Pitchfork's 31 Best Rock Albums of 2021

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

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

Take the irony Steely Dan applied to Boomer narcissists in the ’70s and map it onto the introverts of Gen Z and you get some idea of where Atlanta singer-songwriter Faye Webster is coming from. Like Steely Dan, the sound is light—in Webster’s case, a gorgeous mix of indie rock, country, and soul—but the material is often sad. And even when she gets into it, she does so with the practiced detachment of someone who glazes over everything with a joke. Her boyfriend dumps her by saying he has more of the world to see, then starts dating a girl who looks just like her (“Sometimes”). She might just take the day off to cry in bed (“A Stranger”). And when all that thinking doesn’t make her feel better, she suggests having some sake and arguing about the stuff you always argue about (“I Know I’m Funny haha”). On the advice of the great Oscar the Grouch, Faye Webster doesn’t turn her frown upside down—she lets it be her umbrella.

Ten years after the clangorous thrills of their debut LP, *New Brigade*, Iceage’s apocalyptic punk has led here: a hunger for comfort, refined goth grandeur. “If the last record is us heading out into a storm and feeling content doing so, this record is situated in the storm—longing for something we didn\'t have,” Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt tells Apple Music. “That could be shelter.” *Seek Shelter*, the Copenhagen band’s fifth studio album, is the group’s most expansive. Recording across 12 days in Lisbon, Portugal, the band worked with an outside producer for the first time—Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3’s Pete Kember). (“He’s a good bullshitter,” Rønnenfelt says.) *Seek Shelter* maintains the tenacity of the band’s hardcore roots, elevated with lush, unexpected experimentation, neo-psych dynamism (“Shelter Song”), a bluesy sinister dance (“Vendetta”), a fiery slow-burn and thunderous crescendo (“The Holding Hand”), and a mid-song interpolation of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (“High & Hurt”). Below, Rønnenfelt takes us inside *Seek Shelter*, track by track. **“Shelter Song”** “We thought that a gospel choir would be the exact right thing. Cut forward: We\'re on the last day in Lisbon. We\'ve been bunkered up there for 12 days, collectively losing our minds, not necessarily knowing how to feel about everything we put down on tape. And having never worked with a choir before, we didn\'t really know if we were going to be able to speak the same language, but they instantly got it. They started flowing with the song and harmonizing and taking it in all sorts of directions. It became a very lovely collaboration.” **“High & Hurt”** “The melody started getting incorporated before we remembered what that hymn was. The lyrics of this song are, by nature, really quite scumbag-y, in a mythical sort of way. So it felt too tempting not to include ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’ The contrast between that song and the additional lyrics felt kind of wrong, but deliciously so, you know?” **“Love Kills Slowly”** “Before the choir came in, I thought I was singing almost pitch perfect. As soon as my voice was paired with people who can actually sing, it became very apparent how rugged and broken it still is. I\'ve tried to make the lyrics as simple as possible, but that\'s the hardest thing to approach. How do you state something so obvious, but make it feel urgent and relevant and like it belongs to you? I\'m somebody who has always had a tendency to make lyrics overly voluptuous. This was an exercise in stripping things down. And of course it is still a bit corrupted.” **“Vendetta”** “‘Vendetta’ came about from me lending my little sister\'s plastic toy-store keyboard. I slowed the tempo way down and started playing with it. It is interesting to pair the pounding, dancy feel of the track with speaking about the omnipresence of crime in the world and have it be this discordant dance. We are always attracted to dualities, I guess. Traveling the world and growing up in Copenhagen or anywhere, you never have to scratch the surface very hard to discover that crime is an essential glue that binds a lot of society together.” **“Drink Rain”** “Definitely the most bizarre thing we ever been involved with writing. This was one of those moments where your hands just start writing, and then you take a look at a paper and you\'re like, \'What is this thing that I just wrote?\' It\'s this perverse creep that lurks around drinking from puddles of rain in the streets, because he has some delusion that it might bring him closer to some kind of love interest. In the studio, when we first listened back to the first take of it, we were like, \'I\'m not sure if we should be doing this.\' It feels like a transgression.” **“Gold City”** “It’s a ballad that speaks to how moments can be determined by a lot of factors culminating together: the weather, the air, your company, the levels of chemicals in your brain. Everything rumbles together.” **“Dear Saint Cecilia”** “It\'s a bit drunken and raving, and I wouldn\'t say uplifting. It\'s carefree, but also moving within chaos and trying to evoke the Catholic patron saint. It’s just a very carefree song that charges through the chaos of a modern society.” **“The Wider Powder Blue”** “It started out with one of my old heroes, Peter Schneidermann, who played in Denmark\'s first punk band, Sods. He recorded our first EP when we were 16, and he has always been a hero of mine. He asked me to write a song. I started out with what became this and I became too attached to it. I couldn\'t give it to him. That song is an ode to him and how his insane genius is quite morbid, but ultimately a glorious thing.” **“The Holding Hand”** “I can\'t remember the name in English for the instrument, but we had…like a xylophone, tubes of aluminum, or some kind of metal. The song is quite an abstract one, like a landscape scene in itself. It\'s more about describing a feeling of being in the world than describing the actual world. It plays with notions of power, how strength is sometimes weakness and how weakness is sometimes strength. It has this lost beauty in all that.”

