Piccadilly Records' Top 100 Albums of 2021

Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.

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

'Flock’ is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation. The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but ‘Flock’ is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk. Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is ‘The Revolution Of Super Visions’, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates ‘Flock’ and concludes on ‘Solarised’, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night. The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphosise…

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

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

On the intro to Tony Allen\'s posthumous *There Is No End*, we hear the voice of the iconic Nigerian-born, Paris-based drummer himself, explaining this album’s very title. Quite literally, he says “there is no end” to the hypnotic loop of a distinctive drum groove called Afrobeat, which Allen created and implemented as a cofounder of Fela Kuti’s groundbreaking band Africa 70. On a more spiritual note, there is no end to the creative legacy of a figure like Allen, despite his death in 2020 at 79. With Afrobeat’s supple accents and subdivisions, its calm yet inescapable funk, Allen impacted groove-based music in a league comparable to fellow drummers Bernard Purdie and Clyde Stubblefield. In his post-Fela years, Allen struck up collaborations with the likes of Blur’s and Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn, who coproduced “Cosmosis” here (featuring Nigerian British rapper Skepta and Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri). Allen also signed with Blue Note and released *The Source* in 2017, favoring a more acoustic sound with brass and saxophones. *There Is No End*, by contrast, places Allen in more of a hip-hop context, collaborating with younger rappers and singers. Allen completed the backbone of the project in 2019, but it was up to producers Vincent Taeger and Vincent Taurelle to finish it with Allen’s blessing after his death. Allen’s airborne beats hold it all together, and the rappers feed off of his drive and syncopation with riveting results—especially the female guests on “Stumbling Down” (Zambian-born Sampa the Great), “Mau Mau” (Kenyan-born Nah Eeto), and “One Inna Million” (West London underground phenom LAVA LA RUE). Detroit’s Danny Brown takes a ferocious turn on “Deer in Headlights,” its grungy, stripped-down feel highlighting Allen’s trademark groove with exceptional clarity.

The intense process of making a debut album can have enduring effects on a band. Some are less expected than others. “It made my clothes smell for weeks afterwards,” Squid’s drummer/singer Ollie Judge tells Apple Music. During the British summer heatwave of 2020, the UK five-piece—Judge and multi-instrumentalists Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson—decamped to producer Dan Carey’s London studio for three weeks. There, Carey served them the Swiss melted-cheese dish raclette, hence the stench, and also helped the band expand the punk-funk foundations of their early singles into a capricious, questing set that draws on industrial, jazz, alt-rock, electronic, field recordings, and a Renaissance-era wind instrument called the rackett. The songs regularly reflect on disquieting aspects of modern life—“2010” alone examines greed, gentrification, and the mental-health effects of working in a slaughterhouse—but it’s also an album underpinned by the kindness of others. Before Carey hosted them in a COVID-safe environment at his home studio, the band navigated the restrictions of lockdown with the help of people living near Judge’s parents in Chippenham in south-west England. A next-door neighbor, who happens to be Foals’ guitar tech, lent them equipment, while a local pub owner opened up his barn as a writing and rehearsal space. “It was really nice, so many people helping each other out,“ says Borlase. “There’s maybe elements within the music, on a textural level, of how we wished that feel of human generosity was around a bit more in the long term.” Here, Borlase, Judge, and Pearson guide us through the record, track by track. **“Resolution Square”** Anton Pearson: “It’s a ring of guitar amps facing the ceiling, playing samples. On the ceiling was a microphone on a cord that swung around like a pendulum. So you get that dizzying effect of motion. It’s a bit like a red shift effect, the pitch changing as the microphone moves. We used samples of church bells and sounds from nature. It felt like a really nice thing to start with, kind of waking up.” Ollie Judge: “It sounds like cars whizzing by on the flyover, but it’s all made out of sounds from nature. So it’s playing to that push and pull between rural and urban spaces.” **“G.S.K.”** OJ: “I started writing the lyrics when I was on a Megabus from Bristol to London. I was reading *Concrete Island* by J. G. Ballard, and that is set underneath that same flyover that you go on from Bristol to London \[the Chiswick Flyover\]. I decided to explore the dystopic nature of Britain, I guess. It’s a real tone-setter, quite industrial and a bit unlike the sound world that we’ve explored before. Lots of clanging.” **“Narrator”** OJ: “It’s almost like a medley of everything we’ve done before: It’s got the punk-funk kind of stuff, and then newer industrial kind of sounds, and a foray into electronic sounds.” Louis Borlase: “It’s actually one of the freest ones when it comes to performing it. The big build-up that takes you through to the very end of the song is massively about texture in space, therefore it’s also massively about communication. That takes us back to the early days of playing in the Verdict \[jazz venue\] together, in Brighton, where we used to have very freeform music. It was very much about just establishing a tonality and a harmony and potentially a rhythm, and just kind of riding with it.” **“Boy Racers”** OJ: “It’s a song of two halves. The familiar, almost straightforward pop song, and then it ends in a medieval synth solo.” LB: “We had started working on it quite crudely, ready to start performing it on tour, in March 2020, just before lockdown. In lockdown, we started sending each other files and letting it develop via the internet. Just at the point where everything stops rhythmically and everything gets thrown up into the air—and enter said rackett solo—it’s the perfect depiction of when we were able to start seeing each other again. That whole rhythmic element stopped, and we left the focus to be what it means to have something that’s very free.” **“Paddling”** OJ: “The big, gooey pop centerpiece of the album. There’s a video of us playing it live from quite a few years ago, and it’s changed so much. We added quite a bit of nuance.” AP: “It was a combined effort between the three of us, lyrically. It started off about coming-of-age themes and how that related to readings about *The Wind in the Willows* and Mole—about things feeling scary when they’re new sometimes. That kind of naivety can trip you up. Then also about the whole theme of the book, about greed and consumerism, and learning to enjoy simple things. That book says such a beautiful thing about joy and how to get enjoyment out of life.” **“Documentary Filmmaker”** OJ: “It was quite Steve Reich-inspired, even to the point where when I played my girlfriend the album for the first time she said, ‘Oh, I thought that was Steve Reich. That was really nice.’” LB: “It started in a bedroom jam at Arthur’s family house. We had quite a lazy summer afternoon, no pressure in writing, and that’s preserved its way through to what it is on the album.” AP: “Sometimes we set out with ideas like that and they move into the more full-band setting. We felt was really important to keep this one in that kind of stripped-back nature.” **“2010”** OJ: “I think it’s a real shift towards future Squid music. It’s more like an alternative rock song than a post-punk band. It’s definitely a turning point: Our music has been known to be quite anecdotal and humorous in places, but this is quite mature. It doesn’t have a tongue-in-cheek moment.” LB: “Lyrically, it’s tackling some themes which are quite distressing and expose some of the problematic aspects of society. Trying to make that work, you’re owing a lot to the people involved, people that are affected by these issues, and you don’t want to make something that doesn’t feel truly thought about.” **“The Flyover”** AP: “It moulds really nicely into ‘Peel St.’ after it, which is quite fun—that slow morphing from something quite calm into something quite stressful. Arthur sent some questions out to friends of the band to answer, recorded on their phones. He multi-tracked them so there’s only ever like three people talking at one time. It’s just such a hypnotic and beautiful thing to listen to. Lots of different people talking about their lives and their perspectives.” **“Peel St.”** AP: “That’s the first thing we came up with when we met up in Chippenham, after having been separate for so long. It was this wave of excitement and joy. I don’t know why, when we’re all so happy, something like that comes out. That rhythmic pattern grew from those first few days, because it was really emotional.” LB: “It was joyful, but when we were all in that barn on the first day, I don’t think any of us were quite right. We called it ‘Aggro’ before we named it ‘Peel St.,’ because we would feel pretty unsettled playing it. It was a workout mentally and physically.” **“Global Groove”** OJ: “I got loads of inspiration from a retrospective on Nam June Paik—who’s like the godfather of TV art, or video installations—at the Tate. It’s a lot about growing up with the 24-hour news cycle and how unhealthy it is to be bombarded with mostly bad news—but then sometimes a nice story about an animal \[gets added\] on the end of the news broadcast. Growing up with various atrocities going on around you, and how the 24-hour news cycle must desensitize you to large-scale wars and death.” **“Pamphlets”** LB: “It’s probably the second oldest track on the album. The three of us were staying at Ollie’s parents’ house a couple of summers ago and it was the first time we bought a whiteboard. We now write music using a whiteboard, we draw stuff up, try and keep it visual. It also makes us feel quite efficient. ‘Pamphlets’ became an important part of our set, particularly finishing a set, because it’s quite a long blow-out ending. But when we brought it back to Chippenham last year, it had changed so much, because it had had so much time to have so many audiences responding to it in different ways. It’s very live music.”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums are typically accompanied by a collective ideological statement of intent from the Montreal instrumental ensemble. And coming in the midst of a pandemic that has greatly magnified the societal inequalities they’ve always railed against, the missive/press release that accompanies *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* practically reads like a ransom note, with calls to “take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise” and “tax the rich until they\'re impoverished,” among others. But where they were once the doomsday prophets of pre-millennium post-rock, the band\'s response to the intensifying turmoil of 21st-century life is to radiate an ever-greater degree of positivity through their music. Godspeed\'s seventh album adheres to a similar structure as their post-reunion releases (with two mammoth, multi-sectional movements each flanked by a shorter piece) while tapping into a similar spirit of hard-fought perseverance. However, *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* is distinguished by its heightened sense of clarity and levity. In contrast to the sustained, swelling drones of 2017’s *Luciferian Towers* and the defiant doom-metal behemoths of 2015’s *Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress*, this set’s opening four-track suite gradually blossoms from a minimalist, militaristic march into a delirious orchestral swirl, before entering an extended comedown jam that suggests ’70s Floyd jamming with Crazy Horse. The equally expansive companion piece (spread over tracks 6 and 7) likewise travels from desolate valleys to staggering peaks and back again, but rallies for a triumphant victory-lap gallop that could very well count as the most elating piece of music this band has ever produced. Even the brief meditative ambient symphony that closes the record is embedded with inspirational energy—it’s called “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN,” so consider *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* a sonic premonition of the better, more humane world that awaits us on the other side.

