In late 2020, Kevin Morby holed up in the then-quiet Peabody hotel in Memphis to escape a pandemic-burdened winter in his hometown of Kansas City. There, he wrote *This Is a Photograph*, a folky, left-of-the-dial rock album and a particularly reflective entry in his catalog. Its sound is sometimes earthy and gospel-inflected, sometimes lush and symphonic, with lyrics tinted by existential reflection and the specter of death. The sinewy title track was inspired by family photos that Morby and his mother went through after thinking they’d just seen his father die following an accidental double dose of heart medication. The lived-in duet “Bittersweet, TN,” about the loss of a friend, features vocals by Erin Rae and floats along on its banjo lines. And the sparse but upbeat “Goodbye To Good Times” doesn’t offer any resolution, but instead presents a eulogy for better days as the songwriter strums his acoustic guitar, simultaneously nostalgic and grounded in the difficult present.
The story begins with Kevin Morby absentmindedly flipping through a box of old family photos in the basement of his childhood home in Kansas City. Just hours before, at a family dinner, his father had collapsed in front of him and had to be rushed to the hospital. That night Morby still felt the shock and fear lodged in his bones. So he gazed at the images until one of the pictures jumped out at him: his father as a young man, proud and strong and filled with confidence, posing on a lawn with his shirt off. This was in January of 2020. As the months went on and the world dramatically changed around him, Morby felt an eerie similarity between his feelings of that night and the atmosphere of those spring days. Fear, anxiety, hope and resilience all churning together. The themes began twisting in his mind. History, trauma and the grand fight against time. Having the courage to dream, even while knowing the tragedy that often awaits those who dare to dream. While his father regained his strength, Morby meditated on these ideas. And then, he headed to Memphis. He moved into the Peabody Hotel and spent his days paying tribute and genuflecting to the dreamers he admired. In the evening, he would return to his room and document his ideas on a makeshift recording set-up, with just his guitar and a microphone. The songs, elegiac in nature, befitting all he had seen, poured out of him. Produced by Sam Cohen (who also worked on Morby’s Singing Saw and Oh My God), This Is A Photograph features musical contributions from longtime staples of Morby’s live band, as well as old friends and new collaborators alike. If Oh My God saw Morby getting celestial and in constant motion and Sundowner was a study in localized intent, This Is A Photograph finds Morby making an Americana paean, a visceral life and death, blood on the canvas outpouring. As Morby reminds us early on, time is undefeated. So what do we do while we’re still here? This is a photograph of that sense of yearning.
SEULGI’s debut solo EP, released after eight years with the massively popular K-pop girl group Red Velvet, is unlike anything the five-piece has ever done. It opens with the title track—a spooky whisper-seduction not unlike Selena Gomez’s biggest singles. (When she belts later in the track, Destiny’s Child’s balladic moments might be a more direct comparison.) Then: strings, a crashing crescendo around the bass-blasting “Dead Man Runnin’.” The retro R&B of “Bad Boy, Sad Girl” partners SEULGI’s breathiness with the album’s sole feature, rapper BE’O. “Los Angeles” is yet another detour—smoke machine techno. Where Red Velvet excels at all things bright and ebullient, *28 Reasons* showcases an edgier side of one of the group’s most distinct talents.
Santi White did a lot of the work on what would become her fourth album, *Spirituals*, at a quiet cabin about an hour outside Vancouver. “It was like me and a woodpecker and some chickens,” she tells Apple Music. But after a long, pandemic-induced stretch stuck inside, tending house and caring for three young children, White felt adrift from herself and her art in ways only isolation could resolve. “It was like the only opportunity to find my way back to myself was through art,” she says. “So, it was really more of a lifeline I was weaving.” Like all White’s work, *Spirituals* is bright and punky and eclectic, bridging gaps between collaborators like Rostam Batmanglij and The Weeknd affiliate Illangelo, dance producer SBTRKT and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner. But there’s also a heaviness to it that feels new, if redemptive. The title came in a flash. “I realized that these songs were doing the same things for me that traditional spirituals had done for slaves,” she says, “allowing me to experience freedom and transcendence and moving toward evolution through music.” The bird was both a welcome visitor and a kind of guiding spirit. “What’s interesting about the woodpecker is that it burrows beneath the surface like it’s going for something deeper,” she says. “Sometimes they’re not even pecking for food. Sometimes they’re just sending out sound as a signal for mates. And I was so much thinking about being in my own rhythm. That’s what this period was really about: redefining my rhythm during this crazy, tumultuous time.” Here, she provides a track-by-track glimpse into the mood and making of *Spirituals*. **“My Horror”** “It was about being stuck in that role that was just too small to fit my whole self. Like, during lockdown, just being mother all the time—washing dishes and changing diapers and cooking and cleaning. And that’s it. No time to think, no time to shower, no time to sleep. So, it’s the redundancy of this task-oriented thing and not getting a chance to be the me that I am. But it’s also the climate of a world where everything’s so heavy that people have just chosen to disconnect, whether it’s living in the metaverse or doing drugs or just being deep in social media world rather than the real world. Like, what’s it like when everybody around you is just walking dead or sleepwalking—where you’re living an existence where nobody’s actually turned on? I actually did a series of photos that I called my Mom series. There’s one of me standing in front of the refrigerator in a veil with my kids. But there’s another one where I’m standing by the pool, and my kids are swimming, and I’m on fire with a drink in my hands.” **“Nothing”** “If you’re a Black woman, if you’re a woman, if you’re anyone who ever feels unseen, well, what’s the effect of living with that daily? How does that affect who you turn into? From being a child to a grown-up even—what are the things you didn’t even know you were carrying? I think ‘Nothing’ touched on all that for me in a way that was very personal but really connected me to \[Black Lives Matter\] and the struggle outside. And I cried. I was really able to emote finally. It felt really good.” **“High Priestess”** “I wanted to make a song that felt punk in a futuristic way. And I tried so many different things to just get the energy right, including some really bad moves with guitars and stuff that I immediately took out. A big thing I always set out to do in Santigold music is take things that you would never expect to go together and find a way for them to exist together. And I think that’s what’s exciting—for me making the music and for the listener too.” **“Ushers of the New World”** “It’s about us taking responsibility for the future. And instead of trying to tear people down for being uncomfortable, figuring out if we could just look at ourselves and be, like, ‘Hey, *I’m* uncomfortable. Where is this coming from? What’s my trauma? How can I move through this?’ I think that’s the way to create the future that we want. I’ve been reading a lot. More books than I’ve read in a long time—I don’t usually read ’cause I have so many children! We’ve been focusing on policy and legislation for hundreds of years, and we haven’t really gotten nearly where we need to. It’s really that we need to start focusing on our trauma and what we’re bringing to the table and being able to work through that—to work together.” **“Witness”** “I wanted there to be an ethereal quality in many of the songs. ‘Witness’ has it. It’s almost like you’re going through dimensions, or like you’re stuck in the webbing between dimensions.” **“Shake”** “That was just a surprise. I never would’ve thought I would’ve picked a beat like that. And I literally just started singing, ‘Shake/Ooh, shake.’ It was not a voice that I think I’ve used on a song before. And it doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever written. That energy—it’s almost like being enraptured.” **“The Lasty”** “It was a fictional story based on George Floyd. In my mind, I created a character who was a regular, nondescript type of person—you know, that nobody was paying attention to. And all these other people had gone ahead and surpassed him and gone beyond him, and he hadn’t stepped into his power yet. And then, all of a sudden, there’s an opportunity where he could be the one to save everybody. ‘Lasty’ is just a word I made up. It has a dual meaning. It’s the person who’s last and also the person who lasts.” **“No Paradise”** “Yes, we’ve been struggling, and things are hard, and we’ve been struggling for generations, honestly. But it’s not for nothing. Like, there’s power in that struggle. There’s resilience that has been shown over and over again. I love the bridge of that song because it sounded like a protest to me—a celebration of the fight. And, of course, it’s referring to that old religious idea of an afterlife where you’re finally rewarded with your peace and your riches. But it’s also about making the changes you need to make in the present.” **“Ain’t Ready”** “As a kid, I did go to church some with my mom mostly, and I did not like it. I thought her church was really boring and stale. It wasn’t me. But my dad’s family was from Baltimore, and his grandma was a pastor, and my great aunt was the organist, and that church was awesome. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a church where it’s got all the ushers dressed in white, and the music is going, and the people are catching the Spirit and falling out. Some people speak in tongues, some people are fainting, and the usher’s job is just to hold them up and fan them as they’re enraptured, you know? So, I pictured these ushers holding this woman. And the woman is in the process of this ascension, and she’s falling out. And that woman is me, but the ushers are me too. So, it’s like my song to myself. Like, ‘You’ve got what you need to do everything you need to do here.’” **“Fall First”** “‘Fall First’ was a song that I started with Doc McKinney, who’s one of my oldest writing buddies. He and I are both like old punkers at heart. And so, we started ‘Fall First’ and just decided to do whatever we wanted. And later, I handed it over to Rostam. He has such good taste and is always excited to mess around. And he just took it *everywhere*.”
