“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.
With Coexist, The xx defied any perceived "difficult second album" pressures to create a record that cemented their status as a truly global breakout act. On the follow up to their acclaimed, era-defining debut, the London based trio of Romy Madly Croft, Oliver Sim and Jamie Smith (aka Jamie xx) continued to deal in compelling, sparse atmospherics but expanded their musical world, especially through producer Jamie's growing electronic sound palette. Coexist surpassed expectations to become the best-selling vinyl record of 2012. Meanwhile, the band progressed from playing intimate venues to becoming an international must-see live act, curating their own festivals and collaborating with symphony orchestras. A final ambitious run of 25 shows at New York's legendary Armory venue rounded off the album campaign, witnessed by fellow artists (such as Beyonce, Jay-Z and Madonna) and fans alike. To celebrate 10 years of Coexist, The xx will release a limited edition, crystal clear vinyl pressing of the record, available to pre-order now. An expanded digital edition will also feature live versions of fan favourites "Angels", "Chained', "Reunion & Sunset" - find both here: thexx.ffm.to/coexist-deluxe
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.
When he wasn’t flying around the world, selling out arenas and headlining music festivals, Post Malone had spent the past several years cooking up a stream of blockbuster hits from his tight-knit, dimly lit studio in the middle of Hollywood. Then, when the pandemic hit, claustrophobia—and a bad case of writer\'s block—set in. “I felt so cramped,” the singer-songwriter born Austin Post tells Apple Music. Restless and eager for a change of pace, he and his team moved into a house in Malibu right on the water. “It was just so freeing,” he says. “I was like, ‘I\'m not scared to express myself or make music or write songs.’” It was during these laidback, free-form sessions—enhanced by magic mushrooms and fresh salt air—that the genre-defying artist wrote most of his fourth album *Twelve Carat Toothache*. The somber, reflective project closes out what seems to have been a difficult chapter of Post’s life: Several songs reference his struggles with fame (“Reputation”), drugs (“Wasting Angels” featuring The Kid LAROI), and booze (“Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol” featuring Fleet Foxes), painting the portrait of an addict stuck in a dark cycle of destructive benders and frustrated apologies. “I’m 26,” he says. “There’s been some kick-ass times—and not in a good way. I was not normal. My brain was not operating at its normal frequency. I just wasn’t…Austin. I was so fucking lost. For a long time I didn’t know how to \[cope with success\].” But there’s light at the end of this tunnel. The album arrives as Post enters a new phase of his life, one less defined by partying and more defined by family (he’s expecting his first child). “I realized that there\'s real fucking true positivity and love out there,” he says. “Now, I’m the happiest dude in the universe. I’m so fucking excited. Ready to rock and roll.” As he shifts his focus to his new role as a father, more change—and potentially relocation—is on the horizon. The East Coast native, who grew up in Syracuse, New York, says it’s hard for him to imagine raising kids in Los Angeles. “Now I’m prepping to take care of my family... Move a little bit out, have a spot where I’m able to go,” he says. “I’m so ready to go home. It’s time to go home.”
Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe’s life was turned upside down in 2018 when his beloved father, Tattersall, passed away. Dealing with his dad’s loss was one thing—uncovering the secrets that came to light in the wake of his passing was another. His father was born in Samoa in 1938, not New Zealand in 1948, as Le’aupepe had believed. Tattersall also had two sons in New Zealand before faking his death and moving to Australia—half-brothers that Le’aupepe was, until his father’s passing, unaware he had. “\[These\] were things that my dad hid or made sure that we didn’t find out about because, I think, there was a lot of guilt and sadness and scandal around his life before he came to Australia,” Le’aupepe tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. The singer wasn’t, however, angry when these revelations came to light. “My dad was amazing, but he was a complicated man,” says Le’aupepe. “He was my hero. And naturally, when you find out more about your hero, you get excited. Also, I wanted big brothers growing up, and I just supplemented them with the band and people from church and stuff like that. So, I was actually able to claim a part of myself, a part of my heritage, a part of all this stuff, while also simultaneously reconnecting with these two blokes who I just loved instantly. It was a really, really cool thing.” Tattersall’s passing is a lyrical theme that binds Gang of Youths’ third album together (“I prayed the day you passed/But the heavens didn’t listen,” begins Le’aupepe on opener “you in everything”), but the events of his life and death are captured most concisely in the sparse, poetic piano ballad “brothers.” “There’s a sense of the storytelling traditions of old,” says Le’aupepe of the song. “I listen to a lot of Paul Kelly, Archie Roach—the greatest songwriters who wrote and told stories. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Cactus Tree’ is another one. I love a cinematic slow reveal of what the story’s about. And obviously, cinema’s played a huge role in influencing where this album’s gone visually and sonically.” So, too, has the singer’s Polynesian heritage. While songs such as “the angel of 8th ave.” and “the man himself” merge the band’s penchant for big-tent indie rock with a distinct hint of Britpop (“spirit boy”), and “the kingdom is within you” flirts with UK garage, the album is rich with a mélange of Polynesian musical influences. Witness the presence of Cook Islands drum group the Nuanua Drummers and the Auckland Gospel Choir on “in the wake of your leave,” or the spoken-word verse in “spirit boy,” delivered in the Māori language te reo. “the man himself,” meanwhile, features samples of Pacific Island hymns, captured by British composer David Fanshawe. “There was a sense of wanting to make the record feel like it wasn’t just us mining my people’s past or our people’s collective past for inspiration,” says Le’aupepe, “but that we were in a mode of wanting to move forward and \[take\] what’s happening now in terms of a creative direction.” That the London-based, Sydney-born band managed to largely self-produce (with occasional coproduction from Peter Katis and Peter Hutchings) such an expansive album in their rehearsal room in the East London suburb of Hackney is nothing short of remarkable. “It felt like this anarchic confluence of values,” says Le’aupepe. “It was really, really interesting seeing how together we are, and working in that close, confined space has given us a unity of opinion, or a unity of ‘this is where we’re going to go with it.’ And I think that was all cultivated in the sessions for *angel in realtime.*”
Gang of Youths David Le'aupepe – lead vocals, production, engineering (all tracks); guitar (1, 2, 5, 6); backing vocals, piano (2, 6); bass (3), keyboards (3, 5, 6), synthesizer (6) Donnie Borzestowski – drums, production, engineering (all tracks); percussion (1, 5, 6), piano (1), backing vocals (2, 4, 6–13) Max Dunn – production, engineering (all tracks); bass (1, 2, 4–13), banjo (1, 5), piano (1, 6), backing vocals (2), guitar (3); autoharp, keyboards (5), Tom Hobden – production, engineering (all tracks); backing vocals (2, 5), viola (2, 4–6, 11), violin (2–6, 11), piano (4, 7, 9–13) Jung Kim – guitar, production, engineering (all tracks);, backing vocals (2), piano (3, 8) Additional musicians Daniel Ricciardo – backing vocals (2, 11) Auckland Gospel Choir – backing vocals (2, 11) Seumanu Simon Matāfai – music direction (2), piano (6) Anuanua Drummers – percussion (2, 6) Ian Burdge – cello (5, 11) Johnny Griffiths – clarinet, flute, saxophone (5) Ilid Jones – cor anglais, oboe (5) Nick Etwell – flugelhorn, trumpet (5, 11) Matt Gunner – French horn (5, 11) Dave Williamson – trombone (5, 11) Indiana Dunn – backing vocals, percussion (6) James Larter – marimba (6) Kaumātua – spoken voice (6) Tony Gibbs – spoken voice (6) Aemon Beech - percussion (1) Anna Pamin – percussion (11) Blake Friend – percussion (11) Peter Hutchings – synthesizer (11) Technical Peter Hutchings – production (2, 11), engineering (2, 3, 6, 11), mixing (11) Peter Katis – production (2), mixing (5) Count – mastering (1, 2, 5, 6), mixing (1, 2, 6) Joe LaPorta – mastering (3) Craig Silvey – mixing (3, 11) Richard Woodcraft – engineering (1, 5, 6, 11) Gergő Láposi – orchestral engineering (1) Péter Barabás – orchestral engineering (1) Dani Bennett Spragg – mixing assistance (11) Emily Wheatcroft Snape – engineering assistance (2, 11) Jamie Sprosen – engineering assistance (2, 11) Luke O'Dea – engineering assistance (3) Tess Dunn – engineering assistance (6)
070 Shake sounds like she’s in pain across *You Can’t Kill Me*. If love was an inspiration for the Jersey-hailing G.O.O.D. Music signee\'s follow-up to 2020’s *Modus Vivendi*, it is only to the extent that it has wounded her, caused her to wound someone else, or forced her to treat wounds of her own. The project is heavy and operatic (production credits list Dave Sitek, johan lenox, and Dave Hamelin, among others), and Shake sings frequently about relationships past (“Web,” “Stay,” “Medicine,” “Se Fue La Luz”), present (“Blue Velvet,” “Cocoon,” “Wine & Spirits”), and, in one instance—hopefully—future (“Invited”). What’s clearer than anything else across *You Can’t Kill Me* is that 070 Shake knows how to turn her pain into art. Or maybe it’s more like she tells us on “Wine & Spirits,” that “Life is about balance, war and harmony/Can’t have one without the other.”
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.
