Pop in 2022

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.

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.

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.”

The Beths’ third album finds the Aotearoa indie rockers tighter and brighter than ever, packing chiming melodies and big, buoyant choruses. Elizabeth Stokes’ poignant vocals and diaristic lyrics continue to translate everyday foibles into memorable asides (“Here I go again, mixing drinks and messages”), while lead guitarist Jonathan Pearce proves animated at every turn (see the wild splay of a solo capping off “Silence Is Golden”). For all its noisy freshness, *Expert in a Dying Field* also plays like a studied parallel to the classic power-pop songbook, dispensing sunny harmonies and sharp dynamic shifts. Recorded mostly in Pearce’s own studio, this outing sees all of the band’s strengths balanced across the board. That means Stokes’ witticisms enjoy just as much attention as the fuzzy push-and-pull of the music, alternately driving ahead and pulling back with increasing precision. Stokes may label herself an expert in a dying field when singing about love on the opening title track, but The Beths make whip-smart indie rock look like a flourishing profession indeed.

On The Beths’ new album Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships -- platonic, familial, romantic -- and more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life? The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz. With Expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. They wanted it to be fun in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope. Most of Expert was recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s studio on Karangahape Road in Ta–maki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown. They traded notes remotely for months, songwriting from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone. The following February The Beths left the country to tour across the US, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road, culminating in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. There, Expert finally became the record they were hearing in their heads. The album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. “Love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.” The rest is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum: “Silence is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving. “Knees Deep” was written last minute, but yields one of the best guitar lines on Expert. Stokes strings it all together through her singular songwriting lens, earnest and selfeffacing, zeroing in on the granules of doubt and how they snowball. Did I do the wrong thing? Or did you? That insecurity and thoughtfulness, translated into universality and understanding, has been the guiding light of The Beths’ output since 2016. In the face of pain, there’s no dwelling on internal anguish -- instead, through The Beths’ music, our shortcomings are met with acceptance. And Expert In A Dying Field is the most tactile that tenderness has been.

Like most people on this embattled earth, Maggie Rogers spent the better part of 2020 in isolation—in her case, in Maine, where *Surrender* took shape. “I started this record there,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was really drawn to big drums and distorted guitar, because I missed music that made me feel something physically. I missed the physicality of being at a festival”: a big feeling, she says—a little overwhelming, a little cold, a little drunk. The noise was a symbol of chaos, but also of liberation. “Like, in all the craziness in the world, being able to play with something like that,” she says, “it was as if it could make my body let go of the tension I was feeling.” So think of the album’s title as a possibility, or even a goal: that even at her most commanding—the electro-pop of “Shatter,” the country swagger of “Begging for Rain” and barroom folk of “I’ve Got a Friend”—Rogers can explore what it means to relinquish control without sacrificing the polish and muscle that makes her music pop. “When we’re cheek to cheek, I feel it in my teeth,” she sings on “Want Want”: an arthouse on paper, a blockbuster in sound. When Rogers started the album, she was so burned out from touring she could barely talk. “I hadn’t been to a grocery store in four years,” she says. “I was ready to bite. And this record is the bite. But when I listen back, there’s so much joy. I think that’s the thing that surprised me more than anything—that *that* was the place I escaped to, and it was the thing that became the way I survived it, or the way I worked through it. This idea of joy as a form of rebellion, as something that can be radical and contagious and connective and angry.” “Are you ready to start?” she sings on “Anywhere With You.” And then she repeats herself, a little louder each time.

Since releasing their debut studio album *Nothing Happens* in 2019, Wallows have emerged as one of the most exciting American indie rock bands of the decade. On their second LP, guitarist/vocalist Dylan Minnette (known for his work as an actor on Netflix’s *13 Reasons Why*), lead guitarist/vocalist Braeden Lemasters (also an actor, as seen on *Men of a Certain Age*), and drummer Cole Preston have pushed their sonic palette to new limits, with the help of all-star producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Vampire Weekend, HAIM, Adele). “It’s an eclectic batch of songs, that is for sure,” Minnette says. “We almost pictured it to be a little lusher, or R&B-leaning, originally, but we ended up liking Ariel\'s idea of highlighting the band side of us.” Unlike their first album, which centered around the concept of what Minnette calls “transitioning out of youth into adulthood,” this one is about, he says, “life-changing decisions,” focusing on both beginning and nurturing a relationship and ending and exiting one, and the title reflects that. “‘Tell me that it’s over’—there’s one meaning, like, ‘This could be easier on us if you were to just end this and then all these feelings that go away,’” Minnette explains. “Or it’s the last line \[on the album\]: ‘I look forward to a little me and you/So now I hope that you don’t tell me that it’s over.’” Below, the band walks Apple Music through their new album, track by track. **“Hard to Believe”** Dylan Minnette: “‘Hard to Believe’ was not always how we pictured this album starting. Once Ariel decided that he could picture it going in a *Pinkerton*-era Weezer and my bloody valentine direction, it sparked an idea of having these string stabs opening the song, \[and it sounded\] really interesting. By the end of the album process, we realized it was the most exciting and unpredictable way to open the next Wallows album.” **“I Don’t Want to Talk”** Minnette: “We fast-tracked finishing this song last year before we were done with the album, because we didn\'t want to go too long without putting any music out. It felt like the right song to be the first song back, because its identity is very much a classic Wallows song. It is about insecurity—when you\'re so invested in someone, and if you\'re in a position where you have to be away from someone that you are pretty freshly in a relationship with, you start to get all these fears of them turning their head. The first three songs are very much rooted in the beginning of a relationship and the insecurity it can bring out of you.” **“Especially You”** Cole Preston: “I don\'t exactly know what inspired the swampy instruments. I think the specific references are *Midnite Vultures*, that Beck record, and weird Beatles-y moments. There’s this legendary banjo/steel guitar multi-instrumentalist named Greg Leisz who plays on a bunch of Ariel\'s records. Ariel had the idea to have him come and play the banjo. We were like, ‘What the hell?!’” **“At the End of the Day”** Braeden Lemasters: “The song started with Cole and I at a session. The night before, I was listening to *Harvest Moon* by Neil Young. It was probably 11:00 at night; we had some wine, and I was just playing some music. I went back and listened to three or four little ideas in my voice memos in the other room, and I heard the guitar part that starts with the synth in the song, and I walked back in. I was like, ‘Why don\'t we try this idea?’ I just envisioned myself singing like Neil Young in the first verse. I like how the song constantly changes. It had kind of The Cure vibe when we started with Ariel. It went from *Harvest Moon* to The Cure, a really low-acoustic sludge. Then it went to \'80s synth-pop, like a Tears for Fears, New Order kind of vibe, which I love. It has all those identities in it.” **“Marvelous”** Minnette: “It\'s the newest song on this album. We started demoing a super midtempo version of this. The melody is so frantic in the song now because Cole sped up the demo and pitched it up I don\'t know how many times. The demo just sounded insane. I had a baby voice, and it was a really different-sounding song. But Ariel sort of pitched it going in a funky direction. He wanted the song to feel like \[Deee-Lite\'s\] ‘Groove Is in the Heart.’ It ended up being really quirky and funky, and we were just having fun with it, really.” **“Permanent Price”** Preston: “I was scrolling my voice memos and stopped at a random one that was not marked. It happened to be the synth intro to the song. It’s actually us playing guitar, but it sounds like a synth. I brought that to the guys like, \'Why don\'t we make this a song?\' Our original idea was a Brian Eno kind of vibe. We started recording the song, and Ariel, his idea was to take it in more of a ‘Sometimes’ by James direction, which happened to be produced by Brian Eno. We started doing that, and then Dylan wrote these optimistic lyrics that were really cool.” **“Missing Out”** Preston: “This song has a special place, because we were on tour opening for Vampire Weekend in 2019 \[in Europe\]. We were driving along, and \[our bass player\] Blake \[Morell\] was playing songs in the van, and he played ‘When It\'s Over’ by Sugar Ray. I hadn’t listened to it since I was a kid, and I just remember being so inspired. When we were flying back to the US, we had a session the next day with John DeBold; we were tired, but I was so inspired in the moment.” **“Hurts Me”** Preston: “The lyrics were very honest about going through a breakup, the months after that, and wondering if you should even consider talking to that person again or if that\'s actually not good for you. You\'re not sure what\'s going on. \'What\'s best for me at this moment?\' The song is about trying to avoid things that are going to hurt, even if they\'re beneficial in the moment.” **“That’s What I Get”** Minnette: “Braeden and I had a session at Ariel’s house, but we didn’t meet him or see him or anything. Cut to two years later, we are in his house and actually working on the album with him on this song. It started out as this early-2000s pop-alternative like Aly & AJ or something. And then it became this hype, big, full-band energy. Ariel started talking about Kate Bush, so we started with this cool, reverb-y programmed drum thing, and it became orchestral.” **“Guitar Romantic Search Adventure”** Minnette: “It’s interesting to conclude here, because the song is about the beginnings of speaking with someone—simple things like texting someone that you are interested in or falling in love with. It’s a nice optimistic note to end on. Originally, the demo was incredibly lush. There were never any drums. It became very synthy and dreamy. All the feelings that you\'ve gone through in this album, you ultimately land on \'I can see a future for us in a family and I hope that this never ends.\'”

