Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”
Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.
Harry Styles’ third solo album, *Harry’s House*, is the product of a chain reaction. Had the pandemic not thrown his world into a tailspin in early 2020, he would’ve continued to tour behind *Fine Line*, his critically adored sophomore album, and played its songs hundreds of times for sold-out crowds around the world. A return to the studio was planned, of course, but when COVID-19 canceled those plans too, Styles faced an empty calendar for the first time in a decade. The singer opted to use this free time carefully, taking a solo road trip through Italy and visiting with family and friends for rare long, drawn-out stretches. It was an important moment of reevaluation. “You miss so many birthdays,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And eventually it\'s just assumed you\'re unable to be at stuff. Finally I was like, ‘I want to balance my life out a bit. Working isn’t who I am, it\'s something I do. I want to be able to put that down.’” His upbeat, lightly electronic third LP riffs on the concept of home, viewing it less as a geographical location and more as a state of mind—his mind. “Imagine it’s a day in my house, a day in my mind,” he said. “What do I go through? I’m playing fun music. I’m playing sad music. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff.” Because of the pandemic, Styles recorded the songs with a small handful of longtime friends and close collaborators who gathered in a single room to drink wine, write, and play. That intimacy is reflected in the songs, which are conversational and casually confessional, as if he’s thinking out loud. Blending vintage folk rock with flickers of disco and a generally more relaxed sensibility, they illustrate a turning point in Styles’ career as he transitions even further towards career singer-songwriter. “For a while it was, how do I play that game of remaining exciting?” he says. “But I finally had a moment where I felt like, ‘Okay, I’m not the young thing, so I would like to really think about who I want to be as a musician.’” Read on for the inside story behind a handful of standout selections from *Harry’s House*. **“Music for a Sushi Restaurant”** “After *Fine Line*, I had an idea of how I thought the next album would open. But there\'s something about ‘Sushi’ that felt like, ‘Nah, *that\'s* how I want to start.’ It becomes really obvious what the first song should be based on what you play for people when they’re like, ‘Oh, can I hear a bit of the music?’ It\'s like, how do you want to set the tone?” **“Daylight”** “We were like, ‘We have to find a way to stay awake and finish this, because if we all go to bed, then this won’t turn out the way it would if we finished tonight.’ So we powered through, finished it, and went down to the beach as the sun was coming up and it was like, ‘Okay. Yeah.’ It felt correct that we\'d finished it in that place. Life, and songs in particular, are so much about moments. In surfing, for example, sometimes you don\'t get the wave and sometimes the wave comes and you haven\'t practiced. But every now and again, the wave comes and you’re ready, you\'ve practiced enough that you can ride it. Sometimes when the songs write themselves like that, it feels like, ‘Okay, there\'s a reason why sometimes I sit out there, falling off the board a bunch. It\'s for this moment.” **“As It Was”** “‘As It Was,’ to me, is bittersweet. It’s devastating. It\'s a death march. It’s about metamorphosis and a perspective change, which are not necessarily things you have time with. People aren’t like, ‘Oh, we\'ll give you a couple more days with this moment and let you say goodbye to your former self,’ or whatever. No. Everyone is changing, and by the time you realize what’s happened, \[the moment\] is already gone. During the pandemic, I think we all at some point realized that it would never be the same as it was before. It was so obvious that it wouldn’t. You can\'t go backwards—we can’t as a society and I can’t in my personal life. But you learn so much in those moments because you’re forced to face things head-on, whether they’re your least favorite things about the world or your least favorite things about yourself, or all of it.” **“Matilda”** “I had an experience with someone where, in getting to know them better, they revealed some stuff to me that was very much like, ‘Oh, that\'s not normal, like I think you should maybe get some help or something.’ This song was inspired by that experience and person, who I kind of disguised as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book. I played it to a couple of friends and all of them cried. So I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something to pay attention to.’ It\'s a weird one, because with something like this, it\'s like, ‘I want to give you something, I want to support you in some way, but it\'s not necessarily my place to make it about me because it\'s not my experience.’ Sometimes it\'s just about listening. I hope that\'s what I did here. If nothing else, it just says, ‘I was listening to you.’” **“Boyfriends”** “‘Boyfriends’ was written right at the end of *Fine Line*. I\'d finished the album and there was an extra week where I wrote ‘Adore You,’ ‘Lights Up,’ and ‘Treat People With Kindness.’ At the end of the session for ‘Lights Up,’ we started writing ‘Boyfriends,’ and it felt like, ‘Okay, there\'s a version of this story where we get this song ready for this album.’ But something about it just felt like, no, it’ll have its time, let\'s not rush it. We did so many versions of it. Vocal. Acoustic. Electric guitar. Harmonies on everything, and then we took them out for chunks and put them back in for chunks. You try not to get ahead of yourself when you write a song, but there was something about this one where I felt like, ‘Okay, when I\'m 50, if I\'m playing a show, maybe there\'s someone who heard me for the first time when they were 15 and this is probably the song they came to see.’ Because I\'m learning so much by singing it. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m hearing you.’ It’s both acknowledging my own behavior and looking at behavior I\'ve witnessed. I grew up with a sister, so I watched her date people, and I watched friends date people, and people don\'t treat each other very nicely sometimes.” **“Cinema”** “I think I just wanted to make something that felt really fun, honestly. I was on a treadmill going, ‘Do-do-do-do-do-do.’ I tend to do so much writing in the studio, but with this one, I did a little bit here and then I went home and added a little bit there, and then kind of left it, and then went into the studio to put it all together. That was a theme across the whole album, actually: We used to book a studio and be like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got it for two months, grind it out.’ But some days you just don\'t want to be there, and eventually you\'ve been in the studio so long, the only thing you can write about is nothing because you haven\'t done anything. So with this album, we’d work for a couple of weeks and then everyone would go off and live their lives.” **“Love of My Life”** “‘Love of My Life’ was the most terrifying song because it\'s so bare. It\'s so sparse. It’s also very much in the spirit of what *Harry\'s House* is about: I wanted to make an acoustic EP, all in my house, and make it really intimate. It’s named after \[the Japanese pop pioneer Haruomi\] Hosono, who had an album in the \'70s called *Hosono House*. I immediately started thinking about what *Harry’s House* might look like. It took time for me to realize that the house wasn\'t a geographical location, it was an internal thing. When I applied that concept to the songs we were making here, everything took on new meaning. Imagine it\'s a day in my house or a day in my mind. What do I go through? I\'m playing fun music. I\'m playing sad music. I\'m playing this, I\'m playing that. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff. And it’s all mine. This is my favorite album at the moment. I love it so much. And because of the circumstances, it was made very intimately; everything was played by a small number of people and made in a room. To me, it\'s everything. It\'s everything I\'ve wanted to make.”
Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge was in a Seattle bookstore in 2014 when he came across what would become the theme for the Swedish occult rockers’ fifth album, *IMPERA*. “I saw this book called *The Rule of Empires*,” he tells Apple Music. “I’ve always been quite interested in history and politics, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that every empire eventually ends. Right then and there, I knew that at some point I was going to make a record about the rise and fall of empires.” At the time, Forge was already planning to make a record about the bubonic plague, which became Ghost’s startlingly prescient 2018 album *Prequelle*. “I felt like those two subjects represented two completely different threats of annihilation,” he says. “One feels a little bit more divine, and the other a little more structured and fabricated. So I compartmentalized the two themes and made two different albums.” Below, Forge details some key tracks from *IMPERA*. **“Kaisarion”** “The story this song tells, or the perspective it shines light onto, is basically stupid people destroying something that they don\'t understand with a frantic smile on their face. This has happened many times and unfortunately will probably happen many times in the future, because unfortunately things that we don\'t understand or that we cannot control have a tendency to arouse those feelings. We want to kill it. We want to destroy it.” **“Spillways”** “In ‘Kaisarion,’ we have the en masse, frenetic, frantic buzz of being in a group. In ‘Spillways,’ we have a very internalized pressure that builds up to the next song, which is a distant call that ends up being a voice in your head—the insulated person who’s being communicated with from a higher power. That’s loosely how we move geographically between these three songs. If the leads remind you of Brian May, that’s because I like stacking solos and adding harmonies, which automatically puts you in Brian May territory.” **“Call Me Little Sunshine”** “This is similar to our song ‘Cirice’ in the sense that you have this betraying hand that leads you into the night pretending to have a torch in the other. Which is interesting, because we’ve placed ourselves in the devil’s corner, pop-culturally, so it becomes this paradox. Myself and other peddlers in the extreme metal world use a lot of biblical or diabolical references, and up until recently we felt we were doing it with a distance from history—like this was in the Old World, when people were stupid. But no—this is real. This is now.” **“Hunter’s Moon”** “This song was written specifically for the *Halloween Kills* soundtrack, which made it so much easier to write because I knew the context. If ‘Call Me Little Sunshine’ is a voice inside the head that’s actually coming from outside, ‘Hunter’s Moon’ is inside the empire of the brain of a maniac: ‘I’m coming to get you because you belong to me. Can’t you see I’m doing this as an act of love?’ It’s absolutely illogical, but if you place yourself inside the head of a maniac, it makes sense. It’s burning love.” **“Watcher in the Sky”** “This reverts back to the imperial world of Flat Earth Society members, basically. The narration is calling upon the scientific community to use whatever science we have here within this empire to stop looking at the stars and look for God instead. Can we reverse the tools that we have to watch the stars to communicate with the Lord? And is there any way to scientifically prove that the world is actually flat? Because it looks awfully flat from where we\'re standing. So it’s a song about regression.” **“Twenties”** “This is a machine disguised as a leader talking to liberal persons because we need their manpower, and without them there is no society. So it’s this cheer about the twenties, saying that it will lead to an even more hopeful thirties—but 1900s-style. It’s meant to give people hope, if you’re bent that way. It’s similar to our song ‘Mummy Dust’ in that both are more primally aggressive and have an element of greed.” **“Grift Wood”** “I love Hollywood rock like Van Halen and Mötley Crüe, and it just feels fitting to have an uplifting track towards the end of the record. Musically, one thing that inspired the more Sunset Strip elements of the song was knowing that it was going to throw you off with a really long curveball that felt like something no Sunset Strip band has ever done. And that enabled the more glossy bits to be even more in line with the traditional elements of an early-’80s Sunset Strip song.”
“One more time, for whatever reason, the universe saw fit to inject this band with another giant shot of plasma,” Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis tells Apple Music. “Left to our own devices, we probably would\'ve withered on the vine somewhere along the line, as we all do at some point. But it wasn\'t quite time for us to do that yet.” The shot of “plasma” that Kiedis is referring to is, in large part, the (second) return of guitarist John Frusciante, after roughly a decade away. You can immediately hear the difference—in the aqueous funk of “Poster Child,” the stadium-ready swings of “These Are the Ways,” or the acoustic phrasing of “Tangelo,” the album’s delicate closer. “It\'s so clear when he writes and when he plays,” Kiedis says of his bandmate, whose guitar work proved galvanizing on career highlights like 1991’s *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* and 1999’s *Californication*. “It\'s really fun to listen to because it’s sound and emotion and color. He\'s not trying to play the right notes—he\'s just trying to play the notes that are truly him.” Also back in the fold: producer and honorary fifth Chili Pepper Rick Rubin, who—absent on 2016’s *The Getaway*—accompanied Kiedis to Kauai for a songwriting retreat that was unexpectedly extended by lockdown. “Nobody could come, nobody could leave,” Kiedis says. “It was six months of being in the land that time forgot.” For the five of them, the aim was simple: Be together, play together, and, in Kiedis’ words, “write and write and write and write. Maybe we\'ll keep all of it, maybe we\'ll keep some of it. The process that it had to go through to become this record was very democratic in the sense that we all voted, including Rick.” The result is 17 songs that pay tribute to the veteran outfit’s chemistry and affection for one another, a magnetic coming-together that’s apparent anytime they play. “We\'re older and different, and enter *Unlimited Love*, a really fun and wild experience,” Kiedis says. “We accept each other and we love each other and there is an endless friendship going on there—which is not to say that we want to hang out every day. It\'s nice to go away from it and come back to it, go away from it and come back. But it never dies.” Here, Kiedis takes us inside a few highlights from the album. **“Not the One”** “This idea came out from ‘I think I know who you are, but maybe I don\'t. You think you know who I am, but maybe you don\'t.’ Especially in intimate relationships, we all present something and people always have an idea, but what would happen if we just showed each other our very worst from the very start? Like, not trying to impress each other, or just ‘I’m kind of a fuck-up and here\'s my weak suit and my flaws.’ And then we would never have to discover that down the line and go, ‘What?’” **“Poster Child”** “I didn\'t think that the music from ‘Poster Child’ was going to survive, because Flea brought in two painfully funky basslines on the same day, and they weren\'t similar, but the way I was hearing it was like, ‘I have to choose. My plate\'s too full.’ And so I chose the other one, which ended up becoming a song called ‘Peace and Love’ that didn\'t make the record. The one that I thought was the superior funk was not the superior funk, and then it just took me a long time of living with this music before I found my place. I can\'t say that any of them were really a struggle or a battle, but it’s the one that I was surprised came to life.” **“These Are the Ways”** “That\'s a song that John brought—the arrangement and a version of that melody. I’m never able to recreate his melodies perfectly—he\'s just on a different melodic level—so I usually put it through a simplification machine. I didn\'t overthink it. It was the first idea that came to my mind when I heard that arrangement, which is very bombastic and almost like a huge classical orchestra, exploding and then going way back. It was a reflection on life in America, but not a good or a bad reflection—just, this is it. We might be bloated, we might be overloaded with more than we can handle, and let\'s just take a step back and rethink it just a little bit. But it’s not ‘this is wrong and that\'s right.’ It\'s just ‘this is who we\'ve become.’”
