On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.
After rerecording her 2008 album *Fearless* as part of a sweeping effort to regain control of her master tapes—or at least create new ones—Taylor Swift presents *Red (Taylor’s Version)*, an expanded take on her 2012 blockbuster that features nine never-before-released songs written in the same era as the original. “Musically and lyrically, *Red* resembled a heartbroken person,” she wrote in a letter to fans. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.” The hot-blooded breakup anthems you know and love are still there (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” are two), but the new, full collection paints an even richer portrait of heartbreak. She wrestles with change on “Nothing New,” an alt-rock duet with Phoebe Bridgers; contemplates fate on a wistful pop song produced by Max Martin and Shellback (“Message in a Bottle”); and gets the final, piercing word on “I Bet You Think About Me” featuring Chris Stapleton, penned after a high-profile breakup in 2011. Longtime fans will be especially glad to see an extended cut of “All Too Well,” the project’s emotional centerpiece. It features new production from hitmaker Jack Antonoff, but Swift’s original lyrical genius is still remarkable. “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest,” she sings. It’s the line she’s always said she’s most proud of from this album and era. Ten years on, it still cuts deep.
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.”
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.”
With her incisive lyrics and gift for harnessing classic UK garage samples, PinkPantheress very quickly became one of 2021’s breakout stars. Her debut mixtape, *to hell with it*, is a bite-size collection of moreish pop songs and a small slice of the 20-year-old singer and producer’s creative output over the nine months since her first viral TikTok moment. “I basically put together the songs that I put out this year that I felt were strongest,” she tells Apple Music. “I sat in the studio with my manager and a good friend from home whose ear I trust, and I said, ‘Does this sound cohesive to you? Are the songs in a similar world?’” The world of *to hell with it* is one of sharp contrasts existing together in perfect balance: sweet, singsong vocals paired with frenetic breakbeats, floor-filler samples through a bedroom pop filter, confessional lyrics about mostly fictionalized experiences, and light, bright production with a solidly emo core. “They’re all vividly sad,” PinkPantheress says of the 10 tracks that made the cut. “I think I\'ve had a tendency, even on a particularly happy beat, to sing the saddest lyrics I can. I paint a picture of the actual scenarios where someone would be sad.” Here, the Bath-born, London-based artist takes us through her mixtape, track by track. **“Pain”** “In my early days on TikTok I was creating a song a day. Some of them got a good reception, but ‘Pain’ was the first one where people responded really well and the first one where the sound ended up traveling a little bit. It didn\'t go crazy, but the sound was being used by 30 people, and that got me quite excited. A lot of people haven’t really heard garage that much before, and I think that for them, the sample \[Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 single ‘Flowers’\] is a very palatable way to ease into garage breakbeats, very British-sounding synths, and all those influences.” **“I must apologise”** “This track was produced by Oscar Scheller \[Rina Sawayama, Ashnikko\]. I was trying to stay away from a sample at this point, but there’s something about this beat \[from Crystal Waters’ 1991 single ‘Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)’\] which drugged me. When we started writing it, Oscar gave me the idea for one of the melodies and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this actually is probably going to end up being one of my favorite songs just based off of this great melody that he\'s just come up with.’” **“Last valentines”** “My older cousin introduced me to LINKIN PARK; *Hybrid Theory* is one of my favorite albums ever. I went through the whole thing thinking, ‘Could I sample any of this?’ and when I listened to ‘Forgotten’ I just thought: ‘This guitar in the back is amazing. I can\'t believe no one\'s ever sampled it before!’ I looped it, recorded to it, mixed it, put it out. This was my first track where it took a darker turn, sonically. It really is emo through and through, from the sample to the lyrics.” **“Passion”** “To me, a lack of passion is just really not enjoying things like you used to—not having the same fun with your friends, finding things boring. I haven’t experienced depression myself, but I know people that have and I can attempt to draw comparisons of what I see in real life. Like it says in the lyrics, ‘You don’t see the light.’ I think I got a lot more emotional than I needed to get, but I\'m still glad that I went there. The instruments are so happy, I feel like there needed to be something to contradict it and make it a bit more three-dimensional.” **“Just for me”** “I made this song with \[UK artist and producer\] Mura Masa. I was sat with him, just going through references, and he started making the loop. I’ve never said this before, but I remember being like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write anything good to this,’ and then it just came, after 20 minutes of sitting there wondering what I could do. The line ‘When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?’ just slipped off the tongue.” **“Noticed I cried”** “This is another track with Oscar Scheller and the first song I made without my own production. I held back a lot from working with producers, because I like working by myself, but Oscar is really good, so it ended up just being an easy process. He understood the assignment. I think it’s my favorite song I’ve ever released. It’s the top line, I’m just a big fan of the way it flows. I hope that people like it as much as I do.” **“Reason”** “Zach Nahome produced this track. He used to make a lot of garage, drum ’n’ bass, jungle, but his sound is quite different to that nowadays. So this was a bit of a different vibe for him. We made the beat together. I told him what kind of drums I wanted, what kind of sound and space I wanted, and he came up with that. With garage music, I just enjoy the breakbeats of it, the drums. It’s also quintessentially British. We birthed it. I think it’s always nice to go back to your roots.” **“All my friends know”** “I wanted to try something a bit different, and there were a few moments with this one where I wasn’t sure if I really liked it or not. After I stopped debating with myself it got a lot easier to enjoy it and I ended up feeling like it could actually be a lot of people’s favorite. The instrumental part of it is really beautiful; both producers—my friends Dill and Kairos—did a good job. It’s sentimental in a musical sense, and it’s sentimental in a personal sense as well.” **“Nineteen”** “This is a song that stems from personal experience, and kind of the first time in any of my songs where I’m like, ‘I’m actually speaking the truth here, this actually happened to me.’ Nineteen was a year of confusion, emotional confusion. I didn’t want to do my uni course, I wanted to do music. I didn\'t want people to laugh at me. I didn\'t want to tell myself out loud and then have it not happen. Internally, I was very sure and certain that it was going to happen, just because I\'m a big believer in manifestation. So 19 was that transition year. Once I\'d settled down and started doing what I loved, I felt a lot more comfortable, and actually, a lot more safe.” **“Break It Off”** “‘Break It Off’ was, I guess, my breakthrough track. It was the first time my name was being chucked around a fair bit. I fell in love with the original \[Adam F’s 1997 single ‘Circles’\] and I just wanted to hear what a top line would sound like on the track. So I found the instrumental, played around with it a little bit, and then sang on top. I think it got 100,000 likes on TikTok when I wasn’t really getting likes in that number before. The lyric is really tongue-in-cheek, and I think a lot of people on TikTok like tongue-in-cheek.”
HAIM only had one rule when they started working on their third album: There would be no rules. “We were just experimenting,” lead singer and middle sibling Danielle Haim tells Apple Music. “We didn’t care about genre or sticking to any sort of script. We have the most fun when nothing is off limits.” As a result, *Women in Music Pt. III* sees the Los Angeles sisters embrace everything from thrillingly heavy guitar to country anthems and self-deprecating R&B. Amid it all, gorgeous saxophone solos waft across the album, transporting you straight to the streets of their hometown on a sunny day. In short, it’s a fittingly diverse effort for a band that\'s always refused, in the words of Este Haim, to be “put in a box.” “I just hope people can hear how much fun we had making it,” adds Danielle, who produced the album alongside Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid—a trio Alana Haim describes as “the Holy Trinity.” “We wanted it to sound fun. Everything about the album was just spontaneous and about not taking ourselves too seriously.” Yet, as fun-filled as they might be, the tracks on *Women in Music Pt. III* are also laced with melancholy, documenting the collective rock bottom the Haim sisters hit in the years leading up to the album’s creation. These songs are about depression, seeking help, grief, failing relationships, and health issues (Este has type 1 diabetes). “A big theme in this album is recognizing your sadness and expelling it with a lot of aggression,” says Danielle, who wanted the album to sound as raw and up close as the subjects it dissects. “It feels good to scream it in song form—to me that’s the most therapeutic thing I can do.” Elsewhere, the band also comes to terms with another hurdle: being consistently underestimated as female musicians. (The album’s title, they say, is a playful “invite” to stop asking them about being women in music.) The album proved to be the release they needed from all of those experiences—and a chance to celebrate the unshakable sibling support system they share. “This is the most personal record we’ve ever put out,” adds Alana. “When we wrote this album, it really did feel like collective therapy. We held up a mirror and took a good look at ourselves. It’s allowed us to move on.” Let HAIM guide you through *Women in Music Pt. III*, one song at a time. **Los Angeles** Danielle Haim: “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. It came out of this feeling when we were growing up that Los Angeles had a bad rep. It was always like, ‘Ew, Los Angeles!’ or ‘Fuck LA!’ Especially in 2001 or so, when all the music was coming out of New York and all of our friends ended up going there for college. And if LA is an eyeroll, the Valley—where we come from—is a constant punchline. But I always had such pride for this city. And then when our first album came out, all of a sudden, the opinion of LA started to change and everyone wanted to move here. It felt a little strange, and it was like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to live here anymore?’ I’m waiting for the next mass exodus out of the city and people being like, ‘This place sucks.’ Anyone can move here, but you’ve got to have LA pride from the jump.” **The Steps** Danielle: “With this album, we were reckoning with a lot of the emotions we were feeling within the business. This album was kind of meant to expel all of that energy and almost be like ‘Fuck it.’ This song kind of encapsulates the whole mood of the record. The album and this song are really guitar-driven \[because\] we just really wanted to drive that home. Unfortunately, I can already hear some macho dude being like, ‘That lick is so easy or simple.’ Sadly, that’s shit we’ve had to deal with. But I think this is the most fun song we’ve ever written. It’s such a live, organic-sounding song. Just playing it feels empowering.” Este Haim: “People have always tried to put us in a box, and they just don’t understand what we do. People are like, ‘You dance and don’t play instruments in your videos, how are you a band?’ It’s very frustrating.” **I Know Alone** Danielle: “We wrote this one around the same time that we wrote ‘Los Angeles,’ just in a room on GarageBand. Este came up with just that simple bassline. And we kind of wrote the melody around that bassline, and then added those 808 drums in the chorus. It’s about coming out of a dark place and feeling like you don\'t really want to deal with the outside world. Sometimes for me, being at home alone is the most comforting. We shout out Joni Mitchell in this song; our mom was such a huge fan of hers and she kind of introduced us to her music when we were really little. I\'d always go into my room and just blast Joni Mitchell super loud. And I kept finding albums of hers as we\'ve gotten older and need it now. I find myself screaming to slow Joni Mitchell songs in my car. This song is very nostalgic for her.” **Up From a Dream** Danielle: “This song literally took five minutes to write, and it was written with Rostam. It’s about waking up to a reality that you just don’t want to face. In a way, I don’t really want to explain it: It can mean so many different things to different people. This is the heaviest song we’ve ever had. It’s really cool, and I think this one will be really fun to play live. The guitar solo alone is really fun.” **Gasoline** Danielle: “This was another really quick one that we wrote with Rostam. The song was a lot slower originally, and then we put that breakbeat-y drumbeat on it and all of a sudden it turned into a funky sort of thing, and it really brought the song to life. I love the way that the drums sound. I feel like we really got that right. I was like literally in a cave of blankets, a fort we created with a really old Camco drum set from the ’70s, to make sure we got that dry, tight drum sound. That slowed-down ending is due to Ariel. He had this crazy EDM filter he stuck on the guitar, and I was like, ‘Yes, that’s fucking perfect.’” Alana Haim: “I think there were parts of that song where we were feeling sexy. I remember I had gone to go get food, and when I came back Danielle had written the bridge. She was like, ‘Look what I wrote!’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Okay!’” **3 AM** Alana: “It’s pretty self-explanatory—it’s about a booty call. There have been around 10 versions of this song. Someone was having a booty call. It was probably me, to be honest. We started out with this beat, and then we wrote the chorus super quickly. But then we couldn’t figure out what to do in the verses. We’d almost given up on it and then we were like, ‘Let’s just try one last time and see if we can get there.’ I think it was close to 3 am when we figured out the verse and we had this idea of having it introduced by a phone call. Because it *is* about a booty call. And we had to audition a bunch of dudes. We basically got all of our friends that were guys to be like, ‘Hey, this is so crazy, but can you just pretend to be calling a girl at 3 am?’ We got five or six of our friends to do it, and they were so nervous and sheepish. They were the worst! I was like, ‘Do you guys even talk to girls?’ I think you can hear the amount of joy and laughs we had making this song.” **Don’t Wanna** Alana: “I think this is classic HAIM. It was one of the earlier songs which we wrote around the same time as ‘Now I’m in It.’ We always really, really loved this song, and it always kind of stuck its head out like, ‘Hey, remember me?’ It just sounded so good being simple. We can tinker around with a song for years, and with this one, every time we added something or changed it, it lost the feeling. And every time we played it, it just kind of felt good. It felt like a warm sweater.” **Another Try** Alana: “I\'ve always wanted to write a song like this, and this is my favorite on the record. The day that we started it, I was thinking that I was going to get back together with the love of my life. I mean, now that I say that, I want to barf, because we\'re not in a good place now, but at that point we were. We had been on and off for almost 10 years and I thought we were going to give it another try. And it turns out, the week after we finished the song, he had gotten engaged. So the song took on a whole new meaning very quickly. It’s really about the fact I’ve always been on and off with the same person, and have only really had one love of my life. It’s kind of dedicated to him. I think Ariel had a lot of fun producing this song. As for the person it’s about? He doesn’t know about it, but I think he can connect the dots. I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to figure out. The end of the song is supposed to feel like a celebration. We wanted it to feel like a dance party. Because even though it has such a weird meaning now, the song has a hopeful message. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure it out. I am still hopeful.” **Leaning on You** Alana: “This is really a song about finding someone that accepts your flaws. That’s such a rare thing in this world—to find someone you love that accepts you as who you are and doesn\'t want to change you. As sisters, we are the CEOs of our company: We have super strong personalities and really strong opinions. And finding someone that\'s okay with that, you would think would be celebrated, but it\'s actually not. It\'s really hard to find someone that accepts you and accepts what you do as a job and accepts everything about you. And I think ‘Leaning on You’ is about when you find that person that really uplifts you and finds everything that you do to be incredible and interesting and supports you. It’s a beautiful thing.” Danielle: “We wrote this song just us sitting around a guitar. And we just wanted to keep it like that, so we played acoustic guitar straight into the computer for a very dry, unique sound that I love.” **I’ve Been Down** Danielle: “This is the last one we wrote on the album. This was super quick with stream-of-consciousness lyrics. I wanted it to sound like you were in the room, like you were right next to me. That chorus—‘I’ve been down, I’ve been down’—feels good to sing. It\'s very therapeutic to just kind of scream it in song form. To me, it’s the most therapeutic thing I can do. The backing vocals on this are like the other side of your brain.” **Man From the Magazine** Este: \"When we were first coming out, I guess it was perplexing for some people that I would make faces when I played, even though men have been doing it for years. When they see men do it, they are just, to quote HAIM, ‘in it.’ But of course, when a woman does it, it\'s unsettling and off-putting and could be misconstrued as something else. We got asked questions about it early on, and there was this one interviewer who asked if I made the faces I made onstage in bed. Obviously he wasn’t asking about when I’m in bed yawning. My defense mechanism when stuff like that happens is just to try to make a joke out of it. So I kind of just threw it back at him and said, ‘Well, there\'s only one way to find out.’ And of course, there was a chuckle and then we moved on. Now, had someone said that to me, I probably would\'ve punched them in the face. But as women, we\'re taught kind of just to always be pleasant and be polite. And I think that was my way of being polite and nice. Thank god things are changing a bit. We\'ve been talking about shit like this forever, but I think now, finally, people are able to listen more intently.” Danielle: “We recorded this song in one take. We got the feeling we wanted in the first take. The first verse is Este\'s super specific story, and then, on the second verse, it feels very universal to any woman who plays music about going into a guitar store or a music shop and immediately either being asked, ‘Oh, do you want to start to play guitar?’ or ‘Are you looking for a guitar for your boyfriend?’ And you\'re like, ‘What the fuck?’ It\'s the worst feeling. And I\'ve talked to so many other women about the same experience. Everyone\'s like, ‘Yeah, it\'s the worst. I hate going in the guitar stores.’ It sucks.” **All That Ever Mattered** Alana: “This is one of the more experimental songs on the record. Whatever felt good on this track, we just put it in. And there’s a million ways you could take this song—it takes on a life of its own and it’s kind of chaotic. The production is bananas and bonkers, but it did really feel good.” Danielle: “It’s definitely a different palette. But to us it was exciting to have that crazy guitar solo and those drums. It also has a really fun scream on it, which I always like—it’s a nice release.” **FUBT** Alana: “This song was one of the ones that was really hard to write. It’s about being in an emotionally abusive relationship, which all three of us have been in. It’s really hard to see when you\'re in something like that. And the song basically explains what it feels like and just not knowing how to get out of it. You\'re just kind of drowning in this relationship, because the highs are high and the lows are extremely low. You’re blind to all these insane red flags because you’re so immersed in this love. And knowing that you\'re so hard on yourself about the littlest things. But your partner can do no wrong. When we wrote this song, we didn’t really know where to put it. But it felt like the end to the chapter of the record—a good break before the next songs, which everyone knew.” **Now I’m in It** Danielle: “This song is about feeling like you\'re in something and almost feeling okay to sit in it, but also just recognizing that you\'re in a dark place. I was definitely in a dark place, and it was just like I had to look at myself in the mirror and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucked up. And you need to get your shit together and you need to look it in the face and know that you\'re here and work on yourself.’ After writing this song I got a therapist, which really helped me.” **Hallelujah** Alana: “This song really did just come from wanting to express how important it is to have the love of your family. We\'re very lucky that we each have two sisters as backup always. We wrote this with our friend Tobias Jesso Jr., and we all just decided to write verses separately, which is rare for us. I think we each wanted to have our own take on the lyric ‘Why me, how\'d I get this hallelujah’ and what it meant to each of us. I wrote about losing a really close friend of mine at such a young age and going through a tragedy that was unexplainable. I still grapple with the meaning of that whole thing. It was one of the hardest times in my life, and it still is, but I was really lucky that I had two siblings that were really supportive during that time and really helped me get through it. If you talk to anybody that loses someone unexpectedly, you really do become a different person. I feel like I\'ve had two chapters of my life at this point: before it happened and after it happened. And I’ve always wanted to thank my sisters at the same time because they were so integral in my healing process going through something so tragic.” **Summer Girl** Alana: This song is collectively like our baby. Putting it out was really fun, but it was also really scary, because we were coming back and we didn’t know how people were going to receive it. We’d played it to people and a lot of them didn’t really like it. But we loved everything about it. You can lose your confidence really quickly, but thankfully, people really liked it. Putting out this song really did give us back our confidence.” Danielle: “I\'ve talked about it a lot, but this song is about my boyfriend getting cancer a couple of years ago, and it was truly the scariest thing that I have ever been through. I just couldn\'t stop thinking about how he was feeling. I get spooked really easily, but I felt like I had to buck the fuck up and be this kind of strong figure for him. I had to be this kind of sunshine, which was hard for me, but I feel like it really helped him. And that’s kind of where this song came from. Being the summer when he was just in this dark, dark place.”
