Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith have been through a lot together in their 40-plus years as collaborators. They’ve toured the world countless times in Tears for Fears, the New Wave group they founded in 1981; bounced back from a breakup in the ’90s; and released their sixth album, *Everybody Loves a Happy Ending*, as well as a smattering of singles, in the 2000s. Their 1982 breakout single “Mad World,” “Head Over Heels,” “Shout,” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” remain timeless favorites for generations of listeners, and several chart-topping artists, from The Weeknd to Kanye West and Drake, have sampled their hits to elevate their own. With *The Tipping Point*, their seventh studio album and first LP in 18 years, they’re immensely satisfied with what they’ve written together—partly because they took their time to write their way back to each other, and largely because they did so on their own terms. “We spent a lot of time doing all these writing sessions over a bunch of years with a lot of what are considered more modern songwriters, and it didn\'t really work out for us because we felt it was slightly dishonest,” Smith tells Apple Music. “We were left with a lot of things that seemed like attempts at making a modern hit single, and I don\'t think that\'s what we do. We\'re really an album band. We made *The Hurting* before \'Mad World\' was released. We made *Songs From the Big Chair* before \'Everybody\' and \'Shout\' were released. We sat down, just the two of us, with two acoustic guitars, and tried to forge a path forward. It felt more honest, and the material at the end of it was far better, probably because it was more honest.” “No Small Thing,” *The Tipping Point*\'s first track, is a folk-tinged ballad that builds into a sweeping epic, and it\'s one Smith points to as an example of what they hoped to achieve when they reconnected and started writing: “This song is definitely a journey, and albums for us should be a journey.”
All rippers, no skippers, Sarah Tudzin’s second album as Illuminati Hotties imbues hooky Y2K-era pop-punk with an attitude that feels distinctly contemporary. Stretching her sweet-and-sour voice like taffy, Tudzin sings from the perspective of a millennial slacker who isn’t quite buying what society’s selling, be it marketing scams (“Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism”) or too-cool-for-school socialites (“Joni: LA’s No. 1 Health Goth”). She’s referred to her scrappy, bruised songs as “tenderpunk,” and beneath all the pool-hopping and kick-flipping, there’s a woman trying to pull off this adulting thing in what feels like end times. But in the meantime, why not try and have some fun?
The group drop a pure K-pop potion in shimmering Spatial Audio.
“When I listen to it, it’s sort of a reminder that I am lovable,” Claud tells Apple Music of their sparkling debut LP, the first release on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label. “I deserve to feel love. Sometimes people forget that they\'re capable of giving and receiving it.” Deeply melodic and deeply felt, *Super Monster* is a set of genre-agnostic bedroom pop that surveys the entire spectrum of romantic feeling. “I wrote this record to be very visible, in the sense that I am a multifaceted human being and my story is not shown in coming-of-age movies or these huge shows that are always about straight cis couples,” the Brooklyn singer-songwriter says. “I\'ll write music for the rest of my life, but I don\'t have to put it out. The only reason why I want to put it out is because there\'s so little representation of queer and trans and nonbinary people falling in love and having well-rounded lives that don\'t just revolve around the hardships of being queer.” Here, they guide us through the album track by track. **Overnight** “I liked the idea of a warning as a first song. Like, ‘Here\'s a heads-up: A lot of these songs are love songs, and I tend to jump into things.’ It\'s about any time that I felt I was falling in love or starting something new.” **Gold** “I was really angry when I wrote this song. I felt super betrayed, not just by one person, but by a series of things that had happened. It’s almost recognizing and sort of breaking the news to myself that this person was not there for you when you needed them, or these people were not there for you when you need them. Sometimes I just need to get the anger out and then I can move on.” **Soft Spot** “I was at a party and I was thinking a lot about one specific person, and everywhere I looked, it felt like I was seeing them. But it wasn\'t them, and anytime somebody brought them up it felt I got all mushy and soft and I would blush. I approached the song as ‘This is sad and this sucks.’ But one thing that I came to terms with as the song was developing was that maybe it doesn’t suck—maybe it\'s nice to be able to just smile whenever you want because you can think of somebody.” **In or In-Between** “I\'m so bad at reading social cues, and I never believe that somebody is into me, just because I feel like I\'m conditioned to assume that they\'re not. It\'s a song about unachievable or unrequited love. Feeling like you\'re never going to know what this person is thinking, you\'re never going to know if they actually are into you the way that you\'re into them.” **Cuff Your Jeans** “I had a dream where I was trying to get on a train to go see a friend and the train kept getting delayed or the train wasn\'t showing up or my ticket would blow away in the wind. It felt like I would never be able to see this person again. Which was a real feeling that I was feeling in real life—like, what if I never get to see this person again? What if, by the time I see them again, they\'ve moved on or something?” **Ana (feat. Nick Hakim)** “I was at a point in my writing where I was getting sort of sick of writing about my own life. So I imagined myself as this 40-year-old man who decides that he needs to leave his wife to go find himself. The whole story is like a letter to his wife, who I named Ana. I think I was trying to say that if you really love somebody then you will work on yourself. Because if you love somebody then you know that they deserve the best.” **Guard Down** “When I get in a nervous situation or when I get protective of myself or my feelings, there\'s a voice in my head that says, ‘Don’t let your guard down, don\'t make yourself vulnerable.’ And this song is about that feeling, and confessing, ‘Holy shit, I’m going to be an adult in a few months. I\'m going to be turning 21, and what do I have figured out? And what do I not have figured out? And I\'ve been spending all this time alone—is isolating myself really helping me? Or is it just making it worse?’” **This Town** “I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and it felt like a small town because generations of the same families stay there. I think for the longest time I really wanted to leave, and I did it, and that was the best feeling ever. But this song isn’t talking about any town in particular—it’s more alluding to the fact that I want to run away from a problem, and right now.” **Jordan** “Growing up, my grandparents lived in the same town as I did and I lived in their house a few different times throughout my childhood. But the house behind theirs was Michael Jordan\'s, and it had 23 on the gate. My grandpa and I used to always walk the dog past and he’d always point out the gate because he thought it was so cool, but Michael Jordan was never there—the house always seemed empty. I think it turned into some type of love song, not for Michael Jordan, but for someone else. I don\'t want any headlines being like, ‘Claud writes a love song for Michael Jordan.’ It\'s just not true.” **That’s Mr. Bitch to You (feat. Melanie Faye)** “Somebody called me a bitch, and I was so offended that I responded, ‘That\'s Mr. Bitch to you.’ And then my friend overheard the conversation and he just jumped in to say, ‘Hi, sorry to interrupt this argument, but Claud, did you write that down? That\'s a really great song title.’ I just feel like one of the most offensive words that a man could call somebody who\'s essentially not a man is a bitch. So the song sort of turned into a fuck-the-patriarchy-type song.” **Pepsi** “It\'s pretty straightforward: I told somebody that I had feelings for them and she just responded in a really rude way. It was brutal. I think she was half joking, but we never talked about it ever again, so I\'m not really sure. I feel like I wrote so many songs about that person, but it wasn\'t capturing what actually happened, so I just decided to say it. I thought it was such a hilariously tragic thing that I had to write about it. Because it\'s just so ridiculous. I\'m hoping that she hears the song.” **Rocks at Your Window** “Maybe it was \[John Cusack\] with the boombox standing at somebody\'s window like, ‘I love you, come down here.’ I was thinking about that and how big and beautiful a romantic gesture that is, but also how annoying and invasive it is as well. It\'s like, \'Okay, get out of here. You\'re embarrassing me.’ I\'ve never actually thrown rocks at anybody\'s window, but I am the type of person to do that.” **Falling With the Rain (feat. Shelly)** “My mom was really sick last year. I found out that she had to get a big surgery, and it really scared me and I was just really, really, really sad. I was going through a really dark period. I wanted it to conclude the record because I like that sentiment: I’m feeling down right now, but I\'m going to bounce back.”
