When the world shut down, the Diaz twins of Ibeyi were unsure when or if they’d be able to record again. With Lisa in London and Naomi in Paris, the future looked like a question mark. *Spell 31* became their answer. “We were coming out of two years of so much pain and violence that it felt like the most important thing was to heal,” Lisa tells Apple Music of the inspiration for their third LP. “It became so clear to us that we make albums for ourselves first. We made the songs we need.” Borders opened back up, the album started to materialize, and Naomi began to shuffle back and forth between her home and her sister’s as the pair worked with their longtime producer (and label head) Richard Russell. “I had to go to London a lot and quarantine every time. I was going there and doing a lot of PCRs and shit like that,” she recalls. Listening to *Spell 31*, though, it’s hard to tell that it came together under duress. The vocals are bewitching and the arrangements sublime, accentuating the spiritual elements that underscore Ibeyi’s music. There’s a shift in perspective here as well. Slowing down allowed them to take stock of their journey, both personal and professional. They sound more confident than ever and with a vision that is equally refined. “We felt that the new album and the new phase of our life had to be aligned with how we felt now,” Lisa says. “And so, we took time to write songs that healed us and also write songs to celebrate those last 10 years and the things that are important for us because we had never taken the time to do that either.” Below, Ibeyi explains how each track came together. **“Sangoma”** Lisa: “It felt like it was the perfect bridge between our last album and this new one. It also is telling you exactly what is going to happen through the album, because it’s a patchwork of moments that felt like healing to us. In the song, I said, ‘A church in open air,’ but I also say, ‘Yuri’s cards and the stars.’ And basically, Yuri is a friend of mine that read tarot to me a few days before we started the recording, and I asked her, ‘What are we supposed to be making?’ And she said, ‘A church in open air.’ She said it’s a church made of nothing—four pieces of wood, but it’s in open air and everybody meets there, and everybody heals, you included. The funny thing is, I said to Naomi, ‘Yuri just told me that we’re supposed to be making a church in open air.’ And she said, ‘Girl, a church in open air? OK, but where we can twerk?’ So, this is exactly what we are making—this is us in a nutshell.” **“O Inle”** Lisa: “‘O Inle’ is a song for Inle, who is the god of health and of healing. The idea was with ‘Sangoma,’ where we say, ‘*Somo milagrosas/curándoles el alma*,’ which means we’re made of miracles, and we cured their souls—*sangomas* are healers from South Africa. And so, we would pick you up and take you to the top of a mountain, and then with ‘O Inle,’ we’d be showering you with light and healing and asking Inle to heal all of us. And then, we are ready for ‘Made of Gold’ and for everything that comes after, which is Ibeyi 2.0.” **“Made of Gold”** Naomi: “We started doing it in Dorset because we were recording the album in London and in Dorset in two different houses. ‘Made of Gold’ was the first song we made all together. At one point, we were doing other songs and it was a week or two weeks later. And then, Richard \[Russell\] went to grab a coffee, and he bumped into Pa \[Salieu\]’s manager, and two days later he was there. It was really magical—he’s a special human being.” Lisa: “And this is the song that gave the name of the album also. Spell 31 is the name of the spell that is at the end of ‘Made of Gold.’” **“Sister 2 Sister”** Lisa: “‘Sister 2 Sister’ came out of a want to celebrate our sisterhood and our twinhood, which is crazy because we had made two albums prior and never really talked about being twins, which is the reason why we’re making music together. It became our little anthem. Also, it was a way to reference our past work because we referenced ‘River’ in this song, and we also say, ‘Here’s how you say Ibeyi.’ It felt like a way for us to say, ‘There’s been 10 years of us making this—you should know our name now.’ It was a way to flex and be proud of what we had done.” **“Creature (Perfect)”** Lisa: “‘Creature (Perfect)’ came from the pandemic and realizing that I had been trying to be perfect for so many people for so long and failing miserably at it, and that I was not happy. By trying to be perfect and morphing myself into what I thought every person in front of me wanted, I hadn’t discovered who I was fully. And so, it was my song to stop that and to embrace that I’m just a creature and embrace that. I can’t pursue this perfection because it was making me incredibly unhappy.” Naomi: “And also because \[perfection\] doesn’t exist.” **“Tears Are Our Medicine”** Naomi: “‘Tears Are Our Medicine’ is a way of saying find your way to release what you want to do. For some people, it’s tears—but just find your way to release everything that is happening to your body. During COVID, I think a lot of people finally did it, but I think if they had done it earlier, it would have been less painful. And so, it’s a way of saying let it go. It’s not a weakness, it’s a strength.” **“Foreign Country”** Naomi: “It was meant to be a song, and then we made this interlude, which I love. It\'s really genuine, and Pa is doing all the ad-libs. It was just having fun.” Lisa: “And there’s samples. There’s our mom talking about what it means to be twins, and there’s also a personal message from her. And there’s Naomi saying this sentence that we heard.” Naomi: “We didn’t see it. Richard, he was looking at something with his daughter, and it was saying the sister thing, the twin thing is like a foreign country. I said it \[on the interlude\], but we don’t recall the TV show.” **“Lavender & Red Roses”** Naomi: “Jorja \[Smith\], she’s a really good friend. It’s a relationship outside even of music. And she just came to see us, just to hear what we had done. We were not talking about making something together at all, and it happened. That’s what is beautiful. And in this song, nobody has a verse, but I feel like our voices go really well together, and it shows the intimacy of our relationship outside of music.” Lisa: “Also, ‘Lavender & Red Roses’ was one of the only songs \[Richard and I\] wrote while we were in the studio, so it was a really collaborative song that we all wrote together, which was a beautiful thing. Also, it’s funny because when I hear ‘Lavender & Red Roses,’ I realize how much we’ve grown as women. On our first album, we wrote a song called ‘Stranger/Lover,’ and at the end of this song, we say, ‘Come heal in my arms.’” Naomi: “And you’re not coming to heal in my arms anymore. Hell, no, you’re going to heal by yourself.” **“Rise Above” Lisa: “That’s a cover of a group called Black Flag, a punk group. And funnily enough, at the time, we didn’t know Black Flag. And Richard had probably listened to the song before going to the studio and thought, ‘Damn, the lyrics are really good.’ And he brought the lyrics out and gave them to us. We created the melody right there and then. Naomi was doing some of the beats on bass. The funny part is we still haven’t heard the original, which is crazy. We have heard a lot of Black Flag songs but not the original because it feels like we’re still trying to protect our version a little bit.” Naomi: “BERWYN is on this track. He listened to it, and he did his verse really fast. For him, listening to this song made him think of George Floyd, and it’s beautiful. I think the thing is, with this song, you can think about everything. It could be for women. It could be for minorities. It’s a song for the oppressed. It could be something small or something really big, but I think this song is just empowering.” **“Los Muertos”** Naomi: “We’re saying the names of our family members that are gone, friends of the family that are gone, some artists in it that have changed or that have impacted us in some way. We could have put way more artists, but we were not going to do a 20-minute song. It’s a cover of a song that our dad \[Angá Diaz\] made called ‘Rezos,’ but he was saying his own names, the names of the artists that he loved, musicians that he loved. In between each name, there’s a voice saying ‘ibae,’ and that’s his voice. We knew for a long time that we wanted to do our own version of it. And I think it’s beautiful because it’s just thinking about people we love and—” Lisa: “Allowing them to be a part of this incredible adventure. It’s like celebrating them through our music.”**