“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”

After the release of 2018’s *Wide Awake!*, Parquet Courts guitarist Austin Brown was feeling the effects of nearly a decade of touring and recording. “To be frank, I was a bit disillusioned with music in general,” he tells Apple Music. “There was this exhaustion. Maybe I was just a little bit bored with the state of rock music or indie music—it was a hard world to relate to, and I’m not sure we ever did. But I wanted to figure out a way to reject ideas of whatever was being pushed as culture, and I wanted to do it in a productive way by offering up something better.” That something is *Sympathy for Life*, his Brooklyn outfit’s seventh full-length. In an effort to branch out both musically and socially, Brown became a member of The Loft, New York’s longest-running (and most influential) underground dance party, ground zero for disco in the 1970s. While there is still plenty of rock to be found here (see: the hypnotic crunch of “Homo Sapien”), it’s often braided together with elements of dance music, in the spirit of Talking Heads, Happy Mondays, and Primal Scream. The emphasis was on rhythm, the goal to write songs a DJ could easily unfurl at a party. And to get there, they largely switched up their lyrics-first approach to writing, recording and editing together long stretches of improvisation. “We’ve been together for 10 years now,” Brown says. “One of the biggest influences on the sound of the record is us utilizing that. Our biggest asset and our best instrument is just us, playing together as a band.” Here, Brown guides us through songs from the album. **“Walking at a Downtown Pace”** “Every day in the mix session, we would spend a few hours just on this song, listening to the drums and moving stuff around, finding that sweet spot—what makes you move and what doesn\'t. We really wanted a song that a DJ can play at a party, and that\'s why we really needed to get the kick drum to hit, the snare drum to really be on that right beat. It was important for us to have that crossover feel, between rock and dance. But in trying to find what that would mean for us, it felt like a really important song for the band and for the record.” **“Black Widow Spider”** “A lot of the songs were cultivated from improvisations, and this is one of them. That guitar sound is super unique, and it\'s integral to this sound on this record. We fed Andrew\'s \[Savage\] rhythm guitar—and I think maybe the lead guitar as well—through the MS-20 synthesizer. I had this space station dub set up, where I had a 16-channel mixer, five synthesizers, but then also effects like tape echo and the harmonizer—the one that you would hear on David Bowie\'s *Low*. It\'s this vintage 8-bit digital pitch-shifting thing that I just am obsessed with.” **“Marathon of Anger”** “It\'s about living in quarantine during Black Lives Matter and just all of the things that were happening around that time, but also looking forward to what happens next. It\'s about getting to work to make the change that we need to see collectively in our personal lives and in our community. And right now, this is the marathon of anger, but what happens next? You can\'t just be angry, there has to be something that comes after this.” **“Just Shadows”** “Within the band there\'s been an ongoing conversation about recycling. And I guess this song is sort of summed up by that conversation for me: It just gets really frustrating when you\'re in your kitchen being like, ‘I\'m not really sure if this is recyclable, but I feel like if I don\'t do this right I\'m a bad person.’ And the rules about recycling are honestly so confusing, and they\'re put onto us as individuals, rather than the corporations which are literally making the products. The song lists the ways that we have these false choices about doing the right thing, how we find the things that are good for us, how do we know what\'s good for us or good for the world, and have these choices put in front of us that don\'t always make sense.” **“Plant Life”** “The word that \[producer\] Roddy \[McDonald\] used to describe it was ‘Balearic.’ It hit all these notes, and I had them build this up to be this Mediterranean island vibe, a Grace Jones ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ kind of groove—more of a feeling or a mood. It’s like a sunset or a sunrise, a song that you could play on the beach during that time, but at night or in the morning. That late-’80s rock-meets-dance in England vibe: It was never about hard acid house. It was just about this mellow groove. It helped these guys that were in rock bands understand that transition between what can we do to integrate ourselves into this new rave world, this dance world. ‘Plant Life’ is probably the most pure expression of that on this record.” **“Application/Apparatus”** “The lyrics are sort of about this conflict between a person versus the robot algorithm takeover. I feel like the music really matches that in quality—it’s very electronic, robotic, a really direct expression of the lyrics. That song is sort of this total package, a complete circle of aesthetic and lyrical content and deeper meaning.” **“Homo Sapien”** “This is a song that Andrew brought fully realized. At first, it was the kind of track I was trying to avoid on this record—just more of a rock song. But the more that we worked on it, the more I thought, ‘This is actually cool and it fits in aesthetically.’ It feels like one of our more accomplished high-energy tracks. It\'s not beating you over the head with speed or anything—it’s got a groove to it. But the sound of all the guitars and everything just feels like it actually expresses the energy in an intuitive way that we haven\'t always had. It growls and snarls and just feels very primitive and caveman. But in a way that\'s got swagger to it, which I can really appreciate, because I\'m just getting a little old for that finger-wagging kind of punk.” **“Sympathy for Life”** “I was really obsessed with the intersection between Afrobeat and dub when I was thinking about songs for this record—really into polyrhythm and really wanting to incorporate that. I worked really hard, ended up in some pretty funky zones that were really, really hard to recreate live in the studio.” **“Zoom Out”** “It was really inspired by being at some of these parties that I\'ve been going to—dance parties and disco parties, the experience at The Loft. That song is more about the joy that you can experience through community, what you have when you take materialism out of your relationships.” **“Trullo”** “I think this is maybe my favorite song on the record. It’s another one that was cut up from a long improvisation. It’s a very sample-heavy track. I put in a guitar solo that came off of the song \'Bodies Made Of,’ off \[2014’s\] *Sunbathing Animal*. And there\'s some other hidden samples in there as well that I can\'t even remember. It’s about living inside of a house in the shape of a head, kind of like living in a skull.” **“Pulcinella”** “Pulcinella is this creepy Italian clown, or a masked figure sometimes appearing as a clown. It’s playful, it\'s kind of scary, it\'s sort of like a visual or a metaphorical antagonist for themes that pop up throughout the album. The lyrics I always come back to are where it talks about carrying a chain, because I think that carrying around a relationship\'s worth of experiences or a life\'s worth of experiences can get quite heavy and burdensome when you\'re trying to connect with people. The thing that I love about this song is how naked it feels, especially considering the production on a lot of the other songs. It felt like a sensitive way to close out the album.”

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

On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.