After Yola signed with Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye recordings and released *Walk Through Fire*, her genre-melding full-length debut that earned her four Grammy nominations (including a 2020 nod for Best New Artist), she found herself facing a stubborn foe: writer’s block. Her increasingly demanding career yielded accolades and an ever-growing fanbase that included artists like The Highwomen and director Baz Luhrmann, but she found herself struggling to write at the height of it. “I had ideas right the way through, from 2013, when I was learning to play guitar, through to when I first started doing shows in late 2015,” she tells Apple Music. “But I hadn\'t had a single idea from 2019 into the pandemic—just nothing. That level of being busy just completely poached my ability to write. I started deconstructing my process of how my brain likes to function when I\'m creating.” If she started humming a tune while straightening up the house, she wouldn\'t immediately try to interrogate it. She sought out stillness and space, a contrast to what she calls the “excessively conscious” state she often found herself in. “When that part of my brain was off, ideas would appear almost instantly,” she says. “I clearly had inspiration, but there were situations that stopped the ideas coming to the fore, stopped me being able to access them.” Eventually, Yola wrote her way out of writer’s block and into *Stand for Myself*, an album that meets the high standard she set with *Walk Through Fire* while drawing in new sounds (namely disco, which drives the groove of “Dancing Away in Tears”) and doubling down on vintage vibes (notably the ’70s soul of “Starlight”) and declarations of self-empowerment. New collaborators came along for the soulful journey, too: Joy Oladokun, Ruby Amanfu, and Natalie Hemby co-wrote songs for the album (as did Auerbach, who produced the album, along with *Walk Through Fire*), and Brandi Carlile lends her voice to “Be My Friend,” an all-too-timely celebration of allyship. Below, Yola talks through a few of the songs on the album and how they helped get her back on track. **“Barely Alive”** “The first song on the record, ‘Barely Alive,’ is co-written by Joy Oladokun. We were talking about what it\'s like to be Africans and isolated, and playing guitar, and singing songs, and being into a very broad spectrum of music—and growing up having to explain our existence, and ourselves. You are so often called on to minimize yourself. It can be that your life experience is uncomfortable to somebody and it\'s triggering their white fragility, so they\'re encouraging you to speak less on it, or better still, not at all, and to suffer in silence. If you can\'t speak on your life, then you can\'t address what\'s right and wrong with it. That\'s where the album jumps off from: It\'s a very concise narrative on my journey, from that place of being a doormat to having some agency over my own life.” **“Break the Bough”** “‘Break the Bough’ dates back to 2013, and was started on the evening of my mother\'s funeral. It doesn\'t sound like a song that was written on the horns of a funeral; it\'s a real party song. In that moment I realized that none of us are getting out of this thing called life alive, and so whatever we think we\'re doing with our lives, we better do a better job of it—just manifest the things that you want to manifest, and be the you that you most want to be. I\'d been in a writing block up until that point, and that sparked me to decide to learn to play guitar and inexorably start writing songs again—and that led me here.” **“Be My Friend”** “‘Be My Friend’ was one of the songs to arrive in my mind almost complete. That was a real moment, when I was able to come up with something that felt really real, really true, really about the time I was in, but also about my journey. It was as much about allyship \[as\] it was the idea of what I needed to get to this point in the first place. I thought it was important to call Brandi to sing with me: She\'d had the same conversation with me pertaining to queerness, and the pursuit of not being a token, and to manifest your most true self in your art so you don\'t feel like you\'re apologizing for yourself or hiding yourself in your art.” **“Stand for Myself”** “The song ‘Stand for Myself’ is the ultimate conclusion of a concept. It starts with referencing the \'Barely Alive\' version of myself: \'I understand why you\'re essentially burying your head in the sand: You want to feel nothing.\' But also, it can speak on people that are experiencing white fragility. It\'s like, I get it, it makes you feel uncomfortable. You don\'t want to have to feel empathy for people that aren\'t like you, because it feels like work. But then it\'s saying, \'I was like that, I was an absolute parrot, and I didn\'t have any sets of perspective of what I might stand to gain from not being such an anxious twonk.\' That\'s really where we get to: But I did do it, because I was left without choice. Now I feel like I\'m actually alive, and it\'s really great. You can have this, too, if you\'re actually willing to do the work—go and take the implicit test, find out what your biases are, work on them, feel things for other people that aren\'t clones of you—and that\'s really everything. When someone goes, \'Hey, this album should be called *Don\'t Mess With Yola!*,\' I\'m like, you\'ve missed the point of this record. It\'s not a *don\'t mess with*. It\'s not *I\'m a strong Black woman*. It\'s the deserving of softness and a measure of kindness and of support and friendship and love. And that\'s really all encapsulated in \'Stand for Myself.\'”
Western Australian psych-rock band Pond’s ninth album might have been their first in over a decade that was recorded entirely on home turf (for pandemic reasons), but thematically it darts all over the place. There are biographical moments, with reflections on traveling, meaningful encounters, and thought-provoking conversations. There are observations on modern life, ancient mythology, gentrification, and tourism. There are wild improvisations taken from frenzied jam sessions, collaborations with artists near and dear to the band, ideas drawn from other creative minds and works, with lyrics that bounce from profound to funny to delightfully absurd. All in all, *9* feels like a series of musical vignettes, often focused entirely on a single person, thought, memory, or moment. Below, frontman Nick Allbrook talks through each song on the record. **“Song for Agnes”** “A tribute to Agnes Martin, with none of her zen delicacy—sorry. Took some lyrics from a letter she wrote to her art dealer which I thought was brilliant. \[French artist\] Maud Nadal did the ‘frail as people’ bit, which I love. A lot of this album’s lyrics are kind of biographical.” **“Human Touch”** “One time a woman was smashing up a car outside my house, begging me to help her steal it. She was wired but kind of sweet in a scary way. Her dog, named Josie, was sitting in the passenger seat being very cute and fluffy. GUM \[Jay Watson\]’s loop started it all musically.” **“America’s Cup”** “1987 was the year Fremantle was televised to the world and gentrification began in earnest. There are still relics of the pre-cup history floating around. It’s also about large, massive champions gathered outside a gym in London, who I thought were funny. The first line is lifted from \[Icelandic artist\] Ragnar Kjartansson, and the music came from a super fun jam. Hadn’t done that in ages and it was a gas.” **“Take Me Avalon I’m Young”** “When I was 17—cue strings—I went to England for my traditional Australian ‘gap year,’ to try and become worldly and feel like you’re bigger and better than your home. I went to Glastonbury, met some hippies and got trippy and slept on Glastonbury Tor. Turns out there’s a lot of wild mythology about that place if you look it up. The song’s about age, decay, changing, and the golden dream of England. I wanted to make a song with the drumbeat like the one that comes in at the end of ‘3 Legs’ by Paul McCartney. \[Pond drummer\] Ginoli and me did that. \[New York-based artist\] Jesse Kotansky did some mind-buggering strings on this one, and a couple others on the album. Champion.” **“Pink Lunettes”** “This came from another one of Jay’s crusty loops. Mainly him and Ginoli turned it wild and I just looked at my notebook and garbled over the top in a one-take vomit of pretentious art school tripe. It’s a chopped and screwed mosaic of once-coherent material from Leonard Cohen and Richter and Documenta X and some other things.” **“Czech Locomotive”** “More biography. Emil Zátopek and his incredible story totally squashed me. I’ve been running a lot recently, and his enormous heart and romantic soul and talent and strength and will killed me dead. The music came from the aforementioned improv sesh.” **“Rambo”** “An ode to the ‘unenlightened.’ I had a chat with a translator of very expensive poems who said you can’t make real art unless you’ve read Rimbaud, and I thought that was the most hilarious thing I’d ever heard in my life, and that person thought I was super cool for disagreeing. All very confusing really, but it made me not want to read another book ever again. ‘I should run and hide or die in the generational divide’ seems to be the mantra of the album, like ‘I might go and shack up in Tasmania’ was for \[2019 album\] *Tasmania*.” **“Gold Cup / Plastic Sole”** “Basically this is about the most well-trodden subject of the year—shit getting fucked-er and fucked-erer. I’m aging, and truths like slave labor producing my favorite slippers are turning every once-frivolous pleasure sour. Seeking solace in nature, Deia, love. There’s a really fantastic chord progression written by \[Pond guitarist\] Shiny Joe, ameliorated by brilliant twisted piano by \[Melbourne artist\] Evelyn Ida Morris and Jesse Kotansky strings.” **“Toast”** “Another ripper Joe chord progression. His demo was called ‘Toast’ and I think he was imagining warm, slightly burnt bread, but I wrote about the tourists in Broome watching the sunset and seeing the apocalypse and how I could never spend enough time with my love to make said apocalypse feel right.”
Long gone are the days of “Potential Breakup Song.” On their first full-length LP in 14 years, sisters Aly & AJ Michalka, beloved in the mid-2000s for their Disney-brand teenage pop-rock, have grown up. First came the EPs: 2017’s *Ten Years* and 2019’s *Sanctuary*, a new era for the duo defined by a masterful understanding of ’80s-indebted synth-pop. Now they’ve looked back even further, pulling from ’60s and ’70s rock to craft their own kind of modern classics. “We set out to make a West Coast album—this California energy,” Aly tells Apple Music. “Hopefully it gets people feeling good about the state of the world again.” “This is a self-help record,” adds AJ. “We love it.” There are pleasures to be found, from the Americana road-trip opener “Pretty Places” and the big pop drum fills of “Paradise” to the romanticism of “Slow Dancing” and the album’s surprising collaborations, including Heart’s Nancy Wilson and Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum on the sunny-sounding “Listen!!!” and Melissa Etheridge on closer “Hold Out.” Below, Aly & AJ break down their album, track by track. **“Pretty Places”** AJ: “It’s an anthem for the open road. It\'s one of the first songs that helped steer the direction of this album, and I really feel like this is a song that we\'ll look back on for many years to come and feel very proud that we wrote this. You don\'t feel that way all the time with your own music. It’s nice to feel that confidence.” **“Lost Cause”** Aly: “The thing that I really love about this song is AJ’s stacked harmonies on the verses. And then that breakdown bridge lyric is really moving to me: ‘Maybe it\'s just come to an end/Don\'t need to bring us back from the dead/Maybe it just ran its course/And trying too hard only makes it worse.’ It feels so true to those moments when you know you\'ve given it your all, but it\'s dead. It\'s over.” **“Break Yourself”** AJ: “The drums were layered three times over, so everything you hear is stacked. And we promised each other there\'s got to be a horn section at the end, and extended it out. That became one of my favorite parts on the entire record.” **“Slow Dancing”** AJ: “It\'s one of the older ones, along with \'Pretty Places.\' Originally, it was an ’80s-inspired synth-pop tune. Then we flipped it upside down. It\'s midtempo—the pandemic love song of the record.” Aly: “We knew we were going to release a lot of singles, because we felt like there were so many good songs that we wanted them to have their moment. By choosing \'Slow Dancing,\' it felt like, \'We\'re going to ease you into this, and make you slow-dance in your living room.\'” **“Paradise”** Aly: “There\'s this fantastic quote from Henry Miller\'s book *Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch* that inspired the meaning of this song. Basically, it is about the yearning of wanting paradise, but not being brave enough to stay once you\'ve actually reached it. It’s based on how visitors coming out to Big Sur don\'t really have the courage to live out a life of paradise. They go back to their own life once they\'ve been out there for a few days—where paradise is actually achievable. Paradise is tangible, we just are never brave enough to actually live it.” **“Symptom of Your Touch”** AJ: “The combination of analog synths, guitars, live drums, cello, violin, electric violin—the song has a classic feeling, but it still feels like a modern pop song. It is really hard to achieve that balance.” Aly: “This song is a great pairing with ‘Paradise.’ I also like the subject matter of it: It\'s like knowing that you\'re just doomed if you meet up and see this person, because every single time you better fall back in with them. It is toxic.” **“Lucky to Get Him”** AJ: “It’s hard to convey advice in a song, because it can come out cheesy. I like to think that this song is a character piece, because it\'s about guiding a friend. We joke that this song feels like Dolly Parton speaking to a young version of herself about what she would do differently, romantically, if she could go back in time. And so this is our Dolly Parton advice song.” **“Listen!!!”** Aly: “We’ve known Nancy \[Wilson\] for over 10 years. We’re huge fans. We sent her this song and a couple of others. She came back with these great parts, and we were super honored that she could be a part of this. And then with Jack \[Tatum\], he made the song a little bit weirder and off-sounding, which I loved.” **“Don’t Need Nothing”** Aly: “This song was written in Denver in the winter of 2019. We took the album title from the chorus lyrics. It felt like this was the pinnacle song of the record. It sums up the message, too: It’s a song with a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a response to anguish and the fact that we feel like we need so many things in life. We need our friends, our family, and the things that truly make us happy, which usually aren\'t physical possessions. It\'s usually experiences.” **“Stomach”** AJ: “We, miraculously, wrote this song entirely over Zoom in May of 2020, when the pandemic was at its peak, with our really good friend Olen Kittelsen from a band called Armors. This song hurts when you listen to it, because I think the lyrics are devastating. But funnily enough, Aly\'s husband wrote the line \'I just can’t stomach being your ex-wife,\' and they have a great relationship. It’s not reflective of them, but we\'re children of divorce. The song weaves in and out, but it doesn\'t just put you in this horrible rut. There’s hope around the corner.” **“Personal Cathedrals”** AJ: “We wanted to write a song that completely captured the feeling of Aly and I having to go to an event that we don\'t want to be at. We tend to become two wallflowers at parties in Hollywood, even though we\'re very outgoing people. We end up ordering a drink and standing in a corner with each other. That first chord you hear immediately brings you into that uncomfortable space.” **“Hold Out”** Aly: “It’s the one true ballad on the album. AJ and I are not big ballad writers, and I don\'t tend to gravitate towards straight-up ballads either, so we set out to write a ballad that we were really proud of. To me, \'Hold Out\' really encapsulates the importance of asking for help when you need it the most, and not being ashamed of that. Melissa Etheridge etched the final notes of this outro with her incredible guitar playing, just adding that perfect element to the song.”
