In August of 2018, Helado Negro mastermind Roberto Carlos Lange found himself in Berlin, collaborating and performing with more than 150 other artists as part of the PEOPLE festival, a weeklong artist residency founded by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner. Afterward, on his way home to New York, he spotted multi-instrumentalist and new age pioneer Laraaji seated nearby at the airport. “I don\'t like bugging people like that in public spaces,” Lange tells Apple Music, “but I did it. And then, as I was telling him what we’d been up to in Berlin, he was like, ‘Oh, wow. Far in.’” That expression stayed with him—so much so that it became a title and kind of unifying principle for his full-length follow-up to 2019 breakthrough *This Is How You Smile*. A reaction to what he calls the “implied grooves” of his previous work, *Far In* finds him moving away from the ethereal towards arrangements whose drums and bass are noticeably “present” throughout. Written in Brooklyn and Marfa, Texas—during a stay extended by the pandemic’s first lockdown—it’s a bilingual set of moody, psychedelic folk and pop that even at its dreamiest has a strong sense of place, whether he’s conjuring the fragrant citrus groves of his native South Florida or the spiritual expanse of a desert vista. “What I\'ve tried to do—and I think what I\'ve always tried to do—is make sure each song is its own world,” he says. “*Far In* was the best way for me to describe it, the way for me to talk about how I wanted to express a lot of different places and sounds that I know how to get to, but I maybe haven\'t shared before. I had to just look further in.” Here, he walks us through a number of the album’s songs. **“Wake Up Tomorrow” (feat. Kacy Hill)** “There\'s something about it that is a complete mystery. It feels like it\'s a doorway or it\'s just some kind of path somewhere out in some overgrown, shrubby path that\'s leading you somewhere, to some light. I think a lot of it has to do with Kacy\'s vocals on it, this humming melody that she does. It\'s just haunting.” **“Gemini and Leo”** “I\'m a Leo, my wife is a Gemini. I was working on this really funny loop that I wasn\'t sure was going to go anywhere. And then, the melody just clicked. A lot of times I shape the lyrics phonetically, in terms of trying to find what melodies attach. I don’t know why I was just thinking about us, but ‘her and I’—that was the hook. And then I was like, ‘Shit. Now I’ve got to make a song around this. Let\'s find a way to design a little story that talks about this relationship.’” **“There Must Be a Song Like You”** “There\'s different ways to look at it, and I think one of them is looking at somebody that you don\'t necessarily see eye-to-eye with. But another thing that I was thinking about was, how do you define this person, or how do you define this thing, because ‘you’ doesn\'t really have to be a person. ‘You’ could be you confronting a feeling, trying to describe what that feeling is, and maybe the only place you can find it is in the song.” **“Hometown Dream”** “It was one of the first songs I wrote when I got back to Brooklyn from Marfa, and a lot of those songs were responding to being forced into living somewhere else for six months, and really realizing that the world is beautiful everywhere. In a way, the idea of a hometown is just a dream. This idea of being a native anything. I think it\'s just a fantasy, more than anything, and that\'s kind of the feeling that I\'m trying to convey with this.” **“Outside the Outside”** “That breakdown was a moment of inspiration. I was using this synth that I was really getting into, the OP-Z. And that moment in the song, it\'s one of those happy accidents, where I didn\'t extend some edits and everything had dropped out except for the synth and I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ It kind of pushed the whole theme of being outside the outside. It\'s almost like the further outside the outside you are, you\'re going far in. Not to put the joke on it, but it\'s true.” **“Brown Fluorescence”** “It\'s an interlude. It\'s a song, too. It’s a field recording I made, of some voices that I was able to record. They’re all chopped up and processed, but there was a glow about it. When I talk about music, it\'s more in colors and shapes and textures. It has nothing to do with synesthesia or anything like that—it’s a vocabulary I use because I didn\'t go to music school or anything. So there was something about this idea of something having a brown fluorescence, and that was the feeling I got when I was making that song. It was like this funny glow, something that was not like a fluorescent light, but almost like if there was a brown rock that was fluorescent and you just found it in nature.” **“Wind Conversation”** “The theme—which is a thread that runs through the whole album—was kind of this feeling towards climate change, towards the earth, being spiritually moved by being in Marfa. I had never really experienced the desert before. But the song’s also going deeper into thinking about not so much impending doom, but impending changes that are going to cause a lot of hardships. It takes place under this tree that my wife Kristi and I would go to sometimes, to have lunch under in this park, essentially, surrounded by the desert. It was just us, laying back, looking out to the cliffs, daydreaming.” **“Thank You For Ever”** “It\'s another play on this idea—it’s not \'thank you forever,\' it\'s \'thank you forever, dot, dot, dot.\' And I think that\'s kind of what the song is about, this expansiveness. I think that\'s the first song I\'ve ever written that really feels like the desert. That one was a dream. I just woke up, went to the studio, and it kind of just ignited out of me. It all happened in one day, in one sitting.” **“La Naranja”** “‘Naranja’ means orange, and it\'s kind of like a cousin to another song on the record, ‘Agosto.’ It’s this abstract idea, thinking about how there used to be all these orange trees around me growing up in South Florida. It was something that we would experience in a life cycle: There would be the blossoms and then there would be the oranges and then the oranges would hit the ground and then they\'d be rotting and then it would stink. There was this abundance, and then it was gone—they cut down all the trees. It’s about this era that we\'ve grown up in, how we\'ve had access to everything, and knowing that it\'s not going to last forever. ‘You and I can stop time. You and I can save the world together’: That\'s what the song says in Spanish.” **“Telescope” (feat. Benamin)** “It\'s a song that I wrote for my mom, this idea of how we\'re Zooming or FaceTiming, but how it’s been like a telescope. You\'re only seeing this person through this way of seeing, and it just doesn\'t feel tangible. It doesn\'t feel like the person you know. You\'re seeing this person as if you\'re reading about them in a book or something.”