As Amyl and the Sniffers came off the road in late 2019, they moved into a house together in Melbourne. “It had lime green walls and mice,” frontwoman Amy Taylor tells Apple Music. “Three bedrooms and a shed out back that we took turns sleeping in. We knew we were going to come back for a long period of time to write. We just didn’t know how long.” Months later, as the bushfires gave way to a global pandemic, the Aussie punk outfit found themselves well-prepared for lockdown. “We’ve always kind of just been in each other’s pocket, forever and always,” Taylor says. “We’ve toured everywhere, been housemates, been in a van, and shared hotel rooms. We’re one person.” With all rehearsal studios closed, they rented a nearby storage unit where they could workshop the follow-up to their ARIA-winning, self-titled debut. The acoustics were so harsh and the PA so loud that guitarist Dec Martens says, “I never really heard any of Amy’s lyrics until they were recorded later on. She could’ve been singing about whatever, and I would have gone along with it, really.” And though *Comfort to Me* shows a more serious and personal side—as well as a range of influences that spans hardcore, power pop, and ’70s folk—that’s not necessarily a byproduct of living through a series of catastrophes. “I was pretty depressed,” Taylor says. “It’s hard to know what was the pandemic and what was just my brain. Even though you can’t travel and you can’t see people, life still just happens. I could look through last year and, really, it’s like the same amount of good and bad stuff happened, but in a different way. You’re just always feeling stuff.” Here, Taylor and Martens take us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Guided by Angels”** Amy Taylor: “I feel like, as a band, everyone thinks we’re just funny all the time. And we are funny and I love to laugh, but we also are full-spectrum humans who think about serious stuff as well, and I like that one because it’s kind of cryptic and poetic and a bit more dense. It’s not just, like, ‘Yee-haw, let’s punch a wall,’ which there’s plenty of and I also really love. We’re showing our range a little bit.” **“Freaks to the Front”** AT: “We must’ve written that before COVID. That’s absolutely a live-experience song and we’re such a live band—that’s our whole setup. We probably have more skills playing live than we do making music. It’s the energy that is contagious, and that one’s just kind of encouraging all kind of freaks, all kind of people: If you’re rich or poor or smart or fat or ugly or nice or mean, everyone just represent yourself and have a good time.” **“Choices”** Dec Martens: “\[Bassist\] Gus \[Romer\] is really into hardcore at the moment, and he wanted a really animalistic, straight-up hardcore song.” AT: “Growing up, I went to a fair handful of hardcore shows, and I personally liked the aggression of a hardcore show. In the audience, people kind of grabbing each other and chucking each other down, but then also pulling each other up and helping each other. I also just really like music that makes me feel angry. I constantly am getting unsolicited advice—or women, in general, are constantly getting told how to live and what to do. Everybody around the world is, and sometimes it’s really helpful—and I don’t discount that—but other times it’s just like, ‘Let me just fucking figure it out myself, and don’t tell me what kind of choices I can and can’t make, because it’s my flesh sack and I’ll do what I want with it.’” **“Hertz”** AT: “I think I started writing it at the start of 2020, pre-lockdown. But it’s funny now, because currently, being in lockdown again, I’m literally dying. I just want to get to the country and fucking not be in the city. So, the lyrics have really just come to fruition. I was thinking about somebody that I wasn’t really with at the time. It’s that feeling of feeling suffocated—you just want to look at the sky, just be in nature, and just be alive.” **“No More Tears”** DM: “I was really inspired by this ’70s album called *No Other* by Gene Clark, which isn’t very punk or rock. But I just played this at a faster tempo.” AT: “And also inspired heaps by the Sunnyboys, an Australian power pop band. Last year was really tough for me, and that song’s about how much I was struggling with heaps of different shit and trying to, I guess, try and make relationships work. I was just feeling not very lovable, because I’m all fucked in the head, but I’m also trying to make it work. It’s a pretty personal song.” **“Knifey”** AT: “It’s about my experience—and I’m sure lots of other people’s experience—of feeling safe to walk home at night. The world’s different for people like me and chicks and stuff: You can carry a weapon and if somebody does something awful and you react, it comes back to you. I remember when I was a kid, being like, ‘Dad, I want to get a knife,’ and he was like, ‘You can’t get a knife because you’ll kill someone and go to jail.’ But so be it. If somebody wants to have a go, I’m very happy to react negatively. At the start, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do these lyrics. I don’t know if I’d want to play that song live.’ It’s probably the only song that I’ve ever really felt like that about. It hit up the boys in the band in an emotional way. They were like, ‘Fuck, this is powerful. Makes me cry and shit,’ and I was like, ‘That’s pretty dope.’” **“Don’t Need a C\*\*t (Like You to Love Me)”** AT: “It’s a fuck-you song. When I’m saying, ‘Don’t need a c\*\*t like you to love me,’ it’s pretty much just any c\*\*t that I don’t like in general. There could be some fucking piss-weak review of us or if I worked at a job and there was a crap fucking customer—it’s all of that. I wasn’t thinking about a particular bloke, although there’s many that I feel like that about.” **“Snakes”** “A bit of autobiography, an ode to my childhood. I grew up in a small town near the coast—kind of bogan, kind of hippy. I grew up on three acres, and I grew up in a shed with my sister, mom, and dad until I was about nine or 10, and we all shared a bedroom and would use the bath water to wash our clothes and then that same water to water the plants. Dad used to bring us toys home from the tip and we’d go swimming in the storms and there was snakes everywhere. There was snakes, literally, in the bedroom and the chick pens, and there’d be snakes killing the cats and snakes at school—and this song’s about that.”

Madvillain superfans will no doubt recall the Four Tet 2005 remix EP stuffed with inventive versions of cuts from the now-certified classic rap album *Madvillainy*. Coming a decade and a half later, *Sound Ancestors* sees Kieran Hebden link once again with iconic hip-hop producer Madlib, this time for a set of all-new material, the product of a years-long and largely remote collaboration process. With source material arranged, edited, and recontextualized by the UK-born artist, the album represents a truly unique shared vision, exemplified by the reggae-tinged boom-bap of “Theme De Crabtree” and the neo-soul-infused clatter of “Dirtknock.” Such genre blends turn these 16 tracks into an excitingly twisty journey through both men’s seemingly boundless creativity, leading to the lithe jazz-hop of “Road of the Lonely Ones” and the rugged B-boy business of “Riddim Chant.”

“Things should change and evolve, and music is an extension of that, of the continuity of life,” Hiatus Kaiyote leader Nai Palm tells Apple Music. The Melbourne jazz/R&B/future-soul ensemble began writing their third album, *Mood Valiant*, in 2018, three years after the Grammy-nominated *Choose Your Weapon*, which featured tracks that were later sampled by artists including Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Anderson .Paak. The process was halted when Nai Palm (Naomi Saalfield) was diagnosed with breast cancer—the same illness which had led to her mother’s death when she was 11. It changed everything about Nai Palm’s approach to life, herself, and her music—and the band began writing again from a different perspective. “All the little voices of self-doubt or validation just went away,” she says. “I didn\'t really care about the mundane things anymore, so it felt really liberating to be in a vocal booth and find joy in capturing who I am, as opposed to psychoanalyzing it. When you have nothing is when you really experience gratitude for what you have.” The album had largely been written before the pandemic hit, but when it did, they used the extra time to write even more and create something even more intricate. There are songs about unusual mating rituals in the animal kingdom, the healing power of music, the beauty and comfort of home, and the relationships we have with ourselves, those around us, and the world at large. “The whole album is about relationships without me really meaning to do that,” she says. Below, Nai Palm breaks down select lyrics from *Mood Valiant*. **“Chivalry Is Not Dead”** *“Electrons in the air on fire/Lightning kissing metal/Whisper to the tiny hairs/Battery on my tongue/Meteor that greets Sahara/We could get lost in static power”* “The first couple of verses are relating to bizarre mating rituals in the animal kingdom. It’s about reproduction and creating life, but I wanted to expand on that. Where else is this happening in nature that isn’t necessarily two animals? The way that lightning is attracted to metal, a conductor for electricity. When meteors hit the sand, it\'s so hot that it melts the sand and it creates this crazy kryptonite-looking glass. So it\'s about the relationship of life forces engaging with each other and creating something new, whether that\'s babies or space glass.” **“Get Sun”** *“Ghost, hidden eggshell, no rebel yell/Comfort in vacant waters/And I awake, purging of fear/A task that you wear/Dormant valiance, it falls”* “‘Get Sun’ is my tribute to music and what I feel it\'s supposed to do. Even when you’re closed off from the world, music can still find its way to you. ‘Ghost, hidden eggshell’ is a reference to *Ghost in the Shell*, an anime about a human soul captured in a cyborg\'s body. I feel that within the entertainment industry, but the opposite—there are people who are empty. There’s no rebellion. They’re comfortable in this vacant pool of superficial expression. I feel like there\'s a massive responsibility as a musician and as an artist to be sincere and transparent and expressive. And it takes a lot of courage but it also takes a lot of vulnerability. And ‘Dormant valiance, it falls’—from the outside, something might look quite valiant and put together, but if it\'s dormant and has no substance, it will fall, or be impermanent. And that\'s not how you make timeless art. Maybe it\'ll entertain people for three seconds but it will be gone.” **“Hush Rattle”** *“Iwêi, Rona”* “When I was in Brazil, I spent 10 days with the Varinawa tribe in the Amazon and it changed my life. On my last day there, all the women got together and sang for me in their language, Varinawa, and let me record it. There were about 20 women; they\'ll sing a phrase and when they get to the last note, they hold it for as long as they can and they all drop off at different points. It was just so magical. So we\'ve got little samples of that throughout the song, but the lyrics that I\'m singing were taught to me: ‘Iwêi,’ which means ‘I love you,’ and ‘Rona,’ which means ‘I will always miss you.’ It’s a love letter to the people that I met there.” **“Rose Water”** *“My hayati, leopard pearl in the arms of my lover/I draw your outline with the scent of amber”* “There’s an Arabic word here: *hayati*. The word *habibi* is like ‘You’re my love,’ but to say ‘my hayati’ means you\'re *more* than my love—you\'re my life. One of my dear friends is Lebanese. He’s 60, but maybe he\'s 400, we don\'t know. He’s the closest thing to a father that I\'ve had since being an orphan. He makes me this beautiful amber perfume; it’s like a resin, made with beeswax. There’s musk and oils he imports from Dubai and Syria. So it’s essentially a lullaby love song that uses these opulent, elegant elements from Middle Eastern culture that I\'ve been exposed to through the people that I love.” **“Red Room”** *“I got a red room, it is the red hour/When the sun sets in my bedroom/It feels like I\'m inside a flower/It feels like I\'m inside my eyelids/And I don\'t want to be anywhere but here”* “I used to live in an old house; the windows were colored red, like leadlight windows. And whenever the sun set, the whole room would glow for an hour. It\'s such a simple thing, but it was so magic to me. This one, for me, is about when you close your eyes and you look at the sun and it\'s red. You feel like you\'re looking at something, but really it\'s just your skin. It’s one of those childlike quirks everyone can relate to.” **“Sparkle Tape Break Up”** *“No, I can’t keep on breaking apart/Grow like waratah”* “It’s a mantra. I’m not going to let little things get to me. I\'m not going to start self-loathing. I\'m going to grow like this resilient, beautiful fucking flower. I\'ve made it a life goal to try to at least be peaceful with most people, for selfish reasons—so that I don\'t have to carry that weight. Songs like this have really helped me to formulate healthy coping mechanisms.” **“Stone or Lavender”** *“Belong to love/Please don’t bury us unless we’re seeds/Learn to forgive/You know very well it’s not easy/Who are they when they meet?/Stone or lavender/Before the word is ever uttered/Was your leap deeper?”* “‘Please don\'t bury us unless we\'re seeds’ is a reference to a quote: ‘They tried to bury us, they didn\'t know we were seeds.’ That visual is so fucking powerful. It’s saying, ‘Please don\'t try to crush the human spirit, because all life has the potential to grow, belong to love.’ This song is the closest to my breast cancer diagnosis stuff; it’s saying, ‘All right, who are you? What do you want from life? Who do you want to be?’ Do you emit a beautiful scent and you\'re soft and you\'re healing or are you stone? Before anyone\'s even exchanged anything, before a word is ever uttered, your energy introduces you.” **“Blood and Marrow”** *“Not a speck of dust on chrysanthemum/Feather on the breath of the mother tongue”* “I think is one of the most poetic things I\'ve ever written; it\'s maybe the thing I\'m most proud of lyric-wise. The first lyric is a reference to a Japanese poet called Bashō. I wanted to use this reference because when my bird Charlie died—I had him for 10 years, he was a rescue and he was my best friend—we were watching *Bambi* on my laptop. He was sitting on my computer, and we got halfway through and he died. The song is my ode to Charlie and to beauty in the world.”