For any band, signing to a major label at the beginning of your career is a dream come true. For LGBTQ+ Los Angeles power pop-rock trio MUNA (musicians Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson all identify as queer), it was merely their first milestone. Great freedom and success came later, when they were dropped by their label after releasing two albums and just as quickly picked up by Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. Now an independent band on their self-titled third full-length, they never sounded more confident. “\[*MUNA*\] has a lot to do with identity and agency and self-definition, the ideas that we project onto other people,” Maskin tells Apple Music. “It’s an interrogation of interpersonal relationships, and sexuality, and desire, and just trying to be a person in the world and present in your life.” Those complicated ideas are articulated with an eclectic musical nuance, from the country-folk of “Kind of Girl” and the Peter Gabriel-indebted “Solid” to the jagged, Robyn-esque synth-pop of “What I Want” and the playful pop of “Silk Chiffon.” “Music helps us feel less alone in our human experience, and I think we want people to feel that,” Gavin says. “There’s a hope that these songs can foster moments of connection and joy for people, like for our queer community—we want these songs to be a soundtrack to new experiences that aren\'t full of torment.” Below, MUNA walks Apple Music through their new album, track by track. **“Silk Chiffon” feat. Phoebe Bridgers** Naomi McPherson: “The song has been kicking about since the end of 2019. Katie wrote it, and at the time it was just the pre-chorus. The bridge lyrics were in the place of the chorus. It was synth-ier, but Jo and I had the instinct to make it feel like opening credits of a late-\'90s, early-aughts rom-com. We had been kicking around the idea of having someone feature on the second verse, and Phoebe came to mind—this was prior to us signing to her label. She loved the song and was so stoked to hop on it, which made us feel so, so good.” **“What I Want”** Katie Gavin: “This was a song that started as actually a Zoom co-write. I did it with Leland, who is an amazing songwriter and artist in his own right, and who has also done a lot of work on songs in the universe of *RuPaul\'s Drag Race*. I had a couple beats from Naomi, and I took them into the session and we both liked that one. After the session, I sent a demo to Naomi and Jo, and I remember Naomi freaking out and knowing that it was going to be a banger and wanting to work on it. I was a little bit scared of the song initially because of how much of a banger it is. There are strings in the chorus that were very inspired by \'Toxic,\' the classic Britney song.” **“Runner’s High”** NM: “MUNA’s anti-running song. The funny thing about this track is, I think, that the beat came about in the most peculiar way. During 2020, a friend of ours was letting us use her studio for very cheap, and we were trying to take making music very seriously. We wanted to do something where it\'s like, we had no songs that we were currently working on, so we came up with a game called \'the five-minute game,\' where each of us had to make a part in a five-minute period, and then someone else adds a part on top. The start of this song came from that game. And I don\'t think I\'ve ever heard a song that has this specific metaphor; obviously, it is one of a kind and the song slaps. So, you can run to it. We won\'t, but we hope that people do.” **“Home by Now”** Josette Maskin: “This came about in a pretty classic MUNA way. All the songs have different trajectories and paths, but this one was something that Katie wrote when we were on tour with Phoebe in the fall of 2021. We sometimes find that being on the road can be pretty inspiring. When you\'re away from your stuff and you don\'t have the obligation to work on an album that has a pending deadline, it can take you out of your element and inspire you in a way.” **“Kind of Girl”** KG: “For songs that I start on my own, there\'s two categories: I did it on Ableton, which was \'Home by Now,\' or I did it on an acoustic guitar, which is \'Kind of Girl.\' \'Kind of Girl\' I wrote in a bathtub. I wrote it from start to finish, chronologically, first the pre-chorus, then the chorus. I was thinking about the power that the words we choose to identify with have on the way that our story unfolds. How those affect what we think is possible and not possible and what we think is fixed or unfixed. We recorded just a bunch of layers of acoustic guitar and Josette\'s slide through a toy amp and built this world out.” **“Handle Me”** JM: “Katie wrote this song in January 2020. When we first did this song, Naomi and I were thinking a lot about, funny enough, 311—there’s a guitar part based on those early-2000s songs, something that would be on *The O.C.* Naomi felt really inspired about changing the drums and then I played the guitar part slightly differently and we tried to make it more of a lo-fi sexy track. I really fought for the song to be on the record, because I was like, ‘Oh, we don\'t really have a song in our discography that is sexy in this specific way.\' It shows a different side of MUNA.” **“No Idea”** NM: “‘No Idea’ started at the top of 2020. At the time we were toying with the idea of the third record being an alternative reimagining of the past wherein we were the biggest boy band in the late \'90s and early 2000s. But we are ourselves, and gay, we cast ourselves into that canon. I think of \'No Idea\' as our \'90s Max Martin moment meets a little bit of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk. Katie had written the song, it was pretty finished, but there wasn\'t a second verse. We had a session with Mitski; she came over to me and Jo’s apartment at the time, and we talked about disco. She thought the song was hot and fun to work on; she gave us a kick into the direction that the song found itself in.” **“Solid”** NM: “‘Solid’ has been around since 2018, 2017, I think. It just didn\'t have a place on the second record. It was in the archive for a bit and then it reappeared. It is one of my favorites. We’re always super inspired by \'80s music. I mean, who doesn\'t, that makes pop music nowadays? That artistic innovation, computerized sound, and synthesized sound. It was just fun to work on after all these years. It bops.” **“Anything But Me”** KG: “I wrote this song in my car. I had my laptop, and I was eating a burrito, and I came up with the first lines of the song and I was just like, ‘That\'s so stupid, but it\'s stupid in a way that\'s almost brilliant.’ This song is in 12/8, a really specific groove, and it has a buoyant energy. I had written the verse and the pre-chorus and had the basic groove down, and I sent it to Naomi and Jo. Naomi was like, \'There needs to be a section after the pre-chorus where you\'re doing something very like Shania \[Twain\] with the word “me,” holding it out and having a moment with it.\' We fleshed it out from there. When Jo and Naomi were working on it, they had some influence from Mariah Carey.” **“Loose Garment”** NM: “‘Loose Garment’ started because I was looking at furniture and I made a beat and called it ‘Teak Wood Nine.’ I sent Katie a bunch of beats that had wood and furniture names. We all love Imogen Heap and her collaboration with Guy Sigsworth. The band Frou Frou, they\'re a touchstone for us, both her solo project and that band; it felt like maybe \[the song\] could live in that universe. We switched the beat up and gave it a pulsating feel that motivated the song. It’s definitely a sad one. Cynthia Tolson killed it. She played strings on it and just went off.” **“Shooting Star”** KG: “This song was written literal weeks before we turned in the album. That\'s very MUNA. I always write until it is pencils down. I had written this on acoustic guitar, and it was this folky bassline guitar part that really turned Josette off, and I remember I wanted it. We always intended for this to be a 10-song record. There\'s a certain kind of guitar that we got obsessed with using, and I feel like we associate it a lot with the sound of music in LA: It\'s a rubber-bridge, vintage acoustic guitar, and Jo reworked the guitar part into something that was better. It was Naomi\'s idea to have kind of this Coldplay moment at the end where the song explodes into this more cathartic beat and arrangement, and that was really, I think, a big moment for that song as well.”
MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms, could have made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Since MUNA — lead singer/songwriter Katie Gavin, guitarist/producer Naomi McPherson, guitarist Josette Maskin — began making music together in college, at USC, they’d always embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience: the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But sometimes, for MUNA, after nearly a decade of friendship and a long stretch of pandemic-induced self-reckoning, the most radical note possible is that of bliss. MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is a landmark — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. It’s marked by a newfound creative assurance and technical ability, both in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace. Here, more than ever, MUNA musters their unique powers to break through the existential muck and transport you, suddenly, into a room where everything is possible — a place where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof, and self-consciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.
In late 2020, Kevin Morby holed up in the then-quiet Peabody hotel in Memphis to escape a pandemic-burdened winter in his hometown of Kansas City. There, he wrote *This Is a Photograph*, a folky, left-of-the-dial rock album and a particularly reflective entry in his catalog. Its sound is sometimes earthy and gospel-inflected, sometimes lush and symphonic, with lyrics tinted by existential reflection and the specter of death. The sinewy title track was inspired by family photos that Morby and his mother went through after thinking they’d just seen his father die following an accidental double dose of heart medication. The lived-in duet “Bittersweet, TN,” about the loss of a friend, features vocals by Erin Rae and floats along on its banjo lines. And the sparse but upbeat “Goodbye To Good Times” doesn’t offer any resolution, but instead presents a eulogy for better days as the songwriter strums his acoustic guitar, simultaneously nostalgic and grounded in the difficult present.
The story begins with Kevin Morby absentmindedly flipping through a box of old family photos in the basement of his childhood home in Kansas City. Just hours before, at a family dinner, his father had collapsed in front of him and had to be rushed to the hospital. That night Morby still felt the shock and fear lodged in his bones. So he gazed at the images until one of the pictures jumped out at him: his father as a young man, proud and strong and filled with confidence, posing on a lawn with his shirt off. This was in January of 2020. As the months went on and the world dramatically changed around him, Morby felt an eerie similarity between his feelings of that night and the atmosphere of those spring days. Fear, anxiety, hope and resilience all churning together. The themes began twisting in his mind. History, trauma and the grand fight against time. Having the courage to dream, even while knowing the tragedy that often awaits those who dare to dream. While his father regained his strength, Morby meditated on these ideas. And then, he headed to Memphis. He moved into the Peabody Hotel and spent his days paying tribute and genuflecting to the dreamers he admired. In the evening, he would return to his room and document his ideas on a makeshift recording set-up, with just his guitar and a microphone. The songs, elegiac in nature, befitting all he had seen, poured out of him. Produced by Sam Cohen (who also worked on Morby’s Singing Saw and Oh My God), This Is A Photograph features musical contributions from longtime staples of Morby’s live band, as well as old friends and new collaborators alike. If Oh My God saw Morby getting celestial and in constant motion and Sundowner was a study in localized intent, This Is A Photograph finds Morby making an Americana paean, a visceral life and death, blood on the canvas outpouring. As Morby reminds us early on, time is undefeated. So what do we do while we’re still here? This is a photograph of that sense of yearning.
