Piccadilly Records' Top 100 Albums of 2020

Dreaming doesn’t come easy these shadowed days, which is why Strange To Explain by Woods is such a welcome turning of new colors.  It presents an extended moment of sweet reflection for the 15-year-old band, bouncing back to earth as something hopeful and weird and resolute. After quickly recording and releasing 2017’s Love Is Love in response to the tumultuous events of their (and our) 2016, Jeremy Earl and company took their time with the follow-up. Parenthood arrived, as did a short songwriting pause. The band went bicoastal when Jarvis Taveniere headed west. The result is an album that not only catches and holds and shares the light in yet another new way, but recognizes that there’s still light to be caught. A bend beyond the last bend beyond, Woods keep on changing, thoughtfully and beautifully. The colors were always there, like trees blossoming just slightly differently each season, a synesthetic message coded in slow-motion. Recorded in Stinson Beach, the California enclave where the government once tracked one of the largest LSD rings in the world only to be questioned by the neighbors as agents prowled the woods, on Strange To Explain, the familiar jangling guitars recede to the background. John Andrews’s warm keyboards and twining Mellotron rise around Earl’s songs and dance across the chord changes like warm sunlight off the Pacific. The music feels a karmic landmass away from the creepiness of the uncanny valley.  Just dig into “Can’t Get Out” or “Fell So Hard” and it’s easy to spot the affable hooks and fuzzed-out bass and third-eye winks and fun harmonies that Woods have produced reliably since way back ‘round 2004 (which, in the buzz-buzz world of psych-pop really is a grand achievement). But listen carefully, too, to the sound of our (and their) world in transition, the ambient humming of spring peepers behind “Where Do You Go When You Dream.” Especially sink into the intention-setting opening trio of songs, emerging from (and shimmering inside) an atmosphere that could only be made by musicians who’ve been working together for nearly 20 years, as Earl and Taveniere have. It’s hardly a secret language, but you try verbalizing it. Depending on where in the time-track one stands, it’s their 11th full length (not counting collaborations, split LPs, EPs, and singles), and the 99th release on Earl’s Woodsist label. By any standards, Strange To Explain is the work of a mature band, capable of both heavy atmospheric declarations like “Just To Fall Asleep” alongside extended-form pieces like the album-closing “Weekend Wind,” unfolding in layers of trumpet and vibraphone and ambient guitars and stereoscopic percussion. For contemporary heads, it can be nearly a full-time job to filter out all the bad energy being blasted through nearly all media channels from every conceivable direction. But not all media channels. The benevolent, Mellotron-dabbed dream-sounds of Strange To Explain constitute some of the more welcome transmissions on these shores in a Venusian minute. They’re sure to brighten any desert solarium, LED-lit pod, portable Bucky-dome, eco-fit Airstream, or whatever other cozy dwelling your time-mind is currently occupying. Jesse Jarnow

After spending much of 2019 on the road touring their debut EP, *No. 1*, Montreal quintet Pottery returned home a profoundly changed band. For one, the garage-rock adrenaline of that first record had given way to a cowbell-clanging funk that owed as much to the call-and-response theatrics of James Brown and block-party atmosphere of War as it did to the polyrhythmic complexity of *Remain in Light*-era Talking Heads. But more importantly, the band had fully embraced the (sur)realities of life on the road: the mind-numbing drives, the dinners of raw supermarket hot dogs, the nights spent crammed into zero-star hotel rooms. Those bonding experiences form the basis for Pottery’s full-length debut, *Welcome to Bobby’s Motel*—a concept album that doesn’t so much immerse you in a storyline as a state of mind, with the titular character serving less as a traditional protagonist than a personification of the band’s driving philosophy. “We actually conceptualized the record after we\'d already made it,” guitarist Jacob Shepansky tells Apple Music. “It just ended up culminating into a pretty good portrait of our lives at that time. We were staying in all these shitty motels with five guys in a room with two queen-size beds and one guy sleeping on the floor. The whole idea came out of just trying to make the best out of these dismal situations and just enjoy the time with your friends.” But more than just successfully bottle up Pottery’s relentless onstage energy—with interlocking tracks that suggest the whole album was recorded in a single continuous live take—*Welcome to Bobby’s Motel* also charts the band’s spiritual maturation, as frontman Austin Boylan balances his absurdist proclamations with more sobering ruminations on family, labor, and addiction. Here, Shepansky checks us into *Bobby’s Motel* with this track-by-track guide to the album. **Welcome to Bobby’s Motel** “Back in April 2019, we were touring with Viagra Boys throughout the States, and we actually opened the show with this every night. That was exactly what we wanted to use this song for: a fast show opener that just grabs people\'s attention right away.” **Hot Heater** “We wrote this song a couple of years ago, and it kind of spearheaded a lot of the funkier, dancier stuff on this record. Something clicked, and it was very easy to understand where we wanted to take it from there. This song was sort of like a precursor to \'Bobby\'s Forecast\' and \'Under the Wires\'—it was the start of that trying-to-play-funky type of deal.” **Under the Wires** “This was actually inspired by the same Viagra Boys tour, and the same sort of circumstance that the whole Bobby character is surrounded by. We were staying in Weed, California, and we had a day off, so we had this great idea to rent out a cabin in the woods. We find this cabin on Airbnb, we get there…and it turns out the guy hasn\'t been there in, like, three months and the road isn\'t even plowed. So it\'s like 8 pm, we don\'t know what we\'re gonna do. All we\'ve got is a bunch of uncooked hot dogs and hot dog buns, because our plan was to have a fire and cook hot dogs. We ended up going to a Motel 6 and cramming into there, and we had no way to cook these hot dogs. So we just ended up hanging out by the highway behind this barbed-wire fence all night, and it was very special. It was kind of like that tipping point where you no longer care.” **Bobby’s Forecast** “Austin was ad-libbing for most of this. He was very inspired by James Brown at the time, so I think that definitely had an effect on his delivery. We wanted that line \[‘Power/It doesn’t take much work’\] to sound as ambiguous as possible, and for the listener to create whatever narrative they imagine. At the time we were writing the lyrics \[in June 2019\], we were thinking about our day jobs, and how there\'s always that boss that\'s going to look down on you just because he has the power to, and there\'s always going to be somebody that\'s abusing their power in some form, whether it\'s completely pedestrian or an actual human rights violation. So we wanted to keep it as open as possible for people to create their own narratives and understand it in their own way.” **Down in the Dumps** “We almost ad-libbed the lyrics for \'Down in the Dumps\' as well. We were just riffing off of a similar idea \[as \'Bobby\'s Forecast\'\] and talking about the powers that be. And we were also doing taxes at the time, and everybody was all stressed out about whether they did their returns correctly. There\'s that line ‘Taxman, come get me,’ which started from a joke. One of us was saying to Austin, \'Oh, you might want to double-check your return and make sure everything\'s okay,\' and his response was all confident and cocky, like, ‘Come get me!’” **Reflection** “Austin wrote this about his relationship with his mom, and it\'s very personal. His vocals and lyrics all came after we had actually done the whole song. We had been practicing it for a while and we just never really came up with any melodies. We were kind of getting close to finishing the record, and Austin was like, ‘You know, I just got to do this, I got to finish this.’ So he went home for a night, we came back to our drummer Paul \[Jacobs\]’s house the next day to work, and Austin had a full page of lyrics and a melody. We asked what it was about; he said, ‘My mom,’ and we were like, ‘Perfect!’ I\'m really happy with the way that one turned out. I think it\'s going to definitely affect future records. I think we\'re more conscious about writing personal stories now.” **Texas Drums Pt I & II** “We were in Texas last year for South by Southwest, and we were playing, like, four shows in one day, and there\'s drum kits for everybody to play at each venue. So Paul was kind of like rolling the dice all day. But at one of the gigs, there was this beautiful drum kit that he just fell in love with, and it turns out it was handmade by this guy in Texas. Paul just wouldn\'t stop thinking about it and became kind of obsessed with it. He had become so engulfed in this kit that when we got home, we were working on music and we had this song, and then, in the spur of the moment, he started shouting out, \'Texas drums!\' We all really liked it, and then we just went with it. It\'s a love letter to this drum kit in Austin that Paul played for 45 minutes.” **NY Inn** “\'NY Inn\' was actually written shortly after we finished recording our first record, *No. 1*, so it preceded the whole *Bobby\'s Motel* theme by at least three years. But it\'s kind of funny that it ended up being in such a similar realm. I had an old demo of the guitar line on an old four-track of mine, and then Austin came over and we just hashed it out. And then very quickly we played it with the band and adjusted the lyrics, and we were really happy with it. We\'ve been playing it live for like three years now.” **What’s in Fashion?** “This is definitely the most on-the-nose track on the record. It\'s a culmination of living in a very gentrified neighborhood in Montreal. It was mostly just a commentary on the people that we see on the street, where you\'re like, ‘Do you have a job?’ You see the same person walking around the street most days—they\'re just cruising around and they\'re always looking good, but you\'re like, ‘What the fuck do you do?’” **Take Your Time** “When I was living in Vancouver, my mom ran a mission—it was basically a free store for the homeless in the Downtown Eastside. I would go volunteer there on weekends in high school every once in a while, so it\'s always been something that I\'ve understood, and I\'ve been just really close to it. But then you come to Montreal, and you just see people gorging themselves and it\'s like this free-for-all. \'Take Your Time\' was about going from that point \[of witnessing rampant addiction in Vancouver\] to being a twentysomething in the bar having a great time, but what does it take to get to that other position? And how far do you have to be disillusioned with reality in order to get there? It\'s trying to understand what it takes for that sort of an addiction to spiral out of control.” **Hot Like Jungle** “Our first version of this was much more profane. It was me and Austin basically making this Austin Powers-esque cheesy love song. We sent it to Tim \[Putnam\], the head of Partisan Records, and he laughed…and then he was like, ‘Okay, you\'re going to change this, right?’ But we got somewhat attached to the song—not for the content, but just for the phrasing. And then when we were recording, \'Hot Like Jungle\' was on the back burner the whole time, because I was the only one really pushing to get it going, because I had this idea in my head of where we could take it. But we tried so many different iterations of that song when we were doing demos that everybody was just ready to check out. And then we really slowed it down, and then everybody was really happy about it. And Paul ended up just penning a couple of lines about him coming home from work—when me and him were working construction—and throwing down his keys and giving his girlfriend a hug. I don\'t know how he got in that headspace when we were recording, but c\'est la vie!”

The debut album from Pottery, Welcome to Bobby's Motel, arrives June 26. Produced by Jonathan Schenke. Who is “Bobby,” you ask? Enter Pottery. Enter Paul Jacobs, Jacob Shepansky, Austin Boylan, Tom Gould, and Peter Baylis. Enter the smells, the cigarettes, the noise, their van Mary, their friend Luke, toilet drawings, Northern California, Beatles accents, Taco Bell, the Great Plains, and hot dogs. Enter love and hate, angst and happiness, and everything in between. Beginning as an inside joke between the band members, Bobby and his “motel” have grown into so much more. They’ve become the all-encompassing alt-reality that the band built themselves, for everyone else. So, in essence, Bobby is Pottery and his motel is wherever they are.  But really, Bobby is a pilot, a lumberjack, a stay at home dad, and a disco dancer that never rips his pants. He's a punching bag filled with comic relief. He laughs in the face of day-to-day ambiguity, as worrying isn’t worth it to Bobby. There’s a piece of him in everyone, there to remind us that things are probably going to work out, maybe. He’s you. He’s him. He’s her. He’s them. Bobby is always there, painted in the corner, urging you to relax and forget about your useless worries. And his motel? Well, the motel is life. It might not be clean, and the curtains might not shut all the way. The air conditioner might be broken, and the floors might be stained. But that’s okay, because you don’t go to Bobby’s Motel for the glamour and a good night’s sleep, the minibar, or the full-service sauna. You go to Bobby’s Motel to feel, to escape, to remember, to distract. You go for the late nights and early mornings, good times and the bad. You might spend your entire life looking for Bobby’s Motel and just when you think you will never find it, you realize you’ve been there all along. It’s filthy and amazing and you dance, and you love it. The 11 songs on ‘Welcome to Bobby’s Motel’ don’t just invite you to move your body; they command you to. Fusing reckless, manic energy with painstaking precision, the record is part post-punk, part art-pop, and part dance floor acid trip, hinting at everything from Devo to Gang of Four as it boldly careens through genres and decades. The music is driven by explosive drums and off-kilter guitar riffs that drill themselves into your brain, accented with deep, funky grooves and rousing gang vocals. The production is similarly raw and wild, suggesting an air of anarchy that belies the music’s careful architecture and meticulous construction. The result is an album full of ambitious, complex performances that exude joy and mayhem in equal measure, a collection that’s alternately virtuosic, chaotic, and pure fun.