Lucy Dacus’ favorite songs are “the ones that take 15 minutes to write,” she tells Apple Music. “I\'m easily convinced that the song is like a unit when it comes out in one burst. In many ways, I feel out of control, like it\'s not my decision what I write.” On her third LP, the Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter surrenders to autobiography with a set of spare and intimate indie rock that combines her memory of growing up in Richmond, Virginia, with details she pulled from journals she’s kept since she was 7, much of it shaped by her religious upbringing. It’s as much about what we remember as how and why we remember it. “The record was me looking at my past, but now when I hear them it\'s almost like the songs are a part of the past, like a memory about memory,” she says. “This must be what I was ready to do, and I have to trust that. There\'s probably stuff that has happened to me that I\'m still not ready to look at and I just have to wait for the day that I am.” Here, she tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“Hot & Heavy”** “My first big tour in 2016—after my first record came out—was two and a half months, and at the very end of it, I broke up with my partner at the time. I came back to Richmond after being gone for the longest I\'d ever been away and everything felt different: people’s perception of me; my friend group; my living situation. I was, for the first time, not comfortable in Richmond, and I felt really sad about that because I had planned on being here my whole life. This song is about returning to where you grew up—or where you spent any of your past—and being hit with an onslaught of memories. I think of my past self as a separate person, so the song is me speaking to me. It’s realizing that at one point in my life, everything was ahead of me and my life could\'ve ended up however. It still can, but it\'s like now I know the secret.” **“Christine”** “It starts with a scene that really happened. Me and my friend were sitting in the backseat and she\'s asleep on my shoulder. We’re coming home from a sermon that was about how humans are evil and children especially need to be guided or else they\'ll fall into the hands of the devil. She was dating this guy who at the time was just not treating her right, and I played her the song. I was like, ‘I just want you to hear this once. I\'ll put it away, but you should know that I would not support you if you get married. I don\'t think that this is the best you could do.’ She took it to heart, but she didn\'t actually break up with the guy. They\'re still together and he\'s changed and they\'ve changed and I don\'t feel that way anymore. I feel like they\'re in a better place, but at the time it felt very urgent to me that she get out of that situation.” **“First Time”** “I was on a kind of fast-paced walk and I started singing to myself, which is how I write most of my songs. I had all this energy and I started jogging for no reason, which, if you know me, is super not me—I would not electively jog. I started writing about that feeling when you\'re in love for the first time and all you think about is the one person and how you find access to yourself through them. I paused for a second because I was like, ‘Do I really want to talk about early sexual experiences? No, just do it. If you don\'t like it, don\'t share it.’ It’s about discovery: your body and your emotional capacity and how you\'re never going to feel it that way you did the first time again. At the time, I was very worried that I\'d never feel that way again. The truth was, I haven’t—but I have felt other wonderful things.” **“VBS”** “I don\'t want my identity to be that I used to believe in God because I didn\'t even choose that, but it\'s inextricable to who I am and my upbringing. I like that in the song, the setting is \[Vacation Bible School\], but the core of the song is about a relationship. My first boyfriend, who I met at VBS, used to snort nutmeg. He was a Slayer fan and it was contentious in our relationship because he loved Slayer even more than God and I got into Slayer thinking, ‘Oh, maybe he\'ll get into God.’ He was one of the kids that went to church but wasn\'t super into it, whereas I was defining my whole life by it. But I’ve got to thank him for introducing me to Slayer and The Cure, which had the biggest impact on me.” **“Cartwheel”** “I was taking a walk with \[producer\] Collin \[Pastore\] and as we passed by his school, I remembered all of the times that I was forced to play dodgeball, and how the heat in Richmond would get so bad that it would melt your shoes. That memory ended up turning into this song, about how all my girlfriends at that age were starting to get into boys before I wanted to and I felt so panicked. Why are we sneaking boys into the sleepover? They\'re not even talking. We were having fun and now no one is playing with me anymore. When my best friend told me when she had sex for the first time, I felt so betrayed. I blamed it on God, but really it was personal, because I knew that our friendship was over as I knew it, and it was.” **“Thumbs”** “I was in the car on the way to dinner in Nashville. We were going to a Thai restaurant, meeting up with some friends, and I just had my notepad out. Didn\'t notice it was happening, and then wrote the last line, ‘You don\'t owe him shit,’ and then I wrote it down a second time because I needed to hear it for myself. My birth father is somebody that doesn\'t really understand boundaries, and I guess I didn\'t know that I believed that, that I didn\'t owe him anything, until I said it out loud. When we got to the restaurant, I felt like I was going to throw up, and so they all went into the restaurant, got a table, and I just sat there and cried. Then I gathered myself and had some pad thai.” **“Going Going Gone”** “I stayed up until like 1:00 am writing this cute little song on the little travel guitar that I bring on tour. I thought for sure I\'d never put it on a record because it\'s so campfire-ish. I never thought that it would fit tonally on anything, but I like the meaning of it. It\'s about the cycle of boys and girls, then men and women, and then fathers and daughters, and how fathers are protective of their daughters potentially because as young men they either witnessed or perpetrated abuse. Or just that men who would casually assault women know that their daughters are in danger of that, and that\'s maybe why they\'re so protective. I like it right after ‘Thumbs’ because it\'s like a reprieve after the heaviest point on the record.” **“Partner in Crime”** “I tried to sing a regular take and I was just sounding bad that day. We did Auto-Tune temporarily, but then we loved it so much we just kept it. I liked that it was a choice. The meaning of the song is about this relationship I had when I was a teenager with somebody who was older than me, and how I tried to act really adult in order to relate or get that person\'s respect. So Auto-Tune fits because it falsifies your voice in order to be technically more perfect or maybe more attractive.” **“Brando”** “I really started to know about older movies in high school, when I met this one friend who the song is about. I feel like he was attracted to anything that could give him superiority—he was a self-proclaimed anarchist punk, which just meant that he knew more and knew better than everyone. He used to tell me that he knew me better than everyone else, but really that could not have been true because I hardly ever talked about myself and he was never satisfied with who I was.” **“Please Stay”** “I wrote it in September of 2019, after we recorded most of the record. I had been circling around this role that I have played throughout my life, where I am trying to convince somebody that I love very much that their life is worth living. The song is about me just feeling helpless but trying to do anything I can to offer any sort of way in to life, instead of a way out. One day at a time is the right pace to aim for.” **“Triple Dog Dare”** “In high school I was friends with this girl and we would spend all our time together. Neither of us were out, but I think that her mom saw that there was romantic potential, even though I wouldn\'t come out to myself for many years later. The first verses of the song are true: Her mom kept us apart, our friendship didn\'t last. But the ending of the song is this fictitious alternative where the characters actually do prioritize each other and get out from under the thumbs of their parents and they steal a boat and they run away and it\'s sort of left to anyone\'s interpretation whether or not they succeed at that or if they die at sea. There’s no such thing as nonfiction. I felt empowered by finding out that I could just do that, like no one was making me tell the truth in that scenario. Songwriting doesn\'t have to be reporting.”