Yumi Zouma’s Josh Burgess likens the band’s songwriting process to gardening, “Someone brings in a seed and through collaboration, it grows into a song that is vastly different from its original form.” Like any garden, this one requires dedicated tending, a practice that seems rather inconvenient if not straight-up difficult, considering the fact that the four members live in disparate parts of the world – calling New York, London, and New Zealand home – but long-distance has always been a feature of their songwriting process, not a bug. Their new album, Present Tense, is the product of those efforts, a work Christie Simpson describes as “a gallery wall displaying these different moments in each of our lives. A process of curation, revisiting the past and making it relevant to the present.” You might assume that while some artists have struggled to rethink their processes during a pandemic, Yumi Zouma would be perfectly suited to lockdown, but the opposite proved to be true. Without looming tour dates driving them to release new music, the prolific band found themselves at a standstill. On the day that the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the band released their third LP, Truth or Consequences, via Polyvinyl, and had sold out their first American tour. After Yumi Zouma’s first show in Washington DC, the tour was canceled and the four members went their separate ways, an experience memorialized on Present Tense opener “Give It Hell.” “It was disorientating,” Charlie Ryder admits. “We generally work at a quick clip and average about a record a year, but with no foreseeable plans, we lost our momentum.” So they set a date. By September 1st, 2021, the album needed to be finished, regardless of whether they’d be able to tour it or even meet to record together. Before the September deadline goaded the band into action, they had what felt like endless amounts of time to record the album. What began in fits and starts became a committed practice again as Yumi Zouma dug through demos from as early as 2018 to collaborate on and make relevant to the peculiar moment in time the band, and world, was experiencing. “The lyrics on these songs feel like premonitions, in some regards,” Simpson reflects. “So much has changed for us, both personally and as a band, that things I wrote because the words sounded good together now speak to me in ways I didn’t anticipate.” Remote and in-person sessions in studios in Wellington, Florence, New York, Los Angeles, and London all played a role, and Yumi Zouma brought in new collaborators from different disciplines to broaden their sound. Studio recordings of drummer Olivia Campion were incorporated into every song, while pedal steel, pianos, saxophones, woodwinds, and strings were played by friends around the globe who were able to lend their talents and support. The band enlisted multiple mixers in Ash Workman (Christine & The Queens, Metronomy), Kenny Gilmore (Weyes Blood, Julia Holter), and Jake Aron (Grizzly Bear, Chairlift), and recruited the mastering expertise of Antoine Chabert (Daft Punk, Charlotte Gainsbourg) for the first time. “This is our fourth album, so we wanted to pivot slightly, create more extreme versions of songs,” Ryder says. “Working with other artists helped with that, and took us far outside of our normal comfort zone.” You can hear the impulse on “In The Eyes Of Our Love,” a song that’s seemingly twice as fast as any prior release, and closer to the classic rock of Dire Straits than the dream pop aesthetics that the band has built their career on so far. Campion’s drums crash in hard from the outset, sending the accompanying band into a revelry that only breaks upon arriving at the first bridge, when Simpson sings: “But we won’t lose sight of what we said/ I'll sing from the dirt instead.” There’s a defiance heard throughout Present Tense, a refusal to bend to what might seem fated, communicated not only through lyrics but in the boldness of these arrangements, metamorphosing between tracks without ever losing momentum. The triumphant chorus of “Where The Light Used To Lay” belies any of the pain beneath its surface, a technique Simpson likens to the work of folk-adjacent rock acts like Bruce Springsteen and Phoebe Bridgers. “We wanted quiet moments to give into a big, brash chorus, something that approaches cliché,” Simpson says. “The chorus feels like a dramatic encapsulation of who we want to be as a band,” Ryder adds. Two years away from the road gave Yumi Zouma a new appreciation for the friendship they’ve sustained and the opportunity an abundance of time off-cycle offered. “We used to run on adrenaline, and if a song wasn’t working we’d just nip it in the bud and move on. This process gave us the opportunity to really sit with songs and rethink them until they felt like they belonged in the collection,” Burgess says. Album closer “Astral Projection” is one such song, originally conceived by Burgess, who felt as if he’d been handed a sliver of brilliance after the song had been rewritten and abandoned by Ryder and Simpson. “It was as if I’d been given this rescue cat who had the potential to be great,” he says, laughing. Between them, the song developed into a bass-driven slowburner, moody and oddly prescient,“A hint of panic can do wonders for distance,” Simpson sings, her voice mirrored by Burgess’s. The outro twinkles like a summer skyline at dusk, violets and grays intermingling with the bright glow of a thousand open windows. “I daydream about playing that one live,” Burgess says. “In bed, I’ll close my eyes before sleep and imagine the drumbeat kicking in.” It’s a craving the members of Yumi Zouma all share, one they hope will be satiated someday soon. Dedicated to an embattled past, Present Tense is the band’s offering to a tenuous future.“To 2020, and the memory of all that was lost,” they write in the album’s liner notes. “Kia Kaha.”
It isn’t so much the range of styles London singer-songwriter Bakar (born Abubakar Baker Shariff-Farr) covers on his debut LP, *Nobody’s Home*—it’s 2022; we’re all eclectic now—but how effortlessly he draws them together. He can rap gently over bedroom folk (“Noun,” “Change of Heart”) or shout over sloppy, chaotic indie rock (“Reclaim!”); he’s an earnest child of the diaspora (Yemeni, Tanzanian) out to represent his people (“The Mission”) and a regular, self-lacerating kid who, by his own admission, can’t stop messing up (“GP”). He is, above all, an exemplary product of his time, defined not by any single trait but by his plurality.
Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek could hear the staggering differences in the songs they were writing for their third album as Whitney, SPARK—the buoyant drum loops, the effortless falsetto hooks, the coruscant keyboard lines. They suddenly sounded like a band reimagined, their once-ramshackle folk-pop now brimming with unprecedented gusto and sheen. But could they see it, too? So in the ad hoc studio the Chicago duo built in the living room of their rented Portland bungalow, a shared 2020 escape hatch amid breakups and lockdowns, Julien and Max decided to find out. Somewhere between midnight and dawn every night, their brains refracted by the late hour and light psychedelics, they’d play their latest creations while a hardware store disco ball spun overhead and slowed-down music videos from megastars spooled silently on YouTube. Did their own pop songs—so much more immediate and modern than their hazy origins—fit such big-budget reels? “We’d come to the conclusion we weren’t going to be filming Super 8 videos to this stuff anymore,” Julien remembers with a grin. “How about something more hi-fi, cinematic?” When the footage and the tunes linked, Julien and Max knew they had done it, that they’d finally found Whitney’s sound. SPARK reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What’s more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener “NOTHING REMAINS,” the devastating loss of “TERMINAL,” the sun-streaked renewal of “REAL LOVE”: However surprising it may sound, SPARK is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of your lives and careers at once and without apology. SPARK maintains the warmth and ease of Whitney’s early work; these songs glow with the newness of now. Listen closely, and you’ll notice frequent references to smoke and fire throughout SPARK, itself a double entendre for inspiring something new or burning down the old. Max and Julien were indeed in Portland for the Fall of 2020, when smoke from nearby fires choked the city at record levels. It was terrifying and tragic, but they pressed on. “We found a way to live while the world was burning/Real life was caving in,” Julien sings almost merrily during “BACK THEN,” an anthem for finding out what’s on the other side of hardship. In these dire days, scientists speak increasingly of serotiny, an evolutionary miracle that causes some trees to release seeds only amid a season of fire. That is how SPARK often feels—Whitney’s circumstances were so fraught on so many levels that they hung “the past…out to dry” and began again, finding a fresh version of themselves, their relationship, and their band after the blaze. Max and Julien are back in Chicago now, sharing a cozy walkup with a little studio, where they’re already building songs for the next Whitney album. They’re both in happy romances, too. Now that they let the past burn, everything is new for Max and Julien. SPARK is not only Whitney’s best album; it is an inspiring testament to perseverance and renewal, to best friends trusting each another enough to carry one another to the other side of this season of woe.