Launched in July 2020, the *Dial-A-Stave* podcast revealed that UK sisters Emily, Jessica, and Camilla Staveley-Taylor can mine entertaining conversation from all manner of lockdown mundanities, asking how many baked potatoes is enough for one sitting and whether you should say “edgeways” or “edgewise.” Arriving six months later, the trio’s third album finds them refocusing on the big questions, processing grief, motherhood, and self-actualization on their most adventurous songs to date. While their harmonies remain warm and pure, and the melodies elegant and adhesive, there’s new abstraction to the music, building on the rangy ambitions of 2015’s *If I Was*. “Best Friend” bubbles with psych-pop impulses, “Careful, Kid” digs through relationship wreckage with an industrial churn, and the gauzy, shifting “Trying” suggests the influence of *If I Was* producer Justin Vernon.
When Leon Bridges set out to make his third album, he wanted it to be different this time around. “We felt like the only way to unlock a unique sound was to create this immersive experience and find a place that was aesthetically inspiring,” he tells Apple Music. He landed on Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood, a three-in-one bar, hotel, and recording studio that allowed the Texas-bred singer to tap into his sound the way he hears it in his head, free from the expectations of others. “It definitely felt the most liberating to me,” he says of the process. “I was just able to be myself and let go of any inhibitions and create without any boundaries.” The songs born of those sessions—produced by Ricky Reed and Nate Mercereau—became *Gold-Diggers Sound* and some of Bridges’ most refined work. He rose to fame through his ’50s and ’60s soul stylings, but the R&B contained within this album situates its nostalgia in a more modern context, bridging ’80s and ’90s R&B with lush, jazz-inspired live instrumentation. His writing coupled with his voice has long been the centerpiece, but hearing both in this context is to experience them anew. “When you look at *Gold-Diggers Sound*, a lot of these songs were derived from improvisational jams,” Bridges says. “Back to the basics of musicians in a room and creating music from the ground up.” Here he walks through each song on the album. **“Born Again”** “‘Born Again’ is a song that transpired out of the pandemic. Pretty much everything on *Gold-Diggers Sound* was born within the Gold-Diggers space, but this is one that happened after the fact. Basically, Ricky Reed was doing this livestream series where he would produce a song live. He sent me an instrumental, and he wanted me to write something to it and send it in the next day, so I was stressing out like crazy because I just couldn\'t think of what to write about. I woke up that morning and the song came to me. I wanted to make it parallel to the concept of spiritual newness within a gospel context or within the Bible, but I take that concept and just talk about how I felt during the pandemic and how the pandemic was very healing for me. I felt like this song was a great opener for the album, and it totally sets the mood.” **“Motorbike”** “The instrumental of ‘Motorbike’ was already something that my friend Nate Mercereau was working on, and it resonated with me, and everyone else during the session just kind of slept on it. I went out to Puerto Rico for my 30th birthday, and I was able to spend that time with some of my best friends, and there was just so much camaraderie and love in that moment. I wanted to take that feeling of just living in the moment and escaping with someone you love, and so that\'s kind of what \'Motorbike\' is.” **“Steam”** “This is almost reminiscent of a Talking Heads kind of thing. \'Steam\' is one of the first songs that we worked on for this album. It\'s like a vibe of being at the party and the party gets cut short, and you want to prolong the hang, and so the best thing to do is just bring it on back to the hotel for the after-party.” **“Why Don’t You Touch Me”** “Shout-out to the undefeated, badass songwriter Kaydence. This was a tune that we worked on remotely during the pandemic and just felt like it was a cool angle to write about love diminishing in a relationship from a man\'s perspective. And just the crippling feeling of being physically close to someone but emotionally distant. It\'s an angle that you don\'t really hear often from a man\'s perspective, and so that\'s kind of the inspiration behind that.” **“Magnolias”** “I immediately was pigeonholed after my first album, and the more I continue to create, I want to be honest about the music that inspires me. I love the juxtaposition of that beautiful acoustic guitar with the more trap, modern R&B thing. My mother always used to encourage me to write a song about this magnolia tree that was in her backyard. And so I kind of took that and shaped the lyrics around it. In my head, as far as the chorus, it felt like this is how Sade would sing it in terms of that melody. That probably doesn\'t make sense, but it made sense in my head at the time.” **“Gold-Diggers (Junior’s Fanfare)”** “Shout-out to Ricky Reed for curating some really awesome horn players. I mean, you got Josh Johnson and Keyon Harrold, and with the inception of this album, I wanted to do a progressive sound but also keep it rooted with some organic elements. And so I felt it was important to have jazz interwoven throughout all of this album. It\'s a really awesome interlude, and it\'s something that you don\'t really hear a lot within the R&B space.” **“Details”** “‘Details’ is about learning to appreciate the small things. It\'s the little details that paint the big picture.” **“Sho Nuff”** “For ‘Sho Nuff,’ I wanted to take a page out of Houston culture. I love when you look at artists like UGK—I love the fact that those guys incorporated soul music within their songs. And so that guitar part is definitely reminiscent of that. I wanted to have this very minimalistic, soulful guitar and juxtapose that with a sexy vibe.” **“Sweeter”** “Throughout my career, I\'ve always been scrutinized for not making political music, and I\'ve kind of sat with that for a long time. I just didn\'t want to half-ass it. So this is a moment where Terrace Martin jumped off a session with these crazy chords. And for me, the chords or whatever\'s happening in the music always dictates what the song is about. As soon as he started playing that, I knew immediately this was the moment for \'Sweeter.\' We wrote this prior to the situation of George Floyd, but it\'s reflective of the perpetual narrative of Black men dying at the hands of police. We had been sitting on this song for a while, and I was planning to release a tune with my friend Lucky Daye and we kind of put that on the back burner. But after George Floyd, I was totally compelled to just put this out in the world in hopes it would serve as the beacon of light and hope.” **“Don’t Worry”** “‘Don\'t Worry’ is kind of a stream of thoughts to myself, reminiscing about a past lover and who she\'s currently with. Shout-out to my friend Ink, who is the singer-songwriter from Atlanta, and she embodies this country-hood type of vibe. Her energy is so infectious. I mean, she literally walks into the studio every day with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and then just like brings this really awesome energy to the music—that\'s kind of how \'Don\'t Worry\' came about.” **“Blue Mesas”** “This whole album encapsulates the multifaceted aspects of life. It\'s not serious all the time, but sometimes there are those moments that capture the struggle, and that\'s what it was for me. \'Blue Mesas\' just talks about the moment when I transitioned into fame, and it was honestly hard for me. When you take an insecure person and put them in the limelight, some people can tend to fold or thrive. I\'m grateful that I had great people around me to help me get through those struggles. \'Blue Mesas\' is just like that feeling of the solitude and weight that comes with having a little notoriety and still feeling isolated—even in the midst of people that love you.”