The girl group align shimmering synths with fresh summer vibes.
“This whole album is in questions,” Jack Antonoff tells Apple Music about the meaning behind *Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night*, his third album as Bleachers. “I kept going back to these really dark stories that somehow spin you around and you\'re in this character, and you don\'t know why this hope exists. I was trying to access that part of myself.” The much-in-demand singer-songwriter and producer—whose credits in the past year alone include work with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and St. Vincent—is awash in joy and optimism as he lets things fall into place on these 10 tracks, trading the synth-pop glitz of his previous albums for sweeping, sax-tinged anthems and intimate acoustic confessionals. Antonoff wrote the songs in bits and pieces over the course of four years, though it wasn\'t until early 2020 that he began to record the album—mostly live in a studio with his touring bandmates. “I\'m always writing, and then at some point, an album will form or it won\'t—and when it starts to form, that\'s when I chase it,” he says. “It\'s a window into how I hear music. I don\'t craft records to be instant. I don\'t craft records to be growers. I just craft what I hear and feel in myself.” Here, he tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“91”** “The song, much like a poem, which Zadie Smith helped me write, functions where every lyric is tied to every verse but from a different angle. In the first verse, there’s this child version that can\'t understand what\'s happening. And you only recognize that you\'re here, but you\'re not, through the anxiety of your mother. In the second verse, it\'s a little bit more about anger. You\'re recognizing this part of yourself that you don\'t like through someone else, which is a pretty intense way of understanding it. If you have a feeling that\'s pretty harsh about someone else, there\'s a good chance it\'s really about you. And then, in the third verse, you finally get this unearned hope, and this lightness of actually having all the magic of being alive.” **“Chinatown” (feat. Bruce Springsteen)** “A lot of the music that I love to play sits in that place where it\'s doing two things: There\'s a literal and emotional thing that\'s coming from the same concept. It is going from New York over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. Literally and sonically, the song does that. The music sounds a little bit New York-y in the beginning, and then it gets more innate and hopeful and becomes more New Jersey and more suburban. It feels like going home.” **“How Dare You Want More”** “‘How Dare You Want More’ is this feeling I was seeing with friends and family. Everyone\'s going through this big struggle to have more, to ask for more, and to be in control of their life. I saw it was producing so much shame in other people, and therefore, really just myself. Why is it so hard? And I\'m not talking about more square footage. I\'m not talking about more money. I\'m talking about more of who you are so you can not have that strange feeling that keeps you up at night or makes you feel all fucked up in the morning, or makes you not grab at the things you want. It\'s a question that, if you keep asking yourself over and over and over again, can start to sound silly. And that\'s a good thing, because it is silly. It was a hallmark of the album, trying to move past this shame.” **“Big Life”** “It\'s a sibling track to ‘Secret Life.’ It\'s, in the most real and non-cynical way, falling so in love where you want to have a big life. You want to have all the experiences, and you want to take them with you on all these crazy journeys. And ‘Secret Life’ was the opposite, when you want to close every door. It\'s a pretty romantic concept to me. But the song is all about posing these wants. In a funny, funny way, I think it\'s the most vulnerable song on the album, even though it might not come off as it because the music is so confident.” **“Secret Life” (feat. Lana Del Rey)** “I do this thing a few times in the album where you have a feeling and you look at it from two polar-opposite positions. ‘Big Life’ is this ‘let me go out there, let me get burned, and let the world knock me over because I\'m trying to find love,’ right? I want a secret life where you and I can get bored out of our minds. It\'s not a chase. It\'s not running out there to prove something. It\'s a very optimistic song, which is basically when the chemicals wear off and you\'re really in it with someone. At first, maybe I thought it would be a duet with Lana where it could be conversational, but then I realized that if I just put some reverb on her voice and have her kind of crest over the second verse and the chorus, she\'s more like a dream of this person I\'m talking to.” **“Stop Making This Hurt”** “This one is a sibling song to ‘How Dare You Want More.’ ‘Stop Making This Hurt’ is just sort of a more petulant, pissed-off version. There\'s all this joy and hope about the next phase of your life. But then there\'s all this frustration about ‘I can\'t get through this doorway. Whatever I\'m carrying does not let me through.’ I was able to access this rage by talking about other people: my dad, my friends and their kids, the world, and a whole new generation of people that are inheriting so much crap. But at the end of the day, I\'m right in that struggle with all of them.” **“Don’t Go Dark”** “I\'d never written a song like this. It\'s not \'I love you.\' It\'s not \'I hate you.\' It\'s \'you\'ve got to get off my back. You\'ve got to let me go.\' I can\'t be me for new people who I\'m trying to love if I\'m holding your darkness. I can hold you and I can hold our past and all these things, but it can\'t happen. That\'s why the song is so tense. It feels like this plea and this release. I just didn\'t know what else to do besides write that song. It\'s probably the angriest song I\'ve ever written.” **“45”** “There\'s these pieces of us that, to the world, are gone. They\'re not gone—the people we love see them. When you meet someone new, or someone has been in your life for a while, they\'re bringing these pieces that, even if you know this person, you don\'t know and can learn to love them. It\'s exonerating. I can walk back into it in one second, even though no one else can see it.” **“Strange Behavior”** “I wrote the song a long time ago. I wanted to put it on the album because it’s the only song I\'ve ever written in the past that feels like it\'s still in the future for me. And at the time when I wrote it, I made it really loud and bombastic. I think I was a little bit afraid of it. I wanted to reapproach it with the confidence and vulnerability of how I feel now.” **“What’d I Do With All This Faith?”** “It\'s in many ways the most important song in the album, because the past two Bleachers albums I\'ve closed with this idea of being ready to move on. It\'s a literal lyric I\'ve put in the titles. They\'re these sort of ending pieces. And what I really came to is, that\'s it. I don\'t have God. I don\'t have a sureness about certain things in my personal life that I wish I did. But for some reason I\'m spilling over with faith, and I don\'t even know where to put it. That is the biggest question of the album: What do I do with all this faith?”
“I don’t know of anybody who’s done it,” ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus tells Apple Music. “Is there anybody?” He could be talking about the improbability of a Swedish pop group comprising two formerly married couples selling nearly 400 million albums worldwide and counting. He could also mean their impending residency at a purpose-built arena in London in which all four members will perform as ABBAtars—painstakingly motion-captured renderings of their circa-1978 selves—with a live band, potentially until, or beyond, the collapse of civilization. But he’s actually referring to the fact that ABBA is releasing their first album of new music in 40 years, an event that bears little historical precedent. “I constantly have those moments when I think, ‘How the hell did this all happen? Why is it that suddenly on TikTok two million people are following what we are doing?’ It\'s weird. It\'s all weird.” This unlikely occurrence started becoming more likely around 2018 when Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson wrote two songs, the cheekily self-referential “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down,” for possible inclusion in the show, and approached their former partners, singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. “We asked the ladies and they were absolutely enthusiastic about going into the studio and trying their voices again,” Ulvaeus says. “And then after a while we thought, why not record a couple more? And there was absolutely nobody breathing down our necks.” The result is *Voyage*—nine new songs and one resurrected from their original incarnation, fitting for a project that renders the very notion of the passage of time meaningless. While ABBA\'s legacy is long since assured, their ABBAtars could revolutionize the prospects for artists looking to secure career options beyond this mortal coil. “The reason why it works is that we are still alive,” Ulvaeus says. “The cranium does not change over time. The rest of your body falls apart, but the cranium, they could take exact measurements, which they cannot with a video of Elvis. I bet you there are a lot of singers who will have these in a couple years. Everyone should have an ABBAtar.” Take a chance on these stories behind the songs on *Voyage* from Ulvaeus himself. **\"I Still Have Faith in You\"** “When Benny played it to me, I thought, ‘This is really epic.’ It\'s about us and the bonds we have, about the loyalty we have to each other, and celebrating the fantastic career that we\'ve gone through. Or haven\'t gone through—there\'s a lot left of it, as it seems—but there are more layers than that today in that lyric, but that I want the listener to find out by himself.” **\"When You Danced With Me\"** “It\'s a bit Nordic, but maybe more Scottish and Irish. I lived in England for six years, between \'84 and ’90, and I used to see these fairs that they had in the villages for the children. And that\'s what I saw before me when I heard the melody: a village fair, but somewhere in Ireland. It\'s about leavers and remainers. I grew up in a small town and I left it when I was 20. But somehow I\'d come back to that little town and feel I have roots there.” **\"Little Things\"** “Benny tells me he didn\'t think of it as a Christmas song, but I, the minute I heard it, I said it cannot be anything else. It is early, early Christmas morning. The stockings are hanging right there and then this couple wakes up. This could be played for Christmases to come. And that would be great, because we want to own Christmas *and* New Year\'s Eve, like with \[1980’s\] \'Happy New Year.\'” **\"Don\'t Shut Me Down\"** “At that time we were kind of getting the hang of what the ABBAtars would be. This is about a woman who has broken up and regrets breaking up. And she is going to come back and see if the guy will take her back. So she sits on a bench in a park and it gets dark. And finally she gets the courage up to go and knock on the door. That\'s it at face value, but I see it as us, as ABBAtars, knocking on the doors of the fans: Please take us as we are now and don\'t shut us down. It\'s a little flirt with the disco of the \'70s, but other than that, I don\'t think that any of the old songs have had any impact on the new songs.” **\"Just a Notion\"** “It\'s from \'78 and it\'s never been released in its entirety before. There\'s been snippets on YouTube, but we thought it\'s a great song and it has very good vocals on it. Benny did a new backing track, so the band is new but the voices are old. And it illustrates in a way what we are doing in the ABBAtar concert in London, because we will have a live band but the original vocals.” **\"I Can Be That Woman\"** “It\'s a country song, in essence. And a little gesture to the queen of country, as far as I\'m concerned: Tammy Wynette. The good dog is called Tammy. There\'s a lot of stuff going into that song, but it\'s basically about someone who has come down from an addiction and finally come down into real life and is sorry about all the wasted years. But there\'s hope at the end of the tunnel: I can be that woman now. Only we know what is fact and what is fiction about our life experiences together. It\'s a kind of freedom that you get. With 70, you get that freedom.” **\"Keep an Eye on Dan\"** “Dan is the little child; his two parents are divorced and he is being left with one parent. All of us who have been divorced know what it\'s like to leave that little kid and seeing how absorbed that little kid is with the other parent. And he waves, or she, and you stand there and you feel, \'Argh.\' I find it interesting to explore things that happen in relationships that haven\'t been explored before. I don\'t think that this has.” **\"Bumblebee\"** “I\'ve always found bumblebees or squids as powerful symbols for what we might lose with climate change. It\'s a symbol of the loneliness we will feel when these creatures perhaps vanish because they cannot adapt.” **\"No Doubt About It\"** “I\'ve known a few people who kind of flare up and can\'t help it, but then very quickly sort of get calm again and say, \'Sorry, sorry, I shouldn\'t have done that. I shouldn\'t have said that.\' So it is this woman, in that situation she is incensed with her husband, who is very calm. He knows, he just waits for it. And in the end it comes.” **\"Ode to Freedom\"** “The concept of freedom is so intriguing and it\'s so different for different kinds of people. This song is so majestic. I could never say what my freedom is, because that would be received as, \'Oh, you can say that you are rich, you\'re famous. Da, da.\' *This* is not my ode to freedom; it\'s about how if I ever wrote one, it would be simple. I don\'t know what it would be about, but I wish someone would write one.”
