Piccadilly Records' Top 100 Albums of 2023

Slowdive’s self-titled 2017 comeback album—their first since 1995’s *Pygmalion*—had been propelled by the sense of momentum generated by the band’s live reunion, which began at 2014’s Primavera Sound festival in Spain. But when it was time to make a follow-up, it felt very much like starting all over again for the shoegazing pioneers who formed in Reading in England’s Thames Valley during the late ’80s. “With this one, it was more like, ‘Well, do we want to do a record? Do we need to do a record?’” singer and guitarist Neil Halstead tells Apple Music. “We had to get the momentum going again and figure out what kind of record we wanted to make. The last one was a bit more instinctive. Part of the process on this one was trying to remain just the five of us and be in the moment with it and make something that we were all into. It took a while to get to that point.” Pieced together from a foundation of electronic demos that Halstead had in 2019 sent to his bandmates—co-vocalist and guitarist Rachel Goswell, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott—*everything is alive* feels both expansive and intimate at once, with chiming indie pop intertwining with hazy dream-pop ballads and atmospheric soundscapes. “It showcases some of the different sides to Slowdive,” says Halstead. “It’s very much like the first few EPs we put out, which would always have what we thought of as a pop song on the A-side and a much more experimental or instrumental track on the B-side, the two points between which the band operated.” Exploring themes of getting older, looking both back and forward, and relationships, *everything is alive* is a mesmeric listen. Read on for Halstead’s track-by-track guide. **“shanty”** “This is probably one of the first tunes we worked on. I sent a bunch of electronic music through and this was one of them. There was a eureka moment with this track, where I was trying to keep it very electronic and then we ended up just putting some very noisy guitars on and it was a bit like, ‘Oh, OK, that works.’ I remember Rachel saying when I sent her the demo that she was listening to it a lot, and she said she was getting really excited about going in and recording with the band again. It was the first tune in terms of thinking about getting into the studio and recording again.” **“prayer remembered”** “I wrote this three days after my son Albert was born. I came home from the hospital one night and sat down at a keyboard and started playing this thing. I ended up bringing it into the Slowdive sessions quite late on just because there was something I felt we needed on the record. I had Nick and Christian and Simon play along with my original synth part, and then I took the synth out of the equation altogether. We pulled it out of the mix and added a few more bits to what was left.” **“alife”** “This started off as a very krautrock, very electronic thing. We did a version with the band and I was playing it around the house and Ingrid, my partner, started singing along to part of the song and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good. We should record that.’ The first demo has Ingrid singing the part that Rachel sings now. She has a writing credit on this—it’s the only Slowdive song where someone outside the band has a writing credit. I always thought of it as like a proper pop song—as much as Slowdive ever do pop songs. We sent it to Shawn Everett to mix and basically said, ‘Look, if you could make this sound like a cross between The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac, that would be amazing.’ I don’t know if we got there, but he was really excited about that direction.” **“andalucia plays”** “I’d written this as an acoustic tune that I was going to put on a solo record back in 2012. It’s talking about a relationship and thinking about the things that were important in that first year of that relationship. I came back to it while we were working on the Slowdive record and replayed it on an organ and then we worked on it from that point. It has an element of The Cure about it with the keyboards. Rachel didn’t want to sing on it; she was like, ‘It’s too intimate, I feel like this is a real personal song.’ I had to ask her a few times. The vocals are treated slightly different on the recording than we would normally do, they’re much closer-sounding. I think it’s nice to have it as part of a Slowdive record.” **“kisses”** “I demoed this and shied away from it for a long time because it seemed very poppy and maybe not in our world. It was, again, much more electronic. It almost sounded like a Kraftwerk song. It had the lyric ‘kisses’ in it, the only recognizable lyric. Every time I tried to sit down and write lyrics for the song, I couldn’t get away from the ‘kisses’ part. I was thinking it was a bit too light, too frivolous, but the tune just stuck around. We did so many different versions of it that didn’t quite work, and in the end we did this version. We all ended up thinking it’s a really nice addition to the record. It’s got a shiny, pop, kind of New Order-y thing happening, which we don’t do very often.” **“skin in the game”** “This is kind of a Frankenstein. It’s got a bit of another song in there and then there’s another song welded onto it, so it was a few different ideas thrown together. I liked the lyric ‘Skin in the game.’ I don’t know where I read it, I was probably reading something about investing or something stupid. I like the slightly wobbly feel to this tune, which I think is partly because some of it was taken from a very badly recorded demo on a proper four-track tape machine. Old school. It gives it a nice wobbly character.” **“chained to a cloud”** “This was called ‘Chimey One’ for three years and was one that we struggled to make sense of for a long time. I think at some point we were like, ‘Let’s forget about the verse and just work on the chorus.’ It’s a really simple idea, this song, but it hangs together around this arpeggiating keyboard riff that I think is inspired by ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. It always reminded me of that.” **“the slab”** “This was always quite heavy and dense and it took a while for us to figure out how to mix it, and I think in the end Shawn did a really good job with it. Again, it’s got almost a Cure-type vibe to it. The drums came from a different song and it was originally just a big slab of keyboards, hence the title. It remains true to its roots; it’s still got that big slab-ish kind of feel to it. I always thought the record would open with ‘shanty’ and I always thought it would end with ‘the slab.’ They felt like good bookends for the rest of the tracks.”