In 2018, Moaning emerged as a fully formed post-punk behemoth. The LA-based trio was bred in DIY venues, honing in on a modern goth update on traditional ’70s and ’80s post-punk. Their self-titled debut LP recalls a concoction of Television and Siouxsie & The Banshees, and on their second LP, they shed some of those more obvious tropes in favor of something more original and enthralling. *Uneasy Laughter* is at once more streamlined than its predecessor and more complex. Pascal Stevenson’s basslines now coil around Sean Solomon’s vocals without ever suffocating the darkly observant lyrics. “We used to care, but we forgot,” he sings on the album’s opening track “Ego.” Later, he adds, “Narcissism is not empathy.” Drummer Andrew MacKelvie’s performances here are more often programmed than not, but the sterility of the electronic percussion lends the album an air of foreboding.

What happens when an abrasive rock trio trades guitars for synths, cranks up the beats and leans into the everyday anxieties of simply being a functioning human in the 21st century? The answer is Uneasy Laughter, the sensational second Sub Pop release from Los Angeles-based Moaning. Vocalist/guitarist Sean Solomon, bassist/keyboardist Pascal Stevenson and drummer Andrew MacKelvie have been friends and co-conspirators amid the fertile L.A. DIY scene for more than a decade. They are also immersed in other creative pursuits — Solomon is a noted illustrator, art director and animator, while Stevenson and MacKelvie have played or worked behind the boards with acts such as Cherry Glazerr, Sasami and Surf Curse. On Uneasy Laughter, they’ve tackled challenges both personal and universal the only way they know how: by talking about how they’re feeling and channeling those emotions directly into their music. “We’ve known each other forever and we’re really comfortable trying to express where we’re at. A lot of bands aren’t so close,” says MacKelvie. Adds Solomon, who celebrated a year of sobriety during the Uneasy Laughter sessions, “Men are conditioned not to be vulnerable or admit they’re wrong. But I wanted to talk openly about my feelings and mistakes I’ve made.” Moaning’s 2018’s self-titled Sub Pop debut featured songs mostly written in practice or brought in already complete by individual band members. It garnered acclaim from Pitchfork, Stereogum and Los Angeles Times, who observed, “Moaning craft anxious music for an increasingly nervous local scene.” But Uneasy Laughter is a collaborative breakthrough which significantly brightens Moaning’s once claustrophobic sound, again abetted by producer/engineer Alex Newport (At The Drive-In, Bloc Party, Melvins). The trio points to first single “Ego,” which features a costume-heavy video directed by Ambar Navarro, as an embodiment of this evolution. Solomon admits Uneasy Laughter could have gone in quite another direction had he not gotten sober and educated himself on such core subjects as gender and mental health. “I did a lot of reading in the tour van — authors like bell hooks, Mark Fisher, and Alain de Botton, all really inspired me. I don’t want to be the person who influences young people to go get high and become cliche tragic artists,” he says. “What I’d rather convey to people is that they’re not alone in what they think and how they feel. ‘Ego’ specifically and the album overall is about those themes — letting go of your bullshit so you can help other people and be present.” “We want to be part of a community,” he adds. “I wrote online about being sober for a year, and I had kids from all over writing and asking for advice. One of them said, ‘For the first time I can remember, I didn’t drink last night.’ I thought, for once, maybe we did something besides sell a record. That’s a win. That’s incredibly exciting.”

A Chanukah Celebration. Executive produced by Mach-Hommy. Beats: Tracks 1, 5, 7, 12 - Tha God Fahim Tracks 2, 4 6, 9, 11 - Quelle Chris Track 3 - Preservation Track 8 - Edan Track 10 - Cohen Beats Cover art: FWMJ

It’s auspicious that Sonic Boom—the solo project and nom-de-producer of Peter Kember (Spectrum, Spacemen 3)—returns in 2020 with its first new LP in three decades. Kember’s drawn to the year’s numerological potency, and this intentionality shines into every corner of All Things Being Equal. It’s a meditative, mathematical record concerned with the interconnectedness of memory, space, consumerism, consciousness—everything. Through regenerative stories told backwards and forwards, Kember explores dichotomies zen and fearsome, reverential of his analog toolkit and protective of the plants and trees that support our lives. Sonic Boom’s second album and first for Carpark began in 2015 as electronic jams. The original sketches of electronic patterns, sequenced out of modular synths, were so appealing that Stereolab’s Tim Gane encouraged Kember to release them instrumentally. “I nearly did,” confesses Kember, “but the vibe in them was so strong that I couldn't resist trying to ice the cake.” Three years later, a move to Portugal saw him dusting off the backing tracks, adding vocals inspired by Sam Cooke, The Sandpipers, and the Everly Brothers (which he admits “don’t go far from the turntable pile”), as well as speculative, ominous spoken word segments. His new home Sintra’s parks and gardens provided a different visual context for Kember’s thoughtful observations, and he thematically incorporated sunshine and nature as well as global protests into the ten resulting tracks. “Music made in sterility sounds sterile,” he says, “And that is my idea of hell.” Over the vivid, calculating arps of opener “Just Imagine,” Kember nudges listeners to do as the title suggests. It’s based on a story he read about a boy who healed his cancer by picturing himself as a storm cloud, raining out his illness. “The Way That You Live,” a rollicking drone powered by drum machine rattles and bright chord beds, morphs political distrust into a revolutionary mantra about ethical living. “I try and live my life by voting every day with what I do and how I do it, who I do it with and the love that I can give them along the way,” offers Kember. An unusually curated gear list accompanies each song, unexpected layers reinforcing the monophonic skeletons. Mystery soundscapes and grinding sweeps were teased from EMS synths, synonymous with and evocative of ‘60s BBC scoring and ‘70s Eno. Pacing basslines oscillating into warbling heartbeats came from a cheap ‘80s Yamaha. A modern OP-1 generated subtle kicks and eerie theremins, while his toy Music Modem—an unused holdover from sessions Kember produced for Beach House and MGMT—finally found its recorded home. It’s rare to see liner notes where synthesizers rather than humans are credited (other than guest vocal stints from “co-conspirators” Panda Bear and Britta Phillips), but Kember is masterful at finding the unique personality in his machines. “I tried to find the deepest essence of the instruments & let them play,” he offers. What emerges from these considerations on technology and humanity is a honed collection both philosophical and grooving, spacious even as it fills to its brim. It’s distinctly Kember—more than that, it’s distinctly Sonic Boom.

Wajatta — the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada — return with their second album, “Don’t Let Get You Down”, to be released by Brainfeeder on 28 February 2020. Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic music, beat-boxer/comedian/musician Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. Where the duo’s debut album “Casual High Technology” hinted at the broad stylistic possibilities inherent in the marriage of Watts’ elastic, soul-stirring vocals and Tejada’s layered, melodically inventive productions, “Don’t Let Get You Down” makes good on that promise. The first single from new 11-song LP, released today, is the infectious title track. With its brightly pulsing synths and whistling hook, ‘Don’t Let Get You Down’ is, in the words of Reggie Watts, “the poppiest song we’ve ever done.” Wajatta (pronounced wa-HA-ta) is a mash-up of the artists’ last names. Having grown up with similar musical influences, Austrian-born Tejada and German-born Watts draw from their love of electronic music. Exploring the intersection between influences and innovation, the two describe Wajatta's music as “electronic dance music with its roots in Detroit techno, Chicago house, '70s funk and New York hip hop.” It’s a sound that is both familiar and wholly original — and, like all great dance music, ultimately life-affirming, as Watts vocalizes, sometimes without words, the joyful energy of his and Tejada’s funky, shape-shifting productions. “That’s the great thing about working with John,” Watts says with an infectious grin. “He’s so steeped in the history of this music. I just pick up on that and run with it.” Wajatta builds most tracks from scratch, bouncing ideas off one another from initial spark to finished product. It’s all done face-to-face: “We never just share files,” Tejada notes. They also try to keep their sessions as spontaneous as possible, in a never-ending quest to, as Watts puts it, “capture the freshness.” As a result, the 11 tracks on “Don’t Let Get You Down” crackle with the energy of fresh ideas captured at the moment of inspiration. It’s electronic music made organically, from two masters at the top of their respective games. Their organic approach extends to their live shows, at which Tejada rebuilds the duo’s tracks on his samplers and synths, while the multi-octave Watts conjures vocal symphonies out of little more than a loop station and a delay pedal. They’ve performed at Movement in Detroit, MUTEK in Montreal, CRSSD Festival in San Diego, two Dirtybird shows (BBQ in 2018 and Campout in 2019), in addition to a live studio session for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. The duo’s live energy is captured on the final track of the album ‘All I Need Is You’, a fully improvised song that was part of a spontaneously created 90-minute performance for Club Something at The Sweat Spot, an L.A. dance studio run by choreographer Ryan Heffington. It’s a six-minute snapshot of the improvisational brilliance that lies at the heart of everything Wajatta does — an approach summed up in Watts’ off-the-cuff one-liner near the track’s end: “We’re making everything here for you from scratch — just to ensure maximum freshness.”

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.