The fab five reign supreme with this collection of K-pop riches.
“The connecting thread is definitely the honesty and the vulnerability,” Bebe Rexha tells Apple Music of the real talk that weaves throughout her sophomore album. “I just wanted it to be super straightforward. I just wanted to write whatever I felt like writing about, whether it came from jealousy and body love, to being done wrong and wanting to write an angry song about it, or a song about mental health, or fucking up. I just wanted to be completely honest. I just said what I wanted to say.” With *Better Mistakes*, Rexha not only doubled down on the unfiltered bravado and lung power that made her 2018 single “I’m a Mess” an instant fan favorite, but embraced every musical instinct that felt true to her. The resulting collection of songs is an eclectic mix that blends the pop-punk she embraced during her Warped Tour-playing years (“Death Row”) as enthusiastically as it does dance-floor bangers (“Sacrifice”) and grand, sweeping ballads (“Sabotage”). She assembled a crew of collaborators to round out her vision, including Travis Barker, who joins her on drums for album opener “Break My Heart Myself”; Doja Cat, whose wordplay pops on “Baby, I’m Jealous”; and Rick Ross, who tackles a tricky time signature as Rexha flips the script on her dad’s favorite song. Below, Rexha unpacks each track of *Better Mistakes*. **“Break My Heart Myself” (feat. Travis Barker)** “I was told by a doctor that I was bipolar, and my mental health is something that I\'ve struggled with. So I wanted to write a song about it, about how we can be our own worst enemies. Whether it\'s a relationship or a friend or an outsider, it\'s saying, like, \'Hey, world. I\'ve broken my heart myself with my mental health. I\'ve broken my own heart a million times and there\'s nobody else that can come and break my heart more than I already have, so don\'t even waste my time.\'” **“Sabotage”** “Some people smoke cigarettes, some people think too much, some people eat something they\'re not supposed to be eating, whether it\'s good or bad. Why do we do the things that are not good for us? That stuff comes from a place of \'Maybe I\'m not good enough. Maybe I don\'t deserve it.\' That\'s different for everybody, whether you sabotage your relationship or your diet, or you\'re smoking, whatever it may be.” **“Trust Fall”** “I don\'t really trust anybody—especially being in the industry. In life in general, we need to be careful who we trust. I started dating my boyfriend, and I just wanted a solid \'I hope I can trust you. I want to fall and I want to trust, so would you help me?\'” **“Better Mistakes”** “From Nancy Sinatra to Paramore to No Doubt to Lauryn Hill to Biggie Smalls to David Guetta and dance music, freestyle music back in the day—I love all kinds of music. And this song, I love the beat on it. I love the rhythm, and it just does something to me. And no matter what age you are or what background you come from, who you are, you\'re going to make a mistake in your life. The best we could do is make better mistakes.” **“Sacrifice”** “When you\'re in a relationship, you\'re going to have to sacrifice something. Now, I like to be really dramatic, and I like to be very visual, so I definitely took the lyrics, especially in the second verse, to a heated, intensified place. The sarcasm comes out where I say, \'I want to be the air you breathe, and I want to live in your brain, and I want to be the blood pumping in your veins.\'” **“My Dear Love” (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Trevor Daniel)** “I was just going through some rough stuff in my business and in the music industry, and with my friendships. I felt I was being taken advantage of, and I was really angry. This was kind of my anthem of being like, ‘If you think you\'re going to keep messing with me and playing these games with me, you have it all fucked up. You don\'t know me, my dear love.\' \'My dear love\' is always usually such a loving endearment term, but it\'s kind of like, \'Oh, my dear love, don\'t fuck with me no more,\' you know what I mean?” **“Die for a Man” (feat. Lil Uzi Vert)** “I was going through a breakup, and I was just kind of at the weird point where you\'re both moving on, but then you kind of go through your phase of, \'Oh my god, it\'s over!\' and crying. It\'s about not losing yourself to somebody else.” **“Baby, I’m Jealous” (feat. Doja Cat)** “We were in the studio and we started up this hook about being jealous because I was feeling jealous of other girls. And then I started talking about my love, my body, and my love/hate relationship with my body, and then seeing these perfect girls on Instagram and then being like, \'Oh, I don\'t look like that.\' I feel like a lot of people are probably ready to hear about being jealous of other females and feeling a certain way because it\'s a lot.” **“On the Go” (feat. Pink Sweat$ & Lunay)** “I\'m a big fan of Pink Sweat$ and I just love his voice, his songwriting, his vibe. I really wanted to write a song about being on the road, because I was just new in my relationship. It\'s about this concept of, whether you\'re on tour, or whether you\'re so obsessed with your phone, or whether you\'re so obsessed with your job, you\'re just going, going...we never even stop to just enjoy the moment or our significant other. It\'s like, \'I want to love you but I\'m on the go.\'” **“Death Row”** “I was just new in a relationship, brand new. And you have this obsessive phase of \'If I was on death row, you would be where I ate my last meal. You would be my last word. I know it\'s crazy to die for you, I know it\'s crazy to cry for you.\' It\'s this kind of journey of low-key how insane I could be. And I just love the guitar vibe of it. I feel it rings true to who I am.” **“Empty”** “‘Empty’ is like a ballad, it kind of has a Killers vibe to it. It goes back to the mental illness: It\'s about me feeling as if I was a glass of water, and I feel like I\'m constantly emptying myself out. Why do I do this to myself? It\'s just a song that\'s written to myself.” **“Amore” (feat. Rick Ross)** “‘Amore’ is a flip on the regular ‘\[That’s\] Amore’—the one where the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. So we flip it and we make it into more of a song where we\'re being sarcastic and saying that, to love me, love is like Versace and diamonds. And the reason why I got Rick Ross is because the time signature is really different. I grew up listening to the song, and I grew up listening to my dad sing it so badly. It\'s my dad\'s number one favorite song of all time.” **“Mama”** “This song is about our mothers trying to protect us from the world, and the relationship I had with my mom. In the song I say, ‘I sold my soul. It\'s too late for me. I don\'t care about going to heaven. Right now, I\'m just trying to get through. I\'m trying to just get through this life. And I sold my soul just like you\'ve sold your soul. I\'m just trying to get through. And we all know that you did the best you could, and even though I\'m not perfect and I have a lot of flaws, it\'s okay and you did a great job.\'”
In 2018, Dayglow (aka Sloan Struble) completed his debut album *Fuzzybrain* during his senior year of high school in Fort Worth, Texas. Recorded with minimal resources, it remained in relative obscurity for a short while—a sublime slice of bright-eyed bedroom pop that begged to be discovered. Shortly after, the singer-songwriter went on to study advertising at the University of Texas with no interest in pursuing mainstream stardom. That is, until the music video for “Can I Call You Tonight?” became a runaway crossover hit—which Struble shot on a shoestring budget using green-screen effects and has since netted hundreds of millions of YouTube streams. Naturally, it was a lot for Struble to take in. Reflecting on his rise, *Harmony House* has him dealing with the crazy changes that happened so quickly in his life. “\'Cause if you wanna keep on growing, you’ve gotta leave some things behind,” he muses on the mellow “Woah Man,” reassuring himself that letting go is okay as he calmly strums his guitar. But Struble approaches his music with a glass-half-full optimism, and as such, the album’s billowing indie pop has an airy, carefree vibe that could make even the toughest cynic smile. Whether he’s whistling his way through slick yacht rock (“Medicine”) or pivoting into Wild Nothing-recalling dream pop (“Balcony”), Struble makes even the most lovesick sentiments go down easy. But it’s his taste for ’80s soft-rock that resonates the most throughout, like on “December,” on which he contemplates wanting a fresh start along with a smooth sax solo that would make legendary session musician Phil Kenzie proud.