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

During the pandemic, Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten returned to Skerries, the town on Ireland’s East Coast where he’d spent his teenage years. One night, walking along the beach, something came to him. “It was when the moon conjures a strip of light along the horizon towards you, like a path to heaven,” he tells Apple Music. “And there’s the gentle ebb and flow of an invisible ocean around it.” As he looked to sea, new music seeped into his head—a sort of pier-end lounge pop played out on brass and strings. It didn’t really fit with the ideas Fontaines had been fermenting for their next record; instead it opened up inspiration for a solo album. There were, thought Chatten, stories to be told about lives being etched out in coastal areas like Skerries. “The whole atmosphere of the place, there’s something slightly set about it,” he says. “I’m really into fantasy, the Muppets movies and *The Dark Crystal*, or even *Sweeney Todd*, where they demand a slight suspension of disbelief of the audience in order to achieve, or embellish on, a very human emotion. I wanted to live the town through those kind of lenses.” By late 2022, as Chatten endured some heavy personal turbulence, the songs he was writing helped process his own experiences. “It was like, ‘How do I actually feel right now?’” he says. “Just by painting a picture of the darkness, I gleaned an understanding from it. I was then able to cordon it off.” Unsurprisingly then, *Chaos for the Fly* is as intimate as Chatten has sounded on record. Built from mostly acoustic foundations, the songs explore grief, isolation, betrayal, and escapism—but their intensity is a little more insidious and measured than on Fontaines’ sinewy music. Even the corrosively jaundiced “All of the People” is delivered with steady calm, Chatten warning, “People are scum/I will say it again” under a soft shroud of piano and precisely picked guitar. “There’s probably times on the record where it becomes almost self-indulgent, the personal nature of it,” he says. “It’s a startlingly fair reflection of me, I suppose. I didn’t really realize that was possible.” Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“The Score”** “I had a 10-day break in between two tours. I find it very difficult to switch off, and my manager said, ‘You need to go off somewhere,’ so I went to Madrid. I got antsy without being able to write music—the whole point, really, of me being away—and I actually asked Carlotta \[Cosials, singer/guitarist\] from Hinds if she knew any good guitar shops, so I could grab a Spanish guitar, a nylon. She sent me the name of a place that was just around the corner, and I had ‘The Score’ later on that day. When it comes to the second chord, I think that opens the curtain a bit. There’s a sort of subverted cabaret about it, which I really like. And there’s also a misdirection of the modalities of the chords. It goes to a kind of surprising chord. There’s a nice sleight of hand to the first few seconds of it. I really wanted that to be the tone-setter of the album.” **“Last Time Every Time Forever”** “This was inspired by the sound of these fruit machines and slot machines that I grew up with. There was this casino in town, called Bob’s Casino. It’s about addiction or dependence on something, and I’m not really talking specifically about drugs and booze or anything like that. I’m just talking about compulsive behavior and escapism, which are things that kind of shift my gears—I can relate to the pursuit of another world. It has that weird push that it does in the drums. I think it sounds kind of like stunted growth, like it’s glitching.” **“Fairlies”** “After Madrid, we went down to a town called Jerez, which was the birthplace of flamenco, I believe. We were going to go out to get a beer or something, myself and my fiancée. She was getting ready and I wrote that tune. There’s loads of bootleg recordings of The La’s, and I think they really affected me when I was slightly younger, when we were setting off the band. There’s a tune, ‘Tears in the Rain.’ There’s something about the way Lee Mavers does all that weird stuff with his vocals that really affected the way I write a lot of melodies. The snappy, jaunty, almost poke-y, edgy melody of the chorus, that was inspired by Lee Mavers. The verses are more Lee Hazlewood and Leonard Cohen, maybe.” **“Bob’s Casino”** “I heard the intro to ‘Bob’s Casino’ \[that night on the beach\]. Similar to ‘Last Time Every Time Forever,’ ‘Bob’s Casino’ is a tune about a kind of addiction and inertia and isolation. I wanted it to sound as beautiful as it sounds in the addict’s head, or the isolated person’s head, when they achieve those moments of respite. I think that’s a much more realistic picture than a tune that sounds scared straight or something. A play, or any good piece of screenwriting, is usually helped by the bad guys or the antagonist being relatable, or seeing a side of them that makes you empathize with them, or even love them, briefly. It creates this nice 3D effect. I enjoyed writing from that character’s perspective because I feel like I’m expressing something. I’m not saying that I am that character. But the character has a good chance of winning sometimes within me. The more I write about it and express it, then maybe the less chance that character has of taking over.” **“All of the People”** “This is probably my proudest moment from the album. I’m giving myself compliments here, but I think there’s a surgical kind of precision to it. There’s nothing wasted. I really like the natural swells. I like how it swells when the lyric swells. I really do feel that fucking shit sometimes, as do a lot of people. I’m grateful for that song, for what it did for my head when I wrote it. I can stand back and look at it now. It’s like I’ve blown that poison into a bottle and I’ve sealed the bottle, and now I’ve put it on a shelf.” **“East Coast Bed”** “‘East Coast Bed’ is about the death of my beloved hurling coach, who was like a second mother to me growing up, a woman called Ronnie Fay. The whole idea of the East Coast bed is firstly this refuge that she offered me when I was growing up. And then eventually, we laid her in her own East Coast bed when we buried her. The song is essentially about death. Not necessarily in a grim way, but in a sad, melancholic, moving-on way. That synth part that Dan Carey \[producer\] did sounds like the soul moving on for me. That was him exercising his great sympathy for the music that he works on.” **“Salt Throwers off a Truck”** “I remember the title coming to me when we were writing \[2022 Fontaines D.C. album\] *Skinty Fia*. There were lads on the back of a truck, salting the road outside the rehearsal space. I thought that was an interesting sight: ‘Oh, that’s a good title to have to justify with a good lyric.’ I like the fact that it scours the world a little bit. There’s New York in there and, although they’re not mentioned explicitly, other places too. The last verse is inspired by my own granddad’s death last year in Barrow-in-Furness. It’s different people at different stages. To me, it feels like when a director puts the audience in the eyes of a bird. There’s an omnipresence to it that I really like. It’s like when Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Future, and he gets to fly around, and visit all of these different vignettes, or all these different families in their houses.” **“I Am so Far”** “I wrote that one during the dreaded and not-very-aesthetic-to-talk-about lockdown. It was this kind of bleak and beautiful, ‘all the time in the world and nothing to do’ sort of thing that interested me then. That’s why there’s so much drudgery on the track. I wrote that on the East Coast again. It does sound to me a little bit like water, with light on it.” **“Season for Pain”** “I think it’s an abdication. It’s like cutting something you love out of your life. It sounds sad, and it is sad, and it is dark, but it’s putting up a necessary wall. It’s terminating a friendship or relationship with someone that you truly love. It’s not going to be easy for anyone, but it’s gone too far. I think there’s something about the production that slightly isolates it from the album. It feels slightly afterthought-ish, which I like. I like the end, which came from a jam. We’d finished recording the track, the tape was still rolling, and we just started playing, and then that became the outro. The song is about moving on and it sounds like I’m moving on at the end.”

Packing his mobile recording equipment, trumpet, and box of handmade, collected percussion, composer and jazz instrumentalist Matthew Halsall set out to create his seventh solo album through a connection with the British landscape. “I wanted to be in places with beautiful views and lots of natural light,” he tells Apple Music. “Those locations give me a sense of freedom, a space to sit and create from the moving landscape around me, almost like a painter.” Since the release of his debut album, *Sending My Love*, in 2008, Halsall has become a stalwart of the British jazz scene through creating luscious, melodic improvisations that conjure imaginative vistas. On *An Ever Changing View*, Halsall channeled his inspiration from spaces in North Wales, Northeast England and beyond. Drawing from his solitude and natural surroundings, the record traverses everything from the uplifting flute melodies of “Water Street” to the gentle electronica of “Calder Shapes” and the shimmering harmonic brilliance of “Triangles in the Sky.” “Sometimes, I would see a rainbow or there would be clouds traveling down the street towards me,” he says. “There is a beauty in the sense that things are always changing.” Read on for Halsall’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Tracing Nature”** “This track was composed in a wooden lodge house on the west coast of Anglesey. It was an amazingly remote place to be and the birdsong was so intense. I remember sitting at the piano one day and trying to have an improvised conversation with nature itself. I was trying to be part of nature in the most humble way possible and so the piano playing has a fluid and open feel to it. It’s a great palate cleanser before the record starts.” **“Water Street”** “Another location I went to compose in was a place called Water Street in Penmaenmawr, Wales. It was a terraced house on the coast and I would sit there and look out of the window for days on end, watching the tide and seeing a rainbow almost every day because of the rain. I created a score of my ideas inspired by that setting, as well as a load of percussion loops that I later improvised around with the band. It was a great, impulsive process to create from.” **“An Ever Changing View”** “The title of the album comes from the experience of being in these natural locations and witnessing changing scenes, almost like a landscape painter taking their inspiration from the surrounding environment. This track was also written at the same place on Water Street and delves more into my love of electronica. I don’t have many tracks in my back catalog with a 4/4 feel, so I wanted to bring more of a solid tempo to this composition, crafting it to be dance-floor-friendly.” **“Calder Shapes”** “Newborough in Anglesey is probably my favorite place in the world. It’s full of wild beaches and forests with an incredible mountain range in the distance too. I composed a lot of music for this album and the next one from a log cabin there, since it was pretty much off-grid so I could completely focus. I’d already done a few sessions with a drummer recording breaks, and I chopped them up into loops which I then combined with unusual percussion instruments like the five-octave celesta for this track. It has this really warm, sparkly sound that paired beautifully with the Rhodes and double bass.” **“Mountains, Trees and Seas”** “I was thinking about the views in Newborough when I composed this track, which is one of the first I wrote for the album. I was playing around with lots of percussion and wanted to create a Nightmares on Wax-type track with a trip-hop feel, while keeping it organic and acoustic. I picked a bouncy tempo with a head-nod feel and began splicing in samples I’d recorded. There’s a sonic nostalgia and sense of connection between this song and my 2012 record *Fletcher Moss Park*.” **“Field of Vision”** “‘Field of Vision’ was recorded in Anglesey on the same day as ‘Tracing Nature.’ It has a similar concept, where I put my headphones on and just tried to be completely organic in my reactions to the surrounding nature. I wanted a few moments in the album that would break up the solid tempo and give listeners a chance to reflect before the record moves on.” **“Jewels”** “‘Jewels’ is influenced by the Japanese composer Susumu Yokota, who had a really interesting way of using electronic sounds and samples in his work. The track started life with an upbeat four-on-the-floor tempo where I was jamming out on this 17-note kalimba I bought while adding percussion and playing around with trumpet ideas. I came up with the solo and main melody in one go while improvising and then had to memorize it for the studio. It’s also influenced by the chilled-out feel of old trip-hop bands like Fila Brazillia and St Germain.” **“Sunlight Reflection”** “I got really into the idea of commissioning people to make instruments for me while writing this record. I discovered this guy online in Bristol who makes these beautiful hand-hammered gongs and triangles. They create a spiritual feel with their amazing sustains, so I reached out and got him to make me 18 triangles. This is one of two tracks on the album where I perform on them and the band just followed me in a loose, improvised way.” **“Natural Movement”** “This track features my log drum, which has only six notes but is one of the most fun instruments to play from my percussion collection. I get into a deep trance when I’m jamming with it and ended up recording loops to improvise around before bringing them to the studio for the band. These percussive instruments have such an earthiness to them that always feels great.” **“Triangles in the Sky”** “I’ve been working with the flute player Chip Wickham since my first solo record in 2008. In addition to the amazing young musicians I work with, I wanted to bring in an experienced character who would change the mood in the studio and get more silly and playful. Chip is an absolute pro and we built this gorgeous track from the sound of the hand-hammered triangles before developing into this organic and positive feel, which felt like the perfect way to end the album.”

