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.’”
On their debut album, *life’s a beach*, easy life takes us on a trip to the glorious British seaside. “Being from Leicester, we’re really, really far from the beach,” frontman Murray Matravers tells Apple Music. “This album was about dreaming big and trying to get out of your head. It was about the idea that surely life can be better than this.” Largely written during the UK’s first 2020 lockdown (but decidedly not a quarantine project), *life’s a beach* is an album of two halves. You’ll find easy life’s reliably jovial sing-along anthems—which borrow from R&B, hip-hop, jazz, pop, and even musical theater—on the first, from the wonky, affirming “message to myself” to the shoulder-shaking “skeletons.” Then, still grounded by Matravers’ loose, Jamie T-meets-Mike Skinner speak-singing, *life’s a beach* moves into murkier waters. “This album starts like, ‘We’re going to have a great time at the beach and everything is going to be good!’” says Matravers. “Then it slowly gets worse and worse.” Here he explores his darkest moments with remarkable candor (see the propulsive, chaotic “living strange” and sad banger “nightmares”), as well as the people who’ve helped him out of them (“lifeboat”). But as the five-piece, completed by Oliver Cassidy, Sam Hewitt, Lewis Berry, and Jordan Birtles, calls it a night on the mashed “music to walk home to,” easy life reminds us what they have always been: a band that revels—and excels—in having fun. “We deal with some quite serious themes throughout the album and we have a place to talk about important shit, but I definitely don’t want anyone thinking we’re seriously deep,” adds Matravers. Read on as the frontman takes us on a track-by-track tour of easy life’s whirlwind debut. **“a message to myself”** “This was a real labor of love. I wrote my little bit in about 20 minutes, and it was pretty close to a freestyle. The instrumental came from \[US producer\] Bekon, who worked on the Kendrick Lamar *DAMN.* album. We reached out to him in 2016 and he sent us this beat tape. We were tiny at the time, and Kendrick Lamar was Kendrick Lamar. I\'ve never heard anything like it. As the album developed, I always thought it would be a really weird intro. This track was very much me reassuring myself. Like, ‘Hey, be yourself, because you\'ve got to be authentic in this album, otherwise people won\'t dig it.’” **“have a great day”** “This was written with \[US producer\] Gianluca Buccellati, two or three days before we went into the first lockdown in 2020, so it has a special place in my heart. We had the instrumental cooking up and it just felt like a breezy ’60s crooner-type song. It\'s about a trip to the beach. Again, like lots of our songs, it started as a bit of a joke and then it turned into something a lot more serious.” **“ocean view”** “I wrote this one with \[US songwriter and producer\] Rob Milton. Rob found the track ‘Loved the Ocean’ by \[American singer-songwriter\] Emilia Ali. If you’ve heard it, you’ll appreciate that we literally just took her entire song, sped it up a fraction, and pitched it up—a process that takes about five minutes—put some drums on, and then sang her chorus, which was already written. We basically plagiarized it. ‘ocean view’ is another track where you\'ve gone to the seaside, but this is where the album starts looking a little less hopeful. We sent it to Emilia and she was stoked. She thinks it\'s cool.” **“skeletons”** “‘ocean view’ and ‘skeletons’ are so different. We asked the mastering engineer to put the littlest space possible between the songs, because I thought it was cool to smash them together. It’s part of the journey of *life\'s a beach*—now we’re into a different vibe entirely. It’s one of the only moments in the album where it\'s just a party. This song is about having skeletons in your closet. You meet someone and you know that they’re no good for you, but in a way that\'s quite alluring. I think we all fall into that trap. I certainly used to basically every single weekend.” **“daydreams”** “I wrote this during lockdown. I think everyone can relate to it. It’s like, ‘Let\'s just get drunk and stoned and hopefully it will get slightly less boring but it\'s probably still quite boring.’ It’s about missing people as well. I spun it romantically, but it spans across friendships and family.” **“life’s a beach (interlude)”** “We had a million interludes to choose from. We chose this one because it was in the right key after coming out of ‘daydreams’ and going into ‘living strange.’ It was a nice way of getting from A to B.” **“living strange”** “This is an old one. I wrote this one with my older brother. We\'re super close and we can talk about anything, so when we write music, it usually gets dark, because I\'ll be like, ‘All this shit\'s going down, it\'s terrible,’ and he’ll say, ‘Okay, let\'s write a song about it.’ Things were not good back then. I’ve come out of it now, but back then it was a bit of a whirlwind, and my brother was able to capture it perfectly. This is the first vocal take. I couldn’t recreate it—there’s a paranoia that seeps out. This album needed something on that self-destructive, end-of-the-world-type shit.” **“compliments”** “This was made with \[Leeds-based producer and mixer\] Lee Smith. I introduced him to Rob \[Milton\]. One time we were in a room and Lee was like, ‘You guys are just killing it,’ and Rob and I found it so awkward. It\'s hard to take a compliment. We wrote this song straight afterwards. It’s uplifting and positive, especially with the chords being so melodic and pretty. But there’s also an element of severed relationships and not speaking.” **“lifeboat”** “So obviously we\'re into the second half of the album where shit\'s starting to go south. The lifeboat is a metaphor of someone who has helped you out of a bad patch. There are countless people who have helped me. This song was just me tipping my metaphorical hat to them. Musically, I wanted it to be super ’70s and slick and almost cheesy. In the way that Outkast might do something super cheesy, but it’s just cool as fuck. It was like I was trying to do our best André 3000 impression.” **“nightmares”** “I always think most of our music sounds pretty happy. But most of the stuff that provokes me to write is pretty sad. I’ve always seen ‘nightmares’ as hiding in plain sight. Sure, the music sounds anthemic, but I actually think this is our saddest song. This is obviously intentionally opposite to ‘daydreams.’ You daydream at the start of the album, but you end up in a nightmare.” **“homesickness”** “This is a pretty surface-level song. We were spending loads of time in America. Looking back, I wish I was really stoked about it because it was so much fun. But I spent most of the time missing home. It started with an arpeggiated chord that runs throughout the track. I remember being in the studio and that genuinely bringing a tear to my eye when we first heard it.” **“music to walk home to”** “We collaborated with \[British songwriter and producer\] Fraser T. Smith on this record. We were hanging out at his studio writing stuff and got really drunk. Like, *really* drunk. We were listening to a lot of Fela Kuti at the time, and we just started making an instrumental. I’d written rough points about what it would be like to walk from the station to my house and the places I\'d cross. I got a mic and did it in one take, at around one or two in the morning. I fluffed loads of the words because I was a bit steaming, but kept all of that in. I fell in love with the song after it was born. I just thought it was hilarious. It made sense to be the last track—you’ve gone away on this elaborate trip of self-discovery and now it’s time to go back to the flat and take stock and start over again. It was important to include one track that was purely a laugh.”
“It was really good to be able to play music, and make up music, and put your thoughts and your fears and your hopes and your love into the music,” Paul McCartney told Apple Music of making 2020’s *McCartney III*, his 18th solo LP, in the midst of a global pandemic. “So it kind of saved me, I must say, for about three or four months it took to make it.” In that spirit, McCartney personally approached several generations of more contemporary artists to share in (and extend) the experience for *McCartney III Imagined*, a set of remixes and new interpretations that speaks to the joy and generosity of the original, itself a sort of refuge. Beck converts the pinballing chamber pop of “Find My Way” into a supremely languid funk tune, placing McCartney’s vocal poolside on a chaise made of cowbell. Khruangbin does Khruangbin things with “Pretty Boys,” stretching it out over nearly six minutes of psychedelic expanse and incandescent rhythms. Elsewhere, Blood Orange mastermind Dev Hynes sinks his teeth into the thick melancholy of “Deep Down,” Phoebe Bridgers revels in the gilded harmonies of “Seize the Day,” and Josh Homme makes himself very much at home in the bluesy grooves of “Lavatory Lil.” Most striking here perhaps is Dominic Fike (born 25 years after the release of McCartney’s self-titled solo debut in 1970), whose liquid, keys-driven take on “The Kiss of Venus” feels almost blissful, unburdened by the circumstances. Anyone could be overwhelmed by the weight of McCartney’s name and legacy, but this—all of it, really—just sounds like fun. A celebration of the things that keep us going.
