Pop in 2022

For most people, life as a first-call monster drummer would be enough, but LA-based Louis Cole (of KNOWER) is also a multi-instrumental whiz and singer-songwriter in a category of his own. *Quality Over Opinion* is a welcome blast of his unpredictable funk, fusion, pop, neo-soul, and all else, with crushing basslines and beats and lyrics that can veer from arch and satirical to tender and vulnerable. Cole couches it all in a high-pitched singing voice that’s at once angelic and slightly surreal. His collaborators, including pianist Chris Fishman, saxophonist Sam Gendel, drummer Nate Wood, and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, push the level of musicianship even further off the charts. Along with characteristic hard-grooving fare (“Park Your Car on My Face,” “Outer Moat Behavior,” “I’m Tight,” the instrumental “Bitches”), Cole goes full power ballad on “Let It Happen” and employs acoustic guitar in new ways on “Not Needed Anymore,” “Disappear,”and “Forgetting.”

Louis Cole is a singer-songwriter and sickeningly talented multi-instrumentalist with a strong DIY aesthetic from Los Angeles, California. He is on a mission to create deep feelings through music and is the figurehead of an LA jazz-adjacent scene that includes Genevieve Artadi (with whom Cole co-founded the alt pop / electrofunk band KNOWER in 2009), Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes, Jacob Mann, Dennis Hamm, Pedro Martins and more. He will release his new album “Quality Over Opinion” on 14th October 2022 on Brainfeeder Records. 20 tracks deep, it was written, performed and produced on his own in his modest home studio, but Louis did invite a handful of close friends to contribute, namely Genevieve Artadi (“my no.1 music collaborator”); saxophonist Sam Gendel – Cole’s friend for 17 years; pianist Chris Fishman; Nate Wood from the band Kneebody; Marlon Mackey (“a pillar of the Bakersfield music scene”); and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. “This album is a representation of me trying to make the best, most powerful and listenable music I can. For myself and also others,” he says. Louis’s main instrument is the drums and he has a background in jazz although the music he writes bears little resemblance to jazz in any pure or classical sense. His connection to the movement is more conceptual: “The root of jazz is pure freedom… no limits… just what you’re thinking right at that moment… a pure blast of limitlessness”. Accordingly Cole’s touchstones for “Quality Over Opinion” include boundary-pushing composers such as Gustav Mahler and György Ligeti alongside jazz icons like Miles Davis, the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah, Morten Lauridsen (distinguished professor of music and American Choral Master) and Super Mario Kart. “There is no continuous thread of a story on this album, each song expresses its own moment in my life and time,” explains Louis. “I was inspired by joy, pain and the constant mission to pull something out of life around me”. New single ‘I’m Tight’ arrives hot on the heels of ‘Let it Happen’ – “a timeless modern power ballad classic” released earlier this month. In contrast, ‘I’m Tight’ is a sleek, laser-focused Funk rocket, based on an utterly irresistible bassline. “It comes from me recording about 100 different cells of funk, choosing my favorite ones and quilting them together into a song,” says Louis. “I had to practice the bass part a lot for this one,” he adds, smiling. Cole’s insane musicianship is no secret – he’s been sharing performance videos on YouTube for a decade – growing a dedicated fanbase who appreciate both his craft and off-the-wall style. Drums, bass, keys… he has a monk-like attitude to practice and perfecting his art. Thundercat describes him as “one of Los Angeles's greatest musicians” and earlier this year invited him to play drums on his recent tour of Japan. The pair have frequently written together including on the aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ from Thundercat’s Grammy-winning album “It Is What It Is”, ‘Bus in the Streets’ and ‘Jameel’s Space Ride’ (from Thundercat’s 2017 opus “Drunk”) and ‘Tunnels in the Air’ for Louis’ 2018 album “Time”. Flying Lotus has also expressed admiration for Louis, calling him “super inspirational” during the writing of his 2019 album “Flamagra”. Touring incessantly, Louis sold out two shows at EartH Hackney (1k cap) in London during his last UK tour. He has also appeared at North Sea Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Newport Jazz Festival, Rock En Seine, Jazz a Vienne, Jazz à la Villette, Wonderfruit, Vancouver Jazz Festival, Maiden Voyage and more. Last year Louis embarked on his biggest collaboration to date with the Grammy-winning Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley, for a string of unique shows in the Netherlands, with more to come in 2023. This October he will tour the US with his big band.

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.