“I\'ve made an album about fear and shame, it’s definitely been uncomfortable,” Oliver Sim tells Apple Music. As one third of British indie electronic group The xx, Sim—alongside bandmates Romy Madley Croft and producer Jamie xx—became adept at writing sparse and haunting love songs. For his solo debut, however, he turned his gaze inward to confront the internalized shame that has colored his life. “Initially, it was like, why would I want to share the things that I think make me feel hideous in some way?” he says. “But concealing that hasn’t really worked for me in the past. If anything, the whole idea of concealing things just feeds into shame.” Here, Sim gets straight into it: The album’s first track, “Hideous”—which features guest vocals from queer pop music royalty Jimmy Somerville—sees Sim share for the first time that he’s been living with HIV since he was 17 years old. “My whole way of navigating my status was just control,” Sim says. “I know exactly who knew and if they told anybody else. But writing that down was a real ‘fuck it’ moment.” For the record, Sim worked almost exclusively with bandmate Jamie xx. “It would have been a very different album if I\'d made it with somebody else,” he says. “Jamie\'s been my friend since I was 11 years old. I don\'t think I would have been as vulnerable with someone else. Also, he\'s a straight man and he got involved in some real queer conversations. He just had no ego. He was making my world come to life.” Part of that involved indulging Sim’s love of horror films—he has created an entire short horror film to accompany the album with director Yann Gonzalez—but also helping Sim to unpack his experiences with homophobia, loneliness, and self-sabotage. “I got worried that this record was going to be perceived as perpetuating the idea of self-loathing gay men, which would just be this downer,” Sim says. “But this whole process, and how I see the record, is not a downer. It’s the opposite of shame. It’s not hiding.” Read on for Oliver Sim’s track-by-track guide to *Hideous Bastard*. **“Hideous”** “Jimmy Somerville became my pen pal quite a few months before I asked him to appear on the song. I\'ve known that voice all my life, but as an adult I’ve come to understand what he represented and everything he’s done. He’s been so visible and vocal about queer issues for such a long time. I think I wanted some of that fearlessness. When I finally asked him to be a part of the song, I expected him to be quite militant and for the cause, but he was very gentle with me. He was like, ‘I hope you\'re doing this for yourself.’ He also said, ‘I’m 60, so don’t be expecting me to hit those high notes.’ But he came in and the moment he started singing, Jamie and I cried. His voice is incredible. It\'s so strong and in person it’s really loud.” **“Romance With a Memory”** “For this album I’ve done a lot of playing around with my voice. I have only ever sung in duet with Romy—if I step out of that, where can my voice go? I love trying to see how high can my voice go or how low can my voice go, even if I\'m pitching it down to a point of it either sounding like a parody of what a masculine voice would sound like to it being totally demonic. I like hearing male voices sing together. There is something very masculine about it, but also something romantic and tender, too. The whole idea of men harmonizing together, I think, is quite queer.” **“Sensitive Child”** “This is something that I’ve definitely been called. It’s definitely a euphemism for a certain type of kid, in particular a little boy. I think hearing it as an adult, and as a gay man, brings up a lot of childhood feelings of not being acknowledged. It’s also probably one of the fullest songs I’ve ever made. Normally, for me songs start as words on a piece of paper, but this started with a Del Shannon song called ‘Break Up’ and then I did all the writing around that. I\'m the kind of person that spends months on a song, but this song happened very quickly. I see this as quite an angry song.” **“Never Here”** “I talk a lot about memory on this album, and this song asks the question of just how reliable my memory can be and how, maybe, technology warps how I remember things. It\'s also, sonically, one of the heaviest songs on the record, which was really fun for me. The music that I really got into as a teenager was either from my sister\'s record collection, which was just mid-’90s American R&B like Aaliyah, TLC, En Vogue, and Ginuwine, or it was heavy music like Placebo and Queens of the Stone Age. It was fun to get into that a bit more with \'Never Here\' and to scream. I think that\'s the few times that I\'ve allowed myself to scream, which is a real release.” **“Unreliable Narrator”** “I\'ve come into this record with just tons and tons of questions, but not necessarily the answers. I wrote this song as, in my head, this album is a movie, and this was a plot point I wanted halfway through the record. It was inspired by this monologue Bret Easton Ellis wrote for Patrick Bateman in *American Psycho*. In the film, it\'s where Christian Bale\'s doing his 14-step morning routine and about how he’s not really there. I’m not a psychopath, but I think that idea of facade and wearing a mask, to any degree, is so relatable. I also thought halfway through this film of my album if I was to admit that anything I could be saying is unreliable would be quite fun.” **“Saccharine”** “I’ve made my whole career on love songs—that is my home. For this record, I’ve tried not to write too many love songs because I think that I could have done a lot of hiding if I did. But to me, this song is still quite revealing about myself. It has much more to do with myself than anyone else; it’s my fear of intimacy. I didn’t want this album to be sweet. It could have a sense of humor, but it had to be savage. This is very much about my inner saboteur and how I react when things become too sweet.” **“Confident Man”** “It’s funny: At school, I felt like an outsider because of my sexuality. I didn’t know I was gay at primary school, but it was always made apparent that I was a bit of a dandy. I was never invited to play football. I didn’t want to play football—I hate football—but it’s not nice to not be included, especially when I’m drawn to these boys for reasons I didn’t quite understand. But then, to experience that as an adult within the gay community, a community of outsiders… I don’t know. There’s that feeling of performative masculinity and of what confidence actually looks like. I think there’s something very insecure about feeling like you have to perform masculinity. What do people actually even consider masculinity? I think there’s something very confident about saying, ‘I don’t feel so confident.’” **“GMT”** “Jamie and I had gone to Australia. This was before COVID and we’d started the record. I had gone there to bypass the English winter because seasonal depression is real. We\'d started in Sydney and we road-tripped down to Byron Bay just listening to lots of music. We were listening to The Beach Boys and I started singing things in the car. When we got to Byron Bay, we ended up sampling The Beach Boys on the song. I was in this beautiful sunshine yet still pining for London a little bit. I think there is an inherent melancholy about London, which has been the driving force for so much amazing creativity. This was a jet-lagged love song about London.” **“Fruit”** “Funny enough, this is the hardest song to explain, because I think it kind of says it all. It\'s the very *Drag Race* moment of ‘What would you say to five-year-old Oliver?’ So it is talking to five-year-old me, but it\'s also very much talking to me today, because there is a part of me that is still five years old. I’m still a sensitive child, but now I’m hearing the things that I would want to hear.” **“Run the Credits”** “When I was talking about ‘Unreliable Narrator’ being a plot point, this was the song I wrote exactly for the end of the album. It was the note that I want to end on and mirrors the scariest thing I find in cinema, which is the open-ended ending. A Disney-style bow to close everything is so tempting, but there is nothing scarier than leaving it open-ended. Your imagination\'s always going to tailor-make the scariest outcome.”
Hideous Bastard, the debut album from Oliver Sim—best known for his work as songwriter, bassist,and vocalist of The xx—is set for release on September 9th via Young. Produced by bandmate Jamie xx, Hideous Bastard is the culmination of two years of writing and recording, inspired by Sim’s love of horror movies and his own life experience, unpacking themes of shame, fear, and masculinity. These themes are front and centre on new single “Hideous”. Enlisting the help of lifelong hero and “guardian angel”Jimmy Somerville on guest vocals, the single sets the scene for the forthcoming album and sees Sim speaking publicly for the first time that he’s been living with HIV since the age of seventeen. It debuts with a video by another personal hero, French director Yann Gonzalez, who has also collaborated with Sim on a forthcoming queer horror short film of the same name that premiered yesterday as part of the Semaine de la Critiqueat the Cannes Film Festival.