“I think we approach releasing music like one would approach dating someone,” The Marías frontwoman María Zardoya tells Apple Music about wanting to take it slow with their debut LP. “At the beginning of a relationship, you don\'t want to throw all your cards out there. You don\'t want to give away too much of yourself until you get to know the person.” If the double-volume *Superclean* EPs allowed the LA-based bilingual band to give us a first taste of their lush indie pop, then *CINEMA* expands on their vision with a new set of influences and experiences. Recorded in fits and starts before and during the 2020 quarantine, the album flows with a clear sense of cohesion—like watching a film where, in Zardoya\'s own words, “each song is its own individual scene in its own individual world.” Zardoya also believes her relationship with her partner and bandmate, producer/multi-instrumentalist Josh Conway, strengthens their songwriting. “Our relationship, and our love, is very karmic,” she says. “I think we complement each other in the best ways, and we\'re always pretty much on the same page about the songs and about the creative end. And if we\'re not, we embrace those differences.” Here, Zardoya and Conway take us on a cinematic journey, track by track. **“Just a Feeling”** María Zardoya: “When we came up with the title and the concept of the album, which ties back to our roots of making music together, we knew that we wanted lots of lush string arrangements. And in some of our favorite movies, you can see this motif throughout where they use the same melody, but make different arrangements of it. I just love it so much. During quarantine, we became obsessed with the soundtrack for this ’60s Italian movie called *Amore mio aiutami*. Throughout its soundtrack, there’s this theme that\'s mainly always strings, but also other instruments as well. We heard how lush one of the tracks was on that soundtrack, and that\'s how we wanted it to feel to set the tone for the album as a whole.” **“Calling U Back”** Josh Conway: “‘Calling U Back’ was the first one on *CINEMA* that, once the first idea was written, we were like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got an album coming.’” MZ: “The bark you hear in the beginning is our dog Lucy. You get this really beautiful lush string arrangement. And then, right after, you get this in-your-face dog bark followed by an in-your-face chorus hook. That was definitely very intentional. We wanted to shock the listener in a sense.” **“Hush”** MZ: “In terms of the song’s overall message, there\'s always someone with something to say about what you\'re doing or how you\'re living your life. And this was a song where it was basically telling them to just shut the fuck up and hush. It\'s like, ‘Okay, you\'ve got all these opinions, I\'m going to write a revenge song for you.’ It also has a futuristic sort of feel to it, and so we definitely leaned into that with the visuals for it as well.” **“All I Really Want Is You”** MZ: “This song was written during quarantine while we were putting the finishing touches to the album, working day in and day out on the videos and editing them at 1 or 2:00 in the morning. There was a lot going on during the time that this song was written, so we wanted to go back in time to a month or two prior where Josh and I decided to go on a little LSD journey throughout our neighborhood. We couldn\'t leave or travel in a sense—so we decided to go on a mental trip or a mental journey. We were tripping, just enjoying nature and the stars at night.” **“Hable con Ella”** MZ: “*Hable Con Ella*, or *Talk to Her*, is my all-time favorite film by Pedro Almodóvar. At this point, I think it\'s common knowledge, because he just inspires me so much and I want the world to know about him. There\'s a particular scene in the movie where Caetano Veloso is singing \'Cucurrucucú paloma.\' Obviously, that moment can never be recreated by anybody, but we wanted to recreate the feeling of that beautiful moment with the layered trumpets and this sort of mystic melody.” **“Little by Little”** MZ: “It\'s a classic Marías love song about self-reflection in a relationship and knowing that you need to change things about yourself, but not putting the pressure on yourself to change everything at once. I think it\'s just taking things slow, not putting so much pressure on yourself all at once.” **“Heavy”** JC: “We do this game sometimes where I\'ll pull up some good pictures online, from Pinterest, maybe, and I\'ll show them to María and tell her to sing a melody or anything that comes to mind when she sees it. I pulled up the picture of a woman in a desert, I believe. And María says, ‘I\'m heavy, I\'m nice-eyed.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, here we go.’ And within minutes, we had the verse and the chorus there. This one’s more about wanting to be alone and not wanting to deal with anyone or anything at all. Anyone knocking at your door, you\'re just like, ‘Just go away, let me be alone here.’” **“Un Millón”** MZ: “We approached ‘Un Millón’ like, ‘What would it sound like if The Marías made a reggaetón-inspired song?’ I grew up listening to reggaetón. In my first job ever, at 15, all I wanted to do was save enough money to go to reggaetón concerts with my brother in the VIP section. I ended up saving enough money for Don Omar and Daddy Yankee concerts. It was a huge part of my life and it’s in my blood. We had never made a reggaetón-inspired song, so we were like, ‘Let\'s just try it.’ ‘Un Millón’ happened, and then everybody wanted it on the album.” **“Spin Me Around”** MZ: “It’s definitely our psychedelic ‘what would we listen to while on acid’ song. It’s got that trippiness and waviness that we needed, because psychedelics is a huge part of our life. And we wanted our fans to experience how we feel on psychedelics.” JC: “I think it was the last song written for the album. I personally felt like it needed something a little more open and lighthearted with an indie-rock-type vibe as far as production goes. I\'m stoked that it made it onto the album, because I feel like without it, the album feels a little synth-heavy and very electronic in certain ways. It kind of took those fears of mine away.” **“The Mice Inside This Room”** MZ: “It\'s our most abstract song on the album. Conceptually, it\'s sort of about paranoia. Sometimes, even to this day, I can\'t fall asleep by myself if I don\'t have a light on or hear white noise. I hear one thing and my mind just races. Any little sound could be this mouse inside my room that\'s preventing me from sleeping and from my sanity. It could also be symbolic in how there\'s internal voices, and internal and external chatter, that get in the way from you being completely calm and being able to think clearly.” JC: “It\'s definitely our most Radiohead-inspired song. I think we\'re both very aware of that. Luckily, we didn\'t infringe on anything on it.” **“To Say Hello”** JC: “It was another late one to the album party. María probably spent a good hour and a half recording the vocals to it. I vividly remember there was a moment, about 30 minutes in, when she’s saying the entire first verse—with lyrics and a pre-chorus—and I just remember thinking, ‘This is the song right here.’ After she was done riffing, we went back and I was like, ‘Yo, did you realize that you sang the entire first verse and chorus of this song?’” MZ: “A lot of times when we riff, it\'s subconscious thoughts that need to be released. And I think this one was a subconscious release of me making the shift in moving to LA and leaving my life in Atlanta behind. So when the chorus says, ‘I belong in here,’ it\'s ‘I belong here in LA.’ This is my life, and sometimes I can call you and say hi, but I belong here in LA. It\'s kind of the duality of cities and moving.” **“Fog as a Bullet”** MZ: “This one was written at the start of 2020. I remember sitting in our apartment on a Friday. It was really foggy out on the hills. I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful. I just love when it\'s foggy in LA.’ And just how inspiring that was. And then, two days later, Kobe Bryant and his daughter passed away on the helicopter because of the lack of visibility due to that same fog. I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow, something that, just two days ago, I found so beautiful can cause so much destruction.’ I was just feeling the pain of the city and feeling sad, of being in LA and of him being such an iconic figure.” **“Talk to Her”** JC: “One night, María was reading some poetry from her little tour diary. She was reading it and all the guys in the band were there. It was about being on tour. We were all totally taken aback by it because none of us had ever heard that before.” MZ: “It was just my tour notebook, where I would write random thoughts on. I think we all share very difficult moments on that particular tour. You get to see inside our minds during that time, because I don\'t know if a lot of people know how difficult touring is for, I think, most artists. We didn\'t have a lot of money for things.” JC: “There\'s so many ups and downs. There\'s not really any middle ground. It\'s either, as Eddie \[Edward James, The Marías keyboardist\] says, ‘peaks and pits.’ The line towards the end where it says to don’t stop giving up is restorative too. It’s a call and response, like a train of thought that tells you to not stop and that it’ll be fine.”
Maroon 5 is a pop-rock band and proud of it. Here they embrace pop-rock’s versatility, collaborating with artists from a broad spectrum of sounds. Pittsburgh’s hometown hero Wiz Khalifa raps about envious scrubs who hate on his success—a stark contrast to Adam Levine’s romantic take on the idea of ringing up the object of his desire on “Payphone.” Maroon 5 also joins forces with Max Martin, Benny Blanco, and OneRepublic\'s Ryan Tedder.
depuis sa genèse accidentelle par commotion cérébrale en 2018, Fievel Is Glauque (autour du noyau de Zach Phillips & Ma Clément) s'est manifesté lors de 5 sessions intensives à Bruxelles, New York, Tournefeuille (FR) et Los Angeles au cours desquelles les 5 groupes formés de 7-8 musiciens ont joué les morceaux de 5 albums hypothétiques différents. en plus d'avoir enregistré professionellement en studio (en cours de mixage) et fait un ou deux concerts à chaque rencontre, Zach a enregistré l'intégralité des répétitions sur son enregistreur cassette mono Marantz. l'album "God's Trashmen Sent To Right the Mess" regroupe 20 de ces enregistrements. enregistré 100% live sur cassette mono; 20 morceaux en 35 minutes; masterisé par Ryan Power; pochette par Ma Clément; duplication cassette par Tapemania (Pleven, BG); cassette édition de 200 [épuisé immédiatement]
'Flock’ is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation. The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but ‘Flock’ is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk. Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is ‘The Revolution Of Super Visions’, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates ‘Flock’ and concludes on ‘Solarised’, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night. The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphosise…
Some songs find their place in the world instantly and others take a while. Joy Crookes has been hanging on to some of the tracks on her debut album, *Skin*, since she was a teenager, waiting for the right moment for them to shine. This collection paints a portrait of a young woman of 23, finding her place in the world and understanding herself through her family—for better and worse—mixed in with songs that deal with social injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement. There’s also casual sex (“I Don’t Mind”) and the winding ancestral journeys that bring a family to London (“19th Floor”), as the South Londoner, of Bangladeshi and Irish heritage, pays tribute to the people and places that made her. “Biologically, our skin is one of the strongest organs in our body, but socially and externally, in terms of our identity, it can be used against us,” Crookes tells Apple Music of the album title. “And it’s not just a racial thing; it’s who we are that is used against us.” Read on as the singer-songwriter guides us through the powerful *Skin*, track by track. **“I Don’t Mind”** “I was in a casual relationship, or a casual situation-ship, at that time, and I kind of had to let the person know that it wasn\'t going to be anything more than what it was. I played the track to him and he didn\'t really get the picture. He was like, ‘I don’t really like this one.’ When I produced it, I was listening to Kanye’s *808s & Heartbreak* and Solange. I was really interested in how sonically there\'s a lot of grit and beauty in both of their production styles, so that was the inspiration.” **“19th Floor”** “The spoken bit at the beginning is me saying goodbye to my grandma on the 19th floor of her building in London. This is what I do every time I say goodbye to her, and she always gives me that beautiful ‘Okay, I love you.’ The strings were recorded in Abbey Road in Studio Two, which is The Beatles’ room and is also where Massive Attack recorded ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ And the song is about how far my family’s come to give me the life that I have.” **“Poison”** “I wrote ‘Poison’ when I was 15. I was very angry—I think it was the angriest I\'d been in a very long time and one of the most angry points in my life. I had bought The Clash\'s box set, and there was a blank notebook in it that said ‘The future is unwritten’ on the cover. One of the lines I wrote in there was ‘You’re scared of snakes.’ I looked at that and wrote ‘Poison’ in like 10 minutes.” **“Trouble”** “It was kind of inspired by Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry.’ You know, when you love someone, you\'re so close to them, but you hurt the ones you love. The syncopation and beats in Bollywood music can sometimes kind of be reminiscent of Caribbean kind of syncopation.” **“When You Were Mine”** “I was writing a happy song but about a weird subject, as is usual with me. It\'s about my first love becoming gay after our relationship. The song is about being jealous of their love, but also celebrating the fact that my ex is who he is. The brass was inspired by \[legendary Ghanaian musician\] Ebo Taylor, who has an amazing way of making brass sound kind of drunk.” **“To Lose Someone”** “The conversation at the start of this song was recorded in a nail shop in Brixton. It was two days after my ex and I broke up, and my mum was giving me advice. There\'s a cello interlude there by \[arranger, composer, and cellist\] Amy Langley. And the song is about when you enter a relationship, you have to compromise or remove some of your baggage in order to be together. But at the same time knowing that when you do love someone, you are inevitably going to lose them at some point.” **“Unlearn You”** “There’s a line in this song: ‘Got a plate of pink cupcakes to sugarcoat the aftertaste.’ When I came out about something that happened to me to do with abuse, I was taken to a cupcake shop. The cupcakes were literally to sugarcoat the aftertaste. The scariest line is ‘I didn\'t ever wear a dress in case he thought I was asking for it.’ It’s a really difficult song to sing, not just in terms of the content, but the notes. It helped to write a song about my experiences. It gave me perspective and actually helped me heal.” **“Kingdom”** “I love post-punk music and bands like ESG and Young Marble Giants. I wrote it the day after the December 2019 election, when the Tory party were reelected. I think the whole of London was pissed off. And I was fucking pissed off. It\'s talking about my experience as someone that voted and didn\'t get the result I wanted, and what that meant for the future of our next few generations. I was fucking vexed.” **“Feet Don’t Fail Me Now”** “It\'s about a character that finds it easier to be complicit or performative in fear of actually speaking up about how they feel. And it was in light of the Black Lives Matter protests last year and the movement. I didn\'t have any answers, so I kind of just wanted to write a song that gave a little bit of the sign of the times, and also one that held myself accountable. Because I think we were all guilty of being complacent and performative because of fear, and the fear of cancel culture.” **“Wild Jasmine”** “‘Wild Jasmine’ is inspired by Tony Allen. There\'s kind of something South Asian about the way the guitar moves in that song. It’s about me telling my mom not to trust a man, or love him. Her name is Jasmine, and she is just like the plant—the plant naturally has to grow wild and it grows however it wants to. It felt like this man was not letting her do that. Are you going to accept wholefully, or wholesomely, who that person is? And it felt like he wasn’t.” **“Skin”** “This is kind of inspired by Frank Sinatra and his classic ballad-type songs. I wrote it the day after one of my friends was very much on the brink, and who felt like they weren\'t needed on this planet anymore. It was my way of telling them that they were, and that they have a life worth living—that’s literally what I said to them. And then I went in the next day. I was crying in the studio and I wrote them that song.” **“Power”** “It\'s about the abuse of power. And I think Boris Johnson is guilty of abusing power, as is Trump, as is Nigel Farage, as are all the arseholes, Priti Patel. People think it\'s a feminism song, but it\'s just about the abuse of power in general. Musically, I was inspired by Nina Simone and that kind of messiness and up-front vocal.” **“Theek Ache”** “Everyone always pronounces this wrong. ‘Theek ache’ is translated in the song; it means it’s okay. It’s a big warm hug at the end of the album after you\'ve listened to all these fucking heavy songs. I wrote it after drinking with Jodie Comer. It\'s just saying, ‘Sure, I\'m going to make mistakes, and I\'m going to be a human being, and I\'m going to make fuck-ups, and then I\'m going to go through this, that, and the other. But you know, it’s OK—I’ll have my kitten heels, cigarettes, and a mattress at the end of the night.’”