Over the course of a career spanning more than three decades, Superchunk has served as a model for how to age and rage gracefully in punk, as they’ve continued to expand their musical palette and deliver sage-like lyrical wisdom without ever losing their agitated, pogo-ready essence. That latter quality resurfaced with a vengeance on 2018’s raucous Trump-era address *What a Time to Be Alive*, but *Wild Loneliness* channels its climate-change and pandemic anxieties into more meditative, cautiously optimistic modes of expression. Not that this shift should come as a huge shock: In between the two albums, the North Carolina veterans (and Merge Records founders) recorded an unplugged version of their 1994 indie-rock classic *Foolish*, and its relaxed feel and earthy tones illuminated the path to *Wild Loneliness*’ congenial jangle. “All the things that were driving *What a Time to Be Alive* are still terrible,” singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan tells Apple Music, “but it\'s hard to sustain that kind of negative energy for too long without it becoming a psychic drain. I wanted to make a record with a different feel to it.” While writing for *Wild Loneliness* began before COVID lockdowns, its creation was inevitably affected by them, with members cutting their parts in isolation. And yet the album radiates a warm communal spirit, thanks to a guest list—including Sharon Van Etten, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, and Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley—that speaks to Superchunk’s enduring cross-generational relevance. “Even though we couldn\'t be together in person, it was very gratifying to be able to still collaborate with people that we admire,” McCaughan says. “That independent community is something that\'s super important to us, and it’s still there, even though so much else in the music industry changes all the time.” Here, McCaughan guides us through *Wild Loneliness*’ rustic terrain, track by track. **“City of the Dead”** “The vibe that a lot of people have these days is: Everything is terrible, and there doesn\'t seem to be any good news on the horizon, but at the same time, here we are making coffee in the morning and going about our day. The kids are going to school, we\'re working, because what else are we supposed to do? The song isn\'t trying to necessarily reconcile those things, it\'s just talking about what it\'s like living in that world of oscillating between being super depressed and terrified, and then also still having the normal day-to-day things that make you happy or at least keep you going. Even though the title makes it sound like it\'s some grim pandemic thing, this was actually written before that, at the end of 2019.” **“Endless Summer”** “This was inspired by waking up on New Year\'s Day 2020, and it was, like, 75 degrees outside. We always go to a New Year\'s Day party that friends of ours have, and usually there\'s a bonfire, but there wasn\'t going to be one that year because it was so hot outside. You want there to be seasons, because seasons are a thing that allow your brain to organize the passing of time, and when there aren\'t any, it\'s a strange, discombobulating feeling. In the song, I reference Spanish Town in Jamaica and Lake Louise in Canada—these places that are so incredible, but who knows what they\'ll be like after all this is done. Glaciers will be melted, islands will be underwater—it\'s super sad. But if the music is sad, and the lyrics are sad—no one wants to listen to that. And because this song is such a power-pop song, it really called out for harmonies. I\'ve known Teenage Fanclub for a long time. And when I think of harmonies, they\'re one of the first groups I think of.” **“On the Floor”** “This was written during lockdown, and it\'s about just being here in the studio in the basement, plugging away, even though it’s like, who knows what\'s happening in the outside world. R.E.M. are a band I grew up listening to and I still love listening to them, and I wanted this song to feel like \'Pretty Persuasion\'—like an upbeat R.E.M. song. There are some people who are not lead vocalists but still bring so much to the song because you recognize their harmonies immediately, and Mike Mills is one of those singers.” **“Highly Suspect”** “This is about the pitfalls of not being honest with yourself and with other people about how you\'re feeling. Keeping up a facade of cheerfulness when everything is terrible is not only unrealistic, it\'s probably not healthy. This is a song where I knew when I sent it to \[guitarist\] Jim Wilbur, he\'d be like, ‘This part\'s too complicated!’ There\'s a couple of weird, syncopated chord-changey parts that are maybe a little different from what we normally do. But it reminded me of the horn section that you’d hear on an Attractions record, like *Punch the Clock*.” **“Set It Aside”** “Since I was already playing acoustic guitar, I decided to do something that had a little bit more fingerpicking than would normally work on a Superchunk record. But I figured as long as we\'re going down this road anyway, we might as well take advantage of it and have a genuinely quiet song. It turned out really well—I think \[drummer\] Jon \[Wurster\] playing with brushes really makes it a nice middle-of-the-record pause. You can tell from listening to it that it was written during lockdown—again, it\'s about acknowledging that everyone is in a fragile place and everyone needs to give everyone a break.” **“This Night”** “We wanted to move away from the anger and frustration of the last record, and I feel like one good way to do that is to look around and acknowledge the things that are good around you—relationships and people that you really value. The battle is always to do that without just becoming strictly nostalgic or sentimental. The title is a Destroyer reference \[to their 2002 album *This Night*\]. Dan \[Bejar\] is always referencing other bands and song titles and lyrics in his songs, so I figured turnabout is fair play. But then, of course, the first and the last line in the song are taken from The Smiths.” **“Wild Loneliness”** “This is about being trapped in your head, being trapped in your house, and having some kind of energy but no way to really let it out. We\'re super lucky: We have woods behind our house, so we can take a walk in this park—it\'s really a pretty good situation. But at the same time, if you\'re still walking that same loop every day, it does start to feel like Groundhog Day, which I think everyone was kind of going through. We got Andy Stack \[from Wye Oak\] to play sax on this. When I first asked him, he was like, \'I don’t know, it\'s not really my main instrument,\' but I was like, \'Dude, I\'ve heard you play it, I think it\'ll be a cool surprising thing.\'” **“Refracting”** “This is a slight throwback in feeling to the last record, because everything that was happening in 2018 is still happening now. So it\'s hard to avoid thinking about people that are trying to ruin the world for everyone else, but even the song itself is about trying to not just be thinking about that all the time. I\'m still playing acoustic guitar on it, but I was thinking about the flow of the album and I felt that if everything is midtempo, I still want a rocker in there somewhere.” **“Connection”** “\'Connection\'—kind of like \'This Night\'—is about thinking of what you do have, as opposed to what you\'re missing, or what\'s driving you crazy, or what you wish you could do. It\'s more about what\'s great about your family or your relationships or whatever you have around you, and not wanting to lose that because of your own psycho tendencies.” **“If You’re Not Dark”** “Because it starts so sparse, I couldn\'t really envision what it was going to be until Jon put his drum parts on it. I was loving the way it was sounding, but I still felt like it needed something. I had known Sharon \[Van Etten\] for a long time, and her partner Zeke \[Hutchins\] used to used to play drums in \[McCaughan’s side project\] Portastatic for a while, and I knew they were in North Carolina. So I got in touch with her about singing on this track, and I was really relieved that she was able to do it, because she really elevates the whole thing. Her voice is so distinctive—it doesn\'t just blend in as a harmony in a good way. It feels like a whole other presence on the song, which I feel like gives the song a broader reach.”