All rippers, no skippers, Sarah Tudzin’s second album as Illuminati Hotties imbues hooky Y2K-era pop-punk with an attitude that feels distinctly contemporary. Stretching her sweet-and-sour voice like taffy, Tudzin sings from the perspective of a millennial slacker who isn’t quite buying what society’s selling, be it marketing scams (“Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism”) or too-cool-for-school socialites (“Joni: LA’s No. 1 Health Goth”). She’s referred to her scrappy, bruised songs as “tenderpunk,” and beneath all the pool-hopping and kick-flipping, there’s a woman trying to pull off this adulting thing in what feels like end times. But in the meantime, why not try and have some fun?

After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”

scary artwork/LPs available Summer

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

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

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

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

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

“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”

As The War on Drugs has grown in size and stature from bedroom recording project to sprawling, festival-headlining rock outfit, Adam Granduciel’s role has remained constant: It’s his band, his vision. But when the pandemic forced recording sessions for their fifth LP *I Don’t Live Here Anymore* to go remote in 2020, Granduciel began encouraging his bandmates to take ownership of their roles within each song—to leave their mark. “Once we got into a groove of sending each other sessions, it was this really cool thing where everyone had a way of working on their own time that really helped,” he tells Apple Music. “I think being friends with the guys now and collaborative for so many years, each time we work together, it\'s like everyone\'s more confident in their role and I’m more confident in my desire for them to step up and bring something real. I was all about giving up control.” That shift, Granduciel adds, opened up “new sonic territory” that he couldn’t have seen by himself. And the sense of peace and perspective that came with it was mirrored—if not made possible—by changes in his personal life, namely the birth of his first child. A decade ago, Granduciel would have likely obsessed and fretted over every detail, making himself unwell in the process, “but I wasn\'t really scared to turn in this record,” he says. “I was excited for it to be out in the world, because it\'s not so much that you don\'t care about your work, but it’s just not the most important thing all the time. I was happy with whatever I could contribute, as long as I felt that I had given it my all.” Here, Granduciel guides us through the entire record, track by track. **“Living Proof”** “It felt like a complete statement, a complete thought. It felt like the solo was kind of composed and was there for a reason, and it all just felt buttoned up perfectly, where it could open a record in kind of a tender way. Just very deliberate and right.” **“Harmonia’s Dream”** “It’s mostly inspired by the band Harmonia and this thing that \[keyboardist\] Robbie \[Bennett\] had done that was blowing my mind in real time. I started playing those two chords, and in the spur of the moment he wrote that whole synth line. We went on for about nine minutes, and I remember, when we were doing it, I was like, ‘Don\'t hit a wrong note.’ Because it was so perfect what he was just feeling out in the moment, at 2 am, at some studio in Brooklyn. I was so lucky that I got to witness him doing that.” **“Change”** “I had started it at the end of 2017’s *Deeper Understanding* and it was like this piano ballad in half-time. Years later, we’re in upstate New York, and I\'m showing it to \[bassist\] Dave \[Hartley\] and \[guitarist\] Anthony \[LaMarca\]. I\'m on piano and they\'re on bass and drums and it\'s not really gelling. At some point Anthony just picks up the drumsticks and he shifts it to the backbeat, this straight-ahead pop-rock four-on-the-floor thing. It immediately had this really cool ‘I\'m on Fire’ vibe.’” **“I Don’t Wanna Wait”** “\[Producer-engineer\] Shawn \[Everett\], for the most part, puts the vocal very front and center on a lot of songs, very pop-like. I think as you get more