Order the CD/Vinyl here: shop.tapeterecords.com/harmonious-thelonious-plong.html

“I don’t know where it went, really,” Lianne La Havas tells Apple Music of the time between the release of her stunning second album *Blood*, in 2015, and her self-titled third record, delivered in 2020. “Lots was happening—and nothing.” In 2016 she toured with Coldplay (“Something I couldn’t not do”) and Leon Bridges (“extremely fun”), after which La Havas thought she’d settle down to write album number three. Two years later, she was still drawing a blank. “I was trying really hard, but I realized I couldn’t force it,” she says. “I just had to live my life a bit.” The inspiration came, at last, in 2019, in the form of a series of “big life changes—stuff in my personal life, family, relationships.” *Lianne La Havas* was finished before the year’s end. “Once I made those changes, it was the catalyst for the clarity of what I needed to write and how I needed to do it. Once I knew what to do, the process was quick.” The result is a record that harnesses the power of the bold, bass-imbued sounds of *Blood*—and then takes it up a level. The beats are heavier and the influences wider-ranging, from R&B (“my musical upbringing”) to Brazilian music (La Havas has been an avid fan for the last decade) and Radiohead, whose song “Weird Fishes” the singer gives her powerful take on midway through the album. “I feel like this is the first time my influences are more defined,” says La Havas. “But the album still sounds like me. It’s maybe the most me I’ve ever sounded, which is what I want.” *Lianne La Havas* is, too, a moving exploration of those seismic shifts that prompted the record’s inception and, in particular, the life cycle of a relationship. There’s the heady infatuation of those early days (“Read My Mind”), the devastating moment cracks begin to show (“Paper Thin”), and, finally, the slow, precarious process of putting yourself back together after a painful end (see “Sour Flower,” the album’s gorgeous, sprawling, jazz-imbibed outro). “This is my first album that is actually a full story where you can hear a beginning, middle, and an end,” says La Havas. She adds, as reassurance, “I’m all right now. Get to the last song on this album and you will know that I am totally fine!” More than that, this is the most self-assured the singer has ever sounded. “I’d lost a bit of confidence and got insecure about everything,” she says. “As I completed each piece of the story on this album, it made me a bit stronger. With each song, I realized that I could do it—that I could finish something I was proud of.” Let La Havas guide you through her triumphant album, track by track. **Bittersweet** “I started this song a long time ago and it was actually one of the contenders for my second album. This album is plotting a timeline, and lyrically this song is an overview of what’s to come. And the entire album is bittersweet—if it wasn’t self-titled, it would be called *Bittersweet*. Sonically, it’s also quite a statement. There’s nothing else really like it on the album, and it felt appropriate to start with this. As for the repetition of lyrics in this song: I really like poetry, and I was influenced by some of the poetry I was reading at the time and the idea of repeating a word to give it this whole different meaning.” **Read My Mind** “When I made this song, it made me feel slightly intoxicated. I wanted it to be reminiscent of that—like a night out where you meet someone and there\'s this hazy, wondrous, excited feeling that you can\'t quite describe. I worked with \[British songwriter and producer\] Bruno Major on this. He\'s just the most amazing guitarist, and when I heard the music, it just made me feel like I was on a date. So it had to be about what it\'s about. It’s got humor and lightness, but I wanted to be very literal in the right way about the overwhelming urge to give yourself away.” **Green Papaya** “A love letter, basically. You’ve got one another now and you want to make it a thing—to solidify the commitment in some way. It’s not really about physical love—it’s about making a home and doing all those things that come after the flirtatious infatuation. It\'s like, ‘Actually this could be a really great thing. And I want you to know that I believe it could be that.’ The whole track is very vulnerable—it’s hard to say those things for real at the best of times. That’s why sonically it felt best not to have any drums. I gave all the types of production that you can do a fair shot, but it just wasn’t the same.” **Can’t Fight** “There’s a little bit more humor here. It’s like when your conscience is talking to you. And because of the sound of the lilting guitar, it always felt like a cartoon conscience to me. It feels very animated, but with some quite serious themes at the center of it. I just wasn’t done being happy yet in this song. I was still very optimistic and everything is still pretty good. The music makes you bound a bit. I like how the ending came together—I don’t really do a lot of strings, and I’ve never been a string person. But with this one, because it’s so light-sounding with that quite serious content in the lyrics, I thought the strings brought that serious element to it. I think it ended up being the perfect balance.” **Paper Thin** “The very first song written for this album, but one of the last to be finished. I was falling asleep four years ago and I just heard that guitar part. It was like, ‘Should I get up? Should I record this? Should I just sleep on it?’ But I got up and thought about the lyric ‘paper thin.’ I heard all the chords for each section of the song, and I had the first line. It stayed that way for a long time. Anytime I would get a moment alone—say on a plane or something—the lyrics would start to make themselves apparent for the song. I think this one is maybe the most intimate and most vulnerable that I get, because the person is talking really candidly with the other person in the song. The pain is starting to show about how hard it can be when the person you\'re trying to love is maybe not in the same space as you, or maybe hasn\'t dealt with some things that they might need to deal with. I\'m not saying I\'m perfect. I\'m not saying the narrator is perfect. But it\'s recognizing the pain of somebody you really care about and wanting to help them, but not knowing how. Again, I thought sonically it would be appropriate to just have barely anything on it. And it\'s really all about the lyrics and the groove.” **Out of Your Mind (Interlude)** “This is the descent. When you go, ‘You know what? This isn’t for me.’ It doesn’t really have any words, it’s just sounds, but they’re murmurings of trying to work it out and then something sort of clicks. It’s the moment you flip. I wanted there to be a definite line under the first section of the album. When I first made an album, I had no idea how you would pick the order. How do you put your first album together? How do you know what to say first and last? And a piece of advice that I was given was, just think of it like it\'s a vinyl. Side A and side B. So every album now, I\'ve always just thought of side A and side B. And this one is the first one that is actually a full story that you can have a beginning, middle, and end. And for me, that is the middle, the absolute middle.” **Weird Fishes** “I sat and the looked at the lyrics to this song—which I love—and they felt really appropriate to what was happening in my life. Even the final lyric—‘I’ll hit the bottom and escape’—felt totally where I was at. The first time I played this song was at Glastonbury back in 2013 with my band. Somebody put it on YouTube, and I just loved this version. I was so happy with our arrangement. We’re not the same anymore, but we’re all still mates, so it was a lovely memento of that time we had together. I recorded this with a new band, and from that day I was like, ‘This is obviously how I’ve got to do the rest of the album: with my band, all in a room.’ We all get on, they\'re all sick musicians. So that\'s how it happened really. It just sort of all clicked in my head and everything felt right lyrically and with the personnel.” **Please Don’t Make Me Cry** “This is a loop and it\'s nice, because I got to explore that hip-hop way of writing, that R&B, which I just love. I grew up on all of that stuff. I love how it makes me sing too. I did it with a dear friend of mine, \[US musician\] Nick Hakim. He’s an incredible, humble guy with an incredible voice, and he’s maybe one of the best songwriters out there. I could spend days with him. I was getting frustrated with my lack of output and thought, ‘F\*\*k it. I’m going to New York and I’m going to see Nick.’ I was there for three weeks or so and did a bunch of songs. This one felt special and just said everything it needed to. He has amazing instruments available, amazing textures. And he\'s just such a brilliant producer. I just love every single choice of sound he had. I was just like, yeah, that\'s great. So this song has ended up quite thick in texture, but I love that, because it\'s quite contrasting with the rest of it and I really love that style. I was able to just chuck loads of stuff at it, and it never felt crowded.” **Seven Times** “My Blu Cantrell moment. Again, it’s that R&B which was a really big part of my musical upbringing. I was on a bit of a journey, I think, at this point, and I was finding my confidence and finding my own voice again. I was having an okay time. I was feeling very free and feeling like I’d come home to something or from somewhere and then just dancing in my house to all the music I listened to when I was 12. And then at the same time, again, I was listening to loads of Brazilian music. For me, this song is all my favorite R&B and all my favorite Brazilian music merged. And then I also got to give a piece of my mind in the lyrics. Once the demo was made, my band did their thing on it. I just love the groove, I love the chords, I love the melody. I love the lyrics. I love everything about it. I love the flute solo. I wanted to say that even though this thing has happened, it doesn’t mean that I’m completely out of the woods. It’s an ongoing process of self-care and getting yourself back on your feet after a bad thing.” **Courage** “Milton Nascimento, one of my favorite Brazilian artists, has an album called *Courage*. And during one of my darker times over the last few years, a friend of mine recommended that album to me. And then I wrote this song, and it wasn\'t going to be called that for a while. But then that word is just such a good word. I guess the song takes you to the most vulnerable point of just admitting that you\'re lonely and it\'s really hard and it feels like the pain is never going to end—even if it might\'ve been your decision. It was a particularly confusing type of pain. The music was written with a friend of mine, Joe Harrison, who played bass on ‘Paper Thin’ too. He\'s just an amazing guitarist and songwriter. During those five years where everything and nothing was happening, I was doing a writing camp—I think, basically, my label panicked and wanted to give me the tools to try and make music. I ended up in the studio with lots of incredible musicians, but not much of it was right. One day, I remember I was feeling particularly alone in this process and I called Joe. I was like, ‘Hey, are you in LA right now? Please will you come to the studio?’ And I made everyone get out of the room so that me and Joe could just be in the studio together. And we just wrote that thing in about 10 minutes. That was my piece of beautiful treasure from that weird time creatively that I was having.” **Sour Flower** “‘Sour flower’ is a phrase my great-grandmother used to say. Meaning ‘That\'s your sour flower, that\'s your problem, you deal with it.’ She was Jamaican and would say stuff like that, and I’d be like, ‘What does that mean?’ Later on, I was talking to Matt Hales, who I write a lot with, about her old phrases. We always wanted to get one of them onto a song. And that one just seemed appropriate. It\'s your journey, it\'s your issue, your cross to bear. For me, this song is all about the self-love and the self-care to restore yourself after whatever monumental derailment. I think it\'s ultimately a positive ending. But also, I wanted to have that long outro as well, to represent the ongoing work that the person is doing on themselves to improve things. The song is fully live—we all were playing together in the room, and it just feels like I should have done that earlier in my career. Of course there were some changes and then I was like, ‘No, we have to have that very first version, please.’ I\'m glad that it ended up as it was on the day that we did it.”

GoGo Penguin’s self-titled fourth album together—and third on the iconic Blue Note label—is reflective of their evolution as a band. “We’ve never sat down as a band and said this is the kind of music that we’re trying to make, but this album was the closest we\'ve gotten to achieving a kind of idea that we set out for,” pianist Chris Illingworth tells Apple Music. “We had a lot more time last year to be able to rehearse and experiment than we have had in the past, and everyone’s voice was heard.” The difference in pace means that the mercurial sound of the Manchester jazz trio—Rob Turner plays drums and Nick Blacka plays bass—shifts into something more playful, marked by a greater sense of experimentation through found sounds and innovative techniques, deconstructing their own musical training to unearth new approaches. “It\'s difficult to kind of find that space to always be new in the way that you think,” Illingworth says. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve been thinking about what we could add to our instruments that’s out of the box, and play electronic ideas acoustically.” Thematically, it\'s abstract enough to leave enough space for listeners to interpret what they want and need from the sound. And yet, it’s still an honest offering that conveys the emotions attending the band’s own personal experiences whilst pertinent worldly observations shape and color the tracks. Read more about Illingworth’s thoughts on each track here. **1\_#** “We wanted to incorporate the atmosphere of where we were and the sounds in and around the studio. We found an old pedal organ and pressed the pedals to make it sound like creaky breathing. There’s the sound of kids playing at a school near to the studio, pool balls being thrown around a pool table, a car being driven over some gravel, magnetic fields, and so much more. It was really fun trying to find sounds that weren’t just piano, drums, and bass, and we tried to give the sounds shape to echo the contours of the piano, gradually building to make you feel like this is the start of a journey.” **Atomised** “The drumbeat that Rob had written was actually inspired by UK garage. When we combined the two, I started to make the piano parts a bit more classical, like Debussy, and then we just waited until Nick started playing this dubby bassline in the middle of it all, and that pulled things together. It was a case of experimenting and thinking about where we wanted to go, finding other ideas that were floating around, which all kind of coalesced to become the one track. ‘Atomised’ felt like a good fit \[to describe the process\].” Signal in the Noise “I\'ve always wanted to kind of know what\'s true, to be a realist. I was reading a book called *The Signal and the Noise* \[by political forecaster Nate Silver\], which looks at how all the information is there if you look in the right way and if you can avoid allowing your biases to get in the way of judgment. Everywhere in the world, misinformation is being spread—people call it fake news, or propaganda. It\'s just a shame that often it\'s very difficult to see behind all of this noise that people create to try and hide the truth. The way that people can treat each other with such disrespect and be so harmful to each other—often that\'s happening because of this combination of fear and misinformation. If people were a little more open-minded and looked for the truth, and were worried less about what the truth might mean for themselves, it might be better in general. It\'s getting into that realm of being incredibly optimistic and trying to look for a utopia!” **Open** “Originally, this was a sketch by Rob that was very electronic: The drums were really grainy, compressed, distorted, and very aggressive. In experimenting with synths to flesh out the body of the piece, the beat became a lot softer, and that came from asking ourselves how we could play this electronic sound acoustically. We were asking ourselves, ‘How can we get out of that place of sticking with the same sort of structures? How can we look at something that feels like it starts somewhere, but then ends somewhere totally different?’ Because, like in life, we\'re going through all these experiences. You get to the end and there might be these echoes of something from the beginning, but ultimately, you\'ve gone somewhere new.” **F Maj Pixie** “It\'s not actually an F major, but we won’t tell anyone that—it\'s *rooted* in F. It reminded us originally of the Pixies, and that style of rock. We tried to combine some of what Rob and I do into these glitches that sound almost like they\'re a single percussive instrument. And then I’m playing this loop at the core of it and seeing how far we could develop an idea that revolves around this constant thing in the middle—like a trance-like drone, keeping that going, and then having all these \[elements\] work around that.” **Kora** “When I sit at the piano, it\'s easy to just go to the same kind of melodic ideas or just the same physical way of moving around the piano, so I thought: look elsewhere. I love the kora as an instrument. It\'s beautiful, especially albums by Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté. The \[kora\] patterns don’t translate very easily into the piano; they’re quite electronic in the way they feel—it\'s quite percussive, rather than being melodic in a normal piano sense. It fit well with this punchy electronic beat that Rob had written. Then there are these longer melodic lines that I’d worked on weaving into the bassline that Nick plays, to emulate that fluid feeling of when you hear a kora play. So it was exploring how to play something percussively, but still letting it feel lyrical and vocal.” **Totem** “This started off as a peaceful track, then we opted to make it as aggressive as it could possibly go. It’s really fun to play—we were all right at our limit of what we were physically capable of playing. Nick was reading Grayson Perry’s work, which looked at the idea of people finding groups, finding their identity and solidarity in the way they might think about ideas and find comfort in agreeing with each other. ‘Totem’ is about the objects that become a part of that. We\'re fascinated by the idea of how something can be both positive and negative at the same time. You can have groups that can bring people together, but \[others that\] can also cause isolation and a sense of ‘us and them’; you see how divided it can make people. And then there are just harmful beliefs. If groups come together purely in the hate, disrespect, or mistreatment of others, that\'s where the problems lie. It\'s not a political song—just something we\'re considering without realizing the implication it might have in these times.” **Embers** \"We were trying to find a way that we could create something that felt big and large in the way that it sounds—but without just playing loudly. With this we wanted to create something that felt almost lazy, like sitting back and relaxing and letting it wash over you rather than something that was more direct. We wanted to make sure that the album was balanced in its progression. It\'s like life with its ups and downs—it was nice to have a track like this where we could create that space.” **To the Nth** “This track is a lot more like what we\'ve done in the past, but again, it was us really trying to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. The structure is a bit more traditional: There’s an A section, which leads into a bridge, a piano solo, before revisiting the A section near the end. There were fragments that each of us brought, but we really just had fun by jamming ideas together.” **Don’t Go** “Nick came up with the melody, and as soon as he played it, I thought it was perfect. He takes up the vocal melody here, almost as though the bass is trying to speak and tell a story at the end of the album. The piano at the end is almost like an echo, playing something that isn’t the same, but almost repeating ideas as if in agreement with him. Here we had things like drawing pins stuck in the piano hammers and gaffer tape stuck on the piano strings to create the sound. Rob was playing effects by laying underneath the piano and doing drum rolls softly on the soundboard to create a kind of thunder. We recorded on binaural mics, and at the end of the session, Brendan Williams, our producer, lifted the \[mic\] head away, walked out of the room, and closed the door. We wanted to make it feel like you were there with us.”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