“It wasn\'t forced, it wasn\'t pressured, it wasn\'t scary,” Billie Eilish tells Apple Music of making *Happier Than Ever*. “It was nice.” Once again written and recorded entirely with her brother FINNEAS, Eilish’s second LP finds the 19-year-old singer-songwriter in a deeply reflective state, using the first year of the pandemic to process the many ways her life has changed and she’s evolved since so quickly becoming one of the world’s most famous and influential teenagers. “I feel like everything I\'ve created before this, as much as I love it, was kind of a battle with myself,” she says. “I\'ve actually talked to artists that are now going through the rise and what I\'ve said to them is, ‘I know what it\'s like, but I also don\'t know what it\'s like for you.’ Because everybody goes through something completely different.” A noticeable departure from the genre-averse, slightly sinister edge of 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*, much of the production and arrangements here feel open and airy by comparison, inspired in large part by the placid mid-century pop and jazz of torch singer Julie London. And whether she’s sharing new perspective on age (“Getting Older”), sensuality (“Oxytocin”), or the absurdity of fame (“NDA”), there’s a sense of genuine freedom—if not peace—in Eilish’s singing, her voice able to change shape and size as she sees fit, an instrument under her control and no one else\'s. “I started to feel like a parody of myself, which is super weird,” she says. “I just tried to listen to myself and figure out what I actually liked versus what I thought I would have liked in the past. I had to really evaluate myself and be like, \'What the hell do I want with myself right now?\'” It’s a sign of growth, most striking in the clear skies of “my future” and the emotional clarity of the album’s towering title cut, which starts as a gentle ballad and blossoms, quite naturally and unexpectedly, into a growing wave of distorted guitars and distant screams. Both sound like breakthroughs. “There was no thought of, ‘What\'s this going to be? What track is this?’” she says of the writing process. “We just started writing and we kept writing. Over time, it just literally created itself. It just happened. It was easy.”
“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”
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.
“This feels like \[2017’s\] *Crack-Up*’s friendly brother,” Robin Pecknold tells Apple Music of his fourth LP under the Fleet Foxes name. Written and recorded alongside producer-engineer Beatriz Artola (Adele, J Cole, The Kills) throughout much of 2019 and 2020, *Shore* is an album of gratitude—one that found its lyrical focus in quarantine, as Pecknold began taking day-long drives from his New York apartment up to Lake Minnewaska and into the Catskills and back, stopping only to get gas or jot down ideas as they came to him. “It was like the car was the safest place to be,” he says. “I had this optimistic music but I’d been writing these kind of downer lyrics and it just wasn\'t gelling. It was realizing that in the grand scheme of things, this music is pretty unimportant compared to what\'s going on.” At the album\'s heart is “Sunblind,” an opening statement that pays glimmering tribute to some of Pecknold’s late musical heroes—from Richard Swift to Elliott Smith to David Berman, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Judee Sill, and more. “I wanted the album to be for these people,” Pecknold says. “I’m trying to celebrate life in a time of death, trying to find something to hold on to that exists outside of time, something that feels solid or stable.” Here, Pecknold walks us through every song on the album. **Wading in Waist-High Water** “I would have a piece of music and then I would try and sing it, but I would always try and pitch my voice up an octave or manipulate my voice to make it match the calming, mourning tone of the music a little more. And then a friend of mine sent me a clip of Uwade Akhere covering \[2008’s\] ‘Mykonos’ on Instagram, and I was just in love with the texture of her voice and just how easy it was. That was a signal that this was going to be a different kind of album in some ways. It was like I finally found a song where I was like, ‘You know what? This is just going to be more of what I want it to be if someone else sings it.’ And that\'s been an awesome mindset to be in lately, just thinking more about writing for other voices and what other voices can naturally evoke without just trying to make my voice do a ton of different things to get to an emotional resonance.” **Sunblind** “I knew I wanted it to be kind of a mission statement for the record—kind of cite-your-sources energy a little bit. And then find a way to get from this list of names of dead musicians that I\'m inspired by—whose music has really helped me in my life—to somewhere that felt like you were taking the wheel and doing something with that feeling. Or trying to live in honor of that, at least in a way that they\'re no longer able to, or in a way that carries their point of view forward into the future. ‘Sunblind’ is like giving the record permission to go all these places or something. Once it felt like it was doing that, then the whole record kind of made more sense to me, or felt like it all tied into each other in a way that it hadn\'t when that song wasn\'t done.” **Can I Believe You** “That riff is the oldest thing on the album, because I wrote that in the middle of the *Crack-Up* tour and tried working on it then but never got anywhere with it really. Once I was thinking less about some second party that\'s untrustworthy and more just one person\'s own hang-ups with letting people in—like my own hang-ups with that—then the lyrics flowed a little better. Those choral voices are actually 400 or 500 people from Instagram that sent clips of them singing that line to me. And then we spent days editing them together and cleaning them up. There\'s this big hug of vocals around the lead vocal that’s talking about trust or believability.” **Jara** “I wanted ‘Can I Believe You’ to be kind of a higher-energy headbanger-type song, and then after that, have a more steady groove—a loop-based, almost builder-type song. That\'s the single-friend kind of placement on the record. Jara is a reference to Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer. A national hero there who was killed by Pinochet’s army. But it\'s not about Victor Jara— it\'s more like with ‘Sunblind,’ where you\'re trying to eulogize someone, to honor someone or place them in some kind of canon.” **Featherweight** “It\'s the first minor-key song, but it\'s also the first one that\'s without a super prominent drumbeat. It’s lighter on its feet. I thought it was following a train of thought—where with ‘Jara’ there is a bit of envy of a political engagement, in ‘Featherweight,’ I feel like it\'s kind of examining privilege a little bit more. This period of time accommodated that in a very real way for me, just making my problems seem smaller. Acknowledging that I\'ve made problems for myself sometimes in my life when there weren\'t really any.” **A Long Way Past the Past** “Everything I tried was either too Michael McDonald or too Sly Stone or too Stevie Wonder. At that tempo it was just hard to find the instrumentation that didn\'t feel too pastiche or something. While I was writing the lyrics to it, I was thinking, ‘How much am I living in the past? How much can I leave that behind? How much of my identity is wrapped up in memories?’ And asking for help from a friend to maybe fend through that or come on the other side of that. So I thought it was funny to have that be the lyric on the most maybe nostalgic piece of music on the record in terms of what it\'s referencing.” **For a Week or Two** “The first couple Fleet Foxes records, it was a rural vibe as opposed to an urban vibe. I think on the first album, that was just the music I liked, but it wasn\'t like the lyrics were talking about a bunch of personal experiences I had in nature, because I was just 20 years old making that album and I didn\'t have a lot to draw from. ‘For a Week or Two,’ that\'s really about a bunch of long backpacking trips that I was taking for a while. And just the feeling that you have when you\'re doing that, of not being anyone and just being this body in space and never catching your reflection in anything. Carrying very little, and finding some peace in that.” **Maestranza** “Musically, I think for a while it had something in it that had a disco or roller-skating kind of energy that I was trying to find a way out of, and then we found this other palette of instruments that felt less that way. I was trying to go for a Bill Withers-y thing. I feel like a lot of the people that get mentioned in ‘Sunblind,’ their resonance is there, influencing throughout the record. In the third verse, it’s about missing your friends, missing your people, but knowing that since we\'re all going through the same thing that we\'re kind of connected through that in a way that\'s really special and kind of unique to this period. I feel more distant from people but also closer in terms of my actual daily experience.” **Young Man’s Game** “I thought it would be funny if Hamilton \[Leithauser\]’s kids were on it. My original idea was to have it sung by a 10-year-old boy, and then that was just too gimmicky or something. But I wanted there to be kids on it because it\'s referencing immaturity or naivete—things about being young. Because people say ’a young man’s game’ in kind of a positive way. Sometimes they\'re sad they aged out or something. But in this song I use it more in the negative sense of ‘glad you\'ve moved on from some of these immature delusions’ or something. When I was younger I would be much too insecure to make a goofy song, needing everything to be perfect or dramatic or whatever mindset I was in.” **I’m Not My Season** “A friend of mine had been telling me about her experience helping a family member with addiction. As she was describing that, I was imagining this sailing lesson I had taken where we were learning how to rescue someone who had fallen overboard and you have to circle the boat around the right way and throw the ropes from the right place. Time is just something that\'s happening around us, but there\'s some kind of core idea that you\'re not what\'s happening to you. Like wind on a flag.” **Quiet Air / Gioia** “The chords had this kind of expectant feel or something, like an ominous quality, that\'s never really resolving. And I think that kind of led me to want to write about imagining someone, speaking to somebody who is courting danger. Some of the lyrics in the song come from talking to a friend of mine who is a climate scientist, and just her perspective on how screwed we are or aren’t. Just thinking about that whole issue hinges on particulate matter in air that is invisible. You can just be looking at the sky and looking at what will eventually turn into an enormous calamity, and it\'s quietly occurring, quietly accruing. It\'s happening on a time scale that we\'re not prepared to accept or deal with. The ending is this more ecstatic thing. Just imagining some weird pagan dance, like rite of spring or something, where it just kind of builds into this weird kind of joy. Like dancing while the world burns.” **Going-to-the-Sun Road** “The Sun Road is a place in Montana, a 60-mile stretch of road that’s only open for a couple months every year. It’s where they filmed the intro to *The Shining*, where they\'re driving to the lodge and it’s just very scenic. I grew up fairly close to there. A lot of the studios that I worked at on this record were places that I had always wanted to go and work, places where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, one day I\'ll make a record there.’ That song is about being tired of traveling, wanting to slow down a bit and wanting to not fight so hard personally against yourself. Or trying to have as many adventures as possible, but then having this one place—almost like a Rosebud kind of thing—where it\'s like going to the Sun Road is the last big adventure. The one that\'s always on the horizon that you have to look forward to that keeps you going.” **Thymia** “Getting back to work on the record \[after the pandemic hit\] was so rewarding. And I feel like if there was a relationship being discussed on the record, it\'s between me and my love affair with music. ‘Thymia’ I think means ‘boisterous spirit’ or something. The image and the lyrics to that song in my head were kind of me driving around with some camping gear in my back seat that\'s clanging out a rhythm of some kind. And that feeling of, even if I\'m driving alone, there\'s something. That sound is pulling me to the thought of music. It\'s kind of accompanying me. I\'ve known it for a long time. Even though it\'s ephemeral, it\'s the most solid thing that I have.” **Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman** “I wanted to use the sample of Brian Wilson because that clip meant a lot to me growing up, him layering vocals on ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).’ That song has the most stuff I\'ve ever put on a song, and it\'s the most overdubby—very much in that lineage of just layer after layer after layer. Emotionally, it’s similar to that idea of, like, ‘My clothes are torn but the air is clean.’ That feeling like it can be okay to be a little ragged and you can still feel good, like being exhausted at the end of a long run or something. That image of the maternal and feminine would again be a reference to music. Like my receiver, cradling me again. Kind of like being subsumed by music and comforted and consoled by it.” **Shore** “‘Cradling Mother’ could be the climax maybe, and ‘Shore’ felt like an epilogue. In the same way that ‘Wading in Waist-High Water’ is a prologue. Lyrically, it\'s tying up some loose ends, talking to the kin that you rely on—your family or your heroes—and thanking them. It references the shore as this stable place and questions whether you\'re really at the boundary between danger and safety when you\'re there. I\'d actually had a surfing accident where I snapped my leash and I really felt like I was going to drown. It took me 15 minutes to swim to shore and I kept getting pummeled by waves. I was so happy to make it back. I\'ve been pretty afraid since then to do that much surfing in bad conditions. But to me, that image was this comforting thing that then kind of dissolves. The vocals break apart and then it\'s like you\'re getting back in the water and you\'re catching one sound and your voices are blending together and falling apart. You\'re subsumed by water, and then the seas calm, but you\'re floating into the future.”