Unlimited Love is Red Hot Chili Peppers' twelfth studio album, released on April 1, 2022 and coming six years after their previous full-length effort, The Getaway. The record also marks the return of two key figures in the band’s history: guitarist John Frusciante, who re-joined RHCP in 2019 and scores his first contributions since the band’s 2006 LP Stadium Arcadium, and long-time producer Rick Rubin, who returned to work with the group after a whopping eleven years (since I’m With You came out in 2011). RHCP started recording and working on the album in 2021, at Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu: a initial selection of around 100 tracks was trimmed down to slightly less than 50 recorded songs, 17 of which would eventually make the cut for the album’s final tracklist, while “Nerve Flip” would be the bonus track added to the Japanese Import of the album.
Anyone paying attention to Weezer over the years could’ve seen *SZNZ* coming. Not only does it make Rivers Cuomo’s sense of craft and tradition almost comically explicit (it opens with a riff on an 18th-century Vivaldi theme and Cuomo singing about how Shakespeare makes him happy \[“Opening Night”\]), but it also gives a kind of historical precedent for his eternal boyishness: He isn’t just a kid wallowing away in his suburban bedroom; he’s a cherub on the wings of a bluebird (“Angels on Vacation”) or Adam before the fall (“The Garden of Eden”). As for the soaring choruses and ripping mandolins, that’s just Van Halen, 200 years ahead of schedule. They’re always funny, but they’re never exactly kidding.
The band’s seventh studio album and first new music since 2018, *Viva Las Vengeance* was recorded live entirely to a tape machine and reveals a new layer of honesty from lead vocalist and songwriter Brendon Urie. He takes listeners on a cinematic yet introspective journey through his career in music and his relationships, reflecting on fame, fortune, love, and the stories that come along with them. The album opens with the title track, nodding both to his Vegas roots and his band’s reputation for theatrics. “Don’t Let the Light Go Out” is an aching breakup ballad that showcases Urie’s voice, while “Local God” and “Say It Louder” get a bit meta, telling tales of a band’s rise to fame and success. “Do It to Death” finishes the album with a bang, closing the curtains as Urie softly sings, “Shut up and go to bed.”
The Shirelles and The Supremes. Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child. Girls’ Generation and, now, BLACKPINK officially enter the pantheon of history-making, culture-defining girl groups. Since debuting in 2016 with YG Entertainment (the company also responsible for launching the careers of BIGBANG, 2NE1, and “Gangnam Style” hitmaker PSY), the K-pop quartet—rapper/singer JENNIE (Jennie Kim), rapper/dancer LISA (Lalisa Manobal), singers JISOO (Jisoo Kim) and ROSÉ (Chae-young Park)—have broken records and changed the face of modern pop. They have collaborated with Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, and Selena Gomez while rocking Celine, Chanel, Dior, and Saint Laurent, major fashion houses for which they are ambassadors. They were the first K-pop girl group to perform at Coachella. They have become, without a doubt, one of the most popular K-pop groups across the globe—all with only a few singles and one full-length album to their name. Well, until now: *BORN PINK*, the group’s highly anticipated sophomore release, heralds a new era for the band and a chance to stake out a real legacy. From the familiar raucous rap and hyperpop of single “Pink Venom” and the ROSÉ-led 2010s pop-rock “Ready for Love” to the haunting violins-meets-trap of “Shut Down” and the fully English-language piano ballad “The Happiest Girl,” *BORN PINK* boasts a new eclecticism. The trick is in how the group succeeds without sacrificing any of the hallmarks of a classic, idiosyncratic BLACKPINK song: bombastic raps, nostalgic EDM drops, larger-than-life harmonies, multiple melodies stacked one after the other, and unbridled enthusiasm. When ROSÉ shouts, “I’m so rock ’n’ roll!” you believe her. Prior to the release of *BORN PINK*, some fans (lovingly labeled BLINKs) were concerned about BLACKPINK’s material. With so few songs between them (and understanding that exclusivity breeds intrigue), what would their latest evolution look and sound like? How could they play into a pop landscape now devoid of BTS, the biggest K-pop group on the planet? Their pleasures are found in their indissoluble relationship with one another and how that manifests in each performance, harmony, and comeback for the group—and they have the potential to grow still. In a saturated pop and K-pop music market, BLACKPINK distinguishes themselves from the competition. They’re adaptable: unafraid of traversing new genres, styles, or fashions, somehow managing to make them all their own.
Anyone who followed Weezer in 2022, through the first three of their four seasonal EPs, probably wasn’t just comfortable with the band’s quirks; it’s what they were here for: the obsessive catchiness (“Iambic Pentameter”), the adolescent overstatement (“The One That Got Away”), the way they can turn their nerdiness into a kind of private heroism (“Basketball”). No matter how personal his lyrics get, Rivers Cuomo sounds less like a human being than an alien studying one, which only serves to underscore how lonely he might be. And after nearly 30 years of pining after girls who don’t know he exists, he’s thinking it might be time to get a dog (“I Want a Dog”).
Those of us following Weezer on their nerdy, cryptic journey will note that the opening of *Summer* is *not* a quote of Vivaldi’s Summer suite, but the second movement of his suite for Winter. Folly? Creative misdirection? Who knows. Where parts of *SZNZ: Spring* sounded like program music for Ren fairs, *Summer* fits more neatly with their house style: the triumphant self-doubt of “What’s the Good of Being Good,” the bookishness of “Records.” Then there’s “Blue Like Jazz,” which reminds you that summer isn’t just the season of iced tea and poolside sits, but wildfires and floods. And “Cuomoville,” which makes explicit what fans of the band have always known: Their music isn’t just a break from the world, it’s a little world unto itself.
The third installment of Weezer’s *SZNZ* project is, by Rivers Cuomo’s own description, the dance one. Think The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, Blondie: bands classified as rock, but whose clean, bright sound feels closer to what we think of as pop. Where else can you hear someone sing about sadomasochism while a string section quotes Vivaldi (“Tastes Like Pain”) or the parable of the Garden of Eden set to the Vegas-ready shuffle of Neil Diamond (“Should She Stay or Should She Go”)? The answer is nowhere. You don’t have to understand the rabbit hole the band has become, but you can’t help but respect its depth.
A celebratory EP with classic hooks and groovy beats.