This is the reissue of "Night Falls Over Kortedala". “All my friends were playing in these bass-guitar-drum bands,” speaks Jens Lekman, casting his mind back over twenty years to his first rudimentary experiments with sampling using his father’s old cassette recorder, and an instinct to create music that would set him far apart from his Swedish pop peers. “I’m going to sound like Scott Walker. But I’m going to do it in my bedroom.” Works of sweeping, maximalist, orchestral wonder sung in a sumptuous tenor, weaving lifts from obscure fleamarket vinyl records with by turns burningly romantic and mordantly funny true-life tales from the sleepy-shadowy suburbs of Gothenburg – Lekman’s early songs come from a different time, a different place. An era when the internet was young, limitless and disruptive, sample culture was turning music inside out, and anything felt possible. After initially finding an audience through peer-to-peer file sharing sites, Lekman signed to Secretly Canadian Records in 2003, and went on to release a slew of cherished material, including three cult limited-edition EPs – Maple Leaves, Rocky Dennis and Julie – later collected on the 2005 compilation album Oh You’re So Silent Jens. His DIY fantasias found their fullest and most celebrated form in 2007 on his second album proper, the exquisite Night Falls Over Kortedala – Lekman’s self-professed “dream record”. It went to number one in Sweden and was later hailed as one of the 200 best albums of the 2000s by Pitchfork, as well as one of the top 100 albums of the 21st century so far by The Guardian. Now, like Oh You’re So Silent Jens, it no longer exists in its original form. Oh You’re So Silent Jens enigmatically disappeared in 2011; Night Falls Over Kortedala followed suit in early 2022. Lekman’s impulse for giving old music fresh life and context has led him to remake the records under new names, each delicately positioned in dialogue with the past – the same albums, just different. The Cherry Trees Are Still In Blossom and The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom are a pair of lovingly and painstakingly assembled reduxes each keeping the same core tracklisting, spirit and source material as the originals, but blending brand new versions of some tracks, in part or in whole, together with many tracks left largely as they were. Both records are fleshed out with rare, previously unreleased, and even previously unfinished old songs, as well as other contemporaneous material such as cassette diaries. On The Cherry Trees, two of Lekman’s best-loved early breakout singles are completely reimagined – ‘Maple Leaves’ as a tender ballad burnished with warm strings; tragi-comic illegal taxi ride to oblivion ‘Black Cab’ in two different versions, a handsome full band pop song and a gentle acoustic lullaby. The Linden Trees repackages all the true-life tales, magic, and mystery of Night Falls for a new age, yet in wholly familiar form, from the joyous ‘The Opposite of Hallelujah’ to hilariously uplifting missive ‘A Postcard to Nina’ and open-hearted love-song ‘Your Arms Around Me’. Taken together, the new albums form a sort of belated farewell to Lekman’s formative days as a bedroom Scott Walker, panning for sample gold in stacks of vintage vinyl. Albeit not a farewell to the original albums themselves, which will live on in fans’ record collections, and perhaps illicit corners of the internet. Spread to the wind. “I feel like these new records are like portals that can lead you to the old records if you want,” Lekman reflects. “I think that they can lead you to another time and a place, where you could work with music in a different way.”
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*.
Lauv (aka Ari Staprans Leff) has made a name for himself through his unique approach to hyper-contemporary breakup pop—2017’s “I Like Me Better” became an unavoidable finger-click beat, leading to his debut LP in 2020, the memoir-ish *How I’m Feeling*. Now, one pandemic later, he’s choosing to center his work on a theme of inner childhood. His sophomore LP, *All 4 Nothing*, is an attempt to distinguish Leff from Lauv, his autonomy from his profession, his adult self from what he thought his adult self would be like. “It’s realizing growing up is not what I thought it was,” he tells Apple Music. “Life is not going to look the way I think it is, and even when it does, it doesn\'t make me happy. When was I happiest? As a kid.” At its heart, however, is a pop album with an inherent lightness and darkness, meditation and chemical highs. “Growing up is all for nothing if you’re not connected to yourself on the inside,” he says. “More so than the specificity of the situations, I hope that \[listeners\] can connect to the emotion of striving to find lightness again, to find your true self again, when you feel disconnected from it.” Below, Lauv walks us through *All 4 Nothing*, track by track. **“26”** “I was in the studio, partying a bit, and found all of these lyrics pouring out of me. I felt weird shame. It summed up something I had felt for a long time, which was, ‘Why can’t I be happy with all of the amazing things that have come into my life? Why am I sitting here, significantly more unhappy after success, and what do I have to do about that?’ I decided I wanted to kick it off with some energy.” **“Stranger”** “‘Stranger’ is a song about the saga of being an anxious person and trying to fall in love. It’s also about recognizing how many times relationships have fallen apart and being scared to get close to somebody and knowing that you push people away a lot. There’s a lot of chaos around it. Every song is just straight up about my life. I wrote this while I was in one particular relationship, but the song is really just about dating in my twenties, always falling apart.” **“Kids Are Born Stars”** “I discovered inner-child meditation and that led to this song. I was at a therapy retreat in the middle of nowhere Arizona, guided through meditation. You visualize yourself at a younger age. And for me, different ages were coming up—eight-year-old me, 12-year-old me, 14-year-old me going on these little journeys to reconnect with memories from those times or things that felt significant or things you forgot about. ‘Kids Are Born Stars’ is very much the song version of that—of me going back to my eighth-grade self and being like, ‘You’ve got this.’” **“Molly in Mexico”** “That’s the dichotomy of the light and darkness of the album: It’s striving for the same feeling, one from a healthy and grounded and loving and kind place, and one is from shortcuts, chasing the highs in the moment to just feel free and to feel explosive and to feel like a little kid again.” **“All 4 Nothing (I’m So in Love)”** “I wrote this with my girlfriend \[Sophie Cates\] at the time—a really beautiful experience. A huge part of this album is the healing that you go through in love with somebody; that’s such an avenue to finding your true self and finding that childhood energy again. That’s something I hadn’t felt in so long: just being able to really surrender. This feels so good right now, and if this falls apart, all of the work we’ve put in would’ve been for nothing. It’s an aspiration \[to get beyond that\].” **“Stay Together”** “‘Stay Together’ is super poignant for me. It’s reflecting on younger love, when I didn’t really know what love was, and I had all these big plans.\" **“Summer Nights”** “I was listening to so much dance-y stuff, even \[Dua Lipa’s\] *Future Nostalgia*. Me and a couple of my friends started having our own mini dance parties, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to make something.’ And Jakob \[Rabitsch\], one of the producers, played me the beat one day. He’s like, ‘I made this beat with Guy \[Lawrence\] from Disclosure.’ The whole chorus happened instantly. I just find the chords so fascinating; they sound like some classical piano in the beginning. It’s super non-traditional.” **“Time After Time”** “That song is half about my relationship with substances, but also the idea of a toxic relationship—why you’re so drawn to it, and why it’s so appealing. But it can destroy you, and sometimes, you still do it over and over again.” **“Hey Ari”** “Right after I finished ‘Hey Ari’ and heard it in the studio for the first time, I was bawling on the floor. I may or may not have been on mushrooms, but I was crying. We have some bangers happening, and then it’s the wake-up moment. You go through those bouts of time in life where you’re just trying to figure it out and trying to get to a good place. And you have those moments where you’re like, ‘I need to check out my life right now because I’m not happy, and no more excuses.’ Everybody should be happy. That song very much felt like a sobering check-in with me.” **“Better Than This”** “People are always shocked that my mind naturally goes to a place of struggle, even with upbeat vibes. I don’t know: It’s hard to make something that feels all positive to me. So, musically, it can feel uplifting, but then the lyrics, I naturally won’t go there.” **“Bad Trip”** “It’s my personal favorite. John Cunningham, the producer, I’m pretty sure he had the whole instrumental already made. He played it for me, and I fell madly in love with it. It’s basically about a bad trip where you feel really disconnected. To me, it gives me a bit of the energy of \[Rihanna’s\] ‘We Found Love.’” **“I (Don’t) Have a Problem”** “That song is about using things as a substitute for confidence, a false sense of confidence. It’s a little memoir on that. For me, it is particularly about Adderall. I have narcolepsy, so I’m really tired all the time. When I was in college, I got prescribed stimulants, like Ritalin, to help me stay awake. Being a person who is obsessed with productivity, you could see how that would not go the best direction.” **“First Grade”** “‘First Grade’ is the light at the end of the tunnel. You just went through a vortex. And then it’s like, get back to reality, get back to the good. ‘First Grade’ is about falling in love with somebody, seeing them for who they are, watching them struggle to express themselves fully, and relating to that. Everyone wants to be famous today, and that’s something that really fucked with my head for a long time. In writing this album, I concluded that, no, everybody is a star in their own right. Some people lose touch with part of themselves, or they’re never really given a chance to nurture that part of themselves. It’s a nice thematic closer for me.”