“*Kid Krow* was my introduction to the world—there’s a lot of teen angst,” Conan Gray tells Apple Music, contrasting his sophomore album to his 2020 debut LP. “*Superache* is a bit more self-aware. I’ve had time to think about life; it’s my early twenties.” Written largely in isolation, on his bed, on the floor of his living room, and with Olivia Rodrigo producer Dan Nigro, the YouTuber-turned-pop star’s second LP is a maturation full of nuanced explorations of desire (“People Watching”) and romantic platonic friendships (“Best Friend”). “The overarching theme of this album is lingering pain—this mourning period that almost feels good. You wallow in it, and you cry, and you write all these songs; you’re being really annoying about it all,” Gray laughs. “That’s what a *Superache* is—I wanted it to have a bit of humor as well.” Educated in Taylor Swift’s songwriting school of lyrical specificity, *Superache* is an album of cut-close-to-the-heart narratives (“Astronomy”), explosive pop rock (“Jigsaw”), Harry Styles-esque solo balladry (“Yours”), and ascending vocal melody (“Memories”). Ambitious and melodramatic, sure, but always rewarding. “I hope this album makes people feel less alone in their experiences. That’s why I started writing music: I was a lonely kid and didn’t feel like I could understand other people,” he says. “Being alive is a confounding thing and you’re allowed to have insane, mixed emotions all the time.” Below, Conan Gray walks Apple Music through his sophomore LP, track by track. **“Movies”** “I think the reason why I chose ‘Movies’ as the opener is because it’s a song about being in denial. For a lot of my early teens and a lot of my life, I spent so long, trying so hard, to fall in love in a way that was normal. I wanted the Hallmark movie. I wanted that stupid, fake, perfect love because that’s what I grew up seeing. I think, in the past few years, I’ve realized that’s not what I want anymore. I wanted to show people the process of discovering that over this album.” **“People Watching”** “‘People Watching’ was a really pivotal point in making *Superache*. The truth is, I wrote this album at a time where I just wasn’t in love. I had very few romantic interests. And I feel like my whole life, I’ve been an observer of life but not a participator. I’ve watched people. What does it feel like to fall in love? I write all these songs because I’m trying to understand.” **“Disaster”** “‘Disaster’ sounds a little different from the rest of the album. I wanted the song to sound like overthinking, where you’re racing through all these moments in your life with someone and trying to decipher whether or not they like you, and whether you should tell them that you have feelings for them. So, I wanted the song to be really fast and to have hard synths and drums and this really quick dialogue.” **“Best Friend”** “The song is about a bunch of different friends in my life. Since I’ve never been in a relationship romantically, I really see my friends as the most important aspect of my entire life. It felt like something that I had to say on the album or else it would’ve been an inaccurate depiction of what my life has been like the past few years.” **“Astronomy”** “The reason why I put ‘Astronomy’ after ‘Best Friend’ is because ‘Astronomy’ is about my best friend. My deepest fear in life is losing my best friends—my childhood best friend in particular. It’s irrational because I know her better than anyone else on earth and she knows me better than anyone else. In the bridge, I say, ‘Stop trying to keep us alive/You’re pointing at stars in the sky/That already died.’ When you look up at the night sky, you see all these stars, and most of them actually aren’t even there anymore. That’s that moment when you’re losing a friendship or a relationship, and you realize that the only things you have to say to them are things that you’ve done in the past. There’s nothing new and there’s nothing more.” **“Yours”** “Dan \[Nigro\] and I were sitting at the piano, and he started playing the melody. It got stuck in my head. I started singing, ‘Somebody you call when you are alone...’ At that point in my life, I was dealing with that annoying, lingering love for someone that I very much felt was the most important person in my life. They didn’t have the same feelings towards me. I wanted the chorus to be really simple and repeat itself, like, ‘Well, I’m not yours, and I want more, but that stuff’s not going to happen.’ I wanted it to be very kind of plain.” **”Jigsaw”** “‘Jigsaw’ was the one part of the album where I really needed to express how angry it makes me that when you love somebody, it doesn’t matter who they are, it’s so hard to please them sometimes. You feel pressure to please them or become what they want you to be. I ended up getting in this argument with someone and I remember being so mad—the kind of mad where you start crying and you feel really stupid because you’re angry, but you’re crying. It was originally just a sad little acoustic song. I played it for Dan \[Nigro\] and I was like, ‘I want to make this song so loud.’” **“Family Line”** “It’s about watching generations of hurt people pass their pain onto their kids, and then their kids pass them onto their kids. In my childhood, I felt like I was told that I was going to end up living this very specific life and that I wasn’t going to have a bright future because of my past. ‘Family Line’ is me saying, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter. I can be whatever I want to be.’ I was so scared to put it out; that was the reason why I needed to put it out.” **“Summer Child”** “My generation is the type of generation that loves to just act like everything is perfectly fine. When we talk about pain, we are very sarcastic about it. We don’t really get into depth about it, and we laugh it off. We create these facades about who we are in order to make things a bit easier. ‘Summer Child’ is me acknowledging the fact that we all have a tendency to create versions of ourselves that we think are easier for people to digest. But oftentimes, it’s just something that we’ve made up in our heads and everyone is perfectly lovable the way that they are.\" **“Footnote”** “‘Footnote,’ selfishly, is my favorite song in the entire album. It scratches this itch that I’ve never heard scratched before, if that makes any sense. It’s not a song about the big dramatic heartbreak and the screaming and the slamming doors and crying. It’s not about that. It’s about the aftermath. When your ex ends up writing the story of their life, you’re just going to be a tiny little footnote at the bottom of a page. So much of love, of music is about the big and the loud. This song is about the quiet realization that you’re just going to have to take a step back and let them go.” **“Memories”** “‘Memories’ was the very last song that I wrote for *Superache*. I wanted to take this phrase that I’ve heard so many times in rom-coms, sitting on the curb like, ‘Oh, I hope that you’ll stay in my memories forever. I love you. Never leave me.’ I wanted to take that phrase and completely deconstruct it, like, ‘You know what? I actually do wish you would stay in my memories and not exist in my present. I don’t want you right now. Go.’” **“The Exit”** “I wanted to end the album with ‘The Exit’ because it sums up the album. It’s about realizing that everyone around you is moving on, but you’re still standing at the exit, wondering how everyone is doing it so easily and how they’re able to continue on with their lives after being heartbroken. It’s always been something that’s dumbfounded me. I’m a lingerer. I just stick around, write songs, and think.”