On their debut EP, *FEARLESS*, the six members of K-pop girl group LE SSERAFIM exude a suave, runway-model poise, one that should come as no surprise given their background; members Kim Chaewon and Sakura honed their idol elegance from their time in IZ\*ONE, the three-year project group that launched both of them into global fame. But the entire group’s confidence is exhibited in their name itself—LE SSERAFIM is an anagram of “I’m fearless,” a lyric part of the EP’s sleek electro-pop title track that exemplifies their bold demeanor. “Blue Flame” highlights the girls’ bright vocals as they harmonize together through a fluttering bass line. On the exuberant “The Great Mermaid,” they sing with a focused power, tackling whirling synths and crashing cymbals as if surfing into an ocean wave. And while the sweet-sounding “Sour Grapes” takes the EP into softer territory, the members assert they have no need for the bitter taste of love—even as their voices dip into a gentle hush.
Just one month after the release of their fourth Japanese studio album, *Celebrate*, the prolific K-pop girl group is back with their first Korean release in 2022 and their 11th EP. The output is directly indicative of that veterancy: “Talk That Talk” is a pop-song sugar rush with cheer-like raps; the English-language “Queen of Hearts” stacks power chords beneath ascendant Taylor Swift-like harmonies on the pre-chorus. “Brave” is delightful retro dance pop, at least partially penned by longtime BTS songwriter Melanie Fontana; TWICE members Jihyo, Dahyun, and Chaeyoung are credited as the lyricists on a few of the tracks. Across all seven songs, there’s no shortage of surprises—this is a band that is most comfortable performing across maximalist styles, streamlining them in the process. (And that’s a good thing! Prior to its release, *BETWEEN 1&2* became the most preordered TWICE release to date.) With a single listen, no one could be disappointed.
The singer lays bare her emotions on a dazzling second album.
SEULGI’s debut solo EP, released after eight years with the massively popular K-pop girl group Red Velvet, is unlike anything the five-piece has ever done. It opens with the title track—a spooky whisper-seduction not unlike Selena Gomez’s biggest singles. (When she belts later in the track, Destiny’s Child’s balladic moments might be a more direct comparison.) Then: strings, a crashing crescendo around the bass-blasting “Dead Man Runnin’.” The retro R&B of “Bad Boy, Sad Girl” partners SEULGI’s breathiness with the album’s sole feature, rapper BE’O. “Los Angeles” is yet another detour—smoke machine techno. Where Red Velvet excels at all things bright and ebullient, *28 Reasons* showcases an edgier side of one of the group’s most distinct talents.
On Demi Lovato’s eighth studio album, catharsis comes from recovery, from exorcising demons and excising trauma—and there’s no better avenue for that then a sick guitar lick. *HOLY FVCK* is stacked with ascendent pop-punk (“SUBSTANCE”), grunge-y anthemic rock (“SKIN OF MY TEETH”), biblical references (“HEAVEN”), and diaristic revelations about inappropriate sexual relationships (“29”). “My biggest hope for \[the\] song \[‘29’\] is that others going through a similar experience know they aren’t alone,” they tell Apple Music. “And that it’s time to take our power back.” The sentiment doubles as a mission statement: This is the sound of a young artist claiming autonomy. At the beginning of their career, Lovato made playful pop-punk under Disney’s Hollywood Records label, starting with 2008’s debut, *Don’t Forget*. Echoes of that can be found on this release, but comparatively, it’s child’s play: Lovato has never sounded harder, or wiser, than they do on *HOLY FVCK*, so turn it up loud. Below, read a track-by-track guide to the album Lovato wrote exclusively for Apple Music. **“FREAK”** “This song is about feeling like you don’t belong but owning it anyway, because it doesn’t matter what others think about you. By acknowledging that you are a freak or outcast, you are basically saying that there is nothing anyone can say that will hurt your feelings. I wrote this song with YUNGBLUD while I was in an angry phase, but it turns out that I am proud of it. I am giving myself the power back.” **“SKIN OF MY TEETH”** “I wanted to make an anthem for people in recovery from addiction. I wanted to humanize the disease for people who’ve never experienced it and don’t understand it. That’s partly why I get so detailed about it in the bridge, which is my favorite part of the song: \[I sing\] ‘I am just trying to keep my head above water/I am your son, and I am your daughter/I’m your mother, I’m your father.’ It is making a statement about how I am just like everyone who suffers from addiction. We’re all the same. It was so cathartic for me because I had just come out of treatment again. I wanted to make a statement of saying, ‘I see what you’re saying, this is what I’m going through, and you’re not going to make me feel bad about it.’” **“SUBSTANCE”** “I wanted to make a point about how we live in a world where nothing feels real anymore. The content we intake, the things we do in our day-to-day lives, so much of it lacks substance. We’re always on our phones and the internet, so I wanted to write a song about how I miss the substance that used to be the world we live in. Some of the lyrics that resonate with me would be in the pre-chorus: ‘Whoa, I know we’re all fucking exhausted.’ We’re all still coming out of COVID, which is a time where we all live off of TV, social media, whatever could distract us on our phones. I know we’re all exhausted with it. And ‘Am I in my head or have we all lost it?’ is asking if we have lost the substance in human-to-human connection and the ability to be fully present in the moment. The writing process for this was so effortless, and my co-writers were so amazing.” **“EAT ME”** “Being able to collaborate with Royal & the Serpent on this song was so amazing and exciting. I am sick of people thinking or talking about me in a certain way that isn’t truthful, and I am done letting it affect me and my life. Coming out as non-binary was a way for me to let people know that I am not the person that everyone wants me to be, but rather, the person I am. My hope is that this song will help others feel more comfortable with their identity, and to not feel ashamed of how others may perceive them.” **“HOLY FVCK”** “This is the title track of the album, and the whole album has this feel of good versus evil, with some religious undertones. Even the title fits that theme, with *holy* being good and *fuck* being bad. It’s a very sexually charged song, and I wanted to flip the phrase on its head to ‘I’m a holy fuck.’ In the studio, I was very much like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m singing this!’” **“29”** “Now that I am older, I have had a lot of time to reflect and think about past experiences I have had in my life, whether that be romantically or not. Writing this song allowed me to express my thoughts in a way that I hadn’t before, and turn it into something special. Everyone that wrote this song with me knew that the goal was to help others, and I think we did an excellent job of that.” **“HAPPY ENDING”** “I fell into a hopeless depression that had me asking myself if I will ever find a happy ending before I die. The most honest lyric I’ve ever written is actually in this song: ‘I got high/You name it, have tried it/Sure, I’m sober now and everybody’s proud, but I miss my vices.’ My hope for this song is that people will listen to it and realize that they are not alone. Writing this song was obviously very emotional, but it was very freeing because I was able to express these dark times and concerns I’ve had—and coming out of it in the end in a new light.” **“HEAVEN”** “There’s actually a Bible verse, Matthew 5:30, that says, ‘If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, because it’s better to lose one part of your body than your entire body to hell.’ It’s actually about masturbation, and people may not know that I have my own sex toy. I’m very open about my sexuality, and growing up I was shamed by my church in Texas for exploring that. I was in a place where I was angry, and I had just learned a lot about myself. I learned about what caused that anger and I learned to honor my anger in treatment. I wanted to write a song that takes back my power and my sexuality from the way religion was used against me. I love the pre-chorus where it repeats, ‘Cut it off!’ because unless you know the Bible verse behind the song, you’re like, ‘What?’ And then, of course, the chorus—‘Going to hell because it feels like heaven.’ An Easter egg you can look out for on the vinyl packaging is I have ‘Matthew 5:30’ printed on the side, which is a nod to this song.” **“CITY OF ANGELS”** “The first line of this song says it all. I’ve lived in \[Los Angeles\] for 15 years and it seems as though everything is old and boring. I wrote this song about wanting to experience new things in the city of LA, as if it was brand new. This is definitely a sexual song, but it’s written through using a ton of puns. A great example of this is ‘Splash Mountain from your hands at Disneyland.’ I’d love to christen this city as if it was brand new.” **“BONES”** “I had such a good time writing this song because I was at my house, with my friends, just having a good time. This song is about being so attracted to someone the first time you see them that you physically want to jump on them. My favorite line from this song is ‘Blood racing, heart pounding, like there’s a fucking earthquake’ because it really depicts the feeling of craving someone so badly, but you have to resist.” **“WASTED”** “It’s not a secret that I’ve struggled with addiction and drugs, so I wanted to write a song that’s about how there’s no high greater than the high of falling in love. The best high of your life is the high you get from someone else. Specific lyrics that are so real to me are ‘Will my heart stop, will I withdraw?/Can I detox if the shoe drops?/I’m wiser, I’m older, I’m clean and I’m sober, so I can’t figure out how I’m wasted.’ I remember the first time I tried certain drugs, and I was like, ‘Whoa, what is this going to be like?’ That’s kind of like falling in love with someone you know will change your life. You’re totally wasted on love—you feel totally euphoric and so happy.” **“COME TOGETHER”** “If you listen closely to the lyrics of this song, you will realize this is actually not a song just about unifying and joining together as one. Much like many other songs on this album, this is a very sexually focused track. My favorite line has to be ‘Got me closer to the edge than ever/We both want it, but we don’t surrender/And we can make this last forever/But paradise is even better when we come…together.’ The hook of this song flows very well together, and I think it is open-ended in the way that you can perceive it however you want to.” **“DEAD FRIENDS”** “This song is a way for me to reminisce on the hard times that I’ve been through in my life and how I’ve lost friends along the way. The beginning of the song is very calm and slow, but as the song progresses you will notice that it picks up the tempo and the mood. I think this is a way to represent how although it’s a sad message, I am actually honoring my friends and the times we had together. I lost a friend that went through similar struggles that I’ve had on the same day that I wrote this song, which gives it even more of a special meaning to me.” **“HELP ME”** “This was a song I wrote with Dead Sara on the very first day we worked together. I wanted to write a song that was a clapback to people on the internet who think they know what’s best for me, and make an empowering anthem out of that. I think my favorite lines are ‘Hey, thank you for your useless information/Hey, never satisfied with my explanation/Hey, what’s with your desperate fascination?/Hey, thank you for your useless information.’ I was so excited to write this with Dead Sara because they were such a huge influence for the sound of this album. I fell in love with the album they released last year, and I saw them live. They’ve become great friends of mine, especially Emily \[Armstrong\], the lead singer. Getting to see them work their magic at the show was the catalyst for me getting back to my rock roots.” **“FEED”** “The message of this song is that there are two sides inside of you, which represent the good and the bad, the positive and the negative. This song is a reminder that you are in control of your life and each side will make you feel a different way, so it’s up to you to choose which direction you want to go.” **“4 EVER 4 ME”** “The songs at the beginning of the album show how angry and sad I once was, but as you get towards the end, you realize that I’ve been through a rollercoaster of a life and there is joy at the end. I got to write this song with one of my best friends, which makes it even more special. One of my favorite lines of this song is ‘I can’t wait to hug and thank your mother,’ because I think it’s important to acknowledge those who raised and taught the person you love how to be an amazing person. I don’t write a ton of love songs, but I think that this song really encompasses the hopefulness of love and how sappy I can actually be.”
“I was able to make the album in peace and quiet, really,” Sigrid tells Apple Music of crafting *How to Let Go*. That was thanks, in part, to the pandemic, during which the Norwegian pop queen could “sort of disappear,” writing the majority of her second album’s songs in Copenhagen with Norwegian songwriter Caroline Ailin (Dua Lipa, Charli XCX). “We were swimming in between sessions, talking a lot, and Caroline was making amazing cinnamon buns,” remembers Sigrid (born Sigrid Raabe). It was an approach she valued, having “definitely felt the pressure” to ensure *How to Let Go* lived up to her 2019 debut, *Sucker Punch*, home to hit singles such as “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” “Strangers,” and “Don’t Feel Like Crying.” That debut showcased Sigrid’s ability to craft shimmering electro-pop songs that sound both anthemic and intimate. These elements are all present on *How to Let Go*, but this time around, it feels even more cathartic. “There are songs about breakups and breaking someone’s heart,” she says. “Songs about letting go of your childhood, and songs about letting go of fears and