As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”
Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.
As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”
In 2022, NewJeans dropped into the saturated K-pop industry with zero pre-promotion. The music video for “Attention” combined breezy R&B-inspired pop, immaculate Y2K-nostalgic visuals, and the teen-girl cool of Minji, Haerin, Hanni, Danielle, and Hyein. Now they’re back with their second EP, a mini-album featuring six short tracks that reasserts NewJeans’ dominance in the fourth-generation K-pop scene. Sonically, *Get Up* doubles down on NewJeans’ commitment to noughts-era R&B paired with electronic dance elements. Pre-release singles “Super Shy”—which member Hanni says reminds her of flying through space on a rocket ship—and *Powerpuff Girls* collab “New Jeans” are peppy, synth-driven bops that fans of “Ditto” will love. But the girls have never been as solemn as they are on “Cool With You,” a UK garage track, and “Get Up,” two songs that could be teasing an evolution of their vibe. Tying the sophomore project together are the versatile, finely tuned vocals of the young members, which continue to elevate NewJeans’ music from forgettable pop to something more textured—and serve as a tribute to the teen-girl interiority that is at the center of NewJeans’ music and story.
Rina Sawayama thought she was done with trauma. Her debut album, *SAWAYAMA*, which was released to widespread critical acclaim under the isolating restrictions of the global pandemic, was a deceptively bombastic pop record, the production serving as a disguise for the heavy, existential lyrical content. Had it not been for the paradigm-shifting events of 2020, which left Sawayama experiencing her breakthrough success through screens, the electrifying follow up, *Hold the Girl*, would probably have been a very different record. “The thought I was really confronted with during lockdown was that I just did not feel connected to myself or my body,” Sawayama tells Apple Music. “I was constantly running on adrenaline because so many exciting things were happening, the album was doing better than I ever imagined, but I was so mentally unwell and completely numb to any real emotion.” *Hold the Girl* is the result of two years’ worth of forced self-reflection and “brutal” therapy, or what Sawayama calls a “‘can you be alone with your thoughts for two years?’ experiment.” Musically rooted in country and western—inspired by what she calls the “beautiful” writing on Kacey Musgraves\' *Golden Hour* and Dolly Parton’s appearance in the film *Dumplin’*—the album was intended to be recorded in Nashville to ground the songs in the culture she was referencing, but closed borders made travel impossible. Despite the unavoidable limitations, Sawayama has succeeded in capturing the spirit of the genre, tipping a Stetson to Shania Twain on the irreverent lead single “This Hell,” tapping into the atmosphere of a saloon at closing time with “Forgiveness,” and stitching mismatched elements of other genres like industrial metal and electronica into tracks like “Your Age” and “To Be Alive.” “I really connect with the storytelling aspect of country,” says Sawayama. “It’s very authentic, and grounded in reality, and that’s what I needed to tell the story of this record.” Here, she takes us through that story, track by track. **“Minor Feelings”** “The title of this song is kind of the secondary title of the record. It was inspired by a collection of essays called *Minor Feelings* by Cathy Park Hong. It’s the name she gives to this collective feeling that a lot of Asian Americans have about racial microaggressions, and I really connected with that, because for me it was a collection of all these minor feelings that has now led to a pretty major shutdown of emotions. In the music I wanted to play with the minor and the major chords, so in the chorus when I say ‘minor feelings’ it’s minor and then major when I say ‘majorly getting me down.’” **“Hold the Girl”** “I wrote this with Barney Lister and Jonny Lattimer in the first session I ever did with Barney. He was producing the song and I was throwing out all these ideas, like: ‘So, I want it to be country, and I want the beginning to sound like Bon Jovi, and I really also want to then do a garage drop.’ Luckily he agreed! It was a very, very hard song to balance: I think we must have gone back and forth about 20 times on the production, and then another 20 times on the mix. I was trying to make it really big and orchestral, but also a pop song. ‘Hold the Girl’ was the song that really unblocked me and made me excited to write again. It reminded me of how much fun you can have with production.” **“This Hell”** “On first listen, ‘This Hell’ could be a romantic love song, and I love that. It sort of has a double meaning—during lockdown there were certain people that I really held on to and it truly felt like ‘this hell is better with you’—but I’m specifically talking about my friends’ experiences of being shut out of religious communities for being queer. I wanted the music to channel the confidence Shania Twain has and tell the story like a country song, a bit tongue-in-cheek. I worked on it with Vic Jamieson, Lauren Aquilina, and Paul Epworth, who is one of my ultimate production idols. We were in Church Studios, which felt really apt, and I just remember ‘line dancing’ and lighting the whole studio up in red. It was one of the best moments.” **“Catch Me in the Air”** “One of the first in-person sessions I did for this album was with GRACEY in Oscar Scheller’s flat, and we couldn’t come up with anything. I just wasn’t feeling it. Halfway through, GRACEY was like, ‘Oh my god, Gwen Stefani is coming out with new music!’ As a writing exercise, we pretended we were going to be pitching to Gwen, and then the first melody flowed out. The song is about getting to a certain point in my relationship with my mum, and being able to see things from her perspective now I’m around the same age she was when she had me.” **“Forgiveness”** “I had to write this song over Zoom because I had just come into contact with someone who had COVID, so Jonny Lattimer and Rich Cooper were in one room and I was at home. The lyrics are about forgiving people in my past, and things I couldn’t control. It’s quite stripped back, as if I was in a grunge band, but doing pop. I asked Freddy Sheed to play the drums like he was exhausted and hungover, a little bit behind the beat. I wanted this feeling of dragging your feet down this path that you’re walking to get to forgiveness. I remember that I came out with the chorus melody pretty much straight away, but I hate using GarageBand and Logic so I was having to record it to my voice notes, then AirDrop it to myself, then send to Rich to put it in the song. It’s great when you have those moments where it just flows out, but actually getting the idea down on paper was so boring!” **“Holy (Til You Let Me Go)”** “This is where the record starts to get dark. The previous track talks about the idea that forgiveness is a winding road, and now we’re going off the beaten path for the next four or five songs. ‘Holy (Til You Let Me Go)’ is like the counterpart to ‘This Hell.’ I went to a Church of England school and I grew up hearing so much about religion and spirituality, but there was some dark stuff that went on there that was not handled very well, and I’m alluding to it in these songs. I think going to Christian girls’ schools can be very confusing. There’s this idea that girls are holy until a certain point in their life, and then they’re not. So I’m asking: ‘What does youth mean in that situation? What is good and bad?’ You can hear my friends Louis \[a school friend\] and Lauren Aquilina at the end, talking about what happened, and they’re just in shock about how the adults were behaving.” **“Your Age”** “‘Your Age’ started off with a banjo riff, but it’s massively inspired by Nine Inch Nails. The song is about the anger I had towards the adults that were around me when I was younger. Now that I’m an adult myself, I think I can legitimately be quite angry towards the adults of my youth, because I just never would have done things that way. I think when you get older, you look back at certain things you’ve experienced and the way the adults handled it, and you kind of can’t believe it. This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album; I wanted it to have this really dark moment. It’s a pretty direct message.” **“Imagining”** “So much of the confusion around so many mental health issues is that you don’t know if it’s real, and you assume that everyone else is feeling this way, so you minimize what you’re experiencing. It\'s like being in a club and feeling completely lost, which is the energy I wanted to have in the production. It’s very repetitive, the chorus is really shouty, and the lyrics don’t make the most sense. It’s sensory overload.” **“Frankenstein”** “I had two days in the studio with Paul Epworth, and we wrote ‘Frankenstein’ on the first day and ‘This Hell’ on the second. I was writing about realizing that it’s not okay to give one person in your life all this baggage to deal with—whether it\'s a lover or a best friend or someone else close to you—and asking them to put you back together when that’s not their job. I love Paul’s pop production, but for me it’s about the work he did with Bloc Party. It’s actually Matt Tong playing drums on this track, which is insane. I grew up going to gigs around my area in Camden, and it was one of the best, most hedonistic and chaotic times of my life, and I wanted to reference that frantic energy. I might incite a mosh when I perform it live.” **“Hurricanes”** “A little pop-rock moment: It’s about self-sabotage and running into situations that aren’t good for you. I originally wrote this with Clarence Clarity, and the production sounded a bit like The Cardigans, a bit ’60s surf, and it just wasn’t working. I needed it to sound more driving, like being propelled forward throughout the song, like a hurricane. When Stuart Price came on board later on, he was also working with The Killers, and he suggested listening to them as a reference for the drums. Once we rerecorded the drums, it all fell into place. ‘Hurricanes’ is