“I was able to make the album in peace and quiet, really,” Sigrid tells Apple Music of crafting *How to Let Go*. That was thanks, in part, to the pandemic, during which the Norwegian pop queen could “sort of disappear,” writing the majority of her second album’s songs in Copenhagen with Norwegian songwriter Caroline Ailin (Dua Lipa, Charli XCX). “We were swimming in between sessions, talking a lot, and Caroline was making amazing cinnamon buns,” remembers Sigrid (born Sigrid Raabe). It was an approach she valued, having “definitely felt the pressure” to ensure *How to Let Go* lived up to her 2019 debut, *Sucker Punch*, home to hit singles such as “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” “Strangers,” and “Don’t Feel Like Crying.” That debut showcased Sigrid’s ability to craft shimmering electro-pop songs that sound both anthemic and intimate. These elements are all present on *How to Let Go*, but this time around, it feels even more cathartic. “There are songs about breakups and breaking someone’s heart,” she says. “Songs about letting go of your childhood, and songs about letting go of fears and doubts because sometimes you just have to go for it.” Musically, the album sees Sigrid embrace a more organic sound featuring plenty of live drums, soaring strings, and vocal harmonies; she says everyone from The Beatles to The Killers influenced guitar-centric tracks destined for festival season. Read on for Sigrid’s track-by-track guide to *How to Let Go*. **“It Gets Dark”** “Whenever I’ve been unsure of my musical direction, I’ve always come back to this song. It shaped the whole sound of the album with the strings coming in and the chorus being pretty simple in terms of production: literally just bass, vocals, and drums. It’s a song about letting go and opening your mind. For about four or five years before the pandemic, I was traveling so much with work and always came back to Norway when I had time off. And then, suddenly, I started to feel more comfortable outside of Norway. I started to feel like I also had a home in London, New York, and Los Angeles. That was exciting but also scary for me because I’m such a homebody.” **“Burning Bridges”** “It’s not necessarily about a romantic breakup because, sometimes, breakups that aren’t romantic can be even harder. Musically, it’s very inspired by Muse. I listened to them a lot when I was growing up, and I love it when rock bands go electronic the way Muse did. But at the same time, ‘Burning Bridges’ is still a pop song because you have the big, soaring strings on there. The overall vibe is cinematic but at a British music festival. It’s my proper angry, stomping-across-the-stage anthem.” **“Risk of Getting Hurt”** “When I sing, ‘I’ve crashed with no warning because I’m brave when I’m falling/But so far, I always land on my feet,’ it’s really about my outlook on life. I do get really tired and burned out because work can be really overwhelming; it takes a lot out of me. I’m a person who likes just being by myself in my apartment, cooking, but in 2019 I think I had 290 travel days or something. That’s a lot for me, but the reward of going on tour and traveling is just too good to turn down. I feel like I always land on my feet and that gives me the confidence to keep going.” **“Thank Me Later”** “Musically, it’s inspired by The Killers, who were a very important band for me growing up. Lyrically, I guess it’s really a very straight-up song about breaking someone’s heart. It sucks and it’s really difficult, but sometimes it’s for the best. I had a lot of heartbreak songs on *Sucker Punch*, but they were about me getting my heart broken. So, I thought it was time to talk about the other side of heartbreak too.” **“Mirror”** “I’m always scared of saying the wrong thing, and I’m very self-critical. I’ve been doing this job since I was 16, and when I look back at old interviews, sometimes I’m like, ‘Why did I say that?’ Often, when I write songs, I feel a bit like my older sister writing songs to me. I definitely tried to channel her in these lyrics, which are basically saying, ‘It’s OK to fuck up and move on.’ I’ve loved seeing the reaction to this song from my fans because it seems like they were thinking the same thing as me.” **“Last to Know”** “Every time we tried to put more production on it, it just didn’t work. One of my favorite songs ever is ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ by Bonnie Raitt. This song doesn’t sound remotely like it, but I’m sure I was thinking a little bit of that song when I wrote these lyrics. It’s about when you’ve been through a breakup and you’ve moved on, but there’s a bittersweet element because it’s hard for your ex to see you with someone new.” **“Dancer”** “This is one of my favorites on the album. It’s a full-on lovey-dovey song about falling the hardest in love I’ve ever been. I love the instrumentation on this song with the piano and then the drums and bass coming in. We listened to The Beatles a bit in the studio, and I think you can hear their influence here. It’s just a warm hug of a song that reminds me of summer nights and road trips and getting drunk.” **“A Driver Saved My Night”** “This is a fun song. It’s about being stuck in traffic somewhere, usually in London on the M25 \[highway\], and feeling a bit tired and homesick and ‘ugh’ about things. But then, a song you really like comes on the radio and you ask the driver to turn it up, please. And even though you don’t know each other, you’re both listening and nodding along and thinking, ‘Great song!’ I just love how music can instantly lift your spirits, so this song is really an homage to those moments.” **“Mistake Like You”** “Another ballad, but you’ve got to have a few ballads in there. It’s a sad song but also a positive one. It’s about unrequited love: having really strong feelings for someone who doesn’t feel the same way but coming through that situation and knowing you learned from it. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote the chorus: ‘I decided I think that anyone would be lucky to make just one mistake like you.’” **“Bad Life” (feat. Bring Me the Horizon)** “I’m a big Bring Me the Horizon fan. When I was at Reading Festival in 2021, \[the band’s keyboardist\] Jordan Fish came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I love your music.’ And I was freaking out—like, how do they know my music? We chatted a bit, and he said we should go into the studio some time. Then I got in my tour bus to go to Leeds Festival, and he sent me the demo of ‘Bad Life.’ I played it to my band, and we were all like, ‘This is really good.’ So, I went into the studio with Jordan and Ollie \[Sykes, the band’s singer\] a few weeks later, and we changed some bits and bobs, and I wrote some new lyrics for my verse. But the first time I realized Bring Me the Horizon was an unlikely match \[for me\] was when I walked into that studio and the technician said, ‘Whoa, you were the last person I was expecting to see in this session!’” **“Grow”** “Nick Drake was an inspiration for me when I was writing this one, especially his songs ‘Pink Moon’ and ‘Place to Be.’ There are references to my childhood in the lyrics and also to my first apartment in Oslo. It was a big achievement for me to buy my own place at 22, and I remember trying to hang pictures on the bare white walls to make it feel like a proper home. But somehow, I never really settled there; it always felt like just another hotel room. I was living my dream out on the road, but it felt bittersweet because I had lost a part of myself at the same time. I think that’s just growing up, though.” **“High Note”** “I want to look back on my life and know I’ve not taken things for granted. But I have a bad habit of letting stress get to me, and then amazing things pass me by. I remember when I won the BBC’s Sound of 2018 poll, which is one of my biggest achievements, I actually cried because I was scared of what life was going to be like after that. It was almost like my innocence was going in a way: ‘I’m a serious artist now, fuck!’ It was only months afterwards that I looked back and thought, ‘Oh, that was actually amazing.’ So, this is a song about enjoying those highs when they happen. It’s partly inspired by the Corpus Clock at Cambridge University, which was built to remind the students to live their lives to the fullest.”