doubts because sometimes you just have to go for it.” Musically, the album sees Sigrid embrace a more organic sound featuring plenty of live drums, soaring strings, and vocal harmonies; she says everyone from The Beatles to The Killers influenced guitar-centric tracks destined for festival season. Read on for Sigrid’s track-by-track guide to *How to Let Go*. **“It Gets Dark”** “Whenever I’ve been unsure of my musical direction, I’ve always come back to this song. It shaped the whole sound of the album with the strings coming in and the chorus being pretty simple in terms of production: literally just bass, vocals, and drums. It’s a song about letting go and opening your mind. For about four or five years before the pandemic, I was traveling so much with work and always came back to Norway when I had time off. And then, suddenly, I started to feel more comfortable outside of Norway. I started to feel like I also had a home in London, New York, and Los Angeles. That was exciting but also scary for me because I’m such a homebody.” **“Burning Bridges”** “It’s not necessarily about a romantic breakup because, sometimes, breakups that aren’t romantic can be even harder. Musically, it’s very inspired by Muse. I listened to them a lot when I was growing up, and I love it when rock bands go electronic the way Muse did. But at the same time, ‘Burning Bridges’ is still a pop song because you have the big, soaring strings on there. The overall vibe is cinematic but at a British music festival. It’s my proper angry, stomping-across-the-stage anthem.” **“Risk of Getting Hurt”** “When I sing, ‘I’ve crashed with no warning because I’m brave when I’m falling/But so far, I always land on my feet,’ it’s really about my outlook on life. I do get really tired and burned out because work can be really overwhelming; it takes a lot out of me. I’m a person who likes just being by myself in my apartment, cooking, but in 2019 I think I had 290 travel days or something. That’s a lot for me, but the reward of going on tour and traveling is just too good to turn down. I feel like I always land on my feet and that gives me the confidence to keep going.” **“Thank Me Later”** “Musically, it’s inspired by The Killers, who were a very important band for me growing up. Lyrically, I guess it’s really a very straight-up song about breaking someone’s heart. It sucks and it’s really difficult, but sometimes it’s for the best. I had a lot of heartbreak songs on *Sucker Punch*, but they were about me getting my heart broken. So, I thought it was time to talk about the other side of heartbreak too.” **“Mirror”** “I’m always scared of saying the wrong thing, and I’m very self-critical. I’ve been doing this job since I was 16, and when I look back at old interviews, sometimes I’m like, ‘Why did I say that?’ Often, when I write songs, I feel a bit like my older sister writing songs to me. I definitely tried to channel her in these lyrics, which are basically saying, ‘It’s OK to fuck up and move on.’ I’ve loved seeing the reaction to this song from my fans because it seems like they were thinking the same thing as me.” **“Last to Know”** “Every time we tried to put more production on it, it just didn’t work. One of my favorite songs ever is ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ by Bonnie Raitt. This song doesn’t sound remotely like it, but I’m sure I was thinking a little bit of that song when I wrote these lyrics. It’s about when you’ve been through a breakup and you’ve moved on, but there’s a bittersweet element because it’s hard for your ex to see you with someone new.” **“Dancer”** “This is one of my favorites on the album. It’s a full-on lovey-dovey song about falling the hardest in love I’ve ever been. I love the instrumentation on this song with the piano and then the drums and bass coming in. We listened to The Beatles a bit in the studio, and I think you can hear their influence here. It’s just a warm hug of a song that reminds me of summer nights and road trips and getting drunk.” **“A Driver Saved My Night”** “This is a fun song. It’s about being stuck in traffic somewhere, usually in London on the M25 \[highway\], and feeling a bit tired and homesick and ‘ugh’ about things. But then, a song you really like comes on the radio and you ask the driver to turn it up, please. And even though you don’t know each other, you’re both listening and nodding along and thinking, ‘Great song!’ I just love how music can instantly lift your spirits, so this song is really an homage to those moments.” **“Mistake Like You”** “Another ballad, but you’ve got to have a few ballads in there. It’s a sad song but also a positive one. It’s about unrequited love: having really strong feelings for someone who doesn’t feel the same way but coming through that situation and knowing you learned from it. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote the chorus: ‘I decided I think that anyone would be lucky to make just one mistake like you.’” **“Bad Life” (feat. Bring Me the Horizon)** “I’m a big Bring Me the Horizon fan. When I was at Reading Festival in 2021, \[the band’s keyboardist\] Jordan Fish came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I love your music.’ And I was freaking out—like, how do they know my music? We chatted a bit, and he said we should go into the studio some time. Then I got in my tour bus to go to Leeds Festival, and he sent me the demo of ‘Bad Life.’ I played it to my band, and we were all like, ‘This is really good.’ So, I went into the studio with Jordan and Ollie \[Sykes, the band’s singer\] a few weeks later, and we changed some bits and bobs, and I wrote some new lyrics for my verse. But the first time I realized Bring Me the Horizon was an unlikely match \[for me\] was when I walked into that studio and the technician said, ‘Whoa, you were the last person I was expecting to see in this session!’” **“Grow”** “Nick Drake was an inspiration for me when I was writing this one, especially his songs ‘Pink Moon’ and ‘Place to Be.’ There are references to my childhood in the lyrics and also to my first apartment in Oslo. It was a big achievement for me to buy my own place at 22, and I remember trying to hang pictures on the bare white walls to make it feel like a proper home. But somehow, I never really settled there; it always felt like just another hotel room. I was living my dream out on the road, but it felt bittersweet because I had lost a part of myself at the same time. I think that’s just growing up, though.” **“High Note”** “I want to look back on my life and know I’ve not taken things for granted. But I have a bad habit of letting stress get to me, and then amazing things pass me by. I remember when I won the BBC’s Sound of 2018 poll, which is one of my biggest achievements, I actually cried because I was scared of what life was going to be like after that. It was almost like my innocence was going in a way: ‘I’m a serious artist now, fuck!’ It was only months afterwards that I looked back and thought, ‘Oh, that was actually amazing.’ So, this is a song about enjoying those highs when they happen. It’s partly inspired by the Corpus Clock at Cambridge University, which was built to remind the students to live their lives to the fullest.”
