that’s a subject we’ve definitely returned to on this record. We felt this \[track\] was really good for the album because there weren’t really deep strings on the rest of the record, and it just brings a new sound for your ears to keep your interest up.” **Mother Silverlake** “The end result doesn’t bear any relation to an Afrobeat song, but that’s what we had in our heads—something that felt new to us, we’ve never really attempted that. Jez and Jimi combined \[on the\] vocal—that was really nice to hear those two singing together in the studio, the mix of their two voices. Martin Rebelski’s pianos really uplift the chorus. It’s a feel-good track, but the lyrics are slightly melancholic, almost referencing our mum, who’s still around, thank god. We always try and make music as uplifting as possible, or as joyous as possible. It might be offset with more melancholic lyrics, but overall we always want it to be an uplifting experience.” **Universal Want** “I started it in my studio as a ballad. I never intended it to be like a house workout at the end. I was thinking of just a two-and-a-half-minute song about the universal want—this question of always chasing something, be it consumerism or some aspect of your life where you think you’re going to be happy. But Jez took it away and he obviously saw something else for the end section and thought of welding this house section onto the end. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, it was just so unpredictable, and I hope that unpredictability carries through to the listener. I guess it’s kind of a reference to our past, our Sub Sub days—a cheeky doff of the cap to that era. It was a very formative era for all of us.” **Forest House** “Again, this had been knocking around for a while and we were never able to master it, didn’t ever find the key to unlock it. It just felt like it was a really intimate way to finish the record—a small way to wind the album down. A simple song, but with Jez’s Russian keyboard in there—this old Russian ’60s monster of an analog keyboard. It’s almost got a dystopian sound. Once that got brought into the song, it was like, ‘Yeah.’”

English songsmith Douglas Dare returns with his third and most stripped back studio album to date, Milkteeth, released on 21 February 2020 with Erased Tapes. Produced by Mike Lindsay — founding member of Tunng and one half of LUMP with Laura Marling — in his studio in Margate in just twelve days, Milkteeth sees Douglas become confident and comfortable enough with his own identity to reflect on both the joys and pains of youth. In doing so, he has established himself as a serious 21st century singer-songwriter with an enduring lyrical poise and elegant minimalist sound.

It is impossible to talk about modern psychedelic music without mentioning Ripley Johnson. As bandleader of Wooden Shjips and one half of Moon Duo, Johnson has continually charted new cosmic paths that expand on the language of the genre. With Rose City Band, Johnson’s songwriting and beautiful guitar lines take center stage, the veil of psychedelia notably drawn back. While his vocal treatment would be recognizable to any Wooden Shjips fan, the sparseness of the instrumentation lays bare the beauty of his writing. Shimmering guitar lines are free to shine, buoyed by driving rhythms. New to the mix are arrangements and instruments drawn directly from classic country, resulting in songs with more than a hint of twang. The aptly named Summerlong, born of Johnson’s own fondness for the season, delivers an emotional lift—an expression akin to the joy of getting out there on a warm day, be it gathering for a BBQ, hopping onto a bike, leaping into a swimming hole, or simply reading in a park. Rose City Band started purely as a recording project, with Johnson's role mostly obscured for the self-titled debut album. Released with no promotion, in the style of private press records, it was a liberating act, a focus on music without any expectations. Explaining it with a chuckle, Johnson elaborates, “I always would threaten to my friends that I’m gonna start a country rock band so I can retire and just play down at the pub every Thursday night during happy hour. I love being able to tour and travel, but I also like the idea of having a local band … more of a social music experience.” Freedom from expectation and obligation gave Johnson the space to experiment with new instrumentation and arrangements. The introduction of lap steel, mandolin, and jaw harp enhance Johnson’s lean guitar work with radiant overtones, placing Summerlong more overtly within the country tradition than its predecessor. Work on the album began at Johnson’s home studio in Portland during the summer, but, interrupted by touring, it would not be finished until the winter season. The dark isolation of winter and the pining for summer’s easier days can be felt in the album’s few quieter moments. Summerlong was mixed by John McEntire (Stereolab, Broken Social Scene, Tortoise) at his newly minted Portland Soma Studios and mastered by Amy Dragon at Telegraph Mastering, also based in Portland. Buoyant and joyous, Summerlong is a captivating listen that leaves the listener yearning for more. The record is an ode to freedom, born of a musician stepping out of all routines and whose own liberation is communicated so completely in his music. Summerlong is a record that, taken in its entirety, is an emphatic statement on the songwriting power of Ripley Johnson. Johnson’s joy in every aspect of this album is delightfully infectious.

