Press the “MORE” button for an exclusive Q&A with Jay Chou about the making of this album. Jay Chou established his reputation as a Mandopop superstar through heart-wrenching ballads, kinetic raps, insouciant delivery and compositions applying his training in classical music to a wide range of musical styles. *Greatest Works of Art*, his first full-length album release in six years, returns to those foundational ingredients on a grand yet comfortable scale. The title track combines a plethora of sounds and influences, from Western hip-hop and R&B vibes to classical piano, reminiscent of Chopin. You’ll also hear elements of 1920s-style composition too, alongside nods to Chinese poet Xu Zhimo and painter Sanyu.“Mojito” is a light-hearted excursion to the tropics built around Cuban rhythms, while “Waiting For You”, a collab with Gary Yang, and the humorous “Pink Ocean” showcase the wordplay and emotional resonance of Chou’s long-time partnership with lyricist Vincent Fang. Below, Chou shares some of his thoughts about making *Greatest Works of Art*: **Which songs best represent your current creative mood?** “I have beautiful childhood memories of playing the piano while my mother painted. I remember my mom telling me stories of artists, so it was actually way back then that my mother began influencing me artistically. The combination of painting, drawing, literature, and music has been a recent theme for me. ‘Greatest Works of Art’ and its music video were things I thought about around five years ago. It’s like traveling through time to encounter artists of the past.” **Talk about your collaboration with Ashin Chen on ‘Won’t Cry’ and possibly future collab plan.** “I like to give my fans surprises. For my collaboration with Ashin, the backup vocals, production and video shoot in Japan were all kept secret. I remember when I announced on Instagram that I’d be releasing a song, he acted surprised and encouraged me online as if he didn’t know—and that really surprised everybody. Anyway, it was fun.” **Have your ideas about marrying traditional Chinese music with Western elements like R&B and rap changed?** “‘Cold Hearted’ is a Chinese style song that I wrote with Vincent Fang. I still remember years ago when I was about to release *November’s Chopin*, lots of artists were writing Chinese-style songs, too, so I didn’t want any Eastern elements on the album. But Fang strongly suggested otherwise, and even finished the lyrics to ‘髮如雪’ (‘Hair Like Snow’). Then I thought to myself, I should just stick to my own style and hope that I can influence others instead of being influenced by them. So I’ve just always made the music I want to make.” **What inspires the stories behind your songs and Fang’s lyrics?** “Creativity is not necessarily about the artist’s own stories and experiences. Sometimes I draw inspirations from people around me. For example, the song‘If You Don’t Love Me, It’s Fine’ that I wrote with Devon Song \[of Nan Quan Mama\], expresses the emotional difficulty of a man who feels that their relationship has hit a wall, but he still manages to confront their problems/issues with strength and charisma. Vincent Fang wrote the lyrics to ‘Won’t Cry’, which is a love song about sacrifice. For the sake of a man’s dream, she lets him go with a smile. So each song can have a very different story.” **How would you describe Jay Chou’s music style in the 2020s?** “I’ve never thought about it that way. I don’t categorize my works like that. I just continue to make music in my own style. Of course, I try to add new elements and ideas over the years, and share everything with my fans through my music and music videos.” **How do you feel about fans comparing your new album to older work?** “Lots of people like old songs. There’s a certain nostalgic charm to them. You can feel emotions of the past. It’s like traveling back in time. So no matter what new songs are written, they are no match for the old ones. I have this idea that I’m writing songs for the children of today. From generation to generation, whether my old songs are better or the new songs are better, all the songs I write are good.” What was it like to record your son Romeo’s voice for “Pink Ocean”? “I thought it would be fun to have his voice as an intro, so I asked him to talk a little and then edited it. His laugh is so natural.”