On their first EP release, the K-pop six-piece won’t be typecast.
*Build a Problem*, dodie tells Apple Music, is about “the problems I build in my life and other people’s lives.” But the title of her debut album also encapsulates something else. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the way people are built and shaped, and I feel like that is the main theme of everything I write,” the Essex-born singer-songwriter explains. “I am the problem that was built.” Released a decade after she first achieved YouTube fame, *Build a Problem* finds dodie candidly contemplating her mental health, her sexuality, and the pains of early adulthood. You’ll find the intimate, organic sounds that the singer—whose real name is Dorothy Clark—has always embraced, decorated with soaring strings (“When,” “Sorry”), pop melodies (“Hate Myself”), and gorgeous harmonies (“Four Tequilas Down,” a track so honest she considered not releasing it at all). All of which, she hopes, will offer a final word for anyone who sees her as “just a young YouTube girl.” “With this album, I wanted to make beautiful music. But I also wanted to prove myself. It feels good to do that.” Read on as dodie walks us through her powerful first album, and for her thoughts on eight demos she recorded during the UK’s 2020 lockdown, which feature as bonus tracks. **Air So Sweet** “I wrote this after I had a rare moment of feeling elated and in love with life. I just wanted it to burst through the door and be like, ‘All of life, hit me.’ It’s a great way of introing the album.” **Hate Myself** “This was written on a guitalele, and it was definitely inspired by HAIM and \[2020 track\] ‘Now I’m in It.’ I just thought the lyric ‘When you go quiet, I hate myself’ was so funny. It was certainly something I was feeling but didn’t know how to deal with, so I just laughed it off in that line.” **I Kissed Someone (It Wasn’t You)** “The idea of this song is that the narrator is drunk and in a pretty unstable place. They’re sitting in the back of a taxi after kissing someone who wasn’t the person they wanted to be kissing. And they’re going through the motions like, ‘It’s fine,’ but then dipping into this depressive feeling of, ‘I f\*\*ked up. Get me home. I just want to turn off.’ It’s a short song about a very simple idea.” **Cool Girl** “I wrote this during lockdown. It’s more upbeat and poppy and talks about the suppression of one’s needs in order to be lovable. The title references *Gone Girl*, which is one of my favorite films. I knew I wanted some kind of growth, but I still wanted it to be very gentle. And the best way to do that is to add strings. They were recorded over Zoom and added more depth.” **Special Girl** “I didn’t realize I’d written two songs called ‘Cool Girl’ and ‘Special Girl’ until I was listening to them together. This leads into the more abstract, less poppy side of the album. You can think, ‘I’m broken. I\'m unlovable.’ But ‘Special Girl’ is about saying, ‘This is who I am.’ The ending of it sounds like a hot mess—and that’s exactly what I am in the song.” **Rainbow** “I wrote this two or three years ago. I’d come out as bi, and I still wasn’t feeling entirely sure about myself. I still don’t. It was tough because the world was telling me that it was absolutely fine, and yet I still felt such an internal struggle with it. It’s a very sweet song, but there’s a sadness to it.” **?** “The flipside of ‘Rainbow.’ It’s the anti-feeling—a kind of rumble. I wanted to be quite vague with it. People will take whatever meaning they need.” **Four Tequilas Down** “I wondered if I really wanted to put this song out there. I wanted desperately to alleviate some of the guilt I felt to my audience, who might see me as this perfect angel. I’m not. But also, part of me is like, ‘I don’t care.’ I wrote this in my bedroom, but I wanted it to be swirling, like your mind is going to all sorts of places. My songs never really sit in a place for too long.” **.** “A moment where you really let it all sit and you look at your problems and your choices. I wanted it to be a very quiet moment of understanding.” **Sorry** “This was just an apology and a moment of self-reflection after the realization in ‘.’ that your choices amount to something, that you hurt other people as well as yourself. This section is about finally looking at something that you’ve been pushing away for so long, and what that means in terms of processing. In therapy, I’ve cried so much I’ve wanted to vomit, and I wanted to express how that feels. This track has all this swirling, then it naturally settles. It truly is my favorite moment. It’s like something’s cleared. You’re ready to start again.” **When** “I wrote this when I was 19. It’s quite abstract because I didn’t really know what I was saying. I hadn’t gone through therapy and I wasn’t really sure of myself. And in a way, it kind of makes it more poetic and free. It amounts to this feeling of not being satisfied in your life and waiting for some things to be different. When I was writing the song, I was just starting to feel quite spacey and out of it, and that was the beginning of a mental health condition I now know the name of. But at the time, I thought this feeling was just here to stay. I kept imagining myself on my deathbed being like, ‘Oh God, it all happened, and I didn’t even feel any of that.’” **Before the Line** “This track is me really letting it all go and looking at my brain the way I do when I’m at my worst. I think it’s the angriest song I’ve written. But it’s me being like, ‘I’m f\*\*king alive.’ This song has snippets of every song on the album in it.” **Guiltless (Bonus Track)** “‘Guiltless’ is about a difficult topic that I could never talk about publicly. There are those complex relationships in life where there’s so much love, but so much anger, disbelief, guilt, expectation, and resentment. This is a song exploring that, from a safe, vague-ish distance.” **Boys Like You (Bonus Track)** “I wrote this in two parts. I wrote the verses and chorus when I was enjoying exploring the power play of a potentially unhealthy dynamic. The lyrics in those, I feel, are more understanding and light, but as I came to write the bridge, I wanted to bring forward some of the heaviness and question why so many people fall into these addictive roles.” **Bonus Tracks** “Everyone needed a project in lockdown, and it was good for my brain to have something to do every day. These songs gave me so much. There wasn’t much pressure on them, and they came out easily. They’re a little lighter. I just love the idea of having something very pristine and polished as the main album, and then releasing all this pressure and having this B-side. It’s just me in my room, making mistakes.”