"I feel like 'Home' is a second part of the same book, that the start was in 'Esja', a musical prelude to a real plot. I feel Home is a story with an ending, so the next book can tell a totally different one. I am constantly looking for new ways of expression. I am curious where 'Home' will lead me and my music". — Hania Rani Hania Rani is a pianist, composer and musician who, was born in Gdansk and splits her life between Warsaw, where she makes her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works. Her debut album 'Esja', a beguiling collection of solo piano pieces on Gondwana Records was released to international acclaim on April 5th 2019 including nominations in 5 categories in the Polish music industries very own Grammys, the Fryderyki, and winning the Discovery of the Year 2019 in the Empik chain's Bestseller Awards and the prestigious Sanki award for the most interesting new face of Polish music chosen by Polish journalists. Rani also composed the music for her first full length movie "I Never Cry" directed by Piotr Domalewski and for the play "Nora" directed by Michał Zdunik. Her song "Eden" was used as a soundtrack of a short movie by Małgorzata Szumowska for Miu Miu's movie cycle "Women's Tales" If the compositions on Esja were born out of a fascination with the piano as an instrument, then her follow-up, the expansive, cinematic, 'Home', finds Rani expanding her palate: adding vocals and subtle electronics to her music as well as being joined on some tracks by bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak. The album reunites her with recording engineers, Piotr Wieczorek and Ignacy Gruszecki (Monochrom Studio) and the tracks were again mixed again by Gijs van Klooster in his studio in Amsterdam and by Piotr Wieczorek in Warsaw ( Ombelico and Come Back Home). Home was mastered by Zino Mikorey in Berlin (known for his work on albums by artists such as Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnalds). For Rani, 'Home', is very much a continuation of the work she started on 'Esja', "the completion of the sentence" as she puts it. The album offers a metaphorical journey: the story of places that become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice. It is the story of leaving a place that is familiar and the journey that follows it. Home opens with the fragment of the short story "Loneliness" by Bruno Schulz, which can be seen as a parable of a journey that does not necessarily mean going beyond the physical door but can signify going beyond the symbolic limits of our knowledge and imagination. "One can be lost but can find home in his inner part - which can mean many things - soul, imagination, mind, intuition, passion. I strongly believe that when being in uncertain times and living an unstable life we can still reach peace with ourselves and be able to find 'home' anywhere' This is what I would like to express with my music - one can travel the whole world but not see anything. It is not where we are going but how much we are able to see and hear things happening around us". — Hania Rani Home is also about the inevitability of change. We never find places exactly how we left them. Time flies and life with it. Just like art and music. Once you started the trip, you will never be back really to the place where you started with. It is a sentiment that is at the heart of Home, not just its themes, but at the heart of Rani's music too. Following the success of Esja it would have been easy for her to stick to the same solo piano formula, but while Rani expresses her surprise and gratitude for the success of Esja, "I wasn't sure how this album - based on Piano and silence - will be received by the audience. The reception was a big surprise to me" it has also given her the confidence to express more of herself as an artist. On Home Rani steps into more of a producer's role, adding strings, bass and drums where needed, exploring the sounds of synths and electronica, but also creating textured layered songs made from acoustic samples, mostly from piano recordings. "I try to explore new genres and discover new artists, I don't want to be stuck in things that I know, I want to learn about things that are still new to me". But perhaps most notable is her singing, Rani has a fragile, beautiful voice, both pure and expressive. Long a feature of her live shows she uses it as another instrument, adding extra layers of melody and emotion to her already deeply expressive music. "I consider voice as another instrument. Maybe if I wasn't so often alone on the stage, I would take another instrument to play the melody that I have in my mind. But while I am alone, singing allows me to have more possibilities at the same time. The human voice has a real magic, nothing carries emotions as easily and powerfully as the voice, and I think being able to bring this atmosphere on stage opens up new possibilities of expression for me". — Hania Rani Home also features Rani's new band, bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak who appear on some of the albums stand out tracks, the beguiling single 'Leaving', the title track 'Home', atmospheric 'Tennen' and the beautiful 'I'll Never Find Your Soul'. After working and touring alone Rani begin to feel stuck with her own ideas and thoughts, and sounds. It was a prolific period for her compositionally, writing the music on Home, but also a film score and music for the theatre, but she felt that someone else's vision might bring new ideas to