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.

Anitta has long straddled various genres—and languages—as she sees fit. Yet with *Versions of Me*, the trilingual Brazilian star presents the clearest display of her talent and appeal, often accompanied by a multinational array of guests, from Afro B to Cardi B. Following the reggaetón one-two punch of “Envolver” and the Chencho Corleone-assisted “Gata,” she switches things up with the propulsive pop of “I’d Rather Have Sex” and collaborates with R&B hooksmith Ty Dolla $ign on the clever interpolation “Gimme Your Number.” She playfully recontextualizes a classic on the trap-informed “Girl From Rio” while repping her home country further on the dynamic “Que Rabão.” From the retro electro rock of “Boys Don’t Cry” to the tantalizing polyrhythmic Khalid team-up “Ur Baby,” her self-described versions won’t disappoint the fans.

Cameron has always been a great storyteller, finding his ways into the depths of the places where not many others are looking, and Oxy Music continues on that trajectory. It’s filled with stories of people who fall outside the system and exist in the grey areas of life. In its design - its music, lyrics and tracklist - lies the journey a person can take, if the circumstances present themselves - down the road of heavy drug and alcohol abuse. Initially inspired by Nico Walker’s Cherry, Cameron was spurred into yet another commentary on American Life, this time about the opioid crisis that has taken over the country. He says about Oxy Music: “The album is a story, a work of fiction, mostly from the perspective of a man. Starved of meaningful purpose, confused about the state of the world, and in dire need of a reason to live - a person can, and according to the latest statistics, increasingly will, turn to opioids. This is one of those people.” While Oxy Music could be dark, it’s instead brighter and more buoyant than much of Cameron’s previous work, a shift in mood first seen across 2019’s Miami Memory. It’s told from a place of optimism and through the lens of Cameron, in the way that only he can tell it. As with the previously released, “Sara Jo,” “Best Life” gives a context of drug use to distort the confronting nature of contemporary reality as Cameron sings of the feelings of insecurity brought about by life online: “I guess I’m just winning / But I get no reaction / My comments just don’t rank / Or my post tanks.” Directed by Jemima Kirke, produced by Jim Larson and starring Kirke and Cameron, the song’s video explores the idea of what it means to find one’s “best life” by accepting others’ insecurities – in this instance, a skin condition such as eczema – as loveable qualities.

