Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums of 2021

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.

The second album from Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek asks the big questions in slippery ways, with poetic ripples of mantra-like vocals, or field recordings that take on a mystical significance (a roommate singing, a hand-clapping game). The layered, nonlinear soundscapes on *Fatigue* feel totally uncategorizable yet inexplicably comforting as Cheek—who plays bass, guitar, piano, synth, and percussion here, in addition to her vocals and personal recordings—guides herself down a winding path of discovery. “Make a way out of no way,” she repeats on the kaleidoscopic “Find It”; the wondrous almost-songs that follow use that sentiment as a guiding light.

There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.

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

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.

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.”

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.”

In the two years following the August 2018 announcement of Playboi Carti’s *Whole Lotta Red*, you could have gauged any given Carti fan’s investment in the project by which song leak they claimed to have liked the most. One the internet took to calling “Kid Cudi” had a unique sort of staying power. That song does not appear on *Whole Lotta Red*, but Kid Cudi himself does, on “M3tamorphosis.” Of the project’s 24 songs, Cudi is one of three featured guests, appearing alongside likewise stylistic innovators Kanye West and Future. And so goes the story of the project: *Whole Lotta Red* is likely pretty close to what fans were expecting, but better. The production—provided by names like Pi’erre Bourne, Art Dealer, F1lthy, Juberlee, Richie Souf, Maaly Raw, and Wheezy—is consistently forward-thinking, toeing the line between 808-heavy post-trap rumble and the perpetually weird and increasingly popular avant-pop sound known as PC Music. There is less “baby voice” here than fans of *Die Lit* may have wanted, but the rapping (and singing) is some of Carti’s most impassioned and sharpest. Fans hung up on those early leaks might do well to consider them accidental gifts, because when it was time to deliver the album, Carti made sure we got the best of him. He just needed us to be patient.

“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.

The Pakistani musician began writing her second album, and then her younger brother died. And so, instead of the dark, edgy dance record she’d intended on making, Aftab turned to the Urdu ghazals she grew up with—an ancient form of lyric poetry centered around loss and longing. On *Vulture Prince*, Aftab makes the art form her own, trading the traditional percussion-heavy instrumentation for heavenly string arrangements (harp, violin, upright bass); she even ventures into reggae territory on “Last Night,” a slinky rendition of a Rumi poem. She translates another poem, this time by Mirza Ghalib, on “Diya Hai,” the last song she performed for her brother Maher, and a haunting expression of all-encompassing grief.

Written after the birth of her first child (and just before the arrival of her second), *Colourgrade* finds London’s Tirzah Mastin taking a more experimental approach, wrapping moments of unadorned beauty in sheets of distortion, noise, woozy synthesizers, and listing guitars. It’s decidedly lo-fi—not the sort of album that actively invites you in. And yet, like its predecessor—her acclaimed 2018 debut LP, *Devotion*—this is naturally intimate music, alt-R&B that offers brief meditations on the coming together of both bodies (“Tectonic”) and collaborators (“Hive Mind,” which, in addition to seal-like background effects, features vocals from touring bandmate and South London artist Coby Sey). Working again alongside longtime friend and collaborator Mica Levi, Mastin sounds free here, at ease even as she obfuscates. On “Beating,” as she sings to her partner over a skittering drum machine and a layer of gaseous hiss, she stops for a moment to clear her throat, as if in quiet conversation late at night. “You got me/I got you,” she sings. “We made life/It’s beating.”

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.”

In August 2019, New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins thought she had the rest of her year fully mapped out, starting with a tour of North America as a guitarist in David Berman’s newly launched project Purple Mountains. But when Berman took his own life that month, everything changed. “All of a sudden, I was just unmoored and in shock,” she tells Apple Music. “I really only spent four days with David. But those four days really knocked me off my feet.” For the next few months, she wrote as she reflected, obsessively collecting ideas and lyrics, as well as recordings of conversations with friends and strangers—cab drivers and art museum security guards among them. The result is her sophomore LP, a set of iridescent folk rock that came together almost entirely over the course of one week, with multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman in his Brooklyn studio. “I was trying to articulate this feeling of getting comfortable with chaos,” she says. “And learning how to be comfortable with the idea that things are going to fall apart and they\'re going to come back together. I had shed a lot of skin very quickly.” Here, Jenkins tells us the story of each song on the album. **Michelangelo** “I think sequencing the record was an interesting challenge because, to me, the songs feel really different from one another. ‘Michelangelo’ is the only one that I came in with that was written—I had a melody that I wanted to use and I thought, ‘Okay, Josh, let’s make this into a little rock song and take the guitar solo in the middle.’ That was the first song we recorded, so it was just our way of getting into the groove of recording, with what sounds like a familiar version of what I\'ve done in the past.” **New Bikini** “I was worried when I was writing it that it sounded too starry-eyed and a little bit naive, saying, ‘The water cures everything.’ I think it was this tension between that advice—from a lot of people with good intentions—and me being like, ‘Well, it\'s not going to bring this person back from the dead and it\'s not going to change my DNA and it\'s not going to make this person better.’” **Hard Drive** “I just love talking to people, to strangers. The heart of the song is people talking about the nature of things, but often, what they\'re doing is actually talking about themselves and expressing something about themselves. I think that every person that I meet has wisdom to give and it\'s just a matter of turning that key with people. Because when you turn it and you open that door, you can be given so much more than you ever expected. Really listening, being more of a journalist in my own just day-to-day life—rather than trying to influence my surroundings, just letting them hit me.” **Crosshairs** “You could look at this as a kind of role-playing song, which isn\'t explicitly sexual, but that\'s definitely one aspect of it. It’s the idea that when you\'re assuming a different role within yourself, it actually can open up chambers within you that are otherwise not seeing the light of day. I was looking at the parts of me that are more masculine, the parts of me that are explicitly feminine, and seeing where everything is in between, while also trying to do the same for someone else in my life.” **Ambiguous Norway** “The song is titled after one of David\'s cartoons, a drawing of a house with a little pinwheel on the top. It\'s about that moment where I was experiencing this grief of David passing away, where I was really saturated in it. I threw myself onto this island in Norway—Lyngør—thinking I could sort of leave that behind to a certain extent, and just realizing that it really didn\'t matter what corner of the planet I found myself on, I was still interacting with the impression of David\'s death and finding that there was all of these coincidences everywhere I went. I felt like I was in this wide-eyed part of the grieving process where it becomes almost psychedelic, like I was seeing meaning in everything and not able at all to just put it into words because it was too big and too expansive.” **Hailey** “It\'s challenging to write a platonic love song—it doesn\'t have all the ingredients of heartbreak or lust or drama that I think a lot of those songs have. It\'s much more simple than that. I just wanted to celebrate her and also celebrate someone who\'s alive now, who\'s making me feel motivated to keep going when things get tough, and to have confidence in myself, because that\'s a really beautiful thing and it\'s rare to behold. I think a lot of the record is mourning, and this was kind of the opposite.” **The Ramble** “I made these binaural recordings as I walked around and birdwatched in the morning, in April \[2020\], when it was pretty much empty. I was a stone\'s throw away from all the hospitals that were cropping up in Central Park, while simultaneously watching nature flourish in this incredible way. I recorded a guitar part and then I sent that to all of my friends around the country and said, ‘Just write something, send it back to me. Don\'t spend a lot of time on it.’ I wanted to capture the feeling that things change, but it’s nature\'s course to find its way through. Just to go out with my binoculars and be in nature and observe birds is my way of really dissolving and letting go of a lot of my fears and anxieties—and I wanted to give that to other people.”