Today, on the Autumnal Equinox, Fleet Foxes released their fourth studio album Shore at 6:31 am PT/9:31 am ET. The bright and hopeful album, released via Anti-. Shore was recorded before and during quarantine in Hudson (NY), Paris, Los Angeles, Long Island City and New York City from September 2018 until September 2020 with the help of recording and production engineer Beatriz Artola.The fifteen song, fifty-five minute Shore was initially inspired by frontman Robin Pecknold’s musical heroes such as Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guebrou and more who, in his experience, celebrated life in the face of death. “I see “shore” as a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death,’” commented Pecknold. “Tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.” Pecknold continues: Since the unexpected success of the first Fleet Foxes album over a decade ago, I have spent more time than I’m happy to admit in a state of constant worry and anxiety. Worried about what I should make, how it will be received, worried about the moves of other artists, my place amongst them, worried about my singing voice and mental health on long tours. I’ve never let myself enjoy this process as much as I could, or as much as I should. I’ve been so lucky in so many ways in my life, so lucky to be born with the seeds of the talents I have cultivated and lucky to have had so many unreal experiences. Maybe with luck can come guilt sometimes. I know I’ve welcomed hardship wherever I could find it, real or imagined, as a way of subconsciously tempering all this unreal luck I’ve had. By February 2020, I was again consumed with worry and anxiety over this album and how I would finish it. But since March, with a pandemic spiraling out of control, living in a failed state, watching and participating in a rash of protests and marches against systemic injustice, most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together. In its place came a gratitude, a joy at having the time and resources to devote to making sound, and a different perspective on how important or not this music was in the grand scheme of things. Music is both the most inessential and the most essential thing. We don’t need music to live, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. It became a great gift to no longer carry any worry or anxiety around the album, in light of everything that is going on. A tour may not happen for a year, music careers may not be what they once were. So it may be, but music remains essential. This reframing was another stroke of unexpected luck I have been the undeserving recipient of. I was able to take the wheel completely and see the album through much better than I had imagined it, with help from so many incredible collaborators, safe and lucky in a new frame of mind.
Lil Nas X is nothing if not a testament to the power of being true to yourself. His breakthrough single, “Old Town Road,” forced the industry to revisit old conversations about the limitations of genre, race, and who is kept out (or locked in) by the definitions we use to talk about music. The Georgia-born singer-rapper responded in kind with a remix and remixes to that remix that rocketed him up the charts and simultaneously highlighted the fickleness of the entire endeavor—did Billy Ray Cyrus suddenly prove his country bona fides any more than the addition of Young Thug proved his trap ones or Diplo his electronic? But that\'s the magic of Lil Nas X and of his debut album *MONTERO*: He knows that pop music is whatever the artist creating it wants it to be, an exercise of vulnerable imagination packaged as unyielding, larger-than-life confidence. “I feel like with this album, I know what I wanted,” he tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I know what I want. I know where I want to be in life. And I know that\'s going to take me being more open and bringing it out of myself no matter how much it hurts or feels uncomfortable to say things that I need to say.” But any such ambivalence doesn\'t explicitly manifest in the songs here, as Lil Nas X roams his interior spaces as openly as he does assorted styles—which span everything from emo and grunge to indie pop and pop punk. On “DEAD RIGHT NOW,” a thunderous track complete with choral flourishes, he recaps the journey to this moment, how it almost didn\'t happen, and the ways his personal relationships have changed since. “If I didn’t blow up, I would\'ve died tryna be here/If it didn’t go, suicide, wouldn’t be here,” he sings, adding, “Now they all come around like they been here/When you get this rich and famous everybody come up to you singing, \'Hallelujah, how’d you do it?\'” All throughout—on songs like “SUN GOES DOWN” or “DONT WANT IT”—the weight of his burdens exists in contrast to the levity of his sound, a particular kind of Black and queer disposition that insists on a joy that is far more profound than any pain. And make no mistake, there is plenty of joy here. On “SCOOP,” he finds an effervescent kindred spirit in Doja Cat, while “DOLLA SIGN SLIME,” which features Megan Thee Stallion, is a trapped-out victory lap. Elsewhere, the dark riffs on the outstanding “LIFE AFTER SALEM” bring him to new creative lands altogether. The album brims with surprises that continuously reveal him anew, offering a peek into the mind of an artist who is unafraid of himself or his impulses, even with the knowledge that he\'s still a work in progress. “Don\'t look at me as this perfect hero who\'s not going to make mistakes and should be the voice for everybody,” he says. “You\'re the voice for you.” And to that effect, *MONTERO* is a staggering triumph that suggests not just who Lil Nas X is but the infinite possibilities of who he may be in the future, whether that falls within the scope of our imaginations or not.
“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.”
In 2019, Taylor Swift announced plans to rerecord her entire catalog to that point, an ambitious move sparked by the sale of her original label, Big Machine Label Group, along with all of her masters. Swift’s first entry into this reimagined canon is a new take on her landmark 2008 sophomore LP *Fearless*, which, among many other accolades, took home the coveted Album of the Year trophy at the 2010 Grammy Awards. Swift first teased the “Taylor’s Version” of *Fearless* with the release of a new recording of one of her biggest hits, the ode to youthful romance “Love Story.” That version stays remarkably true to the original track, though it’s hard not to notice how Swift’s voice has strengthened and matured in the 13 years since. (But in this updated version mixed in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos, the difference is clear: more warmth, more intimacy, more clarity with which to appreciate the deceptive ease of Swift’s songwriting.) Elsewhere, she revisits other juggernauts like “Fifteen,” “Forever & Always,” and, of course, “You Belong With Me,” another of her biggest-selling songs.
“It happened by accident,” Halsey tells Apple Music of their fourth full-length. “I wasn\'t trying to make a political record, or a record that was drowning in its own profundity—I was just writing about how I feel. And I happen to be experiencing something that is very nuanced and very complicated.” Written while they were pregnant with their first child, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* finds the pop superstar sifting through dark thoughts and deep fears, offering a picture of maternity that fully acknowledges its emotional and physical realities—what it might mean for one’s body, one’s sense of purpose and self. “The reason that the album has sort of this horror theme is because this experience, in a way, has its horrors,” Halsey says. “I think everyone who has heard me yearn for motherhood for so long would have expected me to write an album that was full of gratitude. Instead, I was like, ‘No, this shit is so scary and so horrifying. My body\'s changing and I have no control over anything.’ Pregnancy for some women is a dream—and for some people it’s a fucking nightmare. That\'s the thing that nobody else talks about.” To capture a sound that reflected the album’s natural sense of conflict, Halsey reached out to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “I wanted cinematic, really unsettling production,” they say. “They wanted to know if I was willing to take the risk—I was.” A clear departure from the psychedelic softness of 2020’s *Manic*, the album showcases their influence from the start: in the negative space and 10-ton piano notes of “The Tradition,” the smoggy atmospherics of “Bells in Santa Fe,” the howling guitars of “Easier Than Lying,” the feverish synths of “I am not a woman, I’m a god.” Lyrically, Halsey says, it’s like an emptying of her emotional vault—“expressions of guilt or insecurity, stories of sexual promiscuity or self-destruction”—and a coming to terms with who they have been before becoming responsible for someone else; its fury is a response to an ancient dilemma, as they’ve experienced it. “I think being pregnant in the public eye is a really difficult thing, because as a performer, so much of your identity is predicated on being sexually desirable,” they say. “Socially, women have been reduced to two categories: You are the Madonna or the whore. So if you are sexually desirable or a sexual being, you\'re unfit for motherhood. But as soon as you are motherly or maternal and somebody does want you as the mother of their child, you\'re unfuckable. Those are your options; those things are not compatible, and they haven’t been for centuries.” But there are feelings of resolution as well. Recorded in conjunction with the shooting of a companion film, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* is an album that’s meant to document Halsey’s transformation. And at its conclusion is “Ya’aburnee”—Arabic for “you bury me”—a sparse love song to both their baby and partner. Just the sound of their voice and a muted guitar, it’s one of the most powerful songs Halsey has written to date. “I start this journey with ‘Okay, fine—if I can\'t have love, then I want power,’” they say. “If I can\'t have a relationship, I\'m going to work. If I can\'t be loved interpersonally, I\'m going to be loved by millions on the internet, or I\'m going to crave attention elsewhere. I\'m so steadfast with this mentality, and then comes this baby. The irony is that the most power I\'ve ever had is in my agency, being able to choose. You realize, by the end of the record, I chose love.”
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.”
As The Killers began work on their sixth full-length, Brandon Flowers had a single visual in mind: the album’s eventual cover art, illustrator Thomas Blackshear’s *Dance of the Wind and Storm*. “We wanted to make sure that the songs fit underneath the banner of what that image was saying,” Flowers tells Apple Music of the drawing, which he hung on the wall of the studio. “Blackshear typically does Western landscapes, or he does spiritual art. But on this particular one he combined them, and that\'s exactly what I wanted to capture. Songs that didn\'t fit, they had to get cut. We’d never done anything like that, but it ended up being a real beacon for us.” As intended, *Imploding the Mirage* evokes the scale and natural majesty of the American West, like The E Street Band playing Monument Valley. And at its heart are a series of synth-lined, often Springsteenian tales of love and salvation, inspired by Flowers’ recent move from Las Vegas to Utah—and the effect it had on his wife’s mental health. (“Las Vegas is a tainted and haunted place,” he says. “Talk about a clean slate.”) It’s the band’s first LP without founding guitarist Dave Keuning, whose departure made space for a list of collaborators that includes k.d. lang, Weyes Blood, The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s also meant to be a companion to 2017’s unabashedly grand *Wonderful Wonderful*. “I\'m very interested in the optimistic side of things,” Flowers says. “I was brought up to have that kind of a perspective, and I think you hear it in the songs: It feels triumphant, like there are angels present.” Here, Flowers details a few of its key tracks. **My Own Soul’s Warning** “It\'s strange to write a song about repentance. It\'s not a typical subject in a pop or a rock song. And I felt like, to be able to go into that territory and write something that was meaningful to myself and that felt like it was going to transcend and resonate with a lot of people in a stadium or inside their headphones—that’s kind of the Holy Grail. It\'s just one of those songs for me.” **Blowback** “The producer of the record, Shawn Everett, he\'s producing the new War on Drugs, and he produced the last one. I think Adam \[Granduciel\] and I share a lot of the same musical landmarks and touchstones—we just follow along through our own experiences, usually Las Vegas. It just kind of happened pretty organically.” **Dying Breed** “Shawn, he’s a wizard in the studio, kind of a mad scientist. And he just will throw things at a song that you were just not envisioning at all. The song was already good, and then Shawn disappeared into a B room for about an hour and came back all excited, and played us that \[Can and Neu!\] loop over the song. And it was like, ‘Yeah.’ It\'s frustrating that it wasn\'t our loop in the beginning, but then we just embraced it and got permission. And when Ronnie \[Vannucci, drummer\] and the full band come in halfway through the song, it just goes to this other level. Now I love that song.” **Caution** “Sometimes they talk. That’s what you hear about, when you hear about great guitar solos—how they speak, how they’re singable. And, man, Lindsey just delivered in a big way, and I love that. I love that you can kind of memorize that solo and sing along.” **Imploding the Mirage** “In \[1977’s\] ‘Solsbury Hill,’ Peter Gabriel talks about walking out of the machinery—and I think he\'s talking about Genesis. It’s kind of like that. It\'s like getting out from underneath the weight of what it is to be in The Killers and what is expected of you, and just doing what you love. That\'s a huge part of it, for sure. I mean, I can\'t pretend like everything\'s just hunky-dory and that we\'re firing on all cylinders. It\'s just not. I\'m obviously using the imagery of Las Vegas—we implode things, we have a casino called The Mirage—and just the idea of this facade that we can put on and how stressful that can be. I think getting rid of it and replacing it with what\'s real can be such a relief and can be something that we could all strive to do.”
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
\"I knew this day was coming,\" Rivers Cuomo tells Apple Music. \"I\'ve always been such a fan of classical music and opera. And yet, I feel like it\'s overdue, like I just kind of got stuck in this pattern of, \'Okay, we\'re a rock band. This is what we do. We don\'t want to get soft too soon.\' But really getting encouragement from \[producer\] Jake \[Sinclair\], and then just a light went off like, \'Oh, this is going to be great.\'\" After delaying the release of their long-promised shred opus *Van Weezer*, Weezer instead dove into *OK Human*, a 12-track change of pace that features a 38-piece orchestra, no click tracks, no computers, and, most surprisingly, no electric guitar. And the tonal shift matched the pandemic neuroses that fueled Cuomo\'s lyric writing. \"I\'m so anxious about looking around my house and seeing, okay, there\'s one child on that device, there\'s the other child on that device, my wife\'s over there on that device,\" Cuomo says. \"Everyone\'s looking in a different direction at a different device, and that\'s the way things are going. Nothing I can do about it, but I just can\'t help but feel a sense of loss and anxiety about it.\" Those worries take center stage on whimsical tracks like \"All My Favorite Songs,\" \"Playing My Piano,\" and \"Screens,\" while the sprawling orchestration adds drama to \"Numbers\" and \"Bird With a Broken Wing\" as Cuomo stares down his inadequacies. \"I was just feeling pretty irrelevant and passed over and past my prime,\" says the 50-year-old singer-songwriter. \"I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.\" It\'s not all dark clouds, however—Weezer fashions a sliver of optimism with the triumphant \"Here Comes the Rain\" and luscious closer \"La Brea Tar Pits.\" \"Hearing it back for the first time with the orchestra, it\'s like, yeah, those are the chords I wrote, and that\'s the melody I wrote,\" Cuomo says. \"But man, it\'s like seeing in three dimensions for the first time or something. It\'s just gorgeous. And I can\'t believe we haven\'t done it before.\"
Way before King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard dropped this, their 18th studio album in less than a decade, it was clear that the Melbourne six-piece refuses to stay tethered to one idea for too long. So after completing a three-album experiment in microtonal tuning—playing notes that exist between the notes on standard Western scales—with February 2021’s *L.W.*, it’s no surprise to find them poking the reset button again. This time, they’re underscoring the pop in psych-pop with a song suite that funnels their wide-eyed ambition through satisfyingly direct melodies. All built from arpeggiated synth loops, the songs skip off in divergent directions, including the motorik rush of opener “Yours,” shimmering cosmic disco (“Catching Smoke”), and celestial synth-pop (“Interior People”). The scope of the band’s adventure would be dizzying if it weren’t for the smooth turns they forge in and out of each track. In a year marked by lockdowns and limited choices, trust The Giz to have created music that feels so boundless and upbeat.