“It was the fear of what people would think,” Stella Donnelly tells Apple Music. The Perth-raised, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter was unable to write songs for some time before beginning work on her second album, *Flood*. It began even before she’d released 2019’s *Beware of the Dogs*. Her debut album had been finished in 2018, months before its actual release date. But between touring and other commitments, she had only two weeks off in a year—and the constant hustle, not to mention the growing vulnerability that accompanied her expanding audience, took its toll. “I was gradually getting more and more creatively unwell,” she says. “When I’m able to create and write, I feel like I’m healthier in my mind. That was definitely blocked, which started creating all sorts of issues for my mental health—I was doubting myself, doubting whether I was a real musician.” Eventually, as the pandemic sent the world into silence, Donnelly found time to breathe, gather herself, and write new music—which she understandably describes as a massive relief. The end result is an 11-track snapshot of where she is in her life right now. From reflections on long-gone relationships to observations on how lockdowns affected us all to songs designed for future live performances, this is Stella Donnelly in 2022, for better or worse. “There’s a big scope as to who I am and what I think about, and it’s kind of varied,” she says. “I might not feel some of the songs when I’m listening back, but they’re a representation of where I was, so it’s important for me to set a timestamp on my life.” **“Lungs”** “I’d written the rest of the record, and I felt like I hadn’t been looking forward while writing these songs. I’d been doing a lot of looking back, and I hadn’t actually pictured myself performing the songs because there was no one performing any songs on any stage in the world at the time. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, this is really slow.’ It felt kind of stuck in 2020 or 2021. I wanted to create a song that I’d really enjoy performing live and that would bring a certain energy to the stage and to the show.” **“How Was Your Day”** “It’s capturing a dynamic. I wanted to bring to life this feeling that often happens between people who love each other very much—that fear of losing that person, so you avoid having the difficult conversation, whether it leads to breaking up or not. And it was brought on by lockdown. A lot of people were either breaking up or getting married. It was like make or break. So, I feel like it was just trying to capture that feeling of the couples having to have that talk because they’re either going to have to choose to live together for 100 percent of their days or live separately for 100 percent of their days.” **“Restricted Account”** “This one came about in a weird way. I was getting kind of incessant DMs in my ‘other’ account on Instagram, and I would block that person, but they’d get another account and then message me on that account. It was always these really long, sprawling paragraphs of their life, and dotted between devotion towards me, but they were actually always talking about being devoted to someone else as well, so it was quite confusing. I wanted to try and capture that feeling of devotion to a stranger that so many people get. In some ways, it’s like a love song from someone else’s perspective. But there’s this uncomfortable feeling about it, and I was trying to bring that out in the flugelhorn and the piano, and the guitar at the end, building up to this almost unbearable frequency.” **“Underwater”** “I did an ambassadorship for the Patricia Giles Centre for Non-Violence in Western Australia, which is a women and children’s refuge for family and domestic violence situations. I met with some of the residents and staff members, and we received a lot of interesting education on the statistics. The most profound and interesting statistic I came away with was the fact that, on average, it takes seven attempts to leave a situation of coercion or any sort of abuse. It takes seven attempts before they are successful in leaving. I feel like there’s a lot of shame around not being able to leave an abusive relationship, and I hope that statistic provides some comfort to people. As worrying as it is, it’s the norm. So, I looked back at a particular relationship I’d been in, and I just wanted to kind of say a final fuck-you to that person and try and just kind of process that time in my life.” **“Medals”** “Life gets pretty tough for people who peaked in high school, and I think I’m just trying to capture that in a humorous, gentle way, like, ‘Come on, everyone’s waiting. You can get out of this funk. Like, you can let go of it. You can take your school medals off now. You can kind of go out and live your life and not be so scared of it.’ It’s definitely just a playful, fun song.” **“Move Me”** “’Move Me’ is a love song written to my mum, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years ago. It’s kind of written from my child self, like, I’m almost having a bit of a tantrum about it. I’m kind of having a little bratty moment, but for the most part, in the verses, I’m just singing to her and keeping it kind of humorous because that’s how we speak to each other. But also finding a way to express the shock and the pain and the fear. But I wanted it to feel like it was quite free—people don’t always realize that it’s the years before you get a diagnosis that are the hardest. So, in a way, it’s almost like this celebration of mum being able to finally get the treatment she needs and find her way to live now with this thing.” **“Flood”** “I wrote this song in Melbourne. We were stuck in a six-month lockdown here, and I wanted to write a song that was kind of at the pace of walking, to capture the feeling of that one hour that we were allowed outside to exercise each day. I didn’t want to capture the feeling of being stuck at home, but I also still wanted to capture what it was like and the sadness that was around. So, it was this sad little adventure that I wanted to create. My representation of the feeling of lockdown, which was kind of warm but sad.” **“This Week”** “This song’s me trying to grow up. It’s just where you feel like you’re just winning at life for a bit, you know? You’re just doing all the shit that you say you’re going to do. And you just feel like a capable, upstanding citizen for a little while.” **“Oh My My My”** “I wrote this song about my grandmother, and so, in a way, that old-time feeling, that sort of gothic sound is feeling that forlorn, almost morbid sadness. I wanted to write a little homage to her and the feeling around when you lose someone that you love so much. I tried to capture that moment with grace and earnestness. I’d never been able to fully capture it on guitar for her. I just didn’t feel like it was genuine or just didn’t feel right. So, finding that keyboard sound was perfect—and it was actually on my housemate’s keyboard that his grandmother had bought for him.” **“Morning Silence”** “It’s a bit of a nod back to my EP \[2017’s *Thrush Metal*\] in a way. I really wanted it to be rough in its production—simple and capturing the feeling of hopelessness in the world and how I was feeling. It’s like a sequel to ‘Underwater’ in a way, but a far less hopeful one in some senses. I just wanted to have that little moment to say what I need to say and then have it over with, and not make it too big in its delivery.” **“Cold”** “I wanted to kind of keep looking forward with the record. Especially after ‘Morning Silence’ and ‘Oh My My My,’ I wanted to send it out the park, energy-wise, and look to the future in some way. It was such a fun song to make. It’s about an old argument with someone. It\'s just me trying to get the last word on it and just capturing that time, how fraught our relationship was. I’ve just always wanted to write a big song, and so that was my attempt.”
Like the many Banded Stilts that spread across the cover of her newest album Flood, Stella Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory. Here, she finds herself discovering who she is as an artist among the flock, and how abundant one individual can be. Flood is Donnelly’s record of this rediscovery: the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of moving around. Donnelly’s early reflections on the relationship between the individual and the many can be traced back to her time in the rainforests of Bellingen, where she took to birdwatching as both a hobby and an escape in a border-restricted world. By paying closer attention to the natural world around her, Donnelly recalls “I was able to lose that feeling of anyone’s reaction to me. I forgot who I was as a musician, which was a humbling experience of just being; being my small self.” Reconnecting with this ‘small self’ allowed Donnelly to tap into creative wells she didn’t know existed. Looking back at the Banded Stilt, Donnelly ultimately appreciates how when “seen in a crowd they create an optical illusion, but on its own it’s this singular piece of art.” While each song in Flood is a singular artwork unto itself, the collective shares all of Stella Donnelly in abundance: her inner child, her nurturing self, her nightmare self; all of herself has gone into the making of this record, and although it would take an ocean to fathom everything she feels, it’s well worth diving in.
Rather than a set of songs, think of Colombian-born, Berlin-based artist Lucrecia Dalt’s eighth album, *¡Ay!*, as a room cast in sound: smokey, low-lit, seductive but vaguely threatening; a place where fantasy and reality meet in deep, inky shadow. Dalt’s takes on the bolero, son, ranchera, and merengue that form the romantic spine of Latin pop are genuine enough to feel folkloric and off-kilter enough to conjure the art and experimental music she’s known for—a contrast that pulls *¡Ay!* along on its hovering, dreamlike course. Squint and you can imagine hearing “Dicen” in a dusty bar somewhere or swaying to “La Desmesura” or “Bochinche.” But like the great exotica artists of the ’50s, Dalt teeters between the foreign and the comforting so gracefully, you don’t recognize how strange she is until you’re in her pocket. *¡Ay!* is lounge music for the beyond.
Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s third album was born out of lockdown sessions building ideas on GarageBand. With the Melbourne group unable to convene and jam—or tour previous album *Sideways to New Italy*—while COVID ran amok, files were swapped, each bursting with ideas and musical freedom. The result is RBCF’s most expansive album yet, one that came together in a flurry of creative excitement once the quintet were able to meet up and play together. While their trademark acoustic-driven indie pop is still in play (“Saw You at the Eastern Beach,” “The Way It Shatters”), there are new twists, such as the smoky ’70s grooves that permeate “Dive Deep.” Lyrically the group also explores new territory, with environmental concerns (“Tidal River” with the line “Jet ski over the pale reef”) and the horrific bushfires that engulfed Australia’s east coast in 2019 and 2020 (“Bounce Off the Bottom”) adding a discontented edge to the record.
While initial ideas for Endless Rooms were traded online during long spells spent separated by Australia’s strict lockdowns, the album was truly born during small windows of freedom in which the band would decamp to a mud-brick house in the bush around two hours north of Melbourne built by the extended Russo family in the 1970s. There, its 12 tracks took shape, informed to such an extent by the acoustics and ambience of the rambling lakeside house that they decided to record the album there (and put the house on the album cover). For the first time, the band self-produced the record (alongside engineer, collaborator and old friend, Matt Duffy). The result is a collection of songs permeated by the spirit of the place; punctuated by field recordings of rain, fire, birds, and wind. "It's almost an anti-concept album," says the band. "The Endless Rooms of the title reflects our love of creating worlds in our songs. We treat each of them as a bare room to be built up with infinite possibilities."