Listening to Liz Harris’ music as Grouper, the word that comes to mind is “psychedelic.” Not in the cartoonish sense—if anything, the Astoria, Oregon-based artist feels like a monastic antidote to spectacle of almost any kind—but in the subtle way it distorts space and time. She can sound like a whisper whose words you can’t quite make out (“Pale Interior”) and like a primal call from a distant hillside (“Followed the ocean”). And even when you can understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t sound like she meant to be heard (“The way her hair falls”). The paradox is one of closeness and remove, of the intimacy of singer-songwriters and the neutral, almost oracular quality of great ambient music. That the tracks on *Shade*, her 12th LP, were culled from a 15-year period is fitting not just because it evokes Harris’ machine consistency (she found her creative truth and she’s sticking to it), but because of how the staticky, white-noise quality of her recordings makes you aware of the hum of the fridge and the hiss of the breeze: With Grouper, it’s always right now.

Across a decade and a half of aliases and side-projects, Dean Blunt’s been known as an enigma. With a penchant for trolling and a disdain for genre boundaries, the Londoner is hard to pin down—from the masked post-punk of his Hype Williams duo to the weirdo noise-rap of Babyfather. But the sequel to 2014’s *BLACK METAL*, released under his own name, is mostly just…pretty. A pared-down collection of downcast avant-pop, *BLACK METAL 2* blurs acoustic strums, MIDI strings, and Blunt’s deadpan half-raps, telling fascinatingly unresolved stories—a gun on the beach, a mother without a son. These are lush, delicate songs that still feel profoundly unhappy: “Daddy’s broke/What a joke/Future’s bleak,” he sing-songs on folk downer “NIL BY MOUTH.” Even at its most accessible, Blunt’s work remains a bit of a mystery.

There’s a liquid, surreal feeling that runs through *Pray for Haiti*, a sense of touching solid ground only to leave it just as fast. Between the bars of Newark rapper Mach-Hommy\'s dusty, fragmented beats (many courtesy of the production regulars of Griselda Records), he glimpses thousand-dollar brunches (“Au Revoir”), bloodshed (“Folie Á Deux”), and the ghosts of his ancestors (“Kriminel”) with spectral detachment—not uncaring so much as stoic, the oracle at the outskirts who moves silently through a crowd. He likes it grimy (“Magnum Band,” “Makrel Jaxon”) and isn’t above materialism or punchlines (“Watch out, I ain’t pulling no punches/So real I make Meghan Markle hop out and get the Dutches”), but is, above all, a spiritualist, driven by history (like a lot of his albums, this one is peppered with Haitian Creole), feel, and a quiet ability to turn street rap into meditation. “It’s crazy what y’all can do with some old Polo and Ebonics,” he raps on “The 26th Letter”—a joke because he knows it’s not that simple, and a flex because, for him, it is.

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”