“I\'m my own album\'s biggest fan, and I have been for ages,” Maisie Peters tells Apple Music of her debut *You Signed Up for This*. “I\'ve been writing music for a while now, and there are so many different avenues I could have gone down and so many different albums I could have made. I feel so surely that this is the right one.” Peters doesn’t *exactly* need to be her record’s main cheerleader. Those already in her corner include Taylor Swift—whose influence shines across all of Peters’ output—and Ed Sheeran, who signed the Brighton-born singer-songwriter to his Gingerbread Man record company in 2021 and who joined her in writing three of the songs here. “We just worked really well together,” says Peters. “This can feel like a very lonely \[job\], so it’s great having a teammate and having someone rooting for you.” Featuring previously unheard work alongside new tracks written in a Suffolk Airbnb in summer 2020, *You Signed Up for This* houses the soft indie folk the singer has built her name and loyal following on, but also forays into the ’80s (“John Hughes Movie”), the early 2000s (“Boy”), and bouncy, unabashed pop (“Psycho”). “It was very important to me that this album reflected everything that I do,” adds Peters. “I was very free and I let myself do whatever I chose.” Running through all of it, of course, is the razor-sharp lyricism and wordplay that have made Peters one of 2021’s most feted rising songwriters (and which led Sheeran to declare her the “voice of this generation” to Apple Music in 2021), as Peters deftly dissects young adult life and falling in and out of love, first with a “bolshy, dramatic, immature” attitude and then with reflection. Read on as Peters guides us through her brilliant debut, one song at a time. **“You Signed Up for This”** “It\'s almost like a bullet point list of everything you need to know about me: I\'m the narrator. This is my life right now. This is how I sing. This is how I write. But it’s really self-aware—it starts off with an eye-roll. In this track, you have the synth noises, which felt like an ode to that side of the album, as well as a guitar feel to it, then this Coldplay-esque moment which married the two together. You’re falling out of one sound and into the other.” **“I’m Trying (Not Friends)”** “There\'s like 5,000 lyrics in this song. It’s all of my personality and everything that was going on in my life at the time. The first verse and the first chorus were actually written for *Trying* \[the Apple TV+ comedy; Peters wrote the Season 2 soundtrack\], but it wasn’t the vibe for it, so I took it back. This song is chaotic and bitchy and passive-aggressive and really flawed.” **“John Hughes Movie”** “I wrote this when I was 17, and it just never felt right to come out at the time. We reworked it for the album, then I sent it to \[LA producers\] Afterhrs, who have done a lot of my stuff and who gave it a shine. This song is so naive and hopeful and stupid and embarrassing and teenage. The first half of this album hits you round the face with melodrama.” **“Outdoor Pool”** “I have a voice note on my phone that says, ‘Midnight, outdoor pool.’ We wrote the chorus for this song one night in Suffolk after we wrote ‘Love Him I Don’t.’ It was such a random chorus and it was really hard to understand what it was about. Why are we in an outdoor pool? Then \[Taylor Swift’s\] *folklore* came out that night, and, listening to ‘betty,’ it just clicked. It was like, ‘Oh, I cannot be me all the time.’ Then I came back to it a few days later realizing it had to be from the point of view of a 15-year-old. From there it was like, bang. I wanted to make it super British and we were throwing in all the references we could: *Skins* and HMV and form on Monday, science lockers, the French exchange.” **“Love Him I Don’t”** “My favorite on the album. Lyrically and musically, it feels like the combination of a lot of songwriting that I\'ve done and a lot of learning about what I love. There’s a real heaviness but also lightness. It’s a song to sing to yourself when you don’t feel it.” **“Psycho”** “Everything about this track is so wild. It was the last session we did for the album. It was like, ‘The album is done, so if we get something, great, but if not, it’s done.’ I was with Ed Sheeran and \[prolific British songwriter\] Steve Mac and thought, ‘If I’m here with these people who have done massive things, I’m here to win, I’m here to write a big song.’ Ed has previously said ‘Psycho’ would be a really good song title. The track only took about 45 minutes once we were in the session, but afterwards I just felt really scared of it—it’s very different for me. I actually told my manager I\'d release it ‘over my dead corpse,’ but I’m so glad I got over it—I love it now. It’s so fun.” **“Boy”** “\[Producer and songwriter\] Joe Rubel, Ed Sheeran, and I had written ‘Hollow,’ then had dinner. Afterwards, I was like, ‘Let’s write another song.’ Everyone had been drinking wine, so it was a fun vibe, and we ended up talking about fuckboys and softboys and I was educating the boys on the differences. They said we should write a song called ‘Fuckboy.’ I was crying with laughter as we wrote it, and I think you can hear that. Really last minute, I said we should take out the ‘fuck’ and just have a gap. They eventually all came around to that idea.” **“Hollow”** “This is a special song. I did it with Ed, Joe, and \[Snow Patrol’s\] Johnny McDaid. It was the first day I’d met Ed and Johnny, and we all knew there was something to this song. It’s so simple but it also has a weird charm—it kind of harks back to what I did when I started, but also what Ed did when he started. It\'s very sad and has one of my favourite lyrics on the album: ‘You\'re the one that got away and you got away with a lot.’” **“Villain”** “Up until this point, a lot of this album is very rash. It\'s coming from a place of being hurt and saying, ‘I was right and you were wrong.’ But ‘Villain’ is this moment where there\'s a cold shower of realism and you understand that you are not always the hero of the story. It felt like it almost leveled the playing field, a moment to hold your hand up and move forward. Sonically, it felt like an older sister to ‘John Hughes Movie.’ I was looking at Bruce Springsteen and Brandon Flowers and The Killers for this song.” **“Brooklyn”** “This is about me and my twin sister Ellen going to New York when we were 19. We went to Gatwick, we had terrible tickets, we flew at 2 am, we had noodles for breakfast. This song literally just tells the story of that trip. I did it with \[songwriter and producer\] Frances \[aka Sophie Cooke\] and it came together quite naturally. It was funny—a lot of people wanted to produce this, but in the end Frances finished it, and it’s not dissimilar to the demo. Two women wrote and produced the song, and I think that\'s really amazing. ” **“Elvis Song”** “One of the oldest tracks on the album. This is like stadium euphoria to me but with more realism to it, I guess. ‘I\'ve got no right to miss you’ is something I’ve always played around with, and it\'s a feeling I\'ve definitely felt before.” **“Talking to Strangers”** “This is a love song and it’s really sweet. I did this with \[songwriters\] Brad Ellis and Jez Ashurst, and we wrote it really late at night. The vocals you hear in it are the vocals I did then. In fact, all of this song is basically the demo, apart from some harmonies I added from my bedroom studio during lockdown. The demo was very much how it needed to stay.” **“Volcano”** “This is a different palette, and it’s almost the hardest to talk about because there’s so much within it. It’s really a song about people who you feel like never see the consequences of their actions. This song is just repetition all the time, because that’s how it feels, I think, when you’re in that moment, and someone has hurt you and gotten away with it. No one has called them out, so they’re able to keep living their life, and you’re just stuck in this song. It was definitely fueled by #MeToo. There’s a lot of real, simmering female resentment and the silence you take upon yourself. I was referencing Dolly Parton and Kacey Musgraves. It felt like the right tone for that sort of thing—no one does ‘woman scorned’ better than country musicians.” **“Tough Act”** “To me, this song feels sad but also has a real air of growth in it. It’s hopeful and it’s respectful and comes from a really mature place of ‘This is nobody’s fault.’ By the end of it, you\'re not sure if it\'s meant to be a sad song or if it\'s meant to be a song of happiness. I listened to it recently and was struck by the second verse, when I say, ‘I got busy and you forgot how to miss me when I\'m not much of who you grew up with.’ I think that speaks to so many people and so many relationships, romantic or platonic or family or anything. It\'s the realization that you\'re not who you were and that\'s fine, but that’s something that everyone has to accept at some point. Originally it was a piano ballad with no harmonies and it was very stripped. It ended up this really beautiful orchestral arrangement. The lyrics felt like a great way to finish this album.”