things that she already knew. Shortly before she was about to record Home she attended a concert of the young Polish jazz trio, Immortal Onion, in Gdańsk, her hometown. She liked what she heard and sked the double bassist and a drummer if they wanted to meet and something clicked. They spent most of the next week improvising and jamming on her music. This gave a whole new insight for some of the songs and brought new ideas for arrangements. And having enjoyed working together on the album Rani is looking forward to touring with the boys. "Touring with band is a totally different thing, way more challenging technically, but it also brings a new energy and new sound possibilities. I am very curious how we will manage to bring the album to life. I would like to keep the show balanced - mixing the new textures of Home with the atmosphere of minimalistic songs from Esja." — Hania Rani For Rani, this sense of exploring is a key part of her art. But it isn't only the music, Rani is keenly interested in art and architecture (as anyone who follows her exquisitely curated Instagram feed will know) and how her music works in the wider world. "I try to keep my eyes and ears wide open. What I want to master in my art is how to build the right atmosphere on stage, in recordings. To do this you need to be aware of many aspects - not only music, but also the full range of gestures, acoustics, visual aspect. I want to learn how to bring particular atmosphere and bring people to a specific space. I observe how music works in different contexts, how the feeling of sound changes in different acoustics, space, light conditions. The same thing happens with artwork that I share. I feel like everything of what I am bringing to the the world and sharing with others has an impact of reception my music. If we are an inseparable part of the ecosystem, then the music should be considered similarly." — Hania Rani The album's distinctive cover artwork was designed by the architect Łukasz Pałczyński, who combined his sketches with the stills from the music video for the song Leaving shot by her regular collaborators Mateusz Miszczyński and Jakub Stoszek in Greece and together with Rani's music and vision it is this sense of collaboration that gives Home it's power as Rani starts to give full expression to her own unique vision and perhaps the most exciting thing is that it is just another step on her journey, one that we are all lucky to be a part of! All prices shown are “NET of VAT” (Value Added Tax). VAT will be calculated and added at the checkout. You will be charged the appropriate rate which will vary depending on the country. This release was uploaded at 24 bit / 96 kHz for maximum fidelity and is available in FLAC, WAV, AIFF or MP3.

Please note: prices do not include VAT/sales tax (where applicable). Erratics & Unconformities is the first album by Craven Faults. It follows three EPs: Netherfield Works, Springhead Works and Nunroyd Works. Real-time journeys across decades and continents, and swathes of post-industrial northern Britain. The journey on Erratics & Unconformities picks up where Netherfield Works left off. We take the canal towpath out of the city. We fork north shortly afterwards. Is this where it started? The terrain gradually becomes more rugged. Familiar. Wild. Evidence of human activity is less immediate in this glacial landscape. It’s there if you seek it. But easy to ignore. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the weight of the ice-sheet carving its way through the rock. Scepter Studios, Manhattan. September 1967. Vox amplifiers driven to within an inch of their lives. An insistent rhythm. Familiar. Wild. We head across the city to 30th Street Studios a year later. More refined. Capturing a moment four years after its inception. We call into Command Studios in London on an evening in March 1972 before the pace drops. A moment to take in our surroundings. Music born in New York that has travelled beyond our solar system. A sense of weightlessness. We go as far back as 1906. Central Park. Tone poems underappreciated at the time - a visionary. We pay a visit to the village of Wümme in northern Germany. Forward momentum. There’s a nod to the rhythm of the loom. The studio building echoes with its own history by way of an early 70s Elka drum machine. We come to Van Gelder Studio in 1962 by a process of addition and elimination. We stay for the next three years. We’re also put in mind of the time we spent at Dierks Studios in 1972. A treasured record bought at sixteen. It takes time to reveal itself completely. Perhaps it never does. It would be lost now. 8th January 2013 – 19:16 – Farfisa drone through diode filter and phaser – 26 mins 38 seconds Everything in its own time. The output from the old textile mill Craven Faults calls home is no longer as linear as it once was. There was no clear start point for the project, rather simply rediscovering the joy in experimentation with no material goals. Some of the recordings that make up Erratics & Unconformities go back almost seven years. Tracks have come and gone in that time. They don’t leave until they’ve undertaken a stringent quality control process. It started slowly, but has picked up momentum in the last eighteen months. Recorded and re-recorded to the correct level of imperfection, and then left to breathe. Mixed and re-mixed. Carefully compiled when the time was right. 3rd July 2019 – 12:34 – Mixdown The journey is just as important as the destination.