Twelve years after Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” upended dubstep and forever changed the course of bass music, the UK DJ/producer, born Peter O’Grady, has yet to put out his debut album. In fact, “I’ve never wanted to write an album,” he tells Apple Music. So, *Still Slipping Vol. 1*, the most substantial offering he’s released yet, might present something of a conceptual hurdle: Its 14 tracks and 46-minute runtime would seem to have all the outward trappings of a bona fide full-length. O’Grady, however, insists that it is not. Instead, he claims, it’s a mixtape. “I listen to a lot of rap mixtapes,” he says. “There’s something quite playful and a little bit more personal about them. Dance albums always feel very put on a pedestal. But with hip-hop tapes, there’s so much energy and excitement. It feels really fresh and unpretentious.” A similar energy runs through *Still Slipping Vol. 1*: Though its muted production constitutes some of the most experimental material in Joy Orbison’s catalog, it’s propelled by lithe garage and drum ’n’ bass rhythms, and it’s stitched together with Voice Notes from O’Grady’s family members. Reminiscing about his grandfather, laughing about a weekend of daiquiris, or even, in the case of one charming recording of his mother, simply praising the young musician’s production chops, these spoken bits lend an intimate air; you feel like you’re eavesdropping on his private life. O’Grady made the record during the 2020 COVID lockdown; cooped up at home, he saw no one for months, communicating with his family only via FaceTime. That sense of isolation bleeds through into some of the record’s darker tracks, like the gothic trap of “Bernard?” or the bit-crushed textures and paranoid jitter of “Glorious Amateurs.” But the spirit of collaboration also courses through the music. Working with an array of rappers, singers, and fellow producers—at first socially distanced and eventually in person—O’Grady took the opportunity to try out new sounds and styles, folding in the grit of post-punk on “’Rraine” and the reflective tenor of dub poetry on “Swag W/ Kav,” a flickering UK garage floor-filler. Here, he explains the backstories behind selected songs from the mixtape. **“W/ Dad & Frankie”** “My dad’s not a massive talker. You’ve got to get stuff out of him. He didn’t know he was being recorded; he was just in a good mood with his brother. My dad was a bit of a mod in the suedehead era, and they’re talking about clothing. I liked it because it’s a nice moment between my dad and his brother, but it’s also painting a picture of something that I find quite interesting. I’m quite influenced by post-punk, and kicking off the record, I was thinking about that; there’s a guitar sample in there.” **“Sparko” (feat. Herron)** “Sam Herron and I did all of this just sending loops and ideas back and forth. I’m really into vocals and vocal melodies, but also the industrial side of things—I’m always trying to bring the soul out of something that’s quite abstract or a bit tougher. This track is him pushing it one way and me pushing it the other way and, hopefully, getting this interesting balance. It came together really quickly; it’s probably one of the last things I did on the record. I like it because it has this really good energy. It’s quite danceable. I play a lot of stuff around that BPM range when I DJ longer sets. We all come from a broken-beat background at 140 BPM, which maybe seems less interesting to us now. At slower tempos, you have more space.” **“Swag W/ Kav” (feat. James Massiah & Bathe)** “I was listening to a lot of 2-step and garage again. It’s something that I’m really influenced by, but I’m so sensitive about doing it, because I hold it in such high regard. Now there’s a throwback aspect, and the trend is really popular. But I think it’s hard for people now to imagine how sophisticated it seemed. I wanted to carry that sophistication on; I wanted to carry that energy into the track. I wanted to write a garage track that you could play like a minimal house track—something you could slip in at the right party and it wouldn’t be a throwback.” **“Better” (feat. Léa Sen)** “When I made this, I was thinking about people like Photek. I’m a massive Photek fan, and the way he approached house music and soulful vocal stuff always sat well with me. It’s uplifting but also melancholic. Drum ’n’ bass was always like that for me. But the nice thing about Léa is she’s 21 and she doesn’t necessarily know a lot of the things I was thinking about. I feel like her vocal is more like her doing a Frank Ocean vocal, which I love.” **“Bernard?”** “This is one I didn’t make during COVID, actually. It was originally called ‘Amtrak’ because I made it on an Amtrak train going from New York to Washington. The reason it’s called ‘Bernard?’ is because of Bernard Sumner. I’m a big New Order fan, and when I made it, I was thinking, ‘What if New Order made a hip-hop beat?’” **“Runnersz”** “This was one of the first Voice Notes I got sent where I was like, ‘Yeah, I have got to use this.’ Mia is my cousin; she’s also Ray Keith’s daughter—my uncle, who does the drum ’n’ bass stuff. I remember her being born, and now she’s 21 or something. She and her sister seemed to grow up quickly in lockdown, and it made me think about them now coming to clubs and falling in love and stuff like that.” **“’Rraine” (feat. Edna)** “Lorraine is my mom’s name, but my dad never says Lorraine—he just says ’Rraine. This is a song that me and Edna wrote, and then it morphed into what it is now. I do a lot of sessions with rappers and singers, and this was one of the beats I was giving to rappers. I got a few different vocals on it, but then I did a session with Edna. She’s in a band called Goat Girl—more post-punk type stuff. Weirdly, she really took to that track. It became this sort of—I don’t even know how I’d describe it. I’m a big Cocteau Twins fan, and I guess I was thinking about that kind of thing, but it isn’t really that, is it? It’s definitely leaning into my emo stuff.” **“Glorious Amateurs”** “I can’t even remember how this one came about. Someone once said to me that I write music like it’s coming out of a tube of toothpaste or something. This is one of the few that I would say I agree with that assessment. My manager didn’t really want to put it on the record, and I pushed. I said, ‘No, this one has to go on there.’” **“Froth Sipping”** “This was quite an old one, actually. When we were putting the tape together, we were going through a lot of my demos and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s actually quite good.’ I don’t really remember how I did a lot of it. I feel like it was quite modular-based. I think it’s even got some of the same ideas as ‘81B.’ I used to do a lot of that—build tracks out of other tracks. Things would just morph into other things.” **“Layer 6”** “I was with my mum and dad at Christmas, and my mum was talking about my radio show. She was like, ‘You should listen to Pete’s radio show. I think you’d like it.’ And my dad turns to me and goes, ‘It’s not for me though, is it? I’m nearly 70. Your mum can sit there and say it’s great, but it’s not really for her either.’ My parents have got really good musical taste, but they’re not musical people as such—they don’t play instruments. So, it’s kind of a sweet moment where my mum is trying to make sense of what I do and say something positive.” **“Playground” (feat. Goya Gumbani)** “This one, again, is thinking about stuff like Cocteau Twins. There was that really interesting point in post-punk—if you listen to the first Bauhaus record, that’s pretty much like a dub record. That fascinates me. I was thinking about that a bit when I made that beat. Goya, who’s the rapper, just has a really good ear. He came round and I was playing things and he was like, ‘Oh, that one.’ He could hear what he calls his ‘pocket,’ where the vocals would sit. It changed quite a bit once he jumped on it. I had been working on it with this vocalist who I was thinking could be the new Elizabeth Fraser. I was envisioning myself in this goth band. And then I played it for Goya, because the track wasn’t working out. It was two worlds colliding.” **“Born Slipping” (feat. TYSON)** “I like the idea of going out on a bit of a bang. It’s pretty straight up. It’s not trying to be anything particularly different, really. It’s quite an honest thing. It’s a bit garage-y, I love that. I’ve always loved a good vocal chop and a nice dubby synth. It’s the kind of thing that if I played it to my mates that I grew up with, they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, why don’t you do this more?’”

“This is the antithesis to our last record—where that was about heartbreak, this album is about freedom, picking yourself up and moving forward,” Jungle producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “It’s an album made for bringing people together; upbeat tunes to set people free.” Lloyd-Watson is one half of Jungle, the London-based production duo, with childhood friend Tom McFarland. Coming to prominence with their Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut album in 2014 (and, specifically, its ubiquitous single “Busy Earnin’”), the producers went on to establish themselves as hook-writing maestros, giving the warm mahogany feel of 1960s and ’70s soul a chrome polish with their seven-piece live band performances and intricate arrangements. Their third album, *Loving in Stereo* (succeeding 2018’s *For Ever*), takes their melodies squarely to the dance floor, featuring the thumping drum breakbeats of “Talk About It,” the driving disco-funk of “Keep Moving,” and collaborations from rapper Bas (“Romeo”) and singer Priya Ragu on the jazz-influenced “Goodbye My Love.” Read on for Lloyd-Watson’s thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Dry Your Tears”** “This was originally a middle-eight of a B-side called ‘Don\'t You Cry Now.’ It was one of the last pieces to go on the record, and it’s an overture about not feeling sorry for yourself. The vocals on it are quite airy and dreamlike, as if you\'re waking up from a bad dream, and the strings then ease you into the album but also make you question exactly what it is we\'re about to listen to.” **“Keep Moving”** “Those strings crescendo into ‘Keep Moving,’ which is an archetypal Jungle track. It\'s a song that we\'ve been trying to make ever since ‘Busy Earnin’,’ and it\'s almost like the older sibling to that song. It\'s about moving on and moving through hard times; a mantra to not worry about stuff too much but to be hopeful instead.” **“All of the Time”** “We always envisioned this track as what it would sound like if a band from the 1960s or ’70s had heard future garage rhythms but were playing them on acoustic instruments. It feels like a sample but it\'s not a sample, since we\'ve always been obsessed with things that sound old but are new. It\'s supposed to be a super uplifting track, with this gospel feeling in the chorus, which is just like pure euphoria.” **“Romeo” (feat. Bas)** “We met Bas at a festival on Coney Island a few years ago. He came backstage with such amazing energy and we got talking. We\'re all about features that are personal and that happen because they\'re meant to happen. We were at The Church Studios in Crouch End and he texted that he was in London, so he came through. We make a lot of hip-hop and we\'ve got so many of those sorts of beats, it\'s really great for people to hear that element to us.” **“Lifting You”** “This was a beat that I had made and it wasn\'t really supposed to be on the album. I remember sending it out to a load of artists and they really liked it but nothing happened with it. I sat down one day and wrote a vocal and we sang on it, and it just had a really carefree feeling to it. It\'s inspired by bits of KAYTRANADA, with this Moog One bassline that gives it a slightly clubbier feel. There’s also psychedelic influences and an uplifting vocal chorus, which takes it to a different dimension.” **“Bonnie Hill”** “‘Bonnie Hill’ is the oldest track on the record; it was one that was written during the second album at Bonnie Hill, a place in the hills in Los Angeles. We just had this beat for a while and it came together with this other melody we had lying around. At The Church Studios we had this 12-piece strings and brass section, and we added jazz flute, as well as a saxophone—that set the track alight. We don\'t have many solos in Jungle songs, so this was really exciting.” **“Fire”** “This was one of the first tracks to signify the direction of the album. It\'s this free-flowing piece that was very quick to make, in only around an hour. It\'s more of a sonic experimentation, where we\'d just gotten this new profiling amplifier and started putting loads of synthesizers through it, blurring that line between electronics and a band sound. We like to set our music to things, and this feels like it could soundtrack a car chase or heist in a film. It\'s a bit chaotic, and that\'s what we love about it.” **“Talk About It”** “The producer Inflo was in town when we were recording in LA and we just started jamming and came up with this. The drums have a sense of \[The Jam’s\] \'Town Called Malice\' or The Stone Roses to them. It\'s another one of those songs that feels like it\'s taken something from different eras and then pieced them all together. We wanted to hold on to the drum breakbeat that started it off and we just wouldn\'t let go of it until it was finished, not tweaking it or changing it but allowing it to sit in its original form.” **“No Rules”** “It\'s something that came about that wasn\'t supposed to be on the album, just again a track that got made for the fun of making music. It\'s like a synth odyssey, but it\'s also got this power. It\'s a rebellion against government control and surveillance and the ever-evolving world of *1984* that we\'re living in.” **“Truth”** “This is the most leftfield thing from what Jungle is. We were following the train of thought that you accept whatever happens in the studio, and it came very quickly. We used to listen to a lot of the indie rock that was dominating the charts in the mid-2000s, things like The Thrills and The Strokes and Kings of Leon, and there\'s an element of that to it, which is really nostalgic to us. It\'s a song about realizing that you love somebody and getting over those trust issues in the beginning of a relationship to ultimately realize that you only want to be with them.” **“What D\'You Know About Me?”** “This is ESG-inspired and it\'s the fastest track we\'ve ever done. It embodies the anger and passion that this record has—it’s got a darkness to it that ‘No Rules’ also has, again being about surveillance and people knowing too much about you. We\'re playfully asking, ‘What do you know about me?’ It\'s got this stark swagger to it.” **“Just Fly, Don\'t Worry”** “The previous two tracks are quite intense, so we wanted this to segue you down into the end of the album. This was originally a lot longer, but it plays now like a palate cleanser, just giving you the bits that you need. It\'s got a mixture between dub and funk in the groove and feel. We\'re making this music for the fun of it, and what we liked and what we connected with went on the record, rather than songs that we thought other people would know.” **“Goodbye My Love” (feat. Priya Ragu)** “We had been writing all day on this other song at Guy Chambers\' studio in London, where he has some amazing equipment like a vintage harpsichord and vibraphone. Our time was coming up and we challenged ourselves to see if we could get these sounds down for something new. Priya\'s got such a fantastic voice with such a pure tone, and we wanted to get her melody down in a free flow of consciousness. It wasn\'t intended to be a Jungle track, it was just made for us, but then we felt like it was supposed to be on the record.” **“Can\'t Stop the Stars”** “We try to close with something quite cinematic on our records. I remember hearing these strings back in the studio and they are so overwhelming—even to this day, that last 16 or 32 bars of music is so emotional and it takes us back to this feeling of wanting to be young and free. It\'s about someone in your life telling you you don\'t need to worry about everything, because you can\'t stop the stars from moving, so you can\'t control everything in this life. The more you let go, the more free you\'ll actually be.”