A lot can happen in a decade. When BTS debuted under Big Hit Entertainment in 2013, there was no telling that the K-pop septet would become the biggest boy band on the planet, demolishing chart records and any insecurity that the world wouldn’t accept a group that didn’t perform in English. In those early days, the Bangtan Boys made self-empowered trap-pop, using their debut single album *2 COOL 4 SKOOL* as an opportunity to articulate youthful injustices and societal pressures. Then came 2014’s *DARK&WILD*, their debut LP, a softer approach to their hard-hitting hip-hop; 2016’s *Wings*, which was inspired by the 1919 Jungian novel *Demian* by Hermann Hesse (seriously); and the *Love Yourself* series, birthing the global smash “MIC Drop.” They never slowed down. They toured the world. They challenged the confines of genre. They released their *MAP OF THE SOUL* series. They held off releasing an English-language song until seven years into their career, when they were already on top, redefining the way the world views crossover artists. They never lost sight of their fans, called ARMY, or their message: that they wanted to be a respite for the world-weary, that they wanted their listeners to love themselves. They became undeniable. Now, in 2022, there’s *Proof*—BTS’s first anthology album, an eclectic collection of the world’s biggest band’s greatest hits, released while they’re still on top of the industry. It’s an anthology of the group’s most impressive work, sorted both chronologically and according to each member’s personal favorites—the most immediate way to travel through their evolution and take stock of their impact. And there are three new songs: the optimistic “Yet to Come”; a continuation of “Epilogue: Young Forever,” called “For Youth”; and “Run BTS,” a reference to their variety show and a deep celebration of their dedicated ARMY. Below, each member of BTS breaks down the tracks they personally selected as favorites for the collection, exclusively to Apple Music. **“Intro : Persona”** RM: “‘Intro : Persona’ is based on the question ‘Who am I?’ It is one of the questions that I often ask myself, in an effort to figure out which one is closest to the true self. Whether as RM of BTS, as a friend or a family member, or simply as Kim Namjoon, it’s not just one but all the personas define who I truly am. That’s why I chose the song for the album.” **“Moon”** Jin: “‘Moon’ has a special place in my heart because the song speaks for our relationship with our ARMY. The song likens ARMY to the sight of the Earth as seen from the perspective of the moon. ARMY is inseparable from BTS as they were there for us every moment. ARMY, love you to the moon and back!” **“No More Dream”** SUGA: “‘No More Dream’ is a meaningful song to BTS because it’s the debut track. It represents the essence of BTS from the beginning. Also, the lyrics sing the message that only those at that age can speak about, so it makes me reminisce about the time and reflect on how much we’ve grown as artists and as a team.” **“ON”** j-hope: “‘ON’ really shows the pinnacle of BTS’s growth as artists. The lyrics talk about growing pains, getting through turbulent times, and finally finding a balance. The song motivates me to push myself forward for another dream or bigger challenge.” **“Friends”** Jimin: “‘Friends’ is about friendship with those who always stand by my side and keep me in balance. Without our BTS members, ‘Jimin’ wouldn’t have existed. Without ARMY, BTS wouldn’t have been the same as who we are now. It is a gratitude to our friends who made everything possible.” **“Singularity”** V: “‘Singularity’ sings about the agony of choosing between two personas as artist V and human being Kim Taehyung. Going through it was hard, but overcoming the confusing times and finally accepting both sides of myself really built who I am today.” **“Dynamite”** Jung Kook: “‘Dynamite’ was like a present to us when we were going through difficult times emotionally and physically after the pandemic started. It gave us another beginning and opportunity to jump higher after a short step back.”
“This isn’t my first language, but once it’s in you, it never leaves you,” Christina Aguilera tells Apple Music. Indeed, she’s no stranger to Spanish-language music, having notably released *Mi Reflejo* the year after her massively successful 1999 full-length debut. Now, all these years later, the pop icon makes her formal and formidable return to the Latin pop world with this six-song EP. “*La Fuerza* represents being a strong force of nature, having had the career I’ve had over the last couple of decades,” she says. One need only see some of the collaborators on this project to see just how powerful she continues to be. She unites with Becky G., NICKI NICOLE, and Nathy Peluso for the empowering “Pa Mis Muchachas” and duets with reggaetón superstar Ozuna on the dance-floor-centric “Santo.” On the moving piano ballad “Somos Nada,” she reminds anyone in need of a refresher just how powerful her voice can be, no matter what language she chooses. “It’s so important to me, at this point in my career and my life, that I literally do things that energetically feel so good.”
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.’”