Dayglow (aka Sloan Struble) has generated a lot of buzz in the indie- and bedroom-pop space with his debut album, *Fuzzybrain*, and follow-up, *Harmony House*. Both albums are a self-reflection on Struble’s journey dealing with the changes in his life due to newfound stardom, all wrapped up in feel-good lyrics and upbeat vocals. With his third album, *People in Motion*, the indie-pop sensation is still bringing the same fun, energetic, and eternally hopeful music, but from a more self-assured place. These 10 tracks are, once again, written, played, and produced by Struble and designed for maximum escapism. “Dancing, feeling like myself/And now I’m dancing, feeling so unstoppable/I know these things are bound to be surrounded in a moment forever on,” Struble muses on the hyper-melodic synth-pop opener, “Second Nature,” a love letter of sorts about the joys of dancing and making music. But *People in Motion* isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There’s still a depth to the lyrics that captures the internal struggles Struble has gone through, from the highs of his relationship (“Like She Does,” “Talking to Light”) to learning how to deal with conflict until it fades away (“Then It All Goes Away,” “Deep End,” “Someone Else”). Personal experiences aside, there are more layers to *People in Motion* that serve as social commentary. “We’re all just people, people in motion/And we’re always moving,” he sings on “Radio.” “But seems we’re never going/’Cause there’s just too much now out there.”
Montell Fish is easily one of the more fascinating artists making faith-based music today, with the young singer-songwriter finding vulnerable, often beautiful ways of expressing the intersections between human relationships and connection to a higher power. On *JAMIE*, which follows 2019’s *Bedroom Lofi*, Fish turns his attention toward the idea of loss and healing, crafting layered, sometimes raw narratives that evoke universal experiences like heartbreak and longing—while still leaving room for alternate interpretations. “The whole album is about the process of grief,” Fish tells Apple Music. “There are several stages of grief, and the first one is denial and isolation. This whole project was rooted in those two states.” Fish recorded the entire project in his bedroom, a process that lends itself well to his stripped-down guitar work and his dynamic voice, which recalls Frank Ocean and Bon Iver. Here, Fish shares insights into several of *JAMIE*’s key tracks. **“Jamie”** “‘Jamie’ was like throwing you into the world \[of the album\], since the whole album is about the first process of grief. I felt those last words, ‘Jamie, the best thing that happened to me,’ represented that denial well.” **“Fall in Love with You.”** “I didn\'t expect that one to be as big as it was. I mean, with a lot of the tracks, I just made them in my bedroom—that one probably took 10 minutes to write, if that. It was something that came to my mind. But what I thought was really cool—because I was studying the art of contradiction and contrast—is the music of the track and even the hook sounds very lovely, like you\'re falling in love very slow, but the verse feels like it\'s a breakup. Most people, I don\'t think, really notice that, because they use it for couples’ videos and stuff like that. But it\'s actually a really sad song.” **“And i’d go a thousand miles”** “‘thousand miles’ is me finally messing around and trying a little guitar solo. The guitar has become my favorite instrument over the years. This track, as well as the whole album, has this stripped nature, which I always thought felt lonely and like the isolation part of the process of grief.” **“Destroy Myself Just for You”** “Throughout the whole writing of the album, I had this fear that I was going to die either as soon as I finished the album or at some point in the process. I don\'t know why. It was just an illogical fear. I don\'t have it as much anymore, but I just kept having that, so I put it in the music because I just wanted to get it out of me, get what was in my head out of me. But again, it has this very beautiful analogy of suffering for the sake of love, suffering and allowing yourself to be destroyed, which can be very unhealthy in the human way. But then when you look at God, it\'s like he suffered for us on the cross. Towards the outro of the track is the beginning of the birth of this character I’ve developed called Charlotte. He screams a lot and sings very passionately. You can hear his high falsettos towards the end.” **“I Can’t Love You This Much”** “‘I Can’t Love You This Much’ is me accepting that I can’t let go. The first words are ‘After all these years still I want you here.’ It doesn’t even feel like a song to me, just like I’m whining over the whole track. But that’s the best part to me.”
Kurt Wagner’s Lambchop project was once the standard-bearer for fusions of country and indie rock, but over the years, it has become more unpredictable: By 2016’s *Flotus*, the Nashville musician was submerging his voice in watery vocoder, and on 2019’s *This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)* he spread on a thick layer of synths and drum machines. After the quasi-ambient diversions of 2021’s *Showtunes*, *The Bible* ventures even further afield. In its opening song, you’ll find ruminative piano, horns, strings, a sudden detour into classical music, digital glitches, and Wagner’s voice freshly stripped of artifice, all in the service of a pensive portrait of his aging father—some of the most moving songwriting in Lambchop’s catalog. Produced by Minneapolis’ Andrew Broder and Ryan Olson, frequent Bon Iver collaborators, *The Bible* offers new surprises at every turn, like the disco-house groove and trance synths of “Little Black Boxes,” or the jazzy drum ’n’ bass of “Whatever, Mortal,” or the Lil Jon-styled “hey!” that goes tearing through the placid waters of “Daisy,” a sound so out of place you wonder if you’ve imagined it. Along the way, he considers the George Floyd riots on “Police Dog Blues” and mourns the late rapper The Gift of Gab on “A Major Minor Drag.” The closing “That’s Music” even features quotes from Tommie Smith, an Olympic runner who raised the Black Power fist from the winners’ podium in 1968. Much like Wagner’s patchwork of styles, the cumulative effect of all these images is cryptic yet powerful: a picture of life in America through the eyes of one of the nation’s most idiosyncratic songwriters.
When Melbourne indie rock trio Camp Cope first emerged on the alt-rock scene with their self-titled debut LP, guitarist/vocalist Georgia Maq, bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, and drummer Sarah Thompson were celebrated for taking down the inherent misogyny in the independent music scene. (“The Opener” from 2018’s *How to Socialise and Make Friends* tackled the subject directly and memorably.) Now on their third LP, the band has ventured into folkier territory: The midtempo “Blue” is a depressed confessional supported by ascendent, Chicks-style pop harmonies, while “Jealous” mirrors the oppressive sentimentality that follows a breakup, with Maq’s voice feeling out all the contours of her fractured refrain, a weeping “Oh, no.” The title track, “Running With the Hurricane,” is a fierce surprise: a bluesy, emo-adjacent shout-along single stuffed to the brim with the oppressive rush of a crush: “I get so bored thinking about anyone else!” Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like it.