The mythology surrounding 23-year-old King Princess precedes them. Mikaela Mullaney Straus exploded on the indie-pop scene with their 2018 single “1950,” leading to a debut LP in 2019, *Cheap Queen*, a thoughtful, vintage-sounding modern-pop record centered on young, queer relationships. On their second full-length, they’ve matured into the raspy, raucous rock star of their dreams, unafraid to place gorgeous hooks atop asymmetrical production (“I Hate Myself, I Want to Party,” and the closer, “Let Us Die,” which features the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins). “I’m in the same situation as when I was writing *Cheap Queen*,” they tell Apple Music. “I’m in a relationship, I want to write music, but I’m not writing about heartbreak, really. I’m writing about my heart being broken because I’m sad every day.” Before it was worked on by star producers like Aaron Dessner and Mark Ronson, *Hold On Baby* began when King Princess linked up with Phoebe Bridgers’ producer Ethan Gruska. “He would do an impression of his grandpa that was really loving and sweet and funny. He’d say, ‘Hold on, baby,’” they say. “I wrote this record as a reminder that it’s OK to be messy, that we’re living through hellish, hellish times, and especially when you’re a young person, it’s so easy to get lost in the sauce. I’ve used art and songwriting to heal myself so many times, to put myself back together, and to appreciate how messy, ridiculous, and foolish I am—and it’s OK to be all those things. We’re all in it together, boo.’” Below, King Princess walks Apple Music through their sophomore LP, *Hold On Baby*, track by track. **“I Hate Myself, I Want to Party”** “Parts of this record were written with Ethan and then another big chunk of it was with \[The National’s\] Aaron Dessner. I rolled up to Aaron’s studio compound \[in Upstate New York\], and I was like, ‘I don’t know this man. I’ve been doing writing sessions since I was 14 years old. I am really uninterested in meeting new people.’ I wrote with him—this was during lockdown. I was in New York, staying at my childhood home with my girlfriend and my best friend, literally playing PS5 every day in my underwear. Looking back, I was like, ‘Oh, I had depression.’ I was addressing these feelings of being a musician. You go out and people do treat you differently. You get this gratification. It feeds the ego, to go out and to party, to be adored onstage. I do think that, partially, that’s healthy and, partially, that’s ridiculous. Because I want to be a star.” **“Cursed”** “‘Cursed’ was written with my friend Dave Hamelin. I was being made to meet all these men. I got to this nasty-ass studio with no windows and a fucking keyboard. There were no \[other\] instruments. We just started talking, and I played him some of the music from the record—later on, we couldn’t write there. I went to his house, and we immediately started writing ‘Cursed.’ He managed the production, and I was writing. I played some drums. I love this song.” **“Winter Is Hopeful”** “I wanted it to be a song about what it feels like to be in a relationship and to stumble—like, constantly stumbling over words. We like the feeling that you’re battling the weather. It’s fucking cold, and you want to bundle up and go outside and feel like you’ve done something. It takes effort to go outside. In the summer, it feels like it’s this weird daze. I don’t really like sunlight. I like when it rains.” **“Little Bother”** “‘Little Bother’ started off because Fousheé and I were DMing. I heard her song that Lil Wayne was on, and I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ I just DM’d her, and I was like, ‘I want to be friends.’ We went in and, all day, we were trying out different stuff. At the very end, \[songwriter\] Zach \[Fogarty\] played this guitar loop he had recorded already, and I was like, ‘This is the vibe.’ We started writing this beautiful verse melody. I wrote the chorus, and we ended up with this song. I’d love to write with other artists.” **“For My Friends”** “I wrote this song with Ethan and Amy Allen. I had just gotten home from the New York trip where I was depressed and playing PS5 every day. My best friend from high school had moved around the corner and my other best friend was in the city. Those are my two girls. When I wasn’t sitting around depressed, the thing that was getting me out was hanging out with them. I wrote this song as a love letter to them, saying, like, ‘I’m always leaving, but I’m always coming back.’” **“Crowbar”** “Aaron wrote that piano line and played it for me. What’s funny is that he had sent that piano line to Ethan, like, months and months ago, unrelated to me, and Ethan had done something with it. So, that piano line was actually part of our little family. It is a love letter to the pillars of strength in your life. It’s reflecting on doing a lot of drugs, being really fucked up all the time, and not prioritizing what I find to be important, which is comfort, safety, art, rock, and roll. I was not prioritizing the things that were important.” **“Hold On Baby Interlude”** “I like for all of my interludes to feel like they’re going to be full songs and then they’re not. I thought it should kind of surmise what the album is about, with the interlude, and bring that melody as a motif back. I’m a woman of the theater, so I love a reprise.” **“Too Bad”** “I wrote ‘Too Bad’ sobbing. People are not going to like you in this life and that is just facts. You are not going to be a fucking patron saint. Anybody who tries to be a patron saint gets fucking slammed for being an asshole. All of the people who come forth and say, ‘I’m nice’—that is the death sentence of public figures.” **“Change the Locks”** “I wrote this song with Aaron, and it was kind of going to be canned, but then my queen warrior angel Jen Knoepfle called me and was like, ‘You need to finish this song.’ I finished it with Dave Hamelin, a hilarious French Canadian ex-indie musician/now-producer. He was like, ‘OK, we’re getting into the Lilith Fair section of the album.’ It just became a joke from there, like, ‘Fine. I need the people to feel like they’re menstruating at Lilith Fair \[when they listen to it\].’” **“Dotted Lines”** “I wrote this with Amy Allen, Nick Long, Tobias \[Jesso Jr.\], and Shawn Everett. Then Dave worked on it because it was going to get scrapped from the album, and then Dave was like, ‘Let me make it the Kate Bush fantasy that it deserves.’ All I was listening to when this album was being written was Kate Bush.” **“Sex Shop”** “I wrote this as a piano ballad, and then I asked my dad to record the vocals. He recorded a vocal on the piano and then I sent it to Ethan, and I said, ‘What can we do with this? This is bigger than a stripped-down ballad.’ He worked on it, and he turned it into this winding scene, like a crazy thing. Then I did the drum programming and played guitar, and it just went from there.” **“Let Us Die”** “Mark really loved this one. I wrote the chorus alone, and then I went in with Ethan and we wrote the verses together and the bridge. This is the type of song that I grew up listening to, the type of song I’ve always wanted to write: concise and emotionally relevant but also rocking. Then Mark enlisted the help of Taylor Hawkins to play drums on it, which was incredible. Taylor was so wonderful and was really excited to play on it. We FaceTimed and did a remote session, and I was sitting in my dad’s studio, and he was playing on it. I was fucking enamored. It was the thing I always wanted—real musicians that I look up to, playing on my music. It probably is my favorite song on the record. \[Also, when we were mixing it and\] we were trying to get the chorus to slap, my dad walked in and he’s like, ‘Just make the verses mono and then make the chorus stereo.’ We both looked at each other and we were like, ‘Oh.’ We took my dad’s note and then it completely changed the whole song. Dad did that.”
Rather than a set of songs, think of Colombian-born, Berlin-based artist Lucrecia Dalt’s eighth album, *¡Ay!*, as a room cast in sound: smokey, low-lit, seductive but vaguely threatening; a place where fantasy and reality meet in deep, inky shadow. Dalt’s takes on the bolero, son, ranchera, and merengue that form the romantic spine of Latin pop are genuine enough to feel folkloric and off-kilter enough to conjure the art and experimental music she’s known for—a contrast that pulls *¡Ay!* along on its hovering, dreamlike course. Squint and you can imagine hearing “Dicen” in a dusty bar somewhere or swaying to “La Desmesura” or “Bochinche.” But like the great exotica artists of the ’50s, Dalt teeters between the foreign and the comforting so gracefully, you don’t recognize how strange she is until you’re in her pocket. *¡Ay!* is lounge music for the beyond.
Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s third album was born out of lockdown sessions building ideas on GarageBand. With the Melbourne group unable to convene and jam—or tour previous album *Sideways to New Italy*—while COVID ran amok, files were swapped, each bursting with ideas and musical freedom. The result is RBCF’s most expansive album yet, one that came together in a flurry of creative excitement once the quintet were able to meet up and play together. While their trademark acoustic-driven indie pop is still in play (“Saw You at the Eastern Beach,” “The Way It Shatters”), there are new twists, such as the smoky ’70s grooves that permeate “Dive Deep.” Lyrically the group also explores new territory, with environmental concerns (“Tidal River” with the line “Jet ski over the pale reef”) and the horrific bushfires that engulfed Australia’s east coast in 2019 and 2020 (“Bounce Off the Bottom”) adding a discontented edge to the record.
While initial ideas for Endless Rooms were traded online during long spells spent separated by Australia’s strict lockdowns, the album was truly born during small windows of freedom in which the band would decamp to a mud-brick house in the bush around two hours north of Melbourne built by the extended Russo family in the 1970s. There, its 12 tracks took shape, informed to such an extent by the acoustics and ambience of the rambling lakeside house that they decided to record the album there (and put the house on the album cover). For the first time, the band self-produced the record (alongside engineer, collaborator and old friend, Matt Duffy). The result is a collection of songs permeated by the spirit of the place; punctuated by field recordings of rain, fire, birds, and wind. "It's almost an anti-concept album," says the band. "The Endless Rooms of the title reflects our love of creating worlds in our songs. We treat each of them as a bare room to be built up with infinite possibilities."
Ever since an early Obongjayar demo first surfaced on SoundCloud in 2016, it’s been clear that Steven Umoh, the man behind the moniker, possesses a completely unique talent. Known to his friends simply as ‘OB’, the Nigerian-born, London-based musician pens stirring and spiritual lyrics, while commanding a distinctive voice that flits between rap, song and spoken word. With afrobeats, soul and hip-hop influences, he has created a bold, genre-defiant musicality. Despite rich successes over the last few years; OB has never felt ready to release an album, until now, and his debut full-length, Some Nights I Dream of Doors represents a real levelling up for Obongjayar. Across twelve tracks, he deftly moves through diverse sounds and subcultures while navigating a wealth of personal and political topics. OB recently featured on the latest Little Simz album and the most recent Pa Salieu project.