The album cuts and discrete singles that formed KAYTRANADA’s 2016 debut LP, *99.9%*, established the Montreal producer/DJ as a true champion of the underground. It wasn’t just evident in his features—which included UK garage/R&B singer Craig David, drummer/producer Karriem Riggins, and jazz experimenters BADBADNOTGOOD, to illustrate his stylistic range—but in the way he could synthesize those artists’ sounds into an amalgam of hip-hop, house, and soul that was both danceable and off-balance. When *99.9%* won that year’s Polaris Music Prize, it was clear that the Haiti-born KAYTRANADA, aka Louis Kevin Celestin, wouldn’t stay underground for much longer. His follow-up, *BUBBA*, might level up the guest list, but KAYTRANADA\'s guiding principles remain uncompromised. “I’m not trying to rebrand a sound, hoping to get a session \[with a high-profile artist\],” he tells Apple Music. Where KAYTRANADA goes, the vocalists follow, whether that’s Estelle punctuating the low-slung, lo-fi beat of “Oh No,” Pharrell getting gleefully lost in the slow-winding funk of “Midsection,” or Tinashe gliding over a loping house track. His instrumentals—all swervy synths, rubbery bass, drums that rush and drag, and filter sweeps in the French-touch tradition—find him homing in on his singular club sound even more. KAYTRANADA is so deeply committed to keeping a groove going that even a tune about securing one’s finances (“10%,” on which Kali Uchis manages to find a rhyme for “residuals”) can’t kill the vibe.

Autechre albums are like language immersion programs: At first they don’t make sense, but listen close and familiar shapes emerge. Not that *SIGN* is accessible per se: We’re still talking about something closer to computer programming than what most people would consider music. But for a group that can be almost mythically forbidding (2016’s four-hour-long—and 12-hours-dense—*elseq*), *SIGN* is almost pop. Thirty years in and the UK production duo’s roots still show: Hip-hop on “M4 Lema,” house on “psin AM,” far-out synth soundtracks on “F7” and “Metaz form8.” But it all remains deconstructed and once removed. Most music depends on memories of something you’ve heard before. With Autechre, you can feel your brain stretch as you listen. Normally they sound like they’re pushing forward or settling in. With *SIGN*, it’s both.

Well here we go - it took 6 years and 300 gigs around the world before we went and cut a proper LP for you finally. Here's 10 songs, blue album stylee, we hope you enjoy them, we think it's our best stuff until the next one comes out. See you out there when this pandemic ends. FFO - Hot Snakes, Sleep, Sabbath, Black Flag, Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Meatbodies, Dinosaur Jr. & Can

Darkstar’s second album, 2013’s *News From Nowhere*, marked a shift from brooding bass music to feathery electronic pop, but on 2015’s *Foam Island*, the UK duo made an even bigger conceptual leap, lacing hazy synths and vocals with snippets of young people sharing their hopes and fears. Five years later, *Civic Jams* speaks more obliquely to the changes that the UK has undergone since then. It’s not an explicitly political album; their vocals, which often bear an echo-soaked resemblance to Arthur Russell, can be difficult to tease out of the murk, but the omnipresent air of exhaustion and melancholy is unmistakable. Darkstar’s Aiden Whalley and James Young have described *Civic Jams* as a response to Brexit, and you can hear the sense of generational unease in the weary nostalgia of a song like “30,” a downcast reverie about long-ago dance floors, or “Text,” in which church organs and bicycle bells underpin the doleful refrain, “Just like a TV show.” In moments like this, the principal themes of the album become clear. It’s about finding community when the world around seems to be dissolving; it’s about finding a solid foothold in a kaleidoscope of screens flashing competing opinions. The sense of anxiety is real, but the closing “Blurred,” with its soft, wordless choir, offers solace in the form of a requiem for all that has been lost.

Field Music’s new release is “Making A New World”, a 19 track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels. The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath.” If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told. The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts - a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum administrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.