This album was made entirely on Wurundjeri & Boonwurrung country, which we are grateful to live and work upon, we pay our respects to elders past & present.
When Los Angeles grrrl-punks The Regrettes broke through in the mid-2010s, they were known for their ferocious riffing and unapologetic attitude. On their third album, *Further Joy*, they lean into the light, pairing their withering observations on modern life with exuberant choruses and gleaming guitars. It\'s a move that shows off how Regrettes anchor Lydia Night\'s songwriting has evolved since her band\'s DIY days; the eff-the-world attitude that animated earlier Regrettes releases is still there, but songs like the buzzy disco cut \"Barely on My Mind\" and the bubbly shuffle \"Rosy\" channel that spirit into directions that go beyond three-chord punk and into pop\'s groovier, hookier outer dimensions. *Further Joy*\'s brightness also makes The Regrettes\' more pointed lyrics, like those of the world-weary recovery rebuke \"Step 9,\" leap out of the songs with increased intensity—a jolting combination that reminds listeners how, sometimes, smiles might not be expressing what they seem.
The K-pop crew serve up complex emotions in a stylish genre mix.
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.
EARTH IS ONE TOUGH BABY OUT SEPTEMBER 16 2022 WORLDWIDE
Guatemalan cellist and composer, Mabe Fratti releases Se Ve Desde Aquí (It Is Seen From Here) on October 14 2022, on Unheard of Hope. Se Ve Desde Aquí (‘It Is Seen From Here’) marks another step in a remarkable run of releases from Guatemalan cellist and composer, Mabe Fratti. It is possibly her most revealing one to date; showcasing a sinuous and tensile sound coupled with a confident and clear-eyed worldview. Mabe Fratti is always on the lookout for new ways to express herself and to reflect her surroundings; she sees this as a process of continual “sonic transformation”. Not that she sees her method as unique: “I believe this happens to a lot of musicians, that in the interim when you finish a record and you release it you learn [new] things and change your philosophy towards what you want to sound like.” Se Ve Desde Aquí is a decisive shift away from Fratti’s most recent works, which were more enigmatic in tone. The rich, multi-layered arrangements heard on 2021’s acclaimed long player, Será que ahora podremos entendernos and egoless collaborations such as the fabulous Let's Talk About The Weather with Malaria legend and Monika supremo Gudrun Gut, created a mystery around Fratti which reveal only certain aspects of this affable musician’s character. Fratti sees her new music as “drier” in texture and more on the front foot in terms of setting out emotion: she describes the results as “less protected”. According to her, the sound is “informed through the aesthetics of rawness, and a ‘dirtiness’”: sampling expressions within improvisation, or extreme hi-fi dry sound. This noisy instrumentation is set against “the tools of melodic lines and harmony”, leading to a trademark richness, but one now more judiciously applied to set up a moment: “I did layering but it's more in specific moments. Basically my whole idea was to be as raw as possible and try to avoid overdubbing the same instrument as much as I could, of course always leaving space to break my own rules in the process.” This “frontal” approach carries over into the lyrical content. Many of the lyrics on tracks such as ‘Algo grandioso’ (‘Something great’), ‘Esta vez’ (‘This time’) and ‘Siempre tocas algo’ (‘You are always touching something’) refer to walls either falling or being circumnavigated. Questions around the use, or value, of time and other lyrical content invoking the senses and the body - as seen in ‘Deja de empujar’ (‘Stop pushing’) or ‘Cada músculo’ (‘Every muscle’) - also seem to suggest Fratti making pivotal individual decisions in her life, whether due to internal or external agencies. The tactile, mercurial and sometimes sparkling arrangements also suggest Fratti knowing where to place her work in the wider world. Mabe Fratti always enjoys working with others and Se Ve Desde Aquí is a record wholly informed by the collaborative process, whether holed up in WORM Sound Studios in Rotterdam, or at her home and in the Progreso Nacional studios, both in Mexico City. One key help has been Hugo Quezada, of Exploded View and late of synth act, Robota. Other recording allies are co-producer, guitarist and synth player Héctor Tosta, drummer and personal mentor Gibrán Andrade, saxophonist Jarrett Gilgore, violinist Alina Maldonado (heard on tracks ‘Cada Músculo’ and ‘Cuestión de Tiempo’), as well as Carla Boregas from Brazilian punk band Rakta who added tape loops and synthesizers to track ‘Siempre tocas algo’. Gearheards will be interested to know how such a transcendent sound came about. One key element is a focus on microphones, specifically Earthworks microphones, which Fratti “fell in love with” and saw as an inspiration for the wider creative process. She also fulfilled a lifelong wish and “played a little saxophone on the track ‘Desde el cielo’.” Whilst at WORM Sound Studios, Fratti lost herself with the vintage synths such as “the amazing” KORG PS 3200 and a much prized CS 60. In Progreso Nacional she recorded Mellotron, CS 50, a Jupiter, Solina, Korg M500 and more. “It was too much fun.” The Solina has an interesting backstory: Hugo Quezada found it “dropped in the garbage” whilst out walking with a friend. Quezada has a history of finding instruments in strange places; having found a vintage MS20 once that was being used as a table in a food stand… Regardless: all these provenances, places and people joined to create a truly remarkable work.