probably my favorite track on the album right now. It ends on that nice major chord, and it’s like this resolve. The end of the chaos. It’s such a fun song to sing.” **“Send My Love to John”** “One of my really good friends has quite actively homophobic parents, and they’ve had a very difficult time because their parents have never been supportive of their queerness. Then one day my friend was on the phone with their mum and at the end of the call she said, ‘OK, I’ll speak to you soon, and send my love to John,’ meaning my friend’s long-term boyfriend. It was a breakthrough. And it’s insane because the mum is never going to say sorry, but this is something they can hold on to. A lot of people need to hear the word ‘sorry’ from their parents and they’re never going to get it, so I wanted to write from the perspective of a parent who regrets not supporting their child to the fullest extent.” **“Phantom”** “I can’t quite remember how this song came about, but I think I had written ‘phantom’ in my notes and I was like, ‘Let’s just try things and see how it sounds.’ We were having quite a free session, just coming up with ideas. It’s a proper rock ballad, almost a love song, about losing yourself and wanting that person back because you don’t like the person that you are now. I wanted it to have a real Aerosmith vibe.” **“To Be Alive”** “The production on ‘To Be Alive’ is inspired by ‘Ray of Light’ by Madonna. It’s got those propulsive breakbeats. I wanted to make an extremely euphoric last song, about the really pure realization that simple things can give us joy if we want them to. The last line of the song, and of the whole album, ‘Flowers are still pretty when they’re dying,’ is actually a lyric Lauren Aquilina suggested. It ends on a hopeful note, but it’s sad at the same time.”
When Taylor Swift announced that *1989 (Taylor’s Version)* was finally seeing release, she mentioned that, of all the albums she’s faithfully rerecorded in her quest to retake her master tapes, this one was special. “The *1989* album changed my life in countless ways,” she wrote on Instagram. “To be perfectly honest, this is my most FAVORITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. I can’t believe they were ever left behind.” From “Now That We Don’t Talk” (on which, wowee zowee, she sings, “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/Or that I’d like to be on a mega-yacht/With important men who think important thoughts”) to “Say Don’t Go” to “Is It Over Now?”, one gets a real feel for the ferocity and focus with which she was writing at the time, a new audience in sight. It’s not just that any one of the newly uncovered songs here is more than strong enough to have been included (or strong enough to have launched the career of a less prolific artist); it’s that, even on material previously deemed inessential, Swift sounds comfortable bordering on imperious—like she’d been making lush, montage-ready pop music all along. Nearly a decade later—and at the tail end of a 2023 in which her every move seems to have determined pop-cultural weather—it’s weirdly easy to forget that in 2014, she was still approaching (nah, *engineering*) an inflection point in her life and career, reintroducing herself (at just 24) as the all-conquering, planet-like presence we know today. She’d already started adjusting the ratio of country to pop on 2010’s *Speak Now* and 2012’s *Red*, working with Swedish superproducers Max Martin and Shellback on the latter. On *1989*, Swift did away with the idea of ratios entirely—just launched them into the ocean, and went all the way. Musically, it wasn’t just her embrace of big beats and shiny surfaces, but a sense of lightness and play as well. Where 2008’s *Fearless* and *Speak Now* take their dramas to Shakespearean heights, *1989* celebrates a newly liberated life of flings (“Style”), weekend getaways (“Wildest Dreams”), and the kind of confidence a younger Taylor Swift was too passionately involved to grasp. So while “Welcome to New York” is her way of letting everyone know that she’s at least momentarily done with country music and Nashville and the constrictions they put on her image and sound, it’s also a song about turning your eye outward and surrendering to the possibilities only a city like New York can offer. And where she may have taken things personally in the past, now she’s just trying to have fun (“Shake It Off”). “Blank Space” even manages to make light of her gravest and most well-protected subject: Taylor Swift. Like Shania Twain’s *Come On Over* or even Bob Dylan’s *Bringing It All Back Home*, *1989* is an instance in which an artist deliberately defies expectations and still manages to succeed. Swift didn’t exactly grow up with the synthesized, ’80s-inspired sounds that producers like Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder, and future bestie Jack Antonoff help her create here; as the album’s title reminds you, she wasn’t even born until the decade was ending. But just as she played with the traditions and conventions of country music on her early albums, Swift uses the nostalgia of *1989* not to look back, but to move ahead.