On her sixth LP, Dawn Richard wanted to celebrate the Black DJs and producers who played an instrumental role in developing the early sounds of electronic music. “Dance music has always been culturally from a Black culture,” Richard tells Apple Music. “It’s Detroit house, Chicago footwork, the New Jersey sound, D.C. go-go, and it goes on.” Dismayed by their lack of representation in festivals and playlists, most notably female artists, the New Orleans artist felt the need to speak louder through her art in order to break the glass ceiling. “I have always been a warrior, this Black woman fighting in a space where I didn\'t think I needed to fight,” she adds. “Conceptually, this album became bigger than just a sonic experience—it became an intention.” Also driven by a desire to bring her hometown to the fore, Richard wanted to tell the story of New Orleans filtered through a post-apocalyptic lens—an idea that started from some sketches she drew while working as a creative consultant for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Centered around an android alter ego she created called King Creole, *Second Line* is a futurist, dance-driven voyage intended to narrate her evolution from girl-group reality star to independent artist. “I had to figure out how to stand on my own in a system that didn\'t look at me as belonging in the genre that I was trying to tackle,” she says. “The android was the mainstream journey. Then the independent hustle comes, and you get to see King Creole as the human.” Read on as Richard guides you on her journey through self-discovery. **“King Creole (Intro)”** “It is a call to arms saying, if you thought you knew what this genre or what this electronic idea was, I\'m going to show you what it really is. And I\'m going to add New Orleans all over it right out the gate. So you know it\'s going to drip with soul and presence, and electronic is not just going to be an algorithm—it\'s going to be a soulful experience.” **“Nostalgia”** “I wanted to make sure that I paid homage to those who created and started a genre that is usually not recognized. Larry Heard was one of those incredible DJs and producers that I actually loved. I wanted to say, ‘Let\'s go back to Black, because this genre was started and developed by a culture that is Black.\' I\'m also introducing the mechanics of King Creole and her build—the first half of the album is the machine version of King Creole. It\'s the android—so that\'s why the beats per minute is fast and why we\'re dealing with a more processed sound.” **“Boomerang”** “Now we\'re playing with the vocals as the instrumentation to bring us through. So out the gate, we\'re hearing the vocoder, the harmonization between the vocals. And again, paying homage to a sound that was curated by Blacks. So again, disco becomes the next one. We\'re still in the future, but we\'re paying homage to the root. And with \'Boomerang,\' there are all these messages saying that the love comes back. If you give love out, it\'ll come back tenfold. So it\'s the idea that within this space, each record pays homage to the things that came before.” **“Bussifame”** “The word itself comes from New Orleans. We talk fast so everything we do is bled together. So really, it generally was ‘bust it for me’—like ‘bust a move’—but in New Orleans that sounds like ‘Bussifame.’ I was paying respects to the accent. I wanted to try to take it to the next level, bring New Orleans to the future. We don\'t hear New Orleans in this kind of sound, and that was the fun part—to create something that doesn\'t exist yet.” **“Pressure”** “To me, ‘Pressure’ was taking a traditional pop record and completely de-structuring it—adding bits of Chicago footwork, adding bits of go-go, adding bits of drum and bass, like really playing with movement within the bass and the sound. The record constantly moves. By the end of it, it goes into hip-hop. I\'m just spitting at that point. Like the cockiness to say that, \'I\'m going to give you a record that has four different transitions, and you will never know what to expect.\'” **“Pilot (A Lude)”** “It\'s a bounce record. It\'s an ode to Freedia, Katey Red, and Messy Mya, and I got to show love to my city. If I\'m going to talk about dance, I got to show love to where I grew up in. And again, calling the record \'Pilot,\' saying that we are the flyers of this. We steer this. Call us the pilots, because we are the connoisseurs of this thing that we do.” **“Jacuzzi”** “I always love juxtapositions, like applying something as catchy and melodic to the raunchiest of records. I\'ve always felt like Black women have been severely disrespected within us owning our sexuality. And on every album, I\'ve always had one song that best speaks to that. I really wanted to connect the relationship of one\'s body when you think about the intertwining of android to human; what that physically looks like sexually to the body, and how machine can make sense to human skin.” **“FiveOhFour (A Lude)”** “504 is an area code in New Orleans. You fight very hard to have that 504. The 504 legitimizes you as you\'re legit New Orleans. I produced it myself, showing that I didn\'t need a collaborator for this. It is purposely gritty, it is purposely pitched low. You\'re starting to see the shift in where I\'m getting out of android and going into human. But more importantly, I\'m showing how culturally important New Orleans is as the narrator of this process.” **“Voodoo (Intermission)”** “This is all *Blade Runner* at this point, the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. So King Creole comes out, and she’s telling everyone that she\'s on a mission to give you more. This is the human in her that wants that acceptance and love. She\'s having the vulnerability to say, \'All I want is your love. If you can just see me, I can give you all of this.\'” **“Mornin Streetlights”** “‘Mornin Streetlights’ starts with my mom speaking about how the only person she\'s ever loved is my father. They met when they were 15 and they\'ve been together ever since. I love music, and the reason why I\'ve been so tenacious at it is because I\'ve only known love like that. I\'ve only been taught to love the way my mom and dad have loved. That\'s what I grew up in, but it also makes sense as to the way I love my art. I love it with a tenacity that I can\'t give up.” **“Le Petit Morte (A Lude)”** “I wanted something that was honest. Even just start with the comment ‘This is the last time I\'m going to write a song about you.\' It\'s like going from talking about how I love this music to then saying, \'But I\'m tired of talking about my relationship with art and music.\' It is my purest and most honest moment and I\'m at my most vulnerable. And I freestyled that entire record. I did that as soon as I walked in. My dad played the piano on it and I just wailed. I didn\'t even know what was coming out.” **“Radio Free”** “You see the album now start to transition into hope, because I never sit in that dark place too long. So with ‘Le Petit Morte,’ it felt a little like death. It\'s acknowledging the death, whereas \'Radio Free\' is acknowledging the loss but understanding that you can play your freedom loud.” **“The Potter”** “‘The Potter’ is seeing the loss of worthiness but exposing it and saying, ‘Okay. But how do I see myself as worthy?’ It came to me when I was in church. What happens when you rust, rot, and you sit on the shelf? Will you be loved then? Who am I now? They let you go, and then how do you go on? How do you go on knowing you are this sculpted thing that once was so beautiful that is now worthless to those? And how do you find your worth within that place?” **“Perfect Storm”** “It’s literally being in a storm—having lost everything and being in Katrina and recognizing that we were homeless. It was beautiful the day before. It was hell the day it happened. And then, the next day, it was beautiful again, as if it didn\'t happen, and everything in its path was gone. My biggest theme and aim was to make the record as close to an actual storm as I possibly could—and that breath of fresh air that you feel when you realize that you\'ve lost everything and that you\'re still alive.” **“Voodoo (Outermission)”** “So now we\'re out of it, and now I\'m bringing you to what will be the next album in the trilogy. Because we\'re on album two after *new breed*. I\'m taking myself and removing it out of the art and the music industry, and now it is me as myself. And so I\'m trying to maneuver you guys out of that journey, and I\'m bringing you into what will be the next phase.” **“SELFish (Outro)”** “When people think of selfish, they think of it negatively, and I totally threw that out the window. I\'ve always loved to mess with interludes and make these hidden gems where people are like, \'Why wasn\'t this song longer?\' With this one, I thought it would be really cool to make an outro eight minutes. Black women, especially, we are punished for wanting more for ourselves. And I just want to encourage artists that it\'s okay to put yourself first in the process.”