In the winter of 2019, Belle and Sebastian had an album’s worth of material ready to record and were preparing to decamp from Scotland to California to make their ninth studio album. You know what happens next. “Once the lockdown started, everything else got forgotten, and then we very much went inside,” lead singer and songwriter Stuart Murdoch tells Apple Music. They kept busy, of course, collaborating with fans online for the pandemic-specific “Protecting the Hive” project and assembling the live compilation *What to Look for in Summer*. “But I don\'t think any of us were really interested in making an album remotely from each other,” says singer/violinist Sarah Martin. Once they were able to convene in person nearly a year later, the band decided to transform their Glasgow rehearsal space into a studio and make their first LP in their hometown since 2000. Murdoch still had his reservations, but they turned out to be moot. “A vocal booth could be in San Francisco, it could be in Cape Town, it doesn\'t matter,” he says. “It becomes like a womb for you to imagine new songs.” And that’s very much what happened—they scrapped most of the songs from the original batch and let *A Bit of Previous* take shape organically. “The record was entirely different to the one that would\'ve been made if we had gone to Los Angeles,” Murdoch says. “We could write in the studio. We could start songs in any direction we wanted to. We could start the song with just a drum beat and build it up from there. Or we could bring everybody in and have everybody perform. It was a very flexible, very creative time.” That result is 12 songs that, like the LP\'s title playfully suggests, represent the band in classic form, reflecting on the present and occasionally looking to the past, with a mix of wit and tenderness. Here, Murdoch, Martin, and keyboardist Chris Geddes speak through each of the album\'s songs. **“Young and Stupid”** Stuart Murdoch: “It\'s a very happy song for me. Although the lyrics might feel like, ‘I was yelling in my sleep/Crying, feeling weak,’ when you write a song where you appear to be moaning about your life, it\'s a sort of a therapy in a way. I wrote this song very quickly, on the way into the studio. And immediately with myself and Brian \[McNeill\], the engineer, we just set up a drum machine, and we put down very basic chords so that we could map it out. And we wrote the song almost. To capture something so quickly—even though in the present time the feeling seems to be down—that\'s part of the beauty and the nature of music and writing songs is that you can capture a feeling and still come out the other end feeling happier.” **“If They\'re Shooting at You”** Murdoch: “I had the music idea for this a couple of years ago. It was around about the same time that Bob \[Kildea, bassist\] brought a song, his own musical idea. This was during the \[*How to Solve Our Human Problems*\] EPs. It became mostly Bob\'s song, and I wrote the words for it, and it became \[2018 single\] \'Poor Boy.’ So I took a little bit of my tune and slotted it in because I felt that the vibe was the same. The thing is, though, afterwards, the original feel kept going around in my head. And I thought, \'I want to extend this and make this a song.\' And so that\'s what we did with this one.” **“Talk to Me, Talk to Me”** Sarah Martin: “I kept going to Sainsbury\'s \[supermarket\] on Friday nights, inexplicably, where they play great records. And there was one time they were playing like a series of Style Council songs while I was in trying to find pasta. When I was driving home, that tune kind of popped into my head, so I made a rough demo of it. It just kept niggling me that I thought Stuart would sing it better than I would.” Murdoch: “As soon as I heard the tune, I was gone. I loved this right away. I could see the possibilities for it. I was thinking about somebody who was corresponding with me, somebody who wasn\'t in fact very well. And so I kind of deliberately tried to slip into their mind and tell the story from their perspective.” **“Reclaim the Night”** Martin: “It\'s about having to kind of carry on bumping into people who are problematic because they\'re friends of friends. And you just want to kind of go through life without having to engage with them, but you can\'t make your friends stop being friends with people who are assholes.” **“Do It for Your Country”** Murdoch: “I do imagine trying to impart wisdom. And sometimes it\'s to an imaginary person, sometimes it\'s to a person from quite deep in the past where it\'s almost unfair in a sense when you think, ‘Okay, well, I know this stuff now. This is what I want to say to you back then.’ But it\'s quite a simple song. It\'s a loving kind of speech, or something. They have that phrase, \'l\'esprit d\'escalier\'—the things you thought about on the stairs, things you thought about afterwards that you wish you\'d said to somebody. And so that is an aspect of songwriting—my songwriting, anyway.” **“Prophets on Hold”** Murdoch: “This was another one, like \'Young and Stupid,\' that would never have existed if we\'d gone to LA. It was a walk-in song. I had the original chorus just as I came in, and played it on the piano. I thought it was going to be the greatest song I ever wrote. I really did. Sometimes you think that. And whereas \'Young and Stupid\' was simple but came out great, this one I thought was going to be great and came out okay. I mean, I think everyone did a good job. But I thought it was going to be a like a soft disco, soulful classic.” **“Unnecessary Drama”** Murdoch: “I took a similar stance that I did with \'Talk to Me\' and decided to write about a correspondence. This correspondence actually spanned time, and the person had sort of changed during the life of the correspondence. And I told the person that I was going to try and write the song. She thought it was funny. The thing I love about this track is that the guitar riff and the melody, which were both provided by Bob, seemed to dance with each other, but they lock in at the same time. And that to me makes a thing interesting.” **“Come On Home”** Chris Geddes: “I never really write complete songs. I\'ll just have the sketch of something, bring it in, teach it to a couple of people, and try and have a groove going. And then hope that one of the singers walks in and says, \'Oh, that sounds quite good.’ But in this instance, the verse that Sarah sings and the whole kind of feel of the track popped in my head when I was on my way to or from a football match. Because of laziness and trying to avoid writing lyrics, I only had those couple of lines, which I gave to Sarah. And then we were playing it as the band, Stuart kind of just took the groove and wrote his verses over it.” **“A World Without You”** Martin: “It\'s nostalgic for kind of times when you connect with somebody. It\'s kind of based on the last episode of *Fleabag*. It\'s based on Fleabag and the priest. Just like when you have a connection with somebody that neither of you is really reachable, but just kind of a memorable moment with people.” **“Deathbed of My Dreams”** Geddes: “I think Stevie \[Jackson\] wanted us to try and do something that sounded like a Frank Sinatra record.” Stuart Murdoch: “It\'s one that just really took off for me with the arrangement. Chris did a pseudo sort of string part, but it sounded rich. And it was a really nice setting for Stevie\'s voice.” **“Sea of Sorrow”** Murdoch: “Most of the songs are very current. They were all written pretty much for the record and written about that time. \'Sea of Sorrow,\' the tune for that was a few years older. And I had it under the pseudonym ‘Nice Waltz Number One.’ We don\'t write too many waltzes, I don\'t think. So that tune was in my head, and then suddenly I had a notion to write some words.” **“Working Boy in New York City”** Murdoch: “‘Working Boy in New York City’ is more about a San Francisco thing, but maybe San Francisco didn\'t scan. It\'s about a friend of mine that I became friends with when I came to America for the first time in the early \'90s. But it\'s best not to be too literal, and so I placed it in New York. And there\'s other elements that come in that go just beyond his story. But there\'s a line from his favorite song, which was ‘Downtown\' by Petula Clark. And I specifically remember him one day describing what that song meant to him.”
On *Small World*, Joseph Mount shrinks his scope. Whereas its predecessor, 2019’s *Metronomy Forever*, was a sprawling 17 tracks, *Small World* consists of just nine. “Often, I want to do the opposite of what I’ve just done,” Mount tells Apple Music. “I wanted to be really musically focused and concise.” This album’s title is, too, a reflection of the shrunken world in which it was made. Written in summer 2020—and recorded between November of that year and early 2021—these songs were crafted in the thick of the pandemic and explore loneliness (the Elliott Smith-meets-Red Hot Chili Peppers “Loneliness on the run”), the optimism we clung to (“Things will be fine”), and the incomprehensible weight of it all (“Life and Death”). This isn’t, however, a record to transport us back to the worst moments of lockdown. “The way I made music during the pandemic was to escape from feeling like I was in a pandemic,” says Mount. “This album is designed to be listened to when you’re free.” The soothing and organic sound of *Small World* might surprise listeners who’ve been with Metronomy since day one—not least because of Mount’s voice, which has dropped a few octaves, sounding at times like Benjamin Biolay’s or Serge Gainsbourg’s. “When I first started writing songs, I imagined I was a producer and that, one day, I would get a female singer to sing them,” says Mount who has, of course, since produced for artists including Robyn and Jessie Ware. “I would always sing in a falsetto voice and really high up. Even though it was never necessarily comfortable, it’s just what I did. This was me trying to be a bit more mature. I want to grow up with Metronomy. You’ve got to develop it and turn it into what you want it to be.” Read on as Mount guides us through his seventh album, one song at a time. **“Life and Death”** “This was the last thing I wrote for the record. I felt like I’d mined the experiences of being locked down for nice songs. And I hadn’t really done anything that acknowledged the actual gravity of the situation, and just how horrible it is and how many people died. This is my song, which is supposed to be a bit despairing about everything. But like all the songs on the record, the music isn’t supposed to make you feel bad or upset. It’s meant to be supportive.” **“Things will be fine”** “The first thing I wrote for the record. It encapsulated everything I wanted it to be, in terms of the sound and the lyrics. I’ve got two children and I was having to say to them, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ But I had no knowledge that backed that up. It’s also about when you’re young, and for the first time you realize that the world is quite a horrible place. And then you realize you’ve been protected by your parents, which is what they’re there to do.” **“It’s good to be back”** “I was imagining this character, a musician who’s in their late thirties, trying to write a record that connects with young people. I was imagining a fictitious conversation with a record label: ‘Oh, you want to reach the kids? You need to use drum machines and synthesizers.’ And then doing that but putting in an acoustic guitar. Which, to me, is this really fun juxtaposition of ideas. The song was about being back at home, and about when our tours were canceled or postponed. When you come back from being away, it always takes a week or two to lock back into the same routines with one another.” **“Loneliness on the run”** “‘Loneliness on the run’ is a song about being far away from people that you love. And wanting them to try and manage their bad feelings. I wrote something about visualizing your loneliness, or your anger, and then throwing it out the window or chasing it away. So, that was the idea. At the end of this song, I guess the album does shift a gear and it becomes a little less introspective and starts forgetting the bad stuff.” **“Love Factory”** “I liked the idea of industrializing love, making it this thing which is churned out. This factory is operating at astonishing capacity. We are doing incredibly well at creating love here. It’s supposed to be a relentless song to reflect that.” **“I lost my mind”** “It’s about feeling like you are doubting your own sanity. It’s not something that I’ve felt, but during the pandemic, it was something that I was very aware of—how friends of ours in quite different situations were just in apartments, on their own, feeling very isolated and out of touch. I wanted it to feel like it was following that in the music as well. It does wig out, and I decided to put a whistling sound in, which helped push it over the edge.” **“Right on time”** “The other thing about imagining where I want to be in a few years is also this awareness that you can’t keep writing songs about falling for people because it’s happened. It happened a long time ago. Having said that, the next two songs on the album are exactly that. But I think they’re going to be the last songs I write like it. It’s just another mindlessly optimistic song about enjoying the sunshine. I remember the summer of 2020. It was super hot. Everyone suddenly had this realization that, yes, you can be unable to see your family and be suffering with all kinds of stuff, but it’s unbelievably sunny and nice outside. Just finding somewhere where you can have the sun hitting your face makes you feel better.” **“Hold me tonight” (feat. Porridge Radio)** “The first demo I have of the song is just my voice and a guitar. It was a Velvet Underground-style thing I was thinking of: very sparse. Relatively near the end of recording the album, I was listening to this song, and I was like, ‘We should just restart and have someone else singing it.’ I thought it should be a girl’s voice and they should be singing about their side of this story, which is, of course, going to be that you love each other and everything’s great. I sent Dana \[Margolin, of Porridge Radio\] the track and what she sent back was this totally ruined situation where she turned the whole thing on its head. She turned it into something absolutely genuine for her, and it rescued the song for me in a way.” **“I have seen enough”** “I thought I’d try and write a song in French, and the idea for it was about the horror of life—but how you can’t look away. It’s too beautiful at the same time. And in the end, the French wasn’t really good enough, so it’s English! To nutshell it, it’s about just enjoying and appreciating what you have around you. And I guess the way that it would relate to the pandemic is just all of the horrors that were going on and still being able to find pleasurable things. Finding happiness within it all.”