In the winter of 2019, Belle and Sebastian had an album’s worth of material ready to record and were preparing to decamp from Scotland to California to make their ninth studio album. You know what happens next. “Once the lockdown started, everything else got forgotten, and then we very much went inside,” lead singer and songwriter Stuart Murdoch tells Apple Music. They kept busy, of course, collaborating with fans online for the pandemic-specific “Protecting the Hive” project and assembling the live compilation *What to Look for in Summer*. “But I don\'t think any of us were really interested in making an album remotely from each other,” says singer/violinist Sarah Martin. Once they were able to convene in person nearly a year later, the band decided to transform their Glasgow rehearsal space into a studio and make their first LP in their hometown since 2000. Murdoch still had his reservations, but they turned out to be moot. “A vocal booth could be in San Francisco, it could be in Cape Town, it doesn\'t matter,” he says. “It becomes like a womb for you to imagine new songs.” And that’s very much what happened—they scrapped most of the songs from the original batch and let *A Bit of Previous* take shape organically. “The record was entirely different to the one that would\'ve been made if we had gone to Los Angeles,” Murdoch says. “We could write in the studio. We could start songs in any direction we wanted to. We could start the song with just a drum beat and build it up from there. Or we could bring everybody in and have everybody perform. It was a very flexible, very creative time.” That result is 12 songs that, like the LP\'s title playfully suggests, represent the band in classic form, reflecting on the present and occasionally looking to the past, with a mix of wit and tenderness. Here, Murdoch, Martin, and keyboardist Chris Geddes speak through each of the album\'s songs. **“Young and Stupid”** Stuart Murdoch: “It\'s a very happy song for me. Although the lyrics might feel like, ‘I was yelling in my sleep/Crying, feeling weak,’ when you write a song where you appear to be moaning about your life, it\'s a sort of a therapy in a way. I wrote this song very quickly, on the way into the studio. And immediately with myself and Brian \[McNeill\], the engineer, we just set up a drum machine, and we put down very basic chords so that we could map it out. And we wrote the song almost. To capture something so quickly—even though in the present time the feeling seems to be down—that\'s part of the beauty and the nature of music and writing songs is that you can capture a feeling and still come out the other end feeling happier.” **“If They\'re Shooting at You”** Murdoch: “I had the music idea for this a couple of years ago. It was around about the same time that Bob \[Kildea, bassist\] brought a song, his own musical idea. This was during the \[*How to Solve Our Human Problems*\] EPs. It became mostly Bob\'s song, and I wrote the words for it, and it became \[2018 single\] \'Poor Boy.’ So I took a little bit of my tune and slotted it in because I felt that the vibe was the same. The thing is, though, afterwards, the original feel kept going around in my head. And I thought, \'I want to extend this and make this a song.\' And so that\'s what we did with this one.” **“Talk to Me, Talk to Me”** Sarah Martin: “I kept going to Sainsbury\'s \[supermarket\] on Friday nights, inexplicably, where they play great records. And there was one time they were playing like a series of Style Council songs while I was in trying to find pasta. When I was driving home, that tune kind of popped into my head, so I made a rough demo of it. It just kept niggling me that I thought Stuart would sing it better than I would.” Murdoch: “As soon as I heard the tune, I was gone. I loved this right away. I could see the possibilities for it. I was thinking about somebody who was corresponding with me, somebody who wasn\'t in fact very well. And so I kind of deliberately tried to slip into their mind and tell the story from their perspective.” **“Reclaim the Night”** Martin: “It\'s about having to kind of carry on bumping into people who are problematic because they\'re friends of friends. And you just want to kind of go through life without having to engage with them, but you can\'t make your friends stop being friends with people who are assholes.” **“Do It for Your Country”** Murdoch: “I do imagine trying to impart wisdom. And sometimes it\'s to an imaginary person, sometimes it\'s to a person from quite deep in the past where it\'s almost unfair in a sense when you think, ‘Okay, well, I know this stuff now. This is what I want to say to you back then.’ But it\'s quite a simple song. It\'s a loving kind of speech, or something. They have that phrase, \'l\'esprit d\'escalier\'—the things you thought about on the stairs, things you thought about afterwards that you wish you\'d said to somebody. And so that is an aspect of songwriting—my songwriting, anyway.” **“Prophets on Hold”** Murdoch: “This was another one, like \'Young and Stupid,\' that would never have existed if we\'d gone to LA. It was a walk-in song. I had the original chorus just as I came in, and played it on the piano. I thought it was going to be the greatest song I ever wrote. I really did. Sometimes you think that. And whereas \'Young and Stupid\' was simple but came out great, this one I thought was going to be great and came out okay. I mean, I think everyone did a good job. But I thought it was going to be a like a soft disco, soulful classic.” **“Unnecessary Drama”** Murdoch: “I took a similar stance that I did with \'Talk to Me\' and decided to write about a correspondence. This correspondence actually spanned time, and the person had sort of changed during the life of the correspondence. And I told the person that I was going to try and write the song. She thought it was funny. The thing I love about this track is that the guitar riff and the melody, which were both provided by Bob, seemed to dance with each other, but they lock in at the same time. And that to me makes a thing interesting.” **“Come On Home”** Chris Geddes: “I never really write complete songs. I\'ll just have the sketch of something, bring it in, teach it to a couple of people, and try and have a groove going. And then hope that one of the singers walks in and says, \'Oh, that sounds quite good.’ But in this instance, the verse that Sarah sings and the whole kind of feel of the track popped in my head when I was on my way to or from a football match. Because of laziness and trying to avoid writing lyrics, I only had those couple of lines, which I gave to Sarah. And then we were playing it as the band, Stuart kind of just took the groove and wrote his verses over it.” **“A World Without You”** Martin: “It\'s nostalgic for kind of times when you connect with somebody. It\'s kind of based on the last episode of *Fleabag*. It\'s based on Fleabag and the priest. Just like when you have a connection with somebody that neither of you is really reachable, but just kind of a memorable moment with people.” **“Deathbed of My Dreams”** Geddes: “I think Stevie \[Jackson\] wanted us to try and do something that sounded like a Frank Sinatra record.” Stuart Murdoch: “It\'s one that just really took off for me with the arrangement. Chris did a pseudo sort of string part, but it sounded rich. And it was a really nice setting for Stevie\'s voice.” **“Sea of Sorrow”** Murdoch: “Most of the songs are very current. They were all written pretty much for the record and written about that time. \'Sea of Sorrow,\' the tune for that was a few years older. And I had it under the pseudonym ‘Nice Waltz Number One.’ We don\'t write too many waltzes, I don\'t think. So that tune was in my head, and then suddenly I had a notion to write some words.” **“Working Boy in New York City”** Murdoch: “‘Working Boy in New York City’ is more about a San Francisco thing, but maybe San Francisco didn\'t scan. It\'s about a friend of mine that I became friends with when I came to America for the first time in the early \'90s. But it\'s best not to be too literal, and so I placed it in New York. And there\'s other elements that come in that go just beyond his story. But there\'s a line from his favorite song, which was ‘Downtown\' by Petula Clark. And I specifically remember him one day describing what that song meant to him.”
After Chris of Christine and the Queens’ mother died, the French alt-pop star began to notice red cars everywhere—and almost always in moments of internal shift. Those sightings give context to the title of his third album, *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*, and inspired the name and artistic persona he would embrace thereafter. “For me, the red car was a way to encourage my spirit to lift a bit higher when I was a bit desperate,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every record is a deep, deep wave of transformation both inwards and outwards. I feel actually braver than before, a bit terrified, but in a true gutsy way.” *Redcar*—the follow-up to 2018’s *Chris*—presents the artist’s most thrilling transformation to date. It’s also the most daring Christine and the Queens album so far: a high-concept collection of roof-raising ’80s synth-pop and funk inspired by artists such as The Cure and Fad Gadget. Sung almost entirely in French, it’s theatrical (the propulsive, operatic “Tu sais ce qu’il me faut”), spooky (“La chanson du chevalier”), shimmering, sensual, and frequently otherworldly, with electrifying guitar solos and R&B along the way. And yet, for all its ’80s hallmarks—drum machines, dazzling synths, songs cloaked in reverb (a throwback, too, to 2014 debut *Chaleur Humaine*)—the album was crafted with a rock ’n’ roll spirit in mind. Moved by the spontaneous artistic process of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, Chris wrote, recorded, and produced this album alone at home within just two weeks, spending no more than an hour on each song. The result is an album that feels epic and alive, and often like an outpouring, as an artist who has always committed to evolving in front of us moves through change. After the farewell—to a lover or a past self—of album opener “Ma bien aimée bye bye,” these songs explore intimacy, the search for meaning and connection (including the Sylvester-referencing “Looking for love”), and stepping into your true self. Loss, too, colors the album, but on “rien dire”—one of the album’s most powerful songs, and as much of a gut-punch as 2020’s “People, I’ve been sad”—Redcar reaches a hopeful conclusion: Love, and the people we love, are never truly gone. “I think true love is a conversation that never is interrupted, and by ‘never’ I mean not even by death,” he says. “That’s my current faith I have right now. That song is a conversation I have with someone who is not there anymore.”