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

In Claire Rousay’s music, a field recording is never just a record of a place—it also represents a trace of a personal memory, perhaps even a portal to another world. The Texas experimental musician is constantly recording, translating the murmurs and footfalls of the world around her into dreamy abstractions. Unlike some of her records, where she has run personal correspondence through text-to-speech generators—rendering the most intimate details in surreal, robotic tones—language does not play a central role on *A Softer Focus*. Yet this short, enveloping album is among her most lyrical, emotionally direct works to date. It begins with clatter—fingers tapping on an iPhone, perhaps the rustle of dishes being cleared—but with “Discrete (The Market),” uncharacteristically harmonic sounds rise in the mix, suffusing everything with a warm glow. The reassuringly consonant piano, cello, and synthesizer constitute the record’s nostalgic through line, recalling post-classical composers like Sarah Davachi. But no matter how lulling Rousay’s melodies become, the line between music and sound remains provocatively fuzzy. In “Diluted Dreams,” sparkling drones are shot through with the sounds of passing traffic and kids playing on the street; “Stoned Gesture” flickers in the light of fireworks exploding overhead. Only Rousay knows the precise meaning of these sounds, but for the rest of us, they are suggestive triggers, as evocative as the scent of a freshly cut lawn or hot pavement after a summer rain.

“Right then, I’m ready,” Adele says quietly at the close of *30*’s opening track, “Strangers By Nature.” It feels like a moment of gentle—but firm—self-encouragement. This album is something that clearly required a few deep breaths for Tottenham’s most celebrated export. “There were moments when I was writing these songs, and even when I was mixing them and stuff like that, where I was like, ‘Maybe I don\'t need to put this album out,’” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Like, ‘Maybe I should write another.’ Just because music is my therapy. I\'m never going into the studio to be like, ‘Right, I need another hit.’ It\'s not like that for me. When something is more powerful and overwhelming \[to\] me, I like to go to a studio, because it\'s normally a basement and there\'s no fucking windows and no reception, so no one can get ahold of me. So I\'m basically running away. And no one would\'ve known I\'d written that record. Maybe I just had to get it out of my system.” But, almost two years after much of it was completed, Adele did release *30*. And remarkably, considering the world has been using her back catalog to channel its rawest emotions since 2008, this is easily Adele’s most vulnerable record. It concerns itself with Big Things Only—crippling guilt over her 2019 divorce, motherhood, daring to date as one of the world’s most famous people, falling in love—capturing perfectly the wobbly resolve of a broken heart in repair. Its songs often feel sentimental in a way that’s unusually warm and inviting, very California, and crucially: *earned*. “The album is for my son, for Angelo,” she says. “I knew I had to tell his story in a song because it was very clear he was feeling it, even though I thought I was doing a very good job of being like, ‘Everything’s fine.’ But I also knew I wasn’t being as present. I was just so consumed by so many different feelings. And he plucked up the courage to very articulately say to me, ‘You’re basically a ghost. You might as well not be here.’ What kind of poet is that? For him to be little and say ‘I can’t see you’ to my face broke my heart.” This is also Adele’s most confident album sonically. She fancied paying tribute to Judy Garland with Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (“Strangers By Nature”), so she did. “I’d watched the Judy Garland biopic,” she says. “And I remember thinking, ‘Why did everyone stop writing such incredible melodies and cadences and harmonies?’” She felt comfortable working heartbreaking bedside chats with her young son and a voice memo documenting her own fragile mental state into her music on “My Little Love.” “While I was writing it, I just remember thinking of any child that’s been through divorce or any person that has been though a divorce themselves, or anyone that wants to leave a relationship and never will,” she says. “I thought about all of them, because my divorce really humanized my parents for me.” The album does not steep in sorrow and regret, however: There’s a Max Martin blockbuster with a whistled chorus (“Can I Get It”), a twinkling interlude sampling iconic jazz pianist Erroll Garner (“All Night Parking”), and the fruits of a new creative partnership with Dean Josiah Cover—aka Michael Kiwanuka, Sault, and Little Simz producer Inflo. “The minute I realized he \[Inflo\] was from North London, I wouldn’t stop talking to him,” she says. “We got no work done. It was only a couple of months after I’d left my marriage, and we got on so well, but he could feel that something was wrong. He knew that something dark was happening in me. I just opened up. I was dying for someone to ask me how I was.” One of the Inflo tracks, “Hold On,” is the album’s centerpiece. Rolling through self-loathing (“I swear to god, I am such a mess/The harder that I try, I regress”) into instantly quotable revelations (“Sometimes loneliness is the only rest we get”) before reaching show-stopping defiance (“Let time be patient, let pain be gracious/Love will soon come, if you just hold on”), the song accesses something like final-form Adele. It’s a rainbow of emotions, it’s got a choir (“I got my friends to come and sing,” she tells Apple Music), and she hits notes we’ll all only dare tackle in cars, solo. “I definitely lost hope a number of times that I’d ever find my joy again,” she says. “I remember I didn’t barely laugh for about a year. But I didn’t realize I was making progress until I wrote ‘Hold On’ and listened to it back. Later, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I’ve really learned a lot. I’ve really come a long way.’” So, after all this, is Adele happy that *30* found its way to the world? “It really helped me, this album,” she says. “I really think that some of the songs on this album could really help people, really change people’s lives. A song like ‘Hold On’ could actually save a few lives.” It’s also an album she feels could support fellow artists. “I think it’s an important record for them to hear,” she says. “The ones that I feel are being encouraged not to value their own art, and that everything should be massive and everything should be ‘get it while you can’… I just wanted to remind them that you don’t need to be in everyone’s faces all the time. And also, you can really write from your stomach, if you want.”