Listening to Hannah Bussiere Kim’s debut LP as Luna Li, you may get the sensation of being somewhere other than where you are: a smooth plastic beach (“Afterglow”), a cradle of stars (“Misery Moon”), the gleaming lobby of some extraterrestrial hotel (“Cherry Pit”). Like Stereolab, Broadcast, and Pizzicato Five before her, the Toronto-based singer-songwriter is fluent in musical languages of the past (lounge, old Hollywood soundtracks, ’60s folk-pop) and has a gift for making kitschy, easy-listening sounds feel personal, substantive, even transportive—the latter a quality that gives otherwise ordinary musings a cosmic lightness (“Alone But Not Lonely”). Then you learn that she played basically all of it herself—the guitars, the bass, the sparkling harp arpeggios and swirling violins—and you get it: She’s not just writing songs, she’s building a place she can retreat to, three minutes at a time.
Korean-Canadian multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, and producer, Luna Li, today announces her intricate debut album, Duality, to be released March 4th, 2022 via In Real Life.
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.
There’s a light but pervasive melancholy that surrounds *FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE*, Brian Eno’s 22nd solo album—a sense of weightlessness that feels both blissful and a little threatening. Are we cruising safely through the clouds or are our wings about to burn (“Icarus or Blériot”)? Are our lives too busy to consider the microscopic worms in the ground beneath our feet, especially when they don’t participate in capitalism (“Who Gives a Thought”)? How long will the world go on without us (“Garden of Stars”)? As much as these songs are elegies for a vanishing future, they’re also beautiful meditations on the fragility of the present—a mode Eno has been working in comfortably since the mid-’70s. The sound design is as beautiful and expansive as you’d expect, and Eno’s voice—an underrated instrument—is both common and quietly transcendent, the sound of a boy wandering an empty earth. He’s always interesting. But this is one of the first times in years he’s sounded so vital.
There is a way a voice can cut through the fascia of reality, cleaving through habit into the raw nerve of experience. Nika Roza Danilova, the singer, songwriter, and producer who since 2009 has released music as Zola Jesus, wields a voice that does that. When you hear it, it is like you are being summoned -- not to somewhere new, but to a place that's already wrapped inside you, somewhere previously obscured from conscious experience. This place has been buried because it tends to hold pain, but it's also a gift, because once it's opened, once you're inside of it, it can show you the truth. Zola Jesus's new album, Arkhon, finds new ways of losing that submerged, stalled pain. Not long after she had started writing the songs that would comprise the record, Danilova found herself stuck in a creative barrens, a spell of writer's block more stifling than any she'd experienced before. "It got to the point where I couldn't even listen to music. Everything sounded the same," she says. On previous albums, Danilova had largely played the role of auteur, meticulously crafting every aspect of Zola Jesus's sound and look. This time, she realized that her habitual need for control was sealing her out of her art. When the frustration of being unable to create became intolerable, she took a leap of faith and reached out for help, something she had never done this early in an album’s lifetime. "At some point, I had to work with other people. I needed new blood. I needed somebody else." Danilova sent her demos to producer Randall Dunn, known for his work with Sunn O))) and on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for the film Mandy. She also began collaborating with drummer and percussionist Matt Chamberlain, whose prior work appears on albums by Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. His daring, askance patterning would come to help define the sound of the record. Relinquishing a degree of control over her music and hearing others contribute to it began to thaw the creative block that had kept her from working. "I felt that I was able to finally hear my music in a context that was broader than what I could do on my own," Danilova says. "I'm letting people interpret my musical ideas and my songs in a way that is supporting everything, but also expanding it into a sound that I never would have been able to think of on my own. That was so rewarding to hear." Arkhon runs the spectrum from songs whose weight lies in their bare simplicity, like "Desire," an elegiac piano composition about the end of a relationship that was recorded acoustically in a single take, to songs that pulse with dense, evolving structures, like "Sewn," a knotty and glittering electroacoustic composition written in total collaboration with Dunn and Chamberlain. Between those poles, "Dead & Gone" boasts a lush string arrangement by Danilova's friend and touring violist Louise Woodward; the overtones of her composition carve abundant, fertile space for optimism and healing to bloom in the midst of overwhelming grief. The towering, groove-oriented track "The Fall" routes Danilova's demo vocals through a lacerating vocoder effect as it seeks out the delights of shaking loose stagnant pain. Throughout “Lost,” tight, interlocking percussion and samples of a Slovenian folk choir propel narratives of collective despair and mutual comfort in kind. Through these turns, Arkhon reveals itself as an album whose power derives from abandon. Both its turmoils and its pleasures take root in the body, letting individual consciousness dissolve into the thick of the beat. "When I look back at my work, I see there's a theme where I fixate on my fear of the unknown," says Danilova. "That really came into fruition for this record, because I had to let go of so much control. I had to surrender to whatever the outcome would be. That used to be really hard for me, and now I had no other choice." In her creative process, Danilova instead began forging a relationship with the unknown. Rather than try to hold Arkhon in its entirety at every moment of its creation, she began focusing on the direct experience of making work with others, allowing for spontaneous moments of unselfconscious play. After over a decade of classical voice training, she found that this shift enabled her to ease into her singing voice in new ways, leading her to greater flexibility and agility. "I had gone through a deeply transformational process of inner growth. That annihilated a lot of tension in my voice, because my whole attachment to things changed," she says. That process bears out across the record in the way the voice takes off from itself, splits from its core, tendrils out into currents of partial language and electronically mediated noise. In the rush, Arkhon unearths buried tools for bearing grief, loss, and disappointment. The album's title means "power" or "ruler" in ancient Greek, but it also has a specific valence within Gnosticism. "Arkons are a Gnostic idea of power wielded through a flawed god," says Danilova. "They taint and tarnish humanity, keeping them corrupted instead of letting them find their harmonious selves. I do feel like we are living in an arkhonic time; these negative influences are weighing extremely heavy on all of us. We're in a time of arkhons. There's power in naming that." Despite the darkness curled inside reality, there is power, too, in surrendering to what can't be pinned down, to the wild unfurling of the world in all its unforeseeable motion. That letting go is the crux of Arkhon, which marks a new way of moving and making for Zola Jesus. "There is a moment where you stop fighting with yourself. That's when things can really happen," Danilova says. "I was disarmed in a way where I just let the process make the record. I could enjoy being in the moment, putting that into the music and letting it unravel or evolve in its own way. To let it have its own story that I only had a part in telling."
recorded 100% live on August 29, 2021 at la Savonnerie, Brussels BE by Daniel Bleikolm Ma Clément: singing Anatole Damien: guitar; bass on 2, 8, 16, 18 Raphaël Desmarets: bass; guitar on 2, 8, 16, 18 Johannes Eimermacher: alto saxophone Eric Kinny: pedal steel Zach Phillips: rhodes, piano Gaspard Sicx: drums all songs written by Zach Phillips & Ma Clément except: "Paging Agent Starling": written by Quentin Moore "I'm a Place" & "To Be Gone": written by Zach Phillips mixed by Ryan Power mastered by Joe LaPorta album art & design by Jake Tobin MATH Interactive, 2022 THANK YOU: Christopher Forgues, Annie Loucka, Martino Morandi, Mathilde Besson, VOLTA, Daniel Bleikolm, Lucas Myers
While working on the songs that became 2022’s *EYEYE*, indie-pop singer Lykke Li found herself following a pattern she’d followed before: taking personal heartbreak and turning it into an album. She didn’t want to repeat herself, but she also found it interesting, in a way, that she was. So instead of scrapping the project, she turned her fixation into a kind of organizing principle: heartbreak music about the tropes of heartbreak music made by someone obsessed with heartbreak music. It’s an arty conceit, but you sense it was liberating: Where 2018’s *so sad so sexy* seemed occupied with covering the range and diversity of modern pop, *EYEYE* surrenders almost completely to its mood—a quality that gives the album an almost dreamlike consistency, filled with familiar images of dark roads (“HIGHWAY TO YOUR HEART”) and empty rooms (“NO HOTEL”), New Agey choral music (“CAROUSEL”) and ’80s ballads smoking with dry ice (“YOU DON’T GO AWAY”), beautiful and weightless throughout. “Is it only in the movies you love me?” she wonders on “5D.” And there’s the album’s realest heartbreak: Sometimes art feels more vivid than life.
After Chris of Christine and the Queens’ mother died, the French alt-pop star began to notice red cars everywhere—and almost always in moments of internal shift. Those sightings give context to the title of his third album, *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*, and inspired the name and artistic persona he would embrace thereafter. “For me, the red car was a way to encourage my spirit to lift a bit higher when I was a bit desperate,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every record is a deep, deep wave of transformation both inwards and outwards. I feel actually braver than before, a bit terrified, but in a true gutsy way.” *Redcar*—the follow-up to 2018’s *Chris*—presents the artist’s most thrilling transformation to date. It’s also the most daring Christine and the Queens album so far: a high-concept collection of roof-raising ’80s synth-pop and funk inspired by artists such as The Cure and Fad Gadget. Sung almost entirely in French, it’s theatrical (the propulsive, operatic “Tu sais ce qu’il me faut”), spooky (“La chanson du chevalier”), shimmering, sensual, and frequently otherworldly, with electrifying guitar solos and R&B along the way. And yet, for all its ’80s hallmarks—drum machines, dazzling synths, songs cloaked in reverb (a throwback, too, to 2014 debut *Chaleur Humaine*)—the album was crafted with a rock ’n’ roll spirit in mind. Moved by the spontaneous artistic process of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, Chris wrote, recorded, and produced this album alone at home within just two weeks, spending no more than an hour on each song. The result is an album that feels epic and alive, and often like an outpouring, as an artist who has always committed to evolving in front of us moves through change. After the farewell—to a lover or a past self—of album opener “Ma bien aimée bye bye,” these songs explore intimacy, the search for meaning and connection (including the Sylvester-referencing “Looking for love”), and stepping into your true self. Loss, too, colors the album, but on “rien dire”—one of the album’s most powerful songs, and as much of a gut-punch as 2020’s “People, I’ve been sad”—Redcar reaches a hopeful conclusion: Love, and the people we love, are never truly gone. “I think true love is a conversation that never is interrupted, and by ‘never’ I mean not even by death,” he says. “That’s my current faith I have right now. That song is a conversation I have with someone who is not there anymore.”
Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek could hear the staggering differences in the songs they were writing for their third album as Whitney, SPARK—the buoyant drum loops, the effortless falsetto hooks, the coruscant keyboard lines. They suddenly sounded like a band reimagined, their once-ramshackle folk-pop now brimming with unprecedented gusto and sheen. But could they see it, too? So in the ad hoc studio the Chicago duo built in the living room of their rented Portland bungalow, a shared 2020 escape hatch amid breakups and lockdowns, Julien and Max decided to find out. Somewhere between midnight and dawn every night, their brains refracted by the late hour and light psychedelics, they’d play their latest creations while a hardware store disco ball spun overhead and slowed-down music videos from megastars spooled silently on YouTube. Did their own pop songs—so much more immediate and modern than their hazy origins—fit such big-budget reels? “We’d come to the conclusion we weren’t going to be filming Super 8 videos to this stuff anymore,” Julien remembers with a grin. “How about something more hi-fi, cinematic?” When the footage and the tunes linked, Julien and Max knew they had done it, that they’d finally found Whitney’s sound. SPARK reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What’s more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener “NOTHING REMAINS,” the devastating loss of “TERMINAL,” the sun-streaked renewal of “REAL LOVE”: However surprising it may sound, SPARK is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of your lives and careers at once and without apology. SPARK maintains the warmth and ease of Whitney’s early work; these songs glow with the newness of now. Listen closely, and you’ll notice frequent references to smoke and fire throughout SPARK, itself a double entendre for inspiring something new or burning down the old. Max and Julien were indeed in Portland for the Fall of 2020, when smoke from nearby fires choked the city at record levels. It was terrifying and tragic, but they pressed on. “We found a way to live while the world was burning/Real life was caving in,” Julien sings almost merrily during “BACK THEN,” an anthem for finding out what’s on the other side of hardship. In these dire days, scientists speak increasingly of serotiny, an evolutionary miracle that causes some trees to release seeds only amid a season of fire. That is how SPARK often feels—Whitney’s circumstances were so fraught on so many levels that they hung “the past…out to dry” and began again, finding a fresh version of themselves, their relationship, and their band after the blaze. Max and Julien are back in Chicago now, sharing a cozy walkup with a little studio, where they’re already building songs for the next Whitney album. They’re both in happy romances, too. Now that they let the past burn, everything is new for Max and Julien. SPARK is not only Whitney’s best album; it is an inspiring testament to perseverance and renewal, to best friends trusting each another enough to carry one another to the other side of this season of woe.
A few months before releasing his third solo album, Liam Gallagher told Apple Music to expect a little of the unexpected. “Some of it’s odd,” he said. “I’d say 80 percent of the record is peculiar but still good, and 20 percent of it is classic. If you’re gonna do something a bit different, do it in these times, and if people don’t dig it, blame it on COVID.” On *C’MON YOU KNOW*, “odd” doesn’t quite mean a journey into the outer rims of acid trance or vaporwave, but, chiefly guided by trusted producer/songwriter Andrew Wyatt, Gallagher is noticeably freer of spirit. After two albums of bedding himself into a solo career with gently psychedelic rock that didn’t range too far from Oasis or Beady Eye, Liam is now deftly toggling between polemic punk and weightless dub on “I’m Free.” He told Apple Music that he’d bought a tepee to help cope with the claustrophobia of lockdown and, by building from a children’s choir to a grand, strobing finale, opener “More Power” suggests he spent those outdoor nights picking up signals from Spiritualized’s richly orchestrated cosmos. Other more intrepid moments include deeply psychedelic pop (“Better Days”), elegantly psychedelic soul (“The Joker”), and limber funk rock (“Diamond in the Dark”). While the music peers in new directions, the voice remains unmistakable—and in decent health. There’s a familiar snarl and swagger to “I’m Free” and the trippy, indie groove of “Don’t Go Halfway,” but Gallagher’s sometimes-overlooked warmth and reassurance are also regularly in play. He never likes slapping definitive meaning on the words he sings, preferring that listeners take what they want from the songs, and in a post-pandemic age there’s plenty to draw from the piano-driven heart-tugger “Too Good for Giving Up”: “Look how far you’ve come/Stronger than the damage done/Step out of the darkness unafraid.” During “Don’t Go Halfway,” he sings, “You were all thumbs/Through the dark days/When your time comes/Don’t go halfway.” On a record released a few months before his 50th birthday, Gallagher is heeding his own advice and emerging as a man whose horizons stretch further than ever.
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.
In 2020, when the alt-pop artist Oliver Tree dropped his full-length debut album, *Ugly Is Beautiful*, he confused audiences: Was he the real deal? Or was he a meme? Turns out he was a little bit of both—a visionary with a keen sense of what goes viral. Now, on his second album (and first since his short-lived and self-induced retirement from the music business), it’s candor he’s after. That, and a new emo-country sound. “When I listen to this album, I cry my eyes out,” he tells Apple Music. “But the truth is, it’s important to cry. It’s so important for people to let it out and not hold it until it erupts in anger and violence. Everybody needs to cry, but especially men, the tough guys, and macho men. My grandfather was a cowboy. His grandfather was a cowboy. It\'s not ripping off another culture or something else that isn\'t true to my DNA.” Recorded at his grandparents’ California ranch during the COVID-19 pandemic, *Cowboy Tears* is a stark departure from Tree’s first album: full of twangy TikTok emo (“California,” “Cowboy Tears”) and echoes of ’90s arena rock (The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” on “Swing & A Miss,” Sugar Ray’s “Every Morning” on “Freaks & Geeks”). It’s eclecticism at its most playful. Below, Oliver Tree walks Apple Music through *Cowboy Tears*’ themes, track by track. He only asks that listeners create their own meanings, too. **“Cowboys Don’t Cry”** “I could talk about, \'Oh yeah, I made it with this person and that person,\' or \'I play this instrument,\' but that\'s not important to me. The message is much more important: It\'s really the story of the end of a relationship, when two people are trying to make it work but there\'s no hope. It’s kind of this revolving door, and the opening is just closing a little more and a little more to the point where there isn\'t even an entrance. \[It’s about\] the acceptance of that and learning how to try to be happy on your own.” **“Swing & A Miss”** “This one is a song about a threesome that I was supposed to have that never happened. While I was recording *Cowboy Tears*, these two girls called me up to have a ménage à trois. I waited and I waited, and they never showed up. The next day I woke up and I had a voicemail from the LA county jail, and they asked me to bail them out. Instead, I recorded this song for them. Later on, I found out they were credit card scammers.” **“Get Well Soon”** “This is about trying to fix a broken person and realizing it\'s impossible. It\'s not your job. No matter how much you want to help someone else, no matter what you try to do for them and try to offer them, we can\'t put someone else back together again. They have to do the necessary work, internally, to fix themselves. We’re all so goddamn lonely—\'well, might as well be lonely with someone else and hate myself with someone else who hates themselves.\' That’s just not how it works. You need to work on yourself first and spend that necessary time to work on yourself, heal yourself.” **“Freaks & Geeks”** “This could be considered a sequel to themes on the last album. Being an outsider is something I will likely always identify with. No matter how much I break into the mainstream, I still don\'t feel like I fit into any genre of music, any specific scene of people. I don\'t look like anyone. I don\'t act like the other artists the way I present myself. And all the while, I\'m not even unique. No one really is unique. We\'re all the same and we\'re all so different. This song is about me grappling with that concept.” **“Doormat”** “‘Doormat’ is about allowing someone to walk all over you and treat you like shit. I was in a relationship where I felt like I was a human punching bag. It wasn\'t until the end of the relationship that I could identify that I was too love-drunk and wanted to keep the fantasy going. But the reality was that I was being treated like shit. But it doesn’t have to just be a relationship: It could be the way your friend treated you. I try to keep my songs as open to interpretation as possible.” **“Suitcase Full of Cash”** “This song is about our society\'s obsession with money and greed. No matter how much we have, it will never be enough, and it will never really make us happier. That, to me, is a sequel off \[my first album\], *Ugly Is Beautiful*, the song \'Cash Machine.\' Even though I already made a song that covers that, I didn\'t cover it all. Some might say, \'Oh man, he\'s running out of ideas.\' But to me, I\'m like, \'No, I didn\'t get to say all this.\' I touched upon moments of it, but there\'s a whole lot more there.” **“Cigarettes”** “I\'ve been battling with addiction since I was 15 years old. And this album, over the process of it, I got completely sober. And I struggle with addiction still. At the time I wrote it, I was chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette. I had just quit smoking weed. I was smoking a pound a month of weed—I\'m talking Wiz Khalifa status. I thought that it was helping keep me energized, but I realized as I removed it that I\'m just a really energized person. Weed has nothing to do with that. Anyways, I realized while I was at the studio, I couldn\'t go more than 15 minutes until I had a craving to smoke another cig. So I wanted to make a song that reminded me that I was killing myself with every hit that I took: \'What am I doing here? I\'m just trying to die from this.\'” **“Balloon Boy”** “This song is actually the saddest one to me. It’s the most personal one, in a way. It’s about the journey of choosing my life path and chasing my dreams and how I really had to give up my life, my family, my friends, girlfriends. It happens over and over again. I can\'t really be present; it\'s impossible. It’s very hard for me to stay close to anyone except for the people who are with me and my collaborators, because those are all my best friends; my team, everyone is with me. I float in the sky. I go wherever the wind takes me, and it takes my balloon. I\'m just holding on by this little tiny thread of dental floss, and any second, it could snap.” **“Things We Used to Do”** “In a lot of ways, this is about watching the time pass as you\'re waiting for someone. You\'ll never really see them again. That could be a person I was with, or it could be your friend or a loved one that died. For the relationship side of things, it’s wondering, \'Is that person thinking about me? Am I even a blip in their imagination, because they\'re off doing their life.\' Life is dense and there\'s a lot going on. Everyone is busy and everyone\'s just trying to get by.” **“California”** “‘California’ is a song about home. I lived in Santa Cruz for 19 years. I grew up there. Then I lived in San Francisco for a few years. I\'ve spent most of my adult life living in Los Angeles when I wasn\'t traveling. California, this is my home, and when I do die, this is where my body will be sent. This is where the coffin is going to go when it\'s all over. There are so many cliché songs about California, but I felt like I haven\'t heard a song about dying and being brought back to California.” **“Playing With Fire”** “This song is about all the risks we take and how close we tiptoe around self-demise and death every single day. There are a lot of metaphors used, like tightrope-walking on a telephone wire butt naked, or the idea of self-harming, drug abuse, or normal day-to-day things like driving a car. Just by driving to work every day, we can all easily perish in flames. By existing, we’re playing with fire. It starts with that match lighting and blowing it out. It’s very symbolic of what it means to me, and by the end of it all, it bursts in flames.” **“The Villain”** “When love goes badly, it turns into hate, and hate quickly turns into war. We\'ll love someone so much and then we hate someone so much. Those two parts of our brain are right next to each other, they\'re very closely linked, and they\'re both tied with passion. When it comes to the war of love, there really isn\'t a good guy. Both sides have done things that contribute to the suffering of one another. I touch upon that in that song, but taking the concept of war and really applying it to the end of a relationship.” **“Cowboy Tears”** “To me this is the theme song of the album: It\'s okay to cry and there\'s no place for you to hide. And this song is really about suicide. During the recording of the album, one of my partners tried to kill themselves, and this song was written for her. I\'ve had friends kill themselves in the past, and I wanted to make a song to let people know that they\'re not alone in this. If I can save one person\'s life with this song, it will be a huge success for me. If I can really just save one person, it will be the most important song on the whole album.”