On *Small World*, Joseph Mount shrinks his scope. Whereas its predecessor, 2019’s *Metronomy Forever*, was a sprawling 17 tracks, *Small World* consists of just nine. “Often, I want to do the opposite of what I’ve just done,” Mount tells Apple Music. “I wanted to be really musically focused and concise.” This album’s title is, too, a reflection of the shrunken world in which it was made. Written in summer 2020—and recorded between November of that year and early 2021—these songs were crafted in the thick of the pandemic and explore loneliness (the Elliott Smith-meets-Red Hot Chili Peppers “Loneliness on the run”), the optimism we clung to (“Things will be fine”), and the incomprehensible weight of it all (“Life and Death”). This isn’t, however, a record to transport us back to the worst moments of lockdown. “The way I made music during the pandemic was to escape from feeling like I was in a pandemic,” says Mount. “This album is designed to be listened to when you’re free.” The soothing and organic sound of *Small World* might surprise listeners who’ve been with Metronomy since day one—not least because of Mount’s voice, which has dropped a few octaves, sounding at times like Benjamin Biolay’s or Serge Gainsbourg’s. “When I first started writing songs, I imagined I was a producer and that, one day, I would get a female singer to sing them,” says Mount who has, of course, since produced for artists including Robyn and Jessie Ware. “I would always sing in a falsetto voice and really high up. Even though it was never necessarily comfortable, it’s just what I did. This was me trying to be a bit more mature. I want to grow up with Metronomy. You’ve got to develop it and turn it into what you want it to be.” Read on as Mount guides us through his seventh album, one song at a time. **“Life and Death”** “This was the last thing I wrote for the record. I felt like I’d mined the experiences of being locked down for nice songs. And I hadn’t really done anything that acknowledged the actual gravity of the situation, and just how horrible it is and how many people died. This is my song, which is supposed to be a bit despairing about everything. But like all the songs on the record, the music isn’t supposed to make you feel bad or upset. It’s meant to be supportive.” **“Things will be fine”** “The first thing I wrote for the record. It encapsulated everything I wanted it to be, in terms of the sound and the lyrics. I’ve got two children and I was having to say to them, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ But I had no knowledge that backed that up. It’s also about when you’re young, and for the first time you realize that the world is quite a horrible place. And then you realize you’ve been protected by your parents, which is what they’re there to do.” **“It’s good to be back”** “I was imagining this character, a musician who’s in their late thirties, trying to write a record that connects with young people. I was imagining a fictitious conversation with a record label: ‘Oh, you want to reach the kids? You need to use drum machines and synthesizers.’ And then doing that but putting in an acoustic guitar. Which, to me, is this really fun juxtaposition of ideas. The song was about being back at home, and about when our tours were canceled or postponed. When you come back from being away, it always takes a week or two to lock back into the same routines with one another.” **“Loneliness on the run”** “‘Loneliness on the run’ is a song about being far away from people that you love. And wanting them to try and manage their bad feelings. I wrote something about visualizing your loneliness, or your anger, and then throwing it out the window or chasing it away. So, that was the idea. At the end of this song, I guess the album does shift a gear and it becomes a little less introspective and starts forgetting the bad stuff.” **“Love Factory”** “I liked the idea of industrializing love, making it this thing which is churned out. This factory is operating at astonishing capacity. We are doing incredibly well at creating love here. It’s supposed to be a relentless song to reflect that.” **“I lost my mind”** “It’s about feeling like you are doubting your own sanity. It’s not something that I’ve felt, but during the pandemic, it was something that I was very aware of—how friends of ours in quite different situations were just in apartments, on their own, feeling very isolated and out of touch. I wanted it to feel like it was following that in the music as well. It does wig out, and I decided to put a whistling sound in, which helped push it over the edge.” **“Right on time”** “The other thing about imagining where I want to be in a few years is also this awareness that you can’t keep writing songs about falling for people because it’s happened. It happened a long time ago. Having said that, the next two songs on the album are exactly that. But I think they’re going to be the last songs I write like it. It’s just another mindlessly optimistic song about enjoying the sunshine. I remember the summer of 2020. It was super hot. Everyone suddenly had this realization that, yes, you can be unable to see your family and be suffering with all kinds of stuff, but it’s unbelievably sunny and nice outside. Just finding somewhere where you can have the sun hitting your face makes you feel better.” **“Hold me tonight” (feat. Porridge Radio)** “The first demo I have of the song is just my voice and a guitar. It was a Velvet Underground-style thing I was thinking of: very sparse. Relatively near the end of recording the album, I was listening to this song, and I was like, ‘We should just restart and have someone else singing it.’ I thought it should be a girl’s voice and they should be singing about their side of this story, which is, of course, going to be that you love each other and everything’s great. I sent Dana \[Margolin, of Porridge Radio\] the track and what she sent back was this totally ruined situation where she turned the whole thing on its head. She turned it into something absolutely genuine for her, and it rescued the song for me in a way.” **“I have seen enough”** “I thought I’d try and write a song in French, and the idea for it was about the horror of life—but how you can’t look away. It’s too beautiful at the same time. And in the end, the French wasn’t really good enough, so it’s English! To nutshell it, it’s about just enjoying and appreciating what you have around you. And I guess the way that it would relate to the pandemic is just all of the horrors that were going on and still being able to find pleasurable things. Finding happiness within it all.”
A few months before releasing his third solo album, Liam Gallagher told Apple Music to expect a little of the unexpected. “Some of it’s odd,” he said. “I’d say 80 percent of the record is peculiar but still good, and 20 percent of it is classic. If you’re gonna do something a bit different, do it in these times, and if people don’t dig it, blame it on COVID.” On *C’MON YOU KNOW*, “odd” doesn’t quite mean a journey into the outer rims of acid trance or vaporwave, but, chiefly guided by trusted producer/songwriter Andrew Wyatt, Gallagher is noticeably freer of spirit. After two albums of bedding himself into a solo career with gently psychedelic rock that didn’t range too far from Oasis or Beady Eye, Liam is now deftly toggling between polemic punk and weightless dub on “I’m Free.” He told Apple Music that he’d bought a tepee to help cope with the claustrophobia of lockdown and, by building from a children’s choir to a grand, strobing finale, opener “More Power” suggests he spent those outdoor nights picking up signals from Spiritualized’s richly orchestrated cosmos. Other more intrepid moments include deeply psychedelic pop (“Better Days”), elegantly psychedelic soul (“The Joker”), and limber funk rock (“Diamond in the Dark”). While the music peers in new directions, the voice remains unmistakable—and in decent health. There’s a familiar snarl and swagger to “I’m Free” and the trippy, indie groove of “Don’t Go Halfway,” but Gallagher’s sometimes-overlooked warmth and reassurance are also regularly in play. He never likes slapping definitive meaning on the words he sings, preferring that listeners take what they want from the songs, and in a post-pandemic age there’s plenty to draw from the piano-driven heart-tugger “Too Good for Giving Up”: “Look how far you’ve come/Stronger than the damage done/Step out of the darkness unafraid.” During “Don’t Go Halfway,” he sings, “You were all thumbs/Through the dark days/When your time comes/Don’t go halfway.” On a record released a few months before his 50th birthday, Gallagher is heeding his own advice and emerging as a man whose horizons stretch further than ever.
Trap and classical touches ignite the group’s K-pop fireworks.
There’s a light but pervasive melancholy that surrounds *FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE*, Brian Eno’s 22nd solo album—a sense of weightlessness that feels both blissful and a little threatening. Are we cruising safely through the clouds or are our wings about to burn (“Icarus or Blériot”)? Are our lives too busy to consider the microscopic worms in the ground beneath our feet, especially when they don’t participate in capitalism (“Who Gives a Thought”)? How long will the world go on without us (“Garden of Stars”)? As much as these songs are elegies for a vanishing future, they’re also beautiful meditations on the fragility of the present—a mode Eno has been working in comfortably since the mid-’70s. The sound design is as beautiful and expansive as you’d expect, and Eno’s voice—an underrated instrument—is both common and quietly transcendent, the sound of a boy wandering an empty earth. He’s always interesting. But this is one of the first times in years he’s sounded so vital.
There is a way a voice can cut through the fascia of reality, cleaving through habit into the raw nerve of experience. Nika Roza Danilova, the singer, songwriter, and producer who since 2009 has released music as Zola Jesus, wields a voice that does that. When you hear it, it is like you are being summoned -- not to somewhere new, but to a place that's already wrapped inside you, somewhere previously obscured from conscious experience. This place has been buried because it tends to hold pain, but it's also a gift, because once it's opened, once you're inside of it, it can show you the truth. Zola Jesus's new album, Arkhon, finds new ways of losing that submerged, stalled pain. Not long after she had started writing the songs that would comprise the record, Danilova found herself stuck in a creative barrens, a spell of writer's block more stifling than any she'd experienced before. "It got to the point where I couldn't even listen to music. Everything sounded the same," she says. On previous albums, Danilova had largely played the role of auteur, meticulously crafting every aspect of Zola Jesus's sound and look. This time, she realized that her habitual need for control was sealing her out of her art. When the frustration of being unable to create became intolerable, she took a leap of faith and reached out for help, something she had never done this early in an album’s lifetime. "At some point, I had to work with other people. I needed new blood. I needed somebody else." Danilova sent her demos to producer Randall Dunn, known for his work with Sunn O))) and on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for the film Mandy. She also began collaborating with drummer and percussionist Matt Chamberlain, whose prior work appears on albums by Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. His daring, askance patterning would come to help define the sound of the record. Relinquishing a degree of control over her music and hearing others contribute to it began to thaw the creative block that had kept her from working. "I felt that I was able to finally hear my music in a context that was broader than what I could do on my own," Danilova says. "I'm letting people interpret my musical ideas and my songs in a way that is supporting everything, but also expanding it into a sound that I never would have been able to think of on my own. That was so rewarding to hear." Arkhon runs the spectrum from songs whose weight lies in their bare simplicity, like "Desire," an elegiac piano composition about the end of a relationship that was recorded acoustically in a single take, to songs that pulse with dense, evolving structures, like "Sewn," a knotty and glittering electroacoustic composition written in total collaboration with Dunn and Chamberlain. Between those poles, "Dead & Gone" boasts a lush string arrangement by Danilova's friend and touring violist Louise Woodward; the overtones of her composition carve abundant, fertile space for optimism and healing to bloom in the midst of overwhelming grief. The towering, groove-oriented track "The Fall" routes Danilova's demo vocals through a lacerating vocoder effect as it seeks out the delights of shaking loose stagnant pain. Throughout “Lost,” tight, interlocking percussion and samples of a Slovenian folk choir propel narratives of collective despair and mutual comfort in kind. Through these turns, Arkhon reveals itself as an album whose power derives from abandon. Both its turmoils and its pleasures take root in the body, letting individual consciousness dissolve into the thick of the beat. "When I look back at my work, I see there's a theme where I fixate on my fear of the unknown," says Danilova. "That really came into fruition for this record, because I had to let go of so much control. I had to surrender to whatever the outcome would be. That used to be really hard for me, and now I had no other choice." In her creative process, Danilova instead began forging a relationship with the unknown. Rather than try to hold Arkhon in its entirety at every moment of its creation, she began focusing on the direct experience of making work with others, allowing for spontaneous moments of unselfconscious play. After over a decade of classical voice training, she found that this shift enabled her to ease into her singing voice in new ways, leading her to greater flexibility and agility. "I had gone through a deeply transformational process of inner growth. That annihilated a lot of tension in my voice, because my whole attachment to things changed," she says. That process bears out across the record in the way the voice takes off from itself, splits from its core, tendrils out into currents of partial language and electronically mediated noise. In the rush, Arkhon unearths buried tools for bearing grief, loss, and disappointment. The album's title means "power" or "ruler" in ancient Greek, but it also has a specific valence within Gnosticism. "Arkons are a Gnostic idea of power wielded through a flawed god," says Danilova. "They taint and tarnish humanity, keeping them corrupted instead of letting them find their harmonious selves. I do feel like we are living in an arkhonic time; these negative influences are weighing extremely heavy on all of us. We're in a time of arkhons. There's power in naming that." Despite the darkness curled inside reality, there is power, too, in surrendering to what can't be pinned down, to the wild unfurling of the world in all its unforeseeable motion. That letting go is the crux of Arkhon, which marks a new way of moving and making for Zola Jesus. "There is a moment where you stop fighting with yourself. That's when things can really happen," Danilova says. "I was disarmed in a way where I just let the process make the record. I could enjoy being in the moment, putting that into the music and letting it unravel or evolve in its own way. To let it have its own story that I only had a part in telling."