Name a K-pop group that has risen to prominence in the last half-decade, and chances are, they owe something to NCT 127. Since debuting in 2016, the Seoul-based nine-member NCT sub-unit (featuring members Taeil, Johnny, Taeyong, Yuta, Doyoung, Jaehyun, Mark, Jungwoo, and Haechan) has no doubt influenced generations of K-pop artists to mimic their impossible choreography, their impeccable harmonies, their hip-hop hybridity. *Sticker*, the group’s third studio album, produced by Yoo Young-Jin, Ryan Jhun, and Dem Jointz (Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar), pushes the envelope even further. The driving bass and penetrating flute of the title track, the wobbling production and smooth, bright harmonies of “Breakfast,” the suit-and-tie R&B romantic balladry of “Focus,” the boom-clap drumline of “Far,” the jagged industrial trap of “Bring the Noize,” the Naughty by Nature-esque cheers of “Road Trip”—no moment on this record sounds quite like another.
When Catharina Stoltenberg listens to Smerz’s debut album *Believer*, she feels emotional. Stoltenberg and her best friend and musical collaborator Henriette Motzfeldt worked on their first record for over three years before its release in 2021, and to play back these songs feels very much like encountering their past selves. “It’s a very detailed diary for the two of us, musically and lyrically,” Stoltenberg tells Apple Music. “I feel like music has that power of bringing back the feeling you had, you get transferred back.” Making *Believer* was not a static experience for the duo. It’s a record that was made in apartments, in schools, in some remote Norwegian cabins, by lakes, and in public libraries across the globe whilst the band were on tour. “We often go to libraries because you’re out in this big city and there’s nowhere you can be calm,” says Stoltenberg. “Libraries are often that place.” That feeling of a grand voyage, and of trying to hide away from the world in order to understand it, underpins this bewitching debut. It’s a record that mixes ambient electronica, warped avant-pop and dreamy soundscapes. “It’s a lot about communications and relationships and how you often meet yourself in relation to others and the struggle for relationships to feel honest or real,” says Stoltenberg. Let the Norwegian pair take you on a tour of their sonic chronicles, track by track. **Gitarriff** Catharina Stoltenberg: “It’s a bit inspired by some spy movies and maybe the opening of some Alicia Keys songs, a very grand opening where you try to get the feeling that something big is going to happen.” Henriette Motzfeldt: “And it’s maybe not that grand, but it’s more like the suspense.” **Max** CS: “It’s about this imbalance that can happen in the relationship when the other person’s look on you becomes stronger than your own look at yourself. The arrangement is based on these asymmetrical bars which are put into a very strict grid and tempo. So to us, the message or the movement feels both floating but also very rigid.” **Believer** CS: “It was lyrically written over almost two years, which is not typical for us. We often finish stuff in the heat of the song. I feel like we thought it was finished at the time, but then it was just the feeling that you had something more to say. So it just opened up for more and more. It ended up having this other type of development lyrically, but one that moves across different parts of an emotional journey maybe. It underlines how confused one can be and how you can keep on telling different stories to yourself.” HM: “The arrangement is based on these loops of different lengths, so they sometimes coincide, that’s what gives it this propulsion.” **Rain** CS: “This song was made very quickly, at least the important first draft. I think that it’s caught the vibe you get when you want to have sex. That sums up the song. Then we replaced the sample strings with real strings, working with violinists and cellists who could play on top of the chords.” HM: “It was fun to experience how our music can take another direction that made it into something new.” **Versace strings** CS: “I think we actively tried to work with the movement and breathing in the music through the computer in a different way than normal. We focused a lot on the movement and breathing, and not so much about the tonality. We played it live on the MIDI keyboard and then we fixed the tones afterwards, but we wanted it to give this fluffy, romantic feeling.” HM: “It’s a bit like these overtures that you often hear in opera where it’s a very dramatic opening, which is just a fun format.” **4 temaer** CS: “It means ‘four themes’.” HM: “It’s based on these four themes that we made separately and each theme has two phrases that are of different lengths. And then we made them work together and let different instruments and sound both play the different themes.” CS: “I think that if you make these very strict rules for yourself, you don’t have to think about all these surrounding things, you only have to think about some kind of core in the message.” **Hester** HM: “We wanted to make something where everything followed this one rhythmic pattern, so that was the basis of it. And then it follows this simple idea of an AB structure.” CS: “We got very fond of ways of shifting and developing our structure, and that happens on ‘Hester.’” **Flashing** CS: “I got inspired by the feeling of euphoria that music is able to make. And lyrically, it’s about losing the feeling of being in a team, in a relationship, maybe when you go from feeling happy to looking at it from the outside.” **The favourite** HM: “It was inspired by various folk songs and Schubert’s song cycle, which is called *Die schöne Müllerin*, and \[Edvard\] Grieg’s ‘Solveig’s Song’. It’s made in real time, which is quite unusual for us. Catha was playing the MIDI keyboard and I was singing into the computer.” **Rap interlude** HM: “This was also made in real time, and we jammed on top of this loud trap song. I feel like it was partly just for fun, because sometimes if we’re not very eager to work or if we don’t have anything specific we want to do, we will just do something.” **Sonette** HM: “This was the quickest song we did. I think it was because we had this week where we were isolated and only made music, so I guess we’d spent some days getting synched and then this just happened. It also helped that we had just discovered or developed these sounds that we\'re using in the song, and that can be such an inspiring point in the process, where you’re finally able to make it into something new or something unknown.” **Glassbord** CS: “Musically, it’s inspired by Pink and 50 Cent. And lyrically, it’s maybe about the feeling where something’s very dramatic or you’re extremely sad, but you’re able to switch in and out of it, and maybe play around with your own emotions. Maybe because something is so big that you don’t understand it so you can switch on and then switch completely off. It’s about that confusing state and the lyrics play a bit with that sensation. And the glass table—glassbord—it’s like dancing on a glass table. Maybe it sets the scene of something being a bit forced.” **Grand Piano** CS: “We’d watch a lot of instrument tutorials on YouTube, and the inspiration for this came from one of those, and also maybe this vibe that is in the audience before a play or before a sit-down concert begins, right before the curtain goes up. And then the last part with vocals, I remember us doing it on our couch when we lived together in Oslo, with our USB mic and headset.” **Missy** HM: “‘Missy’ is very simple, it’s just this one sound which just is a very direct translation of a circular emotion.” **I don’t talk about that much** HM: “Again, musically, I think we were inspired by the Eurodance universe. The drums started out being these polyrhythmic patterns.” CS: “I feel like the rhythmical part of ‘I don’t talk about that much’, and of ‘Max’ and ‘Believer’, how it works for me is that I understand it body-wise and dancing-wise, so you’re able to float a bit around it. And it’s nice to not be so aware of what’s going on in a way so you can just go along with the rhythms.” **Hva hvis** HM: “This was me playing violin on top of samples of me playing violin, and it turned out to be this kind of folky song. And I think the title, which means ‘What if?’, is because it felt a bit hopeful. We wanted to finish with it because of the hopeful feeling, and also it’s not very concluding. That made sense for us.”