Near the end of The Rolling Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years, Keith Richards takes the microphone to ask a series of emotional questions, pleading for honesty about what might lie ahead for him: “Is the future all in the past? Just tell me straight,” he asks. The answer is, remarkably, no: *Hackney Diamonds* is the band’s most energetic, effortless, and tightest record since 1981’s *Tattoo You*. Just play “Bite My Head Off,” a rowdy kiss-off where Mick Jagger tells off a bitter lover, complete with a fuzz-bass breakdown by...Paul McCartney. “At the end of it, I just said, ‘Well, that\'s just like the old days,’” Richards tells Apple Music of that recording session. *Hackney Diamonds* was indeed made like the old days—live, with no click tracks or glossy production tricks—yet still manages to sound fresh. After years of stalled sessions, and the death of their legendary drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, Jagger and Richards decided on a fresh start, traveling to Jamaica (the same place they wrote “Angie” in 1973) for a series of writing sessions. Based on a recommendation from McCartney, Jagger hired producer Andrew Watt, who’d also worked with Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ozzy Osbourne, Post Malone, and more, to help them finish the tracks. “He kicked us up the ass,” Jagger tells Apple Music. With Steve Jordan on drums, Watt kept it simple, bringing in vintage microphones and highlighting the interwoven guitars of Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The whole point is the band being very close, eyeball to eyeball, and looking at each other and feeding off of each other,” says Richards. In the spirit of 1978’s genre-spanning *Some Girls*, the album comprises sweeping riff-heavy anthems (“Angry,” “Driving Me Too Hard”), tortured relationship ballads (“Depending on You”), country-tinged stompers (“Dreamy Skies”), and even dance-floor grooves (“Mess it Up,” featuring a classic Jagger falsetto). The capstone of the album is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a stirring seven-minute gospel epic featuring Lady Gaga. Halfway through, the song goes quiet, Gaga laughs, and Stevie Wonder starts playing the Rhodes keyboard, and then Gaga and Jagger start improvising vocals together; it’s a spontaneous moment that’s perfectly imperfect, reminiscent of the loose *Exile on Main St.* sessions. “Playing with Stevie is always mind-blowing, and I thought that Lady Gaga did an incredible job, man,” says Richards. “She snaked her way in there and took it over and gave as good as she got with Mick, and it was great fun.” Richards didn’t expect to make an album this good as he approaches his 80th birthday. But he’s using it as a moment to take stock of his career with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. “The fact that our music has managed to become part of the fabric of life everywhere, I feel pretty proud about that, more than any one particular thing or one particular song,” he says. “It is nice to be accepted into this legendary piece of bullshit.”
“Real life is a funny thing, you know,” Taylor Swift wrote in the liner notes of 2010’s *Speak Now*, her third album and the third she’s rerecorded as part of a sweeping effort to regain her master tapes. “There is a time for silence. There is a time for waiting your turn. But if you know how you feel, and you so clearly know what you need to say, you’ll know it.” Swift was in her early twenties when she wrote *Speak Now*, still finding her voice as an artist and as an adult. But she’s faithful to her originals here—all of them written on her own, on tour, without co-writers—and faithful to a much younger version of herself. She pays tribute to early influences like Fall Out Boy and Paramore’s Hayley Williams, teaming up with them on the reimagined “from the vault” tracks “Electric Touch” and “Castles Crumbling,” respectively. And though she swaps Nashville producer Nathan Chapman for more recent collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the arrangements are still warm and clear—minus a coat of varnish or two—with an eye towards the sort of all-encompassing pop she’d inevitably, wholeheartedly embrace. We all know what came next for Swift with 2012’s *Red*, but, looking back, you can easily see and hear what’s on the horizon in these songs. The grace of *Speak Now* is in how it makes simple work out of feelings that are anything but. Swift is vulnerable here, but she’s also self-empowered (“Mean”). She’s innocent, but knows when to take responsibility (“Dear John”). She’s wise enough to regret her mistakes (“Back to December”), but not too jaded see the best in people (“Innocent”). Does she want to grow up? Yes, if that means more agency and independence (“Speak Now”). But when you’re all alone in that new apartment, you still might cry—not just for the childhood home you left, but for the knowledge that you can never go back (“Never Grow Up”). The sound is big, but the details are extremely specific—at one point, Swift says her rival thinks she’s crazy because Swift likes to rhyme her name with things (pop-punk blowout “Better Than Revenge”). It’s that balance—the universal and the specific, the accessible and the obscure—that not only sets Swift apart from most contemporary pop songwriters, but makes her a guide for anyone trying to sort out the impossible avalanche of feelings early adulthood brings. Not that you have to be a teenager to resonate with her. If anything, what makes Swift special is her hunch that everyone has had their turn at the heartache she writes about, whether they’re ready to admit it or not. In her liner notes for *Fearless*, she described the power of believing in Prince Charmings and happily-ever-afters. On *Speak Now*, most of the Prince Charmings turn out to be duds, and the real happily-ever-after is the wisdom and resilience you find in falling for them anyway.