“I’ve had a lot of controversies in my short period being an artist,” slowthai tells Apple Music. “But I always try making a statement.” In 2019, there was the Northampton rapper’s establishment-rattling appearance at the Mercury Prize ceremony, hoisting of an effigy of Boris Johnson’s severed head. A few months later, sexualized comments he made to comedian Katherine Ryan at the 2020 NME Awards caused a fierce Twitter backlash and prompted the Record Store Day 2020 campaign to withdraw an invitation for slowthai to be its UK ambassador. Ryan labeled their exchange “pantomime” but it led to a confrontation with an audience member and slowthai’s apology for his “shameful actions.” Since releasing his 2019 debut *Nothing Great About Britain*, then, the artist born Tyron Frampton has known the unforgiving heat of public judgment. It’s helped forge *TYRON*, a follow-up demarcated into two seven-track sides. The first is brash, incendiary, and energized, continuing to draw a through line between punk and UK rap. The second is vulnerable and introspective, its beats more contemplative and searching. The overarching message is that there are two sides to every story, and even more to every human being. “We all have the side that we don’t show, and the side we show,” he says. “Living up to expectations—and then not giving a fuck and just being honest with yourself.” Featuring guests including Skepta, A$AP Rocky, James Blake, and Denzel Curry, these songs, he hopes, will offer help to others feeling penned in by judgment, stereotypes, or a lack of self-confidence. “I just want them to realize they’re not alone and can be themselves,” he says. “I know that when shit gets dark, you need a little bit of light.” Explore all of slowthai’s sides with his track-by-track guide. **45 SMOKE** “‘Rise and shine, let’s get it/Bumbaclart dickhead/Bumbaclart dickhead.’ It’s like the wake-up call for myself. It’s how you feel when you’re making constant mistakes, or you’re in a rut and you wake up like, ‘I really don’t want to wake up, I’d rather just sleep all day.’ It’s explaining where I’m from, and the same routine of doing this bullshit life that I don’t want to do—but I’m doing it just for the sake of doing it or because this is what’s expected of me.” **CANCELLED** “This song’s a fuck-you to the cancel culture, to people trying to tear you down and make it like you’re a bad person—because all I’ve done my whole life is try and escape that stereotype, and try and better myself. You can call me what you want, you can say what you think happened, but most of all I know myself. Through doing this, I’ve figured it out on a deeper level. When we made this, I was in a dark place because of everything going on. And Skep \[Skepta, co-MC on this track\] was guiding me out. He was saying, ‘Yo, man, this isn’t your defining moment. If anything, it pushes you to prove your point even more.’” **MAZZA** “Mazza is ‘mazzalean,’ which is my own word... It\'s just a mad thing. It’s for the people that have mad ADHD \[slowthai lives with the disorder\], ADD, and can’t focus on something—like how everything comes and it’s so quick, and it’s a rush. It’s where my head was at—be it that I was drinking a lot, or traveling a lot, and seeing a lot of things and doing a lot of dumb shit. Mad time. As soon as I made it, I FaceTimed \[A$AP\] Rocky because I was that gassed. We’d been working here and there, doing little bits. He was like, ‘This is hard. Come link up.’ He was in London and I went down there and \[we\] just patterned it out.” **VEX** “It’s just about being angry at social media, at the fakeness, how everyone’s trying to be someone they’re not and showing the good parts of their lives. You just end up feeling shit, because even if your life’s the best it could be, it just puts in your head that, ‘Ah, it could always be better.’ Most of these people aren’t even happy—that’s why they\'re looking for validation on the internet.” **WOT** “I met Pop Smoke, and that night I recorded this song. It was the night he passed. The next morning, I woke up at 6 am to go to the Disclosure video shoot \[for ‘My High’\] and saw the news. I was just mad overwhelmed. Initially, I’d linked up with Rocky, making another tune, but he didn’t finish his bit. \[slowthai’s part\] felt like it summed it up the energies—it was like \[Pop Smoke’s\] energy, just good vibes. I felt like I wouldn\'t make it any longer because it’s straight to the point. As soon as it starts, you know that it’s on.” **DEAD** “We say ‘That’s dead’ as in it’s not good, it’s shit. So I was like, ‘Yo, every one of these things is dead to me.’ There’s a line, ‘People change for money/What’s money with no time?’ That’s aimed at people saying I changed because I gained success. It’s not that I’ve changed, but I’ve grown or grown out of certain things. It’s not the money that changed me, it’s understanding that doing certain things is not making me any better. If I’m spending all my time working on bettering myself and trying to better my craft, the money’s irrelevant. I don’t even have the time to spend it. So it’s just like saying everything’s dead. I’m focusing on living forever through my music and my art.” **PLAY WITH FIRE** “Even though we want to move far away from situations and circumstances, we keep toying with the idea \[of them\]. It plays on your mind that you want to be in that position. ‘PLAY WITH FIRE’ is the letting go as well as trying to hold on to these things. When it goes into \[next track\] ‘i tried,’ it’s like, ‘I tried to do all these things, live up to these expectations and be this person, but it wasn’t working for me.’ And on the other foot, I *tried* all these things. I can’t die saying I didn’t. You have to love everything for how it is to understand it, and try and move on. You’ve got to understand something for the negative before you can really understand the positive.” **i tried** “‘Long road/Tumble down this black hole/Stuck in Sunday league/But I’m on levels with Ronaldo.’ It’s saying it’s been a struggle to get here. And even still, I feel like I’m traveling into a void. You feel like you’re sinking into yourself—be it through taking too many drugs or drinking too much and burying yourself in a hole, just being on autopilot. It’s coming to that understanding, and dealing with those problems. It’s \[about\] boosting my confidence and my true self: ‘Yo, man, you’re the best. If this was football, you’d be the Ballon d’Or winner.’ We always look at what we think we should be like. We never actually look at who we are, and what our qualities are. ‘I’ve got a sickness/And I’m dealing with it.’ I’m trying. I\'m trying every avenue, and with a bit of hope and a bit of luck, I can become who I want to be.” **focus** “From the beginning, even though I’m in this pocket of people and this way of life, I’ve always known to go against that grain. I didn’t ever want to end up in jail. You either get a trade or you end doing shit and potentially you end in jail. A lot of people around me, they’re still in that cycle. And this is me saying, ‘Focus on some other shit.’ I come from the shit, and I pushed and I got there. And it was through maintaining that focus.” **terms** “It’s the terms and conditions that come with popularity and...fame. I don’t like that word. I hate words like ‘fad’ and ‘fame.’ They make me cringe so much. Maybe I’ve got something against words that begin with F. But it’s just dealing with what comes with it and how it’s not what you expected it to be. The headache of being judged for being a human being. Once you get any recognition for your art, you’re no longer a human—you’re a product. Dominic \[Fike, guest vocalist\] sums it up beautifully in the hook.” **push** “‘Push’ is an acronym for ‘praying until something happens.’ When you’re in a corner, you’ve got to keep pushing. Even when you’re at your lowest. That’s all life is, right? It’s a push. Being pulled is the easy route, but when you’re pushing for something, the hard work conditions your mind, strengthens you physically and spiritually, and you come out on top. I used to be religious—when my brother passed, when I was young. I asked for a Bible for my birthday, which was some weird shit. Through this project…it’s not faith in God, but my faith in people, it’s been kind of restored, my faith in myself. Everyone I work with on this, they’re my friends, and they’re all people that have helped me through something. And Deb \[Never, guest vocalist\]—we call each other twins. She’s my sister that I’ve known my whole life but I haven’t known my whole life.” **nhs** “It’s all about appreciation. The NHS—something that’s been doing work for generations, to save people—it’s been so taken for granted. It’s a place where everyone’s equal and everyone’s treated the same. It takes this \[pandemic\] for us to applaud people who have been giving their lives to help others. They should have constant applause at the end of every shift. We’re out here complaining and always wanting more. I don’t know if it’s a human defect or just consumerism, but you get one thing and then you always want the next best thing. I do it a lot. And there’s never a best one, because there’s always another one. Just be happy with what you’ve got. You\'ll end up having an aneurysm.” **feel away** “Dom \[Maker, co-producer and one half of Mount Kimbie\] works with James \[Blake\] a lot. They record a bunch of stuff, chop it up and create loops. I was going through all these loops, and I was like, ‘This one’s the one.’ As soon as we played it, I had lyrics and recorded my bit. I’ve loved James from when I was a kid at school and was like, ‘We should get James.’ We sent it to him, and in my head, I was like, ‘Ah, he’s not going to record on it.’ But the next day, we had the tune. I was just so gassed. I dedicated it to my brother passing. But it’s about putting yourself in your partner’s shoes, because through experiences, be it from my mum or friends, I’ve learnt that in a lot of relationships, when a woman’s pregnant, the man tends to leave the woman. The woman usually is all alone to deal with all these problems. I wanted it to be the other way around—the woman leaves the man. He’s got to go through all that pain to get to the better side, the beauty of it.” **adhd** “When I was really young, my mum and people around me didn’t really believe in \[ADHD\]—like, ‘It’s a hyperactive kid, they just want attention.’ They didn’t ever see it as a disorder. And I think this is my way of summarizing the whole album: This is something that I’ve dealt with, and people around me have dealt with. It’s hard for people to understand because they don’t get why it’s the impulses, or how it might just be a reaction to something that you can’t control. You try to, but it’s embedded in you. It’s just my conclusion—like at the end of the book, when you get to the bit where everything starts making sense. I feel like this is the most connected I’ve been to a song. It’s the clearest depiction of what my voice naturally sounds like, without me pushing it out, or projecting it in any way, or being aggressive. It’s just softly spoken, and then it gets to that anger at the end. And then a kiss—just to sweeten it all up.”