A decade into a storied career as a songwriter crafting chart-toppers for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, and Gwen Stefani, Julia Michaels’ debut album is here—*Not in Chronological Order*, a collection of anthemic pop songs grounded by her characteristically raw lyricism. “Each song has a different story, and even though it\'s predominantly about love, they have different feelings and sonics,” Michaels tells Apple Music. “There’s a song for when you\'re feeling spiteful, revengeful, or sassy, or angry, or introspective, or in love, or heartbroken. Love is the thing I know how to write best, and that’s the recurring theme for this album: love and all its complexities.” A few tracks were written with her romantic partner and fellow songwriter JP Saxe of “If the World Was Ending” fame (“Little Did I Know,” “All Your Exes”). “Because I have anxiety and depression, I thought that I deserved a certain type of love, some sort of toxicity,” she explains. “Then you wake up one day, and you meet somebody, you realize you are good enough for love in spite of what you may think about yourself. I used to think that I had to create drama to write a really great song about love. I was so wrong.” Below, Michaels breaks down *Not in Chronological Order*, track by track. **“All Your Exes”** “There was a moment where JP was like, \'Maybe one day in the future, we’ll be able to talk about the people from our past that have shaped our present.\' I was like, \'Fuck that. I don\'t give a shit about anyone you\'ve ever dated, ever.\' And he was like, \'Well, baby, you can\'t just live in a world where all my exes are dead.\' I sarcastically sang the first two lines of the song in the car, and we decided to go to the studio the next day and write it.” **“Love Is Weird”** “It was myself, Monsters & Strangerz, Billy Walsh, and John Ryan; we had about 30 minutes left in the studio. I was having a conversation with Billy, and I remember being like, ‘Yeah, man, love is weird.’ All of a sudden we had this song about how you can go from loving somebody so intimately to grieving over the heartbreak and devastation of that relationship. And then you\'re sitting in the park with somebody new, you\'re psychoanalyzing everything that person is saying, you\'re hoping to God that they\'re not a serial killer and that everything they say they actually mean. Then you\'re super in love with them and you don\'t remember anything about the last person that you loved.” **“Pessimist”** “I put ‘Pessimist’ after ‘Love Is Weird’ because I feel like that was the next seemingly perfect transition. You know, love is weird, and I do find it very bizarre that \[on\] my last two EPs, I was very pessimistic and very angry when it came to love. Then you meet somebody, and they completely break everything that you thought love was. That’s what ‘Pessimist’ was for me. I \[sing\] about being bitter, planting lemon trees, everything feeling sour, nothing ever feeling sweet, and then that changes. \[You’re\] completely changed by somebody.” **“Little Did I Know”** “I wrote ‘Little Did I Know’ with JP. I had a session with an artist that day, and it didn\'t go the way that I really wanted it to. I think I just put \[too\] much pressure on myself because I wanted it to be great. I remember coming home and looking at JP, just being like, \'I need to write something that feels sincere and honest.\' He was like, \'All right, well, let\'s do it. I\'m happy to help you.\' We started it in bed on the guitar, we went to sleep, woke up the next day, he sat on the bathtub, I was standing on the bathroom floor. We wrote it there. We wrote it in a park. We wrote it in his old house \[which\] he turned into a studio. When it came time to record it, it was July, it was the middle of the pandemic. My vocal producer Ben Rice, who\'s done all my vocals since I was 21, 22 years old, came over. He set up his equipment in my guest bedroom. I sang everything in the guest bedroom. Then JP and I did all the choir stacking vocals. What you hear is from that day, most of it—the only thing that has changed is that we added a couple more choir stacks with a few friends of ours, just for some added texture.” **“Orange Magic”** “I had a random title, ‘Orange Magic,’ basically all about JP and the time we initially started dating and he picked me up in this BMW. It basically looked like a glittery piece of shit showing up at my doorstep. I hated the color so much I actually think I manifested his car getting stolen three months later and set on fire.” **“Lie Like This”** “I was laying in bed with JP, and I was laying in front of him, so my stomach was on his back, and I turned around upside down and he looked at me and said, ‘You\'re pretty upside down.’ I turned forward and he said, \'You\'re pretty right side up, too.\' I was like, \'I\'m putting that in a song.\' That was the start of the album.” **“Wrapped Around”** “I really wanted to have a sassy, spiteful, revengeful song on the album, a ‘fuck you’ to people I once thought I was in love with but I was definitely not in love with at all. When it came time to really get the production down, we had David Campbell, who\'s Beck\'s dad, do all of the string arrangements.” **“History”** “For the most part, I try to go into the studio with non-preconceived ideas, because then I feel like I\'m not listening as much. I sang the chorus of \'History,\' took the headphones off, and John Ryan helped finesse the lyrics with me. You just want all of those details about that person. I wrote \'History,\' which is like, \'Tell me everything\'; \'All Your Exes\' is the response of knowing too much.” **“Undertone”** “It’s a situation where certain memories or certain people don\'t allow you to fall in love, because it makes you scared of what the next one will be like. Of course it is sad, but I didn\'t want it to feel sad. I wanted it to evoke a different emotion: What if we put some sort of pretty breakbeat underneath it, with these beautiful piano chords?” **“That’s the Kind of Woman”** “I remember being in the bathtub, which has been a recurring theme in my album—it\'s the place where I can self-reflect and mentally elaborate on different things I\'m feeling all at once. I remember listening to the water run, thinking about who I am as a person, and if there were things I could change about me as a person, what they would be. That\'s the kind of woman I wish I could be; I would leave me for her. The vocal you hear is the demo vocal from that day. We tried to recreate it, but it just never felt the same, I think just mainly because I was crying. If I can be a voice that makes somebody feel less alone, then great, because in turn, they make me feel less alone.”