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.’”

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?

It’s sort of funny that RP Boo (aka DJ/producer Kavain Wayne Space), who’s been active on Chicago\'s footwork scene for more than two decades, would name his fourth LP *Established!* He’s long been considered a standard-bearer—arguably the creator—of the regional sound, which relies on jittery, extremely off-kilter beats to braid dancers\' legs into a 160-BPM game of Twister. Of course, with his establishment status comes the responsibility to lead in a new direction, and that’s what happens, in fits and starts, with Boo’s fourth album. The 4/4 beat of opener “All My Life” is the first signal of that departure—and provides a window into the electro-funk and house that Boo likely absorbed before he ever sat down in a studio. And “How 2 Get It Done!” starts off with a greasy, ’70s slow-jam vibe before it morphs into deconstructed G-funk and a barrage of snares that snap to an entirely different grid from the underlying rhythm. Those looking for more classic-style tracks—and aggressive conceits—will still find them in abundance. The theme of dunking on one’s detractors, for instance—a perennial footwork favorite since long before DJ Nate dropped “Hatas Our Motivation” in 2010—is well represented on \"Haters Increase the Heat!,” where the minimalist bass wobbles between the channels to such a degree that it throws you off balance even when you\'re sitting down. Footwork tracks can certainly feel like unfinished sketches at times—more a tool for dance-party battles than something you might just have on in the background. But it’s in the DIY experiments that *Established!* conducts—*how many tempos can a track have layered on top of one another before it collapses under its own weight?*—where the boundaries really get tested.

“I like the simple stuff,” murmurs Loraine James on “Simple Stuff,” a standout track on the London producer’s second album for Hyperdub. Perhaps her idea of simplicity is different from others’, because *Reflection* (like its predecessor *For You and I*) is a virtuosic display of dazzlingly complex drum programming and deeply nuanced emotional expression. James’ music sits where club styles like drum ’n’ bass and UK funky meet more idiosyncratic strains of IDM; her beats snap and lurch, wrapping grime- and drill-inspired drums in ethereal synths and glitchy bursts of white noise. Recorded in 2020, while the club world was paused, *Reflection* captures much of the anxiety and melancholy of that strange, stressful year. “It feels like the walls are caving in,” she whispers on the contemplative title track, an unexpected ambient oasis amid a landscape of craggy, desiccated beats. Despite the frequently overcast mood, however, guest turns on songs like “Black Ting” show a belief in the possibility of change. “The seeds we sow bear beautiful fruit,” raps Iceboy Violet on the Black Lives Matter-influenced closing track, “We’re Building Something New.” Tender and abrasive in equal measure, *Reflection* is that rarest of things: a work of experimental music that really does make another world feel possible.