For Dublin singer-songwriter CMAT, making music is the purest form of self-expression. Her songs—a glorious fusion of country, pop, and indie—are where Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson channels how she’s feeling. “I’m not one of these writers that sits down every day and thinks, ‘What am I going to write about today?’” she tells Apple Music. “There needs to be something going on. There needs to be something that’s stressing me out or upsetting me or some kind of demon I need to exorcise.” It’s all there on her debut album, *If My Wife New I’d Be Dead*. On a record that has a warming uplift about it even in its darkest moments, there are songs about breakups and breakdowns, loss and loneliness, mental health and religion. Whether they’re delivered with a synth-pop groove, an Americana sway, or a rock stomp, Thompson is at the center of these songs, her classic melodicism elevating them. “The thing that connects them all is me and whatever I’m going through,” she says. “This collection of songs is specifically about the pitfalls of my personality as opposed to being about an outside source. It’s really introspective and it’s me wreaking havoc through comedy and humor. This record is me trying to cope with the fact that I don’t cope with anything.” CMAT takes us through a debut that defines her, track by track. **“Nashville”** “This sums up the whole album, a song that I wrote because I have really, really been a very depressed person. I was thinking about the fact that during the times of the most depression, just unable to cope with the world, completely struggling, I’m the most craic—I’m so funny, I’m the best, a good-time gal. I listened to a podcast called *You’re Wrong About* and there was an episode on the study of suicide. One of the hosts talked about a friend of his who planned his death six months in advance. For those six months, he was the best guy, so much fun, so excited about life. He told everybody that he was moving to California and had all of his friends go to a going-away party, and then took his own life. I remember thinking that that is exactly what I would’ve done if I had got to the point. And it was an instinctive thought of, ‘Oh, if that was me, I would’ve said I was moving to Nashville,’ because everyone knows I wanted to move to Nashville. It’s a really difficult song to play to people because it makes me very self-aware of how bad I have been and how bad I was for a while.” **“I Don’t Really Care for You”** “This took me a year and a half to finish because I couldn’t figure out what to write the song about. And then, I went through a breakup, and I was like, ‘Well, now I know what the song’s about.’ He broke up with me in March 2020. I got dumped—capital-D Dumped, as in ‘I never want to see you again’—and then I was locked inside my nanny and grandad’s house for COVID. It was just me in my room going, ‘What have I done?’ I think the guy likes to think that he did nothing wrong in his life, ever, but actually he did. But also, so did I and the two of us were as bad as each other. It wasn’t a good relationship.” **“Peter Bogdanovich”** “Again, this comes from a podcast, one called *You Must Remember This*. It was a series about the life of Polly Platt, who was the wife of Peter Bogdanovich. *The Last Picture Show* was the first big film that they made together, and he left her during the middle of filming for Cybill Shepherd, the lead actress. Everyone told Polly to go home, and she was like, ‘No, this is my film. I’m the art director. I scouted it. I adapted the screenplay. I did all the work. I’m not fucking leaving.’ I feel like I’ve been Polly—I’ve been the person that’s been cheated on in such a grotesque and public way. And I’ve also been Cybill, I’ve also been a little shit. I really wanted to write about it and use it as a way for getting to grips with the kind of shit that I’ve been pulling.” **“No More Virgos”** “As I was putting all the songs together, I realized that all of the songs were really dark or had some level of depth and too much darkness in them, and I just wanted one that was fun and not that deep and not that serious. This is about being a problem person for your friends by constantly going for the same guy over and over again. I used to be a serial monogamist. I’m not anymore, but I used to constantly get with the same kind of guy over and over again. They were like, ‘No, no, please, no, this is so annoying.’” **“Lonely”** “I wrote this about a time when I was living in Manchester. I lived there for two years, and I think that was the peak of my problem-person period. I worked in the TK Maxx, and I also worked as a sexy shots-lady in a nightclub in Deansgate-Castlefield. On a Friday and Saturday, I would work in TK Maxx and then there’d be two hours before my shift as a sexy shots-lady started. So, I would just stay in the Arndale Food Court and watch everyone just hanging out, being friends, having more money than me because I was really fucking broke, crying into my fucking Taco Bell Crunchwrap.” **“Groundhog Day”** “A lot of my problems in relationships come from the fact that I care quite a lot about myself over other things, and I’m also a musician. Whenever I get into a relationship, there comes a point where the other person is like, ‘Why are you spending so much time on that and why aren’t you spending time on me?’ I always have to be like, ‘There’s no point in putting any investment into me.’ I just love music. I love doing it. I love working. I love being busy and I don’t love lying in bed, watching YouTube clips and eating takeaway. I don’t like relaxing. It’s not fun. I don’t enjoy it.” **“Communion”** “This is a really old song. It’s about Catholicism and I recorded a bit of it in New York. I decided to notch up the tempo a little bit to see what happened and the drummer we had, Morgan, was like, ‘I’ve got half an hour left. Do you want me to just record some drum fills?’ She did all these crazy-fast drum fills over this and I was like, ‘Oh, this should be a fast song, this should be a really, really, really, really quick song.’” **“Every Bottle (Is My Boyfriend)”** “This is basically a mission statement. It’s not really about anything other than trying to describe myself. It’s just, ‘This is how I live and it’s not great, but also I’m still proud of myself, so shut up.’ I’m very messy. I love to drink. I love to cause a ruckus. I love to be an agent of chaos. I love to be really bold but, also, you’re not much better than me, so shut up. It’s inspired by the band Television and also Bombay Bicycle Club, who are my favorite band ever. I used to stalk them when I was a teenager.” **“2 Wrecked 2 Care”** “Before I launched myself really as an artist, I started renting a yoga studio because it was cheaper than renting a musical studio. I’d go in for four hours on a Wednesday after work and I’d write the song in the first two hours and then I’d record the song on video and then I’d post it on YouTube on Friday. This was one of the songs. At the time, I was working at a UPS as an admin assistant, and because of this song specifically, I was really late to work the next day and I got sacked. So, thanks, ‘2 Wrecked 2 Care’—I’m grateful. I didn’t want to work in a UPS.” **“Geography Teacher”** “My producer had a banjo and I started playing it and he was like, ‘I didn’t know you could play the banjo.’ All of the songs off of the second Laura Marling album are in G, and I learned how to play every single song off of that record when I was 15. So, I was like, ‘I know how to play in G.’ At the time, I was playing ‘Geography Teacher’ like a lot of other songs on the record, and he was like, ‘Should we not just do “Geography Teacher” on that?’ We tried it and it was perfect.” **“I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!”** “Those two years that I had in Manchester, I didn’t really know who I was. I was really confused, and I was super-drinking as well, and the whole time I was in this bad relationship. Two days after he moved out, I got this urge: I can’t really go to the pub by myself because I don’t have a boyfriend anymore, and if people know that I’m single and I’m going to the pub, then I’ll get in trouble—someone will follow me home or someone will beat me up. I was really, really upset about it. I was like, ‘Damn, you really do need to depend on men for safety as a woman out in the world.’ I wrote this song in about a half an hour, and it was the first song that I’d written in two years. It’s the reason that I started writing songs again. I probably would not be doing music right now if I didn’t write this song.” **“I’d Want U”** “I wrote this when I was 17. I recorded a version and posted it on SoundCloud anonymously and it just took off. It was on all these blogs and there were people in America that were like, ‘Who is this girl?’ I ended up getting a manager and all those kinds of things. I wrote it about a girl that I’d met at a house party who I really liked. It’s a really important song to me and I haven’t ever released it properly, so I was like, ‘I need to give that song the time of day. I need to give her a thank-you.’ Also, country music is the reason that I do music in the first place, and so I needed to close this album with the most country song I have.”