There’s a lot to live up to when delivering your debut album after a year in which you’ve become a glam-pop sensation, but Sam Ryder found a novel way to handle the pressure. He’d already made it. “After this crazy year, we thought it would be wicked to put an album out,” Ryder tells Apple Music. “I looked on my hard drive and there were over 100 songs on there. I thought, ‘Well, there’s an album already here.’ I can only imagine the pressure if we hadn’t had those songs written. It was more like I was curating an album out of the 100-odd songs I had.” *There’s Nothing But Space, Man!* builds on the bombastic, Queen-style swagger of “SPACE MAN”—the song that catapulted the Essex-born singer-songwriter to fame in the UK after thrilling performances at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 in Turin and the Platinum Jubilee—with a collection of tracks that demonstrate there’s much more where “SPACE MAN” came from. As well as the big sing-along anthems you’d expect, the album also introduces a softer side to Ryder’s writing, with stirring ballads and atmospheric slower moments in between the rock theatrics. The record is a document of his long struggle to the top, he says. “It’s a symbolization of my best efforts of trying to articulate the importance of hope and faith in my life,” he explains. “I know the grind of music. I’ve been around the block a little bit and I’ve played to no one for a long time.” With *There’s Nothing But Space, Man!*, Sam Ryder seizes his moment. He takes us through his intergalactic debut, track by track. **“Deep Blue Doubt”** “I like the idea of starting a record softly like this. It’s a bit of an homage to Freddie Mercury as well, sat at a piano, and then into something that\'s more like the pace of a Springsteen or Billy Joel record. It’s about doubt and dealing with doubt. I envisioned it as being cast away in an ocean of doubt, there’s nothing but doubt all around you and how do you make it out of that? I was in a great place when I wrote it, but I’ll never forget the years and the feelings. You’ve got to do that as a songwriter, stay connected to the memories of the experience that led you to where you are now, otherwise you get detached.” **“SPACE MAN”** “This was a 10-minute job, one of those golden moments that you’re really thankful for. It’s the song that got me signed to Parlophone. A lot of people think it was written for Eurovision, but it was written a year and a half before I even got that phone call. It’s paying homage to the giants like Elton John, David Bowie. Me, Max Wolfgang, and Amy Wadge were just in the studio—well, Amy was on Zoom because it was during a lockdown—but we absolutely had at it and had the best time. There was no pressure, no one even knew who I was beyond the guy singing in the corner of his shed on TikTok, so the blank canvas was there to be painted, in terms of what you are as an artist, and ‘SPACE MAN’ just encapsulated it.” **“Somebody”** “This was written before the BRIT Awards last year. I was going as a guest, and the BRITs are a funny thing, like any award ceremony, because they make you quite reflective, kind of a yearly review of ‘Where are you in your career?’ I know how many years I’ve spent sitting at home watching it thinking, ‘Jesus, I am so far from that.’ I was doing a session again, with Max and a guy called Jon Green, and we just wanted to write something incredibly joyful and it ended up being this Paul Simon-like celebration of knowing that there\'s someone out there in the world, no matter what you\'re going through, that cares for you.” **“Tiny Riot”** “This was written shortly after ‘SPACE MAN,’ back at the very beginning. It was a real good moment because we had ‘SPACE MAN’ in the bank and you don’t want to think that you’ve just got one song, that it was a fluke. When I sent ‘Tiny Riot,’ everyone was like, ‘OK, we’re on to something here,’ so it was a really important song. It’s taking the negative connotations of the word ‘riot’ like violence and unrest, but using them as an internalization. You disarm the word ‘riot’ by putting ‘tiny’ in front of it and it almost becomes interesting, cute, and something where you are upheaving the tables but within your own soul, not out in the world. Anything that you want to change within yourself, it’s up to you to start that tiny riot and push forward. For me, it was overthinking and procrastination, that was my tiny riot.” **“All the Way Over”** “This is a song for anyone on a journey to the other side of loss. When someone’s going through something awful, the world is there for them in that initial grief stage but as time goes on, life goes on, and that’s a totally natural thing. Everyone’s got their lives to lead and things to do, but that person may still be in an even deeper state of grief than that first moment when everyone was there to hold them. It’s like being in the middle of the river between the two banks, and that’s where a lot of people maybe get swept away. It\'s a song of support for people in that moment.” **“OK”** “This is a typical breakup song. We’ve all been through them, and as a songwriter you hold on to experiences that you’ve had, not just ones that you are living now. It’s about that deluded state, ‘Tell me we’re OK, tell me this is absolutely fine and we’re not going down in flames or spiraling into oblivion.’ Also, I wanted to sing something where I really challenged myself. I’m really on the knife edge of my voice and that was OK. I love the song but I’m very nervous about singing it because it took a lot to get the emotion in the take.” **“Put a Light on Me”** “This is about the responsibility that you have to wrench light out of the darkness. We always talk about how nothing is all good and nothing is all bad and it’s the same with people. Even the most evil person that’s ever existed, there is always room for a tiny bit of light. It might be absolutely minuscule and that person might be absolutely horrid and awful, but the universal law is that light can’t exist without darkness. It’s using that as a comfort with situations that you’re in. Find solace in knowing that there is good in the worst situations that you are going through and that you may well have to wrench that out of thin air.” **“Whirlwind”** “This was my first single. It went straight to No. 1 on the iTunes global chart. In a way, all that sort of number stuff is so fleeting that you can’t find your validation in it, but it really gave me confidence, like, ‘OK, wicked, we’re on to something here. This isn’t just a social media thing, a singing-in-the-corner-of-my-shed-doing-covers thing. This can translate.’ It’s a love song about the person and the people that I love.” **“Ten Tons”** “This is an uplifting song inspired by some of my favorite singers like Sia. When I put on records by her, it always gives me a little bit of empowerment to move through a situation, believe in myself, and remind myself how far I’ve come or for me to remind my friends when they’re in need. We can deal with so much more than we give ourselves credit for a lot of the time and we can adapt so quickly in a situation where we think that we can’t. Human beings are amazing and this is a song celebrating that. I get to do a guitar solo at the end, my first and only guitar solo on this record. That was because of time, I just didn’t have time to get in the studio.” **“More”** “You know how work and offices have their pillars? ‘More’ is about my pillars, about what really means something in my life, what gives my life purpose, the most important things. It’s like my time with my family, realizing that the days I’m living, the years I’m living right now are the golden age, there’s four generations of my family around the dinner table. Getting to share my own music and doing all the glitzy stuff that comes with it isn’t the source of my happiness because I was incredibly happy before. Knowing that my validation can’t and won’t come from this world gives me a lot of comfort because I know that all of us have everything that we already need if we have the right mindset.” **“Crashing Down”** “This is an incredibly sad breakup song. I really wanted to put on paper that moment of where you realize that the world has fallen out from underneath your feet, that you’d remember these strange, tiny, almost insignificant things about your surroundings and the noise around you and that moment in time. It’s trying to find the way of describing that in a song that’s about something incredibly sad. Also, if we are feeling sad, sometimes we like to romanticize that sadness and put something sad on. Sometimes I just want to sit in that space of feeling sorry for myself. We all do it. That’s why ballads exist and sad films exist.” **“This Time”** “This is a reminder for me to never forget where I came from and how much I owe every little fiber of this experience to strangers I’ve never met. A reminder to treat everyone that you meet with gratitude and kindness and move through the world in that space. It’s quite comical but it’s touching on a serious subject, something we can all relate to. Unfortunately, we all know bolshy people who push through the world and use their presence to impress rather than encourage, forget their roots, and look down on others that they decide are lesser than them in some way. You see it a lot, we can all relate to that, so I refuse to ever get to that point.” **“Lost in You”** “It’s a hypnotic-y ballad but a bit more than that. It‘s about meeting my partner. We’ve been together for 11 years and it’s a step-by-step of that meeting, trying my best, and probably failing, to put into a song how I feel. I know I was lost until I found myself totally lost in that person and it felt poetic. Even saying it feels bloody artsy-fartsy, so why not put it in a song?” **“Living Without You”** “This was a last-minute thing so it made sense to chuck it at the end because I’d worked so long getting the flow of the album right and then David Guetta, Sigala, and me did a song together. What an opportunity and what an experience. I’ve been listening to both of their music for so long. Those guys are incredible.”