Far from the blockbuster pop of his 2016 debut, *Nine Track Mind*, or the seductive early-’90s R&B of 2018’s *Voicenotes*, Charlie Puth’s third LP is about the pop star’s sense of interiority. Written with what he calls “feelings first, music to follow,” it’s about the two biggest breakups of his life: a romantic relationship in 2019 and his former record label. If there is a single theme that binds the songs together, he claims it’s bitterness, but a better word might be ‘catharsis.’ “These thoughts spin in my head like a dishwasher,” he tells Apple Music. “I put them against a beat, add some melody, and when the song is finished, it’s like putting a letter in a glass bottle and sending it off into the ocean.” The overall effect is a richer sound, from the stacked ’80s synth-pop of “There’s a First Time for Everything” to the 2000s pop rock of “Smells Like Me” and the sole collaboration, “Left and Right,” featuring BTS’s Jung Kook. “I don\'t hold any sort of resentment for any of the people in those parties that I openly sing about on this record. I have nothing against them,” he says. “But it was important for me to get all this wording out on this album.” Below, Puth walks Apple Music through *CHARLIE*, track by track. **“That’s Hilarious”** “All of these songs come with combining an ugly and a beautiful thing together. In this song, I wanted the lyrics to be ugly and beautiful at the same time, just like I wanted the sound to be ugly and beautiful as well. It starts with pretty chords, then the pre-chorus lyric comes in: ‘You took away a year of my fucking life.’ That’s not exactly subtle. Almost at the minute mark, there’s a really low sine-wave bass that I ran through this Mike Dean plug-in that made it sound super distorted. That is representative of what was the most turbulent time in my life, where I was most uncomfortable.” **“Charlie Be Quiet!”** “I came up with that heavily syncopated, verselike melody as the chorus while going on a walk. I was listening to ‘The Whisper Song,’ produced by Mr. Collipark for the Ying Yang Twins. I thought, ‘Why has no one made a song where someone’s whispering?’ Then, in the second half of the chorus, you have the illusion of it getting louder for the listener, but it’s actually all mastered to the same level. You just jumped the octave.” **“Light Switch”** “I wrote and produced the record ‘STAY’ for Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI, so I was in a very fast mood. I wanted to make fast music, that’s where this started from. I’ve always been obsessed with Broadway plays and cartoons—how they would use music to accentuate movements on the stage. If someone’s tiptoeing, you hear a pizzicato string. I literally saw a light switch, and I was like, ‘What do you do with a light switch? You turn the light switch on.’ OK, let’s be really corny. And so, ‘You turn me on like a light switch’ was it. Maybe the Broadway songs stay Broadway songs for a reason.” **“There’s a First Time for Everything”** “During the time I was making this song, I was exploring new people, taking part in activities that I had never really partaken in before. I’ll say lightly, there’s the first time for everything, and you have one life. There was this sense of euphoria in my mind, just knowing that there’s an open world out there, and that’s what I wanted the record to sonically match.” **“Smells Like Me”** “It’s supposed to be the song that you hear in the beginning of a 2000s reality show, like *The Hills*. It’s a very ugly word, ‘smells,’ and it doesn\'t sing very well. What sound represents the word ‘smells’? So, I just screamed into the microphone and Auto-Tuned that, so it became distorted and robotic. Then came that dreamy arpeggio. It reminded me of *The Little Mermaid*.” **“Left and Right”** “This song is simple. You can’t eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant every night. Sometimes you just got to get a burger and fries from McDonald’s: three chords, fun, and not about anything super heavy. I loved that dichotomy of how BTS\'s music is very well-produced, very crispy, very bright, and this song is the opposite. Jung Kook’s voice is usually associated with big, bright, powerful K-pop chords, and putting it under that Red Hot Chili Peppers type of bass, grunginess—I really liked that combination.” **“Loser”** “This song started off with the title. I was in the shower, recalling a time where I felt like I really messed it up with somebody. I thought that I lost them forever. I felt like a loser. I’m a singer living in LA, I’m seeing too many people, and I’m a loser. I followed up with, ‘How’d I ever lose her?’ And it just happens to rhyme. It sounds like a nursery rhyme that’s been around forever. Just a self-deprecating, sad one.” **“When You’re Sad I’m Sad”** “This is a song about being manipulated. When you’re sad, I’m sad. If you break up with me, and you move on with someone else, and you then come back to me, saying, ‘I made a big mistake,’ I’m going to forget about all my morals, and I’m going to swallow all my pride with one huge, sodalike gulp, and I’m going to go over to your house. I\'m going to console you and comfort you because I am manipulated into loving you.” **“Marks on My Neck”** “I was seeing someone new. I remember waking up the next morning with my neck all bruised up, from some unclipped fingernails. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my god. I got to cover this up. I’m driving up to see my parents right now.’ We lost touch, so the memory of this person started to fade away, as did the marks on my neck. They started to heal. The parallel is interesting—these marks fade the more my memory fades.” **“Tears on My Piano”** “I remember seeing Bruce Springsteen play Giants Stadium and his audience screaming along. Clarence Clemons played this saxophone solo on ‘Jungleland,’ and 50,000 fans were screaming, and there were no lyrics. ‘One day, I’m going to write a song where people can scream along to the non-existing lyrics, just the melody.’ And with that in mind, I came up with the melody, ‘These tears on my piano,’ where the piano melody would be singable. The piano part almost sounds a little sloppy because my fingers were wet from all the tears falling out of my eyes, hitting the piano.” **“I Don’t Think That I Like Her”** “Travis Barker added a really important layer of drums amongst the synthetic drums. It gave the song something that I just wouldn’t be able to do on my own. I like a singer singing something and the listener thinking the opposite. Like ‘Missing You’ by John Waite, where he says, ‘I ain’t missing you at all/Since you’ve been gone.’ Of course, you’re missing this person. You’re in denial. I’m in denial on this song, and I wanted to say that without saying that.” **“No More Drama”** “The album starts off bitter and self-correcting. ‘No More Drama’ is me waving goodbye to all those other 11 songs, sailing on to the next year of my life as a well-seasoned person. I’m ready to move on to the next. It’s the perfect ending punctuation for this album.”

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.