For the follow-up to her harrowing 2019 album *Caligula*, Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) explores the physical and religious ruins of rural Pennsylvania as a metaphor for personal turmoil. “I think overall the record is about betrayal and consequences and facing the repercussions for your actions,” she tells Apple Music. “Looking at myself and the people close to me, it\'s about my most recent very turbulent relationship, and trying to love someone who cannot love you, and the resulting loneliness and isolation.” Because she was living in rural Pennsylvania to be in that relationship, she chose to detail the strange history of the area on *Sinner Get Ready*. “One of the major focuses of the record was to create darkness and intensity, and a very emotional soundscape,” she says, “but to do it without the trappings of extreme music and metal and noise, and to use a totally different palette to create the same vibe.” Below, she comments on each track. **“The Order of Spiritual Virgins”** “This track is a bridge between the last album, *Caligula*, and the rest of the record. The Order of Spiritual Virgins relates to the Cloisters at Ephrata, which was a small monastic society in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. They were hardcore ascetics, and I think a lot of it was based around totally repressing sexuality. I wanted to introduce a lot of the vocals that appear throughout the record—they’re congregational and not particularly refined, but they have real conviction. This song also has the only blatant synth aspect on the record, which is in the Morton Subotnick style.” **“I Who Bend the Tall Grasses”** “This song is inspired by a poem by my friend Blake Butler\'s late wife, who passed away around the time I was writing this record. She\'s a poet named Molly Brodak, and the poem is called ‘Jesus.’ I found it so striking and moving, and so the language of this track is very much indebted to that poem. It’s probably the most violent song on the record, and it also transitions out of the screaming stuff I’ve been doing for the last two years now. It’s like the last gasp of that for this record, and I believe we did it in one take.” **“Many Hands”** “With this one, I really wanted to focus on the repetition of the lyrics because I think they are fairly graphic. I also wanted to bring in part of the world that I\'ve been building previously and to reference ‘All Bitches Die’ by actually pulling the piano progression from that song and then repeating the lyrics and pulling that from the song as well. So that’s actually the first thing you hear, and then it transitions into this other song that is laid over it. They kind of talk to each other throughout the song. I think it has an Angels of Light vibe.” **“Pennsylvania Furnace”** “This is an actual place, a defunct community that’s about 20 minutes away from where I was living this past year. And now it\'s just a big ruin with a concrete slab and some crap laying around. ‘Pennsylvania Furnace’ was another contender for the record title, but I wanted to give it to the song. Musically, I wanted to create a very lonely feeling. We wanted to create something that sounded grand and huge but also extremely close to you. So there’s a very dry, close vocal. It’s a very sad song.” **“Repent Now Confess Now”** “The title for this is from a sign on I-70, which is an interstate that runs the length of Pennsylvania horizontally. About 45 minutes outside of Philly, there’s a barn by the side of the road on what looks like an Amish farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the phrase ‘Repent now, confess your sins and God will abundantly pardon.’ But the song is directly about the surgery I had to get this year. I had a massive disc herniation in my lower back that became an emergency situation that threatened total loss of my lower body.” **“The Sacred Linament of Judgment”** “A lot of the lyrics on this record are intended to emulate or are directly appropriated from Amish and Mennonite texts from the 1800s and 1700s. And this one comes from a book called *The Heart of Man: Either a Temple to God or the Habitation of Satan: Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, Calculated to Awaken and Promote a Christian Disposition*. Also appearing on this song is the confession of Jimmy Swaggart, an evangelist who was brought to accountability by one of the prostitutes he had been frequenting.” **Perpetual Flame of Centralia** “Centralia is an abandoned mining town 30 minutes outside Philly where there was a coal mining accident in 1962, and there’s been a fire burning underground ever since. This song was the first song I did in the studio, and I really wanted to focus on creating an intimate space. Vocally, the phrases are very long and there is a lot of breath taken. I wanted to focus on the quality of the voice as it\'s losing its ability to project or sustain itself. The song is about consequences and judgment.” **“Man Is Like a Spring Flower”** “This song was a wild ride. The title is from a piece of Mennonite fraktur, which is the illuminated manuscript that they would paint in their copious spare time. Again, it starts off with this polyphony, which is just me, but it\'s so grating and abrasive that every time I listen to the song, I start laughing because I think it sounds so gross. We brought in this really, really good banjo player and had him do this compositional technique called phasing, which affects the rhythm of the song. And then I did the most miserable vocal I could muster.” **“The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata”** “I wanted the emotional trajectory of the record to be a bit of an unraveling. It starts out with strength and confidence and virulence and ends in total despair, acceptance, and perhaps a wish for absolution. I kept trying to add all this crazy stuff to this one, but we kept taking it out until I was left with a very simple congruent harmony. It seems like a nice, traditional song, but the only curveball is the lyrical ugliness at the end. It really is about the acceptance of loneliness, I think.”