confident in your songs it\'s okay to have the vocals there. But for this one I was thinking about Radiohead, like it would be cool if we just processed the vocals in this really weird way. I wanted to have fun with them, because we’ve already got so many alien sounds happening with those Prophet keyboards and the moodiness of the drum machine. I wanted to give it something that felt like you were sucked into some weird little world.” **“Victim”** “Ten years ago if we had had this song, we wouldn\'t have a chorus on it—it would just be like a verse over and over. Now I feel like we\'ve progressed to where you have this hypnotic thing but it actually goes somewhere. We’d had it done, but the vocals were a little weird. I told Shawn I wasn’t sure about them, because this song had such a vibe. When he asked me to describe it in one word, I was like, ‘back alley,’ like steam coming out of a fucking manhole cover or something. And then he puts his headphones on and I see him work in some gear for like 30 minutes—and then he turns the speakers on. I was like, ‘Oh, dude. That\'s it.’” **“I Don’t Live Here Anymore”** “I\'ll be the first to say it has that \'80s thing going, but we kind of pushed it in that way. At one point Shawn and I ran everything on the song—drums, the girls, bass, everything—through a JC-120 Roland amplifier, which is like the sound of the \'80s, essentially. I saw it just sitting there at Sound City \[Studios in Los Angeles\]. We spent like a day doing that, and it just gave it this sound that was a familiar heartbeat or something. It sounds huge but it also felt real—in my mind it was basically just a bedroom recording, because everything was done in my tiny little room, directly into my computer.” **“Old Skin”** “I demoed it in one afternoon, in like 30 minutes. Then I showed it to the band, and from the minute we started playing, it was just so fucking boring. But I knew that there was something in the song I really liked, and we kept building it up and building it up, and then one day, I asked Shawn to mute everything except the two things I liked most: the organ and the single note I was playing on the Juno. I brought the drums in at the right moment and it was like, \'Oh, that\'s the fucking song.’ Lyrically, I felt like it was about the concept of pushing back against everything that tries to hold you down—and having a song about that and then having it be as dynamic as it is, with these drums coming out of nowhere, it just feels like a really special moment. It’s my favorite song on the record, I think.” **“Wasted”** “This song was actually a really early one that I kind of abandoned—I sent it to \[drummer\] Pat \[Berkery\] because I knew there was a song there but the drums were just very stale. I didn\'t know any of this, but the day that he was working out of my studio in Philly was the day that his personal life had kind of all come to a head: He was getting divorced from his wife of 15 years. He did the song and he sent it back to me and it was fucking ferocious. It just gave new life to it. Springsteen always talks about Max Weinberg on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and how it’s Max\'s greatest recorded performance. I said the same thing when I heard this: ‘It’s Pat’s greatest recorded performance.’” **“Rings Around My Father’s Eyes”** “I\'d been strumming those open chords for a couple years—I had the melody and I had that opening line. I wanted to express something, but I wasn\'t 100% sure how I was going to go about doing it—part of the journey was to not be embarrassed by a line or not think that something is too obvious and too sentimental. As time went on with this record, I became a dad, and I started seeing it from the other side. It’s not so much a reflection on my relationship with my own dad, but starting to think about being a dad, being a protector.” **“Occasional Rain”** “As a songwriter I just love it because it\'s really concise. Lyrically, I was able to wrap up some of the scenes that I wanted to try and talk about, knowing where it was going to go on the record. I just think it\'s one of those songs that\'s a perfect closer. It\'s the last song in our fifth album. It\'s like, if this was the last album we ever made and that was the last song, I\'d be like, ‘That\'s a good way to go out.’”