NNAMDÏ has never been able to stay in one place. The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and songwriter set a blistering pace in 2020 with his critically acclaimed genre-fusing LP Brat, a punk EP Black Plight, and Krazy Karl, a full-length tribute to Looney Tunes composer Carl Stalling. Add in his role as co-owner of label Sooper Records, as well as recent tours with Wilco, Sleater-Kinney, and black midi, and it’s an overwhelming schedule. However, his latest album, Please Have A Seat, is the result of a much-needed pause. “I realized I never take time to just sit and take in where I’m at,” says NNAMDÏ. “It’s just nice to not be on ‘Go, Go, Go!’ mode, and reevaluate where I wanted to go musically.” This period of reflection allowed him to take stock of his life and his relationships. “I wanted to be present,” he says. “Each song came from a moment of clarity.” Please Have A Seat serves as an invitation to listen. It’s a request to sit down, be present, and take in a moment. With this quiet introspection, NNAMDÏ found inspiration in silence and nuance. While making the record, he decided to stretch the limits of his pop songwriting: every track had to be hummable. Though he’s written earworms throughout his career from playing in bands in Chicago’s DIY community or releasing goofy raps as Nnamdi's Sooper Dooper Secret Side Project, here, his shapeshifting hooks are undeniable. Each of the album’s fourteen songs, which NNAMDÏ wrote, produced, and performed entirely himself, are relentlessly replayable, careening into unexpected and disorienting places. With NNAMDÏ’s singular vision, Please Have A Seat is yet another leap from Chicago’s hardest working musician. By taking a minute to sit down and catch his breath, he reemerged with the most ambitious, accessible, and nuanced work of his career.

When creators fck happens. Isolation and uncertainty loomed throughout the genesis of the band’s latest studio album. “The experience of just trying to keep my head above water and navigate through the last couple years played a huge role in this record,” says Barnes. These expansive selections contrast markedly with the focused pop of 2020’s UR FUN, which was crafted for visceral thrills and the concert stage. As it was for countless musicians around the world, the inability to tour eliminated one of the linchpins of Barnes’ creative process. “I didn’t know if we’d ever tour again, so I didn’t consider that side of things.” Denied social interaction and diverse experiences, Barnes delved inward. Barnes contemplated how time functions in music and experimented accordingly. These new songs, dense with ideas but short on repetition, feel epic in scope despite reasonable running times. Like the staircases of M.C. Escher’s Relativity, the discrete sections of “Marijuana’s A Working Woman” and “Blab Sabbath Lathe of Maiden” crisscross and pivot, confounding the senses yet commanding attention. The imagery and sentiments that bubble forth from Barnes’ lyrical wordplay prove equally disorienting. “Is it important to say black chrome rodents?,” asks Barnes on “Après The Déclassé.” Phrases borne of free association took on new meaning when introduced into a song. “It’s like collaborating with my subconscious in a way. It feels deeply personal, even though I don’t necessarily understand it at that moment.” “Marijuana’s A Working Woman'' juxtaposes oddball funk a la Zapp or Rick James with nods to Alice Anne Baily’s 19th century spiritualism. “Modern Art Bewilders” zigzags between baroque psychedelic idyll and synthpop tantrum, equal parts Sgt. Pepper’s and Gary Numan. Other influences woven throughout include realist painter Edward Hopper, fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin, cinéaste Pedro Almodovar, and erotic illustrator Toshio Saeki. Barnes likens their compositional process to making collages from seemingly unrelated source materials, combining them in provocative ways to reveal new meanings. “I wasn’t working with specific themes that I wanted to try and stretch over a three-minute pop song. It was sewing together a lot of fragmented thoughts,” which ties in nicely to the ‘freewave’ aspect of the album title’s meaning. As Barnes explains, “Freewave is my term for wild and intractable artistic expression. Lucifer is the angel of enlightenment and elucidation. Fuck is something we say when things are going really well, or really badly.” As for anything else going on behind the scenes during the genesis of Freewave Lucifer fck, Barnes opts to preserve the mystery. “Sometimes in the past, I felt it was important for people to know certain things, so they could get into a specific headspace.” Not this time. “The last couple of years laid a heavy trip on everybody’s psyche. There are plenty of universal things here to identify with.”

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

I'm excited and proud to announce that my 5th solo record A Legacy Of Rentals will be released on May 20, 2022 via Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers. A Legacy of Rentals was largely written during 2020, in the shadow of the pandemic and the George Floyd murder that occurred in my hometown of Minneapolis. It was recorded in 2021 with producer Josh Kaufman, engineer D. James Goodwin, and a number of other friends and collaborators. These songs deal a lot with memory: how we remember people that are gone, places that have changed, major events that are part of our past. It's about how memories become the stories that we tell others and ourselves. It’s about the distortion that happens to our own histories when stretched by time and distance. It’s about finding joy in the mundane and engaging in hope in our everyday. You can watch a video trailer for the record here: youtu.be/3YqMngcaZSg I really appreciate you being a part of this. This record is very special to me, and I think a bit different than anything I’ve done before. I’m honored to be here to share A Legacy Of Rentals with you. This is what it looks like. cf Pre-order physical formats of A Legacy of Rentals: orcd.co/alegacyofrentals