With attention spans seemingly shrinking by the day, brave is the band that’s prepared to release a sprawling 19-track double album. Oh, and did we mention it’s a concept record based on the circular nature of life? And that it’s inspired by Parcels’ experiences while writing in a forest on the east coast of Australia at the start of 2020, when catastrophic bushfires were followed weeks later by horrific floods? So far, so bold. Musically, there are elements common to *Day/Night* and the band’s self-titled 2018 debut—the Daft Punk-esque smooth funk of “Somethinggreater” and the sweeping ’70s disco-soul of “Famous” and “Free”—but *Day/Night* is also a more introspective proposition (“Thefear,” “Nightwalk”). The swooning strings that envelop much of the album add a cinematic flair, which is fitting given that the band approached the album as though they were soundtracking a movie. Whittled down from more than 150 demos, *Day* is a lighter, softer side to *Night’s* deeper, darker tones, but they combine to make an album that is bursting with ambition and creativity, life-affirming upbeat moments and inward-looking solitude.
When she debuted in 1993 with the seminal *Exile in Guyville*, Liz Phair planted her flag as indie rock’s resident acid-tongued queen. The Chicago singer-songwriter, who recorded the project as an alleged track-by-track response to The Rolling Stones’ *Exile on Main St.*, challenged the machismo of the scene with a deadpan frankness that was just as evocative as it was shocking. In the years since, Phair has lived nine lives in the music biz: She released two follow-ups (’94’s *Whip-Smart* and ’98’s *Whitechocolatespacegg*) before unleashing 2003’s self-titled LP—a step into the mainstream that many critics interpreted as an anodyne attempt at radio success and, more importantly, a betrayal of her brusque beginnings. In classic Phair fashion, of course, she had the last laugh—it was her highest-charting album to date—and what followed was a pair of records that pushed the envelope even further. It’s been 10 years since Phair released *Funstyle*, a see-what-sticks sort of adventure in experimentalism that traversed everything from Bollywood to hip-hop. In that time, she focused on raising her son while juggling live performances and scoring TV shows—until quarantine, when she felt inspired to pick up where she left. “I cannot \[emphasize\] how weird it was to work on a record in a pandemic,” she tells Apple Music. “There were so many reasons why that ended up being stranger than anyone could have possibly imagined. And in fact, it’s the same as always.” The resulting album speaks to that sentiment, marking a reunion with *Guyville* producer Brad Wood, who brings a pop sheen to a collection of songs rooted in Phair’s DIY beginnings. It’s a record that examines how relationships work, and how distance can manipulate your perceptions of longing and intimacy. Below, Phair walks us through how each song on *Soberish* conveys her view of the world today. **Spanish Doors** “Anyone who’s a fan of my music knows that I’m fascinated by ordinary moments in conversations that somehow take on greater significance in the larger scope of a person’s life—how simply one piece of information can rock your world. And I really resonated with the idea that \[my friend, whose divorce inspired the song\], was in a public place when she found out that she was no longer going to be living the life that she was accustomed to. And how jumbled your internal landscape can be when you’re dealing with denial—‘I don’t want to face this.’ Bargaining, maybe there’s a way out of this. Devastation, in the sense that everything’s going to change and there’s nothing you can do about it. The stages of grief. How can you put that into a pop song? That’s the tricky challenge.” **The Game** “I think most of my romance these days is amped up. It’s not day-to-day, it’s overly large. And sometimes I think ‘The Game’ is really talking about how much you need ordinariness and day-to-dayness in a love relationship. And as exciting as it is to have a kind of a dramatic affair, it gets old, you get tired. You don’t want to keep resurrecting it—you want it to evolve into something more subtle. I think that surprises me.” **Hey Lou** “\[Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson\] are icons to me. Independent of each other, they were huge influences early on in my life. I just loved both of their music when I was a teenager. Both were making groundbreaking, compelling art. And then, when they got together as a couple, it just seemed impossible: How can these two titans coexist in an ordinary life? And it was really an accidental inspiration that turned into a real sort of love letter to two challenging, difficult artists who, by all accounts, had a very peaceful, loving relationship. So, I’m fascinated.” **In There** “It’s like you’ve been saying no to someone for a while and when they start to lose interest because they’ve been rejected a number of times, you’re like, ‘Goddamn it. I miss them.’ And then, you have to break in with your own inability to commit or your own inability to open yourself up to someone. Because for the longest time you could just say no, and you felt like they’d keep coming. And now you are realizing that you’ve said no, and it might be you that has the problem.” **Good Side** “‘Good Side’ is my mature ‘F\*\*k and Run.’ Instead of being in a pithy funk about my hookup, I can just kind of say to myself, ‘Well, he got a pretty good impression of me. So, no harm, no foul.’” **Sheridan Road** “That inspiration came from a longtime partner that also grew up in the same area \[in Chicago\] that I did. And there’s this particular road in it, Sheridan Road, that is the main artery connecting the suburbs to downtown. And every time you want to go home or any time you want to go out, you travel on this road. So, our being together on this road in the song brings up all the different life experiences that we’ve had. And yet, we’ve walked the same walk all our lives, but his life is totally different from mine. He’s got special places and I’ve got special places. How could we have been growing up in the same place the whole time and not have been aware of each other?” **Ba Ba Ba** “I’m hooking up with someone, it’s a new romance, I’m very excited about it. And in the space of a single song, it starts and is already over before it even began. I think of it as a boomerang song, because where you think it’s going and the person you think I am at the beginning of the song is sort of my ambassador self, the more appealing broadly to mainstream people, like, ‘I’m happy. Yay. Woo.’ And then, by the end of the song, I’m back to my usual self and the relationship is already over.” **Soberish** “I feel like we’re all doing the best we can right now. I feel like we, as a country, have gone through a time period that was very dark and difficult and an existential threat, so to speak. So, a lot of people felt the need to stay connected with reality without actually being entirely sober. How much of reality can I stand to absorb and how much do I need to push away from me and keep myself insulated from? ‘Soberish’ is just a more romantic and innocent way to look at that. I used to be the kind of person that could do this sober, but right now I need a shot.” **Soul Sucker** “You know when, if on a certain night, you have a hookup with someone and you like that person and it was perfectly fine, but it was just, like, that night. And then you keep running into them in your real world, and maybe they weren’t the person that you would be most excited for people to see that you hooked up with. You’re in your more elegant persona, and then here comes your hookup from back in the day. And you’re like, ‘I don’t know who this is. I don’t know.’ Like that.” **Lonely Street** “That is a very modern love song, because it sort of speaks to, yes, we can be connected by a screen, but what I really need is for you to be lying next to me, whispering in my ear. And there’s a sense of sadness in the relationship, but also a sense of isolation that we get by in our modern world with a substitute for what we really need, which is actual intimacy.” **Dosage** “I think of it as a modern-day ‘Polyester Bride’ in that I wrote it with the idea of going back to that bar, where Henry the bartender gave me all that good advice when I was young, and coming back as an older woman and seeing a young woman who is basically in the position I used to be in. So, I’m now looking at myself in the younger person who’s wasted, giving her advice, but also saying, ‘By the way, you’re doing fine. Nobody has it all together. Even now, at my age, none of those decisions were even the impactful ones.’” **Bad Kitty** “‘Bad Kitty’ is just embracing the mess that is my life. It’s an ongoing theme I have that I will always be out of place no matter where I go or who I try to be. And the manifestos that people think that I have, or that I have the answers, I really don’t. At the end, it’s the poem of just no helmet, no brake, no net, no rope, no more cocaine. You don’t really believe that I’m never going to do those things, do you? That’s really a kind of a throwing your hands up: I am a bad kitty. To this world, that’s how I am perceived. That’s how I identify myself as. It’s not such a bad thing, really—I get nine more lives. But at the same time, it doesn’t all make sense. It’s my emotional state and that’s how I make art. And it doesn’t always have to make sense. One thing does not have to be like, ‘Now I will never do this, and now I will do this.’” **Rain Scene** “I was here in my house, and I had bought a 3D microphone thing that I can put on my ears that will record surround sound of whatever space I’m in. And I knew I wanted the approaching storm of ‘Sheridan Road’ to break. I wanted the storm to actually release at the end of the album. So, this unexpected rain happened here in Southern California, and I just practically threw clothes on and threw this thing on. And I was, like, yelling to my son, ‘I’m going out in the rain! I’m going to record the rain!’ And I just stomped up and down the street around my house, recording puddles and me splashing in puddles. And I had Brad edit it in such a way that it took on a flavor of synthesizer of manipulated sounds at the end, and then I wrote a little song about it.”