In early 2020, Weezer was forced to put the release of the guitar-driven *Van Weezer* on hold when the stadium tour Hella Mega, on which they would share the bill with Green Day and Fall Out Boy, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The veteran pop-rockers turned inward and decided to release *OK Human* instead—an unplugged orchestral album centered around themes of isolation and feeling alienated that felt more appropriate during lockdown. With the possibility of live shows ever-so-slightly looming on the horizon, they crank the Marshall stack back up and serve fun, gnarly riffs on their second album of 2021. Inspired by their shared love of hard rock and heavy metal bands of the ’70s and ’80s—after all, the album’s title is an obvious nod to Van Halen—the band’s 15th LP offers a nostalgic whiff of guitar histrionics (“Beginning of the End”), stomp-clap anthems à la “Beverly Hills” with more punch (“All the Good Ones”), and palm-muted power chords (“1 More Hit”). Clocking in at a snappy 30 minutes, the 10 tracks here are all killer, no filler—recalling the catchy immediacy of the Green Album, even if, sonically, it’s the equivalent of wearing spandex and lace rather than baggy khakis. But as it is with every Weezer album, they also embrace their pop side regardless of whatever gimmick they pursue. There are sparkling odes to the underdog (“Hero”), anecdotes about overcoming stage fright (“Beginning of the End”), and adolescent memories about raging to Aerosmith (“I Need Some of That”), each guided by frontman Rivers Cuomo’s dewy-eyed ruminations and tightly crafted power-pop hooks. And for the longtime faithful, Cuomo even throws in some fan service with “Sheila Can Do It”—converting an old demo he wrote in the mid-’90s into a revved-up rocker with bubblegum New Wave flourishes.
On 2020’s *Changes*, the newly married pop star extolled the healing powers of love and faith, serving up sensual, clear-eyed R&B ballads about devotion, commitment, and inner peace. Justin Bieber’s sixth album *Justice* continues that narrative, but finds inspiration in something arguably even more novel for one of the world’s most in-demand pop stars: downtime. Like all of us, Bieber spent 2020 holed up in lockdown, unable to travel or tour due to the global pandemic. But rather than doom-scrolling social media, he embraced the relative quiet: He got rid of his cell phone, dedicated himself to therapy, and cut off work at 6 pm each night to hang out with his wife Hailey. The change proved to be nothing short of transformative, and the resulting songs—a mix of soft-focus romantic reverie that recalls ’80s pop (“Deserve You,” “Anyone”) and reflective, confessional ballads about searching for forgiveness (“Hold On,” “Lonely”)—exude the contentment of someone who’s come out on the other side. Bieber tends to use his marriage as a symbol of all his blessings, but these feel like more than wide-eyed love songs; he could be singing about any number of things—religion, perspective, peace and quiet—that ultimately brought him back from the brink. (In a 2020 documentary, he confessed to having endured a mental health crisis in which he felt, in his words, “really suicidal.”) Now, overflowing with gratitude and modesty, he sounds acutely aware of his good fortune. “Never know when my mind\'s gonna turn on me/But you\'re the one I call for security,” he sings on “Unstable,” a contemplative duet with The Kid LAROI. “Through everything you’ve been my rock/I think you\'re the only thing I didn\'t get wrong.” In track after track of heart-on-sleeve pop songs—with Khalid (“As I Am”), Dominic Fike (“Die for You”), BEAM (“Love You Different”), and Burna Boy (“Loved by You”)—he apologizes for acting selfishly and promises to do better. “I still relive the second I met my biggest blessing,” he sings on “2 Much.” “Prayed for you/And look what God has done.”
The title of twenty one pilots’ sixth LP is a play on “scaled back and isolated,” words that summed up frontman Tyler Joseph’s world as he wrote and recorded in his Ohio basement during lockdown. “It just felt very confined,” he tells Apple Music. “I had this little dragon figurine that I kept on my desk during the entirety of the writing process, and I just knew that when you focus on even the tiniest little detail in your room—or wherever you\'re confined—that thing can come to life and fly around your room. That dragon on the cover really represents what can be accomplished with that sort of imagination.” And as has been the case for everyone, the challenges of pandemic living had a noticeable impact on Joseph’s work—but maybe not quite how you’d expect. “I was actively trying to push against that natural inclination to come in darker,” he says. “The idea of adding to the pressure of what\'s going on in our world, it didn\'t feel right.” Instead, *Scaled and Icy* finds Joseph pushing his genre-defying alt-pop into brighter, more hopeful territory. “It felt like I needed to go the opposite direction,” he says. “I wanted to escape a little bit more and provide people with that opportunity to escape too.” Here, Joseph takes us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Good Day”** “I designed it to feel like something was coming to life. If you really listen to the song, it\'s so upbeat and shiny on the surface, and then lyrically I\'m talking about trying to cope with the idea of if I were to ever lose my family and friends. I would probably go through a period in the mourning process where my reaction to anyone asking me how I\'m doing would be like, ‘I\'m fine. Everything\'s great, I don\'t even know why you\'re asking me.’ Making them feel stupid, like, ‘Why would you even ask me that?’ That\'s what this song is.” **“Choker”** “I come from a basketball background, and choking is: You’re standing at the free-throw line and you need to make one of those two, and if you miss them both, you choked. I think for me, with certain friendships and relationships, there were moments that I could have risen to the occasion and I didn\'t, and that\'s something that I\'ll have to live with. I think that everyone has those moments where they feel like they choked. The song is trying to work that through and trying to figure out if that’s someone that I was born to be. Can I shape this? Is this something I can turn around?” **“Shy Away”** “My brother said, ‘Hey, I just want you to show me, from the beginning, how you start a record. How do you start writing a song?’ So I had him over at the studio. A lot of times when I sit down to start, I\'ll tap into my phone and I’ll have a bunch of voice memos of ideas that have hit me randomly. Sometimes it’s just a single word, sometimes it\'s a melody. I started to build up the track from there, and it turned out that it was talking about wanting him to pursue his dream of chasing music. Most of my songs are very inward, but this is one of the few that I feel like the message is outward, coming from me. The only thing harder than figuring out what your purpose and identity is, is watching someone that you love trying to figure out theirs.” **“Saturday”** “When you strip away what day of the week it is, you lose your rhythm. You lose your sense of what is up and what is down. And that\'s a lesson that \[drummer\] Josh \[Dun\] and I learned pretty quickly on tour, because a Friday night and a Monday night could feel the exact same, whether or not we had a show. When the pandemic happened, everything\'s shut down, everyone was starting to learn that same lesson, where the days of the week lose their meaning, and it was messing with people\'s reference of time. You feel like you\'re swirling and your feet aren\'t planted. The song is really, I\'m talking to my wife, hoping that she sticks with me, even though I\'m working through this, even though I\'m kind of tumbling into nothingness.” **“No Chances”** “I recruited my brother and a few of his friends to come over and record gang vocals. You have this microphone in the middle of the room and I have everyone in headphones and I\'m kind of directing them in what to say and what to yell. That was the first time I\'d ever really produced a room full of people. I was thinking of athletics and college sports specifically, where there\'s overwhelmingly this hometown crowd, and how intimidating that can be and powerful that is in the face of opposition. I definitely was writing from that—I felt the energy of a gymnasium or a stadium and was wanting to capture that.” **“Redecorate”** “I had a friend of mine whose son passed away and they would keep his room the same way that he had left it. I remember thinking how crazy powerful a story that is, and how it makes me wonder, like, ‘What will people do with my stuff?’ It can actually bring you back down to earth, make sure that you don\'t make any horrible decisions. I\'m realizing now how difficult it is to talk about, but this song is really important to me. I love the messaging of it, and I hope that our fans hear what it is I\'m trying to say in it. Because it is a bit delicate, but it\'s one of my favorite tracks and it\'s pretty powerful if you let it.”
“The theme of the record is me turning 30, becoming a dad, losing a friend, trying to balance work and marriage,” Ed Sheeran tells Apple Music of his fourth full-length LP, *=*. “It’s stuff that really has meant a lot to me.” The follow-up to 2017’s all-conquering *÷* was originally conceived as an acoustic record, with Sheeran setting up in Nashville way back in 2018 to work. You’ll find tracks from that time here (“First Times,” “Love in Slow Motion”), but—with Sheeran restlessly writing and recording right up until its release—*=* is a typically eclectic record from an artist who has always delighted in confounding expectations. There’s ’80s-inspired pop (the gargantuan “Bad Habits”), sad bangers (“Overpass Graffiti”), a cinematic piano ballad (“The Joker and the Queen”), and even a child’s lullaby, written for his daughter (“Sandman”). All tied together by bare-skinned songwriting, *=* is Sheeran’s most personal, moving record to date. And he has just one request before you press play. “Please just listen to it once in order, that’s all I ask,” he says. “I don’t care what you do after your first listen. Put songs on a playlist, put the album on shuffle—whatever you want. But you should listen the way it’s intended to be listened to at least once.” And as you do that, read Sheeran’s intimate track-by-track guide to the album here. **“Tides”** “I had ‘Eraser’ on *÷*, which was me summing up the last few years and letting people know where I was. I wanted to do that again, but I didn’t really want to rap this time. I wanted something you could open with in a stadium that was huge, but, at the same time, tiny. So the verse is as chaotic as it comes, it’s just noise: This is what\'s going on my life. This is my career. And then everything stops. It\'s about what happened: I became a dad and all the noise was just shut off. Nothing else mattered at that moment.” **“Shivers”** “I sometimes find myself in a vice-grip choke hold by the past songs I\'ve written or the genre I\'m in, or to always be a meaningful, deep singer-songwriter and write songs that really rip out someone’s heart. But the more and more my career\'s gone on, I like to do fun love songs sometimes. You could put this song on at the office Christmas party and hopefully everyone\'s going to get twisted to it.” **“First Times”** “The reason ‘First Times’ is at this point in the album is so there can be an intake of breath from my fans, like, ‘OK, cool, there are songs on here for us.’ This is pretty much classic me format. And it has a funny story. Fred \[aka producer and artist Fred again..\] and I wrote this song and my brother \[composer Matthew Sheeran\] did a string part that went over the demo. We were living in this house in Nashville, which had an amazing wine cellar, and all of my friends had these weed pens. We\'d finish a day of sessions, have a load of wine, get on the weed pens, watch an *Avengers* movie, and just smash Doritos. One night, Fred is like, ‘Hey, man, can you re-vocal this?’ And I could barely keep my eyes open. I was not a functioning human. I sung it once and that’s the version on the song, which is why it’s gentle and delicate. Because I was almost gone.” **“Bad Habits”** “I\'m very aware that I\'ve never really done dance songs solo, and I\'ve always had that in my back pocket as something I wanted to try. Fred and his brother go by Rain Radio, and I wanted to make something like their track ‘Talk About’—not for me to sing, just a club banger. I went home and I had five or six songs I\'d made that day. I played them to my wife \[Cherry Seaborn\], and as soon as ‘Bad Habits’ came on, she was like, ‘That. You should expand on that.’ So we did. If you stripped the dance beat away from this and sung it on a piano, it would fit on *x* or *+* quite well. I became a dad and I needed to cut certain things out that were detrimental to my body, basically.” **“Overpass Graffiti”** “The song’s about a breakup that was years ago. You still hold on to the memory of that and it will never fade, like graffiti on the overpass. Originally, this song was a power ballad, it was very slow. Then Fred said, ‘Have you ever thought about making it double time?’ It gave it new life.” **“The Joker and the Queen”** “We’d written ‘Bad Habits,’ and I was like, ‘I think we’re done for the day. I’m not going to put pressure on trying to get another song.’ Then Fred said, ‘I just worked with this guy, \[British singer-songwriter\] Sam Roman, and he did a piano instrumental that I\'ve always thought is really beautiful, but I\'ve never been able to write anything over it.’ He played it and honest to god, it was probably 15 to 20 minutes of writing down metaphors and whispering them in. I had the line ‘joker and the queen,’ then it was like, ‘I fold, you saw my hand, you let me win, you put the cards on the table.’ I didn’t like this song for a while—in my mind, songwriting is cheating when it’s that easy. Then my brother did a string part and suddenly it sounded like this old classic that had been around since the ’50s. I fell in love with it.” **“Leave Your Life”** “I flew over to Australia for the memorial of my friend Michael \[Gudinski, the beloved Australian music industry figure who was a mentor to Sheeran, who died in March 2021\] and was quarantining for two weeks. We watched the funeral via a live video link, and afterwards I was on the phone to his daughter, who said, ‘My dad always said that he loved me. The last thing he ever said to me was “I love you.”’ I was like, ‘My daughter is six months old. If I went tomorrow, she would never know.’ So this is a letter to her, saying that. I think this is my favorite song on the album. There aren’t a lot of lyrics in this, but every single line, I feel, means the most.” **“Collide”** “I felt the album was quite morose up to this point, and I wanted to pick it up again with an uplifting song. My first-dance wedding song was ‘Thirteen’ by Ben Kweller, which is a list of things that he did with his wife. I messaged him and said, ‘Can I do a version of that \[and\] it’s everything else that me and Cherry have done?’ And he said, ‘Go ahead!’ It\'s a tune that, if you were at a festival, you\'d be putting your hands in the air and holding a glass of cider.” **“2step”** “In April or May in 2021, I was in LA with \[producer\] Andrew Watt, who I’ve known for 10 years, but who I’ve never worked with before. I went by his studio and we made four of five songs for the fun of it. ‘2step’ was one that I really liked. It sounded like 2010 me—it was me at 30, trying to be me at 18, singing about what I was going through at 30. I always had the line ‘two-stepping with the woman I love’ because I can\'t dance. And my wife, god bless her, isn\'t an incredible dancer either. But the two-step is what we can do.” **“Stop the Rain”** “This is about a lawsuit I’m involved with. Every time I\'ve ever taken influence from a song, I give it credit. And this thing that I\'m in at the moment, I believe I\'m in the right. But the rain just won’t stop. It\'s just about knowing that you\'re in the right, and knowing that you will eventually get out of it. I do feel like this song is me taking the shit of that situation and making something great out of it.” **“Love in Slow Motion”** “In the city, there’s always something going on. Then \[Cherry and I\] moved to Suffolk full-time, and not many people live around us, and we would start having evenings where it was like, ‘Oh man, this is really nice. How are you?’ ‘Love in Slow Motion’ is basically about switching all of that off and enjoying each other\'s company and realizing why you love each other.” **“Visiting Hours”** “I was working with \[British singer-songwriter\] Amy Wadge, who I\'d made ‘Thinking Out Loud’ with. And she said she\'d been working with this guy called Ant Clemons, who had sent a song for me to check out. It wasn’t for me, but it had this line: ‘I wish heaven had visiting hours.’ We asked if we could use it. And then my friend Michael passed away. I had about a week and a half where I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone without sobbing. I wrote this at my house and then sang it at his memorial. I found it quite upsetting to write and definitely more upsetting to sing.” **“Sandman”** “I wrote this song before my daughter was born. I thought, ‘She’s going to need a lullaby. What would she be dreaming about?’ This comes just after ‘Visiting Hours,’ so you’ve got sadness and loss and then joy and life. I think it just diffuses the situation instantly after ‘Visiting Hours.’” **“Be Right Now”** “I purposefully wrote this as a closing track. It felt like the end of the record, my family basically going back into our world. The album literally starts with you being slapped in the face with noise, and the album ends with a vocoder choir singing really gently and easing you out. I just liked it—I really, really like the sound of it.”