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

Tony Molina loves and appreciates a well-crafted song, and he's one of the absolute best in the game at writing them. What he doesn't love so much is being told he's "maturing" as a musical artist. His last solo album had what could be described as a jangly, '60s-ish sound, and some listener reactions threw him off a bit. "I kept hearing: 'Oh, he's maturing, he’s getting into other shit, writing more mature stuff,'” he says. “I thought, 'Man, that's kinda lame, no I’m not…' Any time somebody expects something of me, I’m usually gonna do the opposite.” Running the other way isn't exactly how his new record came about, but writing and recording In the Fade, Molina’s first under his own name in four years, did provide occasion to look back in time through his lengthy musical history while also blazing a new path forward. In early 2020, embarking on recording a new album, he started taking inventory in a way he hadn’t really done before, delving deep into his personal archives for songs that might fit alongside the new material he’d been writing and demoing. Many of the ostensibly "mature" musical elements that some listeners have latched on to in his recent work -- piano, Mellotron, the occasional English accent – actually date back well over a decade to Ovens, the criminally underrated band with whom Molina wrote and recorded five albums in the early to mid-2000s. In the Fade revisits a few songs from those days. "I had a bunch of old stuff that I had tried recording in the Ovens days [as well as] some songs that only got to the demo stage back then and I kind of forgot about,” he says. There were several gems to be found in there, and they helped set him off on the path to making a record that’s arguably his best yet. Molina likens In the Fade to a compilation, encompassing every phase of his recording career to date while also fitting together as a tight, endlessly listenable album. "The main thing I was trying to tie everything together with was just really good melodies for the entire record, all the way through,” he says. “Every song I wanted to have a really solid hook, because there are different styles." These hooks permeate the record's heavier guitar-pop tunes as well as its more delicate folk-rock and indie-pop tracks. As he describes it, In the Fade is a very “pop” album. It’s a return in part to the Ovens sound, but also features elements of his more recent material and introduces some intriguing new wrinkles. The record has an audible, effortless-sounding ease and coherence to it. This is remarkable given not only the album’s musical range but also the time span over which it was written and recorded. Sessions began in March 2020, days before things began to shut down due to Covid, and occurred on and off over a long stretch of time. Every time cases died down a bit, longtime friend and recording whiz Jasper Leach would book a flight into town and they'd hit the studio. Recording took place with Bay Area recording engineers Jack Shirley and Bart Thurber, both of whom Molina has worked with for years now, at their respective studios. Sessions were productive, but the fluctuating nature of the pandemic meant some of them occurred as much as a year apart. The long gaps between sessions sometimes prompted Molina to wonder if they would ever get to finish what they started. He recalls one particular trip to the studio on an empty BART train (an exceedingly rare sight in the pre-pandemic Bay Area) that made him wonder whether he was supposed to be doing what he was doing. They were, thankfully, able to complete the record, and they also achieved one of Molina’s chief aims entering the process: having fun with friends in the studio. That sense of fun is something you can hear throughout, and he's delighted about his friends’ many contributions to the record. Sarah Rose Janko of Oakland band Dawn Riding, who’s also Molina’s bandmate in The Lost Days, provides added vocal harmonies (a first on a Molina solo record) to a number of songs. Leach’s contributions are all over the record, perhaps most notably on "I Don't Like That He.” Molina describes it as the "most indie pop-sounding song" on the record, and a tribute to “Chicago New York” by Bay Area indie-pop legends The Aislers Set. "I was just doing these really simple acoustic guitar parts and Jasper laid down this really solid drum take, and he added piano and organ to it, and it just filled the whole song… he added those solos, he did the harmony on a 12-string, and then he doubled the harmony on a piano." The album evokes the sounds of some of his favorite bands: Fastbacks, The Flaming Lips, The Muffs. The simple yet ornate "Burn Everyone," which evokes Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake at his wistful best, is one of a few songs for which he cites listening to a ton of Belle and Sebastian at the time. Another one of these is "Not Worth Knowing," where he wanted a verse with a ’65 Stones sound and a chorus unlike any he had done before, with a countermelody from the Mellotron. "Years Ago, Pt. 2", meanwhile, gracefully channels Abbey Road-era Beatles, and the record closes with a cover of “Fluff”, one of Tony Iommi’s gentle acoustic guitar instrumentals for Black Sabbath. It would be impossible to encapsulate the entire Tony Molina musical worldview in a single record. This is a man whose home stereo, in a single day, could be blaring The Move, Malo, Internal Bleeding, Dear Nora, and The Melvins. All that said, you’d be hard pressed to find a better entry point to his work than In the Fade, a record that Molina sums up tidily: “I think it ties the entire catalog together.”