“This is just a capsule of the last year of my life,” Alessia Cara explained to Apple Music\'s Strombo about her third album. “Throughout the creation of this process, I hit a few different rock bottoms, and I think through those rock bottoms, I found some sort of catalyst for changing the way that I was living.” It\'s heavy context for a project that often lands on the ear gently, light-heartedly even, but the contrast is in part the point. On “Unboxing Intro”, she seems to come apart, growing steadily more frenzied as she sings: “Need some clarity, I miss therapy/Hyperbolic, melancholic/Do I call him? I feel nauseous/Have I lost it? Have I almost hit the bottom?” But the production on “Box in the Ocean”, which immediately follows, suggests the bottom is a tropical island away from it all rather than the claustrophobic places of her mind encapsulated in the lyrics. According to Cara, this is by design. She points to the soothing lullaby swing of “Sweet Dream” as an example—a song that details the difficulty of trying to sleep when it feels impossible to quiet the voice in your head. “I try to juxtapose a lot of the heavier themes with some more humorous lyrics or some more fun-sounding things,” she says. “But ultimately the root of it was a lot of struggle and a lot of difficulty.” Thematically, conflicts like heartbreak, anxiety, isolation and longing form the bedrock of the album, following up on 2018\'s *The Pains of Growing*. The singer typically opts to navigate her woes in words rather than with her voice, but the most arresting moments of *In the Meantime* come when she allows her vocal tone to do the heavy lifting. On “Best Days”, she leaves the poppier backdrops for plodding, minimalist drama, creating the space for genuine conviction when she questions, “What if my best days are the days I\'ve left behind?” It\'s not all doom and gloom, though. “Clockwork” finds her firm in the lessons learned, and tears are transformed into glitter on the chipper closer “Apartment Song”, as if to correspond with the clarity Cara found through her own process. “I feel like on the other end, I found a lot of acceptance,” she says. “I hope I can provide some people some sort of comfort in the commonalities of our pain and the commonalities of the things that we\'ve gone through.”
The Brooklyn singer explores vintage rock ’n’ soul.
Songs steeped in guitar-pop nostalgia—dotted with heady choruses.
Saint Etienne’s 10th studio album wasn’t supposed to sound like this. By early 2020, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell had almost completed a different set of songs. But as lockdown took hold, there was no way to mix them and work paused. While they waited, the trio picked up an idea that was easier to explore from their own homes, one first investigated on 2018’s Christmas giveaway *Surrey North EP*. A few years earlier, Stanley had become drawn to vaporwave, a sound he’d found on YouTube. Bedroom producers were warping and tranquilizing ’80s R&B and setting it to images of abandoned buildings. The hazy sense of nostalgia intrigued Stanley. “The music that gets sampled and images that get used are American or Japanese,” he tells Apple Music. “So, we thought, ‘What if we use British imagery and samples to try to evoke a period in recent British history?’” They settled on 1997 to 2001, a period beginning with the installation of the Labour government and ending with 9/11. It felt like the last time Britain had been buoyed by widespread optimism and was an age that people were increasingly looking back on with yearning. “A lot of the problems we have at the moment, like social media, barely existed,” says Stanley. “The internet barely existed. The climate catastrophe—everyone knew it was possibly going to happen, but no one realized it would accelerate as fast as it has.” Exchanging files and thoughts across email and video calls, the trio foraged samples from the era’s R&B and pop, stretching and reshaping them into eight hypnotic pieces full of summery warmth and reflection. Melodies take hold slowly but doggedly, melancholy occasionally draws in like evening shade, and a gauzy sense of reverie acknowledges how nostalgia can blur details. “The whole point is memory is a very unreliable narrator,” says Stanley. “Every period has its grimness but, with the ’90s, it’s easy to see how people are focusing on the positivity. When we were teenagers, we really looked back at the ’60s and thought what an amazing period that was. But what we were looking at was The Monkees rather than people being lynched in the South.” Here, Stanley guides us along a journey through a half-remembered past, track by track. **“Music Again”** “It’s basically Pete’s work. We just found the samples together and he extended that and made it into a hypnotic, repetitive pattern, and Sarah wrote her lyric over the top. I like the fact that when I’ve mentioned that there’s a Honeyz sample \[‘Love of a Lifetime’\], people are like ‘obscure R&B band’ or whatever. But they obviously weren’t. At the time, they were all over Radio 2; I think they had a couple of Top 10 hits. We really wanted it to be something you might remember hearing, so it might actually jog a genuine memory from the time. So, the samples \[on the album\] were all from mainstream acts, just not the most obvious songs.” **“Pond House”** “\[The sampled track, Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Beauty on the Fire’\] got in the Top 30. With a lot of the samples, we were listening to albums from that period and just hearing if there was a snippet of something that we could use and expand. It’s almost like trying out a new instrument, trying out a guitar pedal, just seeing if there was something we could do with it. We were looking for good productions from the time, relatively smooth. I have playlists of all the ones that we never ended up using. There’s a song called ‘Sky’ by Sonique, a couple of Jamelia things—‘Antidote,’ ‘Life.’ Maybe we’ll use them in the future. Mel B’s solo stuff, Martine McCutcheon, Lutricia McNeal.” **“Fonteyn”** “\[The sample is\] a Lighthouse Family song, but it’s not the biggest hit, ‘Lifted’; it’s a relatively minor single \[‘Raincloud’\]. I remember hearing them on Radio 2 at the time, and I always really liked the bottom end of the piano working as a bassline, so that’s what we used.” **“Little K”** “We were just going back and forth, but basically Pete was sending us things that were essentially finished. It was like, ‘Well, this is terrific.’ Then Sarah would write lyrics and come up with the topline, then he’d fit them in and cut it up a bit like he did here on ‘Little K.’” **“Blue Kite”** “Pete did this in his studio at home. It was using bits of our own songs, from the early ’90s I think. That kind of abstraction reminds me of My Bloody Valentine, even though there’s no obvious guitars on it. I think it’s sad they never made another album 18 months after *Loveless*. Because I remember Colm, the drummer, was getting really into jungle, and I think they probably recorded stuff. I was thinking, ‘Wow, where’s this going to go?’ Then they just don’t make a record for 20-odd years instead. There were so many directions you could go in the early ’90s and so much music being made where you could take inspiration from it, from contemporary stuff. I think that really gave us a palette that we could use, as well as stuff from the past that we already liked—psychedelia, Northern Soul, or whatever.” **“I Remember It Well”** “I worked with a guy called Gus Bousfield, who does a lot of TV and film work. He’s an engineer, producer, and a multi-instrumentalist. That’s the kind of person I need to work with because I can barely play ‘Chopsticks.’ It’s great to have someone who can do everything you want. Gus recorded \[the sampled conversations here\] in an indoor market in Bradford. They’re heavily distorted and it sounds like human language, but you really can’t work out a single word. He plays guitar on this, which has a slight *Twin Peaks* feel.” **“Penlop”** “I think this probably had the most time spent on it. Pete did a version that was about eight minutes long. It got more distorted towards the end. I just love the way it has a part where it drops down, then comes crashing in. And then it goes up another level after that.” **“Broad River”** “The piano part is the intro to a Tasmin Archer song \[‘Ripped Inside’\]. That’s all we took from that, I think, a bar of piano or whatever, two bars. It’s funny because a lot of people have said, ‘Oh, this is the first time you did sampling since \[1993 album\] *So Tough*.’ And it isn’t. I suppose we’ve just not used it as obviously. There’s plenty of things we’ve recorded over the years which have samples on them, but you can take a bit of an existing song and make something completely new, with a completely new atmosphere. I think this is one of the cases, because I love the way it sounds on ‘Broad River’ and the Tasmin Archer song is obviously a fair bit darker.”
The boy band shift between alt-rock angst and synth-pop dreams.
In late 2019, Holly Humberstone left her beloved family home in Lincolnshire and moved to a dingy flat in London. “All the walls were completely damp, the fridge was full of mold, there were mattresses with full-on nasty stains on them, and there was broken glass all over the floor,” the singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “It was the worst thing possible. And I was like, ‘What have I done?’” Such grim surroundings inspired the title of *The Walls Are Way Too Thin*, but also forced Humberstone to escape, shuttling each weekend to visit friends studying in Nottingham, Newcastle, and Manchester. Then, as she journeyed back to the capital after nights out, she’d start writing. “I seem to write the best stuff when I’m hung over, maybe because I can’t overthink it,” she says. “I’d go into the studio and it would be my only constant, familiar place to work through all of the confusing stuff that was going on.” The result is an EP on which Humberstone navigates the dizzying change of your early twenties, from homesickness (“Please Don’t Leave Just Yet”) to helping your best mate through a breakup (“Thursday,” “Scarlett”) and realizing you’ve outgrown your own relationship (“Friendly Fire”). Yet *The Walls Are Way Too Thin*—influenced by ’80s pop and artists including Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, and Prince—is more upbeat that the subject matter that inspired it. “I wrote really happy-sounding songs about really sad things,” adds Humberstone. “Maybe that was part of the coping mechanism.” Read on as she walks us through her second EP, one track at a time. **“Haunted House”** “We were told that we had to leave our childhood home. This house is the only place I’ll ever consider as my real home. It\'s so quirky—it’s this really old house in the middle of the countryside that I think my friends at school were terrified of. But I feel so safe there. I feel it\'s raised me in a way. An elderly family member had also died. I just felt all of the really sacred, precious things from my childhood were slipping away from me all at once. I was so emotional writing the song—it just felt like I really needed to write it. Writing it helped me to understand that change is really hard, but it\'s really necessary for us to evolve and to grow.” **“The Walls Are Way Too Thin”** “Going into the studio and making sense of everything that was going on was my salvation. The flat where I was living in London was the worst of the worst. I wrote this with \[frequent collaborator and songwriter/producer\] Rob Milton in Nottinghamshire and it was such an amazing excuse to leave London. Like a lot of the songs on this EP, there’s quite a depressing meaning behind them, but it was important not to make it sound depressing. This was written over a long period of time, and I remember being just obsessed with synth for ages. I wanted to write stuff that sounded fully ’80s: cheesy cringe music.” **“Please Don’t Leave Just Yet”** “I wrote this with Matty Healy in between the lockdowns in 2020. The 1975 was such a huge musical influence for me—Matty wrote the soundtrack to my teenage years. I hate writing with new people, it’s my worst nightmare, but he just created such a comfortable, chill environment. I wrote this when I was living in London and I didn\'t have any friends. Every time I\'d go and visit people or someone would come to visit me, it always felt like I couldn\'t really enjoy it because I was thinking, ‘You\'re going to have to leave soon. I\'m going to be on my own again.’ I would do anything to make them stay. I wanted to mirror that in the production. I wanted to make it really conversational as well and have the lyrics almost like a phone call.” **“Thursday”** “I was thinking ‘I\'m on Fire’ by Bruce Springsteen with this, with that driving kind of rhythm. I was writing about my friend Scarlett, but also dwelling on my own experiences with having somebody break up with me and feeling completely rejected. This song was written a couple of months before ‘Scarlett’ and it was when she was in the midst of the breakup. It was really hard to watch her being in denial about everything. She would do anything for this guy and he was just completely uninterested. I really like the lyrics in this one—they’re so relatable.” **“Scarlett”** “This song is different from the other tracks, because it’s like, ‘Actually, I’m so much better off without you. I’m not dependent on anyone.’ I wrote this when Scarlett was starting to feel hopeful and see herself the way that I had been seeing her the whole time: as her own person without this relationship. The sonics and the production of this song just felt uplifting to me and like the high point of the EP. I think Scarlett feels quite empowered by it.” **“Friendly Fire”** “My relationship—like a lot of people’s—broke down during the pandemic. It was my first proper relationship and I really cared for this person. But, especially with being really busy with my music, I didn’t have any spare emotional energy. I wrote this song a few weeks before I ended it, and it made me realize what I needed to do. I often just feel really confused about stuff and I find that writing a song helps me to figure out what I need to do. The message is: ‘I really care about you. And I\'m really sorry if, somewhere down the line, I break your heart. It’s nothing personal, it’s my own issues.’”