Even before easy life released their debut album, *life’s a beach*, in May 2021, leader Murray Matravers was writing songs that would become the core of this follow-up. When the UK’s lockdowns paused the five-piece’s operations, Matravers found rare opportunities to take stock. “When you leave school, you’re like, ‘Go, go, go, go, go!’” he tells Apple Music. “A thousand miles an hour. I don’t really think you’ve dealt with any of the shit in your childhood because you’ve just been trying to get through it. All of a sudden, I had this decompression where I looked back at everything that had happened, and I wrote this album about it. It’s a lot about growing up, and I don’t think anyone feels really at ease and happy with the way they grew up, so it’s no wonder it feels rawer.” That rawness manifests itself not just in the honesty of Matravers’ lyrics, but also in a sonic saturation and distortion. As the group patches intriguing new sounds together from influences as divergent as Randy Newman, ’90s hip-hop, indie rock, New Orleans funeral marches, and The Beach Boys, there’s often a static and tension that taps into the turbulence of life. That’s not to say *MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE...* is a dark record: Matravers’ reflections generate plenty of optimism and arm-around-the-shoulder empathy for anyone struggling, and easy life often frames his meditations within invigorating beats and uplifting pop melodies. Nevertheless, Matravers is well-aware that he’s revealing more of himself than ever. “I feel vulnerable a few times on this album,” he says. “But you can be empowered. We’re all vulnerable, and if you allow that, if you champion it rather than shy away from it, it can feel good.” Here, he takes us through his journey, track by track. **“MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE…”** “The first song we wrote for the album was ‘DEAR MISS HOLLOWAY,’ and it had this chorus, ‘Maybe in another life.’ That felt like exactly where I was. So, I had Sam \[Hewitt, bassist\], who is the resident musical genius, make these weird jingles. This was the first. It helps you step into the world, and you’re like, ‘OK, this is a fairy tale,’ the sonics of it are kind of cute and cozy, and it has glockenspiel and nice harmony. We produced seven or eight jingles, but the rest of the band were like, ‘Dude, this is too much. There’s more jingle than song.’ So, only two of them made it—this and one at the end of ‘ANTIFREEZE.’” **“GROWING PAINS”** “I wrote this, and a lot of the album, with my friends Gianluca and Alessandro Buccellati. I wrote ‘have a great day’ on the first album with them, and we became really close. This is set within a relationship. It’s quite easy in songwriting to put things in a romantic context because they’re more easily digestible. The relationship I have with my girlfriend’s pretty much the only functioning one; the rest of them are all fucked. So, bless her—she bears a lot of the songwriting. I was actually writing about the state of the band and where we are. Growing up and wondering, ‘How did I get here? Is this where I wanted to be?’” **“BASEMENT”** “It’s literally about going out to a nightclub called The Basement \[in Leicester\] and getting fucked up. There is a darker edge to it where it’s like, ‘I feel the wheels coming off.’ It’s like you haven’t really got your shit together, and you’re going out and partying to remedy or forget about that. It’s a big part of British culture: We don’t talk about how we feel. Instead, we get pissed and then it spills out in these drunken slurs that you are forgiven for, and you can blame on being intoxicated. Heaven forbid you actually have to say those things for real.” **“DEAR MISS HOLLOWAY”** “I wrote this about being infatuated with a teacher, which is something that all of us go through. I’ve been saying this in front of audiences, and there’s always this weird or awkward silence. I’m like, ‘Come on. Is that not a thing?’ You’re an adolescent teenager full of hormones, you do have these weird fantasies with your teachers. She’s a fictional character; there’s not an 80-year-old geography teacher thinking, ‘What the fuck? This is really creepy.’ It’s about unrequited love in general. It feels wistful and like a fairy tale. It feels very, very old-school Disney. I was watching a lot of old Disney and listening to loads of old Randy Newman when I was making this album.” **“BUBBLE WRAP”** “Releasing the first album was a bit of a whirlwind. I’d just come out of that and was moving house and didn’t give myself time to reflect on anything. I didn’t really know where I was. And it was COVID, so a lot of stuff was going wrong. I got this studio in London, but it was completely empty. I ended up in there, getting really drunk on my own—for all those reasons I talked about with ‘BASEMENT’—and wrote ‘BUBBLE WRAP.’ The recording is so bad—I used all the wrong mics, and all the vocals were so out of tune and distorted because I’d accidentally driven the pre-amps too hard. Or maybe it was a conscious decision. But there’s a lot of raw emotion in this song. We’d just done a Justin Bieber cover for a Radio 1 *Live Lounge* and got it all wrong. Honestly, it was terrible. Sam left me a voicemail \[checking in on Matravers\] that weekend, and I stuck it in this because it encapsulated the whole message of the song.” **“OTT”** “We’ve spent our whole career trying not to be put in the ‘indie’ bracket just because we’re British dudes that play guitars. On this, we’re like, ‘You know what? This is our indie anthem.’ easy life’s about experimenting and enjoying it. It has my first-ever guitar solo at the end. I made this shitty solo in my bedroom, in my pants. It’s, like, three notes. When I play it live, I feel so embarrassed, like, ‘Oh my god, as if I’ve got to play this solo for the rest of my life.’ ‘OTT’ is uplifting and feels good, but it’s actually about addiction. We all encounter addiction in our lives, and it’s the saddest illness I’ve ever come across. It’s one where it’s too raw to put it down in its entirety. So, we just try and make people smile while doing so.” **“MEMORY LOSS”** “This is the rawest one. When you go through your life, especially your early twenties, trying to get somewhere and achieve some shit, you never actually look back and deal with the stuff that’s affected or defined you. This was my time to reflect on that. It’s me recounting a few things that had happened, but I can’t remember anything. I have the worst memory. It’s really annoying, and I wanted to write a song about it. I did a lot of reading into how trauma victims can’t remember anything because it’s a defense mechanism. I was trying to think, ‘Right, so what is it that I’m scared of remembering?’” **“SILVER LININGS”** “I felt like we needed some light relief from the heaviness. I wrote this in New York with Rob \[Milton\], who produced a lot of *life’s a beach*. This is inspired by ’90s hip-hop, the sound selection, the drums, the flow, everything. That’s the shit I grew up on. It’s literally about having a really nice time in New York, and everything’s going to be great. It has that half-glass-full energy. Despite all the misery and nostalgia of this album, there’s a lot of hope in there, and we are positive people.” **“CROCODILE TEARS”** “This was written drunkenly with some friends of mine, \[producers\] Bekon & The Donuts. They did a couple of tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*. We basically used to nail absinthe. And because they’re on hip-hop time, the sessions would start at 8 in the evening and go on until 4 in the morning—and I was already jet-lagged because we were in LA. We just ended up getting hammered and messing around. Bekon’s a huge Beach Boys fan. So, we nerded out about how they recorded. We placed a mic in the middle of the room and recorded different harmonies from different proximities and positions. It’s inspired by New Orleans funeral marches as well. It has the ‘maybe in another life’ in the lyric again. It’s just about what could have been.” **“MORAL SUPPORT”** I wrote this with Luca and Sandro in LA. It’s a conventional love song. I spent so much time away from home over the last few years. I miss my family and my girlfriend. I miss being in one place. ‘MORAL SUPPORT’ is me saying, ‘I miss you and thanks for having my back.’ It has those sort of bossa nova, samba chords. Very, very Bee Gees. Even the first three chords are—different key and slightly different inversion—the same three chords from ‘How Deep Is Your Love.’ It just wrote itself, and I’m now bonded to Luca and Sandro, in a way, for eternity because we shared this moment together. It’s almost like having sex with someone, like, ‘Wow, we did this thing, and it can never be undone.’” **“CALLING IN SICK”** “This one was just for us. I was very inspired by Randy Newman. ‘Short People,’ one of his hits, has this piano thing where it’s like, *ding, ding, ding*. I was like, ‘I’m having that because that’s such a fucking vibe.’ We just wanted to jam. I think people are going to skip this, but if you’re a true fan, listen to this because this is what gets us really excited. It has this key change into a minute-long instrumental horn outro, which is the most self-indulgent moment on the album. We started as muso nerds, so it’s nice to embrace that from time to time.” **“BEESWAX”** “Coming out of lockdown, everyone was a little bit, ‘Whoa!’ Stepping out into the world, it’s a lot: ‘I’m having to share a lot of stuff with people, and I’m not used to this.’ ‘BEESWAX’ is a reaction to that. The lyrics are quite arrogant and cocky. I become a lot more confident. You hear the real me on ‘MEMORY LOSS’ and ‘MORAL SUPPORT.’ I’m insecure and scared and humble and sweet, and that can get a bit boring. So, I was like, ‘You need to turn up and go crazy.’ So, I used the vocal processing to be able to become like this rapper for a minute.” **“BUGGIN”** “Luca threw this house party, and we were all getting stoned and drunk and whatever, and this really coke-y and weird dude turned up. He was really tall, and I’m really short, so that already was an issue. And he was dressed in this kind of traditional African dress, a play on that. He was telling us he was a wanted man who’d escaped his country, that he was the prince of this place, and his face was on all the money there. I had to run away from him because he was following me around. The next day, we wrote ‘BUGGIN’ about him, an unwelcome guest just bugging you out. We finished the song and went for food, and the same guy was at the restaurant. We were all hiding our faces, pulling our hats down over our eyes. It was super weird.” **“ANTIFREEZE”** “Gus \[Dapperton\] and I have been friends since we supported him on his UK tour in 2017. We were just chatting one day and decided to write a song over FaceTime. I was in England, and it was fucking freezing because it was January. He was in New York, and it was freezing there. So, we just started writing about how cold it was. Wrote it in a day, super simple.” **“FORTUNE COOKIE”** “This really is my ode to Randy Newman. It was written about someone in the band who was going through a really hard time. I sent it to him, and I remember him calling me back in tears. We had a real heart-to-heart. There’s certain things you can say in a song that you can’t really say to your mate in the pub. And music has a funny way of saying a thousand things with just one line. This song really helped us open up the floor, to actually have this conversation as a band. It had to be the last one because it ends on ‘take care.’ Our first album ends on ‘goodnight.’ We’re just trying to make a theme of saying goodbye at the end of each project.”