Nearly 20 years after they first played together as teenagers just outside of London, TV Priest began writing their debut album. “It was probably just a way for us to be with each other again in a space that wasn\'t the pub for someone\'s birthday,” frontman Charlie Drinkwater says of reuniting in their thirties, in 2019. “I think some artists get to that honest place quite young. But I think it took us having some life experience—having personal setbacks, having joy—to get to a place where I feel like we had something to say and something to write about.” Recorded before the global pandemic, *Uppers* is a set of alternately heartbreaking and hilarious post-punk, as Drinkwater and his bandmates—guitarist Alex Sprogis, bassist/keyboardist player Nic Bueth, and drummer Ed Kelland—barrel through the beauty and many indignities of modern adulthood with all the urgency of a much younger band. “It\'s a time capsule for me,” Drinkwater says. “Hopefully it speaks to this moment, and to people who feel potentially the same way as I do. Like this weird totem to a really fucking weird time.” Here, Drinkwater guides us through the album track by track. **The Big Curve** “I think it\'s relatively direct in terms of its intention as a song. It\'s got a groove to it. It was one of the songs that we wrote on the record that was like a bit of a breakthrough song for us in terms of just letting it live and breathe and just kind of be a bit sprawling. It\'s about your place in history, this idea that somehow human endeavor and human work corresponds with the progression of time, which, you can see that that isn\'t necessarily the case. It\'s not always up.” **Press Gang** “My granddad has had a very big presence in my life. He had the fucking maddest life that anyone\'s ever had. He left school at 13, was a dirt-poor working-class South Londoner. He got a job as a messenger boy in Fleet Street, would run between the newspaper offices and the photography agencies. At 18, he became a photographer. He did five tours of Vietnam, covering that. He was in the Six-Day War. He was doing the Angolan Civil War, the Biafran War of independence. He took pictures of The Beatles, Brigitte Bardot. He was maybe naive in a lot of ways about how his work would be used, but he was very honest. He really believed that what he was doing was like holding up a mirror to the world, showing truth to power. He believed in the idea of truth, and over the last couple of years, my belief in that was rocked by a lot of events. But I think more than ever, the truth matters. This is not an easy song, because it has to balance the feelings that I have about what he taught me and what I see.” **Leg Room** “‘Leg Room’ refers to the leg room in a cinema, actually. Where I studied in London, my university, used to be right in the middle of Soho and the West End, which is ‘Theatreland.’ It’s a bit abstract, probably a bit more like a paintbrush in terms of it\'s trying to set the scene and tone more than anything else. I remember Black Francis saying that Pixies lyrics have meaning, but more than anything, they have a visualization. That whenever you hear it on the radio, or you hear it on a record, the thing that jumps up first is the weird visuals that it puts in your head. I think that this song was exercising that as well.” **Journal of a Plague Year** “Alex wrote most of those lyrics. He’d read \[Daniel\] Defoe\'s *A Journal of the Plague Year*, which is a sensory account of the plague in London, talking about how London emptied out. It was like, ‘This would be a fun, interesting exercise, to write a song about what would happen if there was a plague again.’ And then six months later you\'re like, ‘Fuck.’ We did actually have a discussion about whether or not we should put it on the record. I think we sat with it for a minute and were like, ‘No. Maybe it\'s good. Maybe it offers a take on it in a different way, rather than just like, ‘We\'re all in our houses.’” **History Week** “The album is supposed to be listened to as an album—probably a really stupid thing to do, now that you\'re just streaming. There\'s a purpose to the fact that the first three songs are very intense punk songs. There\'s a reason why they come at the start, and then the record starts to open up as it progresses. This is a purposeful intermission.” **Decoration** “That first line is an in-joke. It was from a TV show called *Britain\'s Got Talent*, a misremembered quote from Simon Cowell. One year, the winner was literally a dog that can jump over itself: Pudsey the dog. And there\'s this quote—that I can’t find now—where Simon Cowell goes, ‘I\'ve never seen a dog do what that dog does.’ And it became this running joke, something we’d say anytime someone did something that wasn’t particularly impressive. I’d completely fucked the vocal take in the studio, and I think I said that about myself, and Ed was like, ‘That\'s a great opening line.’” **Slideshow** “This is about our relationship to technology. I think anyone can write songs that are just ‘iPhones are bad.’ But I\'m complicit in it all the time. I fucking doomscroll forever. It’s a bit of an uneasy balance. That song is calling myself out, in a way. It really came alive, I think, in the studio. That was a bit of a breakthrough for us in terms of Alex\'s guitar playing. Alex Sprogis by nature is quite a precise person, like an engineer, but he\'s going against his instincts there to play like that, which I think gives it this element of tension.” **Fathers and Sons** “That was written when I was in a B&Q—which is a huge hardware store—buying some wood to fix a fence. I sat in my car and I was like, ‘This is what I did with my dad on so many afternoons, and now I\'m a dad, doing the same thing.’ It’s about a particularly British male sensibility, the way that men talk to each other. If I meet a guy for the first time, the first thing that they’re going to ask me about is football. I think this song was written about me trying to talk to my son in that way as well.” **the ref** “I think that\'s the sound of a pneumatic drill outside our studio. It\'s also got a bit of the tube in there, some traffic. It’s supposed to be very interruptive. It\'s supposed to take you out of the record and put you in a place. A physical place, rather than a sensory place.” **Powers of Ten** “Before we did this, I was working at a big record label as a designer. And this song is about what corporations do to people, including me. It\'s about the pursuit of something that you never even thought you wanted. I think corporations breed a certain competitiveness, and it bred something in me that was not nice. I think something that I struggled with was I was working ostensibly in a place that was supposed to be creative, and it didn\'t engender any form of creativity, at all. To be creative is not to compete with people. I don\'t find that. I find that my proudest moments of creativity is when I\'ve collaborated with someone, and shared an idea, and a space, and a feeling. Those are the things that made me get out of bed in the morning, and made me excited.” **This Island** “It’s about nationalism, and it\'s about being in a country that you don\'t really recognize anymore. I don\'t think that\'s only about the process of Brexit, or the Brexit decision. I think it\'s about the things that it unleashes. In a lots of ways, England has a fucking superiority complex. The war is constant; you cannot escape it. It’s fucking spitfires over Dover and Churchill and D-Day. I got a fucking email from the butchers on Remembrance Sunday, being like, ‘10% off: Remember our troops.’ What? Fucking celebrate the horror of the Somme with a fucking leg of lamb? I\'m proud to be a British person; I\'m proud of many, many things of my history. I\'m proud of the fact that we have a history of multiculturalism. I\'m proud of the fact that we have a history of many, many different things, but what I am not proud of is this belief that we are somehow better than other people.” **Saintless** “It was a hard song to sing. It\'s about my little boy being born, and about my wife. We had a shocker, and my wife was really, really unwell. I was suddenly left in an operating room with a newborn baby, while she was rushed to emergency surgery. It\'s one of the only times in my life I just didn\'t know what to do. I felt completely helpless and confused and overjoyed—but terrified. Terror, sheer terror. It’s about plans changing, about being hopeful for the future as well as being scared for it, about being fallible. The main line of the song is ‘We\'re no saints, but that\'s okay.’ I probably will let my son down at some point, because I\'m a human being, but I\'ll make it up to him. I’ll always be there.”