As a kid in the late ’60s, Wayne Coyne lived in fear of losing his oldest brother to drugs. “A lot of times, when he left the house on his motorcycle, I just thought, ‘He’s going to crack,’” the Flaming Lips frontman tells Apple Music. “If he didn\'t come home ’til 4:00, I would literally be up in my bed, scared that he was dead somewhere. That’s a real thing.” The Lips’ 16th studio LP is a haunting exploration of how we see the world as children and adults, high and sober, innocent and experienced—and its cover is a photo of Coyne’s brother in 1968. Featuring guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves, it’s also—by Flaming Lips standards—a song-oriented reimagining of American classic rock that’s inspired, in part, by a passage in the late Tom Petty’s biography about Petty and his band Mudcrutch stopping to record in Coyne’s native Oklahoma in 1974, as they traveled cross-country to make a go of it in LA. “There\'s never been anybody who’s ever uncovered it or ever noticed it or anything,” Coyne says of the Tulsa session. “But in that little gap, I wondered what that music would have been. So \[multi-instrumentalist\] Steven \[Drozd\] and I just took it further. Like, ‘What if Tom Petty and his band would have run into my older brother, if my brother went up there and they all got addicted to drugs and they got caught up in all this violence and they never became Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, but they made this very sad, fucked-up, beautiful record in Tulsa?’ And then we said, ‘Let\'s make that record.’ Here, Coyne tells the story of every song therein. **Will You Return / When You Come Down** “A lot of music is trying to tell you, ‘Dude, go blow your mind.’ And ‘Being insane is great.’ Steven and I\'ve always been like, ‘Dude, I think I\'m insane anyway.’ And I think we\'re glad to finally be embarrassed enough or old enough or whatever it is to say, ‘Yeah, we\'re singing about drugs.’ Part of it is our friends that have died from crashing their car. Part of it is our friends that have died from drug overdoses. And a part of the song is survivor’s guilt, while part of me was glad that I wasn\'t the one who died. But now as you look at yourself later, you’re like, ‘I wish was there with you.’ I think when you\'re a teenager and your friends die in a car accident, part of you has this fantasy you\'ll see them in heaven. Or if we live a thousand lives, you’ll be something else and I\'ll meet you again. And all of these are just fantasies, so you really have to face the horrible truth that you\'re never going to see that person again. The song’s you singing to these ghosts and hoping that they understand how you feel about it.” **Watching the Lightbugs Glow** “We like to always leave room for instrumentals. We like that it just floats along. You don\'t have to listen to it so intensely. Once we convinced Kacey Musgraves to sing on one track \[‘God and the Policeman’\], I thought, ‘Well, while we\'re there, why don\'t we try to do two songs?’ So we came up with another song, and then we end up coming up with a third song \[‘Flowers of Neptune 6’\], and she ended up liking all the things that we presented. I asked her about the song \[2018’s\] ‘Mother.’ She talked about this idea of light bugs, and they were floating around in her yard and she got one with a leaf and she put it in the house and she played some music for it and they danced together. All of this was on a very pleasant acid trip, but she did say that not all of her acid trips were pleasant—she understood sometimes they go horribly bad. While we were coming with this thing, I thought, well, let\'s just have her do kind of a wordless melodic thing, and we would let it be about that story. We could relate to it and she could relate to it and it would be real. And it would be true. I think that\'s why we put it second. Like, ‘Let\'s just not be in such a hurry to say more stuff, just let it just float along with the mood.’ But I wouldn\'t have done it without her. We would have never done it as one of us singing. It was made for her.” **Flowers of Neptune 6** “‘Flowers of Neptune’ came from an insanely great demo that Steven made, but it was long enough that we could envision it being a bigger, more epic song. As we started to make it, we were like, ‘I don\'t think it\'s as good if it keeps going too long, because it\'s got such a crescendo of emotion. Let’s just make it two songs.’ One, ‘Lightbugs,’ could be a little bit more fun and kind of floaty and melancholy—but optimistic. The other, ‘Flowers of Neptune,’ could be more powerful and personal. There is some connection to that idea that our older brothers and their friends, they were these characters that we didn\'t relate to. They were crazy and they were going to go to jail. They were going to go off to war, they were going to get in a fight, they were going to get in a motorcycle accident and we weren’t. And then at some point we realized their life and ours is the same. I am me because of them. You can\'t really express it, but in a song you can, because it\'s big and it\'s crescendos and it\'s emotional and you find somehow you\'re able to express this thing that we would never, ever consider saying to our real brothers, in real life. You\'d just be too embarrassed. But music wants you to go all the way.” **Dinosaurs on the Mountain** “I remember being in the back of the station wagon with my family as we were traveling down a highway, in the middle of the night, on our way to Pittsburgh. And seeing these giant trees, pretending that they were dinosaurs, falling over and killing each other. And also remembering that this is like the last time that I felt that I could just see fantasy and not worry that we\'re driving down a highway, my father might be falling asleep, and we could crash the car and die—all these things you start to think about when you\'re becoming an adult. The times we went back after, I didn\'t see the dinosaurs in the trees. They were just trees. You can\'t get that back. It’s trying to make that into a song that an adult can relate to instead of being like a children\'s storybook or a Disney movie.” **At the Movies on Quaaludes** “I only did quaaludes once, and I have to say, I didn\'t feel anything. There\'s a line at the very beginning of the novel *The Outsiders*—which when you live in Oklahoma, you read in junior high and high school because it\'s set in Tulsa—about coming out of a movie theater. You were so immersed in the movie that you forgot, ‘Oh yeah, this is real life out here.’ My brothers and their friends, they would go to movies all the time in the middle of the day and they would just be so completely fucked up. There was hardly any moments that they weren\'t on some drugs. And I just remembered for myself sometimes, the shock of being in a movie theater, so immersed in that, and you walk outside and you\'re back in real life, whereas I think sometimes they never came back to real life. It\'s just one big, long movie. So there\'s something wonderful about that. It\'s like a dream that you know is never going to come true, but the better to dream it and know it isn\'t going to come true. Or is it worse to not dream it at all?” **Mother I’ve Taken LSD** “This one is devastating for me. It has to be 1968, 1969—there’s a lot of talk about LSD. It’s in the news every day, and when we would be at school, dudes in suits would come with a briefcase full of drugs and say, ‘Don\'t take drugs. And especially don\'t take LSD, because it\'ll make you think that you can fly, and you\'ll go to the top of a bridge and jump off and you\'ll die.’ So all this is in our minds and I\'m only seven or eight years old. It’s like, ‘Fuck. The Beatles think it\'s cool, but the police think it\'s horrible. What do I do here?’ So my brother and my mother are sitting on the porch and they’re having a conversation. I remember my brother saying, ‘Well, mother, I\'ve taken LSD.’ I just couldn\'t believe it. My own brother is doing the things that the police are coming to school to tell me about and he’s going to go insane. I\'m singing about it like it\'s sad for her, but really, it was just sad for me. It’s stayed with me my whole life because it was such a blow.” **Brother Eye** “Steven was like, ‘Why don\'t you just write down some words and I\'ll make up a song around your words?’ Which we never do. Usually, he\'s got a melody and I\'ll put lyrics to it, or I\'ll have lyrics and stuff and he\'ll help me with melodies. I think I wrote out, \'Mother, I don\'t want you to die.’ And then he was like, ‘Well, you have too many songs about mothers. Let\'s do one about brothers.’ His older brothers and his younger brother, all of them, his whole family is dead. When his oldest brother died, I know it devastated him, and we really don\'t sing about it. But in this way of me presenting words to him, I know that he put it in a way of saying we\'re just doing a song. But both of us knew somewhere in there, we\'re singing about this heavy thing. When it came time to be like, ‘Well, are you going to sing it or am I going to sing it?’ I just told him, ‘I think you’ve got to sing that.’ And he was just like, ‘Oh shit.’” **You n Me Sellin’ Weed** “When I was 16 and 17, I started selling pot because everybody around me was selling pot and some were making better money than they were working in a restaurant like I was. But I didn\'t want to do it for very long, because I did fear that I\'d get put in jail or something worse. The second verse is about that. It sounds pretty gentle, but it\'s really about a friend of ours who was involved in a murder. He owed the drug dealer a lot of money and the drug dealer was threatening to kill his little girl. So he went over to his house and he stabbed \[the dealer\] to death. He was put in jail for murder and he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life there. And a year or two later, he committed suicide in jail. It\'s a blissful story about a state of mind for just a moment, before the violence and all these things rush in and kill you. I was very lucky that my experience stayed an adventure. That time could have been where everything went badly and our family destroyed itself. Because we saw it happen and because we knew them and they were just like us, I think it changed us to say, ‘Let\'s not let that happen.’” **Mother Please Don’t Be Sad** “When I was 17, there was a robbery happening in the restaurant that I was working in. The guys came in and I thought for sure that I was going to be killed. This song is what I was saying to myself while I laid on the floor, waiting to be shot in the head. I was going to stop at my mother\'s house after I got off work that night and leave my dirty work uniform there, and talk to her for a little bit. I\'m laying on the floor and I know that I\'m going to die. And I\'m thinking, ‘Mother is going to wonder where I\'m at because I\'m going to be late, and she\'s going to start to worry. Then the cops are going to show up like they do in all these horrible movies, and they\'re going to tell her that I died in the robbery.’ And that line, ‘Mother, please don\'t be sad’: I said that laying on the floor there because I just knew it was going to be horrible. It was me that was going to die, but I just thought I\'ll be dead in a second, and it\'s going to be horrible for her. I wanted her to know that I wasn\'t doing something dangerous, I wasn\'t doing something fucked up. I was just at work and this happened, so don\'t worry about it. This was just the chaos of the world. Sometimes there\'s nothing you can do. You\'re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” **When We Die When We’re High** “That beat that Steve plays—in the hands of a lot of drummers, it would be flashy and it would be pompous, but he\'s doing these things that are just so effortless that you don\'t realize what an insane beat it is. And man, that one note with that beat, that\'s got a good menacing joy about it. And then to put that title to it. A friend of ours was killed in a car accident, and everybody in the car was completely zonked out. The car hits a telephone pole and part of his head is just completely taken off and he\'s just dead right there at the scene. This is real stuff. And part of you, what you do to get around just how brutal and how horrible this is, is you do music. Well, he was so high when he died that he wouldn\'t know he was dead. He\'s going to wake up later in the afterlife, everything will be cool. We\'re saying, ‘If you\'re high when you die, do you really die?’ It\'s ridiculous, but it\'s fun to sing.” **Assassins of Youth** “I think in the beginning, it was intended to be on that Deap Lips collaboration that we did with the girls from Deap Vally, and it just never really went anywhere. Something about it reminded us of ABBA. And what I liked about ABBA is that they\'re singing about something that sounds rebellious and revolutionary, but it\'s very sweet-sounding at the same time. And because English too wasn\'t their first language, I always felt like they didn\'t quite know what they were talking about, which was better. So we took this ridiculously overused line, ‘assassins of youth,’ and we pretended that we were like ABBA—we’re not quite sure what it means in English, but we know what it means in Swedish or whatever. It\'s just great, triumphant classic-rock stuff. It presents itself like it\'s an important message. And then when you dissect it, you’re like, ‘I\'m not sure what you\'re saying.’ That, to me, is wonderful.” **God and the Policeman (feat. Kacey Musgraves)** “When Kacey heard it, she came back to me and was like, ‘Now, this is the one. This is the one I want to be on, for sure.’ I kept looking at it like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. I thought it would be perfect for her, a song about a fugitive on the run. On the run from what, I don’t know, but it tied into another drug story, a friend of ours who got caught up in a bad drug deal. It sounds like I\'ve told this one before, but another guy I know, a drug dealer was telling him, ‘Well, if you don\'t pay me, I\'m going to kill you.’ So he went over to \[the dealer’s house\], and the drug dealer, he thought that he was bringing him what he owed him and he just went over there and killed the guy. And he said, ‘See you later. I\'ll never see my friends again. Better than being killed by this biker drug dealer.’ I can\'t talk too much about it, but I feel like enough time has gone by, I really don\'t even know if he\'s alive anymore.” **My Religion Is You** “It still feels like a folk song or religious song or something, but nothing in our life—my life, anyway—was ever so heavy that I had to turn to God. I always had my mother, my father, and plenty of people around to explain the mysteries of pain and all that to me. I remember, when we initially went to school, our first and second grade, we went to a Catholic school. And there\'d be a lot of talk about Jesus sacrificing himself for us. I didn\'t really understand. I would ask my mother, like, ‘Well, what do they mean? Why is Jesus dying? I don\'t want him to die. Why does he have to die for me?’ And she\'d say, ‘Well, these aren\'t things that most people have to deal with. It\'s for people who don\'t really have families and brothers. People don\'t love them, so Jesus loves them. They don\'t have anybody that will listen to them. So they need God to listen to them.’ And I said, ‘Well, my religion is you.’ She\'s like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

‘From a View’ is the debut LP from Melbourne’s Floodlights. This full length album explores themes of identity, personal crossroads and the misuse of power in the modern world. Historical awareness remains a central pillar for the band's material, and is often a theme that shines through various songs from the lyrical content. Floodlights are made up of members Louis Parsons, Ashlee Kehoe, Joe Draffen and Archie Shannon (Equal Parts, Dragoons). Following a tour of Australia’s East Coast in October last year, the band began polishing up what would become ‘From a View’. The 11 tracks were written over various points in the band's short career, yet come together fittingly to depict their distinct sound. Their 2019 EP ‘Backyard’ gained them more traction than they anticipated, ending up in a deal with Spunk Records, and a large amount of air time on community radio in Australia and various larger radio stations around the world (BBC 6 Radio, KPSU Portland, etc). ‘From a View’ is the band's first exploration into proper studio recording with a well regarded sound engineer. The album was recorded over two days in November 2019 at Head Gap Studios (Preston) by Nao Anzai. It was recorded live, directly onto a 24 track tape machine with minimal overdubs, and sometimes none at all. Anzai took the role of mixing the album, working closely with Shannon over four hot nights in December before sending it off to Mikey Young for the Master.

Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini have different skill sets: The former’s a purveyor of heavy-hitting techno, while the latter specializes in shape-shifting modular-synth etudes (when he’s not playing with Nine Inch Nails). Their full-length debut together sounds more like Berliner Cortini than Londoner Avery: In place of four-to-the-floor rhythms and surging acid lines, there are floating pads, pensive arpeggios, and eerie ambient miniatures. But they also venture into spaces neither has explored before: “At First Sight” and “Enter Exit” are so flush with distortion that they verge on shoegaze, while the even more overdriven “Inside the Ruins” boasts the scorched-earth textures of doom metal. In addition to being formally inventive, *Illusion of Time* is emotionally exploratory, too, slipping between contrasting moods in a way that accentuates its immersive qualities—and makes its climactic payoff, with the blissed-out shimmer of “Water,” that much sweeter.

For some electronic musicians, sound is primarily a formal or aesthetic concern; for Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, it’s spiritual. The music she makes with her Buchla modular synthesizer is an extension of her yoga practice: a means of self-knowledge, a way of finding balance between mind, body, and the world around her. The Bolinas, California, musician calls the album “my expression of love and appreciation for electricity”—that is, an attempt to channel vibrations into a shape both resonant and meaningful. She composed the album as part of a daily practice of physical movement, and it shows: Unlike drone-based ambient, which puts its focus on static tones, *The Mosaic of Transformation* is awash in waves of motion, as layer upon layer of arpeggios and pads roll and crest and shift. It amounts to the most expressive and lyrical work of Smith’s career so far, and the most surprising, too. A short, burbling introduction gives way to gentle chants and string-quartet echoes in “Remembering”; the pointillist “Understanding Body Messages” leads to buoyant, mantra-like vocals and even actual drum beats in “The Steady Heart.” It all builds to an ecstatic finish in the form of “Expanding Electricity,” which weaves together ideas from across the spectrum: minimalism, contemporary classical, new age, even folk. “How can I help to serve you so you can do what you do?” she asks, sounding benevolent and beatific. It might be the voice of electricity itself, a current ready to carry us to another world.

West coast composer, artist, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has chartered a pioneering career with multiple critically-acclaimed albums since 2015. Following the release of The Kid in 2017, Smith focused her energy in several directions. She founded Touchtheplants, a multidisciplinary creative environment for projects including the first volumes in her instrumental Electronic Series and pocket-sized poetry books on the practice of listening within. She's continued to explore the endless possibilities of electronic instruments as well as the shapes, movements, and expressions found in the physical body's relationship to sound and color. It is this life-guiding interest that forms the foundational frequencies of her latest full-length, The Mosaic of Transformation, a bright, sensorial glide through unbound wave phenomena and the radiant power discovered within oneself. "I guess in one sentence, this album is my expression of love and appreciation for electricity," says Smith. While writing and recording, she embraced a daily practice of physical movement, passing electricity through her body and into motion, in ways reflecting her audio practice, which sends currents through modular synthesizers and into the air through speakers. Not a dancer by any traditional definition, she taught herself improvisatory movement realizing flexibility, strength, and unexpectedly, what Smith calls “a visual language” (the term was introduced to her by filmmaker Sean Hellfritsch) stemming from the human body and comprised of vibrational shapes. Understood as cymatics, as she says, "as a reference for how frequencies can be visualized," much like a mosaic. Smith describes her first encounters with this mosaic; "the inspiration came to me in a sudden bubble of joy. It was accompanied by a multitude of shapes that were moving seamlessly from one into the other...My movement practice has been a constant transformation piece by piece. I made this album in the same way. Every day I would transform what I did yesterday...into something else. This album has gone through about 12 different versions of itself." As it has arrived, in a completed state, The Mosaic of Transformation is a holistic manifestation of embodied motions. Smith's signature textural curiosity that fans have grown to adore pivots naturally into a proprioceptive study of melody and timbre. Airy organ and voice interweave with burbling Buchla-spawned harmonic bubbles. "The Steady Heart" quivers to life, peppering blasts of wooden organ between winding vocal affirmations. As with a body, moving one portion requires a balance and counterbalance; here, subtle tonal twitchy signals fire in conjunction with coiling arias to create a mesmeric core. When the beat arrives at the midway mark, a swooping and jittery waltz, a sense of stasis in motion, a flow state, is sonically achieved. As soon as it syncs, it disappears back into the swirling ebbs of electric force. Other tracks stray into more ruminative physical realms. "Carrying Gravity" is built around string-like pads that expand and contract like a solar plexus, becoming taught and then loose. As the breath interacts and is focused upon, suddenly, the nervous system engages, delicate arpeggios cascade, akin to becoming aware of the transmission of energy happening between muscles and the mind. If the record could be summarized in a single movement, it is the 10-minute closing suite, a rapturous collage called "Expanding Electricity." Symphonic phrases establish the piece before washes of glittering electric peals and synthesized vibraphone helix into focus. Soon, Smith's voice grounds it all with an intuitive vocal hook, harmonized and augmented by concentric spirals of harp-and-horn-like sounds. Smith's music doesn't capture a specific emotion as much as it captures the joys of possessing a body, and the ability to, with devotion and a steady open heart, maneuver that vessel in space by way of electricity to euphoric degrees.