In early 2021, Tom and Ed Russell were working on a mix for the iconic London club fabric. They knew they wanted a particular tune included, but simply couldn’t find the track anywhere or remember its name. Faced with a deadline and an endless dig through disc logs, the pair changed their approach: They would themselves write the song they could hear. The track became June 2021 single “So U Kno”—an insidious, addictive banger that’s a cornerstone of the Russells’ debut album as Overmono. It’s an anecdote that reveals a great deal about the brothers’ practical mindset and prodigious abilities. Veterans of the UK dance scene (Tom, the elder Russell, released techno as Truss, while Ed put out drum ’n’ bass as Tessela), the Welsh-raised producers combine for something special here. *Good Lies* is an extraordinary electronic record: a genre-defying set glistening with purpose, poise, and dance-floor delirium. “The main anchor for the album isn’t genre-based, it’s an emotional place,” Ed tells Apple Music. “It’s a particular emotional sense that we try and achieve with a lot of our music—depending on what mood you’re in on that day, you could interpret that state in a few different ways.” Tom is able to pinpoint the origins to that “emotional ambiguity.” “I think our formative experiences of partying in the Welsh countryside had a massive impact on us,” he says. “When you have the sun going down and the sun coming up, and those emotions of somewhere between euphoria, slight sadness that the night’s coming an end but a real sense of optimism that you’re going into a new day. These sorts of weird crossover points are what we try and find in how we put our music together.” Read on for the brothers’ track-by-track guide. **“Feelings Plain”** Ed Russell: “It was originally going to close the album. We wanted to see if we could make a sort of plainsong piece of music—13th-century church music, where someone would be singing one note over and over and then someone else joins in, and everyone’s singing these cyclical things. But when it all comes together, they start cycling differently and you get this big wash of voices. But we wanted to try and do a sort of R&B take on plainsong—it was one of the songs that had a more conceptual start to it.” Tom Russell: “It was the furthest we’d gotten in terms of direct new avenues that we might explore. It’s a bold statement of intent to start.” **“Arla Fearn”** ER: “When did you first write this bassline, Tom?” TR: “About 1976. No, I think it was about 15 years ago.” ER: “I would tell Tom it’s the best thing he’d ever written. It’s got so much mood and character and just sounds so satisfying to me.” TR: “I know Ed meant it as a compliment but I kept on taking it as a bit of a diss really. But I finally gave in.” ER: “We spent ages processing the drums and then Tom sampled the Geovarn vocal and came up with the insane outro. The track is at 135 BPM, and by the end it’s at 170 BPM, but you never really notice it’s changed—it just flips the vocal into a different spot. We really wanted the album to be a place where tracks would often morph into something completely different. That it’s bubbling over with ideas.” **“Good Lies”** ER: “We went through a phase of trying not to sample every Smerz song because they just had so many good hooks. They’re incredible at writing these top lines that sound straight off early-2000s garage records, but not in a pastiche way. We had the vocal from \[2018 Smerz track\] “No harm” and spent a lot of time chopping it into the phrasing we wanted and creating a hook out of this little section that had jumped out at us. The demo for the instrumental then came together in a day, but there was an 18-month, almost two-year period from writing the demo to coming back and starting to really chip away at it.” **“Good Lies (Outro)”** TR: “When we were writing the ‘Good Lies’ instrumental, we thought we’d see if we could flip it and turn the vibe on its head into something moodier. It’s always going back to that ambiguity with us. There’s something of that in the *Good Lies* title. What constitutes a good lie?” **“Walk Thru Water” (feat. St. Panther)** TR: “Ed was at my studio in February \[2022\], and we were battening down the hatches for Storm Eunice.” ER: “It was this quite nice feeling of, ‘All right, there’s a storm coming, we’ve got loads of snacks and a few drinks, the place to ourselves, and we can’t go anywhere.’ Tom had written these really beautiful chords and I’d kept saying I wanted to do something with them. We got really stoned while the rain was coming down, listening to these chords, and we came across the St. Panther vocal.” TR: “I then started doing the beat on the Pulsar—which is a drum machine that’s quite difficult to tame but on certain things it just works beautifully.” **“Cold Blooded”** TR: “This started out as something quite different. It dawned on us that we’d written this massive IDM tune.” ER: “It was a bit too nice, wasn’t it?” TR: “It was this late-’90s breakdance thing—not really the vibe we should be going for.” ER: “I had this Kindora sample that I’d wanted to use for ages, and then Tom sent me this slowed-down version of ‘Cold Blooded’ with the new drums and I realized it’d be fucking killer. It then became a month of last-minute adjustments, which we sometimes get ourselves into a bit of a hole with. Tweaking everything until the last.” **“Skulled”** ER: “We had the Kelly Erez sample put away into our sample folder. And then we built a drum machine—a copy of a ’70s drum machine called the Syncussion, made by Pearl, the drum kit manufacturer. It \[the Syncussion\] was meant to sound like a normal drum kit, and it sounds so far away from real drums it’s insane. We spent a couple of weeks trying to make our version sound like we’d soldered it not quite right. It has this weird, sort of dry, alien, ’80s vibe to it. Like with all our stuff, it’s processed so heavily.” TR: “Ed has come up with this mad compression chain, which you can basically put any sort of drums into and you get this massive wall of noise.” ER: “I said earlier the best thing Tom has written was the bassline on ‘Arla Fearn,’ but I’ve changed my mind now: It’s the piano outro to ‘Skulled.’ We both loved the idea of the song ending like a classic ballad—a Céline Dion tune.” **“Sugarushhh”** TR: “We liked the idea of trying to shoehorn in a screaming 303 to the album somewhere.” ER: “Tom’s good at doing these quite irregular things that you don’t immediately notice. This, if you actually count it out, is in some weird time signature and it’s cycling every nine bars. It was also really important that we had this abrasive, aggressive 303 line being offset completely with a really beautiful vocal.” **“Calon”** ER: “Tom played me the first iteration of this in the back of a van on the way to a festival in Minehead. We’ve sampled Joe Trufant a few times before and we liked the idea of there being a few familiar voices on the album.” TR: “We then hired a studio in Ibiza and Ed had the idea of making the beat much slower. It became this big, slowed-down house tune—it dropped to something like 110 BPM.” ER: “We were in a US club sound-checking and played through some tunes from the album. Hearing it on the club system we were like, ‘Fuck me!’ It’s this sneaky banger.” **“Is U”** ER: “We’ve both been massive Tirzah fans since the start, and one day the ‘All I want is you’ line from ‘Gladly’ just jumped out of the speaker at us. We then spent ages trying to make the beat on this mono machine we have, which has all these really shit ’80s drum samples. We just mangled them until we had the beat, and then chopped up the vocal to get what we felt was a really strong and more confrontational delivery. Tom then put these lush chords in the breakdown and it opens the track up, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.” TR: “It’s amazing when a track starts to take on a life of its own. Playing this out and seeing the reaction gives me goosebumps every time.” **“Vermonly”** ER: “A lot of our tracks will be written on just one piece of gear and we see what you can do with it. I had bought Tom a synth for his birthday, but when I gave it to him he said he wasn’t going to be in the studio for a few days, so I asked if I could take the synth I had just given him. I sent him a really rough 16-bar loop with the main melodic ideas, and he did the rest, really.” TR: “Tracks like this are really important to us. They might get lost on an EP. It’s not always about writing dance-floor bangers.” **“So U Kno”** ER: “We were doing this mix for fabric and we both knew we wanted a very particular tune in the mix but couldn’t find it. So we basically just thought, ‘Fuck it, it’ll be quicker to write something ourselves.’ I had a chopped-up vocal and a rough beat going, played it to Tom, who went straight over to a Jupiter-6 synth and immediately played the bassline before doing the same with the chords.” **“Calling Out”** TR: “Ed had suggested to try and sample something by slowthai and I managed to find this little \[section\] I really liked from quite an obscure track called ‘Dead Leaves.’ I loved the line ‘I’m like the sun, I rise up and then gone.’ Then we combined it with a CASISDEAD and d’Eon sample and it really started to make sense. I have a tendency to overcomplicate things, but Ed is often able to say, ‘We don’t need that,’ or ‘Change a snare from there to there.’ A tiny idea or decision can make such a huge difference.” ER: “I remember when Tom sent me the chords for the end and I felt like it reminded me of old Radiohead—the perfect way to close the album.”