“The process for this album genuinely happened by accident,” Luke Hemmings says about his first album as a solo artist. “When the world shut down last year, I had a lot of time to reflect on my youth and the person I had been, who I’ve become and who I wanted to be. It just so happens that the best way for me to face those things and process my thoughts is by writing songs.” The Sydney-born, LA-based singer-songwriter may only be 25, but he’s already been in the game for a decade, having founded 5 Seconds of Summer in 2011. The pop-rock group, which is fronted by Hemmings, shot to global fame in the years that followed—and with that came years of constant touring and momentum that didn’t really let up at all until the pandemic hit. It marked the first time in years that Hemmings was able to stay in one place for an extended period of time, and it allowed him to focus on himself, his past, and his solo career. “I’m in a constant pursuit of bettering myself and always trying to become a better artist, songwriter, musician, and human,” he says. “A huge goal was to have the sonics of the album reflect the feeling of the emotions that I was immersed in when writing.” Below, Hemmings delves deep into the meaning and making of every track on *When Facing the Things We Turn Away From*. **“Starting Line”** “The lyric and sonic of ‘Starting Line’ are a reflection on 10 years of your life passing you by in what felt like forever, but also in the blink of an eye. It’s about forgetting pieces of your life—not from vices, but from sheer volume and speed. I’ve had to figure out how to fill all the gaps for myself in a positive way. I love the way this song builds and the emotion it evokes. It is a perfect first step to the rest of the album.” **“Saigon”** “This song was inspired by a trip to Vietnam that I took with my fiancée and both of our mothers. This entire album was written in the moments of stillness that quarantine forced, and I spent those months facing the things I turned away from—the good, the bad, my regrets, needing to get help. Through all those times, I kept thinking about how euphoric that trip was, and how I wanted to keep chasing those highs I felt. I reflected on the sad truth that sometimes we can’t appreciate the best moments of our life until they’ve passed us by and are out of reach.” **“Motion”** “‘Motion’ is about having a sense of distrust with the way you perceive your own thoughts and the way the world moves around you. If I’m completely honest, this was the first time in my life that I was scared and motivated enough to seek professional help with my mental health. I couldn’t trust my own thoughts and the voices in my head, and the way this song feels brings me back to those moments.” **“Place in Me”** “This is the only song on the album that’s the same, overall, as the first demo. There were no changes or tweaks afterwards on the production or writing. I think that\'s what makes this a captivating piece of music. It’s about letting someone down, and was supposed to sound as if it were a voicemail on someone\'s answering machine.” **“Baby Blue”** “‘Baby Blue’ was sonically inspired by listening to artists like George Harrison. It’s about escapism; it’s the knee-jerk reflex of running away to your bedroom as a child, but as you get older, it just turns into vices and finding different ways to escape reality. The ‘wonderland’ that’s referenced in the chorus is whatever place you go to in your head, by whatever means, and how tempting it is to want to run away and stay there forever.” **“Repeat”** “‘If life’s a game of inches, how\'d you get miles away?’ was the first lyric written for this song. I was listening to a lot of Neil Young at the time and wanted to write a song that I felt would make him proud. ‘Repeat’ is about the endless feeling of chasing something so long, or living a certain way for so long, only to wind up back at the beginning—unrecognizable to yourself.” **“Mum”** “This song is essentially a letter to my mum. I think as you get older, you tend to appreciate family more and more. I’ve grown up a lot and have never appreciated my family more than in these two years that I haven’t gotten to see them. One of my favorite musical moments on the whole album is at the end of this song—I love how it makes me feel. The wall of guitars and synths and the soft outro vocal balance each other really beautifully to me.” **“Slip Away”** “‘Slip Away’ is about that feeling right before bed where every bad decision and bad thing you have ever done swirls around your mind. The constant ache of expecting loved ones to be out the door as soon as they see who you actually are. It was written in a cabin in the middle of the woods, and it certainly feels like that to me when I listen to it. Sometimes in my moments of extreme happiness, I feel like I am undeserving of them, almost like an impostor.” **“Diamonds”** “It’s the most honest I’ve ever been in a song. To be frank, I didn\'t think that I was going to make it to 25. For many different reasons. It’s about being a young individual and going through such a whirlwind of an experience and being unable to handle it in a lot of ways.” **“A Beautiful Dream”** “It was the last song written for the album, and it was written at home. This song comes from the word ‘zenosyne,’ which is the feeling that as you get older, time moves quicker. I hadn\'t seen my family in Australia for almost two years—I still haven\'t seen them—and this was inspired by reliving memories from a child. It has a voicemail from my mum hidden among the music. I find it difficult to remember anything in general, so I suppose it\'s about not wanting my most precious memories to fade away.” **“Bloodline”** “‘Bloodline’ took the longest to write out of all the songs and is an extremely special song to me. It’s about struggling with addiction and making choices in your life but looking back and wondering, ‘Is this genetic? Am I destined to be this person and struggle with these things, or can I fight the bloodline and remember the things that help keep myself grounded and become the person I know I can be?’ It\'s also the only song on the album to be recorded on just one instrument and one vocal.” **“Comedown”** “‘Comedown’ was written mostly at the piano at home until it underwent many production versions to get to the place it is in now. It was one of those ones that I felt I didn\'t write, but was given to me. I was inspired by the idea of doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result, and constantly living in such a negative loop of actions and emotions. ‘Let it come down on me’ means allowing yourself to feel it all, the good and the bad and everything in between.”
While making their fifth album, The Vaccines experienced something they hadn’t felt for a while: youthfulness. “One of the reasons a band’s most successful record is often their first one is because there is this youthful, reckless abandon,” singer/guitarist Justin Young tells Apple Music. “You’re not crippled with self-doubt, not overthinking things. There’s a purity to all of it.” The Londoners felt that spirit being squeezed out of them early on. On the back of a platinum-selling debut of effervescent garage rock, 2011’s *What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?*, they were ravenously anointed as the saviors of guitar music by the UK press. “It stifled us for a while,” says Young. “We were obsessed with building on the first record, not just in terms of how good it was, but how big it was. I think we got a little bit lost along the way.” Almost a decade later, The Vaccines felt rejuvenated by recording *Back in Love City*. It’s the first album they’ve made as a five-piece, adding drummer Yoann Intonti to a lineup of keyboardist Timothy Lanham (who came on board for 2018’s *Combat Sports*) and founding members Young, guitarist Freddie Cowan, and bassist Árni Árnason. “So, in many ways, we are a new band,” says Young. They were excited by the songs they’d written and inspired by the studio—Sonic Ranch, a sprawling residential complex in the middle of a pecan orchard near El Paso, Texas. The music that emerged embellishes their punk spirit and pop nous with disco flourishes, industrial clangs, and a distinctive flavor of spaghetti Westerns. Young jokingly calls it “Morricone indie-rock” and uses it as a backdrop for lyrics that explore how human expression is becoming increasingly binary. The songs imagine a dystopia where emotions are finite commodities—with Love City as a place where you can replenish your stocks for the right price. For Young, it’s an album that goes some way to solving the enduring puzzle of songwriting. “We’ve always tried to evolve but, at the same time, figure out our core and what makes The Vaccines *The Vaccines*,” he says. “You want to remain interested and interesting and keep pushing yourself forward, but you want to pull everyone along with you. That keeps me awake at night.” Here, he talks us through this particular solution, track by track. **“Back in Love City”** “We were trying to write something that was kind of garage-y and a little punky but had more of a disco or fun groove to it. The first verse, I’m singing about arriving in Love City. I always remember driving, a few years ago, from San Francisco to Vegas with some friends, taking all day. Just as we were pulling into Vegas, the sun was going down and the neon lights were firing up. I imagine this song existing in quite a similar space. It\'s the beginning of the story.” **“Alone Star”** “I was told quite far into the writing process of *English Graffiti*, our third record, that we didn’t have any singles. And I ended up writing all of the singles in a week—‘Dream Lover’ on the Tuesday, ‘20/20’ on the Wednesday, ‘Handsome’ on the Thursday. I wrote ‘Alone Star’ on Monday and we just couldn’t get it right. It felt a bit ham-fisted and we wanted to try to create a bit more nuance around the arrangement, instrumentation, and production. We picked it up again for *Combat Sports* and, again, couldn’t make it sound right within the context of that record. We picked it up for this record, too, and very nearly dropped it but ended up in a place where we all fell in love with it. It’s funny when you see the odd comment on social media, ‘This isn’t The Vaccines I know.’ I like reminding myself that, ‘Actually, yes, it is. It was written on the exact same week as all the songs that you love and know already.’” **“Headphones Baby”** “There is a bit of a theme across the record of fatalism. Not necessarily wanting to die—more wanting to throw caution to the wind, doing whatever you want. There’s a hedonism and euphoria, too. I remember the second I wrote this song, being very excited about it. It felt very euphoric. There were a few comments that it was maybe too pop, but I see it in the lineage of big Vaccines singles. The first time I sang the chorus to ‘If You Wanna’ out loud, we all laughed because we thought it was so cheesy and poppy. We’ve always written songs like that with those big, euphoric choruses.” **“Wanderlust”** “I suppose it sounds like it belongs in the desert and belongs in Texas. I think it’s potentially the heaviest Vaccines song to date. It’s obviously super pop as well, but I would say it’s more rock than punk rock.” **“Paranormal Romance”** “I’m touching on hyperbole and being really over the top, wanting to feel in ways that we hear about in songs and read about in books and see in movies and just have that feeling that’s out of this world and impossible or improbable or immortal. I think this is the first moment where \[the album’s\] not just Western-inspired or South-inspired, but it’s quite cinematic as well.” **“El Paso”** “This was written in LA with Daniel \[Ledinsky\], who ended up producing the record. He was telling me about Sonic Ranch that day. He’d just been there with Dave Sitek or Miguel or someone, and was telling me how amazing it was, telling me all these crazy stories. I said, ‘Oh, I’m flying to El Paso tomorrow morning because Vaccines are playing in Juarez.’ So, as we finished the song that evening, we named the file ‘El Paso.’ And then, six months later, when we asked him to produce the record, he said, ‘We should go to El Paso.’ Here was all this nice poetry and serendipity; it felt destined to be made there. Once we got there, it was impossible not to ham that up a little bit, given the environment, but we were headed for that Morricone indie-rock stuff long before we decided to go to Texas.” **“Jump Off the Top”** “We first recorded this when we recorded ‘All My Friends Are Falling in Love,’ which was a stand-alone single in 2018. Again, we couldn’t quite get it right, but it consistently has one of the best reactions live. I think the most popular Vaccines songs do have this kind of tempo to them. They’re quite frenetic. They’re obviously upbeat and fun and a little dumb, maybe. And there’s this happy/sad thing. There’s a slightly dark undertone to the lyrics, but it’s also sung on top with this kind of nursery rhyme melody.” **“XCT”** “\[The title\] is like ‘Ex-city.’ We thought it would be funny to call it that and have it open Side Two. I liked the idea of everything falling apart and ending up in a dilapidated, abandoned version of Love City. Someone once told me that when the central business district of Detroit was pretty much abandoned, they found a grizzly bear living on the 20th floor of this old office block. Whether or not that’s true, I had that in my mind as I was writing this song. It’s a quite brittle-feeling song, in places a little industrial or nu-metal, even.” **“Bandit”** “This is a good example of a song being written very much with Love City in mind, and the idea that someone can steal your heart or steal your feelings. It’s building on the idea that this world exists where there might even be gangs of love, this kind of underworld, this underbelly.” **“Peoples’ Republic of Desire”** “It’s the title of an amazing documentary about kids in China. I watched it one night and it was like, ‘They’ve made a documentary about this place I didn’t even realize existed.’ It’s just building on this notion that there’s a place where you can go to feel something you didn’t think you could feel anymore.” **“Savage”** “‘Savage’ came from a riff that Freddie sent me. I immediately found it very exciting. We’d never really successfully written a song that, like, swung. It was obviously very glammy—it just got me excited and it felt quite primal or savage.” **“Heart Land”** “This is the one song I’ve been worried about people taking the wrong way. But I hope that it’s obvious that it’s being written from this quite naive, optimistic perspective of this 13-year-old English boy who’s never been to America before, but has grown drunk on a diet of American pop culture. It’s less about commenting on where America has ended up and more about trying to capture that feeling of where I once thought it was.” **“Pink Water Pistols”** “I finished the lyrics before the song existed, so I was just waiting for a song to come along where they’d be able to fit. And when Freddie sent me this melody, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, great.’ I think it’s probably quite obvious it’s about wanting to be better and get better, and thinking you might be able to find that with someone else.”
“I always say ‘Tusa’ changed my life,” KAROL G tells Apple Music. “I will always be grateful to this song and Nicki Minaj.” After outdoing herself with that outstanding 2019 international smash hit, the Colombian star transcends expectations on her new album as she bends contemporary pop music to her will. As previewed via her popular singles “Ay, DiOs Mío!” and “LOCATION,” she continues to astound as one of modern music’s biggest stars, Latin or otherwise. Her commitment to performing in Spanish speaks to how far global artistry such as hers has come since the so-called crossover days. “This has made a huge impact culturally,” she says, “and it makes us so proud that we can sing in Spanish and still reach a massive audience.” Though the album’s title explicitly refers to the date in 2006 when her parents signed her first record contract, itself a subtle nod to her endurance and longevity as an artist, she considers *KG0516* to be about much more than just a particular moment in time. “I wanted to take my fans on a flight through my musical journey,” she explains. “Each song takes you to a different place.” Indeed, the diversity of sound on *KG0516* goes further than that of its fairly eclectic predecessor *OCEAN*, building on that multi-genre affair’s strength by expanding her sonic palette. She dives headfirst into the contemporary corridos scene with “200 COPAS,” embraces reggae vibrations on the empowering “BICHOTA,” and brings it back to a summertime R&B classic with the bilingual “BEAUTIFUL BOY.” Befitting her superstar status, she’s curated an impressive set of features, from Latin power players Anuel AA and J Balvin to hip-hop legend Ludacris. She makes room for rising star Nathy Peluso on the popwise “GATO MALO” and goes toe to toe with no less than Ozuna on the ethereal “ODISEA.” Perhaps the most notable of these guests is the inimitable reggaetonera Ivy Queen, who features prominently on the stacked album closer “LEYENDAS” alongside Nicky Jam and Wisin & Yandel. “She opened the path for future female artists like me in the culture,” Karol says. “She proved that we are not limited, and we can be just as successful as the men.” In turn, she lifts up a young woman from the next generation, Miami sensation Mariah Angeliq, for the thumping “EL MAKINÓN.”
After a year filled with highlights—including a critically acclaimed debut EP, 2020’s *For Broken Ears*, and hit collaborations with Wizkid, Justin Bieber (“Essence”), and Drake (“Fountains”)—Nigerian alté R&B singer-songwriter Tems leans into a newfound sense of creative freedom on her sophomore EP. “I have learnt to let go and just live life and just do what comes naturally to me,” she tells Apple Music. “It has helped me find a new freedom of expression and a new vibe that isn\'t based on past experiences but present moments.” Through its five tracks, *If Orange Was a Place* creates ample space for Tems’ distinctive voice to shine as she navigates through themes of finding inner peace and staying true to self. “Orange is a vibe,” she explains. “It is the feeling of sunset and the sweetness of an orange. And when I think of those songs, I am transported to a different place where everything is warm and sweet.” Lyrically and sonically, Tems (Temilade Openiyi) represents an alté sound driving a new wave of African R&B—one centered on mood, expression, and originality, and one less concerned with trying to sound too familiar. “Growing up in Nigeria has created the rebel in me when it comes to my sound,” she explains, “and what motivates me to move every morning. All the encounters I have had brought out that rebel in me in different ways—the rebel that dares to do things her own way.” Here, Tems shares a snapshot of the EP, track by track. **“Crazy Tings”** “This song was inspired by the crazy amazing things that have been going on in my life, and it was made in Ghana. The beat was played to me by GuiltyBeatz and I was surrounded by orange light and alcohol. The vibes just flowed in afterwards.” **“Found” (feat. Brent Faiyaz)** “I was in LA with Brent; he is such an amazing artist. He always knows how to bring a different perspective. The song is really about releasing different thoughts in my head and reconciling them with my truth.” **“Replay”** “This song was just my rebel side coming out. Again, this was just me expressing my thoughts on opinions and all types of energies I encounter. It’s me reiterating who I am. The song was produced by Jonah Christian.” **“Avoid Things”** “I am someone who doesn’t like unnecessary disputes that lead nowhere, and ‘Avoid Things’ is about my \[desire\] to provide solutions, but being met with resistance, madness, and crazy things.” **“Vibe Out”** “‘Vibe Out’ is the setting of the sun and getting prepared to move. It is what I call the ‘ginger’ and the burst of dance…the sunset dance.”