A thirty-minute trip for the post-Internet consumer, Air Guitar calibrates inventive pop hooks for the indie rock lover, instantly accessible yet intricately arranged. The album draws a line through the history of pop stylistics from 80s new wave [Last Resort] and 90s power-pop [Burn Book] to 00s sk8er punk and radio pop [Air Guitar]. Further informed by the cosmopolitan, culturally astute ethos of PC Music – Sobs connects the uptempo of Shibuya’s Advantage Lucy [Lucked Out], heart-on-sleeve indie rock of Bettie Serveert and Big Star [World Implode], with the eclecticism of New York’s Darla Records [Friday Night] to define the pulse of indiepop then and now. Pre-save the album 💾 → topshelfrecords.com/252 Watch the video for single "Air Guitar" 🎸 → youtu.be/6PAoFRUU7GQ ——— For our Japanese 🇯🇵 friends, an exclusive CD pressing with an additional bonus track is available from Inpartmaint Inc. → inpartmaint.com/site/35896/ For our Indonesian 🇮🇩 friends, our buddies from Kolibri Rekords are releasing a special run of CDs and cassettes available from Oct. 26 → tokopedia.com/kolibrirekordsshop

Since releasing his debut LP, *21st Century Liability*, in 2018, and 2020’s celebrated *weird!*, British artist YUNGBLUD (Dominic Harrison) has become a voice for a misunderstood generation, turning external environmental pressures into rallying cries for outsiders. Pop-punk rock was his weapon for most of his career; now, on his self-titled third record, there’s ’70s punk (“The Funeral”), New Wave (“Tissues”), energetic emo (“Memories”), Britpop (“Sweet Heroine”), and so much more. “YUNGBLUD is a community; YUNGBLUD is a movement,” Harrison tells Apple Music. “It\'s a community where you can be truly yourself. And by finding that community on the first two albums, I felt like I was allowed to write a record about me because I feel protected.” And on *YUNGBLUD*, he’s never sounded so vulnerable. “I recorded the whole album in a bedroom in Glendale,” he tells Apple Music. “It felt like I was making my first album again. It was so raw.” Below, YUNGBLUD walks us through his third studio album, track by track. **“The Funeral”** “I had a fire in my belly. Everyone had an opinion on me. The world had an opinion on me—the internet, my mom, my dad, my label, my fans, my management. Every fucking person had an opinion on where I should go. And I got fucking exhausted. I felt like I was 15 years old again in fucking high school, getting shoved into a locker. I always work best when I\'ve got to kick back against the bear who\'s biting me, and I\'ve got to bite it back.” **“Tissues”** “It samples ‘Close to Me’ by The Cure. I fucking get the song. I get Robert Smith\'s email, I email him ’cause I\'ve met him at the NME Awards a couple years before. And then he loved the song and let me use the sample. Cleared it. Crazy. What the fuck?” **“Memories”** “I\'ve never put a feature on one of my albums. I\'ve always been separate, but I love this song. I think it was brilliant. WILLOW is the truth for me. She\'s fucking nuts in the best way possible. You\'ll catch her on a good day, you\'ll catch her on a bad day, but she\'s fucking real. She reminds me a little bit of Amy Winehouse. A lot of people might crucify me for that, but I don\'t give a fuck ’cause it\'s true.” **“Cruel Kids”** “Me and \[Bastille’s\] Dan \[Smith\]. I always respected Dan. Great fucking writer. He came by the studio one day, and I played him this idea. When you meet artists, they can send you in a different direction. A lot of people don\'t know I really love Radiohead. And I really love *Kid A*. I really love the reverse snares and the madness of it all. We went down in that direction.” **“Mad”** “I just wanted to be like, \'I feel like I\'m going fucking insane right now. And I don\'t know how to express it. I don\'t know what to say. I don\'t know how to. I\'m just going fucking crazy and that\'s it.\'” **“I Cry 2”** “‘Everyone online keeps saying I’m not really gay/I’ll start dating men when they go to therapy’—I love that line. It\'s so playful. It\'s probably going to get me in trouble, but I\'m down. This song started because one of my mates was getting really upset and really emotional, but he found it really hard to express himself emotionally. There’s such a big stigma against males expressing their emotions. If you\'re hurting, it means you\'re alive. And, \'Mandy\'s on the counter kissing Charlie\'s neck/And your best mate\'s girl to your best made bed\' is a drug reference; it\'s about MDMA and cocaine, but also a party where you\'ve lost control. You don\'t know who the fuck\'s in your house because you\'re blocking out real feelings so much.” **“Sweet Heroine”** “I wrote this song in London, and I was completely nocturnal for weeks. We came from LA, and we stayed in LA time. It was a beautiful way of writing. I was in London, in the cold with my friends from LA, showing them my stomping grounds, taking Americans to fish and chips for the first time, feeling fucking Britpop, was wearing exclusively Fred Perry. And that song is about someone who really pulled me out of a really dark place in my life.” **“Sex Not Violence”** “I loved Green Day, *American Idiot*: one acoustic guitar down the middle, electrics panned left and right. One acoustic loud as fuck, straight down the middle. And I was like, ‘I\'m stealing that. No one\'s done that for ages.’ It gives it such an urgency and a movement. And there’s such a simple power in singing and describing sex. The connection, the trust, the feeling of euphoria, the metaphor that love will always win over hate, because I love sex. I love having sex. I love talking about sex. I love exploring sex in all its forms.” **“Don’t Go”** “So funny: This song almost didn\'t make it onto the record. I wrote it in an hour in London. Start to finish, production as well, and that frightened me. ’Cause normally so much thought goes into the music. And this song didn\'t mean fucking nothing to me until three weeks later, when I\'d written it off as a whatever tune.” **“Don’t Feel Like Feeling Sad Today”** “I wrote it when I didn\'t want to get out of bed. I was so fucking exhausted about not wanting to get out of bed. I turned to the side of my bed where I\'ve got a notepad in case any ideas come in my sleep. And I wrote, \'I don\'t feel like feeling sad today.\' But fuck that. I don\'t want to feel sad right now. And then it just fucking felt like a T-shirt. I was listening to a lot of Ramones, and went for a one-minute, two-minute punk hit, \'Bonzo Goes to Bitburg\' vibe. I had the lyric, I had the fucking title, and it just fucking happened. Like when you listen to The Libertines or the Arctic Monkeys or Oasis and it\'s all feeling first.” **“Die for a Night”** “I brought in a really good friend of mine, a kid called Jordan Brasko Gable. I met this fucking little twat in a Thai restaurant, and he\'s got a Karl Marx book in his back pocket. I rolled my eyes but he was so intellectual. We spoke about Kurt Vonnegut and Oscar Wilde, and now he\'s a songwriter. He pushed me on my lyricism. He sat opposite me and was like, \'No, you can say that better. Morrissey would say that better. John Lydon would say that better. Fucking Alex Turner could say that better.\' He challenged me. It\'s when I came up with \'Pain is language I can read/So I\'d rather remain illiterate tonight so I can sleep\'—his eyes lit up and I was like, \'I know I\'ve got something.\'” **“The Boy in the Black Dress”** “I basically wrote a poem about every significant moment that had made me grow up a year in a second about my life. The first time I got punched, the first time a teacher ridiculed me for wearing makeup, the first time the internet came after me and where I\'m at right now. It was the first time I felt pain, and it was really cool to write that song. And the instrumentation: That’s a toy keyboard from Walmart; all those sounds were made on guitars and a toy keyboard.”

A celebratory EP with classic hooks and groovy beats.