In the lexicon of jazz band configurations, the trio is perhaps most challenging. Triangulating compositions through just three instruments, there is ample space for each member to either sink or fly. For New York-based composer, professor and pianist Vijay Iyer, it\'s the perfect setting in which to showcase his intuitive, emotive approach to improvisation, one that feeds off collaboration as much as it is propelled by uncompromising individual thought. Despite having spent the past decade playing informally with bassist Linda May Han Oh and two decades recording and performing with drummer Tyshawn Sorey, *Uneasy* is his first in this trio configuration. “The impetus behind this album wasn’t necessarily a theme—it was just about the three of us playing together,” Iyer tells Apple Music. “As soon as we sat down together in 2019, I realised our playing had its own energy and drive, it demanded its own space for a project.” The result is eight reimagined compositions from the past 20 years of Iyer’s work, as well as a tribute to his long-time mentor and friend Geri Allen and a reinterpretation of the jazz standard “Night and Day”. *Uneasy* takes its title from a 2011 collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage, and its reference to the emotions of anxiety and discontent come to epitomise the ensuing narrative of the record as a whole. “We want you to inhabit this slightly turbulent space of the album, since life is not stable, as is increasingly revealed to us every day,” Iyer says as he guides us through each of *Uneasy*\'s tracks. **“Children of Flint”** \"I had been invited in 2019 to write a piece for a classical music context, and the theme was \'the year of water\'. Immediately, I thought, ‘The year of water for whom? What about people who don\'t have it?’ In the US context, it becomes a political question, and with the Flint crisis, this was a moment where a political disaster caused an environmental disaster that disproportionately affected communities of colour. So I wrote a piece for solo viola called \'Song for Flint\', which had a mournful and harrowing quality to it. There was a fragment of it that kept haunting me, and I wanted to keep that sense of rage and to direct energy and money to that community. When it came to the trio, I included this piece called \'Children of Flint\' on the record, as it is both a child of the \'Song for Flint\' and I imagined it playing for children or giving it to children.\" **“Combat Breathing”** \"This was originally created for the occasion of a Black Lives Matter protest that we did at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014, which was the year of the birth of the movement. That year, things came to a boil and we all wanted to divert energy in the direction of the people on the ground who were doing the work. With the trio’s interpretation, it has a sense of urgency to it, but then it also has a space where it imagines a different reality and it stretches out. Something that this group does best is to stretch out without too much provocation, to allow the music to blossom into a river of energy.\" **“Night and Day”** \"Joe Henderson made a version of this Cole Porter composition in 1966, which remakes the song. Musicians in the jazz lineage have always repurposed and reinvented pre-existing material on their own terms. It’s a transformative tradition of creating something else using a found text as a vehicle. With the trio, we wanted to capture the very colourful, bright energy of Henderson and McCoy Tyner’s version. I\'ve been listening to that recording for 30 years and I\'ve studied McCoy Tyner, trying to understand how he sets things in motion, how he anchors the sound and how he creates this spectrum of colours. Since he passed away last year, this is a tribute to him.\" **“Touba”** \"The poet Michael Ladd and I collaborated on an album called *In What Language?* in 2003, and there is a piece on there called \'Plastic Bag\', which is based around a poem about a Senegalese street vendor in New York. He was part of this community that practised a version of Islam called Mouride; their mythic homeland is called Touba, and wherever they settle and build community, like in Harlem, you\'ll find these businesses called Touba. They carry this sense of home with them throughout the diaspora. That piece was called \'Plastic Bag\' because this guy carried all his earthly belongings in this gigantic plastic sack, and this version is a travelling blues.\" **“Drummer’s Song”** \"I\'ve been a fan of Geri Allen’s music and her playing since the late ’80s. I first heard her when I was 16, and later, in the early 2000s, I got to know her better, and she\'s been a hero to me ever since. She became a very nurturing and endlessly generous member of our community. Very few of us knew that she was suffering when she died of cancer at the age of 60 in 2017. I wanted to continue to study her music and to perform it and uphold her legacy as best as I can. Playing this composition of hers for the record was a nice challenge. It\'s really hard to pull off in the trio context because there\'s a lot of polyphony going on and everyone has to cover a lot of bases. She always made it look effortless.\" **“Augury”** \"For this track, we were all done with the recording sessions. Tyshawn and Linda went home and I just asked the engineer to hit record. In those moments, especially after a long day of recording, you\'re depleted and in a vulnerable state, which attunes you intuitively to certain things. I went in with no real agenda; I didn\'t know if I would make anything worth salvaging, I just decided to play something. This was what came out in that moment, and I call it ‘Augury\' because it feels like a certain kind of divination. In that moment at the end of 2019, at the cusp of a disastrous year, what am I hearing?\" **“Configurations”** \"It had been almost 20 years since I\'d last performed this piece with Tyshawn and I dared him to play it to see if he remembered, and of course he did—he has a genius memory. We had fun pulling it together, particularly trying to do it as a trio because it has a challenging structure, but Linda and Tyshawn always rise above any challenge and make it into something better. It ended up becoming a set piece for us where there\'s all this energy being passed around rapidly and then there is a wild ending referencing different rhythmic techniques from South Indian music.\" **“Uneasy”** \"This piece was written for a collaboration with a dance company in 2011, and we were thinking about what it was to be an American 10 years after 9/11. It was the thick and thin of the Obama years—optimism and surveillance, truth and deception. \'Uneasy’ was the word for how none of that felt quite right. We were asking with the piece, what does it mean to come together with a certain kind of exuberance and yet to also know that there\'s something sinister beneath the surface that we are not talking about yet? Now, 10 years on, it still fits well with the current moment—perhaps even better. In American life, we\'re living in the echo of that time.\" **“Retrofit”** \"I wrote this originally for my sextet, since I wanted to make something that was dealing with new ideas rhythmically and harmonically. Reducing it to the trio format meant that it could be split open differently to become an interactive vehicle for us. Especially in the last few minutes, it becomes molten—it keeps changing shape, and that\'s something that we can do with the trio because we’re a rhythm section. A lot of what is happening in our work is rhythm being expressed and then shifting.\" **“Entrustment”** \"So often with the trio, we\'re creating an intimate version of something more grand, which is the case with ‘Entrustment’, a composition I wrote as part of a larger suite for a string orchestra. The suite was called ‘City of Sand’ and it was inspired by me visiting the site of an incredible network of several hundred Buddhist cave temples in the Gobi Desert. It was this crossroads of all these different cultures, and ‘Entrustment’ was the closing meditation, a processional embrace of that kind of openness, expansiveness and emptiness. It\'s only two chords—it’s made of almost nothing, it\'s just those qualities coming together.\"