You don’t become one of the biggest bands in the world without sticking to a system. In Coldplay’s case, that means starting every album with an agreed-upon title that dictates the project’s direction, from songwriting to production style to visuals. “It allows us a little bit of discipline in the studio knowing what we\'re trying to build,” bassist Guy Berryman tells Apple Music. “If you\'re building a building without any kind of architect\'s drawings, you would just start piling bricks on top of each other.” This preparation particularly came in handy in the case of a paralyzing global pandemic. Since 2019\'s *Everyday Life* was always intended to be stripped-down and introspective, without the customary world tour, the band already had a trove of songs earmarked for a proper larger-than-life affair and a vision for their use. They knew it would be called *Music of the Spheres* and they knew it would be helmed by Swedish über-producer Max Martin (no relation to frontman Chris), a partnership they kicked the tires on with the *Everyday Life* track “Orphans.” “He\'s just so talented and everything just meshed together so well with everybody\'s personalities in the studio,” Berryman says. “We had thought ahead to playing in big stadiums.” Lead single “Higher Power” could not have made those blockbuster intentions clearer or been a better showcase for (Max) Martin’s trademark pop sheen. The entire project is so imbued with youthful spirit that five tracks have emojis as titles. “Let Somebody Go” features Selena Gomez, while “My Universe” boasts none other than K-pop phenomenon BTS, who could always use some brains to pick as they learn how to navigate megastardom. “I think they\'re bigger than us,” Berryman says. “We should have been asking them.” Read on for behind-the-scenes tales of making *Music of the Spheres*. **“🪐”** “That’s an intro piece called ‘Music of the Spheres.’ We always make albums as a whole, and we started putting interludes and musical sections between songs, almost like palate cleansers.” **“Higher Power”** “I think people needed to have something uplifting. We wanted to put out this optimism and positivity into everything on this album. The famous story which is going around about this song is how Chris kind of was tapping out the drum pattern on a bathroom sink, and he recorded it on his phone and then went and wrote the song on top of it.” **“Humankind”** “You can sketch ideas out in the studio sometimes, and that was one we were really kind of struggling with before Max took the reins. It didn\'t sound very fresh; it had a good energy, but was maybe just a little bit too rock for us, and he really gave it more of a modern shine. It could be from just editing the basic song and the song structure or it could be adjusting slightly the rhythm pattern to make it all stick together better.” **“✨”** “It\'s an interlude.” **“Let Somebody Go” (feat. Selena Gomez)** “It\'s just a really lovely ballad. And quite early on we realized it needed a female counterpart to the vocal. And we were very grateful that when we asked Selena to sing on it, she loved the song and was happy to do so. Collaborations in general are something that we\'ve done more of recently. We never really used to do it before. When we were younger, we kind of locked ourselves in a room and felt we had to prove everything ourselves. But I think as time has gone on, it\'s become more interesting for us to work with other people from different parts of the world, different genres. It just adds color and character to the music.” **“❤️” (feat. We Are KING and Jacob Collier)** “We love the way that sound shaped up with all the stacked layers of vocals; it\'s almost like a modern-sounding gospel song in some ways. Sometimes as a musician, it\'s my job to step in and say, \'Actually, the best course of action for me is to not play anything at all, because what we created here has a much more unique sound.\' You have to take your ego out of the picture and understand that the best job you can do is leave something alone. Because then it allows the other songs around it to sound bigger and fuller.” **“People of the Pride”** “We started the song probably over 10 years ago and couldn’t really finish it. Again, this was one which Max really helped shape sonically. The way we had it before, it sounded a little bit old-fashioned, almost like glam rock. What Max managed to do was take the energy and layer in a way which preserved that feel but also made it sound very modern at the same time.” **“Biutyful”** “That\'s quite an interesting song from a production point of view, because it\'s really kind of pushing the boundary for us in terms of vocal identity. The manipulated voice is almost like an alien character singing this song. Is it Chris\' voice? That is highly, highly confidential. Nobody will ever know. It\'s going to be a big old secret.” **“🌎”** “It’s an interlude.” **“My Universe” (feat. BTS)** “BTS were asked in an interview who they\'d like to collaborate with, potentially, and a couple of the guys said they\'d love to collaborate with us. A lot of the themes on this album are about bringing people together and taking away divisions and walls and boundaries and all of these human constructs that keep people apart. So we felt like this would be great because it\'s an unusual collaboration between people who are known to come from a different genre and completely different part of the world.” **“♾️”** “That is not an interlude, it’s a longer piece—a collaboration with an old friend of ours who has been on our albums before, Jon Hopkins. He\'s an unbelievably talented musician, piano player, and arranger. He works in an electronic genre on his own music, so he has the ability to create these very beautiful landscapes in a way that none of us can really do.” **“Coloratura”** “Each album can quite easily be defined by the singles you release on the radio, and it\'s always important to us when we make albums to include many different moods and textures and styles. So it was important to us, as a counterbalance to some of the poppier songs, to have something which was unashamedly long and complicated. It started off with more of a conventional song structure, then Chris came in one day and showed us the arrangement including all these interludes and sections between the parts we were already familiar with; it was a big challenge to piece it all together. Max\'s involvement on that song was extremely minimal; if he got hands on it, I think it would be chopped up into something a lot shorter, the chorus 10 seconds in.”
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 *Compliments Please*, her 2019 debut as Self Esteem, Rebecca Taylor reintroduced herself to the world in a way that stunned fans of her previous work as one half of Sheffield indie-folk duo Slow Club. Here was Taylor fully realized as an artist—a millennial Madonna delivering personal polemic within a kaleidoscopic blast of bombastic pop. For this follow-up, Taylor has doubled down on that MO, creating a record that is bigger, better, and even more unapologetically true to herself. “On my first album I didn’t know what Self Esteem was, really,” she tells Apple Music. “Back then we were finding out and, now I know what it is, it’s a much more self-assured way to work. I knew I wanted to make *Compliments Please 2*, essentially. I wanted to do similar production but bigger and bolder. If there’s one violin, I want it to be a quartet. If it’s three-part harmony, I want it to be a choir. I just wanted to build it and make it more massive.” Over 13 frank, funny, and vital tracks, *Prioritise Pleasure* finds Taylor exploring sex and sexuality, misogyny, and toxic relationships. “Lyrically, I’ll always reflect where I’m at in my life,” she adds. “A lot of changes have happened between the first record and the second record.” Above all else though, it’s a record that uses skyscraping pop bangers to deliver a triumphant message of self-acceptance. Here, Taylor talks us through it, track by track. **“I’m Fine”** “With that slow beat opening it, me and my producer were like, ‘This would be an amazing first song…’ I’d wanted to write about something that’s happened to me. I wanted to reclaim my independence and my sexuality and my right to live my life however I want after that had been taken in a traumatic way. It has become this sort of mission statement at the top of the record for the thing I’m singing about. But for anyone who feels like they have to live their life because of the way society is—it’s for you.” **“Fucking Wizardry”** “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t put this on because I feel so overwhelmed singing it back. But it was very much where I was at when I was writing. I was in a relationship. I really, really loved him and we could have had a really good relationship, but his ex didn’t leave him alone during it. I had to get a thicker skin and build myself back up and say, ‘Do you know what? I’m not doing this.’ I did feel really hurt. I succumbed to jealousy and fear and I didn’t feel good enough. I’m embarrassed by my spitefulness, but it’s also very human and it’s important for me to show all the sides of myself on the record.” **“Hobbies 2”** “Kate Bush was someone I was thinking about when I was making this. She was an artist first and foremost and created the work. If it happened to be a hit then cool, but she was never going to deviate from just coming out of her head. This feels like a 2021 \[1985 Bush hit\] ‘Running Up That Hill.’ It’s so funny too. I’m basically saying I’ve got time to have this fuck buddy, but only if I’m not busy. I think that’s a very modern thing to have committed to song.” **“Prioritise Pleasure”** “All of my songs link to each other, because I’m always thinking about sex, sense of self, heartbreak, or defiance. They’re always in there. *Prioritise Pleasure* is sexy and it’s about prioritizing yourself in that way, but also it’s about prioritizing just what you want every day. As a woman, I’ve people-pleased and shapeshifted and sort of begged the world to not be mad with me my whole life. The turnaround and the key to my happiness is to not do that anymore.” **“I Do This All The Time”** “I’d wanted to a song that was like \[Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’\]. And a song that’s like ‘Dirrty’ by Christina Aguilera. I did one take. It’s almost like it possessed me. I had to just make it. There was this moment when I was tracking and recording the string line, I walked home, listened to it and thought, ‘I could just stop now.’ There was this part of me that was like, ‘This is it. This is what I’ve always wanted to do. This is always what I wanted to say.’ I’ve not had that feeling before.” **“Moody”** “I loved the keyboard sound and Johan \[Karlberg, producer\] just smashed a loop out. I had the lyric ‘Sexting you at the mental health talk seems counterproductive’ for ages so I put that in and that set the tone of what I wanted to write about. Spelling-out pop choruses are always L-O-V-E or whatever, I’ve always had this idea of spelling out something that has negative connotations. I thought it would be funny to do a song where I’m saying what I’m saying in the form of very sugary pop. It’s a bit of a piss-take really, me being sarcastic about girly pop music.” **“Still Reigning”** “That’s a sister song to ‘She Reigns’ on the first record. I’m obsessed with acceptance at the minute and letting things just be. I’ve always been someone who wants to strong-arm reality into what I need it to be, rather than just letting it happen. I was a very convincing kid. I remember convincing my dad to get a dog by drawing a pamphlet that I pretended was from the RSPCA, where I listed the benefits of having a dog. That was cute, but I was just being a manipulative little shit. I’ve always been like, ‘I want this, why not?’ That’s how I was approaching a relationship that I wanted to continue and they didn’t. Finally, the penny dropped about letting things go with the flow and about acceptance and love.” **“How Can I Help You”** “‘Black Skinhead’ was something we were going for in mood. Everything comes back to Kanye production every time we’re stuck. It’s a weird song but I’m a punk at my core. I love pop but I cut my teeth playing in a lot of punk bands. It’s a little nod to the tapestry of me and my music. Being a woman is hard enough. Being someone who wants to please everyone is very hard. Then being in the music industry has been really hard. So \[the lyrics are about\] all of it.” **“It’s Been A While”** “Me and Johan both really love trap and I requested a very, very deep, dark trap loop. This one is a bit of another timestamp. I’m addicted to my phone and the sort of weariness from it. I’ll be texting someone I’m seeing. Then I’m on Twitter making some sort of joke. Then I’m reading some news report about something awful. Then I’m on Instagram liking some cute woman’s picture. It’s round and round and round and my eyes are consuming so much all day. Also, I was still going out with that guy that was treating me pretty cheap. Again, it comes back to trying to strong-arm the world into doing what I want. It’s about all those things.” **“The 345”** “It’s me singing to me. It’s very on-the-nose. I just wondered what a love song to myself would be. I sing so many love songs to these people that come in and out of my life. I wondered what would happen if I sang to the person that’s not going to go anywhere, which sounds quite sad.” **“John Elton”** “It’s playing on the idea that these people come into your life and you love them and then they go and then that’s it. I’ve always struggled with that. Someone I loved who I had the joke with, and the joke was a really shit joke, but it still makes me laugh. Then you go to chat about it but everyone’s lives have moved on. People get married and have children and I’m just still out here laughing at the stupid joke we had. It’s an interesting little jolt back to reality and all part of the experience. I end the song by saying it’s all for me. No matter what, all of this is mine and all of these experiences are mine and that’s it.” **“You Forever”** “This is coming from a place of deciding whether or not to get back with someone. At one point in time, I really wanted to and I said that, and the other person said, ‘You need to be braver.’ Also an acceptance is creeping in where I’ve been all right on my own and I will be all right on my own. That’s important to hold on to. Modern dating is as much about not wanting to be alone as it is about trying to meet someone you like. To be all right on your own really does mean if you meet someone and they add something to your life, that’s what it should be about.” **“Just Kids”** “With a lot of my songs, when it’s not just romantic relationships, it’s about the frustration and the desire to be loved by someone who just won’t. Deciding to stop trying is what the song is about. Accept it and leave it with love but move forward in your life. It feels like a good place to try and put that to bed before I write the next album.”
Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.