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 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”).

The singer lays bare her emotions on a dazzling second album.

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.

“One thing we saw very early on in the recording process was the fact that this couldn’t be one record,” Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds tells Apple Music. “There were two different directions, two stories being told, and two timelines. We had songs that I wrote right after my best friend took his life and right after my sister passed away—you know, grieving songs. And then we had songs that were written, because of COVID, almost three years later, when I was in a totally different place. I had a different story to tell.” The band decided to release two variations on a single theme: *Mercury - Act 1* addresses the death and grieving process, while *Act 2* unpacks the complicated task of trying to move forward. These eclectic and ultimately uplifting rock songs are amplified by the band’s new collaborator: legendary producer Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, System of a Down, Tom Petty, AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers). “They’re wildly sophisticated in their production ability, in their playing, and in their writing—this glut of greatness,” Rubin says of the band. Rubin’s style allowed Reynolds to rectify his loss of religious faith and discover a new kind of meaning on the record. “My first goal with creating art is putting out something that is honest,” Reynolds says. “One of the things that has been so inspiring to me working with Rick is I have been trying to refine spirituality and belief. When the rug is pulled out on you with religion, I was left with nothing. It made me trust no one. Any story anybody told me, it was a ghost story. I’ve been trying to refine believing in deeper things, unexplainable things. I’m trusting where I feel honesty. Rick is honest.” *Act 1* is largely about letting go, as evidenced in the haunting vocal overlays of “Wrecked,” a song written about Reynolds’ sister-in-law, who died of cancer in 2019. “My biggest fear in life is lack of control,” Reynolds admits, revealing that he confronted that fear in a spiritually transformative ayahuasca trip, which no doubt influenced the record. “I had to give up control completely. And I died. Spiritually, I felt like I died. I saw so many things in my life from a bird’s-eye view. Then I heard, like, the bell and this incredible shaman came over and was helping me come alive again. It felt like a rebirth. It was everything I was told religion would give to me.” *Act 2* focuses on the “post-death” experience, he says, and reaches for the light at the end of the tunnel. “Dealing with someone who has passed—and then what? What does tomorrow look like? Grief is always there, but life continues. It’s about being present. All you have, after you lose someone close to you, is this \[new perspective\] that every single second counts.”

Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.” This special expanded version of *Midnights* includes seven additional songs.

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.”

“Through the writing of these songs and the making of this music, I found my way back to the world around me – a way to reach nature and the people I love and care about. This record is a sensory exploration that allowed for a connection to a consciousness that I was searching for. Through the resonance of sound and a beaten up old piano I bought in Camden Market while living in a city I had no intention of staying in, I found acceptance and a way of healing.” - Beth Orton Many musicians turn inward when the world around them seems chaotic and unreliable. Reframing one’s perception of self can often reveal new personal truths both uncomfortable and profound, and for Beth Orton, music re-emerged in the past several years as a tethering force even when her own life felt more tumultuous than ever. Indeed, the foundations of the songs on Orton’s stunning new album, Weather Alive, are nothing more than her voice and a “cheap, crappy” upright piano installed in a shed in her garden, conjuring a deeply meditative atmosphere that remains long after the final note has evaporated. “I am known as a collaborator and I’m very good at it. I’m very open to it. Sometimes, I’ve been obscured by it,” says Orton, who rose to prominence through ‘90s-era collaborations with William Orbit, Red Snapper and The Chemical Brothers before striking out on her own with a series of acclaimed, award-winning solo releases. “I think what’s happened with this record is that through being cornered by life, I got to reveal myself to myself and to collaborate with myself, actually.” Weather Alive - Beth Orton's first album in six years - is out 23rd September on Partisan Records"

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)

“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.