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band themselves. This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.” This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet. ‘Viscerals’, their third proper is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Whilst the fearsome opener ‘Reducer’s battle cry “ego kills everything” brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, elsewhere ‘Rubbernecker’ may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction. Meanwhile the sinister sound-collage of ‘Blood And Butter’ delves into jarring abstraction anew, ‘New Body’ countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby and - perhaps most memorably of all - the perverse banger ‘Crazy In Blood’ marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger. “We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way”. Yet for all that this record is the most far-reaching yet, its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band (whose rogues gallery is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley). “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word!” “At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed they all jump on too and for just a few minutes we all feel liberated, together.” Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough. ---

To mark this year’s Piano Day and as an acknowledgement to these unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in, Nils Frahm surprised the world with a collection of eight solo piano pieces, titled Empty, made available digitally on March 28. The highly anticipated physical editions on vinyl and CD are set for release via Erased Tapes on October 23, 2020. Conceived of just before Nils broke his thumb and composed the similarly intimate solo piano album Screws, Empty is a soothing vessel of eight simple and serene pieces originally recorded as the music to a short art film he shot with his friend and film director Benoit Toulemonde. Drifting through emotions from the stark and sobering opener First Defeat, to the gently euphoric No Step On Wing and the contemplative but hopeful closer Black Notes, with its poignant minute of silence, Empty is a comforting score for these turbulent times. “When I came back from the hospital with a broken thumb and listened to the recordings, I felt they were unfinished. I decided to put them aside and started to work on my small album, Screws. Many many other notes of the piano have been struck since these days, and before we all forget about this, I thought it would be a good moment to share these lullabies with you. I hope they help you stay all strong and calm in these days of solitude – despite the hardship, we can discover introspection and reflection unexpectedly. Who knows what it is good for. Much love, Nils” About Piano Day: “Why does the world need a Piano Day? For many reasons. But mostly, because it doesn’t hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener.” – Nils Frahm Piano Day is an annual event conceived of five years ago by the composer, producer and pianist Nils Frahm. It takes place on the 88th day of the year on March 28, 2020 – the number of keys on the piano. Over the past five years Piano Day has grown into a global phenomenon, celebrated in countries all over the world by artists and audiences alike. The desire to celebrate this versatile instrument is growing greater than ever with more than 100 piano-related events planned this year around the world. But due to the current situation with regard to the coronavirus pandemic, Piano Day encourages all the piano lovers, organisers and promoters to cancel their events to put everyone’s health and safety first. A list of all originally planned Piano Day events is available on the official site. As this is changing day-to-day, please check each event you are interested in to see if it is cancelled, postponed or shared via livestream.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

“It was just a big experiment, the process of making this album,” Tom Misch tells Apple Music. “There wasn\'t too much thought process behind it.” On this freewheeling passion project born of breakneck jam sessions, songwriter and producer Misch unites with virtuoso jazz drummer Yussef Dayes for a sound that fluidly combines elements of jazz, hip-hop, and electronica. Freddie Gibbs—the album\'s sole vocal feature—adds menace on “Nightrider,” “The Real” riffs on Dilla-era soul chops, and “Sensational” throws a nod to the swirling solos of percussive greats. This wickedly unrestrained vision has landed the Southeast London pair a maiden release on the pioneering jazz imprint Blue Note Records. “It\'s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be associated,” says Dayes, reeling off Blue Note luminaries including Coltrane, Hancock, and Blakey. “It makes you want to work harder, because those guys, they were on another level.” The process also prompted a bout of déjà vu for Misch. “I have this memory of seeing this guy on drums, like, 15 years ago in a talent show in this school, and thinking, ‘This guy\'s insane.’ When we were working on the album, I was like, \'Shit. Are you that dude who...