Since appearing on *American Idol* in 2014 and realizing a life of conventionality was not for her, LA pop singer-songwriter Remi Wolf has graduated from USC Thornton School of Music, released a series of EPs (2019’s *You’re a Dog!*, 2020’s *I’m Allergic to Dogs!*, and 2021’s *We Love Dogs!*), scored a viral hit on TikTok (“Photo ID”), and signed a deal with Island Records. *Juno*—which, not surprisingly, is named after her dog—is her first full-length. “I raised him during the pandemic,” Wolf tells Apple Music of the album’s namesake. “He was with me for the writing of every song. He was my partner.” *Juno* mixes chaotic funk, maximalist melodies, psychedelic synths, and absurdist lyrics for an album that’s as ebullient as that new pup. But making it was a different story. “There was this week where I wrote ‘Liquor Store,’ ‘Anthony Kiedis,’ ‘wyd,’ and ‘Grumpy Old Man,’” she says. “I wrote all of those in three days. I was bursting at the seams. Mental-health-wise, it was one of the worst \[states\] I\'d ever been \[in\]. I was so completely and utterly miserable, and then we made some of my favorite songs on the album,” she says of her work with coproducer Jared Solomon. Here she goes deeper into how they all came together. **“Liquor Store”** “I wrote this song about having gotten recently sober, this big fear of abandonment that I have, and this codependency issue that I\'ve been dealing with for a long time. It’s one of my most vulnerable songs on the record. It was very cleansing for me. I said exactly what I was feeling. In my writing, I tend to do a lot of abstraction and surrealist imagery, just a lot of crazy shit. But that song is \'This is how it feels to be in my head right now.\' I also wrote that song really, really fast. We probably finished it in four hours. I was crying. I was in and out of absolute breakdown, sobbing tears the entire time we were writing that song. The sacrifices we make out here.” **“Anthony Kiedis”** “I love the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anthony Kiedis doesn\'t have that much to do with the song other than I was reading his memoir at the time, and he talked a lot about his relationship with his dad. I was inspired by that. The song is really about everything that I was going through in COVID and the way I was viewing myself at the time.” **“wyd”** “This is my funk song. This is like if Carlos Santana liked playing funk. But this song was also written in that big week of depression. I love my team, but at the time I was in such a tough spot and people were constantly wanting me to work. I was like, \'Hey, can you leave me alone?\' So the line \'Little bitches telling me what to do\' were my team, but that was just a moment in time. I was angry. Nobody tells me really what to do creatively, thank god. I have a lot of independence on that level.” **“Guerrilla”** “It is such an anxious-horny anthem. I started writing that in the beginning of the pandemic. We didn\'t really know what COVID was, so I was still going to hang out with some people, but it was a very anxious time in my life. But I was still horny. I named it \'Guerrilla\' because when I would go to a party, it felt like guerrilla warfare. My own brain was attacking itself. I can be way too perceptive and care about other people\'s energy and let that affect me, and that just causes this crazy anxiety.” **“Quiet on Set”** “I made that song with my friend Jared \[Solomon\] and my friend Elie \[Jay Rizk\]. It was the first session that we had together with Elie. It was one of my most fun times I\'ve ever had making music. The Chuck E. Cheese line came out of Elie being like, \'Guys, let\'s get some lunch.\' He was like, \'Oh my god, should we Postmates Chuck E. Cheese?\' I was like, \'Okay, that\'s going in the song right now.\'” **“Volkiano”** “Jared had a session with this producer, Y2K \[Ari David Starace\]. He was like, \'Remi, we don\'t have anybody to write a song for right now. Would you want to come through?\' They had these chords down, and as soon as I heard the chords, I was like, \'I can write something to this.\' We decided to keep the verses way more stripped down because I am speaking so fast and I want you to hear those words. It\'s definitely more of a dark pop sound. I\'m super down for the variance. I want every song to be its own statement.” **“Front Tooth”** “I wrote this song with Jared and Kenny Beats at his studio in the Valley. Kenny played all the drums on the songs, and he put them through this crazy analog gear to make them sound so huge. I wrote this song about how my career was going super well, the momentum was moving, but I felt like shit. It didn\'t feel how I wanted it to feel, and it didn\'t feel how everybody was telling me it should feel.” **“Grumpy Old Man”** “I feel like an old man, old woman, really weird person a lot of the time. I wrote this song about feeling like I was so unpleasant to be around. I was going through such a hard time, and that\'s such a thing that people with anxiety and depression often feel. They just want to isolate and not be around people because they feel like they\'re not very fun. I was in that state: \'Oh, I fucking suck.\' It\'s pretty much a song about me hating myself, but we put it in this beautiful little danceable package.” **“Buttermilk”** “I wrote the song about a tumultuous relationship. Buttermilk is when you whip up cream, and you whip it to the point where it\'s butter, and the fat separates from the liquid. It happens very quickly. You\'ll have a big lump of butter in the bowl, but then you\'ll have all this buttermilk around it. I\'m referring to my relationship, where one minute we\'re okay, but then the next minute we\'re fighting so much, like the process of making butter. It\'s about this relationship that is sometimes absolutely amusing and then sometimes it\'s just toxic and sour.” **“Sally”** “I actually wrote ‘Sally’ before any song on my second EP. I initially wrote it on acoustic guitar with my friend Julian McClanahan, who I went to college with. He is a great songwriter. We went to San Diego on this party/writing trip and did it there. Jared sometimes likes to name our project files weird things. So for a long time, it was just \'Sally Four.\' Once it came down to like putting it on the album, everybody was like, \'Okay, do you want to just call this “Sally”?\'” **“Sexy Villain”** “‘Sexy Villain’ I wrote with my power trio of my girly songwriters—Mary Weitz and Olivia Waithe. I wrote \[2020’s\] ‘Disco Man’ with them, and ‘Buzz Me In.’ I trust them a lot; they understand me, and they understand where I like going lyrically. At the time, I was watching and listening to a lot of true crime. I was in a relationship, and I was constantly feeling like the bad guy—even though I wasn\'t, but that\'s where my anxiety takes me a lot of the time. The sexy villain is my alter ego, in a sense—or it was that day.” **“Buzz Me In”** “We had so much champagne during that session. I remember I played guitar and came up with those chords, but I honestly can\'t really tell you anything about that song. It’s the classic booty call: \'Let me in, like, will you make me cum?\' But the mental state I was in when I was writing that song was just absolutely drunk.” **“Street You Live On”** “I love this song. I made it with my friend Ethan Gruska, who I had just met for the first time the day that we started writing this. I had been a fan of him for six years. I think he\'s a genius. This is the closest I\'ve gotten to a ballad thus far in my career, which is cool because I think that I need that. I believe it\'s one of my most well-written songs on the record. We kept joking that it sounds like the Bee Gees meets like Alex G. When you listen to this song, you feel really sad, but you also feel happy. There\'s like this undeniable nostalgia to it.”
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.
“I didn’t know if we were going to be able to recreate the magic,” Tunng’s Mike Lindsay tells Apple Music of returning to LUMP, his collaboration with Laura Marling, following 2018’s acclaimed, eponymous debut. “I was petrified.” It’s not too hard to see why. *LUMP*—on which Marling layered, as she puts it, “essentially free-form nonsense poetry” atop atmospheric electronic folk soundscapes crafted by Lindsay—presented a strangely wonderful meeting of musical minds that few could have predicted. Fortunately, *Animal* proves that it was no one-off. Here, bolstered by their experience of touring together, LUMP takes their sound to bigger, bolder, and more hedonistic places, as the duo explores—like they did on their debut—a space somewhere between sweetness and menace, darkness and light. “That’s what makes it work for me,” says Lindsay. “There’s this creepiness versus cuteness. It needs to grate up against each other to keep it surprising.” And there are plenty of surprises, from gloriously danceable moments (“Animal”) to off-kilter indie pop (“Climb Every Wall,” “We Cannot Resist”) and one thrilling, truly unexpected guitar solo (“Paradise”). Marling—who drew from her study of psychoanalysis and her own dreams for this album’s lyrics—says *Animal* is about “desire and the under-conscious things that are driving us,” as well as our attention deficit, validation, fame (including her own), and cultural shifts. (If any of that sounds impenetrable, it somehow isn’t once you press play.) There is, too, a sense of freedom and playfulness throughout. And for Marling in particular—who worked on *Animal* alongside 2020’s *Song for Our Daughter*—that has always been the beauty of LUMP. “When I was working on *Song for Our Daughter*, I was having problems with my throat. I was struggling to sustain my voice or catch my breath. But in the studio with Mike, I wasn’t experiencing those problems. I think that obviously says a lot about what LUMP was to me at that time, which is just a huge relief. Laura Marling is this very private, stressful experience, whereas LUMP is an energetic force to draw on. There are no bad ideas.” Read on as Marling and Lindsay guide us through their second musical adventure, one track at a time. **“Bloom at Night”** Mike Lindsay: “With the ambient beginning, I feel this song has an element of similarity to the opening track on *LUMP*. But when those beats click in, it’s a shock. It just felt the perfect way to draw you in and then make you wonder, ‘What\'s going to happen on this record? ’Cause I don\'t really know what this is anymore.’” Laura Marling: “The first lyric that I came up with was ‘It took one God seven days to go insane.’ I guess I was trying to describe the feeling of what people have been reduced to in the attention age. The indecency of being reduced, at times, to get your piece of attention in the world, which none of us is above—particularly artists and musicians.” **“Gamma Ray”** ML: “We had the chorus first, but it took a long time to figure out the verse part. Laura went to the kitchen and came back with this amazing set of lyrics—really menacing, covered in attitude. They slotted in perfectly around the stupid timing this song is in (it’s in 7/4). When we layered up that verse at the end of the last chorus, it was like black magic or something. When you hear the words ‘Excuse me, I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ for me that’s the voice of Lump \[the duo’s yeti-like mascot, who appeared on the cover of their debut\].” **“Animal”** LM: “This was the easiest to decipher from the music Mike had made. And again, lyrically following the theme of desire, and sort of the gross accoutrements of desire.” ML: “We had that riff, and it felt like a kind of ’90s, slowed-down rave riff or something. The first lyrics Laura started singing—‘Dance, dance, this is your last chance’—were a joke, with that overly British voice, just for fun. But for me, it was kind of a eureka moment. And in the breakdown, she started doing this kind of gospel or party animal moment and it blew my mind. What Laura is singing in the middle collapse of the song is the word ‘animal.’ And that\'s why it became the title of the album. I think it\'s such a strong, very simple word that meant a lot to the LUMP project.” **“Climb Every Wall”** ML: “For me, this song is all about the bassline. There was a kind of melancholy and drunkenness at the same time. It felt like a brilliant piece of pop music, which I hadn’t really done in LUMP before. But Laura totally twisted it into something I wasn’t really expecting. It’s dark, foreboding, with almost a Nico-esque voice.” **“Red Snakes”** LM: “This song is similar to stuff I’ve done before, but with LUMP’s slightly wonky imagery. I have a recurring dream of my mother being in a pool of water at night, like a pond, and not being able reach her. In one of the dreams I reached into the water to see what was in there and a huge red snake came and bit my arm and I couldn\'t get it off. That’s obviously a very stark image and a very strong feeling, so it came together quickly. The intimacy of the piano also dictated that.” **“Paradise”** ML: “I wasn’t sure about this track. Partly because it’s in a slightly different key to the other tracks, so I was like, ‘It’s going to ruin my journey, man!’ But I was wrong. It’s one of those tunes that is very creepy mixed with this pure joy. I worried it was just too far beyond what we’ve done before, but I think that was why Laura wanted it on the record. And for me, all that really matters about this song is the badass guitar solo.” LM: “The ‘paradise’ in the context of the song is either that moment near death or the moment near waking when you have a sort of ecstatic experience. The whole fool\'s journey is that we\'re getting back to that state, total bliss, just unachievable. It\'s a fantasy. And then, that was intertwined with me having a dream in which my therapist approached me on the top deck of a London bus, offered me a cucumber sandwich, then asked me out on a date. And that was a disturbing image, as I\'m sure you\'d agree.” **“Hair on the Pillow”** ML: “This whole album is supposed to be one kind of journey. And I think after we’ve had the massive moment of ‘Paradise,’ we needed some time to reflect. What is this world you’ve been put in sonically? It’s also a chance to reflect on some of Laura’s imagery. The words ‘hair on your pillow’ is sampled form ‘Animal’ through a heavily pitched-down vocoder. It’s another example of the voice of Lump the character.” **“We Cannot Resist”** LM: “This song is a pretty well-trodden story: kids on the run, first love, biggest heartbreak, and so on. Then there’s all this quite strange libidinal language about profanity. Desire is quite often something that\'s either really tightly strung or has gone slack. I was just messing around with that and it ended up making it a not straightforward pop song.” ML: “There’s a magic moment at the end of this song when it just dissipates into whispers, which then continues into the flutes of the next song, ‘Oberon,’ which are actually the same flutes from ‘Bloom at Night.’ The whole record has these kinds of in-between tracks, which give a different flavor to the song you just heard. This song is kind of a broken pop song that doesn’t quite know what it’s supposed to be.” **“Oberon”** LM: “Mike had this piece of music and we didn’t have very long to work on it—he was in Margate and I was going home at the end of the day, so we needed to come up with something quickly. I have a continuous run of notebooks—the front is for Laura Marling and the back, flipped around, is for LUMP. I flipped it to the Laura Marling side and found something I had never used. ‘Oberon’ must have been in the mix for *Song for Our Daughter*. We did three takes and I read excerpts of notes that I’d written way back. Then Mike just cut them up and put them in random places, so that their meaning was completely different and obscure. It turned out to be an odd, pleasing listen.” **“Phantom Limb”** LM: “I make a daily habit of underlining things in newspapers and quote some stuff, phrases that I like. This song is just a repository for the funny phrasing I’ve heard in the last few years. Lots of the lyrics are about things that are uncomfortable to think about—slightly disturbing images.” ML: “This song has a rolling time signature that never ends. I could listen to it forever. ‘We have some work to do’ is such a brilliant line to end the whole project on. It can be very open to interpretation as a comment on society. This ending makes me want to go back to the start and retrace my steps, to work out what journey I’ve just listened to.”
Compared to the strutting reggaetón of *KICK ii* and the demonic club experiments of *KicK iii*, *kick iiii* captures Arca at her most serene. The crooning “Xenomorphgirl” is a kind of cyborg lullaby; “Esuna” curls up like a kitten in the soft swirls of Oliver Coates’ strings. But serenity is not the same as docility, and *kick iiii* also features some of Arca’s most coolly triumphant work to date. On the self-empowerment anthem “Queer,” Planningtorock testifies to their “tears of power,” while on “Alien Inside,” Garbage’s Shirley Manson solemnly intones the virtues of Arca’s self-proclaimed “mutant faith” over a shimmering shoegaze backdrop. Most affecting of all is Arca’s own proclamation on “Lost Woman Found”: “I’ve been walking toward the light for years now/And it’s the first time I feel the sun’s warmth on my skin, now that it’s my own/A lost woman, found.” The quest for one’s true identity has long been at the center of Arca’s work, and here at the heart of her sprawling, futuristic bildungsroman, she channels years of trauma into something like peace.