Since releasing his debut LP, *21st Century Liability*, in 2018, and 2020’s celebrated *weird!*, British artist YUNGBLUD (Dominic Harrison) has become a voice for a misunderstood generation, turning external environmental pressures into rallying cries for outsiders. Pop-punk rock was his weapon for most of his career; now, on his self-titled third record, there’s ’70s punk (“The Funeral”), New Wave (“Tissues”), energetic emo (“Memories”), Britpop (“Sweet Heroine”), and so much more. “YUNGBLUD is a community; YUNGBLUD is a movement,” Harrison tells Apple Music. “It\'s a community where you can be truly yourself. And by finding that community on the first two albums, I felt like I was allowed to write a record about me because I feel protected.” And on *YUNGBLUD*, he’s never sounded so vulnerable. “I recorded the whole album in a bedroom in Glendale,” he tells Apple Music. “It felt like I was making my first album again. It was so raw.” Below, YUNGBLUD walks us through his third studio album, track by track. **“The Funeral”** “I had a fire in my belly. Everyone had an opinion on me. The world had an opinion on me—the internet, my mom, my dad, my label, my fans, my management. Every fucking person had an opinion on where I should go. And I got fucking exhausted. I felt like I was 15 years old again in fucking high school, getting shoved into a locker. I always work best when I\'ve got to kick back against the bear who\'s biting me, and I\'ve got to bite it back.” **“Tissues”** “It samples ‘Close to Me’ by The Cure. I fucking get the song. I get Robert Smith\'s email, I email him ’cause I\'ve met him at the NME Awards a couple years before. And then he loved the song and let me use the sample. Cleared it. Crazy. What the fuck?” **“Memories”** “I\'ve never put a feature on one of my albums. I\'ve always been separate, but I love this song. I think it was brilliant. WILLOW is the truth for me. She\'s fucking nuts in the best way possible. You\'ll catch her on a good day, you\'ll catch her on a bad day, but she\'s fucking real. She reminds me a little bit of Amy Winehouse. A lot of people might crucify me for that, but I don\'t give a fuck ’cause it\'s true.” **“Cruel Kids”** “Me and \[Bastille’s\] Dan \[Smith\]. I always respected Dan. Great fucking writer. He came by the studio one day, and I played him this idea. When you meet artists, they can send you in a different direction. A lot of people don\'t know I really love Radiohead. And I really love *Kid A*. I really love the reverse snares and the madness of it all. We went down in that direction.” **“Mad”** “I just wanted to be like, \'I feel like I\'m going fucking insane right now. And I don\'t know how to express it. I don\'t know what to say. I don\'t know how to. I\'m just going fucking crazy and that\'s it.\'” **“I Cry 2”** “‘Everyone online keeps saying I’m not really gay/I’ll start dating men when they go to therapy’—I love that line. It\'s so playful. It\'s probably going to get me in trouble, but I\'m down. This song started because one of my mates was getting really upset and really emotional, but he found it really hard to express himself emotionally. There’s such a big stigma against males expressing their emotions. If you\'re hurting, it means you\'re alive. And, \'Mandy\'s on the counter kissing Charlie\'s neck/And your best mate\'s girl to your best made bed\' is a drug reference; it\'s about MDMA and cocaine, but also a party where you\'ve lost control. You don\'t know who the fuck\'s in your house because you\'re blocking out real feelings so much.” **“Sweet Heroine”** “I wrote this song in London, and I was completely nocturnal for weeks. We came from LA, and we stayed in LA time. It was a beautiful way of writing. I was in London, in the cold with my friends from LA, showing them my stomping grounds, taking Americans to fish and chips for the first time, feeling fucking Britpop, was wearing exclusively Fred Perry. And that song is about someone who really pulled me out of a really dark place in my life.” **“Sex Not Violence”** “I loved Green Day, *American Idiot*: one acoustic guitar down the middle, electrics panned left and right. One acoustic loud as fuck, straight down the middle. And I was like, ‘I\'m stealing that. No one\'s done that for ages.’ It gives it such an urgency and a movement. And there’s such a simple power in singing and describing sex. The connection, the trust, the feeling of euphoria, the metaphor that love will always win over hate, because I love sex. I love having sex. I love talking about sex. I love exploring sex in all its forms.” **“Don’t Go”** “So funny: This song almost didn\'t make it onto the record. I wrote it in an hour in London. Start to finish, production as well, and that frightened me. ’Cause normally so much thought goes into the music. And this song didn\'t mean fucking nothing to me until three weeks later, when I\'d written it off as a whatever tune.” **“Don’t Feel Like Feeling Sad Today”** “I wrote it when I didn\'t want to get out of bed. I was so fucking exhausted about not wanting to get out of bed. I turned to the side of my bed where I\'ve got a notepad in case any ideas come in my sleep. And I wrote, \'I don\'t feel like feeling sad today.\' But fuck that. I don\'t want to feel sad right now. And then it just fucking felt like a T-shirt. I was listening to a lot of Ramones, and went for a one-minute, two-minute punk hit, \'Bonzo Goes to Bitburg\' vibe. I had the lyric, I had the fucking title, and it just fucking happened. Like when you listen to The Libertines or the Arctic Monkeys or Oasis and it\'s all feeling first.” **“Die for a Night”** “I brought in a really good friend of mine, a kid called Jordan Brasko Gable. I met this fucking little twat in a Thai restaurant, and he\'s got a Karl Marx book in his back pocket. I rolled my eyes but he was so intellectual. We spoke about Kurt Vonnegut and Oscar Wilde, and now he\'s a songwriter. He pushed me on my lyricism. He sat opposite me and was like, \'No, you can say that better. Morrissey would say that better. John Lydon would say that better. Fucking Alex Turner could say that better.\' He challenged me. It\'s when I came up with \'Pain is language I can read/So I\'d rather remain illiterate tonight so I can sleep\'—his eyes lit up and I was like, \'I know I\'ve got something.\'” **“The Boy in the Black Dress”** “I basically wrote a poem about every significant moment that had made me grow up a year in a second about my life. The first time I got punched, the first time a teacher ridiculed me for wearing makeup, the first time the internet came after me and where I\'m at right now. It was the first time I felt pain, and it was really cool to write that song. And the instrumentation: That’s a toy keyboard from Walmart; all those sounds were made on guitars and a toy keyboard.”
Trap and classical touches ignite the group’s K-pop fireworks.
Camila Cabello’s solo career continues to be one of modern pop’s most worthwhile musical journeys. Where 2019’s *Romance* stepped back from the Caribbean vibes of her smash hit “Havana,” *Familia* shifts decidedly closer to her Cuban American roots and culture. Indeed, the first time we hear her voice here is on the subversively playful “Celia,” sung entirely in Spanish. Far from some staid Latin crossover, the rest of the project jumps between languages and genres as she sees fit, earnest and revealing on “psychofreak” with WILLOW and just crazy in love on “Hasta Los Dientes” with Maria Becerra in her corner. She goes back and forth with Ed Sheeran over the salsa sway of “Bam Bam” and revels in the expansive rhythms of “Don’t Go Yet” on her own.