EARTH IS ONE TOUGH BABY OUT SEPTEMBER 16 2022 WORLDWIDE

The third and most seasoned Drugdealer album, Hiding in Plain Sight, almost didn't happen at all. Frustrated and insecure with his own singing voice prior to the pandemic, Drugdealer founder and primary songwriter Michael Collins was nearly ready to throw in the towel. With hits like "Suddenly" and "The Real World" (from the band's 2016 debut, The End Of Comedy) and "Honey" (from their first album for Mexican Summer, 2019’s Raw Honey), Collins had plenty to be happy about. But due to a frequent impulse to hand over the microphone to friends and collaborators like Weyes Blood, Jackson MacIntosh, and his trusty musical companion Sasha Winn, Collins became increasingly unsure of himself as a singer. Then, amidst the windswept art colony of Marfa, Texas, a chance encounter with the visionary artist and composer Annette Peacock changed his outlook. While attending Mexican Summer's annual Marfa Myths festival, Collins ran into Peacock backstage. "I was so inspired by [Annette]. But similarly to all these other vocalists I'd worked with, I didn't feel like I had it in me." he recalls. "I told her my plight, then I played her a song, and she told me I wasn't singing high enough for my speaking voice. When I returned to LA, I started coming up with new progressions, which I'd modulate up three half steps. It forced me to find a new way to sing." In the valley of the shadow of doubt, during a period when Collins was considering giving up on music and embarking on his lifelong dream of filmmaking, a furtive conversation with a legend allowed him to find his own distinctive voice. But, as the title implies, the lockdown era during which Collins wrote the bulk of the record was a time spent searching for answers – searching for love. "Madison," the opening track on Hiding in Plain Sight, is the first song Collins wrote singing in this suggested range. His newfound confidence as a yarn-spinning vocalist in the gruff tenor tradition of Nick Lowe, or even Van Morrison, is readily apparent, with Conor "Catfish" Gallaher's pedal steel adding a dusting of cosmic country to Collins' down-hard love song. When Collins wrote the would-be AM Gold hit, he was summoning an imaginary vision of a love that had eluded him in reality. The song focuses on an unknown figure he could idealize. "All the art I've made is related to this searching archetype," Collins says. "I feel there's no one way that people find love in their life. When I started to make this album, I noticed that all the lyrics dealt with this subject. On 'Madison,' the chorus goes 'Hoping you'll find a love/You're one design of love.' Then the next song I wrote went 'Find someone to love...' At that point, I pretty much knew where it was going. Sasha (my main musical partner) and I are both incredibly romantic. We've worked on multiple projects that are all based around this search for love." But this quest spanned beyond the traditional conception of love. It takes a village to put together Drugdealer records. The Greek term for love of friends, philia, translating to "the highest form of love," is evident in a deep cast of characters including Drugdealer band members Mikey Long, MacIntosh and Josh Da Costa (CMON), as well as Southland virtuosos like John Carroll Kirby (Frank Ocean, Stones Throw) and Daryl Johns (Mac DeMarco, The Lemon Twigs). Tim Presley sings on the second song, "Baby," and Collins had a clear role in mind for the California avant-rock mainstay. "I love White Fence so much, but I also wanted to hear Presley sing a song that sounded like an early '60s sock hop band who had never tried drugs in their life." Meanwhile, Kate Bollinger floats an effervescent lead vocal over the Rhodes-driven groove in “Pictures of You.” As usual, Collins wrangled a who's who of background singers and instrumentalists to carry out Hiding in Plain Sight's vision. Mainly, however, the record acts as a welcome showcase for Collins as an emboldened lead singer, a wayward bandleader who has found a way to love himself as a singer, songwriter and storyteller. Taking inspiration from a canon of gruff but soulful rock vocalists like Phil Lynott, Collins looks back on his nocturnal meanderings through LA's warrens of bars and clubs ("New Fascination"). He’s right up front in the mix, detailing a search for love in all the wrong places. All the while, his band turns on a dime, with Long and Sergio Tabanico trading respective electric sitar and electric sax solos. On "Hard Dreaming Man," he looks back at a restless decade on the road through the rearview mirror. "Hard dreaming man/lemme tell you anything I know... I gotta go any place I can go," he sings over a chorus of honky-tonk guitars you might hear wafting out of saloon doors. "The thing I actually do at a high level isn't playing piano," Collins says, "it's telling stories. Our group of musicians, we all just really like to hang out and tell stories together." Collins once again hands the mic over to his talented friends on the final, celebratory track, "Posse Cut." The latest, greatest entry in a Los Angeles funk tradition spanning from Leon Sylvers to Warren G, the six-minute jam finds a groove and rides it, with Bambina, Winn, Sean Nicholas Savage, Video Age, and Kirby showing out. In what could be a summation of the record's themes, Winn sings, "I don't wanna stop the flow/But there's something you should know/I've been known to move around/I get lost before I get found." Ultimately, Hiding in Plain Sight is an odyssey from philautia—the ability to love oneself —to philia, a greater ability to love and embrace the contributions of those around you. Only then does a path clear for an encompassing and passionate romantic love, eros. Ultimately, Collins finds love all around and, finally, feels in possession of the voice to sing about it, resulting in the most joyful and fully-realized Drugdealer album to date.

Several things happened before a warm day when I met the four members of Frankie Cosmos in a Brooklyn studio to begin making their album. Greta Kline spent a few years living with her family and writing a mere 100 songs, turning her empathy anywhere from the navel to the moon, rendering it all warm, close and reflexively humorous. In music, everyone loves a teen sensation, but Kline has never been more fascinating than now, a decade into being one of the most prolific songwriters of her generation. She’s lodged in my mind amongst authors, other observational alchemists like Rachel Cusk or Sheila Heti, but she’s funnier, which is a charm endemic to musicians. Meanwhile Frankie Cosmos, a rare, dwindling democratic entity called a band, had been on pandemic hiatus with no idea if they’d continue. In the openness of that uncertainty they met up, planning to hang out and play music together for the first time in nearly 500 days. There, whittling down the multitude of music to work with, they created Inner World Peace, a collection of Greta’s songs changed and sculpted by their time together. While Kline’s musical taste at the time was leaning toward aughts indie rock she’d loved as a teenager, keyboardist Lauren Martin and drummer Luke Pyenson cite “droning, meditation, repetition, clarity and intentionality,” as well as “‘70s folk and pop” as a reference for how they approached their parts. Bassist/guitarist Alex Bailey says that at the time he referred to it as their “ambient” or “psych” album. Somewhere between those textural elements and Kline’s penchant for concise pop, Inner World Peace finds its balance. Instant centerpiece “One Year Stand” is a small snowglobe of intimacy recalling the softest moments of Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. Lifted by Martin’s drones on Hammond organ and synthesizer, it could be played on repeat in a loop. I like to think it’s obvious how Greta’s vocals were recorded: late at night as we all sat by in low light, transfixed as she sings “I’m not worried about the / rest of my life / because you are here today / I go back in time / I’m a cast iron.” The voices of Kline and Martin, who have sung together since middle school, blend seamlessly. The first order of business upon setting up camp in Brooklyn’s Figure 8 studios was to project giant colorful slides the band had made for each track. Co-producing with Nate Mendelsohn, my Shitty Hits Recording partner, we aimed for FC’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies to shine.The mood board for “Magnetic Personality” has a neon green and black checkerboard, a screen capture of the game Street Fighter with “K.O.” in fat red letters, and a cover of Mad Magazine that says “Spy Vs. Spy! The Top Secret Files.” On tracks like “F.O.O.F.” (Freak Out On Friday), “Fragments” and “Aftershook,” the group are at their most psychedelic and playful, interjecting fuzz solos, bits of percussion, and other sonically adventurous ear candy. An internal logic strengthens everything, and in their proggiest moments, Frankie Cosmos are simply a one-take band who don’t miss. When on Inner World Peace they sound wildly, freshly different, it may just be that they’re coming deeper into their own. Throughout the album there are plays on the notion of feeling seen or invisible, as in “Magnetic Personality” when Kline sings “ask me how I am and I won’t really say,” or in “One Year Stand” when she says “maybe I’m asking myself.” Kline emphasizes that this was her first group of songs in years that weren’t written while on tour, but rather with ample time on her hands. She reflects on past selves in “Abigail” (“that version of myself I don’t want back”) and “Wayne” (“Like in first grade / How I went by Wayne / I always had / another name”). If we’re alone, what becomes of the things we see? As in “Fruit Stand,” Kline asks “If it’s raining and I can’t feel it, is it raining?” Inner World Peace excels in passing on the emotions it holds. When in the towering “Empty Head” Kline sings of wanting to let thoughts slide away, her voice is buoyed on a bed of synths and harmonium as tranquility abounds. When her thoughts become hurried and full of desire, so does the band, and she leaps from word to word as if unable to contain them all. As a group, they carry it all deftly, and with constant regard for Kline’s point of view. Says Greta, “To me, the album is about perception. It’s about the question of “who am I?” and whether or not the answer matters. It’s about quantum time, the possibilities of invisible worlds. The album is about finding myself floating in a new context. A teenager again, living with my parents. An adult, choosing to live with my family in an act of love. Time propelled us forward, aged us, and also froze. If you don’t leave the house, who are you to the world? Can you take the person you discover there out with you?” - katie von schleicher