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

“I would definitely say that 2020 pushed me over the edge, to the point that I needed to express myself more than I ever had,” Greentea Peng tells Apple Music. Recordings for *MAN MADE*—her debut album—first took shape in the early months of 2020, coinciding with a pandemic-induced lockdown and shortly after some sad family news. It led her to use the work as both a means of rumination on the pains of modern life and an ode to his memory. Creating a makeshift studio out of a friend’s house (nicknamed “the woods” from its location in the greenery of Surrey), she spent time alongside longtime friends and collaborators including her band, The Seng Seng Family, and executive producer Earbuds, diving into eclectic genres—ska, soul, trip-hop, dub—to “deliberate my inner workings, and inner conflicts,” she says. But there’s also an underlying effort to weather that conflict through messages of oneness and healing. The bulk of the project is deliberately mixed in 432 Hz (a frequency below industry standard) by legendary engineer Gordon \"Commissioner Gordon\" Williams, inspired by Wells’ research into the power of vibrations to provide comfort and restoration. “We\'re living in a very conflicting time,” she says. “Amidst the huge paradigm shift globally, physically, and spiritually, things are intense. I always want to help uplift and bring people into the spirit, ignite a little self-belief and sovereignty inside.” Explore *MAN MADE* with her track-by-track guide. **“Make Noise”** “This is a manifesto for the album. The song started from a beat that SAMO and Josh \[Kiko, UK music producers\] brought to the woods. We were listening to it, the band started jamming it. It ended up turning out really different to the original. I was in a very free state of expression, channeling like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. It\'s not meant to be an easily digested piece of work; it\'s meant to be somewhat niche and provoking.” **“This Sound”** “My band and I were in a perfect environment—very comfortable, there was a heat wave—and we got very trippy. We were making an untold amount of music and things would just happen, the boys started playing, and again, it just came. When we were making it, I wasn\'t thinking of any influences, but when I listen back, I think Fatboy Slim, or Quentin Tarantino movies. But that\'s just it—no song on the album really sounds like the song before, but in a way they all do.” **“Free My People” (feat. Simmy and Kid Cruise)** “Simmy \[UK musician\] and Cam \[Toman, UK musician known as Kid Cruise\] are my bredrins, they\'ve been my bredrins for years. Before the lockdown I\'d always ask them to open up my shows; we\'re almost in a similar kind of vibe the way we mix up the genres. I invited them through to the woods and we actually wrote that song together on the spot.” **“Be Careful”** “Swindle \[UK musician and music producer\] came with the beat and then we recreated it with the musicians. ‘Be Careful’ was cool because it\'s probably the most different tune on the album; it\'s quite modern-sounding, almost trappy type. And in terms of the lyrics, I feel like it\'s one of the simpler songs—it\'s straight to the point.” **“Nah It Ain’t the Same”** “When I say ‘being a man today,’ I\'m talking about how being human today is just not the same; when you read scriptures, the word ‘man’ is what human is referred to, like, ‘We are all man at the end of the day.’ I guess I was playing devil\'s advocate a little bit because I knew people were gonna be like, ‘What about women?’ But I\'m going beyond that, beyond all of these ideas of man and woman. For me, I think everyone should be actively seeking to try and balance both their masculine and feminine energy; it doesn\'t matter what people identify with.” **“Earnest”** “The words just came to me—I think I just was waiting for the opportunity to be able to purge and release all of this shit. I\'m kind of channeling Barrington Levy and other kinds of reggae, but also just exploring my journey with faith and my connection with God, exploring that in there. It’s very honest.” **“Suffer”** “I originally started writing this about my man—he lost his dad basically the year I started going out with him. Initially I started writing about seeing him upset all the time and feeling his pain. I\'m very sensitive, and very much an empath. When I then also experienced loss, it gave ‘Suffer’ a new lease of life. I touch on the topic of inherited trauma as well; it\'s such a massive thing that people just don\'t realize or know about.” **“Mataji Freestyle”** “That was one of the ones we made at like five in the morning—we jammed that song for about two hours straight. Me and the boys were in altered states of consciousness a lot of the time. Obviously we\'re making music in 432 Hz as well, so that definitely added to the energy of the house. It was very meditative and intense, like I was crying whilst recording that song. It\'s also quite a complex song if you break it down in terms of technicals; everyone is on a different time.” **“Kali V2”** “It’s controversial; I knew certain heads were not gonna like it. But at the end of the day, the album isn\'t for everyone. I guess it was kind of like a battle tune, a kind of rebel tune—the whole album is, to be honest.” **“Satta”** “I got the term ‘satta vibrations’ from \[UK singer-songwriter\] Finley Quaye. I wrote it one morning outside Highbury & Islington tube station on my way back from a party, still kind of buzzing. Just sat on a bench watching my surroundings—seeing a woman cry, bare feds everywhere, pigeons. ‘Satta’ was also produced by Commissioner Gordon, too.” **“Party Hard Interlude”** “I referenced \[UK musician\] Donae’o on this. It was essential to have on there, like a nice little break. I knew I wanted the album to have interludes, skits, to go in and out, I wanted it to be a journey. We were all on copious amounts of mushrooms when we made this, so I felt it would be rude not to have a little ode to mycelium on there.” **“Dingaling”** “We all went to Anish’s \[Bhatt, UK producer known as Earbuds\] studio after being back from the woods; we met up and were going through the album. Anish showed us that tune and we all ended up just getting a bit waved and being there all night with our instruments out. Before we knew it we’d recreated \[his beat\]. Again, it’s a re-lick of Blak Twang \[2002 single ‘So Rotton’\] and 2Face’s \[Idibia, now known as 2Baba\] ‘African Queen,’ with my own little bit in the middle.” **“Maya”** “‘Maya’ for me is a mad one, because I\'ve never sung like that before, especially at the end where I\'m proper wailing. This was a time where I really just expressed myself freely. I don\'t do that often and am not able to do that often yet.” **“Man Made”** “This is probably the most overtly political tune, but to me it’s more spiritual. You can take the song literally, but also metaphorically: how these man-made seeds are being planted in society and in the collective. Materialism, consumerism, individualism—it\'s only once you’re able to shed these accessories that you actually start remembering what it is to be human.” **“Meditation”** “This song literally was a meditation. This track could have been like 15 minutes long; initially we recorded for over an hour. It’s meant to take you inside yourself. And with the 432 Hz as well, it\'s tranquil, to say the least. When you can actually submit to the sound and the frequency, and you\'re not distracted by anything else, you can actually just listen to it.” **“Poor Man Skit”** “I’m questioning the idea of what it is to be rich, to be successful in the modern world, and what it is we should be striving for. Concepts of happiness have kind of gotten distorted. This is really just delving into that—like what does ‘poor’ even mean? Is it the person with no money, or the person with no empathy, compassion, or connection?” **“Sinner”** “This one came from a slightly darker place. I played the bass on this one, which was sick; I came up with the bassline first and just built the tune around that. I was feeling quite sinful at the time, I guess—just questioning myself, my intentions, faith, morals—questioning everything, really.” **“Jimtastic Blues”** “This is a sentimental one. It\'s funny because it probably has the saddest lyrics, meaning, and sentiment on the album, but is maybe the most upbeat tune. It\'s one with Swindle; we’d made it in the woods, then Swindle took it away and added the brass elements at the end, which kind of took it up a notch. It seemed like the perfect way to end the album.\"

A few years removed from his Oscar-nominated work on 2017’s *Call Me by Your Name*, Sufjan Stevens turns to film for inspiration on this collaborative concept LP with LA singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine. Working together in upstate New York, the two would watch a movie in the evening, then write a song in response the next morning, employing the sort of quiet arrangements and pristine melodies that mark their work as solo artists. It’s an ode to maintaining an open mind (or *shoshin*, the Zen Buddhist term whose English translation is the album’s title), Stevens and De Augustine as eager to engage with horror films and commercial blockbusters as they would artier fare—from *All About Eve* to *Hellraiser III*, *Bring It On Again* to *Point Break* and *Wings of Desire*. But whether they’re giving voice to *The Silence of the Lambs*’ Buffalo Bill (“Cimmerian Shade,” sung from the perspective of said serial killer) or exploring the power dynamics of Spike Lee’s *She’s Gotta Have It* (“It’s Your Own Body and Mind”), every song here sparkles and stands on its own. You don’t need to have seen any of the source material to fully appreciate it.