There’s something they don’t tell you about virality: It never seems to last. Beach Bunny, the Chicago-based indie-rock band fronted by Lili Trifilio, blew up on TikTok when the songs “Prom Queen” and “Cloud 9” (the latter from their 2020 debut LP, *Honeymoon*) made the rounds. But this is a band of pop songwriters—led by Trifilio’s undeniable ability to write a hook—and so, on Beach Bunny’s sophomore LP, they’re out to make a more permanent name for themselves. Backed by Fall Out Boy producer Sean O’Keefe, *Emotional Creature* is all “emotional experiences,” says Trifilio. “And viewing them in a positive, empowering light or feeling deeply shameful—it ties into a greater theme of how we, as humans, feel things,” and how social relationships influence those feelings, be it the Y2K Disney pop of “Entropy,” the rush of a crush on “Fire Escape,” or the proggy sci-fi synth detours of “Gravity” and “Scream.” “I hope it brings relatability,” Trifilio says of the album, “and maybe acts as a cathartic experience for people going through similar things as me. Music’s healing in that way, if you find tracks that resonate.” Below, Trifilio walks Apple Music through *Emotional Creature*, track by track. **“Entropy”** “There’s one Jonas Brothers song called ‘Burnin’ Up,’ and it has this transitional lead into the song. It kind of fades in, in a cool way. And with Kelly Clarkson and Avril or any of the big acts of the time, I think I was pulling from a vibe more than trying to mimic anything. The song has a late-’90s, early-2000s feel. I was leaning into that and trying things and seeing what worked and would fit that vibe.” **“Oxygen”** “I wanted to separate the verses and the choruses, and make the verses have that anxiety undertone—not just lyrically. I wanted the guitar riff a little more chaotic. The choruses are the breakthrough moment in this song where these reflections come together and it’s like, ‘OK, everything’s fine. Don’t stress out so much.’ It took me a while to write, just because it’s quite wordy. It was this ongoing poem, notes in my phone. Once it flowed, I was like, ‘OK, this is a pretty good song. We can put this on the album. It’s not just chaotic word vomit.’” **“Deadweight”** “‘Deadweight’ feels like a sequel to some *Honeymoon* tracks. It was 2019, and I was feeling very passionate. I wrote it in 10 minutes; it was super fast, like getting out my therapy session emotions. But I didn’t actually know how to end the song. I procrastinated till we got to the studio and then revealed to everyone that I didn’t have an ending. It reminds me of Vampire Weekend a little bit. And to fill you in on some Midwest history: There’s this place called the Wisconsin Dells, a chaotic water park land. It’s super corny, and they also love cheese. It’s just a really weird place. All of the resorts have really weird theme songs, and I feel like, listening back, we were like, ‘Oh my god, that sounds just like the Kalahari Resort’s theme song.’” **“Gone”** “The best time I write is if I’m feeling something pretty intense. It’s when, instead of journaling or calling my mom, I’m like, ‘All right, let’s try to get some lyrics out of this situation first.’ Other times, it’s just a bunch of notes on my phone that are all related. I just wanted it to sound aggressive, but also simple at the same time. It’s a straightforward punk song. I like that the chords have some dissonance to them. And the contents of the song are about being stuck in a situation and wanting out, not being sure what the right thing to do is.” **“Eventually”** “It’s about having panic attacks, but also finding love and how that can be so healing in those moments—to have loved ones. I think I wrote this right after having a panic attack, and I was like, ‘I don’t really know who to talk to about this, but I feel like I need to get this out of my system. I need to reflect on it somehow.’ There’s something bittersweet about it, this sad undertone.“ **“Fire Escape”** “‘I was excited about a trip that was coming up in a couple weeks with my boyfriend. We were long-distance, and I was so excited for this trip that I wrote a fantasy song about what it would be like. I did add some lyrics after the trip, too, capturing the entire event. I’ve always loved New York, and it’s funny because Chicago is, in a lot of ways, similar. It’s not the craziest transition when I’m there, but it still has such a magical mysticism to it. Things were getting a little bit better in my personal life, and I just wanted to write something happy.” **“Weeds”** “‘Weeds’ was one of the first songs I wrote for the album. It is one of my favorite songs on the record because it deviates from a lot of the breakup-angled songs I have. Those are super self-deprecating, and this was written from the perspective of being my own best friend. It’s me giving myself an intervention, almost. And musically, I think I took a lot of risks—experimenting and trying synths, stuff that isn’t as common on Beach Bunny things.” **“Gravity”** “A lot of this interlude was improvised. Sean was like, ‘Yeah, you want to do that? OK. We’re going to go get Starbucks or something. We’ll be back in a sec. You work on that.’ With the theme of the album being this salute to old sci-fi, in my head, it’s a movie-soundtrack moment.“ **“Scream”** “‘Scream’ was, by far, the hardest to write. The guitar was fleshed out, but it was very difficult to jam on. With my bandmates, if I bring them a song, we’ll do some trial and error. They just pick up on the vibe, and we know the direction of music. It usually works out pretty easily. But ‘Scream,’ for some reason, it felt like we were all very disjointed. It is so different from other Beach Bunny stuff; it was just difficult for everybody to figure out. Everyone saw that I was getting frustrated, so they left me alone with a bunch of synths, and I tried a bunch of stuff until it finally clicked. I don’t remember how long it took, but I remember after that day, everyone was exhausted and pissed but also happy that it was just done.” **“Infinity Room”** “There’s this UK artist. His name’s Tom Rosenthal. His songs make me cry all the time. They’re these really sweet, acoustic songs. He’s an amazing lyricist. And there was one song where he sampled bird sounds, and that blew my mind. I wrote it down long before I went to the studio. I was like, ‘I want to put birds on the record. I don’t know where, and I don’t know if that’s going to be weird, but I’m going to bring it up and see what people think.’ It ended up working really well. ‘Infinity Room’ reminds me of being in a greenhouse. It’s ambient nature vibes. The song’s lyrics, in themselves, are ethereal.” **“Karaoke”** “‘Karaoke’ was written early in the pandemic or right before the pandemic. I feel like that song is, in very simple terms, just about having a crush. It doesn’t have maybe that much depth to it, but it just has a lightheartedness about when you connect with someone cool. Sonically, it’s one of the more laidback songs on the record.” **“Love Song”** “As soon as this song was written, I was like, ‘OK, I want this album to have a happy ending.’ It really is just a sweet love song that I wanted to write with intention. It’s this big moment and that ties in all the themes. ‘Love Song’ feels like a reflection on all of the hard moments \[in a relationship\], but at the end, love perseveres and everything’s OK.”