\' So it was kind of a weird one,” he says. “I was always performing at school,” Dayes admits. “It\'s a way for me to express what I\'m feeling. A chance for me to connect with the people that are into the music and give them some energy and vice versa. But with us two collaborating, coming from two different fields, we have to meet in the middle. It\'s give and take from both of us.” Here, the pair run through the album track by track. **What Kinda Music** Tom Misch: “This was one of the first tracks we did. I had a session with Loyle Carner in summer 2018. We were recording and I called up Yussef to try some drums on this track I was producing. He came down and recorded the drums for what is now ‘Angel,’ on Loyle\'s \[*Not Waving, But Drowning*\] album. So, he left the studio, and then Yussef and I were there for the rest of the day. The origins of \'What Kinda Music,\' \'The Real,\' and \'Storm Before the Calm\' came from that day. It was just a crazy day.” Yussef Dayes: “From there, we realized it wasn\'t a one-track collaboration. We felt like it could be a tape or something. Sometimes you collaborate and it doesn’t quite click, but if from the get-go it\'s clicking and it\'s sounding good, you know there\'s something there. It\'s a unique sound this track; I felt like that was a fresh sound that neither me or Tom had explored completely, so I wanted to see us start with the off-kilter thing.” **Festival** TM: “This was a day with me, Yussef, and a bassist, Tom Dressler. We recorded a bunch of stuff over the three days. And the basis for this song was something we recorded there. I knew I liked the vibe, but I wanted to sing on it, and it took a while to execute the vocals. It\'s about when you\'re younger, you have this natural presence as in you\'re in the *now*, generally, when you\'re young. And then you kind of lose that as you grow older. It\'s saying how you still have that, that you\'re still able to be present. Yussef was like, ‘I want to call it \"Festival Tune.\"’ So I was like, \'Fair enough.\'” YD: “This is a big tune. It sounds like it could score a David Attenborough documentary, you know? On something about the planet, for the real earth people. It\'s just emphatic. I can imagine this being performed at Glastonbury; I can hear people singing along.” **Nightrider (feat. Freddie Gibbs)** TM: “The vibe of the instrumental felt kind of woozy, a bit hazy. And I remember going on the *Knight Rider* trailer on YouTube, playing it with the music, and it was just a perfect combination. We knew we wanted to get a rapper on the record, and I wrote down a list of people that we like. I\'m just going through the list and Yussef said, \'Let\'s do Freddie Gibbs.\' I\'m really chuffed about getting him because I\'m a big fan of Freddie. It really adds a different vibe to the record.” YD: “We recorded this with a good friend of mine, \[producer and engineer\] Miles James. We were just were rocking. We recorded the drums and bass down in Eastbourne and then we came back and produced it up. It\'s the same thing again. My job is...my drumbeat should be able to give everybody the music that they hear on top of it. I just was like, \'Yeah, we\'ve got to get Freddie on this, man.\' I\'d been in contact with him already, just sending him beats, and I just thought this needed that extra, that little touch, man.” **Tidal Wave** TM: “You can just hear the rawness of it, the moments where we\'re just shouting and stuff. Really low in the mix you can hear me shout out, \'All right, now it\'s like a chorus, so play drumming.\' Because at that point, even though we were just jamming, I knew it had potential to be a song.” YD: “This was me, Tom, and Rocco Palladino on bass. We set up, pressed record, and just jammed some ideas. We did that twice on this record, and this was the second time, just three hours worth of music. It was just one of those days, man, just light up the incense and catch a vibe, man. Not even thinking. I was just trying to do some different stuff on the drums, different cymbals that I hadn\'t used before, some wood blocks and stuff, and try to switch up a bit.” **Sensational** TM: “This represents a bit of the rawness on the record. It’s just a little cut from a day of jamming, a little insight, and I hit up Tobie Tripp, he’s an amazing strings player. I got him to lay some violin on it and double up the guitar part.” YD: “I wanted to make sure there\'s skits and interludes and off-cuts on the records, because all my favorite albums, when I listen to the Fugees or D\'Angelo, those albums play with skits in between that tie it together. I think \'Sensational\' is one of those things—it\'s like some country-western shit, sort of, like some Django shit. This is, I suppose, my bag, man. This kinda shit. I\'d love to get a rapper on this for a remix maybe.” **The Real** TM: “For me, this was kind of like me going back to being a beatmaker. The drums are from that day I was in the studio with Loyle, and then I went home and I started chopping some Aretha Franklin. That\'s what I like about this one. It\'s kind of me going back to what I used to do.” YD: “This is definitely one of my favorites. It\'s from the same day as \'Angel.\' This is one of the beats from that day, and I recorded the drums and then I forgot about this. Tom went away, he put the Aretha sample to it, processed the drums a bit, and came back later. I was like, \'Wow, what\'s this? I don\'t even remember this.