5 Seconds of Summer began work on their fifth album without even realizing it. After its predecessor, 2020’s *CALM*, came out just after the pandemic shut the world’s borders, the four-piece found themselves with an empty calendar for the first time since their 2014 debut LP catapulted them to global stardom. In November 2020 they decamped to Joshua Tree in Southern California for 10 days, simply to explore new song ideas, with guitarist Michael Clifford producing the sessions at Rancho V recording studio. It was there that album opener “COMPLETE MESS”—which meditates on the worthwhile chaos of a relationship—came to fruition, the band emboldened by the absence of pressure and outside voices. Those sessions inadvertently marked the beginning of what would become *5SOS5*, an album that draws more on radio-friendly pop (“Flatline”) and the mature songwriting of Coldplay (“Bleach”) than the pop-punk with which the band first made their name. Co-produced by Clifford (a first for the band) with songwriting contributions from Michael Pollack and longtime collaborator John Feldmann, *5SOS5* finds the quartet in a reflective mood: “Take My Hand” is about embracing change and the fear that comes with it; “Me Myself & I” reflects on pushing away good things in your life because you think you can do everything yourself. The uptempo “Best Friends” celebrates friendship with a fittingly sugarcoated earworm melody, while “Older” is a tender piano-based ballad featuring a duet between vocalist Luke Hemmings and his fiancée, Sierra Deaton. Equal parts widescreen, anthemic, introverted, and atmospheric, *5SOS5* is the sound of a band feeling increasingly comfortable in their own skin.
recorded 100% live on August 29, 2021 at la Savonnerie, Brussels BE by Daniel Bleikolm Ma Clément: singing Anatole Damien: guitar; bass on 2, 8, 16, 18 Raphaël Desmarets: bass; guitar on 2, 8, 16, 18 Johannes Eimermacher: alto saxophone Eric Kinny: pedal steel Zach Phillips: rhodes, piano Gaspard Sicx: drums all songs written by Zach Phillips & Ma Clément except: "Paging Agent Starling": written by Quentin Moore "I'm a Place" & "To Be Gone": written by Zach Phillips mixed by Ryan Power mastered by Joe LaPorta album art & design by Jake Tobin MATH Interactive, 2022 THANK YOU: Christopher Forgues, Annie Loucka, Martino Morandi, Mathilde Besson, VOLTA, Daniel Bleikolm, Lucas Myers
Pale Waves’ third album is the sound of a band unafraid—and more importantly, unapologetic—about who they are. *Who Am I?*, released in 2021, saw lead vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie open up a more personal side to her songwriting, but its follow-up *Unwanted* delves even deeper, exploring betrayal, jealousy, depression, rage, addiction, loss—and on the heartbreaking “The Hard Way,” the suicide of a schoolmate. “It’s from me maturing and becoming more comfortable within my own skin that I can be more confident and open,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “I feel like with the first album, and even slightly with the second album, I was still so timid. As I grow up, I become more sure of myself and that\'s displayed through how much I\'m able to put out there for everyone to see and hear.” Sonically, too, *Unwanted* is a far tougher proposition than its predecessors. Tracks such as the middle-finger-up pop-punk of the title track and the classic-rock crunch of “Jealousy” hold back some of the Manchester quartet’s more ethereal synth-pop trademarks to deliver a heavier kick. “That was 100% a conscious decision,” Baron-Gracie says. “When the pandemic happened, we were so upset that we couldn\'t play live, and that definitely influenced the direction we went in with this record, because we knew that when we stepped back onstage, we wanted to have the best time. We wanted to have that more heavy sound sonically; we didn\'t want to play these slow, sad songs.” That’s not to say *Unwanted* is short on poignant moments (you can practically taste the grief that powers the epic ballad “Without You,” for instance), yet the roar that breaks through the pain is one of defiance. Read on as Baron-Gracie walks us through her band’s album. **“Lies”** “We’re easing fans into the transition—we’re placing them in the swimming pool, and we were putting them in the shallow end. Even though there’s something quite dark about the subject matter, it puts people in a good mood because it’s got this drive running through it. It’s so fun to watch people dance to it when we play live.” **“Unwanted”** “‘Unwanted’ really summarizes the overall record, too—the dark, traumatic themes that run throughout. Feelings of neglect, anger, vanity, jealousy, sadness, depression…a lot of worlds that I think Pale Waves haven\'t tapped into before. It was really important that we made this record because I feel as a woman in today\'s society, when we project these feelings, we get labeled crazy. If a man\'s angry, they’re seen as more confident because they know their point, they know what they want. Whereas when a woman\'s angry, she\'s a crazy bitch. I wanted to show other women that it’s OK to feel these things.” **“The Hard Way”** “It\'s such a traumatic story about an amazing young girl at my school who had so much potential, but she was being bullied and took her own life because of it. She couldn\'t take any more of the abuse. I feel partly responsible that I didn\'t step up when I was a child and I saw that happening. It’s something that’s really affected me throughout my life. I hope that me telling her story in some form will influence other people and show them that everyone\'s fragile and to be careful with your words and be careful with your actions, because you never know when you\'re pushing someone too far.” **“Jealousy”** “I wrote ‘Jealousy’ with Whakaio Taahi from Tonight Alive. I’d written a few songs with him and a lot of them were very soft and mellow and they just weren\'t sitting right with me. I didn\'t feel like this was the next Pale Waves record. And then one day I came in and he played the ‘Jealousy’ riff and I was like, ‘Oh my god, you genius. That is amazing. That is exactly the direction that I want to go in! Forget all these soppy songs that we\'re writing. Let\'s write about jealousy and make it this sexy, aggressive song!’” **“Alone”** “’I don\'t think I\'ve ever been as brutal as I am on this track. It’s about when you say no to someone and they just don\'t leave you alone. So many times—in clubs, in bars, in goddamn Tesco—where someone comes up to you and they\'re like, ‘Can I buy you a drink? Can I get your number?’ And you say, ‘Sorry, I\'m not interested.’ And they still get all handsy and physical with you. Do you not get the message? Don\'t touch me. It\'s as simple as that. Leave me alone. I\'m absolutely fine by myself without you. It’s the ultimate rejection song. I just channeled all those nights where I\'ve said no but they\'ve continued to harass me.” **“Clean”** “Even though there\'s a lot of negative emotions on the record, I really wanted a moment or two where there was some kind of positivity or some kind of hopeful agenda. I wanted to write a cheesy love song. Like a song that they would play in a movie when the couple was falling in love and decide to run away together. I wanted to capture those moments that you feel when you\'re falling in love. There\'s nothing quite like that thrill of the very start of a relationship where those feelings are growing.” **“Without You”** “I knew that I wanted a huge ballad on the record. I feel like this record, because it\'s so loud and it\'s so in-your-face, that this ballad had to be on the same level as tracks like ‘You\'re So Vain.’ It couldn\'t just be a ballad where I\'m on my guitar or on the piano again. It had to be dynamic and flow through the emotions. ‘Without You’ is about me losing someone so close to my heart that I struggle to comprehend how I can live life without them. It\'s the sad realization of you have to find a way to get through it and cope with it and realize that they aren\'t coming back.” **“Only Problem”** “‘Only Problem’ is about me having this constant thing in my life that I was always battling with and was always pulling me down. It was always something that I relied on in my states of feeling fragile and it brought me back up, but then it would always drop me back down. I had to learn and come to terms of removing that from my life for good. Alcohol would give me that fake confidence that you need when you feel insecure. There can be such reliance on that, and people in this industry normalize it, and it shouldn\'t be normalized. It can be abused, and I wanted to learn to live a life without it. So I removed it completely, and now I\'m much happier.” **“You’re So Vain”** “There\'s a lot of pop-punk on the record, which I love, but then you get to ‘You\'re So Vain’ and it\'s almost more classic rock and roll in a way. I wanted to push it more in this direction. We came up with the riff first and I was like, ‘Yes! That’s it!’ And then I was like, ‘OK, we need a subject matter that is going to work with this. It needs to be badass. It needs to be confident. It needs to be unapologetic…’ I feel like there\'s a lot of egotistical people in the music industry, people that I may have looked up to that I\'ve met and I\'ve figured out that they’re an awful person. I channeled my anger towards people\'s egos with this song. I wanted to take them down a step.” **“Reasons to Live”** “This has the dark and it has the light. The chorus is the light and verses are the dark. It\'s about when I was really struggling with my mental health. I felt like it was deteriorating and I felt really fragile, and then I found love that enabled me to see the light. Love pulled me back and showed me a new perspective on things. It helped me get healthier and helped me to really fall in love with things. Even to really fall in love with music again.” **“Numb”** “I go through periods in life where I hit this wall of depression and it can last days. I don\'t want to move out of bed, I don\'t care about anything, I don\'t care about anyone. I know that a lot of people feel this way and go through the same thing, and I feel it\'s important when you get to that point to know that other people go through it too, and to be able to relate to something. So I wanted to write a song about the way I feel when I get like that. I wanted it to be really stripped back, just me, an electric guitar, and some harmonies. I didn\'t want any other distractions, I just wanted everyone to focus on what I was saying.” **“Act My Age”** “It is about growing older. It’s a battle between being like, ‘Shit, I need to grow up,’ but then also, ‘Oh, shit, I miss when I was a child and I didn\'t have to worry about anything.’ It’s that realization that everyone gets older and everyone needs to get their shit together. I was turning a page in my life where I was wanting to remove a lot of toxic things out of my life and I was reflecting on childhood and that innocence that we have and wanting to channel some of that into where I am right now.” **“So Sick (Of Missing You)”** “I wrote this because I was tired of writing about myself or other people that I knew in my life. I was watching *Sex Education* at the time, and I wrote this about the period where Maeve and Otis aren’t talking and they\'re missing one another and they’re both like, ‘How could you be so mean to me and just cut me off like that?’ I related to that so much, and I love their relationship. I think it\'s so interesting and *Sex Education* is such a good show. After listening through various track listings for the record, it felt like this could be the only closing act. No other track felt right. I didn\'t want to do the typical Pale Waves thing and finish on the classic ballad, because we\'ve already done that twice.”