Back in the early aughts, when most Melbourne bands were making party-rock anthems, HTRK (that’s “hate rock”) were the cool kids in the corner, with icy post-punk jams that might soundtrack an evening at the *Twin Peaks* Roadhouse. The band’s seen its share of loss in the years since, including the death of founding member Sean Stewart in 2010. But the duo wears its sorrows elegantly on *Rhinestones*, an album that refracts its gothic country inspirations through a blurred prism. “Kiss Kiss and Rhinestones” is Western folk at its most windswept and dreamy, whispered poetry over reverb-drowned acoustic guitar, like a fever dream set in the Wild West.
Among the many reasons why Rauw Alejandro has become one of the most sought-after singers in the Latin music world, his restless creativity certainly ranks highly. There were undeniable glimmers of that on his full-length debut *Afrodisíaco*, with more than its fair share of high-profile guests. His disinterest in being pigeonholed or limited to any one lane, as alluded to on that album’s delightful dance-floor outlier “Algo Mágico,” led to some exciting moments of risk-taking on his follow-up *VICE VERSA*. The radical pop pivot of “Todo De Ti” proved a transformational moment in his ascent to stardom, its epic clubby funk and irresistible chorus hook translating to a smash hit throughout the Spanish-speaking world. While he opts not to repeat this specific formula too many times, he shows that single was no fluke with the Tainy-produced “Desenfocao\'” and its hedonistic haze. Elsewhere, he showcases both his range and a willingness to keep evolving via the sentimental R&B of “Aquel Nap ZzZz,” the bilingual tech-house revelations of “Cosa Guapa,” and the surprise junglism of “¿Cuándo Fue?” Of course, those seeking the steamy loverman perreo vibes of his prior album will find plenty of that on offer, from the throbbing online come-ons of “Sexo Virtual” to the *duro* throwback thrills of “La Old Skul.” But above all, *VICE VERSA* truly succeeds by reframing Rauw as an artist operating on a whole other level than the R&B new jacks he came up with.
The boy band craft a psychedelic fusion of K-pop and punk rock.
Baby Queen named her debut mixtape *The Yearbook* because she wanted it to feel like a coming-of-age film. \"This whole body of work was written during a time of my life that was so developmental,\" the artist born Bella Latham tells Apple Music. \"When I listen to it now, it sounds like all the different characters you play when you\'re growing up, and all the intense emotions you feel, like extreme happiness and extreme pain. I wanted people to feel like they could grow up with me listening to the music.\" The South Africa-born East Londoner says she always knew this savagely honest and personal body of work was a mixtape rather than a traditional album. \"For me, an album is something that is incredibly sonically cohesive, whereas these songs were sort of written as singles,\" she says. \"Each song has its own character and we followed specifically what it wanted in terms of production—not necessarily what the project as a whole wanted.\" For this reason, *The Yearbook* serves as a catchy showcase for the breadth of Baby Queen\'s spiky alt-pop sound, pinging between synthy anthems (\"Raw Thoughts\"), melancholic midtempo (\"Dover Beach\"), and chugging guitar pop (\"American Dream\"). Along the way, there are also affecting spoken-word interludes that matter hugely to an artist who takes palpable pride in her lyrics. \"I liked the idea of breaking up this mixtape with poetry because it\'s really nice to have a moment where the words can just completely shine through,\" she says. Read on for Latham’s track-by-track recollections on *The Yearbook*. **\"Baby Kingdom\"** \"This was originally a poem I wrote about the desire to rebel against the way people want you to fit a certain mold and life. I guess it\'s a manifesto about freedom and finding a space that is entirely yours. That\'s what the ‘Baby Kingdom’ is for me, and what being Baby Queen has really brought to life.\" **\"Raw Thoughts\"** \"I think this song is going to haunt me for a really long time because it\'s just a really good song. And annoyingly, it came \[to me\] in about 15-20 minutes. I started writing it after a really crazy night out in East London, when I was honestly so hung over. I was going through a really bad breakup at the time—my ex was in LA with this beautiful supermodel and I was living this sort of broke-ass gremlin life running around London getting wasted. So this song is really about the confusion of being so heartbroken but also having all this newfound freedom.\" **\"You Shaped Hole\"** \"This is about the same breakup. I can remember writing the melody while walking through the park. I don\'t know where I was going, but I just started singing, \'There\'s a hole inside of me and it\'s shaped like you,\' into my voice notes. I love the concept of having this hole that was cut out of my body that I was trying to fill by cramming with so many things. But because the hole was shaped like one particular person, all these things could never reach the corners. I was trying to fill the hole with alcohol, kissing people, new experiences—all the stuff you do during a breakup to try and escape your feelings. At that point in my life, I was just on a rampage.\" **\"American Dream\" (feat. MAY-A)** \"I came up with the concept when I went on a writing trip to this farm in Bath—it was just one horse, one cow, and me. And I had this idea of comparing the desire to be with someone—and the dream or illusion that you have of someone—with the American dream, which is something that people also have such preconceived notions about. In both cases you think something is going to be a certain way, but it often isn\'t what you expect, and that was a really interesting concept to me.” **\"Narcissist\"** \"This song is very specific and opinionated. I don\'t think anyone else could sing these words but Baby Queen, which is why I like it so much. My generation, Gen Z, is criticized for being narcissistic, but there are very specific reasons why we are this way. We grew up with social media and the internet, being fed this message: \'Focus on yourself, obsess over yourself. It\'s all about aesthetics and how you\'re perceived.\' I wanted to take back ownership of that word and say, \'Yeah, I am a fucking narcissist, but here\'s why: You started it.\' Because if you don\'t accept your flaws, how can you even begin to work through them?\" **\"Dover Beach\"** \"One of my favorite poems as a kid was ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold, so it was always this really romanticized place in my head. So when I had time for another writing trip, I was like, \'I\'m going to Dover!\' It was a pretty amazing experience to write a song called \'Dover Beach\' when you\'re actually there. There\'s something very magical about the white cliffs and the sea air and seeing the ocean in front of you. The concept of this song is very romantic in a way. It\'s about going to a place you\'ve dreamed about your whole life, but instead of experiencing it fully and having a great time, everything you see is taken over by the object of your affection. So it\'s a bit like: ‘Fuck you! Now you\'ve even stolen Dover Beach from me!’\" **\"Dover Beach, Pt. 2\"** \"This is a poem I wrote at the same time about the same person—it’s a continuation of the story that adds depth to those feelings. Originally we were going to outro ‘Dover Beach’ with the piano sound you hear here, but I remember saying: \'This feels like something else; I think there\'s room for another story here.\' So I went through my notebooks and found these ideas that became the lyrics.\" **\"These Drugs\"** \"This song really changed my career because it\'s so starkly honest and seeing people respond to that was incredible for me. I\'ve never been addicted to anything really, but I have definitely had a bad relationship with substances and partying—especially during this dark time of my life where I felt like a failure. Because I hated myself so much, I would go out partying all night so I could reach this point where it was like I could switch off my brain. Really, this song is about my deep self-hatred and realizing you can\'t block out that feeling with anything, because if you do, you wake up feeling worse and it becomes this vicious cycle. I felt like I had a duty to tell this story, which is a really great feeling to have when you\'re writing a song, because it drives you to say something that feels really important.\" **\"Fake Believe\"** \"I find it really hard to speak about social issues online. The best way for me to say something is through my songs. I wrote this last year when so many Black Lives Matter protests were happening and Donald Trump was in power and I felt really fucking powerless about what was happening in the world. The way that I deal with things is through satire, so this song is written from the perspective of someone who would go to a BLM march with an \'All Lives Matter\' sign, or someone who would go to a Pride march and say, \'You\'re going to hell because you’re gay.\' I want to laugh at them because being laughed at is what they would like the least.\" **\"I\'m a Mess\"** \"Lyrically, this is my favorite song I\'ve ever written. It details what it\'s like to have depression, because at the time, I felt like I couldn\'t even be bothered to get out of bed. It\'s kind of weird for me to listen back to this song now, because it\'s like: \'Wow, that was a really bad place for me to be in.\' I\'m sure there will be moments where I go back to feeling that way again, but putting those thoughts out there definitely helped me. I think being honest allows you to take responsibility and own your faults, so you can kind of become one with them. From that point on, at least you\'re not deceiving yourself anymore.\"