*NO THANK YOU*—the follow-up to 2021’s Mercury Prize-winning *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*—emphatically deepens Little Simz’s connection with producer Inflo, and provides further confirmation of the Islington rapper’s generational abilities. The initials of the title of her soul-searching fourth LP spelled out her first name, and the name of its surprise follow-up also hints at a purposeful double meaning. Perhaps a kindly expression of gratitude for the flowers given since *SIMBI*’s success? More likely an act of defiance. Either way, within this trademark ambiguity Simz gets her shine on across 10 sumptuous tracks. BRIT Awards Producer Of The Year 2022 Dean Josiah Cover—aka Inflo—taps into the rich, bluesy elements of his enigmatic Sault music for urgent dispatches from Simbi Ajikawo. It’s a rich sonic seam: A returning undercurrent of gospel-rooted R&B reinforces lines with spiritual resonance. From tone-setting opener “Angel” (dedicated to the model Harry Uzoka, who died in January 2018), soft choral flourishes and dreamy Cleo Sol vocals help Simz pick up where she left off in 2021. “Revoke access, I’m running it back, yes/Missing opportunities, I wish I was that pressed.” Building on a deep-rooted synergy, Simz and Inflo go the whole length on the gut feeling that has made their partnership so prolific. For Simz, an artist who’s always operated to her own set of standards, an equally clear-sighted collaborator (Inflo is also across the keys, chords, and strings) finds her at her most compassionate and precise, tackling family trauma and the emotional isolation of success. Within the streams of sharp, self-analyzing rhymes, scattered samples, and prolonged orchestral sections—“Sideways” and “Control”—lies the sound of a winning combo firmly in the groove. As Simz continues to soar, she’s evidently still clearing house. By facing down the dark reaches of the mind and the tests of her daily environment, emotional and soulful highs and lows are wonderfully bared across her tightest lyrical offering to date.

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

A decade into their career, London duo Jungle is determined to make up for lost time. Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland felt that they’d taken too long to follow up 2014’s self-titled Mercury-nominated debut, with second album *For Ever* arriving four years later. It injected their third album *Loving in Stereo*, released in 2021, with a creative restlessness, and that thrilling urgency continues on *Volcano*. “We’d just come off the road and went straight back into the studio,” Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “We got the record done between November and December 2022 and wrapped it up in January, which is one of the quickest turnarounds we’ve done. You can feel that in the music.” It’s a record that both sharpens the pair’s melodic hooks and hones their nu-disco, soulful pop swagger—pushing them further away from being a band and deeper into how they’ve always imagined themselves. “It’s going back to what is essentially a production duo,” says Lloyd-Watson. “It’s a collective—we wouldn’t be where we are without the dancers, without the incredible vocalists, without all the people that come together to make the full thing. But ultimately, it feels like bits of it are heading much more towards something like Justice or Daft Punk, more dance-y.” Exploring themes of love found, loss, heartbreak, and rediscovery, *Volcano* is also a record that insists you move to its rhythm. This is Jungle at their most vibrant and infectious. Lloyd-Watson talks us through it, track by track. **“Us Against the World”** “This starts in almost chaotic fashion. I think we like that because it bamboozles you a little bit and you can’t really work out what’s going on. It’s frantic and a bit crazy and then it settles in and takes a while to find some solid harmony that Jungle would be known for. We’re embedded deep in harmony. It’s like a breakbeat track, a little bit on edge. I suppose the track can be taken as, ‘We’re about to climb this mountain together, this volcano.’ It’s a setting-off track. It’s us against the world.” **“Holding On”** “This is one that wasn’t necessarily made for Jungle, we made it with \[Dublin DJ/producer\] Krystal Klear and \[Essex singer-songwriter/producer\] Lydia Kitto. It has a much more clubby touch to it, it’s got heavier kicks and it’s got 909 hats, which we’ve never really used. It continues that more aggy side of what we wanted to do, we wanted to have a bit more of the disco-punk element to it, à la \[the South Bronx’s early-’80s punk-funk pioneers\] ESG, something that was anti the soft, midtempo Jungle that we know and love. It’s a bit strobe-y and then eventually it releases to this refrain, which sounds like some old soul sample that we made. I suppose it’s the first time you’re like, ‘OK, this is a Jungle record. I know what’s going on here.’” **“Candle Flame” (feat. Erick the Architect)** “Track three has always been the big one for us—\[2014 breakthrough hit\] ‘Busy Earnin’’ was track three \[on their debut album\]. We had this hook for a long time. It had been sitting at 104 BPM and we eventually got a bit bored of it down at that tempo and ramped it up so you get those sped-up, soul-pitched vocals. We wanted to have something that was really fun and carefree and had this atmosphere of a party. I think ‘Candle Flame’ is about the fire and the passion in early love, essentially. Erick the Architect, of Flatbush Zombies fame, jumped on it and did a verse which reminded me of a young Snoop Dogg. It had that fiery energy and just set the thing on fire really…like a candle flame!” **“Dominoes”** “‘Dominoes’ is another song that had this old soul vibe—it was a lot slower originally, it was down at 85 BPM. ‘Dominoes’ is a metaphor for falling in love and the cataclysmic events that happen as you adapt to being deeper and deeper in love and you change your whole life. It has a sample of the \[US R&B singer\] Gloria Ann Taylor song ‘Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,’ which we took and then mixed with the vocals of our song, like this mashup thing. It’s got this cruising, The Avalanches vibe, a real summer jam. I suppose it’s the first time in the album when you get a little bit of respite and it’s not so explosive.” **“I’ve Been in Love” (feat. Channel Tres)** “This features Channel Tres and is from a session that we did a while back—basically before Channel Tres was even established as an artist. We wrote this over another song which was called ‘I’m Dying to Be in Your Arms,’ which you can hear in the middle of ‘I’ve Been in Love.’ We resampled the original track that he was on, which forms the middle eight. It tells the story of love past and the idea of coming out of that love.” **“Back on 74”** “The feeling of ‘Back on 74’ is a nostalgic one, it’s that feeling of having this place of your life where you grew up, where you had these really fond memories. 74 is a fictitious thing, but for us it’s like 74th Avenue or 74th Street or something, where, in your imagination or as a kid, you were playing out on the street. You’ve gone back to this place and it’s giving you this really nostalgic feeling but everything’s not quite the same. You’ve come out of something on ‘I’ve Been in Love’ and through ‘Back on 74,’ you have this desire to go home, back to a place that felt safe.” **“You Ain’t No Celebrity” (feat. Roots Manuva)** “This is probably the most raw and honest track on the record, a warning to people in your life that think they’re a bit of a princess or a bit of a diva—when they become demanding or a little bit self-righteous or a little bit expectant of certain things to fall their way. Roots Manuva was maybe relating to that feeling. He had these lyrics which were originally on another track, something we did with him way back in 2016 or something. He had these almost like nursery-rhyme, Mr Motivator-style hooks that weren’t even a verse, almost like this mantra. It explains the compromise that you have to have in a relationship with somebody, the push and pull, over easy and easy over, a constant back and forth.” **“Coming Back”** “This is a continuation of ‘You Ain’t No Celebrity’ but it’s a little bit more of a celebration. It takes the resentment and the anger and turns it into this more cheeky, throwaway, carnival vibe. It starts off with these shouted vocals, like, ‘I don’t miss you,’ these realizations about yourself, and the chorus goes on to say you keep coming back for more—once you’ve let go of somebody, somebody keeps wanting more from you. It explores the idea of expectation in relationships, but we end up with this almost carnival ending where everybody’s joining in, getting through it through fun.” **“Don’t Play” (feat. Mood Talk)** “‘Don’t Play’ is a sample from ‘Faith Is the Key,’ a really rare record by Enlightment, a Washington soul and gospel outfit. They put this record out in ’84 but then the record plant basically went under and their distributor went under, which made this record quite valuable, a holy grail for collectors. It surfaced again in 2000 and now copies are going for about £800. It had this amazing little hook in it and my cousin, who is Mood Talk, put this beat together and sampled it. We featured him on the record and we sang over the sample. ‘Don’t Play’ is, ‘Stop playing these games, I’m not bothered.’ That message can be applied at the beginning and it can be applied at the end of a relationship. There are always games on the in and the out…” **“Every Night”** “This is fun and guitar-based. We really wanted to make a song without a snare drum. It’s a fun song, a positive message about love, and it’s got gospel influences to some extent. It’s a bit of a party.” **“PROBLEMZ”** “This came out originally in 2022 and I suppose in some way, with \[its double A-side\] ‘GOOD TIMES,’ was the blueprint for the sound of the record. We left ‘GOOD TIMES’ off the record because it didn’t feel like it was right, it didn’t really feel like the production or the vibe was quite where this record was. But ‘PROBLEMZ’ is one of our favorite bits of music we’ve ever made and we didn’t want to leave it as some B-side. It’s got Latin American vibes and feels to it, especially in the flutes and the swing of the music, a classic disco feel. At the end, it goes to this place that’s almost like musical theater with the strings.” **“Good at Breaking Hearts”** “This is the first traditional ballad of the record. It’s like, ‘I’m only good at making mistakes—a bit of a juxtaposition in that you are only good at breaking hearts.’ It features \[London singer-songwriter\] JNR Williams and 33.3—which is mine and Lydia’s new project. JNR has an amazing voice and I’ve been working with him for two or three years, writing loads of songs with him. This is a song that we made for his album but he was like, ‘I don’t want it,’ and then as soon as it was done, he was like, ‘Oh, I wish I’d taken this!’ I said, ‘You should have trusted me, man!’ It’s a beautiful song. His voice has got touches of Nina Simone and Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder to him. He’s got an amazing voice.” **“Palm Trees”** “We made this out in LA originally. It was about this idea that you could escape to this place, like holiday-themed, ‘Here we come, palm trees!’ That feeling of ‘I’m just going to escape this and I want to go somewhere hot and I want to go somewhere where my troubles don’t affect me and I can leave all this stuff behind.’ It’s told through this story of a girl going to a club and taking a drug that sends her on this wild space disco trip.” **“Pretty Little Thing” (feat. Bas)** “This was something that got made in the same chunk of time in which ‘PROBLEMZ’ and ‘GOOD TIMES’ were made, and fans would know that it’s actually on the end of the video for ‘GOOD TIMES/PROBLEMZ’—on the credits we ran a little snippet of ‘Pretty Little Thing.’ It’s a ballad, a chance to reflect on moments and reflect on the old experience. \[Queens-via-Paris rapper\] Bas jumped on this and told his own story, which weirdly made sense of the whole thing anyway. It was serendipity.”