Dome Rock. Nestled deep in the forests of Mendocino County in Northern California, huddled under the protective shade of towering redwoods and within earshot of frothy waves crashing against the Pacific coastline, squats a geodesic dome that has served as crucible for the experimental genius of Carlton Melton.Nature and Man operate under different logics. But here, Carlton Melton wholly entrusts this idyllic environment with the task of inspiring and guiding their musical improvisations. The Dome has been the ideal setting to facilitate their creativity. Without forcing a specific dynamic or theme, the band inhabits its womb-like confines to improvise, explore, dream. Their music draws on psychedelia, stoner metal,krautrock, and ambient atmospherics to convey, above all else, a mood. A prickly guitar melody will float lazily, a wall of dissonant feedback will resolve into a hypnotic drone, or a colossal riff will exhume the soul of Jimi Hendrix. One hears Hawkwindor Spacemen 3 jamming with Pink Floyd at Pompeii. Indeed, Carlton Melton have one foot in the ancient world and one tentacle in deep space. They are both the pack of proto-humans drumming with femurs in Kubrick’s 2001 and the film’s inscrutable monolith hinting at the universe’s mysteries. The “Stoned Ape” theory holds that early hominids ingested psychedelic mushrooms that provided an evolutionary boost to their brains, helping them blossom into Homo Sapiens. Imagine such cavemen trippin’ balls, their nightmarish visions sending them into feverish bouts of rage and then gentle moments of introspection. They very well could have heardthe music of Carlton Melton rattling inside their skulls, first driving our ancestors mad then upward into a higher realm. Andy Duvall (drums, guitar), Clint Golden (bass), and Rich Millman (guitar, synths) have yet to play Pompeii, but they have already wowed crowds at European festivals such as the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, Roadburn, and Desertfest Antwerp. Live, they are jaw-dropping. On record, mind-altering. In fact, with each album, Carlton Melton adds a subtle new element, synapses firing new neural connections. In 2020, they release new full-length Where This Leads, marking ten years of the band’s working relationship with their UK labelAgitated Records and five years of recording with Phil Manley in his El Studio in San Francisco. With Where This Leads, the band rewires the listener’s mind. “Smoke Drip Revisited” is a ticklish acid flashback, “Porch Dreams” a dabbling in country psych, and “Closer” a driving, freak-outof guitar heroics. One senses that the group is conveying a message that cannot be expressed verbally but only suggested through synth sighs,walloping rhythms, and soaring solos. Would Carlton Melton therefore be a group of stoned apes dizzily grasping for meaning or telepathic futurists communicating to us through crude man-made instrumentation? Well, lower the stylus to find out. - Eric Bensel, Paris July 2020

SUZANNE VALLIE - LOVE LIVES WHERE RULES DIE After a hard spell, heartbroken and drifting, Suzanne Vallie aimed to make a driving record rich with sympathy, high romance, and dedicated to the magic of good-timing. Other themes on the album include dogs, surfers, and the supernatural. Vallie, a sorta-recluse living in rural Big Sur, California, is known for her improvisational performances where she freestyles lyrics and tells stories, mythical and rowdy both. She wrote the bulk of Love Lives Where Rules Die during the bummer summer after a breakup. As medicine, she tried to blow out the speakers of her 94’ Honda, driving up and down California’s central coast.

The 11 songs of Love Lives Where Rules Die were largely live-tracked over five days. Suzanne Vallie and a core band of California collaborators flew out to upstate New York during the last warm days of September 2019. 

Vallie and her producer, Rob Shelton, chose Dreamland Recording in Hurley, New York, for many reasons. The analog signal flow allowed a 70’s style warmth. The studio, a hundred-some-year-old church, had room for the whole crew to live-track. Some said a ghost might come around. What’s more, much of the band was already on tour out East, playing a run of shows with both Luke Temple and Meerna, double duty every night. They were plenty warmed-up. Opening with “Ocean Cliff Drive”, Vallie sings of driving on the winding cliff side of Highway 1, blinded by fog and rain, all the same singing, “I can't see the road ahead of me, but I’m coming.” 

The title track, "Love Lives Where Rules Die", begins with baritone guitar calling in a story of a broken heart among good company. With no way out in a three-day storm, Vallie asks friends to sing her love songs, and flies "on a wild light" with a “heart on borrowed wings.” 

The party anthems, “Morro Bay” and “High With You”, celebrate friendship and the delicious urge for fun with Springsteen length lyric sheets. For Vallie, recording the sing-along "High With You" was also a “high” point in the making of Love Lives Where Rules Die. “It was midnight. We were real loose. Everybody got a tambourine!”

 The album features production and keys by Rob Shelton (Meernaa, Sis, Luke Temple, Kacey Johansing), guitar by Blake Kennedy (The Range of Light Wilderness), guitar and vocals by Carly Bond (Meerna, Sis), guitar and bass by Doug Stuart (Meerna, Brijean), percussion and drums by Andrew Macquire (Mirah, Vetiver, Meerna) with contributions from violin virtuoso, Edwin Huizinga (Acronym, Dark Watchers), percussion by Mark Clifford and Bob Ladue, and backing vocals by Paul Spring, Emily Ritz (Yesway, Honeycomb), and Molly Sarle´ (Mountain Man).

If I Break Horses’s third album holds you in its grip like a great film, it’s no coincidence. Faced with making the follow-up to 2014’s plush Chiaroscuro, Horses’s Maria Lindén decided to take the time to make something different, with an emphasis on instrumental, cinematic music. As she watched a collection of favourite films on her computer (sound muted) and made her own soundtrack sketches, these sonic workouts gradually evolved into something more: “It wasn’t until I felt an urge to add vocals and lyrics,” says Lindén, “that I realized I was making a new I Break Horses album.” That album is Warnings, an intimate and sublimely expansive return that, as its recording suggests, sets its own pace with the intuitive power of a much-loved movie. And, as its title suggests, its sumptuous sound worlds – dreamy mellotrons, haunting loops, analogue synths – and layered lyrics crackle with immersive dramatic tensions on many levels. “It’s not a political album,” says Lindén, “though it relates to the alarmist times we live in. Each song is a subtle warning of something not being quite right.” As Lindén notes, the process of making Warnings involved different kinds of dramas. “It has been some time in the making. About five years, involving several studios, collaborations that didn’t work out, a crashed hard drive with about two years of work, writing new material again instead of trying to repair it. New studio recordings, erasing everything, then recording most of the album myself at home…” Yet the pay-off for her long-haul immersion is clear from statement-of-intent album opener ‘Turn’, a waltzing kiss-off to an ex swathed in swirling synths over nine emotive minutes. On ‘Silence’, Lindén suggests deeper sorrows in the interplay of serene surface synths, hypnotic loops and elemental images: when she sings “I feel a shiver,” you feel it, too. Elsewhere, on three instrumental interludes, Lindén’s intent to experiment with sound and structure is clear. Meanwhile, there are art-pop songs here more lush than any she has made. ‘I’ll Be the Death of You’ occupies a middle ground between Screamedelica and early OMD, while ‘Neon Lights’ brings to mind Kraftwerk on Tron’s light grid. ‘I Live At Night’ slow-burns like a song made for night-time LA drives; ‘Baby You Have Travelled for Miles without Love in Your Eyes’ is an electronic lullaby spiked with troubling needle imagery. ‘Death Engine’’s dark-wave dream-pop provides an epic centrepiece, of sorts, before the vocoder hymnal of closer ‘Depression Tourist’ arrives like an epiphany, the clouds parting after a long, absorbing journey. For Lindén, Warnings is a remarkable re-routing of a journey begun when I Break Horses’s debut album, Hearts (2011), drew praise from Pitchfork, The Guardian, NME, The Independent and others for its luxurious grandeur and pulsing sense of art-pop life. With the electro-tangents of 2014’s Chiaroscuro, Lindén forged a new, more ambitious voice with total confidence. Along the way, I Break Horses toured with M83 and Sigur Rós; latterly, U2 played Hearts’ ecstatic ‘Winter Beats’ through the PA before their stage entrance on 2018’s ‘Experience + Innocence’ tour. Good choice. A new friend on Warnings is US producer/mixing engineer Chris Coady, whose graceful way with dense sound (credits include Beach House, TV on the Radio) was not the sole reason Lindén invited him to mix the album. “Before reaching out to Chris I read an interview where he said, ‘I like to slow things down. Almost every time I love the sound of something slowed down by half, but sometimes 500% you can get interesting shapes and textures.’ And I just knew he’d be the right person for this album.” If making Warnings was a slow process, so be it: that steady gestation was a price worth paying for its lavish accretions of detail and meaning, where secrets aplenty await listeners eager to immerse themselves. “Nowadays, the attention span equals nothing when it comes to how most people consume music,” Lindén says. “And it feels like songs are getting shorter, more ‘efficient’. I felt an urge to go against that and create an album journey from start to finish that takes time and patience to listen to. Like, slow the fuck down!” Happily, Warnings provides all the incentives required.

Alongside Londoners such as saxophonist Nubya Garcia, tuba player Theon Cross, and keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, Shabaka Hutchings is at the forefront of club jazz’s resurgence in the UK. The British-Barbadian artist’s various projects all work in Afro-political idioms, with each occupying a different philosophical realm: Sons of Kemet focuses on black displacement in royal Britain, The Comet Is Coming is influenced by Afrofuturism and progressive rock, and Shabaka and the Ancestors explores the African diaspora from the standpoint of Western culture’s erasure of black identity and communities. On *We Are Sent Here By History*, Hutchings and his South Africa-based band use history as a reflection point, but one that deeply informs the future. Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and Yusef Lateef are just a few of the musical-political touchstones that also influence the record, and you hear these icons in the powerful chants and spoken words of Siyabonga Mthembu, the phrasing of the woodwinds—chaotic, playful, spiritual—and the general status-quo-challenging vibe of the arrangement. Like his predecessors, Hutchings makes protest songs that make you feel alive, even when they are indictments of colonialism and toxic masculinity. But he also uses music as a corrective: Like its title suggests, “We Will Work (On Redefining Manhood)”—all looping chanted vocals around a multitude of percussive instruments—looks beyond a dark past towards brighter days.