Since debuting in 2017, JYP Entertainment boy band Stray Kids have separated themselves from their contemporaries—Bang Chan, Lee Know, Changbin, Hyunjin, Han, Felix, Seungmin, and I.N are unafraid of taking musical risks, which means every comeback of the group brings unique pleasures. On *ODDINARY*, the thesis statement arrives in the single “MANIAC,” with the opening line “Relax, everyone, stop pretending to be normal” introducing the listener to a collection of songs that celebrate the everyday nonconformist. That’s mirrored in the musicality: “MANIAC” features techno trap production so jagged it borders on industrial, save for a chorus of bird sounds; it’s out there, but without sacrificing melody. “Lonely St.” is lovelorn emo-trap; “VENOM” is elastic, drippy hip-hop-pop. No matter your peculiarity, there’s something for you here.
In 2005, Swedish singer/songwriter Jens Lekman released *Oh You’re So Silent Jens*, a collection of the songs he’d written from 2003 up until that point. Filled with wry if gently despondent observations and potent melodies, the album placed him among indie pop’s upper tier of troubadours—but in 2011 it was taken out of print, vanishing some of his most beloved songs from availability. *The Cherry Trees Are Still In Blossom*, an update of *Silent* that blends bits of those early-2000s recordings with newly laid-down tracks, breathes new energy into songs that already sparkled because of their tightly knotted lyrics and Lekman’s deadpan yet melodic delivery. *Cherry* warmly updates Lekman’s earliest material in a way that allows longtime listeners to reflect on his two decades of musical growth while also inviting newer audiences to listen to cuts like the gently undulating “Maple Leaves” (here, with a live string quartet swapped in for the original’s sample-heavy track) and the brightly world-weary “Black Cab” on endless repeat.
All my friends were playing in these bass-guitar-drum bands,” speaks Jens Lekman, casting his mind back over twenty years to his first rudimentary experiments with sampling using his father’s old cassette recorder, and an instinct to create music that would set him far apart from his Swedish pop peers. “I’m going to sound like Scott Walker. But I’m going to do it in my bedroom.” Works of sweeping, maximalist, orchestral wonder sung in a sumptuous tenor, weaving lifts from obscure fleamarket vinyl records with by turns burningly romantic and mordantly funny true-life tales from the sleepy-shadowy suburbs of Gothenburg – Lekman’s early songs come from a different time, a different place. An era when the internet was young, limitless and disruptive, sample culture was turning music inside out, and anything felt possible. After initially finding an audience through peer-to-peer file sharing sites, Lekman signed to Secretly Canadian Records in 2003, and went on to release a slew of cherished material, including three cult limited-edition EPs – Maple Leaves, Rocky Dennis and Julie – later collected on the 2005 compilation album Oh You’re So Silent Jens. His DIY fantasias found their fullest and most celebrated form in 2007 on his second album proper, the exquisite Night Falls Over Kortedala – Lekman’s self-professed “dream record”. It went to number one in Sweden and was later hailed as one of the 200 best albums of the 2000s by Pitchfork, as well as one of the top 100 albums of the 21st century so far by The Guardian. Now, like Oh You’re So Silent Jens, it no longer exists in its original form. Oh You’re So Silent Jens enigmatically disappeared in 2011; Night Falls Over Kortedala followed suit in early 2022. Lekman’s impulse for giving old music fresh life and context has led him to remake the records under new names, each delicately positioned in dialogue with the past – the same albums, just different. The Cherry Trees Are Still In Blossom and The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom are a pair of lovingly and painstakingly assembled reduxes each keeping the same core tracklisting, spirit and source material as the originals, but blending brand new versions of some tracks, in part or in whole, together with many tracks left largely as they were. Both records are fleshed out with rare, previously unreleased, and even previously unfinished old songs, as well as other contemporaneous material such as cassette diaries. On The Cherry Trees, two of Lekman’s best-loved early breakout singles are completely reimagined – ‘Maple Leaves’ as a tender ballad burnished with warm strings; tragi-comic illegal taxi ride to oblivion ‘Black Cab’ in two different versions, a handsome full band pop song and a gentle acoustic lullaby. The Linden Trees repackages all the true-life tales, magic, and mystery of Night Falls for a new age, yet in wholly familiar form, from the joyous ‘The Opposite of Hallelujah’ to hilariously uplifting missive ‘A Postcard to Nina’ and open-hearted love-song ‘Your Arms Around Me’. Taken together, the new albums form a sort of belated farewell to Lekman’s formative days as a bedroom Scott Walker, panning for sample gold in stacks of vintage vinyl. Albeit not a farewell to the original albums themselves, which will live on in fans’ record collections, and perhaps illicit corners of the internet. Spread to the wind. “I feel like these new records are like portals that can lead you to the old records if you want,” Lekman reflects. “I think that they can lead you to another time and a place, where you could work with music in a different way.”