\' I love that kind of stuff. I love gospel music. That\'s a big influence to me, man. That\'s a dream of mine, to record with a live choir at some point, and obviously Aretha Franklin, that\'s legendary.” **Lift Off (feat. Rocco Palladino)** TM: “I linked up with Rocco through Yussef. They have a proper sort of musical bromance. And it\'s cool to play with them, because they\'re very much in sync. It\'s been interesting finding my voice within that trio. It\'s brought out something different in me.” YD: “I\'ve known Rocco for about 10 years now. I think we\'ve started performing together the last three years now. He\'s crazy, man. You always can tell, because bass players—they\'re very specific, man. He\'s definitely the best at what he does, and obviously he comes from... \[Welsh musician and producer Pino Palladino\], his dad\'s an amazing bass player, too. He knows what he\'s doing, man. Let\'s put it that way.” **I Did It for You** TM: “We just clicked record and we were jamming for a whole day. And this is one of the joints that came up in the evening. We jammed something, then we\'d go up to the control room, we listen. I remember thinking, \'Shit, that sounded really nice.\' I knew I wanted to sing on that one. I was like, \'Yeah, this is a vibe.\'” YD: “We recorded this nearly two years ago, it was one of the first tracks. I\'d been to Brazil a few years back, years ago, and I remember Tom wanting to go. I think he did in the end, so that track was kind of inspired by some of those rhythms and that kind of energy. It\'s closer to Tom\'s sound, I think.” **Last 100** TM: “I was playing some piano, messing around, Yussef was up on the drum kit. It was after a session. We\'re just messing around before we go home, and then I start playing those chords. And I recorded it on my iPhone. I was like, \'This is nice.\' We came back to it the next day and recorded the bassist. This is kind of like the love tune on the record. It\'s a summery, feel-good one.” YD: “You have the initial session and then obviously some of the tracks you need to produce up, so you spend a couple of weeks on them. Tom would write his vocals or add little synths to it, to get those sections there, but the drums are obviously the main thing you want to record and get that first. Then after that, it’s just adding the structure around it. ‘Last 100’ is definitely one of those ones we produced up and got the arrangement and added different instrumentation and backing vocals.” **Kyiv** TM: “So this one was actually recorded in London, but the live video was recorded in Kiev. That was a very, very cold day. It was about minus five degrees. And we were recording the live video for ‘Lift Off’ in this ex-community center in Kiev. It\'s an amazing old building. It looks like a Call of Duty zombie level. It was pretty cool. It was interesting to be in that part of Europe, the fashion and the architecture, ex-Soviet kind of architecture. And everyone in fur jackets and stuff. I want to go back.” YD: “It was in a mad building. It was like a freezer in there. They said we had one reel left, and we’d already wrapped up ‘Lift Off,’ then Rocco started playing these chords and we just recorded real quickly. It just came. What I like to do is still like to make it like it was a song. You play your part. The music is still the most important thing, even though you want to freestyle and you want to solo and all this stuff. You want to make a beat. You want to make something people will listen to as well. It’s just that know-how, how to, even if you are freestyling, just make it into the thing straight away, man.” **Julie Mangos** YD: “That’s our dads speaking on this one. It\'s a medley of little skits and stuff that we\'ve recorded. My dad’s talking about Deptford Market, where he used to sell Caribbean and West Indian food. He\'s describing what it was like in the market. About 20 years ago, he had a stall down there, and we used to have fruit imported and pick it up from the docks. This is just me and Tom trying to give a bit of context to where we\'re coming from. To get our dads on the record, and family involved—it\'s a touch, man.” TM: “Both our dads have been quite involved in coming down throughout making this record. Just coming and listening, giving their opinions on stuff. I called my dad, another day. Clicked record without him knowing, and I asked him what he thought of the record. So we put those on. I think my dad knew that this is something that I really wanted to do, making this record. Because I\'d tell him how excited I was about working with Yussef, and the way the tracks were sounding initially. There\'s a lot of excitement making this record. I think he sensed that.” **Storm Before the Calm (feat. Kaidi Akinnibi)** TM: “Kaidi is an amazing saxophone player. I met him when I was about 12 and he was seven or something. We met at a jazz youth club called Tomorrow’s Warriors. He was just insane at the sax at that time. Then fast-forward 10 years, I hit him up and we start jamming, and he featured on one of my tracks from \[2017 EP\] *5 Day Mischon*. And then we hit him up again, and he\'s been playing in my band, he\'s been touring with me. Thought we\'d try him on this track, and he just destroyed it.” YD: “He\'s 20 years old, and he\'s killing it already. It\'s one of the first ones we recorded as well. It\'s *that* same day, man. The same day, the \'Angel\' day, we recorded this one as well. This one’s got these dark synths, it\'s like a storm. It was always going to be the outro or the intro, but I think it just closes off with a different vibe before you check out. We were just trying to experiment with synths and the OP-1, which is this mad little synth I’ve got, and just span different sounds.”

“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”