The Murder Capital’s second studio album Gigi’s Recovery, produced by John Congleton, will be released on January 20, 2023 via Human Season Records. Painting by Peter Doyle and designed by Aidan Cochrane.

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

For drummer Yussef Dayes, music is a family affair. Getting his first taste of performance as a teen by playing with his older brothers in the jazz group United Vibrations, Dayes has gone on to build a formidable family of collaborators. From working with pianist Kamaal Williams as Yussef Kamaal and kick-starting a new London jazz scene with the release of 2016’s *Black Focus* to duetting with guitarist Tom Misch on 2020’s *What Kinda Music*, Dayes channels an intuitive connection when it comes to his energetic, improvised music. Now releasing his debut solo album, *Black Classical Music*, Dayes places family front and center. “I became a father in 2020 and it led me to reflect on the amazing influence of my own parents,” he tells Apple Music. “My mum passed away in 2015 and this album is guided by her healing spirit. It’s my tribute to all those I love, in music and beyond.” The result is a creatively boundless 19 tracks, traversing epic jazz harmonies on the title track, Bahian beats on “Chasing the Drum,” head-nodding hip-hop on “Presidential,” and orchestral expansions on “Tioga Pass,” all anchored in the foundation of Dayes’ innate groove. “Genres are restrictive when it comes to what I play,” he says. “I’m just chasing the rhythm, tapping into the Black classical music.” Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Black Classical Music” (feat. Venna & Charlie Stacey)** “We wanted to kick off the album with a jazz epic, something to reference the lineage of improvised music I’ve grown up on. It features my live band with Charlie Stacey on keys and Venna on saxophone, and it’s the tune we always open our shows with. It never fails to get everyone dancing, which is exactly what jazz has always done.” **“Afro Cubanism”** “In 2019, I took a trip to Havana and worked with some great musicians to learn the technicalities of Cuban rhythms and the clave groove. We came up with this tune on the spot in the studio, jamming after ‘Black Classical Music.’ It instantly took me back to my time in Cuba. Plus, it’s ‘Afro’ since I have a huge one on the album cover!” **“Raisins Under the Sun” (feat. Shabaka Hutchings)** “I’ve known Shabaka since I was a kid. He lived in my area and I always remembered seeing him as this super-tall guy getting on the train with his instrument cases. I later started playing with him and was on the drums for some of his Sons of Kemet shows. He is one of a kind, a person full of wisdom and artistry, and I knew I had to have him on the record. He’s on bass clarinet for this tune, which takes its name from the Sidney Poitier film, and is simply perfect.” **“Rust” (feat. Tom Misch)** “Ever since me and Tom started playing together in 2018, it’s always been a vibe. We’re both independent artists who keep our playing free and we’ve never been in the studio and not had a wicked idea. He takes me out of my comfort zone and provides a great fusion between styles. It only felt right to continue our collaboration on this album.” **“Turquoise Galaxy”** “We invested in a Moog One synth for the album and created a new patch for this track that I played a shuffle beat to. For some reason, that combination took me to another place, to the summer and the sky and the color of turquoise, which was my mum’s favorite and is still all over my family house.” **“The Light” (feat. Bahia Dayes)** “This track was first recorded in 2019. I used to play it to my daughter Bahia as a lullaby while she was a newborn. When it came to making the album, I was listening to Stevie Wonder’s *Songs in the Key of Life* and got inspired by how he uses his daughter’s voice in his tracks. I decided to do the same thing for Bahia’s favorite tune, so you hear her throughout this.” **“Pon di Plaza” (feat. Chronixx)** “My dad’s Jamaican and, recently, I’ve wanted to tap into my Caribbean heritage more. I’ve known and loved \[Jamaican reggae star\] Chronixx’s music for ages and this ended up being a beautiful Jamaican collaboration after we got in touch during lockdown. He sent over the vocals and arrangements and it was so fun to put together and produce. I’m really pleased we managed to make it happen.” **“Magnolia Symphony”** “I recently took a trip to New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, and was so struck by the music on every street corner there, as well as the gorgeous magnolia trees that are all over the city. This track became an ode to that beauty, chopped from an outtake the Chineke! Orchestra played when they were in to record the track ‘Tioga Pass.’” **“Early Dayes”** “This is a little family skit, taken from a VHS my dad filmed when I was a kid and you can hear me in the background playing the drums. It’s a link back to those childhood days of being free, as well as an appreciation for my parents—you have to have patience when there’s a drummer in the family!” **“Chasing the Drum”** “I’m always chasing rhythms and trying to find different drums native to each place I’m traveling to. This track is dedicated to the rhythms I picked up in Salvador in Brazil. It’s an ode to my time there and my interpretation of the way those incredible people express themselves through their drums.” **“Birds of Paradise”** “‘Birds of Paradise’ is one of the first sessions I laid down at \[one of the album’s co-producers\] Malcom Catto’s studio back in 2021, with my core band of Rocco Palladino on bass, Charlie Stacey on keys, and Venna on sax. It’s a lover’s song that reminds me of the beauty of nature and how we need to take care to protect it.” **“Gelato”** “I love listening to funky house and dance music, and ‘Gelato’ is inspired by that vibe, creating a little dance riddim in the album to get the people moving. It’s a tune for driving along to, named after a nice strain of one of my favorite herbal remedies.” **“Marching Band” (feat. Masego)** “I met \[Jamaican American singer-songwriter\] Masego in 2022 and we really got along, he’s such good vibes. He invited me over to his house to record and we had a conversation about my love of Brazil and how he was starting to learn Portuguese. Once he got in the booth, he freestyled what we were speaking about in one take, on the spot. It was amazing to watch and be a part of.” **“Crystal Palace Park” (feat. Elijah Fox)** “\[Pianist/producer/songwriter\] Elijah joined the live band in summer 2022 and we soon started working together in the studio. This is his interlude and space for him to shine. He’s from North Carolina, where John Coltrane and Nina Simone are from, and he channels this contagious, positive energy that really comes through when he plays.” **“Presidential” (feat. Jahaan Sweet)** “Jahaan Sweet is an incredible producer from the US who I worked with when we were in a session for Kehlani. This is a tune we came up with then that showcases my love of rap music. Listening to it makes you feel presidential, it gives you such confidence, and it has perfect space in it for a vocal feature, which hopefully could come through in the future.” **“Jukebox”** “I grew up listening to records played on an old 7-inch vinyl jukebox my dad has. Over the lockdowns, my brother repaired it and this track is dedicated to the sounds and feeling of those records being loaded and played. It’s also a collaboration with my good friend, the producer and guitarist Miles James, as it references his love of West-Coast G-funk and ’80s drum machines. It was my chance to bruk out with him on his flex.” **“Woman’s Touch” (feat. Jamilah Barry)** “\[UK singer-songwriter\] Jamilah joined us on our 2021 UK tour, and she has such incredible talent. I wanted to give her a moment to shine on the record. ‘Woman’s Touch’ has a great Sade feel to it and spotlights Jamilah’s beautiful voice. It’s amazing to be able to curate a record like this and to collaborate with so many great artists I know and love.” **“Tioga Pass” (feat. Rocco Palladino)** “The bass and drums combination is super important, from Sly & Robbie to The Wailers and The Headhunters, it’s the foundation. Rocco and I had the same upbringing in music and we essentially have a telepathic connection when we play—he knows exactly what I’m going to do. This track is his moment to play beautiful lines and it reminded me of the epic nature of Yosemite, which is the last family holiday I took with my mum in 2014. It also features the incredible Chineke! Orchestra, who are a blessing to have on the album.” **“Cowrie Charms” (feat. Leon Thomas and Barbara Hicks)** “I wanted to end on a note of healing and peace, so this track features a recording of one of my mum’s yoga classes, where she’s guiding us in a shavasana. It was always my favorite part of her practice, as you can just lay down and relax. The track also features the amazing vocalist Leon Thomas, who I linked up with in 2022. It’s really special to be able to collaborate with my mum in this way and it also channels the good energy of the cowrie-shell necklace that I got given in Senegal and that features in the artwork.”