In August of 2018, Helado Negro mastermind Roberto Carlos Lange found himself in Berlin, collaborating and performing with more than 150 other artists as part of the PEOPLE festival, a weeklong artist residency founded by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner. Afterward, on his way home to New York, he spotted multi-instrumentalist and new age pioneer Laraaji seated nearby at the airport. “I don\'t like bugging people like that in public spaces,” Lange tells Apple Music, “but I did it. And then, as I was telling him what we’d been up to in Berlin, he was like, ‘Oh, wow. Far in.’” That expression stayed with him—so much so that it became a title and kind of unifying principle for his full-length follow-up to 2019 breakthrough *This Is How You Smile*. A reaction to what he calls the “implied grooves” of his previous work, *Far In* finds him moving away from the ethereal towards arrangements whose drums and bass are noticeably “present” throughout. Written in Brooklyn and Marfa, Texas—during a stay extended by the pandemic’s first lockdown—it’s a bilingual set of moody, psychedelic folk and pop that even at its dreamiest has a strong sense of place, whether he’s conjuring the fragrant citrus groves of his native South Florida or the spiritual expanse of a desert vista. “What I\'ve tried to do—and I think what I\'ve always tried to do—is make sure each song is its own world,” he says. “*Far In* was the best way for me to describe it, the way for me to talk about how I wanted to express a lot of different places and sounds that I know how to get to, but I maybe haven\'t shared before. I had to just look further in.” Here, he walks us through a number of the album’s songs. **“Wake Up Tomorrow” (feat. Kacy Hill)** “There\'s something about it that is a complete mystery. It feels like it\'s a doorway or it\'s just some kind of path somewhere out in some overgrown, shrubby path that\'s leading you somewhere, to some light. I think a lot of it has to do with Kacy\'s vocals on it, this humming melody that she does. It\'s just haunting.” **“Gemini and Leo”** “I\'m a Leo, my wife is a Gemini. I was working on this really funny loop that I wasn\'t sure was going to go anywhere. And then, the melody just clicked. A lot of times I shape the lyrics phonetically, in terms of trying to find what melodies attach. I don’t know why I was just thinking about us, but ‘her and I’—that was the hook. And then I was like, ‘Shit. Now I’ve got to make a song around this. Let\'s find a way to design a little story that talks about this relationship.’” **“There Must Be a Song Like You”** “There\'s different ways to look at it, and I think one of them is looking at somebody that you don\'t necessarily see eye-to-eye with. But another thing that I was thinking about was, how do you define this person, or how do you define this thing, because ‘you’ doesn\'t really have to be a person. ‘You’ could be you confronting a feeling, trying to describe what that feeling is, and maybe the only place you can find it is in the song.” **“Hometown Dream”** “It was one of the first songs I wrote when I got back to Brooklyn from Marfa, and a lot of those songs were responding to being forced into living somewhere else for six months, and really realizing that the world is beautiful everywhere. In a way, the idea of a hometown is just a dream. This idea of being a native anything. I think it\'s just a fantasy, more than anything, and that\'s kind of the feeling that I\'m trying to convey with this.” **“Outside the Outside”** “That breakdown was a moment of inspiration. I was using this synth that I was really getting into, the OP-Z. And that moment in the song, it\'s one of those happy accidents, where I didn\'t extend some edits and everything had dropped out except for the synth and I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ It kind of pushed the whole theme of being outside the outside. It\'s almost like the further outside the outside you are, you\'re going far in. Not to put the joke on it, but it\'s true.” **“Brown Fluorescence”** “It\'s an interlude. It\'s a song, too. It’s a field recording I made, of some voices that I was able to record. They’re all chopped up and processed, but there was a glow about it. When I talk about music, it\'s more in colors and shapes and textures. It has nothing to do with synesthesia or anything like that—it’s a vocabulary I use because I didn\'t go to music school or anything. So there was something about this idea of something having a brown fluorescence, and that was the feeling I got when I was making that song. It was like this funny glow, something that was not like a fluorescent light, but almost like if there was a brown rock that was fluorescent and you just found it in nature.” **“Wind Conversation”** “The theme—which is a thread that runs through the whole album—was kind of this feeling towards climate change, towards the earth, being spiritually moved by being in Marfa. I had never really experienced the desert before. But the song’s also going deeper into thinking about not so much impending doom, but impending changes that are going to cause a lot of hardships. It takes place under this tree that my wife Kristi and I would go to sometimes, to have lunch under in this park, essentially, surrounded by the desert. It was just us, laying back, looking out to the cliffs, daydreaming.” **“Thank You For Ever”** “It\'s another play on this idea—it’s not \'thank you forever,\' it\'s \'thank you forever, dot, dot, dot.\' And I think that\'s kind of what the song is about, this expansiveness. I think that\'s the first song I\'ve ever written that really feels like the desert. That one was a dream. I just woke up, went to the studio, and it kind of just ignited out of me. It all happened in one day, in one sitting.” **“La Naranja”** “‘Naranja’ means orange, and it\'s kind of like a cousin to another song on the record, ‘Agosto.’ It’s this abstract idea, thinking about how there used to be all these orange trees around me growing up in South Florida. It was something that we would experience in a life cycle: There would be the blossoms and then there would be the oranges and then the oranges would hit the ground and then they\'d be rotting and then it would stink. There was this abundance, and then it was gone—they cut down all the trees. It’s about this era that we\'ve grown up in, how we\'ve had access to everything, and knowing that it\'s not going to last forever. ‘You and I can stop time. You and I can save the world together’: That\'s what the song says in Spanish.” **“Telescope” (feat. Benamin)** “It\'s a song that I wrote for my mom, this idea of how we\'re Zooming or FaceTiming, but how it’s been like a telescope. You\'re only seeing this person through this way of seeing, and it just doesn\'t feel tangible. It doesn\'t feel like the person you know. You\'re seeing this person as if you\'re reading about them in a book or something.”

One of the first albums the teenage producer bought on iTunes (or, rather, that their mom bought for them) was Childish Gambino’s *Because the Internet*; that title is also a pretty spot-on description of digicore, the genre pioneered by Gen Z bedroom artists that sounds like the internet feels. Still, there’s a realness to *Frailty*, the second album from dltzk, that transcends the digital. With its fuzzy guitar chords and yearning high school poetry (like “Time passed with a slap to the back of my head,” from the hyper-catchy unrequited-love ballad “Your Clothes”), this is emo music rigged with the pyrotechnics of EDM and the absurdity of meme culture, minus the irony. There’s a sweetness to the youthful chaos, something to relate to even if you didn’t spend your adolescence scrolling.

The 49-year-old Brownsville rapper cuts a mythic figure: Raised on the mean streets of ’70s Brooklyn, he now splits his time between being a NYC fire captain and crafting dense rap allegories that touch on Greek mythology and the code of the samurai. But on *A Martyr’s Reward*, Ka strips down everything—the mythology, the production—to tell his own story, unembellished, over hauntingly minimalist (and mostly self-produced) beats. But it isn’t just his story; it’s the story of surviving being Black in America—or, in the cases of too many of his friends, not surviving. And on “I Need All That,” he demands retribution: “I want back everything they took/My culture, my music, my look.”

The retro-futuristic duo (Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin) hails from LA by way of the uncanny Valley, churning out trippy DIY videos made from random VHS footage and mailing weird brochures to fans like a secretive cult. But on debut full-length *Mercurial World*, their polished synth-pop demands to be taken seriously, though their playful spirit abides—emulating the effects of a VOCALOID with their mouths, kicking off the album with a track called “The End.” Tenenbaum and Lewin blend the nostalgic with the contemporary, combining Y2K-era bubblegum, the disco grooves of mid-aughts indie-dance crossovers, and the space-age sheen of hyperpop for a 45-minute sugar rush; don’t miss “Chaeri,” 2021’s best pop song about being a bad friend.

www.mercurialworld.com