Far from the blockbuster pop of his 2016 debut, *Nine Track Mind*, or the seductive early-’90s R&B of 2018’s *Voicenotes*, Charlie Puth’s third LP is about the pop star’s sense of interiority. Written with what he calls “feelings first, music to follow,” it’s about the two biggest breakups of his life: a romantic relationship in 2019 and his former record label. If there is a single theme that binds the songs together, he claims it’s bitterness, but a better word might be ‘catharsis.’ “These thoughts spin in my head like a dishwasher,” he tells Apple Music. “I put them against a beat, add some melody, and when the song is finished, it’s like putting a letter in a glass bottle and sending it off into the ocean.” The overall effect is a richer sound, from the stacked ’80s synth-pop of “There’s a First Time for Everything” to the 2000s pop rock of “Smells Like Me” and the sole collaboration, “Left and Right,” featuring BTS’s Jung Kook. “I don\'t hold any sort of resentment for any of the people in those parties that I openly sing about on this record. I have nothing against them,” he says. “But it was important for me to get all this wording out on this album.” Below, Puth walks Apple Music through *CHARLIE*, track by track. **“That’s Hilarious”** “All of these songs come with combining an ugly and a beautiful thing together. In this song, I wanted the lyrics to be ugly and beautiful at the same time, just like I wanted the sound to be ugly and beautiful as well. It starts with pretty chords, then the pre-chorus lyric comes in: ‘You took away a year of my fucking life.’ That’s not exactly subtle. Almost at the minute mark, there’s a really low sine-wave bass that I ran through this Mike Dean plug-in that made it sound super distorted. That is representative of what was the most turbulent time in my life, where I was most uncomfortable.” **“Charlie Be Quiet!”** “I came up with that heavily syncopated, verselike melody as the chorus while going on a walk. I was listening to ‘The Whisper Song,’ produced by Mr. Collipark for the Ying Yang Twins. I thought, ‘Why has no one made a song where someone’s whispering?’ Then, in the second half of the chorus, you have the illusion of it getting louder for the listener, but it’s actually all mastered to the same level. You just jumped the octave.” **“Light Switch”** “I wrote and produced the record ‘STAY’ for Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI, so I was in a very fast mood. I wanted to make fast music, that’s where this started from. I’ve always been obsessed with Broadway plays and cartoons—how they would use music to accentuate movements on the stage. If someone’s tiptoeing, you hear a pizzicato string. I literally saw a light switch, and I was like, ‘What do you do with a light switch? You turn the light switch on.’ OK, let’s be really corny. And so, ‘You turn me on like a light switch’ was it. Maybe the Broadway songs stay Broadway songs for a reason.” **“There’s a First Time for Everything”** “During the time I was making this song, I was exploring new people, taking part in activities that I had never really partaken in before. I’ll say lightly, there’s the first time for everything, and you have one life. There was this sense of euphoria in my mind, just knowing that there’s an open world out there, and that’s what I wanted the record to sonically match.” **“Smells Like Me”** “It’s supposed to be the song that you hear in the beginning of a 2000s reality show, like *The Hills*. It’s a very ugly word, ‘smells,’ and it doesn\'t sing very well. What sound represents the word ‘smells’? So, I just screamed into the microphone and Auto-Tuned that, so it became distorted and robotic. Then came that dreamy arpeggio. It reminded me of *The Little Mermaid*.” **“Left and Right”** “This song is simple. You can’t eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant every night. Sometimes you just got to get a burger and fries from McDonald’s: three chords, fun, and not about anything super heavy. I loved that dichotomy of how BTS\'s music is very well-produced, very crispy, very bright, and this song is the opposite. Jung Kook’s voice is usually associated with big, bright, powerful K-pop chords, and putting it under that Red Hot Chili Peppers type of bass, grunginess—I really liked that combination.” **“Loser”** “This song started off with the title. I was in the shower, recalling a time where I felt like I really messed it up with somebody. I thought that I lost them forever. I felt like a loser. I’m a singer living in LA, I’m seeing too many people, and I’m a loser. I followed up with, ‘How’d I ever lose her?’ And it just happens to rhyme. It sounds like a nursery rhyme that’s been around forever. Just a self-deprecating, sad one.” **“When You’re Sad I’m Sad”** “This is a song about being manipulated. When you’re sad, I’m sad. If you break up with me, and you move on with someone else, and you then come back to me, saying, ‘I made a big mistake,’ I’m going to forget about all my morals, and I’m going to swallow all my pride with one huge, sodalike gulp, and I’m going to go over to your house. I\'m going to console you and comfort you because I am manipulated into loving you.” **“Marks on My Neck”** “I was seeing someone new. I remember waking up the next morning with my neck all bruised up, from some unclipped fingernails. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my god. I got to cover this up. I’m driving up to see my parents right now.’ We lost touch, so the memory of this person started to fade away, as did the marks on my neck. They started to heal. The parallel is interesting—these marks fade the more my memory fades.” **“Tears on My Piano”** “I remember seeing Bruce Springsteen play Giants Stadium and his audience screaming along. Clarence Clemons played this saxophone solo on ‘Jungleland,’ and 50,000 fans were screaming, and there were no lyrics. ‘One day, I’m going to write a song where people can scream along to the non-existing lyrics, just the melody.’ And with that in mind, I came up with the melody, ‘These tears on my piano,’ where the piano melody would be singable. The piano part almost sounds a little sloppy because my fingers were wet from all the tears falling out of my eyes, hitting the piano.” **“I Don’t Think That I Like Her”** “Travis Barker added a really important layer of drums amongst the synthetic drums. It gave the song something that I just wouldn’t be able to do on my own. I like a singer singing something and the listener thinking the opposite. Like ‘Missing You’ by John Waite, where he says, ‘I ain’t missing you at all/Since you’ve been gone.’ Of course, you’re missing this person. You’re in denial. I’m in denial on this song, and I wanted to say that without saying that.” **“No More Drama”** “The album starts off bitter and self-correcting. ‘No More Drama’ is me waving goodbye to all those other 11 songs, sailing on to the next year of my life as a well-seasoned person. I’m ready to move on to the next. It’s the perfect ending punctuation for this album.”
“One thing we saw very early on in the recording process was the fact that this couldn’t be one record,” Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds tells Apple Music. “There were two different directions, two stories being told, and two timelines. We had songs that I wrote right after my best friend took his life and right after my sister passed away—you know, grieving songs. And then we had songs that were written, because of COVID, almost three years later, when I was in a totally different place. I had a different story to tell.” The band decided to release two variations on a single theme: *Mercury - Act 1* addresses the death and grieving process, while *Act 2* unpacks the complicated task of trying to move forward. These eclectic and ultimately uplifting rock songs are amplified by the band’s new collaborator: legendary producer Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, System of a Down, Tom Petty, AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers). “They’re wildly sophisticated in their production ability, in their playing, and in their writing—this glut of greatness,” Rubin says of the band. Rubin’s style allowed Reynolds to rectify his loss of religious faith and discover a new kind of meaning on the record. “My first goal with creating art is putting out something that is honest,” Reynolds says. “One of the things that has been so inspiring to me working with Rick is I have been trying to refine spirituality and belief. When the rug is pulled out on you with religion, I was left with nothing. It made me trust no one. Any story anybody told me, it was a ghost story. I’ve been trying to refine believing in deeper things, unexplainable things. I’m trusting where I feel honesty. Rick is honest.” *Act 1* is largely about letting go, as evidenced in the haunting vocal overlays of “Wrecked,” a song written about Reynolds’ sister-in-law, who died of cancer in 2019. “My biggest fear in life is lack of control,” Reynolds admits, revealing that he confronted that fear in a spiritually transformative ayahuasca trip, which no doubt influenced the record. “I had to give up control completely. And I died. Spiritually, I felt like I died. I saw so many things in my life from a bird’s-eye view. Then I heard, like, the bell and this incredible shaman came over and was helping me come alive again. It felt like a rebirth. It was everything I was told religion would give to me.” *Act 2* focuses on the “post-death” experience, he says, and reaches for the light at the end of the tunnel. “Dealing with someone who has passed—and then what? What does tomorrow look like? Grief is always there, but life continues. It’s about being present. All you have, after you lose someone close to you, is this \[new perspective\] that every single second counts.”