Hannah Reid wasn’t in a great place when London Grammar began working on their third album towards the end of 2017. Over the previous year, the release of the trio’s second LP, *Truth Is a Beautiful Thing*, and subsequent tour had thrown up experiences that fostered her disillusionment with the music industry—not least the sexism she regularly encountered. The singer/multi-instrumentalist was also living with the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia. But it was precisely because of this low that Reid could forge a path towards *Californian Soil*. Lacking the energy to keep considering external opinions and expectations, she focused on what *she* wanted to express as a songwriter—and saying it more explicitly than before. “It was so liberating,” she tells Apple Music. “I was like, ‘Even if this album is never released, or I decide that I can’t do this anymore, I may as well say whatever it is that I want to say.’ In doing that, I felt a lot of strength come back to me as a person.” That unfettered attitude carried over into making the music. Jam sessions with bandmates Dan Rothman and Dot Major birthed the trio’s richest and most adventurous album to date, stretching from the neon-lit pop of “How Does It Feel” to the spartan ballad “America.” In between, collaborating with house maestro George FitzGerald brings dance-tent sparkle to “Baby It’s You” and “Lose Your Head.” “We did things where we were, ‘We’re going to make something that the world is never going to hear. Let’s just do it for us,’” says Reid. “Just messing about—which has made it different.” Here, she takes us though the experience, track by track. **“Intro”** “That string part had been floating about for a while. I wanted it to be a strong introduction to the album, and it’s also the antithesis of ‘Californian Soil’ in some ways. I loved the fact that there was the intro then it went straight into that beat and guitar part \[on ‘Californian Soil’\]. That is what I wanted for the album as a whole—that juxtaposition.” **“Californian Soil”** “Dan’s guitar part is so different. There’s a different kind of energy going on. It was like we had nothing left to lose. Nature and landscape have quite a lot of importance to me in terms of my writing. This is not a comment so much on California, but it was meant to be about something really, really beautiful, a landscape or a place. But then my lyrics are quite dark. I guess that’s what I wanted to say throughout the whole album, and it starts with ‘Californian Soil.’” **“Missing”** “We wrote this song but I was doing spoken word over the top. That did not make the record because it was just ridiculous. But then we took it and then made something a bit more in the world of London Grammar.” **“Lose Your Head”** “It touches upon emotionally manipulative relationships and toxicity. I know men do experience this as well, but I was speaking about it from a female point of view. All my girlfriends, really, have experienced that kind of thing at some point. Sometimes I’ll write a song that is actually about a story that somebody else is telling me, a friend perhaps, and that’s what this song is about.” **“Lord It’s a Feeling”** “It was the same thing \[manipulative relationships and toxicity\]—I think what affected me so much in my twenties, and my personal experience of the music industry. It’s a bit of a fuck-you song. And I do swear in it, which people will not be expecting from a nice, very middle-class lady. But it just came out and I was like, ‘On the second album I would have really second-guessed myself.’ You have to make yourself vulnerable to do that, but the payback is greater, because if you make something that other people listen to and connect with, it’s like you’ve actually done something for somebody else, rather than just write a song for yourself.” **“How Does It Feel”** “This is the most different for London Grammar, I think. It’s much more poppy. I was encouraged to do a writing session with Steve Mac \[a co-writer with Ed Sheeran, Louis Tomlinson, and Sigrid\], and I was a bit nervous about it. But I was like, ‘I’m going to do it because this record is all about experimentation.’ He was such a breath of fresh air. The lyrics are still kind of dark, but I love the fact that it’s upbeat. I hope people can one day sing along with it at a festival. It’s the mixture of being happy and sad at the same time.” **“Baby It’s You”** “This was one the boys wrote together. I turned up at the studio and they’d made this amazing piece of music. Listening to it, I was just like, ‘Ah, I\'m just at a festival.’ It gave me such a feeling of being in love, newly in love, and stuff like that. The lyrics came out quite naturally.” **“Call Your Friends”** “I had that chorus for a long time. Again, it went through a few different versions. It’s one that I go back to again and again. I’m not sure if we ever got that song quite right. It is about being in love and finding yourself in that.” **“All My Love”** “I’d written this on the piano and then we produced together as a band. This is maybe the most powerful song on the album. It does still have a bit of darkness in there, but it is, again, about falling in love. The amazing guitar part at the end is one of my favorite things that Dan’s ever done. It has so much emotion to it. It’s like the guitar is another voice—he takes over and sings the rest of the song. Then the atmospherics and all the additional production that Dot did just was so sympathetic to the mood.” **“Talking”** “Dot wrote the piano part, not even in five minutes but almost instantaneously, quite a long time ago. It was floating around on the second album process, and I loved it so much. But nobody else was really that keen. External influences made us lose confidence in it, and when I went back and listened to the demo, I was like, ‘This is amazing. What is wrong with us? We’re going to make it work this time.’ It reminds me of the first album. Our music’s moved on, but I’m so glad we have these moments that remind me of that time too.” **“I Need the Night”** “I wouldn\'t really even know what genre to put it in—and that is, I hope, the good thing about where our music has moved on to. Similarly to ‘Californian Soil,’ it was a loop that Dan had, of a beat and a guitar part. Together as a band, we built around that loop. It has a slight Americana darkness to it.” **“America”** “To be honest, I don’t really know where it came from. It was one of the first ones that I wrote. I wrote it at my piano, and I was very emotional. It just came out, all the lyrics just came out. Now that I’m being asked about that song again, I’m like, ‘What was that song about?’ I guess it is about loads of different things. It means a lot to me. \[The cricket noises at the start are\] so emotive, because everyone has experienced that, when you’re outside in a beautiful place and there are crickets singing to you.”
Written after the birth of her first child (and just before the arrival of her second), *Colourgrade* finds London’s Tirzah Mastin taking a more experimental approach, wrapping moments of unadorned beauty in sheets of distortion, noise, woozy synthesizers, and listing guitars. It’s decidedly lo-fi—not the sort of album that actively invites you in. And yet, like its predecessor—her acclaimed 2018 debut LP, *Devotion*—this is naturally intimate music, alt-R&B that offers brief meditations on the coming together of both bodies (“Tectonic”) and collaborators (“Hive Mind,” which, in addition to seal-like background effects, features vocals from touring bandmate and South London artist Coby Sey). Working again alongside longtime friend and collaborator Mica Levi, Mastin sounds free here, at ease even as she obfuscates. On “Beating,” as she sings to her partner over a skittering drum machine and a layer of gaseous hiss, she stops for a moment to clear her throat, as if in quiet conversation late at night. “You got me/I got you,” she sings. “We made life/It’s beating.”
“I’m not trying to reinvent myself,” Mike Milosh tells Apple Music. “I’m furthering my sound.” The Los Angeles singer/producer who heads up the electro-R&B project Rhye has, after three albums, a well-established aesthetic: ethereal, sumptuous soft-pop with gentle grooves and minimal production. On his contemplative fourth project, he applies these now signature characteristics to meditations on the idea of home. The album was largely inspired by Milosh’s recent move to Los Angeles’ bucolic Topanga Canyon. “I bought this home at the top of a mountain and I was very intentional about it,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted a sacred, creative space.” He turned one of the property’s structures into a customized home studio, which he describes as “deeply analog,” and played with ways to refine his sound. “The space is set up ergonomically in a way where I can turn on all the synthesizers, their designated preamps and compressors, and float between any keyboard quickly without a lot of plugging or unplugging,” he says. “I like to have creative explosions when I’m writing, and this facilitates that immensely.” Unlike his past records, *Home* doesn’t have any midi or digital samples. Says Milosh: “Everything you hear, I created from scratch.” Read on as he takes us inside three key tracks. **Holy** “I always have musicians supporting me on my tracks, but ‘Holy’ is unique in that there\'s a 50-piece choir—the National Danish Girls\' Choir. Ben, a keyboardist who toured with me for about five years, was with me when I did the first concert with the Girls\' Choir in Copenhagen. We both felt so moved by them. I remember he was playing organ a lot at that concert, and there were moments when I’d look over at him and he was literally crying. The sheer beauty of the sound of the choir was overwhelming. That\'s when I decided I needed to have them on a record. They were game, and I always assumed I’d record them at their studio in Denmark. But it happened that they flew to Santa Barbara for a concert and were able to spend an entire day with me at the studio. This was right before the pandemic, and they did ‘Holy’ in one take. Ben and I were sitting in the control room mystified that it could happen that quickly, that perfectly. It was utter joy.” **Black Rain** “This weird thing happens to me where I write things that then become true. It\'s actually why I\'m careful to not write anything very dark or angry. When I wrote ‘Black Rain,’ I didn\'t understand what it was; I had come up with these stream-of-consciousness lyrics and rolled with it. But pretty soon after, the California wildfires started hitting and there was one day where it rained black soot all over my driveway. It was black rain. This really creepy, ominous feeling came over me at first, but I reminded myself that the song is about not letting anything get you down, about dancing your way through it. It’s also, more literally, about not ignoring the problems we’re causing. I don’t want there to be an ingenuity gap between our environmental damage and environmental cleanup. I want us to acknowledge it all, but to have fun while we do it. Life is beautiful, joyous, and precious. Let’s make positive, conscientious decisions.” **Sweetest Revenge** “‘Sweetest Revenge’ may sound like a mean song, but it’s about the realization that the best answer to negative energy is living a good life. If someone enters your life who doesn’t have good intentions or says something to get you down, the best thing that you can do is say, ‘I\'m not going to let that in. I\'m just going to enjoy my life.’ I’ve never been an overly emotional person; I’m the kind of guy who laughs when things get awkward or intense. Maybe that’s a way of coping, but it’s also about my outlook. I refuse to believe that anything I encounter is really that stressful or hard. I get to make music for a living. There\'s nothing stressful about that. Shooting a music video is not stressful. It\'s fun. Mixing records is fun. So I try to apply that mentality to the way I live. I believe that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and we train our minds how to deal with every scenario. On tour, you realize quickly that if you get stressed out when things go wrong, it infects everything. You’re better off laughing about it.”