Poignant musings on loss and rebirth against a Cornish canvas.
The week before Yebba released her debut, she got one powerful boost from none other than Drake, who gave the Memphis singer an interlude on his *Certified Lover Boy* album, and named it after her to boot (“Yebba’s Heartbreak”). Her brief inclusion was a sample of her charms, but *Dawn*, which was lovingly produced by Mark Ronson, offers a more robust idea of one of her greatest strengths—her breathy, soulful voice, which she uses to bring emotional depth and texture to her lyrics. A song like “October Sky” becomes a dazzling yet devastating ballad of grief honoring her mother. “Now I work in the city and I blend into the crowd/And the pеople grieve with mе since the towers came down,” she sings, filling the final syllables of each line with soul. “You could cut the pollution with a butter knife/You could wake up at two and then party all night/But I\'m missin\' my mama, so I stand on the street and get high.” It\'s poetry as is, but Yebba makes it magic. Such heart-wrenching tenderness is her sweet spot—see, for example, the mellow opener “How Many Years” and closer “Paranoia Purple”—but alongside a rapper like A$AP Rocky or against more throbbing, danceable beats like on “Love Came Down,” we are able to hear her voice in all of its soaring glory. Enchantment seems to come easy for Yebba, as she soothes and stuns all at once.
“There were three potential titles for this album,” Rostam Batmanglij tells Apple Music. “One of them referenced gender, another was referencing America and nationality. As I’m saying this, I’m realizing that’s what I like about this title—that it can apply to gender or politics, and yet you might hear this record and not think about either of those things.” Listen to *Changephobia*, the former Vampire Weekend talisman’s second solo record, and plenty of things hit you. To name a few: Americana; unexpected time structures; guitar solos; gorgeous melodies; a lot of sax. “Stylistically, I was seeking to make a clean break from a lot of the music that I’ve made over the last 10 years,” he says. “I wanted to be a bit more abstract. I was thinking about minimalist art, and that was kicking around in the back of my mind in very simple shapes.” Accordingly, there’s a joyful union between a desire to keep things, as he says, to “one or two colors” and Batmanglij’s natural musical curiosity and invention. Let him talk you through the story of his second album, one track at a time. **“These Kids We Knew”** “I was just working on music to get out of my bedroom during lockdown, and then these lyrics started coming out of me. I really didn\'t think it was for the album. But then, as more time passed, I started to realize that it was not only for the album, but eventually that it was track one. I think as a queer musician I identify a little bit more with the younger generation because I relate to their attitudes towards sexuality and gender—it\'s a little bit distinct from people that grew up in the \'90s and early 2000s. That made me think about the generation above mine, and just how each generation has different things that we have to contend with, whether it\'s climate or gender or equality. I kept thinking, ‘Who are these kids?’—and maybe in some ways it’s also me coming to terms with the fact that I\'m not a kid anymore. I\'m fully in my mid-thirties.” **“From the Back of a Cab”** “It started with this drum part without many chords, and it just kicked around on my iPhone but I knew there was something exciting there. One day I started playing this Americana piano along to these drums, and it felt very disconnected from the drum part, because the drum part is in 12/8, which is something that you hear in African music and Iranian music. I\'ve become more interested in trying to use lyrics as the driving force, as opposed to just writing vocal melodies and figuring out what lyrics should go along with.” **“Unfold You”** “This features a sample from Nick Hakim \[2015’s ‘Papas Fritas’\] and features Henry Solomon’s sax playing which I later brought into HAIM’s \'Summer Girl.\' Even though \'Summer Girl\' came out within a few months of us starting to record it, \'Unfold You\' took years. In some ways it had to—because the recording of the song tracks an evolution and a personal change.” **“4Runner”** “I was in a store in Japan when I heard this song, and to this day I haven\'t been able to find it. But I remembered how it sounded in my brain—it had 12-string acoustic guitar and had brush drums, and I just filed that away knowing it was a palette I should try one day. Years later, I was in the studio wanting to realize this idea. I started building it up with 12-string acoustic, drums, and Moog Voyager bass. I made a track that felt fresh and then spent a lot of time just driving around and sitting in my room listening to it, piecing it together what it should be about.” **“Changephobia”** “A few years ago I was sitting at a park bench in Massachusetts and someone told me change is good, and it just stuck with me. No one had ever said to me that change is good. This idea informed the whole album. I’ve also had a fascination with sax that dates back maybe a decade. I knew where I wanted to go musically, and wanted to push myself away from the same chord progressions I’ve used in so many songs. This was a new kind of chord progression for me, inspired by jazz. I asked Henry to play a solo over those chords, and he did about 36 takes. The second take had the magic, so that’s what you hear.” **“Kinney”** “The first day that I worked with Henry, I sang this melody to him—and he played it back on the saxophone. I didn’t think I was able to play it myself on any instruments, but Henry played it back to me, we put the melody on top, and the next thing I knew I had a song written—a sort of crazy 182 BPM drum ’n’ bass song. I was very doubtful on the outro, because it’s fully grunge. I worried there are some places you should never go. Ultimately, though, I’m glad I went here.” **“Bio18”** “I was on tour in Houston years ago and recorded these drums on my iPhone. I’d honestly been hearing the rhythm in my head since I was a kid in D.C. played on buckets on sidewalks. I was curious about where stuff like Charlie Mingus and Charlie Parker, that how that stuff kind of intersects with, like, the French classical composers like Debussy and Ravel. I was curious about the way those things overlap.” **“\[interlude\]”** “I have a rule that I need every song to be at least two minutes, even if it doesn\'t have lyrics. This was supposed to be a song on the album, but I could just never figure out what to sing. I had Henry play sax on it, and originally the sax was supposed to be a solo, and there would be a song on either side of the solo. Eventually I said to myself, ‘I don\'t know exactly what I want to say, but maybe the music is saying what I want to say.’ And so I kept it on. The original version of this album also had two other interludes, and I cut those but I kept this one. I don\'t know why.” **“To Communicate”** “Therapy and psychology are probably a huge part of what was on my mind as I was writing the lyrics of this album. But I think that shouldn\'t be something that\'s too obvious if I did it right. I like the idea that someone might hear the song and feel, ‘This is clearly about psychology.’ And another person might hear it and think, ‘This is clearly about someone that betrayed Rostam or Rostam feeling that he betrayed himself.’ Dave Fridmann mixed this song, and the one thing I told him was I wanted it to sound like The Zombies. His response was, ‘Then maybe you should speed it up about 10 BPM.’ And I think he\'s right. I did experiment with that. But it was too late in the game to speed it up that much. And maybe it\'s good that it doesn\'t sound *too* much like The Zombies. But hopefully it sounds a little bit like The Zombies.” **“Next Thing”** “It wasn\'t supposed to be on this album. I\'d given up on it for a couple years. And then as I was finishing the album, I thought to myself, ‘You\'re going need to have a special bonus track for Japan, or it\'ll be good to have one extra thing.’ But once it was done, I liked it too much. The drums and the piano were recorded live at the same time, they were not recorded with a click track, which, for people who make music, you know that almost everything we hear is steady. And this song is not steady. If you dropped it into one of your DAWs \[digital audio workstations\] like Ableton, Logic, or Pro Tools and tried to line it up, it will constantly infuriate you. But that\'s exactly what I wanted from the song.” **“Starlight”** “Even before I had written the rest of the album, I knew that this was going to be the last song. It started on a bullet train in Japan, so it was originally called ‘Shinkansen.’ I was at a friend\'s wedding and he sang Chet Baker to his wife, which made me think there hasn\'t been a futuristic update of Chet Baker. This is my attempt.”
Like many of us during the COVID pandemic, Elton John got to know a few of his neighbors very well. Unlike most of us, his neighbors are also famous musicians, and these serendipitous encounters have led to some of the highest-profile collaborations of his career. A chance meeting with Charlie Puth—“he lived three doors away from me”—was the first in a series of impromptu lockdown sessions launched via email and Zoom calls. After a few scattered tracks had come together, Elton had an epiphany. “I suddenly thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m a session musician again,’” he tells Apple Music, recalling his early days as a not-yet-famous piano player. “And it was just like, ‘You know what, I love this.’ To play on other people’s records, to hear different music and be able to fit in with someone else’s thoughts is an incredibly inspiring and moving thing to do.” And because it’s Elton—the host of Apple Music Radio’s Rocket Hour, where timeless classics mingle with the latest hits from upcoming artists—there’s a mix of old and new. Lil Nas X, Young Thug, and Nicki Minaj are here, as are the late Glen Campbell, Eddie Vedder, and Stevies Wonder and Nicks. “They’ve all taught me something at 74 years of age,” he says. “I think if that can happen in your life and you listen and learn something from these people, it’s a bonus.” As a further bonus, Sir Elton takes us track by track through each collaboration on the album. **“Cold Heart” (PNAU Remix) with Dua Lipa** “She was the most professional, brilliant, well‐rehearsed, humble, fabulous, glamorous, beautiful person. I just took to her immediately. *Future Nostalgia* is one of my favorite albums of the year. She has a certain energy that kind of reflected and inspired me, too. But it was her professionalism and her humility that really struck me.” **“Always Love You” with Young Thug and Nicki Minaj** “He came over; I went, ‘What do I call you? Thug? Young Thug? Mr. Thug?’ He said, ‘No, just call me Jeffery.’ He was very humble and very sweet and asked my advice: ‘What do you think I should do as I go on?’ I said, ‘Did you sing in the gospel choir?’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Then sing a little bit more—use more melody as well as rapping, because you do that brilliantly.’ He came into the studio and he just freestyled it all the way. What he did on the track was amazing, and then we thought we\'re going to have to have a female to answer it. Eventually we got hold of Nicki. I never knew Nicki could sing. I’d just heard her rap. She sang beautifully. She really captured the meaning of the song.” **“Learn to Fly” with Surfaces** “They had a hit in America at that particular time and they wanted me to play and maybe do some vocals on their next single. I went up to the studio, and I did my first ever Zoom recording. I put a piano and I did voice on it. And so really that was the first *Lockdown* track I did. When I go into those situations, I say, ‘Listen, I’m playing on your record. If you don’t like anything, tell me. It’s not going to hurt my feelings.’ They were very, very forthright like that. I put the piano on, then I did the harmonies and the vocals. I love decisive people, so it made it very easy.” **“After All” with Charlie Puth** “Charlie Puth and I were in the studio—just the two of us. He’s got a little home studio with all his keyboards and his synths, his Pro Tools. I went up there, played electric piano, and actually wrote the song all the way through. This and the Stevie Wonder song are very unusual for me because I wrote them all the way through without a lyric and the melody. Charlie wrote some words, and I did a vocal, he did a vocal, and that came from that.” **“Chosen Family” with Rina Sawayama** “Rina’s album was one of the most amazing records I heard that year. The most frustrating thing for people like her is that they couldn’t tour, because she’s such a visual artist, and you can imagine what the song was going to be like. She was stuck in COVID and we became email friends, and I fell in love with her. I just absolutely adore her. ‘Chosen Family’ is such a beautifully written track, and it’s so important now to bring people together in the divided world that we live in.” **“The Pink Phantom” with Gorillaz feat. 6LACK** “I just love the fact that Damon \[Albarn\] works with so many different people, and he’s not afraid to take a chance. They’re not in it for the glamorization and the glory, they’re in it because they’re working with people they like. And they might not be the biggest‐selling records in the world, but that doesn’t matter to them. Damon used to think I had a pink Phantom, but I didn’t. If