From the instant that a disorienting, time-stretched vocal loop collides with a rock-steady four-to-the-floor beat in the brief but invigorating “Intro,” it’s clear that The Chemical Brothers are here to rave. The duo’s 10th album, their first since 2019’s *No Geography*, is a no-holds-barred attempt to channel all the energy and euphoria of their live shows into the album format, and it’s a testament to their success that the record’s compact, 47-minute runtime can barely contain all the four-dimensional dynamism within. It’s even sequenced like a DJ mix, careening almost seamlessly across gnarly acid bangers, slow-motion big-beat throwbacks, and the sorts of stadium-sized, hands-in-the-air, sun-emerging-from-behind-the-clouds anthems that they do better than just about anyone. The duo’s Tom Rowlands tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that the album came together in pursuit of “the moment of feeling like something is lifting off in the studio.” That’s the perfect metaphor for “Live Again”: The song’s opening bars of surging shoegaze swirl, segueing directly out of “Intro,” have all the pent-up energy of a NASA launchpad, and once the song kicks off—serenaded by a dulcet refrain from Paris’ Halo Maud—it just keeps rocketing upward, propelled by endlessly rising glissandi. They describe their approach as a kind of deconstruction—“Sometimes you start with a quite songy song, but then you spend about three years destroying that song,” says Rowlands—and it’s audible in “No Reason,” a late-night epic that’s stripped down to little more than funk bass, extended snare rolls, and the occasional crowd-stoking whoop. Throughout, they keep finding new ways to mix up the essential components of big beats, bigger basslines, and titanic hooks. “Fountains” is psychedelic disco set to a Neptunes-inspired drum pattern; “Magic Wand” pairs breakbeat rave with old-school hip-hop ad-libs and a spooky a cappella; “The Weight” calls back to the slow-motion grind of their earliest hits and then turns all the dials to 11. Part of The Chemical Brothers’ genius has always been their balance of kinetic oomph and transcendent melodies, and that’s all over this album, most noticeably in the heavenly “Skipping Like a Stone,” a shoegaze-flavored jam featuring Beck at his melodic best. He paints a forlorn picture—“When you feel like nothing really matters/When you feel alone/When you feel like all your life is shattered/And you can’t go home”—before promising to “come skipping like a stone” in a chorus imbued with both childlike innocence and reassuring empathy. Going into the album, Rowlands says, was the idea to “make something that had a real direct emotional heart,” but to sculpt it in such a way “where it would still feel like our world.” Their Beck collab is exactly that: It’s a super-sized song about overwhelming feelings and all-encompassing love, the emotional cornerstone to one of the most ebullient albums in the duo’s career.

*Digital download includes pdf booklet of Jorge Velez illustrations (available exclusively via Bandcamp)* “I wanted this to be my most open record, uncynical, naive, unguarded, the record teenage me wanted to make,” says electronic explorer James Holden of his generically unconstrained new album of rave music for a parallel universe 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities'. “I used to balance my clock-radio on a wardrobe to catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a New Age traveller. So it’s like a dream of rave, a fantasy about a transformative music culture that would make the world better. I guess it’s also a dialogue with that teenage me.” The New Age traveller lifestyle may have ultimately eluded Holden, as by the time he was old enough to actually go to raves the UK’s infamous Criminal Justice Bill of 1994 had long since clamped down on the traveller free party circuit, and instead in 1999, when he was just nineteen years old, he fell into a professional career in the more commercialised end of dance music after an early 12” ('Horizons') was picked up by a Sony Music-backed trance imprint. But here and now, with this latest album offering that tops off a musical career spanning over twenty years, Holden is seeking to recapture that feeling of hope, freedom and possibility (both musical and otherwise) that characterised those venerated earliest days of dance music, when the boundaries of the distinct genres as we now know them had yet to crystallise, and a starry-eyed teenage Holden was still dreaming in the bedroom of his Leicestershire village. Standing in contrast to the expanded band and live take recordings of its predecessor 'The Animal Spirits' (“Dramatic, colourful and Holden’s fullest-sounding work yet” 9/10 Loud And Quiet), Holden’s fourth solo artist album is more of a continuous sound collage, artfully juxtaposing audio worlds in his own inimitable manner, with a respectful hat tip to the pastoral classics of his early nineties youth (notable mentions to The KLF’s timeless 'Chill Out', and the sprawling radio soundscapes of Future Sound of London). But where his first wave forebears pilfered freely from the history of recorded music to date, Holden’s sample sources are custom generated, drawn from recordings of his own performances on the modular synth, keyboard, organ and piano plus the lesser explored drones of his childhood violin, cut-up bass guitar, overblown recorder, all manner of percussive trinkets and the serendipity of the odd field recording, as well as guest contributions from various members of the wider Animal Spirits live family: long-time touring companion drummer Tom Page, tabla-championing percussionist Camilo Tirado, multi-instrumentalist for hire Marcus Hamblett (here, on double bass and guitar) and saxophonist Christopher Duffin (on loan from Xam Duo and Virginia Wing). Some of the references here undeniably draw from the past: 'Trust Your Feet' is dominated by the most unashamedly ravey stabs Holden has ever played, yet by the end has seamlessly unfurled into a hand-drum-and-flute campfire singalong, whilst the more Balearic 'Common Land'’s pairing of percussive bird samples with the evocative reverberating saxophone of Christopher Duffin casts it as a distant cousin of 808 State’s 'Pacific State'. But this anything goes approach also welcomes contributions from the left of field: the bold piano flourishes and trembling violin which emerge seamlessly in the middle of jolly Sabres of Paradise-esque tabla jamboree 'Contains Multitudes'; an unexpected dalliance with the slap bass on the fantasy alliance between John Cale and Simple Minds that is the audacious 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form'; the overblown recorder that heralds beatific mellotron, squealing synths and soaring guitars on ceremonial march in the style of Popol Vuh 'The Answer Is Yes'; and to close proceedings, the expressive pitched tabla motifs which punctuate melancholy outro 'You Can Never Go Back', as played by Camilo Tirado. Holden is an artist who has traditionally found it difficult to settle, no sooner finding himself momentarily aligned with one musical milieu before he is off onto the next thing. But 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities' also seems to represent a coming-to-terms with his own musical past, with subtle nods and callbacks to notable moments in Holden’s twenty year long sonic history: the undulating dancefloor melancholy of 'In The End You’ll Know' and the spiralling kinetic pixie arpeggios and hazy vocals of 'Trust Your Feet' and 'Continuous Revolution' awaken the distant memory of his erstwhile career as an international DJ and remixer to the stars, whilst the driving synth and drum, pagan thud, synthesized strings and woozy shimmering nostalgia of his landmark 'The Inheritors' era (Resident Advisor ‘Album of the Year’) remains omnipresent ('Continuous Revolution', 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form', 'The Answer Is Yes', 'Infinite Fadeout'), albeit with a somewhat lighter and brighter sheen. “It’s full of things I’ve come to terms with – I’ve always hated the call of a woodpigeon, synonymous with unending suburban weekend boredom for me, but they’re in there ['Four Ways Down The Valley']. Or, despite learning both piano and violin I never used either on my records, ashamed of my playing and turned off by their connotations but I’m happy they’re both in there too ['Contains Multitudes']. And for a while in the mid 2010s I couldn’t hear dance music anymore, a single kick drum had me lunging for the skip button, but I’ve found my way back to that – reclaiming the bits I liked (the hypnotism, the utopianism, the wide ranging cross cultural freedom) and leaving behind what I don’t need.” And as if to prove he means business, after a prolonged absence of almost ten years Holden has recently dipped his toe back into the remixing culture where he built his name, with XAM Duo (Sonic Cathedral), GoGo Penguin (Blue Note) and Lost Souls of Saturn (R&S) the latest blessed recipients of a Holden rework. The hefty album title ('Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities') meanwhile is suitably suggestive of the utopian sense of hope, freedom and transformative potential that resonated throughout early rave culture, but it was actually discovered scrawled in Holden’s own notebook after a long night of delirious hyper-focussed coding, as a message to his future self. Holden is a long-time advocate of Cycling74’s Max/MSP programming language, and most recently he has used it to build an ambitious custom modular sequencing and synthesis environment to facilitate his live performances, which he also (in keeping with his collectivist impulses) plans to make available to other budding music makers via his website. “A song isn’t the recording that starts at 0:00 and finishes at 4:32 or whatever,” he explains. “It’s the system, the rules, the limits, the relationships contained in it, and it could’ve turned out so many other ways. If a song had only two midi controls to play the whole thing you could map it to a walk around a 2D map, but a real song is a journey in some kind of high dimensional space, and also the knowledge of all the other journeys it could’ve been. Probably a metaphor for life, I dunno.” 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities' will be released via Holden’s own proudly DIY Border Community label on 31st March 2023, on double vinyl, CD, digital download and streaming. For the album’s distinctive hand drawn artwork and accompanying twelve page comic booklet insert, Holden called upon Amsterdam-based illustrator and musician Jorge Velez to help flesh out the visual component of the immersive fantasy world that is conjured up in 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities'. The result is a twelve panel storyboard (one per track) documenting the rave rituals of an alternative reality populated by magical creatures, which owes much to the pair’s shared love of the soothing retro-futurist colour palettes of the late and truly great French cartoonist Moebius (included in pdf form exclusively with Bandcamp downloads).