A fiery, confident kick-back against convention, Pale Waves’ third record Unwanted sees the group building on the promise of last year’s UK Top 3 album Who Am I?, and staking their claim as British rock’s most dynamic young group. “It’s bold and unapologetic, and that’s what the Pale Waves community is about,” says frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie herself. “We don’t need to fit a perfect mould, we don’t need to apologise for being ourselves, and we won’t change for anyone. That acceptance is what connects us.” Led by riotous lead single “Lies”, Unwanted is a record that reaches out to the passionate community of misfits and LGBTQI+ fans around the band, tapping into darker emotions than ever before while also striking a fresh tone of defiance.
The sixth album by Scottish rockers Twin Atlantic was supposed to be an accompaniment to 2020’s *Power*. But as frontman Sam McTrusty and bassist Ross McNae entered their studio in Glasgow, their muse had abandoned them. “For the first time ever, we weren’t really enjoying what we were doing,” McTrusty tells Apple Music. “Then the pandemic came along and gave us a parachute moment. It allowed us to stop and take stock of everything.” After setting up a home studio in his two-bedroom flat, McTrusty rediscovered his creative spark over nocturnal songwriting sessions with The Killers and U2 producer Jacknife Lee, checking in from his home in the US. They originally planned to do one song, but it soon blossomed into a collection of tracks that would become *Transparency*, Twin Atlantic’s most imaginative and forward-thinking album to date. “Jacknife and I were just having fun,” says McTrusty. “It felt really fresh and fun and exciting. It took my mind off watching the daily briefings and being stuck in the house, because \[shortly before the UK-wide first lockdown\] we’d been playing to a thousand people.” The album that emerged takes in electronic-tinged glam rock, urgent goth-pop, R&B grooves and epic balladeering. “I was just freed,” says McTrusty. “Because we play rock music, there’s some rules there, and we’ve always tried to live on the edge of them, or mix some of the subgenres together. Here, I couldn’t hide behind the fake rock ’n’ roll ego thing, because I was recording it in my flat, with my neighbor through the wall. I couldn’t get to the chorus and fucking wail.” It’s also the most personal record that McTrusty has made. “You know when they do that thing in biology where they slice through someone?” he says. “I’ve just taken a slice of me out. I had a lot to get off my chest from the previous four years and what I was living in, plus my troubled past.” Let McTrusty take you through Twin Atlantic’s bold statement, track by track. **“Keep Your Head Up”** “This was the last song that was written for the record. When we get to the end of an album, I’ll always be like, ‘Man, it\'s missing this type of song,’ and then I’ll very purposefully go and write that exact song. I was trying to sum up everything. The lyrics are about, ‘Fuck, did I have a mental breakdown? And am I still refusing it? And has every song I’ve ever written been about my fractured relationship with my dad, even when I’m saying happy things?’ Probably. I wanted to ground myself in the realest possible conversation I could have. It felt like it was important to start the album with a song that felt vulnerable.” **“One Man Party”** “It’s a funny album, this, because it’s either one extreme or the other, where I’m making fun of myself and making fun of success and wealth and social interaction and then the other half is really self-focused and quite depressing and sad. This is one of the fun ones. I’ve got that inner voice that’s self-deprecating, but I also probably fucking fancy myself a bit to be a singer in a band and get on a stage and tell 50,000 people what to do, so I’m making fun of that and all the little idiosyncrasies that would result in a person thinking that you can hide that.” **“Get Famous”** “This was the first song written in lockdown. Jacknife and I were talking about an Instagram account, Influencers in the Wild, which is people taking selfies or filming a travel blog or doing yoga in the sea, all of the typical things that we’ve come to accept as normal. Totally harmless fun on the face of it, but there’s that darker seedy underbelly to the whole thing that interests me as a people-watcher. I thought maybe I could make fun of that and pick some of the language out and be clever with how I use wordsmithery. It became quite fun, and made us really giddy, nervous giggling wee boys about the song that we were making.” **“Young”** “This existed in the batch of songs post-*Power*, pre-*Transparency*, in the ether. A friend of mine has been in the same group of pals since he was at school and they’re all marrying off and he felt like everyone was just choosing to give up on life, settle down and stop adventuring—a really naive, almost sweet take on life to me. But it was this big debacle in my friendship group: ‘Why did he say it like that? What a fucking selfish prick, does he not know that we are made for each other?!’ and all that. I thought, ‘That\'s really interesting that he has put that like that, I’m just going to tweak this song to have a bit more depth,’ and made the chorus about his way of putting that.” **“Haunt”** “This is taking a view of things that happened when I was my daughter\'s age. Things happened in my family situation that now, as an adult, I can put a different lens of judgment on, where I’m like, ‘I would never in a million years, no matter what, end up in that type of situation.’ It’s something that’s scarred me for a long time and I think it’s the reason I always want to make something new, because it takes my mind off analyzing divorce and family and division between people. The sound at the start is the first time we heard my daughter’s heartbeat at the first maternity appointment, but then at the end it’s her screaming, because she would come into the room I was writing in and always wanted to shout into the mic.” **“Dance Like Your Mother”** “We wanted to have a song that had undeniable groove. If we’d come straight out of *Power* and tried to make this record, it would’ve been so bad. It needed all of these massive things in the world and in our personal lives to go wrong and our business to fall apart because we weren’t able to play gigs. The fact that I was getting to think, ‘Let’s write a song over just 100% groove for four minutes. Can it be done?’ was so much fun because I wasn’t having to think about any of that other stuff.” **“Dirty”** “This was meant to be the lead single on *Power* and someone at our label was like, ‘It\'s too strong. We need to hold it back for Part B once we have people’s attention.’ It wasn’t on this record either until we got to the end and were like, ‘We’re just missing that no-nonsense uptempo song that marries all the groove-based moments.’ At that point, some of the songs that were 100% groove felt a bit out of place, and this maybe merged everything. It’s the sort of song that people have enjoyed about our band from previous records. Maybe we got soft at the end and threw this in to be nice for our existing fans.” **“Bang on the Gong”** “‘Bang on the Gong’ was craving laughter, wanting to have a good time. I was imagining that when this record comes out, maybe people will want to dance and let their hair down and have a bit of fun. It’s got that Detroit, heavy, industrial, funk groove that runs through a lot of the music there. I thought, ‘I come from an industrial, really creative town as well; I wonder if I can just blend being super Glaswegian over that big, muscular grooving.’ My mum’s on it. I was like, ‘What’s the most Glaswegian thing there is?’ Well, when my mum’s annoyed is pretty unbeatable, so I rang her up and said, ‘Remember when you used to shout at me when I was wee? Do that.’ She said all that stuff in one take.” **“It’s Getting Dark”** “This is about how there’s an innocence to ‘If you want this from someone, I’ll be the one to do that for you.’ But then once you dip your toe into that world, where you’ve never felt pain unless you’ve felt love, where the beginning’s really innocent and you want to be in love with someone, it can be one of the more painful experiences—even in the good times. Some of the best times can feel quite melancholy because you’re like, ‘Man, I’ll never be as happy as this ever again.’ I don’t know if that’s just Scottishness. We ended up putting it through a bunch of tape machines and distorting it because the whole song started to become too pretty.” **“Instigator”** “I feel like this is a good message to finish this type of record on, considering that the intro to it feels harrowing. It’s maybe slightly generic, ‘Give me something to believe in,’ but it’s more that you’re searching for something and pursuing something. I’ve realized that is really important for me. And as soon as that isn’t there, life is duller. It took me months to figure out that that was why it was OK to have quite a generic message like that. On a personal level, it started to feel quite powerful.”