The view from the living room of Damon Albarn’s home near Reykjavik is striking. Beyond the black-sand beaches and North Atlantic water, Esja, a volcanic mountain range, cuts across the skyline. Around it, the Icelandic weather regularly puts on a show. “It’s always extreme there,” Albarn tells Apple Music. “It doesn’t exist in a meteorological platitude.” Toward the end of 2019, Albarn gathered an orchestral ensemble to sit at his window and chart the landscape, wildlife, and climate in music. Three sessions were recorded before the pandemic stalled the project. Relocating to his UK home in Devon, Albarn found he just couldn’t let those musical improvisations lie dormant until lockdown loosened. “They were such a strong thing,” he says. “It’s like a potion—I kept taking the cork top off to sip for a minute, maybe just smell it. At one point, I was like, ‘I’m just going to drink this now and use it to do something.’ So, I did like Asterix, and I made *The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows*.” Assisted by longtime collaborators Mike Smith and Simon Tong, Albarn transformed the music into his second solo album—11 unhurried reflections on loss and fragility. “The fragility is the humans’ place within nature,” he says. “And the loss is the transferal of everything. Nothing’s lost. The thing changes, it doesn’t actually disappear—it just has a different state or form.” With its vivid sense of place and transformation, the record recalls two of Albarn’s recent projects: Gorillaz’s *Meanwhile* EP and The Good, the Bad & the Queen’s *Merrie Land*. “The older you get, depending on your circumstance, the more acutely you feel these things,” he says. “I’m making music for young people at a rather advanced age for someone making music for young people. People of my own age, it’s kind of, ‘Yeah, well, that’s how I feel as well.’ Whereas for younger people, it’s like, ‘Well, that’s a strong flavor,’ but it’s not a bad thing.” Here, he takes us through the album, track by track. **“The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows”** “I’d had that phrase for a while and thought that was a good working title for the Icelandic project. It was only in Devon at the end of \[2020\] that I realized where it had come from fully—I’d obviously read the poem \[John Clare’s ‘Love and Memory,’ adapted here\] at some point. And that poem just felt like it worked weirdly with the nature. John Clare was a very natural poet, working-class. \[What I was getting from the poem\] was ‘the dark journey,’ and you can’t just wipe out the memory of somebody. It’s a very emotional negotiation you go on when someone’s left your life: You’ve lost something, but you retain what you choose to retain, and that can be a beautiful thing as well.” **“The Cormorant”** “For years, I was scared of swimming out into the bay \[in Devon\]. I sort of conquered that fear at the beginning of lockdown and started to do it as a daily meditation. Sometimes I got myself in quite a lot of trouble because it was too rough. I did have one point where I thought, ‘I’m going to drown.’ But I love doing it, because although the fear of being devoured by a shark or whatever has diminished, it’s still there a little bit, so it’s quite an edgy thing to do every day. That’s just the first two lines of that song. It’s a deep song, a whole novel in itself really. I was sitting on the beach, and I had my phone. I recorded the whole of the vocal line, music and words, without really anything in my head. It was more of a sung conversation with myself and the cormorant and the water and everything that’s taken place on that beach over 25 years. I love that about the beaches—I’m there on my own, I can just bring everyone who’s ever been there with me and all the thoughts I’ve got. It\'s important for all of us to have somewhere where you can somehow gather your thoughts.” **“Royal Morning Blue”** “\[When rain turns to snow\], suddenly everything goes in slow motion and beautiful geometric patterns start to appear and the world feels reborn in a way. Even the most desolate of landscapes after a big snowfall are perfect. It’s such an ephemeral thing though. It’s the same water but transformed for a moment.” **“Combustion”** “This is part of a much bigger thing. I think it’ll be developed more when I do it with the orchestra in February \[2022\] and I’m reunited with my musicians from Iceland. The record will transform again, the space in between the singing will be much greater, to return it more to its meditation on this perspective that musicians and myself were allowed by being there and playing in real time.” **“Daft Wader”** “\[It’s inspired by\] Zoroastrian sky burials. And the public mourning of martyrs. It’s a very big part of Shia religion, martyrdom. Problematic. And same with Sunni. It’s problematic, but it just struck me how it was very beautiful seeing communities all sitting together, drinking fruit juice and coffee, and being really peaceful publicly. Because it’s always kind of invested with such drama and violence, their religious festivals—we’re taught to fear them, and not understand it and not be sympathetic. I’m very lucky: I’ve been to Iran, and it has its issues, but it’s a very civilized place.” **“Darkness to Light”** “Dawn is so much later in the winter \[in Iceland\]. It’s like half-10, maybe even 11 o’clock. Dawn is in the working day. So, it’s a lot of time making this record in that state, which is something I grew to understand more about when I was doing *Dr Dee* \[a 2011 opera about Elizabethan polymath John Dee\] because the time between dusk and night, and night and dawn, was the favored time of the day to commit to magical practice. That’s where all the good spells are cast.” **“Esja”** “This is the outline of the mountain, and it moves with the contours around a certain harmonic destination. You’ve got to give \[the musicians\] some sort of harmonic destination. Once you start saying, ‘Play in a certain way,’ you’re missing the point. It’s how they feel once they start to tune in to just staring, and not thinking about what you’re playing. So, listening, being sensitive to each other. It’s like everyone’s got a paintbrush—and how do we keep moving but somehow inhabit our points of view? When I was writing over the top, it made it easier having this harmonic reasoning behind all of this abstract stuff.” **“The Tower of Montevideo”** “I’ve made it. I’ve swum past the buoy to the uncharted cruise ship \[first mentioned in ‘The Cormorant’\], and I’ve met fellow musicians, or stowaways or refugees, emotional refugees, and we’ve formed a band and we’re playing these songs to nobody. I’ve had a bit of an obsession about music in empty clubs for a long time. To make music for an audience is a true joy, but be careful, because modern consumption of music is killing us musicians slowly. It’s a long, protracted death, but it’s happening.” **“Giraffe Trumpet Sea”** “This is a song about flying back to London and looking down—there were a few clouds, a night city—and feeling like I was at the bottom of some ocean, that it was gold treasure. Giraffe trumpets are the cranes. When they’re resting, they look like they’re sort of giraffes. Half-giraffe, half-trumpet, sending out beautiful sounds to the universe. But I left out all the words. I think it was too distracting at that point in the record to go off on another tangent and another story, but I liked the music and I liked the title.” **“Polaris”** “‘Polaris’ reminds me of that anxiety I felt in the ’80s around Greenham Common \[RAF air base housing cruise missiles under Britain’s Polaris nuclear weapons program\]. That understanding that we had as kids of that age, that nuclear war was a very real thing, and we were quite scared. ‘Polaris/Watching the embers fall.’ That’s after a nuclear attack. And then the next bit—‘Joining the saline to start the inspection’—is me zoning in on the oystercatchers in Devon when the tide goes out. Seeing them in an *Animal Farm* kind of way: They’ve become the rulers. They’re black and white, and their red eyes—kind of this uniform. And waiting for the saline to clear so they can eat. And the other birds have to wait in their line before they’re allowed to go and do anything. So, ‘Polaris’ is an ominous word. But it’s the Polar Star as well, which is something that’s been used by anyone who’s gone to sea. It’s saved many people.” **“Particles”** “\[A rabbi Albarn met on a flight\] was fleeing certain particles. But she said the particles are looking for you in the universe. They are attracted to you. You cannot stop anything. We moved on to the conversation of Trump, and she said he’s a perfect example of a particle in that you can’t escape it, but it’s benign in a sense because it’s just going to come and cause great disruption and then disappear, and other things will come out of it. And that is true of the universe. Firstly, nothing disappears; it just changes. And secondly, there is no sadness because everything is evolving. And it’s only us who want to find some meaning to it. And that’s why we become sad—because when we can\'t find meaning to things, we’re sad. And that’s just being a good old-fashioned Homo sapien.”
Towards the end of “Serotonin,” the opening track on girl in red’s debut album, some Norwegian dialogue emerges through the bracing alloy of indie rock and hip-hop. “That recording is where I’m talking to the doctor,” the singer-songwriter born Marie Ulven tells Apple Music. “My friend had to carry me out from a lobby in Bergen while I was making the album because I woke up, thought I had a blood clot in my brain, and was like, ‘I’m about to die.’ I’m like, ‘OK, it felt like my heart stopped beating.’” It’s a moment that exemplifies the album’s remarkable openness—manifested by Ulven’s emotional honesty and her anything-goes approach to making music. “Serotonin” details the Norwegian’s experiences with intrusive thoughts, and across the subsequent 10 tracks, she performs an unflinching internal audit, processing her feelings, anxieties, and behaviors and their effects on herself and her loved ones. It’s all cast in a free-spirited brand of alt-pop that dissolves genre boundaries and shreds the “bedroom indie” tag that accompanied her early DIY EPs. The result is something that she hopes will offer help to anyone who listens. “It would be really cool if I was able to say some shit about their lives, not just mine,” she says. “The best thing about music is when you hear a song where someone is explaining what you felt but you’re not able to say because you haven’t dared to try and figure it out, or haven’t had the time.” Let girl in red take you through the album, track by track. **“Serotonin”** “\[Intrusive thoughts\] can be really scary and make you feel really crazy if you don’t know what they are, where they’re coming from, and how to deal with them. It was so liberating, knowing that I’m not crazy and that I don’t want to do these things, and then I just felt like I was over it almost. Then I wrote the song. It was just a weird journey figuring out the rap parts, but they came really quick. It was not a hard time writing those lyrics. They poured out of me.” **“Did You Come?”** “There’s no proper chorus there. The entire thing is just like a vibe. It’s hooky, and that’s all you need. I started out with the lyrics first: ‘You should know better now to fuck it up and fuck around.’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is cheating. Someone is really fucking angry here, and this is a great way to get out this aggression.’ I started making really fast-paced drums and this guitar and this piano thing. It really made me see a lot of stuff in my head.” **“Body and Mind”** “I’ve experienced a lot of self-hatred this past year, which I’ve never really understood. Realizing that you are a person is really fucking weird. I think a lot of people struggle with accepting mortality. People fixing up their bodies, changing themselves because they just want to avoid the inevitable, which is dying and aging. This is me trying to comfort myself: ‘I’ve had my deepest cries for now/My heart’s out, my guard’s down.’ I’m accepting this shit, and I don’t want to beat myself up for being a person. I think aging as a concept is really beautiful because it just means that you’re alive still.” **“hornylovesickmess”** “It’s a fun, self-aware track about how my life led me to be a jerk to someone a little bit and also being really sad that touring had its toll on my relationship with this person. My favorite line is ‘Maybe on a bus for months straight, shit’s fun but I’m going insane/Like it’s been months since I’ve had sex, I’m just a horny little lovesick mess.’ Just this fun image of me being with 10 sweaty guys on the tour bus, and being in a bunk bed thinking about this one person that I just want to call right now.” **“midnight love”** “I had a friend that would always get a guy over late at night. Then he would leave in the morning and they would never hang out during daytime. It was really getting to her. I was like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of someone.’ I was that dude who would just call someone when I felt like ‘I need this and I know that you are able to give it to me, so therefore I will call you.’ I’d never had any bad intentions. But I was able to realize a few things about myself.” **“You Stupid Bitch”** “The story here is that I had to go and comfort someone because of their broken relationships with other people. But really: ‘I’m here, I could be yours right now and you wouldn’t be going through all of this if you just saw how present I am and how much I want to be with you.’ It’s about being so angry but still comforting someone: ‘I love you but you’re fucking stupid.’ It is a really intense song, but it’s going to go hard live.” **“Rue”** “I’m singing to my sister. I had to sleep in her bed for weeks straight because I’ve just been so scared. Every time I was about to fall asleep, I felt like my heart stopped beating, so I’d want to be in her bed in case I died. I’ve just been completely all over the place. This is singing to my family and loved ones that I want to get better. I’m trying to leave it all behind. I don’t want to make it worse for you guys. It’s also about realizing that you have to do the work. If you want to get better mentally, or if you struggle with depression or anxiety, it’s such a heavy realization figuring out that it’s you who has to do it.” **“Apartment 402”** “I live in Apartment 402. I’m imagining myself lying on the floor because I’ve lost every will to do anything. I’m singing about how shitty things have been for so long; I have a sense of hopelessness. But then I’m seeing the sun come in. You know when you see the sunlight hit dust? The room is opening up for me. I’m turning this place that I’ve had so many bad feelings towards into something beautiful and into a safe place and a good place—not just a place I could die in and nobody would know.” **“.”** “There’s something about the vocal performance that’s just like, ‘Oh, Marie, you really, really know what you’re saying right now.’ That song is really sad and I always want to cry thinking about it. It’s about the one that got away, really. A result of touring and being away a bit too long and not giving enough while being away. And how that can seem like you don’t care, but in reality, in my bubble, I was like, ‘I have absolutely no emotional capacity to be in another country and to give you what I think you need from me right now.’ It just ended up disappearing, and there wasn’t really anything more to say than to just have a full stop.” **“I’ll Call You Mine”** “It’s such a catchy, summery, driving song. It’s about letting someone in and hoping for the best, even though you’ve been fucked over a few times. I’ve had a tendency to think that nothing good could ever last. You know how sometimes you have fun but then we’re like, ‘Oh, something bad is going to happen.’ Two or three years ago, I’d have fun with my friends, and I’d be driving and I’d be like, ‘One of us is going to die first.’ That always happens, a real death element coming in, or ‘someone is going to get hurt’ element.” **“it would feel like this”** “\[The title\] *if i could make it go quiet* is all about the mental noise, all the feelings and thoughts that are so big they just take up your entire mental capacity and take over your entire body. This song feels like ‘If I could make it go quiet, it would feel like this.’ This place of quietness, this beautiful place where I’m able to be OK. I’m taking it all in. It feels like the credits to a movie because the album is so full, you could get to like, ‘Holy cow, what did I just listen to?’ There’s no words. You don’t need any. I’ve just poured my heart out in all of these songs.”
Eagerly anticipated after years of choice collaborations with Latin-music hitmakers, Selena Gomez’s first-ever Spanish-language project delivers everything one hoped it would. Though its relative brevity will no doubt leave listeners wanting more, *Revelación* embraces the contemporary sounds of Latin pop without sacrificing what makes her so special to her fans. From the reggaetón thump of “Buscando Amor” to the resplendent balladry of “De Una Vez,” she sounds perfectly at home singing in Spanish over Tainy’s elegant productions. She limits her vocal collaborations here to two—first with R&B standout Rauw Alejandro on the hypnotically slow “Baila Conmigo” and next with Latin trap’s next big thing Myke Towers on “Dámelo To’.” On bilingual closer “Selfish Love,” she reunites with DJ Snake to revive their “Taki Taki” might, albeit through a jazzy Ibiza club lens.