Back in 2017, Michelle Branch released *Hopeless Romantic*, her first album in 14 years, marking a shift in her career. Her youthful pop rock had become matured bluesy rock, a textured sound. Now, half a decade later, she’s back with an even bolder evolution. *The Trouble With Fever*, the result of those five years, showcases her immense talents: everything from a new interest in somber pedal steel (“Not My Lover”) to empathetic ruminations on the male experience (“I’m a Man”). Branch and her husband Patrick Carney, of The Black Keys, worked on the collection at home in Nashville, largely writing and recording during lockdown. “We were in isolation; we couldn’t call outside session players,” she tells Apple Music. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and I played a lot of instruments I’d never played and wrote the bulk of the material on my own. It felt really good because I hadn’t really written the bulk of an album worth of material since \[2001’s\] *The Spirit Room*. If I didn’t have kids, I could just put my headphones on and sit there with a Mellotron and a glass of wine and just hours would go by,” she laughs. And it’s well worth the wait. “I kept coming back to this feeling of cabin fever, sleepless nights of wondering what was happening in the future and thinking about the past. The title encapsulated these 10 songs in a perfect way.” Below, Branch walks Apple Music through some of the key tracks from *The Trouble With Fever*. **“I’m a Man”** “‘I’m a Man’ was written in March of 2020, which surprises people because when it was released, it was on the tail of Roe v. Wade being overturned. I kept having this chorus idea, ‘I’m a man,’ and here I am, very much not a man, going, ‘What do I know about being a man?’ As hard as it is to be a woman, I’m so fucking relieved to be a woman. I’d much rather be a woman than a man. I was trying to figure out how to tell that story, but I kept coming back to my own experience of being a woman: everything from walking down the street and having some strangers tell you to smile, to not having autonomy over my body, to dealing with, like, ‘Here I am, home with the kids’—not this generalized view of a woman. But here I am, at home with the kids, making dinner and cleaning the kitchen. We fall into the roles that we’re given because of our gender. I’m happy that it’s being seen as a protest song. When I was a teenager, I would’ve shied away from talking about a topic like that. But now, at 39 years old, in the climate that we’re in, I can’t afford not to speak out about it.” **“Not My Lover”** “The pedal steel is the loneliest-sounding instrument there is. It just sounds like tears. I have been wanting to learn how to play pedal steel for years and have been really frustrated every time I sat down and tried. Mark, our engineer, and Patrick were very patient with me because it was not in tune for a lot of the passes. Another instrument that I really went to town on and enjoyed was \[the Mellotron\]. I just kept writing string parts on the Mellotron.” **“You”** “There’s strings on almost every song. I can’t take all the credit for the cello, but I wrote all the parts. We called a woman who lives here in town, Casey Kaufman. We called her down to overdub some cello at the very end, and she showed up to the studio. We all had masks on; she brought us homemade hand sanitizer. She came in and she put a live cello over some of my string parts that were played with the synth, so they would sound a little more real.” **“Fever Forever”** “When I get stuck lyrically, I love to read poetry. What I loved most about reading this David Berman book \[*Actual Air*\], I love the way that he approaches his storytelling. There’s inner rhymes that aren’t so obvious, and there are words you wouldn’t normally expect to hear in a song. There’s just so much character to what he writes. There’s a song on the record called ‘Fever Forever’ that was really inspired by David, lyrically. I don’t come anywhere close to his genius, but I find myself in these situations where I’m like, ‘WWDD? What would David do? What would he say?’ ‘I’m buzzing like a goddamn honeybee’ is one of \[my\] lines that I’m like...it’s David-adjacent.” **“I’m Sorry”** “Believe it or not, one of the first songs written. I have had a chorus since 2017. We started recording it, the verses didn’t exist, and I was just really struggling with finishing it. Patrick kept teasing me, saying, ‘There’s something about it that reminds me of a Nickelback song, ‘How You Remind Me.’ Hopefully, a musicologist doesn’t hear this and say, ‘Actually, you’re right, and you should be sued.’ It was a tough nut to crack, and it was saved by Patrick approaching the verses differently and playing the bassline differently. It gave this whole new life to this idea I’d been struggling to get on paper. Once the ending came along and that guitar part came in, I was like, ‘OK, this is an album closer. This just feels right as an album closer.’”
Frontiers Music Srl is proud to announce the release of the new studio album, "From The New World" by the legendary Alan Parsons. The eleven-time Grammy nominated legendary music icon and master of progressive rock released his last studio album “The Secret” in April 2019. "From The New World" features the classic sounds Parsons has become known for in his impressive career, with progressive, symphonic, and classic rock elements all touched upon on this stunning album. Guest appearances from the likes of renowned guitarist and singer Joe Bonamassa, Tommy Shaw of Styx, vocalist David Pack (Ambrosia), and vocalist James Durbin add wonderful atmosphere to the stunning performances by Alan and his incredible backing band.