When you’ve been a member of one of the biggest boy bands in music history, navigating a solo career that is both authentic and individual to you can be a disorienting experience. Not so for Louis Tomlinson, who course-corrected his initial post-1D EDM-influenced pop towards the indie, Britpop, and stadium rock lanes he feels most comfortable in, with the release of his debut album, *Walls*, in 2020. On his follow-up effort, *Faith in the Future*, Tomlinson anchors himself more firmly in this identity. Lyrically, he is in much the same headspace as he was on his debut album, ruminating on love and romance—the grounding feeling of returning to his hometown and the importance of looking out for each other in hard times. As the album title suggests, however, Tomlinson’s outlook is more optimistic and forward-focused this time around. He’s more concerned with the road ahead than sorting through the baggage he might be carrying with him along the way. Having spent much of the first half of 2022 on tour, it’s perhaps no surprise that this record sources inspiration from the energy of a live show, pulling from influences like DMA’S on the galloping sing-along “Face the Music,” while soaring lead single “Bigger Than Me” and the thumping momentum of “Out of My System” aspire to world stages and huge crowds. Elsewhere, “Written All Over Your Face” calls to mind early Arctic Monkeys—showcasing a lyrical wit and sleek, suave guitar riffs that guarantee the song will be a crowd-pleaser. A solid home base gives Tomlinson the confidence to venture into places he was conspicuous in before. *Faith in the Future* carries over very few return collaborators from his debut, with Tomlinson drafting in the talents of Fred Ball, James Vincent McMorrow, and Theo Hutchcraft of synth-pop duo Hurts, among others, to assist on writing and production. Tomlinson experiments with a more electronic sound—to greater effect this time round—on songs such as “All This Time” and “She Is Beauty We Are World Class,” which stands out as one of the record’s most intriguing moments. His drive to build on his foundations is commendable, and a promising indicator of his future as a songwriter.
When a 14-year-old Taylor Gayle Rutherfurd started her “GAYLE project,” as she calls it, she sat down to write as much as she possibly could, for as long as she could. Four years later, that work became two EPs, *a study of the human experience volume one* and now *volume two*—the former featuring her inescapable viral hit, “abcdefu.” In that time, GAYLE learned to home in on all her influences, from Aretha to Alanis. “Now that I’m 18, I’ve learned so much about myself, my generation, my relationships,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s a combination of all those human experiences, put into one project.” *volume two*, to no surprise, is an evolution from the first. Fiery odes to breakups have become existential ruminations on religion (“god has a sense of humor”), Ashlee Simpson-style pop-punk sing-alongs don’t defer responsibility (“indieedgycool”), and love has nuance (“fmk” \[with blackbear\]). “I hope people can see that there’s a wide range of emotions I’m trying to convey, different parts of myself I’m trying to show,” she tells Apple Music. “And I hope that people, even passive listeners, can listen and attach themselves to it, if they choose to.” Below, GAYLE walks through the EP, track by track. **“indieedgycool”** “At the beginning of 2020, I started getting attention from social media that I haven’t gotten before, and I realized that my actions affected the way that people perceived me. I was caring a bit too much. I started saying this phrase ‘indie edgy cool’ to make fun of myself. And so, the song started with me walking into the studio with the lyrics ‘I’m too cool for the radio/Got vintage kicks, I’ma let you know.’ We wrote the chorus and then, pretty quickly, it went on to bass, the electric guitar stabs in the chorus.” **“fmk” (with blackbear)** “I have loved blackbear for years. I feel very lucky that he was down. He ended up rewriting his own second verse with this friend Andrew Goldstein. He texted it to me. I was able to send some notes back, and he tracked all the vocals and everything. It’s just absolutely mind-blowing that I was able to do a song with blackbear.” **“ALEX”** “Alex is a real person. It is about one relationship—a very toxic, codependent relationship. I was listening to Lorde in my best friend’s car, and my seat was fully back. All of a sudden, I sit up and I’m just like, ‘I have to break up with Alex. I have to break up with him.’ And she was like, ‘Thank God. But why?’ Then I went home, broke up with him, and my best friend and I, Sara Davis, we wrote the song with Reed Berin. I wanted to hate the song. I really did. I wanted to think it was the shittiest song, but then, unfortunately, I really love what Reed did with it, and I was like, ‘Fuck you, I’m putting it out, but I hate you all.’” **“15”** “I wrote the song with Austin Jenkins, and I wrote the chorus before I came into the room. I’ve written a few songs about the experience that I had; a lot of them were talking about how debilitating it was for me. This song is the first time that I am trying to hold this person accountable.” **“god has a sense of humor”** “Somebody I met when I was 13, at summer camp, she and her mother passed away. Something very terrible happened. She was younger than me. In that moment, the world just stopped making sense because an innocent, loving, funny, curious, smart, talented young girl was just gone from this earth—and for no fucking reason. I stopped believing in humanity a bit. I never grew up with any religion. I really hated the phrase ‘God has a sense of humor’ because there’s times where I just didn’t think it was funny. I see the song in more of a positive light, teetering between believing in the good in people and believing that it’s all terrible and we’re all doomed. God has a sense of humor, and I’m just not always in on the joke.” **“snow angels”** “‘snow angels’ is actually an interpolation of \[Demi Lovato’s\] ‘Cool for the Summer.’ That was an accident. I did not mean to do that. I rewrote the chorus melody three separate times, and I just could not find anything I liked as much. Shout-out to the writers because they approved it. Sometimes you just need to forget about all of the difficulties about the world, about your own life, body, and brain, and just have fun with your friends. And that’s where I wanted to leave the EP, like, ‘Things are serious, but sometimes you just need to be lighthearted to be happy with life.’”
“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy yet referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and Yeezus-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.” Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish yet austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far. For the deluxe *MOTOMAMI +*, ROSALÍA expands on the original with an additional eight tracks. Among these are the liberating summer jam “DESPECHÁ,” a live version of “LA FAMA” (sans The Weeknd) from Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi, and a “Thank Yu :)” voice note from the artist herself. Also of note, reggaetón veteran Chencho Corleone hops on a remix of “CANDY” that further elevates the album favorite.
Sound of the Morning is released on Heavenly Recordings on Friday 8th July 2022. Written and recorded in late 2021, Katy’s latest effort is co-produced by Ali Chant (Yard Act and the helm of Katy’s debut Return) and Speedy Wunderground head-honcho Dan Carey (Fontaines DC). Katy’s debut album, Return, released in November 2020, saw her go from Bristolian newcomer to a critically-acclaimed breakthrough star, selling out shows up and down the UK. Praised for “the arresting quality of [her] Kate Bush-meets-Dolly Parton vocal delivery” by The Times, labelled as “finding humanity in every moment” by DIY and with lead single ‘Take Back The Radio’ described as “a whoop of pure joy” in the Guardian, amidst the bleak toll of lockdown, something about this curiously optimistic album began to really resonate. It feels fitting then that, having provided an aural balm at just the right moment with her first album, its follow-up should reflect a world brimming with curiosity, back in action and wanting to expand its horizons. If Pearson’s extracurricular activities in recent months have shown that she can dip a toe into a multitude of genres - providing guest vocals on Orlando Weeks’ recent album ‘Hop Up’; popping up with Yard Act for a collaboration at End of the Road festival; singing on trad-folk collective Broadside Hacks’ 2021 project ‘Songs Without Authors’ - then forthcoming second album Sound of the Morning takes that spirit and runs with it. It’s still Katy J Pearson (read: effortlessly charming, full of heart and helmed by that inimitable vocal), but it’s Katy J Pearson pushing herself musically and lyrically into new waters. It’s an album that’s as comfortable revelling in the more laid-back, Real Estate-esque melodies of lead single ‘Talk Over Town’ - a track that attempts to make sense of her recent experiences, of “being Katy from Gloucester, but then being Katy J Pearson who’s this buzzy new artist” - as it is basking in the American indie pop of ‘Float’, penned with longtime pal Oliver Wilde of Pet Shimmers, or experimenting with the buoyant brass of ‘Howl’, in which Orlando repays the favour with a vocal guest spot. It all makes for a record that’s increasingly unafraid to explore life’s darker parts, but that does so with an openness that’s full of light. As an artist who professes to “always strive for the bittersweetness of things”, Sound of the Morning does just that, taking the listener’s hand and guiding them through the good and the bad, like the musical equivalent of an arm around the shoulder. “I want people to feel things with my music, but I don’t want to cause my listener too much trauma,” she notes with a cheeky glint. “Counselling is expensive, so you’ve got to pick your battles…”
Folky, direct soul-pop and balladry made Paolo Nutini famous as a teen during the mid-2000s, but it was his adventurousness that quickly separated him from other British singer-songwriters emerging at that time. When second album *Sunny Side Up* arrived in 2009, he was drawing on ska, Dixieland jazz, country, and doo-wop, before 2014’s *Caustic Love* played out like an expansive history of soul and R&B. From the start, *Last Night in the Bittersweet* reveals the Scotsman’s horizons have only broadened during the intervening eight years. “Afterneath” begins the album with feedback, motorik rhythms, and Tarantino samples as Nutini’s spoken-word lyrics herald “a deep dive into an open mind.” From there, the songs circle around New Wave (“Petrified in Love”), epic indie rock (“Shine a Light”), and hymnal, muted electronica (“Stranded Words \[Interlude\]”). At the heart of it all is Nutini’s voice. Precociously expressive and versatile from day one, it’s aged handsomely, sounding more lived-in than ever. Here, he contemplates regret, anxiety, optimism, and love as it both blossoms and falters. When the record ends on its most unadorned moment, the gentle folk ballad “Writer,” Nutini sings, “I am your writer who bleeds indecision.” It’s that restless, capricious spirit that continues to make him such an absorbing artist.