As a producer and multi-instrumentalist, Aaron Dessner has worked alongside a number of magnetic vocalists: Matt Berninger, Sharon Van Etten, Justin Vernon, and, most famously, Taylor Swift, on 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But on his second LP as one-half of Big Red Machine (a sprawling collaboration with Vernon that began in the late 2000s with a song that became their namesake), he’s finally taken the mic himself. “I’m not naturally somebody who seeks the spotlight or wants to be lead singer,” he tells Apple Music. “I like the process of making and engineering and producing stuff, getting lost in the weeds. I’ve almost been a ventriloquist or something, trying to create emotional worlds for other people to inhabit. But I think I did realize that there’s another step, artistically, that I needed to take.” The decision to step into the foreground began, in part, with a nudge from both Swift and Vernon—after each heard a song Dessner had recently written about his twin brother (and fellow National guitarist), Bryce. “It just started happening,” he says of the transition. “I was lucky to be getting a strong push from these crazy-talented singers, who were all saying, ‘Don’t hide your voice.’” And though *How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?* offers a stage to more lead vocalists than ever before (Anaïs Mitchell and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold among them), it’s an album that feels like Dessner’s—more personal, less opaque. Where Big Red Machine’s debut LP was, as Dessner says, a “wild” and “fairly cryptic” set of mostly electronic smudges and smears and sketches (all fronted by Vernon), its follow-up is traditional by comparison, its more song-oriented approach inspired by Dessner’s time playing with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. “I wanted to be more intentional about it, but to create this feeling where there’s room for improvisation and the paint is always wet somehow,” he says. “I tried to make stuff that’s open and had this warmth, and always had this experimentation in it, too. I think we were successful on that.” Read on as Dessner takes us inside a number of the album’s key tracks. **“Latter Days” (feat. Anaïs Mitchell)** “I’d recorded the instrumental and when Justin heard it, the very first thing that he did is whistle. There was a microphone that picked him up. And we just kept it as a sort of improvised vocal melody that I wrote words to. I’ve always liked that about records, where there’s things that you don’t clean up, even though it’s slightly out of tune. If you listen closely, you’ll hear crickets and frogs on certain songs because the doors were open. That’s kind of how I think about Justin whistling.” **“Phoenix” (feat. Fleet Foxes & Anaïs Mitchell)** “I feel like Robin’s voice is timeless. I had written ‘Phoenix’ and Justin wrote the chorus melodies, and I just sent it to Robin as kind of a work in progress, imagining this multitude of voices could be a dialogue between different singers. He was really into it and moved and inspired. He wrote the song essentially as a dialogue between him and Justin, recalling the only conversation they ever had in person, which was backstage at a venue in Phoenix, Arizona, 10 years ago at a loading bay dock. That’s literally what it’s about, and when Anaïs Mitchell heard it, she rewrote Justin’s chorus lyrics, almost like a response to Robin. It’s very much the process of this record, the exchange of ideas.” **“Birch” (feat. Taylor Swift)** “It’s actually a beat that The National’s drummer, Bryan Devendorf, made in his basement. He will make these kind of loopy, trippy beats in his basement on a drum machine, and then send them to me as a Voice Memo. I wrote music to it and developed it and played all the parts to it and made it. It was during a time where I wasn’t doing that well, actually—maybe in fall 2019. I sent it to Justin, and good friends sometimes know when you’re going through something and maybe he felt that. He wrote the words and melody to it and as we recorded and developed it, we played it for Taylor at some point, towards the end of *folklore*. She really loved the song, and heard harmonies, and then kind of helped to lift further into some heavenly place.” **“Renegade” (feat. Taylor Swift)** “We wrote ‘Renegade’ after we finished *evermore*— I was really specifically writing music for Big Red Machine, and I think Taylor was, too. When she sent me ‘Renegade,’ it was literally another bolt of electricity. Thematically, it’s this idea of the way fear and anxiety and emotional baggage get in the way of loving, or being loved. I can just really relate to it in a very deep way. It did feel very connected to other songs and other characters in the record. But also, just the clarity of her songwriting and her sense of melody and rhythm and her diction: It’s just astonishing. She’s able to make a Voice Memo sound almost like it’s a finished record.” **“The Ghost of Cincinnati”** “It’s about the feeling of someone that’s empty, overextended to the point where they feel empty and hollow, like a ghost. They’re still alive, but they kind of feel like they’re running on fumes and searching for a remedy through fleeting memories and fleeting images of the past. It’s a sense of catharsis just by giving voice to a feeling that might be bleak. It kind of helps you get over it.” **“Easy to Sabotage” (feat. Naeem)** “It’s literally two bootlegs stitched together, two live recordings—one from Brooklyn at Pioneer Works and one from LA at the Hollywood Palladium. It was purely improvised, and then we took it and made a song out of it. It does relate more to the spontaneous, structured improvisation of the first Big Red Machine record, but I think it’s also a link between the past and the future of whatever this is.” **“Hutch” (feat. Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan & Shara Nova)** “I wrote a sketch inspired by my friend Scott Hutchison from Frightened Rabbit, who passed away. It’s this dark, kind of spiritual, kind of gothic piano piece. I’d produced the last Frightened Rabbit record, and it was just very shocking. He’s not the first friend I’ve lost that way, but it’s just really hard, obviously, and sad. You wonder how did it get so bad, or did I check in enough, or did I miss signs, or did I not take it seriously enough? That was the sentiment, but we wanted it to feel cathartic and have this heavenly lift to it. Lisa Hannigan and Sharon Van Etten and Shara Nova sing so beautifully on it. They added their parts and really lifted it like this angelic choir almost.” **“Brycie”** “I remember I wrote the music backstage in Washington, D.C. It was clear to me, in my head somehow, that it was about my brother. I think even the way that I was playing the guitar was how he and I play the guitar together, kind of—these interlocking, twin, mirrored guitar parts. That’s actually me and him playing together on the song, too. There are so many times in my life where he helped me get through a difficult time, where he refused to let me fall, and that’s what it’s about. It’s a love letter to him, thanking him for keeping me above the ground and hoping he’ll be there when we’re old. And when I wrote it, it was the first clue of what this record would become. It’s about looking at your childhood and searching for meaning in it—that time before you’ve lost innocence and before you’ve taken on the pressure and anxiety and uncertainty of adulthood. Just that feeling of ‘how long do you think it’s going to last?’”
At 28, Demi Lovato is reckoning with a life in the spotlight that has been anything but glamorous. After being sexually assaulted by one of their Disney Channel costars at age 15, the pop singer says they fell into a years-long stretch of depression, eating disorders, self-harm, excessive drinking, and drug use that culminated in a dark night in 2018 during which they were raped by their dealer, overdosed on heroin, and nearly died. Their soul-baring seventh studio album (accompanied by a documentary film of the same name) recounts these horrors in excruciating detail, but strives to find a path forward from pain. Through every gutting piano ballad and stomping pop anthem, you begin to grasp the magnitude of Lovato’s strength, willpower, and courage—to go to rehab, to ditch their enablers, to break off their engagement, to forgive themself. Read on as the resilient power-pop force shares the story behind each song. **“Anyone”** “‘Anyone’ was the first song I shared with the world in regards to what I’ve been going through the past couple years. I feel like it was really the catalyst of the new beginning of this journey, so it was the perfect song to open the album right out of the gate. The rest of the project goes through my story and my journey, so you see where it ends up when you listen to the full thing.” **“Dancing With the Devil”** “I wrote this song with a really good friend of mine named Blush at the end of 2018. That was a very difficult year for me, and I wanted to tell that story in a song. It was really important to me that I introduced that song in the documentary. I remember playing it for Ratty, the director, and we decided we should name the documentary *Dancing With the Devil*. It’s so significant and means so much to me.” **“ICU (Madison’s Lullabye)”** “Madison is my baby sister. When I woke up in the hospital after my overdose, I was legally blind and couldn’t see. So when she came to my bedside I actually asked her, ‘Who is standing there? Who are you?’ It was a really emotional moment for everyone who was there. I was able to take that situation, write a beautiful song out of it, and also be able to express to my little sister how much she means to me and how clearly I do see her on a daily basis.” **“Intro”** “The interlude of this album is very simple, very raw. I didn\'t want it to be too long or complex. I wanted it to be a brief intro to this new chapter of my life which I feel is \[about\] the art of starting over.” **“The Art of Starting Over”** “This song came about in a writers’ camp for the album that took place in Malibu. When they played me the idea, I remember I jumped on it right away. I\'ve been obsessed with the song ever since and knew it was going to be the title track.” **“Lonely People”** “My favorite lyric from this song is ‘All that love is/Is a means to an end/Romeo and Juliet are dead.’ It’s so dark and it doesn’t even rhyme that well, but when I sing it, it does. That’s the cool part about being a singer—you can make anything rhyme. And it’s true: Why do we romanticize this story about this couple who had a really unhappy ending? It’s weird.” **“The Way You Don\'t Look at Me”** “This is about that feeling you get when you\'re with someone and you know they\'re not paying attention to you. They\'re not watching you when you get out of the shower, their eyes aren\'t lingering on you when you walk by naked, and it sucks. That\'s a shitty feeling, especially when you love the person. It also talks about how not feeling seen or valued can result in body image \[issues\] or eating-disordered behaviors. I talk about that in the beginning of the song, and I think it\'s really important to express. In ‘Dancing With the Devil’ I talk about my struggles with substances, and in this song I talk about my struggles with food. Sometimes it’s difficult. People can really internalize not feeling seen or heard in a relationship.” **“Melon Cake”** “I used to eat melon cake on my birthday in place of an actual birthday cake. It was this watered-down, diet version of a birthday cake that was basically fat-free Cool Whip or coconut cream on top of a watermelon cut like a cake. It was never the vibe. The song is me saying goodbye to melon cake. That might seem insignificant to someone who hasn\'t struggled with food issues, but for someone like me who has overcome that, I was stepping out of my comfort zone by eating actual birthday cake. It was a big step for me, and I wanted to celebrate it.” **“Met Him Last Night” (feat. Ariana Grande)** “I remember playing ‘Dancing With the Devil’ for Ariana back in 2019 when I was at her concert in London. We were backstage and she was so excited. She\'s always been super supportive of me and my career, and it\'s so awesome to have a friend like her in the industry. She started writing this song and immediately thought of me, so when she gave it to me I was like, ‘We should just sing this together.’” **“What Other People Say”** “Sam Fischer and I did this song together, and I’m so grateful to know him because he’s so fun to work with. Performing this song with him on *Ellen* was a blast. I\'m really glad that we got to do that together.” **“Carefully”** “This is a song about wanting to be loved—but wanting it to be done carefully. It’s kind of self-explanatory, but it\'s really about offering yourself up to somebody. One of my favorite lyrics in the song is ‘I could be your favorite dream/Baby, nobody can love you like I do.’ It\'s so simple but it\'s powerful, and I don\'t have a favorite dream, so it\'d be nice to find that.” **“The Kind of Lover I Am”** “I feel like this is the song I’m going to play people if we start dating so they can get a sense of who I am. I\'m just an open, free-spirited person who wants to be happy, and I deserve that. Everyone deserves that.” **“Easy”** “Noah \[Cyrus\] and I sing this song together, and it was originally sent to me by Matthew Koma, who is a talented producer and artist. I fell in love with it the second I heard it and immediately thought of how incredible Noah’s voice would sound on it. I\'ve always wanted to collaborate with her because she\'s so brilliant.” **“15 Minutes”** “Crickets. Is that an answer?” **“My Girlfriends Are My Boyfriend” (feat. Saweetie)** “Saweetie’s so good at those best-friend hype songs and I knew she’d be perfect on this. She killed it. It\'s such a great song and definitely an anthem for anyone who has just gone through a breakup.” **“California Sober”** “I wrote this song to try and explain that sometimes recovery is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and in my case, it looks a little different than maybe other people’s journeys. But it\'s working for me, and this song explains why. I hope people can listen to it from a place of curiosity and understanding and compassion. I hope they can try to respect my truth the same way I respect other people’s truths.” **“Mad World”** “I saw this song in *Donnie Darko* when I was 14 and have listened to it over and over. I kind of forgot about it until I went to Big Bear \[in California\] and was sitting by the fire listening to music and it came on. I immediately texted my producer Mitch Allan and said, ‘We *have* to cover “Mad World.”’ He was like, ‘Cool, I’ll make the track.’” **“Butterfly”** “I wrote this song about my birth dad. I always had a complicated relationship with him, and I felt like it was in his death that we actually grew closest. I had more compassion and understanding for who he was, and came to understand why he couldn\'t show up for me the way that I had always wanted him to. When a butterfly came right up to my finger on Father’s Day last year, around the anniversary of his passing, I knew I had to write a song about it. My favorite lyric is ‘You were never really graceful/Now you\'re just what you\'re supposed to be.’ It perfectly explains my dad\'s transition from life to death. I feel like he became graceful and delicate in a way that he was never able to be on earth.” **“Good Place”** “This song best represents where I\'m at today. It is the message I want to get across to anyone who’s ever struggled and can relate to my story. It\'s an example of where you can be when you do the work on yourself. I hope people listen to this album and hear the struggles, but also come to a happy ending. Maybe this song can help them find the happy ending in their own journeys.”
She was almost a cautionary tale: Singer-songwriter Madison Beer’s career began on YouTube at age 13, when Justin Bieber found her 2012 cover of Etta James’ “At Last” and told the world to listen. It did. She signed with Island Records, got the Radio Disney push, released a few teen-pop singles, and was dropped by the label before ever releasing a debut full-length—pop star aspirations dead by age 16. Instead of giving in to disillusionment, she went independent, leaned into her original musical loves—the soulful sounds of James, Fugees, Adele—and released a debut EP in 2018, *As She Pleases*, followed by the Charli XCX-penned single “Hurts Like Hell” featuring Offset. Now, nearly a decade after her initial career-making moment, Beer’s released her debut LP, a robust reintroduction emboldened by her smoky soprano. Gone is her teen pop sheen; she’s penned a collection of ascendent R&B (“Effortlessly”), sultry Americana like an impressionistic Lana Del Rey (“Blue”), breathy kiss-offs (“Sour Times”), slinky come-ons (“Baby”), doo-wop balladry (“Emotional Bruises”), defiant anthems (“BOYSHIT”), and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, comic relief in the form of a *Rick and Morty* sample (“Homesick”). Seventeen tracks, no collaborations, all co-written by her—*Life Support* is Beer, laid bare. And she’s never sounded more herself.
It’s a shame if Zayn Malik actually believes *Nobody Is Listening*, because they should be. Since departing One Direction in 2015, the comparatively low-profile British Pakistani singer has steadily delivered high-concept pop albums that take risks, bare emotions, and defy expectations. *Mind of Mine* transformed fluorescent, Frank Ocean-inspired R&B into a hazy after-hours head trip, and the heavily loaded *Icarus Falls* made intimate love songs into mythic voyages. Here, on his third solo LP, he finally realizes his full potential as a shape-shifting pop auteur, dialing the production way up and fine-tuning his falsetto so that it melts into every bar. Malik’s past projects have drawn comparisons to big-budget R&B/pop stars like Justin Timberlake and Justin Bieber, but this album feels against the grain and quietly experimental, as if he’s spent most of lockdown vibing to The 1975 and Daniel Caesar. Whatever he’s been absorbing is working: The songs here are glossy without being obvious, and as a vocalist, he’s never sounded so dazzling and bold. Sonically, he manages to cover some serious ground. The introspective poetry of “Calamity” bounces right into “Better,” a hopeful soul-pop tune that would make John Legend proud. And Malik’s hushed, coy delivery on “When Love’s Around,” a fluttery duet with Syd from The Internet, is quickly outshined by his whinnies and howls on the belt-it-out ballad “Connexion.” But the production—playful and unexpected—is especially fun: “River Road” is stripped back like a barroom acoustic cut, while the megawatt “Sweat” picks right up where Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” left off.
“I never fully comprehend, thematically, what the record is about,” Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds tells Apple Music about their fifth full-length album. “I’m not that deliberate, for better or worse, when I’m writing.” After three years and some band therapy, *Mercury - Act 1* arrives as ascending, eclectic, accessible arena rock, amplified by a new collaborator: legendary producer Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, System of a Down, Tom Petty, AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers). “They\'re wildly sophisticated in their production ability, in their playing, and in their writing, this glut of greatness,” Rubin says of the band. Rubin’s style allowed Reynolds to rectify his loss of religious faith and discover a new kind of meaning on record. “My first goal with creating art is putting out something that is honest,” Reynolds says. “One of the things that has been so inspiring to me working with Rick is I have been trying to refine spirituality and belief. When the rug is pulled out on you with religion, I was left with nothing. It made me trust no one. Any story anybody told me, it was a ghost story. I\'ve been trying to refine believing in deeper things, unexplainable things. I\'m trusting where I feel honesty. Rick is honest.” *Mercury - Act 1* became a record about letting go—about moving forward (like in the haunting vocal overlays of “Wrecked,” a song written about Reynolds’ sister-in-law who died of cancer in 2019)—and about accepting what terrifies us. “My biggest fear in life, and I didn\'t know this until recently, is lack of control,” Reynolds admits, revealing that he confronted that fear in a spiritually transformative ayahuasca trip, which no doubt influenced the record. “I had to give up control completely. And I died. Spiritually, I felt like I died. I saw so many things in my life from a bird\'s-eye view. Then I heard like the bell and this incredible shaman came over and was helping me come alive again. It felt like a rebirth. It was everything I was told religion would give to me.” If *Mercury - Act 1* sounds darker than its predecessor, 2018’s *Origins*, it’s because Imagine Dragons have never been so forthright; Rubin brought it out of the band. The ebullient percussion of “It’s Ok,” the shimmery piano of “Easy Come Easy Go,” the thunderous nu-metal-adjacent “Cutthroat,” the glitchy romance of “Monday”—all of these kaleidoscopic elements work to mirror Reynolds’ understanding that some things are out of our control, and that’s all right. “I\'d be overly metaphorical out of fear of people knowing what I was talking about,” Reynolds says. “I have a hard enough time knowing that people are going to hear what I\'m talking about.”