“Tony called me right after *Cheek to Cheek* came out and had gone No. 1,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music, explaining the decision to follow up their successful duet album of Great American Songbook covers with an LP devoted solely to the music of Cole Porter. “He said, ‘I want to make this record with you, and it will be all Cole Porter songs,’ and I just thought it was a brilliant idea.” Gaga and Bennett breathe new life into some of Porter’s most timeless classics—“You’re the Top,” “Night and Day,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and of course the heartbreaking title track. Gaga takes a solo turn on “Do I Love You,” and as she tells it, Bennett provided her with the confidence to approach the recording booth alone: “Tony gave me the inspiration and permission to hold court in the studio again,” she says. “He reminded me that I am the artist.” But the real magic happens when the two come together. “I know he’s 95 years old, but I see a young boy every time I sing with him,” Gaga dotes. “It makes the experience so freeing to have two souls singing together.”
When Heather Baron-Gracie looks back at Pale Waves’ 2018 debut album, *My Mind Makes Noises*, the singer and guitarist feels like it was a period when she didn’t really know herself at all. The Manchester four-piece achieved breakthrough success with their coming-of-age anthems and jubilant, ’80s-influenced synth-pop, but behind closed doors, the group’s leader was going through an internal struggle. “I was still growing up at that point,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “I was 23 years old, but I felt a lot younger when it comes to maturity.” It’s led to the sense of self-discovery that runs right through Pale Waves’ exhilarating second record *Who Am I?*. Produced by Muse and Biffy Clyro collaborator Rich Costey, it mixes alt-rock dynamism with razor-sharp pop hooks and marks a huge leap forward for the quartet. These are songs that tackle personal, intimate topics in a universal way, their themes taking in sexuality, society, sexism, mental health, and love. “I wanted it to connect with people,” explains Baron-Gracie. “I wanted it to bring them understanding and comfort, be a piece of music that will be timeless to them.” Heather Baron-Gracie has put every inch of her soul into *Who Am I?*. Here she guides us through it, track by track. **Change** “I didn’t really know this was going to be the opener at all, but most people around me in my life did, and I felt like, ‘OK, maybe I should listen to other people for once.’ I had the majority of the album written and I realized I didn’t have a song about heartbreak. Personally, I feel like I’ve never truly been completely heartbroken, so I channeled two emotions. I channeled frustration from my life and being disappointed and frustrated with people in general and having high expectations of them and them never delivering. Then I spoke to people in my life about their experiences of being heartbroken. I combined the two and that’s how it came about.” **Fall to Pieces** “At the start of the relationship I’m in, my mental health was really all over the place and I was having a tough time with a lot of things in my life, and I was sort of putting my partner through it. Luckily, they’re amazing and they stuck by me and they pulled me through it. But it had an impact on our relationship. I created this argument and we went through it again and again, because at the time I wasn’t completely stable. Anything that troubles me, I feel like I need to get out.” **She’s My Religion** “I’ve been open about my sexuality for a while, but I’ve never put it into a song. I wanted to do it justice and I needed someone to write about. I didn’t want to just write a song that said ’I like girls’ or something. It’s basically me saying, ‘To love someone entirely, you have to love every inch of them and take the bad side, take the darkness to them.’ So the chorus may say, ‘She’s cold, she’s dark, she’s cynical’—well, for me, you have to love every single part, and I do for my partner.” **Easy** “It’s just a feel-good little song. I feel like love is the most universal and most powerful emotion we experience. Love can drive you to do crazy things. It’s about how euphoric and uplifting love made me feel. I wanted to put that into a form of a song because I wanted people to experience that if they haven’t already. I just wanted to talk about how good love can be when it’s right.” **Wish U Were Here** “We finished the album and I had 10 songs on there. And then Rich Costey said, ‘Oh, we have some extra time in the studio if you want to try and do another song.’ So I did ‘Wish U Were Here.’ It was half-written at that point. I’m really grateful that it’s on the album because it is my favorite now—maybe because I knew it wasn’t going to go on there. It was fate that it was meant to be on this album, and for me there’s something so raw to this song in comparison to anything. I said to Rich, ‘I want it to sound like I’ve recorded this in my bedroom,’ and I think we captured an element to that.” **Tomorrow** “‘Tomorrow’ is the first song I wrote for the album. It paved the way for this record, and I wanted a song that was there for fans, because I see a lot of our fans online and they struggle with mental health or they struggle with their sexuality. Life is tough. Life is hard. So I wanted a song that represented strength, and sometimes you do need that voice to give you the strength to persevere through whatever you’re going through. You do need someone to say, ‘Carry on going because you are loved.’” **You Don’t Own Me** “This is a really powerful song. It’s so tough trying to summarize what it’s like to be a woman in this world within three minutes and whatever, but it was a subject that was really important to me. I feel as women we’ve come a long way over the years, but there’s still not complete equality and this is still a journey that we have to go on.” **I Just Needed You** “This is me realizing that I realigned a lot of my priorities within this last year and a half. I look at social media and society and the conversations that I’ve had with people and realize that sometimes we get it so wrong in life. The Ferrari is not going to buy us long-term happiness—we can get caught up in the materialistic things as people. You have to find happiness within, you have to learn to love yourself, you have to find the right sort of people that love you for who you truly are.” **Odd Ones Out** “‘Odd Ones Out’ is me watching a lot of people’s relationships fall apart. I find it really interesting how a couple can be so obsessed with each other and then, a few months later, they hate each other and go from knowing everything about each other to complete strangers. This song is me saying, ‘Hey, I want to be the odd ones out. I don’t want to fall into that pattern. Can we please be different, because I don’t want to ever become that. And I will always fight for us.’” **Run To** “This is a letter that I would write to my mum. It’s basically me saying, ‘Hey, I know you worry, you probably worry too much, but I am OK. Life can be hard, but I know that you’re always there for me and I know that that love as a mother that you give to me as a daughter will never die and I can always come to you for anything and I appreciate that. But you don’t need to worry about me 24/7.’ I wanted it to be like a really thrashy song, a bit messy. It doesn’t sound perfect. I wanted it to sound real and quite rough around the edges.” **Who Am I?** “This came at the very end. We’d started recording the album and then we took a break and went on tour. I didn’t have the album title at that time. Whilst you’re on tour, you really need to get away from that environment and go on a walk by yourself. I’ve learned that now, but I didn’t at the time, and on this one particular day, I just felt super low and upset. So I took my guitar to the bathroom and wrote ‘Who Am I?’ Within an hour and a half, it was done. It summarized the album completely. The album is all about emotional growth and finding your way in life and finding what makes you truly happy. I knew it had to be the album title and I knew it had to be the closing act.”
The thing about FINNEAS’ full-length debut is that it doesn’t feel like a debut at all: As longtime producer and co-writer to his sister, Billie Eilish, he’s had a hand in shaping some of the most popular and influential music of the new century—and winning, in the space of a few years, more Grammys than he could hold at one time. But few producers have successfully made the leap to solo careers—Kanye and Pharrell among them—and fewer still have done it after such a seismic first impression. Marking the first time we’ve really heard the LA native entirely on his own, singing his own songs, *Optimist* functions as a kind of formal reintroduction. “It’s very hard to prioritize your own music, because it\'s more excusable to let yourself down than to let other artists down,” he tells Apple Music. “The biggest challenge in making an album for myself is having to actually always look inward and be like, ‘Is this how I want it to sound?’ I\'m not trying to please anybody with it except myself.” It opens with the sound of applause and “A Concert Six Months From Now,” a straight-ahead strummer that erupts—briefly, like a controlled explosion—into a lovesick rock anthem that doubles as a tribute to the magic of an evening spent at the Hollywood Bowl. On “The 90s,” he sends a simple but elegant synth-pop tune into a series of festival-ready spasms, suggesting that, in longing for the now distant past (or fretting over a future apocalypse), we’re watching the present pass us by. Both songs have a sense of scale and dramatic timing that checks out for any artist who’s already helped engineer a massive mainstream response or started branching out into scoring films. But like much of *Optimist*—and Eilish’s *Happier Than Ever*, which he finished work on months earlier—they’re also ballads at heart, with a natural emphasis on intimacy and quiet. About what you’d expect from a singer-songwriter working in lockdown. “When I listen back to it now,” he says, “I was writing a very introspective album. And I think that’s what a year of sitting at home and thinking will do to you.” He can be angry (“The Kids Are All Dying”) and self-aware (“Happy Now?”), contemplative (“Peaches Etude”) and scared (“Love Is Pain”), capable of channeling the melodic smarts of Chris Martin (“What They’ll Say About Us”) and the ambient dread of Trent Reznor (“Around My Neck”) in the span of a few minutes. Above all, he offers a deep appreciation for living right now, free from the news or spiraling social media feeds. “I think, sometimes, when stuff is finished and sits on a shelf for a while, you look up at it and you’re like, ‘I don’t know how well that’s aging,’” he says of his work. “When I listen, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is how I was feeling and this is how I’ve felt my whole life about certain things.’ I think this album is honest enough that it doesn’t really matter how it ages because it’s how I feel.”
Once John Mayer mapped out the concept and the songs for *Sob Rock*, his first studio album since 2017’s *The Search for Everything*, he promised himself he was going to stick by it. “This is the record where I had 10 songs locked,” John Mayer tells Apple Music. “My record before suffered because the door was open to it the whole time—new songs would come in, old songs would go out. And so it became ‘This is my script, this is my movie.’ We\'re not going to write a different scene from a different movie.” For the veteran singer-songwriter, that meant immersing himself in the sound of the ’80s—aiming to synthesize a piece of work that feels true to the era while injecting his own flair. Mayer cozies up to mellow, easygoing blue-eyed soul that oozes with nostalgia at every turn—from his serious, Don Henley-like posture on the album cover to bringing in session musician par excellence Greg Phillinganes (known for his work with Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Toto) to play keys. As always, his songs serve up a meticulously tidy mix of smooth pop with bluesy accents—though this time around, he does so in a more subdued manner. Romantic ballads like “Shouldn’t Matter but It Does” and “Why You No Love Me” ease in with snare drum taps and weeping guitars, as Mayer tries to mend his broken heart. He lets a little looser on “Last Train Home,” stamping in vintage sonic pleasantries like gated drums and slow synth swells as he wonders if his time to settle down in a long-term relationship is running out. It’s a thought that Mayer’s been circling back to more now that he’s in his forties, especially on “Why You No Love Me,” on which he reconsiders how to ask this no-win question. “I have spoken those words for a long time in relationships,” Mayer says. “Maybe it takes 43 years to ask that question, but you still ask it in the language of a child? I\'ve never written more brutal lyrics in my life.” Even if Mayer embraces these sounds with his usually slick, demure manner, he was keen on making sure that the album wasn’t too sentimental or overly dramatic. “This is the whole *Sob Rock* game—get sweet, but never sappy,” he says. “It’s demonstratively sweet and luscious, and melodic and colorful, but it\'s never to the point where it gets cloying and syrupy. I like to teeter on that line.”