“Growing up is chaotic,” Tate McRae sings on her debut album—and that’s especially true when you’ve logged a Top 10 single in multiple countries and racked up over a billion streams before you’ve graduated from high school. After her devastating 2020 ballad “you broke me first” transformed the former aspiring dancer into Billie Eilish’s honorary Canadian cousin, McRae spends much of her debut album offering us reassurances that success hasn’t changed her—in that she still feels as confused, anxious, and messed up as any other 18-year-old. That sense of turmoil is baked right into the album title: *i used to think i could fly*, a phrase that, for McRae, signifies the loss of innocence and idealism that occurs on the journey to adulthood. “When you\'re younger, everything seems completely possible,” McRae tells Apple Music. “You wouldn\'t assume that heights are scary, because no one\'s told you what they\'re scared of. No one\'s left a mark on you yet. I’ve always been interested with the idea of how life makes a mark on you as you get older, and how the people you surround yourself with shape you as a person.” In McRae’s case, those transformative and traumatic moments often play out in the context of toxic relationships plagued by substance abuse, infidelity, and gaslighting. The singer has a forensic eye for those subtle turning-point moments in a partnership—like a boyfriend forgetting to wish her good night for the first time—that spell inevitable doom. But while *i used to think i could fly* is built upon McRae’s familiar foundation of aching acoustic melodies and atmospheric trap-infused R&B production, the album also uncorks a pop-punk energy that breaks up the pity party. “I didn\'t want this album to feel like a sulk-for-me album,” McRae says. “I wanted people to have moments where they could cry and feel like they could relate, but I also want them to feel like \'I\'m a bad bitch\' at the same time. I just wanted to cross off all aspects of my brain.” Here, McRae talks us through her mental checklist, track by track. **“?”** “I basically pick up my phone and record everything. I was on a plane, and I was scrolling through all of my voice memos because I was super bored, and I found this one clip. I cut it up and put a whole bunch of effects on it. And I thought, ‘This could be a really cool way to start off the album.’ I used to hear Juice WRLD do this kind of stuff a lot, and I was really inspired by that. I wanted to give people some sort of context of what the album title meant to me.” **“don’t come back”** “A lot of my songs on this album are super self-analytical and self-deprecating at times—they\'re some of the more intense songs that I\'ve ever written. But I wanted the album to start with something lighter, and something that felt kind of empowering. It’s an interpolation of a Nelly song \[‘Ride Wit Me’\], which is super cool—I’ve never done something like that.” **“i’m so gone”** “‘don\'t come back’ feels like more of a vague opener, but ‘i\'m so gone’ definitely talks about a real situation. I\'m the type of person who, when I\'m moving on \[from a relationship\], I\'ll be like, \'I\'m gonna stick my head up and keep trudging on with my life and I\'m not gonna let you ruin the things that I\'ve been doing recently.\' I wanted \[the two songs\] to be on the same kind of line, but you can tell this song touches on a more vulnerable side and gets a little more sensitive compared to \'don\'t look back\'—I thought that was a cool dynamic.” **“what would you do?”** “I had no idea what this song was gonna be like when I was writing it. I wrote it with Charlie Puth and Alexander 23, and it was a really interesting situation, because I had no idea what Charlie was creating on his million different instruments that he was playing. I just started writing about these real feelings, and then, by the end, we were all like, \'What the hell did we just write?\' This is such a crazy song. Writing with a tempo change was so foreign to me. It felt like a big risk for me to take as an artist.” **“chaotic”** “I was at Greg Kurstin\'s studio. I had been writing with a lot of people and I wasn\'t getting songs that I really connected with. And I think it was because there was a lot changing in my life—I had graduated high school and turned 18 and moved to LA and I was kind of settling into my own skin for the first time. I had no idea who I was. And I feel like this was one of the first times that I sat down in a session and I was like, \'Okay, I need to really talk about where my mental state is at right now, because I don\'t know if it\'s looking too good.\' I didn\'t even think I would end up releasing this song, because it was so personal to me. I was really nervous to put it out. I wrote it really quietly on my computer, and then an hour later, I walked across the studio and gave Greg a high five and left.” **“hate myself”** “I feel like in \[failed\] relationships, the first thing people will do is make themselves a victim, because the easiest way to heal from things is to blame something on the other person. And I feel like I\'m really opposite in that sense—a lot of the time, I\'ll take the blame for everything, and I\'ll overanalyze everything that I did wrong to wreck something. There\'s that line ‘After I just put you right through hell/You couldn\'t hate me more than I hate myself’—I think that was a really cool way to approach this situation. I had just recently gone through a fresh breakup the day I wrote this. You can hear my voice cracking because I was actually crying while recording it. I take the blame throughout the song, and I feel like I make myself the villain in the story. But then you get to the bridge, and there\'s this point where it\'s like, \'I know that you\'re gonna be happier with another person, and that\'s the most painful thing in the world for me.\' That\'s what makes the song so heartbreaking.” **“what’s your problem?”** “I think this record is such a great description of me as a person, because I feel like I have so many different sides to my personality, and they can switch at any second. It\'s crazy, because I wrote \'hate myself,\' and then a couple months later, I came to the realization where I was like, ‘Oh, so this is why I was blaming myself—because he made me hate myself!’ So when I was writing this song, I put in the line ‘You made me hate myself just so that I can love you more.’ It was really cool to just talk about the perspective of a manipulator and how that can really mess you up mentally.” **“she’s all i wanna be”** “This one actually started out as a ballad. I was writing with Greg Kurstin—again, I was sitting in the corner of the room with my computer, and he was playing these really depressing piano chords. I had been scrolling through social media all day, and I was going through the worst feelings of comparison—I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Right now, I would rather be anyone else in the world.’ It was just a moment of feeling those really toxic feelings of envy and insecurity and jealousy. I wrote this song in like an hour—and then four days later, I emailed Greg, and I was like, ‘Hey, is there any way you could turn this into an upbeat, poppier song?’ He came back with this kick-ass guitar part and totally made it into this really cool punk song. It totally shifted the energy and brought a whole new life to it.” **“boy x”** “It was my first time writing with Alex. And I just had this one line in my notes: ‘But when you get bored, like you always do/Just tell me that you\'ll let her go before you look for someone new.’ I wanted to write a song about wandering eyes—when a person\'s eyes start to wander before they actually end the relationship. Alex and I were sitting in this garden, and he was just strumming on his guitar, and I started describing this girl and we started writing this whole story around this line that I had wrote. And then by the end, we slowly realized that this whole time that I was improvising and writing, I was reallly talking about myself.” **“you’re so cool”** “This song talks about a lot of different people—so don\'t worry, I\'m not just ripping on this one individual! I had never really experienced how awful it is to be around people with huge egos. Because I\'m from Calgary, Alberta, I feel very grounded—I sometimes joke that I have a negative ego. In this song, I really wanted to just talk about how it\'s so wild that you can look at yourself in the mirror and just be so obsessed with yourself and think you are just the shit and want to treat everyone else around you like they are the worst things to exist. I was kind of shocked to meet people like that.” **“feel like shit”** “I hadn\'t actually gone through my first-ever real heartbreak until this summer. I always knew how to write about small things and blow them up. But once I actually went through a big thing, I had no idea how to write about it. And it took me forever to actually process what was going on, until I went to the studio one day and said, \'I genuinely feel like shit.\' So I wrote this song about it.” **“go away”** “It\'s a really crazy thing how you can get so caught up on one person that no matter how great your life is, this person will still be the only thing on your mind. I was going through some experiences that I always dreamed of—moments that I should have been super present for, where I should have been happy and feeling on top of the world. It\'s so wild to me that if one person is stuck on your mind, it can take up all of your thoughts and distract you from anything good going on. This song was a cool way for me to sum up the album: I should be enjoying everything right now, and I should feel like my life is going great, and I don\'t because of you—because you\'re the only thing I can think of.” **“i still say goodnight”** “Obviously, FINNEAS has been a big inspiration of mine for quite some time, and getting to work with him on this song was an honor. He started off playing these beautiful, classic piano chords that, to me, felt like the rolling credits in an old movie. I\'m a very visual person—I feel like I can watch a movie in my head when I sing. What I see is what I write, and so in this situation, I was envisioning this one thing that I remembered from a specific person: Whenever they would lie to me, they would always twitch their eye a certain way. I specifically remembered that look that they would give me. Trying to have hope in something but just knowing it\'s all a lie is a really crazy feeling. And at the end, I feel so stupid because I still think saying good night to each other is just the last bit of hope in a relationship. It\'s sometimes the last thing that people hold on to before you cut ties.”

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.

On Jillian Banks’ fourth album, the avant-pop performer has reinvented herself: Her alt-R&B sonic signatures remain, sure, but she’s leaned into the darkness. “Someone write my new name down,” she sings in the intro of lead single “The Devil.” “I’m the devil/Did they tell you I’m the devil?” The wickedness sounds good on her: “Misunderstood” is goth church, “F\*\*k Love” is glitchy trap production, “Burn” is a ballad from the great beyond, closer “I Still Love You” is a relationship dirge. Despite—or perhaps due to—Banks’ sophisticated approach to pop music, this is a deep album with unique pleasures: soulful harmonies, dance-driven bass, contorted synths, club-ready love songs. This is a new Banks, the result of a victorious battle with depression and anxiety attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clearly, she’s emerged stronger 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.

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.