When it came to writing his third album, George Ezra was ready to fall back on a fail-safe formula. His first two—2014’s *Wanted on Voyage* and 2018’s *Staying at Tamara’s*—were propelled by travel (across Europe and in Barcelona, respectively), and the people, places, and things Ezra witnessed along the way. A mammoth walk the length of the UK was lined up to help unlock album three, but when the pandemic hit in 2020, Ezra, like the rest of us, was forced to stay put. “I was living alone in a flat in London without a balcony,” he tells Apple Music. “I did five weeks in that flat and had an awful lot of conversations with myself. \[That time\] made me realize how much I\'d relied in the past on other people\'s stories. Because I\'m not pinching other people\'s stories, you\'re left with your own, and that\'s great. It’s cathartic.” *Gold Rush Kid*, of course, houses the uplifting anthems that Ezra has built his career on (“Anyone for You,” “Gold Rush Kid”), a side of his music he will always cherish. But beneath those songs’ breezy charm lies Ezra’s most personal and horizon-broadening music yet. Born of those bracing conversations with himself, these are tracks about loneliness and yearning for love (“Sweetest Human Being Alive”), mental health (“I Went Hunting,” about Ezra’s experiences of intrusive, repetitive thoughts), the unexpected contentment he found in lockdown (“The Sun Went Down”), and just how much he wants to do all of this anyway. “The truth is, you love it. You\'ve lived a life that you couldn\'t have predicted so far,” says Ezra. “I see it as a gold rush: Be the gold rush kid. ‘I\'m proud of this record,’ ‘it\'s a personal record’ is the least sincere thing you hear artists say all the time. But I think this is a moment in time for me. At this moment, it felt like the right thing to do.” Read on as the singer-songwriter walks us through each track on his touching third album, including the four exclusive songs on this Apple Music Edition in Spatial Audio. **“Anyone for You”** “Often, when I listen to someone else\'s album, I end up skipping track one once I\'ve listened to it once or twice, because it\'s like the artist is trying to introduce you to the album. ‘Anyone for You’ doesn\'t feel like that for me. It feels like it\'s just in. \[During the 2020 lockdown\], I was going through old journals and had pages of trying to figure out who Tiger Lily could be. A big part of the conversations I was having with myself was about how, from whatever age, promoting yourself felt very locked in. ‘This is who you are.’ It didn\'t take much to say, ‘Well, that\'s not true. There\'s a lot of you.’ That\'s true of all of us. Naturally, once we started writing it, it was always going to be a positive song. We’d invite people into the studio and with this song and you could just see their faces loosening up. It still does that for me.” **“Green Green Grass”** “I was in the Caribbean in 2017-18 with two friends I grew up with. We were in this tiny bar and this really loud music came up, you could tell it was far away. I excused myself and ran down these little streets. There were different sound systems, a lot of hugging, dancing, food. I went into a shop and asked what the party was for. They said it was a funeral day and that they were celebrating three lives they had lost in their community. For me it was like, ‘That\'s amazing. Whoever those people were, if they could see this, I bet they\'d be so happy.’ I had the lyric from that point.” **“Gold Rush Kid”** “I was bumping into the idea of a gold rush a lot. There was one travel documentary I\'d watched about these guys who panned for gold in India. They were finding the dregs that had been washed up from bigger operations, and I remember one of the lads being like, ‘This is our gold rush.’ I was also talking to \[the album’s producer and Ezra\'s longtime collaborator\] Joel Pott an awful lot about how I didn\'t see myself doing this forever. But then anytime I speak about that, or anytime I\'ve spoken about that, I quite quickly come back around going, ‘But it\'s the best thing.’ It’s really fulfilling to write about \[some of the more personal aspects of this song\] in a creative way. It’s really obvious what certain lyrics are about.” **“Manila”** “The first three songs—although they’re independent of each other—are the same pace in the record. You kind of don’t take a breath until here. I love this song, and I fought tooth and nail for the guitar solo in it. I was listening to a lot of Khruangbin—this world, not just of rhythm, but of guitar tones, and I pushed for that. I love where we landed.” **“Fell in Love at the End of the World”** “This song was written well before the pandemic, back in 2016. We all thought 2016 was a fucked-up year, with Trump, Brexit, and it felt like every three weeks, another legend passed away. When we first recorded this, it was the one song that I can put my hands up and say, ‘We got that wrong.’ It sounded like a really rocky, Raconteurs-type song. Then we took it to the other extreme and dialed it back. It feels like this segue into the next part of the record.” **“Don’t Give Up”** “I just love the production on this. There’s a guitar part I had that I was playing in sound checks a lot whilst recording the last record, and I knew I wanted to do something with it. There were these nights that I couldn’t sleep, and I\'d often play guitar and just see if there were any ideas. There’s a lyric about it in this song \[\'I don’t sleep too good and I work too hard\'\]. It’s also the first of a few songs that came from that lockdown and longing and missing friends, missing family, and trying to figure out who you are amongst all those things.” **“Dance All Over Me”** “We wrote this song that was so Eurobeat-sounding, even with my delivery of the opening lyric. We would laugh about it: It was also disco-y, with bits that almost sounded like a Dua Lipa track. We kept coming back to it, scratching our heads, like, ‘Can we make it work?’ We were in the studio on a day where we had more or less finished all the songs, and I picked up Joel’s guitar, this old battered thing. You have to cite the Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus track ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart.’ This song feels like new territory for me. It’s a really good feeling to stand next to it and say, ‘Yeah, it does sound like a curveball in a way, but it sounds like you.’” **“I Went Hunting”** “The name of this song is the idea that if you go looking for a problem, you\'re going to find one. If you want to find a reason that it\'s been a bad day, you’ll find it. But then, on the flip side, I could sense that something wasn\'t right, and I owed it to myself to turn the room inside out and try and find out what it was. One part in the second verse is ‘Imagine having a thought and then thinking it again, thinking it again, thinking it again.’ But some people have thought I said, ‘Imagine having a daughter.’ I’m genuinely gutted because I thought it was such a clear record and now I’m like, ‘You’ve fucked it.’ The lyric is about starting to understand a bit more about how your mind works and then realizing that maybe not everyone thinks in the same way. Because I think as a kid, I just assumed everyone did.’” **“In the Morning”** “This was written, more or less, on the same day as ‘I Went Hunting.’ It feels like they’re siblings. I was listening to a lot of records that were male voices using falsetto, and certainly in the first record, I wasn\'t confident enough to do it. And then you think, ‘You’re actually quite good at this. You should try it.’” **“Sweetest Human Being Alive”** “I think this is my favorite song on the record. I wrote it in the first lockdown. I was obviously very isolated. There was this moment where I was just walking through the flat with a guitar, playing a chord sequence I’ve had for a long time. I just thought, ‘Just fucking sing the truth.’ And it was: I\'m looking forward to meeting someone. I remember getting really emotional, because it was really hopeful, but really quite lonely. \[Once we recorded it\] I thought, ‘Oh no, you’ve written a piano ballad.’ But I love it.” **“Love Somebody Else”** “I wrote this at the end of the last record, when I was the least happy and getting to the point where you think, ‘Whatever’s going on in your head, it isn’t fucking working. So go pin the energy you are putting on fixating over this on someone else.’ Which I appreciate isn’t healthy, but for a pop song, it’s OK. This song had a blank space for the longest time. The second verse is almost like a stream of consciousness, but it\'s my favorite verse I\'ve ever written.” **“The Sun Went Down”** “During that first lockdown, there were also these really beautiful days where I was making myself do things such as no screens for 48 hours or no talking for 24 hours. I pulled this chair into the window because there was a bit of a heat wave going on, but I couldn\'t get outside, so I just sat there. I wasn’t speaking. I was reading. And there were all these feelings \[in the previous songs\], but there was also, just as clearly, this real contentment.” **Apple Music Edition tracks** “It was proposed to me that we reimagine some of the songs. I said, ‘Can we see what they would sound like if we give \[the album’s string arranger\] Tobie Tripp the stems: strip them back, replace things, let Tobie remix things that are in there?’ That, to me, felt like a sincere way of reimagining them. I think it\'s also a really good lesson in production of how many different ways something can sound. I genuinely didn\'t want to just do the singles. It felt like if you were given this space, do the ones that lend itself to this idea. Don\'t try and string up ‘Anyone for You.’ Tobie indulged in more creative license than I was anticipating, but it’s a beautiful thing now to have. Alongside everything else, there’s a huge ladle’s worth of impostor syndrome. There is still this sentiment of, ‘God, do people want to hear my music? Is this any good? Do these people want to work with me?’ And so it\'s not lost on me that these people do. I don’t jump for joy when I’m asking to do a cover, which will be born of insecurity and a lack of confidence. But a friend of mine who was once working with Jamie T said, ‘What do you think Jamie’s best song was?’ And I said, ‘Love Is Only a Heartbeat Away.’ I love his *Carry on the Grudge* record, and \[the cover\] sounds great.”
A lingering sense of loss informs BROODS’ fourth record, as singer Georgia Nott reflects on the end of her marriage. But that doesn’t make it a downer by any means. Unfolding over simmering R&B motifs, “Heartbreak” even drives home a message of staying present with one’s grief. Meanwhile, the New Zealand sibling duo builds out an expansive vision of modern pop, with producer/multi-instrumentalist Caleb Nott introducing grounding notes of Farfisa organ amid stacked sheets of cosmic synthesizer. Returning collaborator Tove Lo’s haunting vocals feature on the rippling dance-pop ballad “I Keep,” and “Like a Woman” arrives almost completely unadorned before adding dramatic flourishes of beats. For all its introspective airs, *Space Island* is reliable for the band’s trademark widescreen turns, as on the sadness-forged anthem “Piece of My Mind.”