Behind their dynamic image, ITZY have always focused on staying true to themselves. Their sleek, genre-blending songs and sophisticated, perfectly executed performances have placed them firmly in the top tier of K-pop girl groups since their debut—and they maintain that energetic self-confidence on their fifth mini-album, *CHECKMATE*. For the cheery opener “SNEAKERS”, a summertime gem that finds ITZY declaring their intent to be free and not compare themselves to others, they turned to GALACTIKA \*, the songwriting team behind their best-known hits. The record also features tracks from hitmakers like KENZIE, LDN NOISE and Sebastian Thott—and allows the group to flex their creative muscles with forays into hybrid trap and electro-pop. Ahead of the release of *CHECKMATE* and the start of ITZY’s first world tour, Apple Music asked the group’s members five questions about their everyday lives when they’re not onstage. Check out what these straight-talking Gen-Zers had to say below. 
**Five Facts You Didn’t Know About ITZY** **1. What were your favourite sneakers to wear while working on the new album? 👟** YEJI: All white Adidas Superstar! LIA: Adidas white sneakers. RYUJIN: Adidas Superstar! CHAERYEONG: All white Adidas Superstar! YUNA: White Adidas Forum! **2. What are your phone wallpapers? 📱** YEJI: A photo of the sky I took from the plane! LIA: A still from *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*. RYUJIN: Gremlin. CHAERYEONG: A photo of the sky that I took. YUNA: It’s just the default screen. **3. Anything you’d like to eat right now?** YEJI: Sushi. 🍣 LIA: Spicy cheesy tteokbokki. 🫕 RYUJIN: Umm… beef? Mala xiang guo…? Ramyeon, maybe? 🍜 CHAERYEONG: Chocolate-flavoured TURTLE CHIPS… 🍫🐢 YUNA: Yogurt ice cream! 🍦 **4. What’s your very own way of de-stressing? 🤯** YEJI: Lying in bed and just relaxing. LIA: Eating spicy stuff. Also, crying myself to sleep. RYUJIN: Eating something I crave, or watching movies or shows by myself in bed till I doze off. CHAERYEONG: First I take a nice shower. Then I get on the couch and watch TV. YUNA: Having a shower, or taking a walk while blasting music! Also, dining out somewhere nice. **5. What are some movies or shows you’ve seen recently? 🎥** YEJI: *About Time*. LIA: *Twenty-Five Twenty-One*. RYUJIN: *The Chef of South Polar*. CHAERYEONG: I watched *About Time* again! YUNA: *Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness*.