Over the course of her first four albums as The Weather Station, Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman has seen her project gradually blossom from a low-key indie-folk oddity into a robust roots-rock outfit powered by motorik rhythms and cinematic strings. But all that feels like mere baby steps compared to the great leap she takes with *Ignorance*, a record where Lindeman soundly promotes herself from singer-songwriter to art-rock auteur (with a dazzling, Bowie-worthy suit made of tiny mirrors to complete the transformation). It’s a move partly inspired by the bigger rooms she found herself playing in support of her 2017 self-titled release, but also by the creative stasis she was feeling after a decade spent in acoustic-strummer mode. “Whenever I picked up the guitar, I just felt like I was repeating myself,” Lindeman tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was making the same decisions and the same chord changes, and it just felt a little stale. I just really wanted to embrace some of this other music that I like.” To that end, Lindeman built *Ignorance* around a dream-team band, pitting pop-schooled players like keyboardist John Spence (of Tegan and Sara’s live band) and drummer Kieran Adams (of indie electro act DIANA) against veterans of Toronto’s improv-jazz scene, like saxophonist Brodie West and flautist Ryan Driver. The results are as rhythmically vigorous as they are texturally scrambled, with Lindeman’s pristine Christine McVie-like melodies mediating between the two. Throughout the record, Lindeman distills the biggest, most urgent issues of the early 2020s—climate change, social injustice, unchecked capitalism—into intimate yet enigmatic vignettes that convey the heavy mental toll of living in a world that seems to be slowly caving in from all sides. “With a lot of the songs on the record, it could be a personal song or it could be an environmental song,” Lindeman explains. “But I don\'t think it matters if it\'s either, because it\'s all the same feelings.” Here, Lindeman provides us with a track-by-track survey of *Ignorance*’s treacherous psychic terrain. **Robber** “It\'s a very strange thing to be the recipient of something that\'s stolen, which is what it means to be a non-Indigenous Canadian. We\'re all trying to grapple with the question of: What does it mean to even be here at all? We\'re the beneficiaries of this long-ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history—so to sing \'I never believed in the robber\' sort of feels like how we all were taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is: ‘People lived here.’ And then the next 265 pages are all about the victors—the takers.” **Atlantic** “I was thinking about the weight of the climate crisis—like, how can you look out the window and love the world when you know that it is so threatened, and how that threat and that grief gets in the way of loving the world and being able to engage with it.” **Tried to Tell You** “Something I thought about a lot when I was making the album was how strange our society is—like, how we’ve built a society on a total lack of regard for biological life, when we are biological. Our value system is so odd—it\'s ahuman in this funny way. We\'re actually very soft, vulnerable creatures—we fall in love easily and our hearts are so big. And yet, so much of the way that we try to be is to turn away from everything that\'s soft and mysterious and instinctual about the way that we actually are. There\'s a distinct lack of humility in the way that we try to be, and it doesn\'t do us any good. So this just started out as a song about a friend who was turning away from someone that they were very clearly deeply in love with, but at the same time, I felt like I was writing about everyone, because everyone is turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.” **Parking Lot** “What\'s beautiful about birds is that they\'re everywhere, and they show up in our big, shitty cities, and they\'re just this constant reminder of the nonhuman perspective—like when you really watch a bird, and you try to imagine how it\'s perceiving the world around it and why it\'s doing what it does. For me, there\'s such a beauty in encountering the nonhuman, but also a sadness, and those two ideas are connected in the song.” **Loss** “This song started with that chord change and that repetition of \'loss is loss is loss is loss.\' So I stitched in a snapshot of a person—I don\'t know who—having this moment where they realize that the pain of trying to avoid the pain is not as bad as the pain itself. The deeper feeling beneath that avoidance is loss and sadness and grief, so when you can actually see it, and acknowledge that loss is loss and that it\'s real, you also acknowledge the importance of things. I took a quote from a friend of mine who was talking about her journey into climate activism, and she said, ‘At some point, you have to live as if the truth is true.’ I just loved that, so I quoted her in the song, and I think about that line a lot.\" **Separated** “With some of these songs, I\'m almost terrified by some of the lyrics that I chose to include—I\'m like, \'What? I said that?\' To be frank, I wrote this song in response to the way that people communicate on social media. There\'s so much commitment: We commit to disagree, we commit to one-upping each other and misunderstanding each other on purpose, and it\'s not dissimilar to a broken relationship. Like, there\'s a genuine choice being made to perpetuate the conflict, and I feel like that\'s not really something we like to talk about.” **Wear** “This one\'s a slightly older song. I think I wrote it when I was still out on the road touring a lot. And it just seemed like the most perfect, deep metaphor: ‘I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.’ I\'m always really happy when I can hit a metaphor that has many layers to it, and many threads that I can pull out over the course of the song—like, the world is this garment that doesn\'t fit and doesn\'t keep you warm and you can\'t move in. And you just want to be naked, and you want to take it off and you want to connect, and yet you have to wear it. I think it speaks to a desire to understand the world and understand other people—like, \'Is everyone else comfortable in this garment, or is it just me that feels uncomfortable?\'” **Trust** “This song was written in a really short time, and that doesn\'t usually happen to me, because I usually am this very neurotic writer and I usually edit a lot and overthink. It\'s a very heavy song. And it\'s about that thing that\'s so hard to wrap your head around when you\'re an empathetic person: You want to understand why some people actively choose conflict, why they choose to destroy. I wasn\'t actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song; I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it\'s not cool.” **Heart** “Along with \'Robber,\' this was one of my favorite recording moments. It had a pretty loose shape, and there\'s this weird thing that I was obsessed with where the one chord is played through the whole song, and everything is constantly tying back to this base. I just loved what the band did and how they took it in so many different directions. This song really freaked me out \[lyrically\]. I was not comfortable with it. But I was talked into keeping it, and all for the better, because obviously, I do believe that the sentiments shared on the song—though they are so, so fucking soft!—are the best things that you can share.” **Subdivisions** “This was one of the first songs written before the record took shape in my mind and before it structurally came together. I think we recorded it in, like, an hour, and everyone\'s performance was just perfect. I like these big, soft, emotional songs, and from a craft perspective, I think it\'s one of my better songs. I\'ve never really written a chorus like that. I don\'t even feel like it\'s my song. I don\'t feel like I wrote it or sang it, but it just feels like falling deeper and deeper into some very soft place—which is, I think, the right way to end the record.”