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

In 2021, Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby decamped to Ibiza for two weeks. There, they rented the island’s only Fender Rhodes from one of the local rave crews. John posted it against the plaster walls and concrete floors of their temporary home, which was set into a green hillside overlooking a beach called Siesta. As they worked on Sundown, Pharoah Sanders’s “Greeting to Saud” was a daily listen. Instead of emulating its sound, Eddie absorbed its deeper lesson – that simplicity wins out over virtuosity every time. They wrote the first half of Sundown during that Ibiza stay and finished it at 64 Sound Studios in Los Angeles, where they both live. Joining Eddie on vocals and John on production and keys were Logan Hone (flutes and saxophones) Elizabeth Lea (trombone), Will Logan (drums) and David Leach (percussion). “It feels like we’re building our dream house,” says Eddie. “With Pleasure, Joy, and Happiness, we poured the foundation and now we’re expanding into new rooms.” The two artists have worked together before, on Eddie Chacon’s 2020 album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness. It was in 2019, when he met John Carroll Kirby – a prolific artist in his own right who’s collaborated with Steve Lacy, Frank Ocean, Solange, and many more – that Chacon considered a return to releasing music. Pleasure, Joy and Happiness was meant to bring closure to a music career that began when Eddie was a teenager playing in Bay Area garage bands, and peaked in the 1990s when, as one half of the duo Charles & Eddie, he topped charts internationally with “Would I Lie To You”, before deserting the business. Eddie didn’t expect much from Pleasure’s release, and was amazed to find it resonated widely, gaining him a whole new fanbase and reinvigorating his career. Eddie says that only at his age – 59 – could he have the life experience and quiet confidence to make Sundown. That this new record exists at all is a surprise to its creator. As Eddie says, “Sundown is the follow-up I never thought I would get to make.”