I was going to have a Phantom, then it probably would have been pink. I haven’t really had anybody rapping on my records before. To hear 6LACK rapping and Damon weaving me in and out of this dreamlike track was hypnotic and fascinating for me.” **“It’s a sin” (global reach mix) with Years & Years** “Olly \[Alexander\] did a version of ‘It’s a sin’ acoustically. It’s a beautiful song. The lyrics say everything about being gay. It’s a genius lyric by Neil Tennant and a genius record. It’s a tribute to the Pet Shop Boys, and how their music has influenced me, has given me so much pleasure. And it showed the brilliance of both of them creating music and lyrics that sum up being gay. I’ve never written those kinds of songs. It’s me paying tribute to two people who have given me so much pleasure all my life.” **“Nothing Else Matters” with Miley Cyrus feat. WATT, Yo-Yo Ma, Robert Trujillo & Chad Smith** “Miley is a fairly new artist in a way, because she’s kind of making different music from when she started, you know, ‘Wrecking Ball.’ I was so impressed with her voice on ‘Nothing Else Matters.’ I’ve always loved Metallica and I always loved that song. It’s the same kind of version, except there’s a piano at the beginning and the end…and there’s Yo‐Yo Ma.” **“Orbit” with SG Lewis** “Sam Lewis is someone I’ve been looking at for a long time. He’s a young British producer; I’ve interviewed him on Rocket Hour and played his tracks. I went to the studio in London with his lyricist and wrote a song called ‘Orbit.’ He sent me a track which I didn’t like because it was too Eltonish. I wanted balls. I wanted to dance. I said, ‘Sam, go ahead and destroy what I\'ve done. Just keep the bits you like. The reason I wanted to work with you is that I wanted you in it.’ What he finished up with I love, because it\'s a bit Depeche Mode, a bit New Order. It’s totally what I wanted. I didn’t want it to sound like Elton John doing a dance record with an Elton John song, which was too formulaic. Dance records aren’t formulaic, with bits and snatches of melodies.” **“Simple Things” with Brandi Carlile** “She wrote me a letter 18 years ago asking me to play on her album, the most beautiful letter saying how much I’d meant to her as an artist. She came to Vegas and I played on her record. And we’ve become friends ever since. For her to sing on ‘Simple Things,’ it’s like a dream come true, a bucket list moment. I watched her grow and become the artist she is. She’s exactly the same as me, she wants to help young people. It’s one of my favorite songs. It’s a sort of song I would have written with Bernie.” **“Beauty in the Bones” with Jimmie Allen** “This came about because of my friend Bruce Roberts, who’s been having a lot of bad health. Bruce is a songwriter who I’ve known for years, and he played me this track. I liked the song, a different kind of song to all the rest, a different kind of genre. I wanted to support Jimmie because he’s a young rising star. He’s unknown over here, he’s just starting out.” **“One of Me” with Lil Nas X** “All the people I work with knew what they wanted, and so did Lil Nas X and Giles Martin. They were decisive people. I’d say, ‘Is that too much?’ He said, ‘Yes, a bit too much, calm it down a bit.’ And I think they used the bare bones of the piano I did, because I did some other funky stuff. And maybe it shifted the track from what they wanted it to be and made it a bit too Elton. And I also sang a little on the Lil Nas X track, but they didn’t use that either. And that\'s fair enough. It’s their record. I give them as much as they want, and they can just take it away and just use what they want. You have to accept that you’re playing on someone else’s record.” **“E-Ticket” with Eddie Vedder** “I got to know Eddie Vedder because he comes to a lot of shows, especially in Hawaii, where he has a place. He gave me a beautiful ukulele. I’ve always loved him, and I love what he stands for. Eddie left a note for me in the studio saying it would be one of his bucket list items if I would ever write a song to one of his lyrics. So I wrote two—one for him and one for me. How lovely to be able to do something for someone who\'s as joyous as that.” **“Finish Line” with Stevie Wonder** “I put the electric piano down. He came and played acoustic piano and then did the harmonica solo. Then we put the Kanye West choir on, which really made the difference. And then Stevie put his vocal on. I haven’t heard Stevie sound so young since he was about 19, just before he did *Talking Book*; it’s an ‘Uptight’ Stevie. I’m the Ernie Wise to him on that record, because I’m just the straight man. You just listen to what he does vocally and instrumentally, and you think, ‘Oh, my god, this is a true genius.’ I’m obviously a huge fan of his, and he’s still younger than me, which I loathe. On this track that we did, he produced something very special that Stevie Wonder fans haven’t heard for a long time.” **“Stolen Car” with Stevie Nicks** “I didn’t know Stevie that well. When I say bucket list of vocalists, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie would be two of my choices. It’s just a dream come true. She has a style of her own; I never get fed up listening to her. When people like Stevie Wonder, Eddie Vedder, Stevie Nicks, and Brandi Carlile say yes to you straight away, it really makes you feel special. On this record, we sound like an old married couple in a car like Thelma and Louise going to Big Bear and having an argument, pulling over by the side of the road.” **“I\'m Not Gonna Miss You” with Glen Campbell** “I got a phone call from Glen Campbell’s people saying the last song he wrote was called ‘I’m Not Gonna Miss You.’ And when that came out, I said in an interview that I thought it was one of the most beautiful songs that I ever heard because it was very short and sweet, but it was about his battle with Alzheimer’s. They said they were doing a remake of the album with people duetting with him. ‘Would you sing that song?’ I said, ‘Yes, absolutely, I’d love to sing that with him.’”
Over the course of 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown, Alice Phoebe Lou spent more time alone than she ever had. She also fell hopelessly in love, had her heart torn in two, and experienced something she terms an “ego death,” while still being able to dig deep and create. These are the experiences that fuel the fire of *Glow*, underpinned by the alternative pop singer’s distinct warbling vocal. Over the course of 12 tracks, her unapologetic feminism (“Dirty Mouth”) and lyrical prowess (“Dusk”) are wrapped in delicate piano melodies (“Only When I”), bright synthscapes (“Lonely Crowd”), and a range of minimalistic bluesy and indie-rock guitar riffs (“Mother’s Eyes,” “Velvet Mood”) that only further serve to highlight the album’s emotional complexities.