“When I make records, I make them with the idea that no one else will hear them,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “When you get to the realization that this private dialogue is going to be completely public, it’s like I’ve tricked myself again.” On her band’s fifth album *Dance Fever*, such private dialogues include rejecting real love (“Girls Against God”), dance as the greatest form of release (the anxious synth-folk of “Free”), embracing less healthy coping mechanisms in her past (“Morning Elvis”), and the push-pull between a creative career and the possible desire to start a family. “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king,” Welch declares in baritone on “King,” in which she ponders one of *Dance Fever*’s most prominent themes: her complicated relationship with her own artistry. “A lot of it is questioning what it gives to me as well, and being like, ‘Why do I need this so much, sometimes at the cost of more sustainable forms of intimacy or more stable relationships?’” she says. “I think this record is questioning, ‘How committed am I to my own loneliness? How committed am I to my sense of a tragic figure?’” Work on the album had begun alongside producer Jack Antonoff in New York in early 2020 before the pandemic forced Welch back to London, where her creativity was stifled for six long months. *Dance Fever*, then, also covers writer’s block (the cathartic “My Love,” a track intended to help shake off Welch’s blues, and our own) and her despair of what was lost in a locked-down world. Her lyrics occasionally poke fun at the image she has created of herself (“I think there\'s a humor also in self-knowledge that runs through this record that I\'ve actually found really liberating,” says Welch), but they are often as strikingly vulnerable as on 2018’s *High as Hope*. And even if the singer admits on “King” that she is “never satisfied,” her band’s fifth album has brought her rare peace. “I feel like I managed to take everything that I learned in the last 15 years and consolidate it into this record, into this art, into the videos,” she says. “I felt like, if I had to prove something to myself, somehow I did it on this record.” Read on as Welch talks us through a selection of tracks on *Dance Fever*. **“King”** “Sometimes songs just arrive fully formed, and it\'s always when you think you\'ll never write a song again. I felt like my creative abilities were finally at the peak of how I understood myself as an artist and what I wanted to do. But if I wanted to have a family, there was this sense that suddenly I was being irresponsible with my time by choosing this thing that I\'ve known my whole life, which is performance, which is making songs, which is striving to be the best performer that I can be. Somehow, it would be your fault if you miss the boat. I think that scream at the end of ‘King,’ it\'s just one of frustration, and confusion as well. I was thinking about Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. I was thinking about how they can commit their body entirely to the stage. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I\'m not going to be able to do that. I\'m going to have to make choices.’ It\'s a statement of confidence, but also of humor that the album has, of ‘If I\'m going to sacrifice these other things in my life, I have to be the best.’ I was like, ‘Why not me? Why can\'t I be king?’” **“Free”** “I think out of all the Florence + the Machine songs, it\'s sort of the purest sentiment of why I do it, distilled into why music is so important to me, why I need it, why performance is so important to me. Sometimes you just know a song is working: When we started playing it before it had even come out, just this ripple started in the audience of people catching onto the chorus and starting to move. And it was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Oh, this is a special one. This is really hitting something in people.’ And that\'s so magical for me. That\'s when the celebration starts.” **“Daffodil”** “I thought I\'d lost my mind, because I remember coming home and being like, ‘Okay, I wrote a song today. It might be the most Florence + the Machine thing I\'ve ever done. We\'re a year into the pandemic, I think maybe I\'m losing it. The chorus is just “daffodil” over and over again.’ I was like, ‘Can you do that? That\'s a crazy thing to do.’ There were so many moments where I had nearly gave up on this record. There were so many moments where I nearly went, ‘It just feels like the way that the world is, this is just too hard to finish.’” **“The Bomb”** “There\'s a lot of nods, I think, to the previous records. All three of them are in this album, which is nice. Because I feel like somehow I\'m bridging the gaps between all of them on this record, like all the things I\'ve been interested in. This song is nodding to what I was thinking about, in terms of unavailability in people, in *High as Hope* in songs like ‘Big God,’ with like the obsession of someone who\'ll never text you back. Why is the person who creates the most space and gives you nothing the most appealing person? And really that\'s because if you\'re a songwriter, they give you the most enormous space for fantasy and you can write anything you want because they don\'t really exist. Every time I think in my life I\'ve been in a stable place, something or someone will come up and be like, ‘How do you feel about blowing all this up?’ It\'s also a fear of growing up and a fear of getting older, because if you regenerate yourself constantly through other people by blowing up, changing everything, you never have to face aging or death.” **“Morning Elvis”** “I\'m obsessed with Nick Cave as a performer, but the performer he\'s obsessed with is Elvis. So that\'s how it feeds back to me. I was at home and stuck and there was an Elvis documentary. It made me remember us, when we were on tour in New Orleans, it would have maybe been on the second record. The wheels were really coming off for me, in terms of drinking and partying. I just got very in the spirit of New Orleans and was at a party and just went, \'You all leave without me, I\'m staying at this party.\' I ended up with my dress completely shredded, because I\'m always wearing these vintage things that basically just disintegrate: If you’re on a rager, you will come back with nothing. You would\'ve thought things were going so well for me. What was it about me that had such a death wish? I had such little care for myself. It didn\'t matter what I had done the night before, or the week before, or what chaos I had created, I knew if I got to the stage, something there would save me and that I would be absolved. And that song is about that feeling, but also a testament to all the performers I\'ve seen turn pain into something so beautiful.”

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

hi everyone. this is a very deeply personal album but i don't wanna say much about it this time. i'll just say i hope it finds a way into your hearts. thank you for everything we also recorded some visuals, check it out www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl6g0lJ5V7k it's so intuitive to look up to the sky to try to find meaning on such events as natural as life itself I can only see pieces of you on every space that i can touch, see, hear, feel, breathe I see the desire to be able to look into your eyes one more time but I remember I can see you again when I stare in a mirror on my reflection, we are daughters of the stars and the same sun still burns when I close my eyes meandthesunalwaysandforever

Special thanks to: Lobsterfight, Your arms are my coccoon, Tooth Cemetary, Plague Skater, GammaGril, Hibernator, The Budgets, Me Too, Thanks, Glass Beach, Cliffdiver, Oolong, Treasure State, James Ceaser, (Leave) Nelson B, Exciting!!Excellent!!, New You, Merrier, Why Sloth, Why?, bedbugs, Thank You, I'm Sorry, Deathwish 406, GoodLuckRy, Superdestroyer, John & Shane, Scarlet, Ty Sutton + Ty Herman, Gunnar, Tanner, Ian, Quinn, Porter, Shane, Mike, Liam, Bella, Ariana, Sunnie, Leo <3, Our rad parents & To anyone who has ever believed in us, we love you all so much! - Hey, ily!

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

Simple Minds return with eighteenth studio album Direction of the Heart, set for release on 21st October 2022 and including lead single ‘Vision Thing’. Direction of the Heart is Simple Minds’ first album of new material since 2018’s outstanding UK Top 5 album Walk Between Worlds. Throughout its nine tracks, Direction of the Heart finds the band at their most confident, anthemic best on an inspired celebration of life, and which manages to perfectly encapsulate the essence of past and present Simple Minds, a band whose reascent over the past 10 years has seen them, once again, capture the magic and critical praise of their early days.

Benjamin Clementine has returned with his long-awaited third album, And I Have Been. It’s taken five years for him to release the follow-up to his critically acclaimed second album, 2017’s I Tell a Fly, but it has been worth the wait. As was expected, the LP is his most accomplished to date, a more dynamic, atmospheric and affecting body of work than anything he’s released, even his Mercury-winning debut album At Least for Now.

Cults made their name in black and white. A pair of film school dropouts who burst onto the New York scene with a perfect single and a darkly retro sound, the band’s first two albums play like noirish documentaries on a lost girl group. Four years after Static, Cults returns with Offering, an exciting collection of songs bursting with heart, confidence, shimmering melody and buzzing life. The time off has given the band new energy and new ideas–Cults are working in Technicolor now. The core duo remains the same. Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion, both 28, still live in New York. They still finish each other’s thoughts and still share a love of catchy music and black humor (this is a band that sampled cult leader Jim Jones on their first hit). But the pair have put some blood on the tracks since their breakout debut: they’ve toured the world, built a devoted audience, survived a breakup, grown up in green rooms, parted ways with their old label and made a home of their new one.

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