Since their 2002 debut, Simple Plan has gradually crowd-surfed further and further away from the mosh pit, as the Montreal band tilted toward the pop side of their pop-punk axis—and became the only Warped Tour alumni to count Nelly and Natasha Bedingfield as collaborators. But on their sixth album, Simple Plan reassumes the stage-diving position. *Harder Than It Looks* was completed just before the pandemic shut everything down in early 2020, but its two-year delay now frames the record as the perfect 20th-anniversary sequel to the group’s multiplatinum breakthrough, *No Pads, No Helmets...Just Balls*. Over its 10 tracks, the band reasserts their innate flair for adrenalized, guitar-charged gallops and festival-sized sing-alongs, even as the cheeky teen angst of old gives way to more sobering reflections on mental health, cyberbullying, and divorce. “For us, this is a full-circle, back-to-basics record,” frontman Pierre Bouvier tells Apple Music. “We came out in the early 2000s and had massive success, and then you start questioning, ‘How can we prove to the world that we\'re not just this?’ But I think with some maturity and hindsight, we\'ve all come to the conclusion: ‘Let\'s just do what Simple Plan does best, and not worry about showcasing that we can do other things. Let\'s give the people what they want.’” Here, Bouvier gives us the track-by-track lowdown on how Simple Plan made *Harder Than It Looks* sound so easy. **“Wake Me Up (When This Nightmare\'s Over)”** “Through meeting fans and reading people\'s messages, we\'ve come to realize that there\'s a lot of people in our fanbase who literally rely on this music when they\'re struggling. It\'s more than just entertainment to them. Because of that, we always try to write songs that are going to help people through their struggles. And we wanted to make a song that was sort of vague enough to fit with whatever you\'re going through. So the \'nightmare\' is whatever that struggle is for you.” **“Ruin My Life” (feat. Deryck Whibley)** “We\'ve had parallel careers with Sum 41 for 20-plus years. I\'ve been a fan of theirs for a long time, and I think Deryck sang a great part on our song. We all see it: People in the comments section can get really nasty, and that\'s hard—even for me. But then at some point, I\'m like, \'You know what—I don\'t care about that person. They mean nothing to me. And you may have thought that what you said hurt me, but guess what: You didn\'t ruin my life.\' That\'s what the song is about to me.” **“The Antidote”** “A lot of these concepts were brought in by our drummer, Chuck \[Comeau\]—he had this word, \'antidote,\' on this little whiteboard that he brings in when we do writing sessions. It reminded me of when I was having trouble with anxiety like 10, 12 years ago, and I started having these pretty intense panic attacks. I didn\'t know what they were, and I thought, ‘Am I gonna die?’ So I would call my wife and she would calm me down—we\'d talk for an hour at four in the morning. That\'s what this song represents to me: that lifeline that you reach for when you\'re having those moments of terrible anxiety or depression.” **“A Million Pictures of You”** “This is about the infatuation moment in a relationship, where you just can\'t get enough of each other. You look at this person, and you\'re like, \'I want to take so many pictures of you and spend every moment with you,\' and you\'re just obsessed with each other and want to document it all. I love the riff that we came up with—it just feels like a classic, feel-good song.” **“Anxiety”** “This song was written with Chuck and I, and we also invited Travis Clark from We the Kings. We were inspired by twenty one pilots\' stuff and ended up going with more of a modern take on reggae. The song is talking about anxiety—mental health is no longer taboo, and I think that\'s awesome, because when you\'re going through that stuff, it feels embarrassing. We want to help make that conversation more accepted. It should be treated like an injury—when you break your arm, you go to the hospital, you put a cast on, you listen to the doctor. But when your head\'s broken, people don\'t always do that, and I think it\'s important to treat it that way.” **“Congratulations”** “This song is a little reminiscent of \'Ruin My Life.\' It could be seen as being about a relationship where someone wronged you, whatever way that may have been. It\'s about feeling betrayed. I don\'t know if karma is a real thing, but in my experience, it sure seems like it is. So \'Congratulations\' is really a song about karma. It\'s like: Okay, you have this small victory because you wronged me. Well, congratulations on that one, but just remember: What goes up must come down.” **“Iconic”** “Almost every album of ours has a song where it\'s like, ‘What the hell\'s that doing there?’ And for this one, we tried to get ourselves in a frame of mind of writing a song for when a team comes out on the field. Imagine sports highlights, where you see all the tackles and all the rough parts. It\'s almost like we wrote a song for a documentary about a team of underdogs that made it to the top. And that team could be Simple Plan: I feel like our band has always had a chip on our shoulder. We’ve had great success; however, we\'ve always had a healthy bit of headroom to aim for that Green Day level of being the biggest band in the world.” **“Best Day of My Life”** “A lot of people think that we came out and instantly had success. But Chuck and I were in a skate-punk band \[Reset\] since we were 13 years old—we opened up for Face to Face and NOFX. That was the world that we came from: We were playing fast punk beats and didn\'t give a crap about success. I\'m a huge fan of NOFX and Lagwagon and Pennywise—that\'s what I used to play when I was a kid. So Chuck and I love putting stuff like that on our records. For some people that only know us for \'I\'m Just a Kid,\' they might be like, \'Whoa, what the hell is this?\' But this is the sort of song we end up playing live a lot, because they\'re fun. If you\'re playing a festival and you want to get the mosh pit going, just crank out this song.” **“Slow Motion”** “Once again, this was one of those whiteboard ideas Chuck had. He was describing this idea of love at first sight. You see it in movies all the time, where you see the girl walking into the room in slow motion. We were trying to get music to match that sort of emotion and be very cinematic. Production-wise, we just wanted to make it as grandiose as possible. This is gonna sound silly, but when I hear this chorus, it just makes me want to cry. I was driving to LA for a session and I was sitting in my car with tears coming down my face, and I\'m like, \'What is wrong with me? I\'m listening to my own music and I\'m crying in my car!\'” **“Two”** “Now that all of us have kids, the idea of splitting up with your spouse and having to make decisions in your life that will affect your kids has sort of taken a whole new meaning. Luckily for me, and Chuck as well, we came from families that are still together, but we wanted to write about divorce and get as real and raw as possible. When a couple is going through divorce, and they\'re worried about the impact on their children, what do they do? They start saying, ‘Well, from now on, you\'ll have two Christmases and you get to have two birthday parties!’ And the kid is probably thinking, ‘I don\'t want that! I don\'t want two bedrooms or two holidays, I just want one!’ So for anyone who\'s the product of divorce, or is going through that themselves, I think this song is really going to hit home. It was a hard one to sing.”
a bunch of songs about people, places, and things that are near and dear to my heart! dedicated to amanda, gus, willy, star, abe, ellie, jaden, gilbert, lev, pluto, eli, armen, charlie, stella, kyle, phan, b lambert, owen don, all of skramz gang, miles, jay, zekai, dylan, zach, and all of the FHR discord <3
Half a decade since iKON debuted, eight years since WINNER, and 16 years since BIGBANG, the 12-member TREASURE is YG Entertainment’s first K-pop boy band in a minute—the result of a television survival competition series, *YG Treasure Box*. Meet Choi Hyun-suk, Park Jihoon, Kanemoto Yoshinori (Yoshi), Kim Junkyu, Takata Mashiho, Yoon Jaehyuk, Hamada Asahi, Bang Yedam, Watanabe Haruto, Kim Doyoung, Park Jeong-woo, and So Junghwan—a dream team of trainees-turned-rookies here to remind listeners that they can find their treasure anywhere. It’s a concept first introduced on their debut studio album, 2021’s *THE FIRST STEP : TREASURE EFFECT*, and continued on 2022’s *THE SECOND STEP : CHAPTER ONE – EP*. The delivery is as smooth as the message: From the high-octane opener, “JIKJIN,” and the Bieber-esque retro-R&B balladry with subtle trap production of “DARARI,” to the acoustic romance of “IT’S OKAY” and Junkyu’s rich tenor on “U,” a performance that recalls One Direction’s Zayn Malik, there’s a lot to take in.
“Being an adult is fuckin’ hard,” sings Sasha Alex Sloan on the guitar-fueled “Adult,” one of many disenchanted anthems that bolster the singer/songwriter’s nihilistic alt-pop manifesto *I Blame The World*. Relatability is one of Sloan’s natural gifts as a songwriter—and that’s why artists like Camila Cabello, Charlie Puth, and Katy Perry have turned to her talents—but she reserves her most brutally honest confessions for herself. The “glass-half-empty kinda girl”—as she proclaims on the pulsating title track—unleashes all the cynicism she’s collected over her first 27 years and packages it into tidy synth-lined sing-alongs for the misanthrope. “I don’t want to live my best life,” she confesses on the mopey, minimalist ballad “Live Laugh Love,” her voice soft and airy yet half-detached, as if she’s cooing lullabies to her greatest enemy—which may just be herself (see the deceptively jaunty “I h8 Myself”). Still, there are a few rays of hope in Sloan’s blackened world. Even when coolly singing of Earth’s demise on breezy electro-pop groover “Global Warming,” she still admits that love is the best way to forget about it all.