As much as Romy Madley Croft’s debut solo album is an absorbingly personal record, its roots lie in music intended for other people. In 2019, The xx singer/guitarist met—and immediately gelled with—Fred again.. during a period of creative exploration that lead her to Los Angeles to try writing chart-topping pop songs for other artists. “I ended up writing some quite honest songs about myself, thinking someone else was going to sing them, and realizing, ‘Actually, maybe these are my songs…’” Romy tells Apple Music. Arriving in 2020, airy, anthemic debut solo single “Lifetime” was written to uplift herself during the pandemic. In stark contrast to the hush and restraint of The xx, the song leaned into the rapturous dance music influences of Romy’s youth, and it’s a direction continued on *Mid Air*. “At the time \[that The xx emerged\], I was genuinely just suited to feeling more shy and being more guarded,” she says. “It was nice to share a different side, and it definitely opened up a lot more doors in terms of the way people see me. I wanted to find a way to balance melodic, storytelling pop writing with club-referenced music, and Robyn was a big reference. She makes very emotional songs within a dance/electronic sphere. Robyn is someone that I really admire. I’ve met her a few times and I’ve sort of mentioned to her that I’m on this journey with it and she’s been really encouraging and supportive.” Co-produced with Fred again.., bandmate Jamie xx and veteran hitmaker Stuart Price, *Mid Air* succeeds in building a dance floor on which Romy can shake out her feelings. The joy and freedom of the shiny synths and skyscraping melodies serve as a misdirect to the lyrical themes of grief and heartbreak, rooted in the loss of both her parents at a young age and, recently, another very close family member. “I wrote \[lead single\] ‘Strong’ and ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as part of an ongoing ambition to remember to check in and talk to people and let things out,” she says. “I’ve had to talk about grief and my parents way more than I would if the whole album was just love songs. I’m ready to talk about it more. It’s been amazing having conversations with people that I wouldn’t normally have, and hearing and learning and connecting. People come up to me in a club to talk to me about grief and I’m like, ‘Wow, actually, this is very special.’ The fact that people feel like they can talk to me means a lot.” Let Romy guide you through *Mid Air* track by track. **“Loveher”** “This is the first song that I made with Fred after writing these songs for other people, the first track that I wrote thinking, ‘This actually is my song to sing.’ Very much the first tentative steps into this project. It opens the album because I can hear that slight nervousness in it and I shed that as the tracks go on. I had done a songwriting session with King Princess and she was like, ‘This is who I love, I’m writing a song about a girl, there’s no question.’ I was really inspired by the way that she was very comfortable with that. I thought about myself at that similar age and I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel comfortable or reassured that it would be chill for me to say that. Maybe it would’ve been fine, but in my head I was worried about it. The more young, queer artists I hear talking about their exact experiences and being really amazing, visible, inspiring people, the more I’m inspired to do my own thing and talk about my actual experiences in a clear way.” **“Weightless”** “This song is about realizing, ‘Wow, I’m really feeling all these things and that’s OK,’ and really embracing that. It still feels like it’s from the earlier, tentative time, lyrically. It was originally written as an acoustic ballad, and I wanted it to become more than that, so I went on a journey to take it into an electronic space. It was a challenge I set myself—I still wanted it to work when you take it off the track and take it back to the guitar. That’s something I admire about a well-written song.” **“The Sea”** “The lyrics for ‘The Sea’ are inspired by a trip to Ibiza. Or my vision of what it would have been like in the early 2000s—the dream of Ibiza. I went for the first time for Oliver’s \[Sim, The xx bandmate\] 30th birthday. We went out clubbing and we went on a boat and it was exactly what I had hoped it was. I’ve been back since, for my honeymoon. I also got to play Pacha in 2022, which was really amazing. But that first time, I was listening to the instrumental while I was driving around and I was thinking, ‘I want this song to feel connected to this place. I want it to feel like a home in a summer situation.’ So that’s how I framed it, lyrically.” **“One Last Time”** “I wrote this thinking it was for someone else—I didn’t have anyone specifically in mind, but just as a fan, if I had to pick someone, Beyoncé is my number-one person. Thinking it wasn’t going to be me singing pushed me to try out something new, vocally. Just pushing my voice. It was fun to come back to it and sing it in my own way. It’s one of my favorites to sing.” **“DMC”** “I love an interlude. I feel like that’s quite a pop-album thing. My friend always says that she loves a DMC corner in the club—I don’t know if everyone knows DMC is a deep, meaningful conversation, but that’s what it means to me. Those moments where you have a kind of emotional exchange somewhere that ends up being the right place, even though it’s not typically the place you have those chats. This is just a little moment of stepping outside of where we’ve been, like we’re outside the club. You have a little reset and you carry on.” **“Strong”** “I wrote this one for myself, using songwriting as a way of processing grief and my relationship to it and putting it out there. I internalized a lot of things for a long time and thought I’d put it out of sight, out of mind. I think having time off tour and being in a good place in a relationship was when it all started to come up and I had to face those things. ‘Strong’ was me just reflecting on that at that point, and just feeling it out, and trying to write around that. It was great to put it in a song that is quite uplifting and high tempo. It keeps giving different meanings to me in different contexts.” **“Twice”** “I worked on this with an amazing songwriter called Ilsey, who co-wrote ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart’ \[by Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus\]. I’d been writing for other people for a while and finding it hard to make connections. I wanted something a bit more real. Ilsey has got quite a country style, so when I got paired up with her, I opened up and said, ‘This is what I’m going through,’ and she helped me write this very storytelling-like song. I’d never had a songwriter help me lyrically before, but it was really cool. It’s another one that started as a guitar ballad, but I didn’t want it to stay that way. Stuart worked on it and it evolved into what it is now—echoes of a club and then building into being a big club-experience track.” **“Did I”** “This was sonically created around the same time as ‘Strong.’ I’ve written a lot of acoustic music and I wanted to put it into a different frame, so I was playing a lot of early-2000s trance to Fred. There’s already a blueprint embedded in trance—a haunting vocal and huge chords and builds and euphoria. It’s one of my favorites, so I’ve been playing it out in clubs recently. Lyrically it reflects a part of my relationship \[with my wife\], from back when we were younger and we broke up.” **“Mid Air” (feat. Beverly Glenn-Copeland)** “I consider this to be a transitional moment on the album. The fact that Fred and I made this piece of music together is a reflection of a weird moment we were both in—it’s more winding and introspective than everything else we did together. Although there’s a lot of euphoric sounds on the album, I’m not always super upbeat, there’s times when I have a bit of a weird time mentally. It’s kind of the aftermath of the night out: ‘Twice’ and ‘Did I’ connect as a mix and ‘Mid Air’ is the musical comedown. \[American singer and composer\] Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s voice comes in as a reminder, a self check-in. Then you come back into ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as a reaction to that.” **“Enjoy Your Life”** “This was probably the most challenging song to make because it contains a lot of different elements. I’m trying to say quite a lot in it and make it danceable and contain lots of samples. Finding the balance took quite a long time. When I heard \[Beverly Glenn-Copeland\] say, ‘My mother says to me/Enjoy your life,’ I thought it was such a beautifully simple disarming sentence, but I didn’t want to just say, ‘Yeah, life’s amazing.’ I wanted there to be a journey in the song. In the verses, I’m processing some stuff, I’m having a bit of a weird time, but I’m reminding myself: Life is short, enjoy your life. I wanted there to be enough of a narrative to give that context. Just to acknowledge and then also celebrate.” **“She’s on My Mind”** “I wanted to end the album with this because it feels like the end of the night when you’re at a party and someone puts a disco song on and everyone just has their hands in their air. It’s a fun one to end on. Just embracing and accepting how you feel. From the way that I start the album—the more tentative way of singing—to the end where the last thing I sing is, ‘I don’t care anymore,’ it’s a bit of a release of pressure.”

Like it did for listeners, Polly Jean Harvey’s 10th album came to her by surprise. “I\'d come off tour after \[2016’s\] *Hope Six Demolition Project*, and I was taking some time where I was just reassessing everything,” she tells Apple Music of what would become a seven-year break between records, during which it was rumored the iconic singer-songwriter might retire altogether. “Maybe something that we all do in our early fifties, but I\'d really wanted to see if I still felt I was doing the best that I could be with my life. Not wanting to sound doom-laden, but at 50, you do start thinking about a finite amount of time and maximizing what you do with that. I wanted to see what arose in me, see where I felt I needed to go with this last chapter of my life.” Harvey turned her attention to soundtrack work and poetry. In 2022, she published *Orlam*, a magical realist novel-in-verse set in the western English countryside where she grew up, written in a rare regional dialect. To stay sharp, she’d make time to practice scales on piano and guitar, to dig into theory. “Then I just started,” she says. “Melodies would arise, and instead of making up vowel sounds and consonant sounds, I\'d just pull at some of the poems. I wasn\'t trying to write a song, but then I had all these poems everywhere, overflowing out of my brain and on tables everywhere, bits of paper and drawings. Everything got mixed up together.” Written over the course of three weeks—one song a day—*I Inside the Old Year Dying* combines Harvey’s latest disciplines, lacing 12 of *Orlam*’s poems through similarly dreamy and atmospheric backdrops. The language is obscure but evocative, the arrangements (longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish produced) often vaporous and spare. But the feeling in her voice (especially on the title track and opener “Prayer at the Gate”) is inescapable. “I stopped thinking about songs in terms of traditional song structure or having to meet certain expectations, and I viewed them like I do the freedom of soundtrack work—it was just to create the right emotional underscore to the scene,” she says. “It was almost like the songs were just there, really wanting to come out. It fell out of me very easily. I felt a lot freer as a writer—from this album and hopefully onwards from now.”

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

Less was recorded on the island of Great Bernera in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, during September 2022.

The deskbound among us might first interpret the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album as a reference to the font, but a few minutes with the music and you’ll realize that what Josh Homme refers to is a sense of decadence so total it ends with the city on fire. They remain, as ever, the hardest hard-rock band for listeners who don’t necessarily subscribe to the culture or traditions of hard rock, channeling Bowie (“Emotion Sickness”), cabaret (“Made to Parade”), and the collars-up slickness of British synth-pop (“Time & Place”) alongside the motorcycle-ready stuff you might you might expect—which they still do with more style than most (“Obscenery”). And like ZZ Top, they can rip and wink at the same time. But *In Times New Roman...* plumbs deeper personal territory than prior records. Homme has weathered the deaths of friends, the dissolution of his marriage, and other painful developments since the release of 2017’s Villains, and the album touches on all that—but he also wants to be clear about assumptions listeners could make from his lyrics. “I would never say anything about the mother of my kids or anything like that,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also, by the same token, you must write about your life, and I think I\'m soundtracking my life. These songs and the words that go with them are an emotional snapshot where you stop the film, you pull out one frame. One song it\'s like, \'I\'m lost.\' And another one, \'I\'m angry.\' They need to be these distilled versions of that, because one drop of true reality is enough flavor. I think the hatred and adoration of strangers is like the flip side of a coin. But when you\'re not doing it for the money, that currency is worthless. I can\'t get involved in what the people say. In a way, it\'s none of my fucking business.” For Homme, the breakthrough of *In Times New Roman...* came *because* he was unflinchingly honest with himself while he was writing through some of his darkest moments. “At the end of the day, the record is completely about acceptance,” Homme says. “That\'s the key. My friends have passed. Relationships have ended. Difficult situations have arisen. I\'ve had my own physical and health things go on and things like that, but I\'m okay now. I\'m 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of what\'s going on, you know what I mean? But in the last seven years, I\'ve been through a lot of situations where it doesn\'t matter if you like it or not, it\'s happening to you. And so I\'ve been forced to say, yeah, I don\'t like this, I need to figure out where I\'m at fault here or I\'m responsible here or accountable here. And also, I need to also accept it for what it is. This is the reality. Even if I don\'t like it, it would be a shame to hold on too tight to something that\'s slipping through your hands and not just accept it for what it is.”