When UK trio Drug Store Romeos started making music together as teenagers, their sound was indebted to post-punk, heavy and raw. But then Sarah Downie, Charlie Henderson, and Jonny Gilbert started listening to such cosmic trailblazers as Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, and Broadcast, and their approach transformed, their songs taking on a more dreamy and hypnotic form. On the group’s debut album, *The world within our bedrooms*, they craft a series of indie-pop gems out of the haze, balancing sonic exploration with enchanting hooks and intricate dynamism. Their minimalist approach was forced on them by necessity, but it has opened up exciting new avenues. “I started playing keyboards, which meant I couldn’t play the bass,” Downie tells Apple Music. “We had to pick between guitar or bass, because we only have so many hands, and Charlie started playing bass. It meant our songs had to be stripped-back. Charlie started playing the bass in a more melodic way rather than just trying to fill in the foundation.” Their lean, lo-fi grooves are the perfect soundbed for tales of isolation and reflection, trying to make sense of a chaotic world as their teens became their early twenties. “We came from a very small town,” says Downie. “We were cut off a lot from the world, and I think that introspectiveness, with all the time we had to overanalyze ourselves, wrote itself into the music.” It is, explains Downie, an album that captures a coming-of-age, a record that fills you with hope when you come out the other side. Here, the three-piece take us through their journey, track by track. **“Building Song”** Sarah Downie: “It does what it says on the tin. We gave it that name but kept going, ‘We need to find a good name for this. That’s such a cop-out.’ And it just became that. I think it’s quite fitting.” Charlie Henderson: “It’s got a feeling, an atmosphere, that’s quite central to the world that we were trying to create. Naturally, throughout the song, it layers up over time and everything—it feels like a nice way to introduce the whole sound of the album.” **“Secret Plan”** CH: “This was written at 2 in the morning whilst my housemates were having a drum ’n’ bass party downstairs. I made the synth line and the bass part, and then, for the vocals, I was just improvising while this intense drum ’n’ bass was going on downstairs. It was quite chaotic. If ‘Building Song’ is the establishing shot, this is the first scene that’s in this slightly spooky, surreal suburban town. I hope people can dance to it, but also I imagine people listening to this album alone on headphones.” **“Bow Wow”** SD: “This was written when I got a Casio Casiotone CT 1000P, which has shaped a lot of our music. If you have headphones on and you’re listening carefully enough, you can just about hear my heartbeat in this song. Me and our producer, George Murphy, were in the studio at 2 am and we were pretty knackered, doing vocals over and over again. The lyrics—‘My heart rate increases’—were going through my head and I needed to get more energy in my body, so I started running around the studio. Then I put the microphone on my shirt and we recorded my heartbeat. George quantized it so that it’s going along with the kick.” **“Elevator”** CH: “I did a lot of experimenting, a lot of different things went onto that, but it was quite surprising it worked. They’re quite similar—both emotional and intense. The melody feels like it’s coming from a similar place, and they just locked together.” **“Walking Talking Marathon”** SD: “I wanted a song that didn’t fit into some chorus-verse-chorus, strophic structure. I pieced together from magazines, from things I’d been watching at the time, any little bits and bobs, phrases. The goal is to have as little friction between me and my instruments and what’s coming out of my mouth as possible.” **“Frame of Reference”** CH: “I spent about a year struggling with depression, but I’d still gone to festivals that summer. And so, a couple of times, there were hundreds of people dancing around me, and I was dancing, but I felt really crushed and empty, yet dense at the same time—whilst also being on ecstasy. The strangeness of that feeling, that artificial euphoria with this deep human sadness combining, was such a potent and unique emotion to me.” **“Feedback Loop”** CH: “I was really happy with the lyrics in this song. To me, this is, like, an 11 pm song—as you’re walking home, you don’t particularly want to go home and you’re aimlessly wandering around a little bit. I remember me and Sarah were in my garden and I was so obsessed with Molly Nilsson’s song ‘Hey Moon!’ I smoked a joint and listened to it five times and then came in, and then we wrote the chorus of ‘Feedback Loop.’” **“What’s on Your Mind”** SD: “Half of this was improvised in the studio. I think there was some technical difficulty that George was trying to figure out, and we were just mucking around, and he thought it was quite interesting so he pressed *record* and that was one of those lovely studio moments where a song comes out quite a lot differently than when it came in.” **“No Placing”** Jonny Gilbert: “This was written at a marijuana-and-music evening at Charlie’s house. It wasn’t an organized band writing session—more of an impromptu, just-for-enjoyment session. It was an evening of getting down parts that Charlie then spent more time crafting over the next few weeks, and with the help of Sarah, he brought it into a full song. It’s one of the most uptempo ones we’ve got, but to me, it will always feel nighttime because it was written entirely at nighttime.” **“Vibrate”** CH: “It was quite different to what we really wanted to do, and then our managers said it was pretty much their favorite song we’d ever written. We wanted to make songs that were dreamier and playful, but this one is quite dark and a bit serious. I like it now though.” **“Electric Silence”** SD: “This was around the time I was reading the *The Secret Life of Plants*, which is a book that talks a lot about Cleve Backster and his experiments in the 1960s with a polygraph test and plants. It’s a fun little one. I guess it’s just a cute little song. On my Casio, we had this auto-bass that makes these different rhythms and stuff, and we use one which I’m pretty sure is ABBA. We used that a lot.” JG: “It’s very *bop-bop-boop-boop*.” **“Kites”** SD: “‘Kites’ was written when I was in Winchester with my dad in the first part of lockdown. There was this hill that I would go to most days. It was carved out by the surrounding foothills of Winchester, and when you were on the hill, you could see the city in the foreground and this little hill adjacent from my hill. You could see people having picnics and dogs running up, people running up. I guess I was inspired by the open space, and I kind of wanted to spin up out of my body and be one with the clouds.” **“Put Me on the Finish Line”** SD: “This song was hanging around for ages. I created the keyboard line, but I didn’t really know where to go from there. I had this verse, but I could never, ever get a chorus for it. It means that the person that wrote that song all those years ago feels like a completely different person to who I was finishing it. But, thankfully, those two people seem to get along.” **“Cycle of Life”** SD: “This was written in about 20 minutes. Jonny had been watching this documentary on life cycles, nature, sandstorms, and the movement of currents and diatoms.” JG: “I started writing down what they said in the documentary to try and understand it, and it was on the wall when Sarah was making music. She started to fit it into her lyrics, and we realized it could be a thing.” SD: “It’s our most factual song. It’s a little palate cleanser.” **“Adult Glamour”** SD: “This is our oldest song. It feels like family to me. We spent months mixing it in my dad’s study in Fleet, encasing it in as many layers as we could. It was finished after this very intense acid trip that me and Charlie had where we got extremely into the personalities of sounds, thinking about the tones and what they create, just getting very into the tiny intricacies. It’s about the desensitizing nature of technology. After that acid trip, I got rid of my phone for about a year. It was a naive thing to do but was also quite good for me. As most people are, I was very addicted to my phone and I hated that.”