Bold post-punk, female trio, PINS announce their third full-length LP Hot Slick, out May 29 via their own Haus of Pins label. The vibrant album is filled with neon synths, loud guitars, and cheeky melodies that mirror the group’s new boldly-hued imagery and create the sound of a girl gang refreshed and amplified. Hot Slick features a trio of recently released singles: the glitchy and cathartic title track (produced by Jamie Hince of The Kills) and anthemic “Bad Girls Forever” (produced by Rich Woodcraft) as well as the high-heeled skittering beat struts of “Ponytail”. The 10 new original tracks found the trio of singer/guitarist Faith Vern, guitarist Lois MacDonald and bassist Kyoko Swan welcoming a rotating cast of collaborators following the departure of their original rhythm section. Rich Woodcraft oversaw the entire project as producer and engineer, while Jamie Hince and Dean Horner contributed additional production and Nathan Saoudi of Fat White Family lent his talents on the keys. The resulting album highlights an expanded soundscape with nods to influences such as Soulwax, LCD Soundsystem, Suicide, and New Order. Since the release of Girls Like Us in 2013, PINS has exuded strength in their danceable alternative post-punk transmissions and earned the trust, endorsement, and creative blessings of rock royalty such as Iggy Pop, with whom they collaborated on 2017’s The Bad Thing EP. 2015’s Wild Nights earned widespread critical acclaim including an Album of the Week nod from Stereogum and profiles in Harper’s Bazaar, Interview Magazine, The Guardian, DAZED, and i-D. In recent years, PINS toured on both sides of the pond alongside everyone from Sleater-Kinney and Warpaint to Best Coast and The Subways. The band is on the road wrapping a UK tour and will announce more tour dates soon. Singles from 'Hot Slick' have already received radio play from BBC 6 Music (Marc Riley, Steve Lamacq, Lauren Laverne) BBC Radio 1 (Huw Stephens - Introducing)

Before they began writing *The Main Thing*, their fifth full-length, Real Estate asked themselves a great question: “What\'s the point of doing this?” bassist Alex Bleeker recalls for Apple Music. “What’s the point of making another Real Estate record in 2019 or 2020? What\'s the point of repeating ourselves?” Over the last decade, the New Jersey-bred outfit has very quietly became one of the most consistent bands of their generation, always opting to refine their sound rather than reinvent it. But they’ve also evolved as people. “Frankly, we just got tired of the, like, ‘toe tappin’ summer sounds of Real Estate, crack another beer, it\'s so chill’ thing,” Bleeker says. “Our lives don\'t feel that way anymore. We wanted it to be really clear about that this time around.” The result is a personal and often surprising set of songs rich with observations from frontman Martin Courtney’s life as a husband and father of three girls—a long ways from the languid post-collegiate melancholia of their 2009 debut. “I was really trying to consciously put more of myself into this record, to make something that felt more substantial,” Courtney says. “We\'re in a place now where we\'re really lucky to have seen whatever success we\'ve seen and we\'re lucky to still be a band 10 years in. We went into this one with more of a mission to make something that felt worthy.” Here, Courtney and Bleeker break down all of the album’s 13 songs. **Friday** Martin Courtney: “I was pretty anti-this song being the first track. I felt like it was inviting a lot of comparisons to previous iterations of the band and what we sounded like, but I don\'t necessarily feel that way now. It\'s called ‘Friday’ because when I was writing it, I was basically trying to rip off ‘Friday I\'m In Love’ by The Cure. I was like, ‘I want to write a perfect pop song right now.’ I think it went through the most radical transformation from the demo I recorded to what ended up on the record, but it had that beat to it and it was a little bit faster.” Alex Bleeker: “We were thinking about early-2000s Air or even The Beta Band, but it just gave it this different vibe than we\'d ever explored before.” **Paper Cup (feat. Sylvan Esso)** AB: “We knew ‘Paper Cup’ was going in the direction of a disco vibe. But Martin was in the studio attempting to nail the vocal and I think he and Kevin \[McMahon\], our producer, were just like, ‘Man, we\'re doing this falsetto and it would just be better to have a real female voice on it.’ And they thought of Amelia \[Meath\] to sing—she’s a really old friend and she’s someone we trust. It ultimately wound up feeling a bit more like a collaboration than just like a ‘Hey, sing this part.’ I had one quick call with her and she came back with something rhythmically different, more than any of us had ever expected. It was really organic and simple and an example of many unexpected collaborations from people outside the band, which is a new thing for us on this record.” **Gone** MC: “It’s about being on the road, which has almost become like a classic trope for me—the idea of missing my family and the idea of trying to FaceTime somebody and it just doesn\'t work. It’s so insanely frustrating not being able to communicate. I just really want to make this connection that is impossible to make, and then your kids are like, ‘Oh, hi, how\'s it going?’ And then they\'ll run off and do something else. It\'s like, ‘That was not enough for me, at all. That interaction that we just had was really not enough.’ It’s a basic thing, but it’s real.” **You** MC: “It\'s funny: Sometimes I think that my lyrics are more subtle than they are. And I feel like ‘You’ is pretty straightforward, but my wife was actually pregnant when I was writing it. It\'s about this child that I haven\'t met yet, about the idea of memory—kids supposedly can\'t form memories until they have the capacity to speak. I don\'t know if that\'s true or not, but just the idea of feeling responsible for your child\'s first memories and all their memories and just this feeling of wanting to create a safe environment while at the same time feeling like that\'s almost a bit of a lie because the world doesn\'t really feel like a safe place to be.” **November** MC: “I was writing some songs for a friend\'s movie called *Plus One*. There\'s a scene in it that was soundtracked by \[2011’s\] ‘It’s Real,’ and he was like, ‘Can you write a song that\'s like that?’ Just like for fun, I wrote this song. Going into making this record, we were like, ‘Well, this is the most Real Estate-y of the batch.’ But I also really liked it, especially the stuff that Julian \[Lynch\] did in the chorus with the layers of vocals. Because it was something that felt familiar to us, we made a lot of effort to push it in different directions through the production—specifically keyboard sounds and drum sounds—trying to get it to a point where it felt a little more alien.” AB: “The song was deliberately written to be musically backward-looking, which was pretty much the antithesis of what we were trying to achieve on this record. But we tried to fuck with it a little bit, which is kind of why it sounds the way that it does, much to the label’s shock and dismay and disappointment.” **Falling Down** MC: “It’s a weird one. It’s impressionistic, but there\'s some weird climate change stuff in there; there’s some weird anxiety; and there’s a verse that is literally about a place that I used to live. I liked the idea of it being like anti-poetic, just like, ‘This is a picture of what it\'s like to wake up before dawn, in a cold house, while everyone\'s still sleeping.’ It\'s like, you got a baby, the baby wakes up, and so I go downstairs with the baby. It’s just me and this baby in a freezing cold kitchen; it’s still dark out. I try to make coffee or something. In terms of production, I’m really psyched on the strings. I was constantly inspired by \[Wilco’s\] *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* and what Jim O\'Rourke did with the mixing on that record. It was a little bit of an attempt to do something like that, to just radically alter the arrangement in post.” **Also a But** AB: “That\'s the song that Julian wrote for the record. You wouldn\'t peg it as a typical Real Estate song necessarily, but it works. It’s almost got this, like, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, English psychedelia sound to it. I like it as a centerpiece of the record. Lyrically, it\'s pretty direct, like, ‘This is how I\'m feeling in an age of great anxiety.’ The chorus is: ‘Floating atop a mushroom cloud.’ I mean, it\'s pretty over the top, but it\'s a nice juxtaposition, because Martin\'s writing about outside influence on this portrait of domesticity and personal navigation through a difficult time for a lot of different reasons. And then you have this other voice come in, another sound that represents what all that force is. There’s also an improvised jam section in that song, which is new for us.” **The Main Thing** MC: “I don\'t think I would\'ve been able to write a song like that if it didn\'t feel a little bit tongue-in-cheek. But having said that, it comes from a real place. The lyrics of that song are like, ‘Despite the fact that I should be doing something else and this feels really irresponsible, I\'m going to do it anyway, because this is what I love to do and it\'s what I know how to do.’ It might be the last lyric that I wrote for this record, so it comes at the end of this whole process of exploring why I make art. As a band, we found an answer in just making the record: If you really work hard enough at something that you love and you really dedicate yourself to the thing that you find nourishing and fulfilling, that in itself is a worthy thing. To me, it’s this idea of trying to set that example for my kids. I could quit music and get a real job and have hopefully that stability and not feel like I\'m being irresponsible or something, but then at the same time, I would be betraying that part of myself. This is who I am.” AB: “It kind of communicates this beautiful idea that sometimes the most responsible decision is to do the thing that nourishes you spiritually. It’s incredibly earnest.” **Shallow Sun** MC: “It’s about inevitability—you can’t go back, which is obvious but worth dwelling on sometimes. Time starts to feel like it’s moving faster as you get older, but I look at my kids and know that the way they see the world, it moves slowly—when you\'re a kid, a year feels like an eternity. It’s reflecting on that, and we recorded this song on the same day as ‘The Main Thing’—it was one of the final ones. It\'s one where the arrangement came together rather quickly, but it’s one of my favorites. I think it just sounds cool. It reminds me of Radiohead.” **Sting** AB: “We did several long full-band sessions to get this album recorded, and that was in one of the last ones, and it felt like we were really just taking our time and unfolding and blossoming. Matt \[Kallman\] had these chords that he had sent to the band months earlier. Somebody brought a drum machine in and we were just learning it together, and that was when I was like, ‘We\'re really making an album here,’ because you\'re exploring little side interludes and stuff like that. In the studio, I was reading the 33 1/3 about \[David Bowie’s\] *Low*, which has crazy tape loop experimentation in it. And I was just like, ‘This feels like we\'re digging into the cheesier stuff of making a record.’ I remember it really distinctly. It was late at night. The record was made in a barn. You had this sense of the crickets going outside and us being isolated in this weird barn. This song just sounds that way to me—it’s very evocative of the actual space that we made the record in.” **Silent World** MC: “The silent world is the bubble that my family has created in our house with our family and our friends in the little town we live in, and just wanting to create this feeling of safety. Looking around at the outside world and just feeling like it\'s obviously not. It\'s just the idea of wanting to make your kids feel safe, but at the same time knowing that at some point they\'re going to be experiencing all the same anxieties that I am as an adult, and it\'s sad to think about that. It\'s scary and it\'s just ultimately not wanting to let go of them. Luckily my kids are still really young, but I think it\'s just a basic feeling of protection. I feel like I\'m better off not finishing my thoughts, because if you think too much, your mind goes to dark places.” **Procession** MC: “I\'ve lived in a lot of different places, and at the same time we have this weird, unearned sense of nostalgia—like being 24 and being nostalgic for when you were 19 or something. It’s almost like we\'re intentionally trying to create this sense of nostalgia by just constantly moving. I had to go back to this town because my great-aunt died. So it a was literal funeral procession going through this town, and when you do that, you drive through the town and you\'re going past places from this person\'s life. We drove past her old house, which is down the block from my old house when I was a little kid—we moved away when I was two, but to this day my parents still work there. So it\'s like being nostalgic for a time that I don\'t remember.” AB: “It\'s funny because it\'s almost a criticism of what \[Martin’s\] written about before, which I didn\'t get until I heard him explain it. It sounds like the most classically Real Estate-y in terms of subject matter, at least on the surface, which I liked at the end of the record because it almost feels like we\'ve explored all this new space and it\'s a bit of a curtain caller or signature.” **Brother** MC: “It comes from a demo that I recorded on cassette in my house a couple of years ago, while we were mixing *In Mind* during the summer of 2016. I\'ve just always liked it, so I brought it to the band, but I had no intention of adding lyrics to it—I liked it as an instrumental. We basically just transferred the cassette demo into the computer and built off of that so it feels really nice. It\'s this nice semi-lo-fi epilogue, like a nice cap on the record. It feels like a nice breath, exhalation at the very end.” AB: “I think it\'s nice that it’s small and somewhat lo-fi and that it brings us into Martin\'s house. You can actually hear an Easter egg: one of Martin\'s kids opening a door and saying hello at the very end of the record. I just like that.”

Over the last decade, Real Estate have crafted warm yet meticulous pop-minded music, specialising in soaring melodies that are sentimentally evocative and unmistakably their own. The Main Thing dives even further into the musical dichotomies they’re known for—lilting, bright guitar lines set against emotionally nuanced lyrics, complex arrangements conveyed breezily— and what emerges is a superlative collection of interrogative songs as full of depth, strangeness and contradictions as they are lifting hooks.

Jazz, hip-hop, “organic beat music,” as the man himself calls it: Whatever Makaya McCraven is up to, the fact that it doesn’t fit extant taxonomy remains a good sign that it’s moving the needle. Recorded during the same globe-hopping improvisatory sessions that made up 2018’s *Universal Beings*, *E&F Sides* spins a simple idea—build a collaborative groove on the spot; sample, loop, and collage the track later—out to elegant ends. You can tune in to it (the fusion of “Dadada,” the free gospel of “The Way Home”), you can tune out (“The Hunt,” “Isms”). Or, as McCraven seems to intend, you can let it all play moon to the mind’s tides, focusing and releasing attention as the music winds on. Easy to listen to but challenging under the surface—this does it.