Tresor (Treasure) is Gwenno Saunders’ third full length solo album and the second almost entirely in Cornish (Kernewek). Written in St. Ives, Cornwall, just prior to the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and completed in Cardiff during the pandemic along with her producer and musical collaborator, Rhys Edwards, Tresor reveals an introspective focus on home and self, a prescient work echoing the isolation and retreat that has been a central, global shared experience over the past two years. The wider project also includes a companion film, written and directed by Gwenno in collaboration with Anglesey based filmmaker and photographer Clare Marie Bailey. Tresor diverges from the stark themes of technological alienation in Y Dydd Olaf (The Final Day) and the meditations on the idea of the homeland on the slyly infectious Le Kov (The Place of Memory). Accessible and international in outlook, peppered with moments of offbeat humor, Le Kov presented Cornish to the world. It highlighted the struggle of Kernewek and the concerns of Cornish cultural visibility as the perceptions of a timeless and haunted landscape often clash with the reality of intense poverty and an economy devastated by the demands of tourism. The impact of Le Kov was resounding, providing for the Cornish language an unprecedented international platform, that saw Gwenno touring and headlining in Europe and Australia, and supporting acts such as Suede and the Manic Street Preachers. Her performance of ‘Tir ha Mor’ on Later with Jools Holland was a triumph, and the album prompted wider conversations on the state of the Cornish language with Michael Portillo, Jon Snow, and Nina Nannar. After Le Kov, interest in learning Cornish hit an all-time high, and the cultural role of the language was firmly in the spotlight. Cornish is now enjoying increased visibility in some commercial contexts, yet Cornish is importantly also a language which is spoken in families and communities. This context is the starting point for Tresor and it’s where this dreamy album finds its bite. Gwenno occupies a singular position, raised speaking Cornish alongside Welsh in the home with her family as a living mother tongue. Cornish is not only a cultural legacy or a politicized project; it is the language in which one thinks and dreams, a language of loving and longing. To be able to share in this private world is the gift of Tresor. On Tresor, Gwenno shifts focus from the external to the internal, exposing the walls of gems hidden within the caves. Inspired by powerful woman writers and artists such as Ithell Colquhoun, the Cornish language poet Phoebe Proctor, Maya Deren and Monica Sjöö, Tresor is an intimate view of the feminine interior experience, of domesticity and desire, a rare glimmer of life lived in and expressed through Cornish. Don’t ever be fooled by Gwenno’s pop sensibility and her ability to create plush and immersive moods. Gwenno always has something to say, often signposting powerful commentary with discordant notes and sonic friction. Tresor is no different: like a soothing mermaid’s call it lures the listener into strange and beautiful depths. Although Tresor evokes the waters that shape the Cornish experience, it is musically far reaching with influences spanning from Eden Ahbez to Aphex Twin. More overtly psychedelically tinged than her previous work, Tresor embeds found sounds ranging from Venice to Vienna, layering cultural and historical atmospheres, decoupling the use of Cornish from any geographic determinism. The personal and political are fully entwined in Tresor with stories showing the complex tension of both integration and resistance, of feeling decentered yet also fully belonging to several places at once. Languages are symbolically contradictory: they are indelibly embedded in place, yet they travel with bodies and in dreams, taking up root wherever they are planted or abandoned out of necessity. They signal identities and histories, yet are also indifferent tools of communication and commerce belonging to everyone and to no one. How do both speakers and non-speakers navigate these legacies? In Tresor Gwenno explores the perspective that living through Kernewek allows for an expression of imaginative spaces that are truly free. As such, Tresor also recalls the waters of the unconscious, the undulating elemental tides suggesting emotion, intuition, those features long associated with the archetypal anima. In “Anima” Gwenno asks how do we fully inhabit different parts of the self, acknowledging convergent cultural and personal histories, embracing the shadow. She explores how the power of the feminine voice inspired by the Cornish landscape asserts itself, presenting a richly melodic counterpoint to a place and people known for rugged survival and jagged edges. The title track “Tresor” (Treasure) confronts the contradictions that come with visibility as a woman and the challenges of wielding women’s power. “Tonnow” shows the watery depths of woman’s desire and knowing, an invitation to liberation. The Welsh language track, “NYCAW” (Nid yw Cymru ar Werth - Wales is not for Sale) widens the frame outward from the personal to the collective, condemning the urgent crisis caused by second home ownership in Wales, denouncing the neoliberal marketing of place that is shattering communities and exploiting cultures. Tresor the film, is inspired by surrealist filmmakers such as Sergei Parajanov, Agnes Varda, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and reflects Gwenno’s growing interest in film and the intersection of music with visual components. Filmed in Wales and Cornwall, Tresor evokes a dreamworld from another time, surreal, and sensual, saturated with light and colour. Although Tresor is a project birthed from introspection and intimacy, the implications of the messages are much broader. Ultimately Gwenno is asking what are other ways of understanding and being in relation to one another? What are the spaces where we can best see each other and ourselves in our most raw and authentic state? Can we find balance individually and as a species, and can we sit with the discomfort that comes with growth? What are our roles in both shaping and being shaped by the cultures we move in, in a world that is ever changing, and where we all have a place? Tresor does not provide easy answers, for Gwenno shows us that we exist in paradox, our threads of place and story entwined like knotwork, our many selves shining as beautiful entanglements.
In May 2021, amidst a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US stemming from the pandemic, the Los Angeles Public Library posted a video of four young girls from Los Angeles playing a song called “Racist, Sexist Boy” for AAPI Heritage Month—two minutes of wonderfully sludgy outrage inspired by an interaction that drummer Mila de la Garza had with a classmate just before lockdown began. The song quickly went viral, creating an audience for The Linda Lindas before they’d ever had a chance to launch a proper tour. “In a way, I felt like we kind of had something to prove, to show for ourselves that we\'re actual musicians,” Mila tells Apple Music. “We\'ve been around for three years, and it\'s not just that we had one viral moment then we were going to go away.” While most teenagers spent the pandemic fumbling through remote school and social isolation, The Linda Lindas seized the opportunity to record their debut album. (They released a self-titled EP in 2020.) Written and rehearsed almost entirely through Zoom while all of its members—Mila and her sister Lucia, their cousin Eloise Wong, and Bela Salazar—were also feeling their way through the chaos of high school and middle school from home, *Growing Up* is a set of blistering, deeply felt pop-punk that meets the moment head on, whether they’re grappling with solitude (“Why”), self-care (“Remember”), spirals of thought (“Talking to Myself”), or disgruntled house cats (“Nino”). Here, the band takes us inside every song on the album. **“Oh!”** Mila de la Garza: “‘Oh!’ was actually written all together on our front porch.” Lucia de la Garza: “We had amps inside and we had cords running out the screen door to Bela and Eloise on opposite sides of the porch. The neighbors didn\'t like it, but it\'s okay.” Eloise Wong: “There was a situation at school where I tried to help someone who was being bullied, but then it kind of just blew up in my face. I wasn\'t really sure what to do and I was kind of angry at stuff. That\'s how the lyrics came about.” **“Growing Up”** Lucia: “It was hard being at home and feeling at this age that I had to figure out who I was. I felt like I was supposed to know what I want to do with my life. We were all apart from each other, and I didn\'t want to grow up in a way, and I realized you can\'t make growing up happen. You can\'t stop it from happening either. I was really, really nostalgic and sentimental about all the times that we had, because I didn\'t realize how much the band meant to me until it wasn\'t really in full swing anymore. I think I was realizing that music is special to me, too. All the parts of my life that were suddenly gone.” **“Talking to Myself”** Mila: “It\'s basically about needing someone else to talk to. Because being by yourself can be a blessing, and it\'s like you need that sometimes, but you also, you can\'t be by yourself forever. The song is about having someone else to take you out of a spiral, having someone else to bring you back up when you push yourself down so much.” **“Fine”** Eloise: “I think that a lot of oppression in society is just so normalized. In the words that we say and the things that happen, I feel like we\'re just taught to see it and just not blink an eye. It happens all the time, but no one does anything about it, because, you know, it\'s fine. But sometimes it gets to a point where it\'s not fine, where it\'s hard to take. Because some of these things that are just normal shouldn\'t be normal, and they push other people down, and it\'s not okay. I was kind of fed up about that and wrote that song.” **“Nino”** Bela Salazar: “On our EP, I wrote a song called ‘Monica,’ and that was about my other cat. I would play ‘Monica’ and my cat Nino would get really pissed. I don\'t know how he understood, but he would just start yelling. So I was like, ‘Okay, I have to write you a song now, because it\'s not fair.’” Mila: “I feel like I was most nervous for Nino\'s reaction to ‘Nino.’ Like, what if Nino doesn\'t like it?” Bela: “He was purring when he heard it, so that\'s a good sign.” **“Why”** Mila: “It\'s just pandemic stuff, missing people. I feel like during the pandemic we all kind of figured out more of who we are.” Lucia: “Isolation brings up a lot of emotions that you didn\'t know were there. I feel like being by yourself for that long kind of takes a toll on your mental health. Eloise\'s lyrics are very poetic on that one, I just have to say.” **“Cuantas Veces”** Bela: “I grew up listening to a lot of bossa nova, and I wanted to mix some of the stuff that I listened to into what we\'re doing. I chose to do a song in Spanish because I\'m not very good at sharing my emotions and this felt like a way that I could do it, but also have it still be a little bit more intimate and personal. I wasn\'t completely ready.” **“Remember”** Lucia: “There was a lot of feeling like every day is the same during the pandemic. There was a lot of feeling like I could have been doing so much more with my day. I didn\'t learn anything in school; I didn\'t pay attention; I was just lounging around watching Netflix all day. I was trying to find a way to forgive myself for not doing anything during my pandemic, and I think this song is just about forgiving yourself for that. Kind of remembering that it\'s okay to make mistakes and it\'s okay to regret and it\'s okay to not be okay sometimes.” **“Magic”** Lucia: “Teenagers complain—that\'s just how it is. I\'m around them every day. It’s a thing. But I always remember that I\'m super fortunate—to have discovered music and discovered a passion for it at my age. And obviously the world needs to be better and the world needs to change. Magic is always treated as like a curse and a gift—it depends on who is wielding it. But what if it’s this fantastical thing that might could save us all? What if *we* are the magic?” **“Racist, Sexist Boy”** Mila: “Before, it was more of an angry song, directed at one person. But now it\'s more a prideful song about bringing people together. Telling people that they\'re not alone, because other people go through that stuff too.” Eloise: “You write that song and it\'s made for blowback—you expect all the racist, sexist boys out there to be like, ‘What? Racism doesn\'t exist. Sexism doesn\'t exist.’ But instead we got all these positive comments. It was so cool just to see. There is good in this world, you know?”