On the title track that opens Badly Drawn Boy’s ninth studio album (and first in eight years), Damon Gough is getting back up and he’s ready to move on. “It’s time to break free from this plaster cast/And leave your past behind,” the English singer-songwriter rejoices over horn-filled funk, returning to the genre-bending experiments of 2000’s Mercury Prize-winning *The Hour of Bewilderbeast* and 2002’s *Have You Fed the Fish*. Gough, who went through an extended bout of soul-searching during his absence, exudes marital bliss on \"I Need Someone to Trust\" and \"Fly on the Wall,\" taking a more pop-minded bent even as his penchant for chamber music remains present. The loose-limbed “Is This a Dream?” and “Colours” carry a celebratory tone, where he acknowledges his past mistakes as he recollects his thoughts. Even the more subdued moments, like the bossa-nova-tinged “You and Me Against the World,” play with a slow rhythmic groove as Gough opens his heart: “I feel so vulnerable/I want to be/Only in love.”

When My Morning Jacket decamped to Stinson Beach, California, to record the *The Waterfall* in late 2013, their intention wasn’t to walk away with enough material for a sprawling “White Album kind of thing,” as frontman Jim James describes it now to Apple Music. But after James injured his back moving an amp—an incident that would temporarily halt the sessions and require surgery for a herniated disc—he spent months reflecting as he recovered. So many new songs poured out of him that when the album was eventually completed and ready for release in 2015, the band worried that a triple LP would only overwhelm listeners. “When it got right down to when we were deciding what it was supposed to be, we were just getting a lot of information coming in that made us feel like a lot of the songs would be wasted if we put them all out,” James says. “We didn\'t want these songs to be lost. So we decided to just chop it in half and put out *The Waterfall* as it was, and then put out the other half some other time. I mean, life has gone through so many ups and downs since then, there was never a deliberate call as to when we would do it.” Five years later, amidst the upheaval of a global pandemic and social uprising, James felt the time was right to finally share *The Waterfall II*, a set of psychedelic, collage-like rock that feels clearly linked to its equally introspective first half. “I was so frozen,” James says of the first weeks of the pandemic. “I was kind of looking back across my life and taking stock. I just felt like it would hopefully be a good time to release the record while the world was kind of in a reflective state. I think we still are.” Here, he tells us the story behind every song on the album. **Spinning My Wheels** “I go on walks with my phone on shuffle, and it played ‘Spinning My Wheels.’ I listened to it and I was like, ‘Whoa, we’ve got this whole other album that, to me, feels very reflective.’ It’s funny because we\'re working on another new record—a new My Morning Jacket record—but with the pandemic and everything, it\'ll be a little while before we finish that and get all that stuff done.” **Still Thinkin** “I feel like there\'s always this period—at least for me—when I\'m going through a relationship falling apart, that I keep thinking that I can make it work. I think we\'ve all experienced that. If there\'s something that can\'t be fixed, but you haven\'t accepted that yet and you keep trying to fix it. You’re trying everything because you don\'t want to lose it. But you kind of have to lose it, because that\'s what will be best for both of you—but you don\'t realize it. \'Still Thinkin\' was caught up in that emotion and caught up in the fog of that. Ultimately, once it was gone and I was looking back on it and writing that song, it’s like that feeling of being a lone soul hanging off the edge of the world. I feel like so many nights during this pandemic—and I know I\'m not alone—but you feel so alone because you\'re kept at home. And you\'re like, all right, I\'m at home again for the 800th night in a row. What do I do tonight? And I think a thing that\'s difficult that a lot of people have said that I really appreciate is trying to not be hard on ourselves, trying to remember we don\'t have to write the next great American novel. We don\'t have to paint an amazing painting every night. Some nights we\'re just going to be sad and that\'s okay, because it\'s a difficult time.” **Climbing the Ladder** “One thing that I\'ve gotten sometimes when I talk to people about my sadnesses or my failures in love or personal life, people won\'t validate them or they\'ll say back to me, ‘Oh, but your career\'s going so good.’ And it\'s not like I\'m not happy about those times, because we have so many levels in our life. We have so many different ways we are. There\'s the us that focuses on our career. There\'s the us that focuses on our family. There\'s the us that focuses on our hobbies, whatever. So that song I just kind of wrote about how I\'m climbing the ladder and I\'m paying my dues in this career way. But really at the end of the day—not that I don\'t value that or appreciate that—what I really want is sustainable love in my life and to create a sustainable relationship and a family and that kind of stuff, which I haven\'t been able to do.” **Feel You** “That song was so weird, because I wrote the main riff in Kentucky before we went to Stinson Beach, but there weren\'t all of the instrumental parts and there weren\'t all of the other parts that happened. We went to Muir Woods several times while we were in Stinson Beach, and Muir Woods really gave me that song. I feel like being in those woods, the parts would come, because that\'s something that happens for me a lot. I walk and it generates music, but I feel like where I am contributes to that music. That song—a lot of the instrumentation and a lot of the ending and a lot of the space in the song—I feel like really was downloaded from the trees.” **Beautiful Love (Wasn’t Enough)** “I wanted the song to have kind of a lighter vibe—not goofy, but just more of a resonant vibe that wasn\'t necessarily sad even though the song is kind of sad. I\'m just really trying to look at myself and figure out why things didn\'t work out. I\'ve had these moments where I\'m like, ‘If I wrote down everything I wanted on paper, it was all there in this relationship. But for some intangible reason that I couldn\'t figure out, it just didn\'t work.’ And I was wondering about that in the song. Why wasn\'t it enough? Everything was there, but for some reason that I still don\'t understand, it wasn\'t enough. And I\'m trying to figure that out for myself. What is it in me?” **Magic Bullet** “God, I don\'t even know where to start. I mean, it\'s so sad to me that as I sit here and try to remember which shooting it was that inspired me to write that song and I can\'t even remember. There\'s been so many of them. The whole gun thing just makes me so sad, because guns disgust me and guns are made to kill people and that is so profoundly messed up. The whole right to bear arms and the right to carry guns and stuff: It’s like, when the Constitution was written, they had muskets. So if you want to get literal about the Constitution, then give everybody a musket or give everybody a single-shooter rifle or whatever, and be like, ‘Okay. Here\'s your guns. You got them.’” **Run It** “It\'s Stinson Beach. I kept thinking about just wanting to get back to water. And I feel like most humans, we all love going to the water. We love going to the lake or to the beach, whatever it is, the swimming pool, we all have this desire. We’re made of water. At times, I feel so overwhelmed by life and I feel like I don\'t fit in to the human experience that I just want to turn back into water and go back into the ocean and start again. Maybe wash back up on shore, go through the whole thing again, because I don\'t know, sometimes it just doesn\'t make sense to me. That’s where that song came from.” **Wasted** “I feel like there\'s two ways to waste time. In ‘Feel You’ I reference what I consider to be the good way to waste time: to just take time, to do nothing basically, to experience the forest or experience the ocean, because I feel like we\'re all constantly trying to do things and trying to fill our time with activities and keep it moving. But I think we forget to just take time to just not do anything, but then there\'s the other kind of wasting time where I feel like if you start to do too much and you get stagnant and you get complacent and you don\'t realize what you have, you can waste a lot of time. You can waste a lot of opportunities, and ‘Wasted’ was just me thinking about that for myself and other people I know. When I feel like, ‘Oh god, I\'ve been sitting here in this stagnant place,’ whatever it is, whether it\'s my misery or various injuries I\'ve had that I\'ve had to recover from, that require you to be in this time-wasting place, try and create that motion again. ‘Wasted’ was the instrumental nature of it, the whole middle section, and I was just trying to create that momentum, and that was all one of our favorite tracks, such a fun track to record and play. I feel like the first part of the song is we\'re trying to break up the energy, and then the instrumental part sends it out, shooting it out, once you\'ve broken it up.” **Welcome Home** “This was a rumination on family, and I have such a wonderful family—not only a blood family, but my friends that have become family—and sometimes I get so lost in the end of a romance or the failure of a romantic relationship that I can spin out and almost forget there\'s anybody else on earth. When I wrote ‘Welcome Home,’ it was a time after I came home to Kentucky and just had some beautiful hangs with my family and with my friends. It\'s just a reminder to myself that there are these people that love me, that do welcome me home, no matter what my personal or relationship life may be going through, and to not forget them in those times of need, but remember them and call on them, because they\'ve always been there for me.” **The First Time** “Another one I wrote walking down the beach. That\'s a thing I think about a lot, that I struggle with. I almost feel like sometimes I haven\'t unlocked the key yet. Some people have, but I feel like we get almost penalized in relationships, that everybody always says there\'s the magic there at the beginning and everything is so amazing, and then slowly the magic fades away. You can keep creating that beginner\'s mind—that freshness that brought you together in the first place—but still grow. Can we make this feel as special as it did back when we met and things were electric and things were on fire and we were everything to each other? I haven\'t been able to sustain that. Somehow that always fades away, and I wish it was engineered the other way, where you got more and more rewarded for staying in the relationship—it just got hotter and hotter and more and more amazing. I know some people do make that happen, but I think it takes a lot of work, obviously, doing the work for yourself and have your partner do the work.”

Back in 2014, the members of My Morning Jacket spent time up in Stinson Beach, a tiny Northern California town set right on the ocean and near the majestic Muir Woods. Massively inspired by their idyllic surroundings, the Kentucky-bred five-piece ended up creating over two dozen songs at the mountaintop studio known as Panoramic House. Though they flirted with the idea of putting out a triple album, the band ultimately decided that less would be more and divided the project into two halves, releasing the first segment as The Waterfall: a 2015 full-length that earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. My Morning Jacket are now set to share the second half of the project as The Waterfall II, an unforeseen and timely continuation of a psychic and sonic journey begun long ago.

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

Staying together during anxious times is the central focus of the Wellington, New Zealand, band’s seventh album. In the five years between 2015’s *Give Up Your Dreams* and *Friend Ship*, the six-piece worked on a variety of projects—from teaming up with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for a series of concerts celebrating their 20 years together to working on the soundtrack to Taika Waititi’s *Hunt for the Wilderpeople* (which three of the band members were involved in under the name Moniker). These collaborative experiences sparked an interest in bringing in more guests on this hazy neo-psych record. On “Tranquility,” frontman Samuel Flynn Scott duets with Tiny Ruins’ Hollie Fullbrook as they ease the mind over a blanket of ambient soundscapes and late-night sax, while on the harpsichord-led ’60s sunshine pop of “Hounds of Hell,” it’s singer-songwriter Nadia Reid who joins him for an enchanting duet about the fruits of true companionship. Scott, who’s known to inject some sarcasm into his lyrics, is less hopeful on the otherwise lush chamber pop of “Miserable Meal,” another collaboration with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: “All aboard the S.S. Shithole/The captain says we’ll make it/But I disagree.”

🇬🇧🇺🇸 "Domesticated" is Sébastien Tellier's 6th studio album, his groundbreaking come back since "L'Aventura" in 2014. In his mind, he had only one ambition: gathering a fresh new guard of producers with the aim of crafting a new lush, futuristic pop sound, although still infused by his eternal and oh so special melodies. Mixed by the sound wizard Nk.F (celebrated for French rap duo PNL’s stunning sound), "Domesticated" will surprise you by its breadth and silkiness. Its topic, domestication, will speak to anybody delightfully familiar with the everyday domestic ballet of a household. Mostly written at home, Sébastien allowed himself to be inspired by what he had in front of him: piles of plates stacked in the sink, dirty socks spread out on the scratched floor, two beautiful children he has yet to domesticate…or is it him now who is being domesticated? 🇫🇷 "Domesticated" est le 6e album studio de Sébastien Tellier, son retour en grandes pompes depuis "L'Aventura" en 2014. Dans sa tête, une ambition : rassembler toute une jeune garde de producteurs dans le but de produire un nouveau son pop léché, futuriste, mais toujours emprunt de ces mélodies éternelles dont lui seul a le secret. Mixé par le sorcier du son Nk.F (repéré notamment aux côtés de PNL), "Domesticated" vous surprendra par son ampleur et sa douceur. Et aussi par son thème, la domestication, et le destin d'un homme qui assiste au ballet domestique avec délectation. Écrit en majeure partie à la maison, il s'est laissé inspirer par ce qu'il y a trouvé : des piles d'assiettes dans l'évier, des chaussettes sales sur le parquet rayé, deux beaux jeunes enfants à domestiquer... Ou peut-être est-ce lui qui est désormais domestiqué ?...