On her 2013 debut album *Yours Truly*, Ariana Grande reintroduced herself. Before working in music full-time, she had worked on both Broadway’s *13* and Nickelodeon’s *Victorious*, eventually earning lead status on the network’s spinoff series *Sam & Cat*. Plans for her first full-length were already underway when she released her debut single “Put Your Hearts Up” in 2011, but Grande felt its bubblegum-pop sound was at odds with her self-image. As she neared 20, she needed her music to grow up with her. *Yours Truly* did that and more. Assisted by Babyface, Grande created an album that’s more mentally—and sonically—in sync with her spirit: sleek pop-R&B that approaches love from a sweet, almost coy perspective. “Hey, what happened to the butterflies?” she asks on “Honeymoon Avenue,” the strings-led opener about fading feelings. But those butterflies return in full force on songs like “Baby I,” “Right There” (featuring Big Sean), and “The Way” (featuring Mac Miller), fluttering alongside skittering percussion and bright piano chords. The R&B here is a throwback to the ’90s, while on “Tattooed Heart” Grande croons and shoops over ’50s-inspired doo-wop: “I wanna say we\'re going steady like it\'s 1954.” Whether she’s serving her now-signature “yeh” ad-libs or effortlessly slaying whistle notes, her vocals are as playful as they are powerful. Vestiges of Grande’s past are sprinkled throughout the LP, too: Leon Thomas III, her *Victorious* co-star and a musician in his own right, has several writing credits (“Honeymoon Avenue,” “Tattooed Heart,” etc.), and “Popular Song” with MIKA samples “Popular” from the Broadway musical *Wicked*—a prescient moment as Grande would later be cast as Glinda the Good Witch in the film adaptation. Ultimately, *Yours Truly* helped Grande make a successful transition from child actor to full-on pop artist, punctuated by a No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200 chart. Even as she spent her next albums fine-tuning her sound and finding herself, her debut laid the foundation for a future star.
Who, exactly, *is* Miley Cyrus? Is she the country music progeny turned former child star turned pop provocateur, twerking on awards shows and throwing middle fingers to critics? Is she the hopeful young balladeer, lending her naturally emotive voice to Top 40 anthems like 2009’s “The Climb”? Or is she the rock star in hiding, getting trippy with The Flaming Lips on their collaboration *Dead Petz* and channeling her inner Joan Jett on 2020’s *Plastic Hearts*? While her shifting identities can distract from her formidable musicianship, it is exactly this restless, chameleonic nature that makes Cyrus one of our more engaging and enduring pop stars. On eighth LP *Endless Summer Vacation*, Cyrus finally finds a way to bring these seemingly disparate parts together. She tapped four producers to help helm the album, each with an ear toward one of Cyrus’ primary lanes. Greg Kurstin (Adele, Maren Morris) brings his trademark gravitas to the cutting but compassionate breakup ballad “Jaded.” Kid Harpoon, who recently took home a Grammy for Harry Styles’ *Harry’s House*, has fingerprints all over the LP, as on powerhouse opener “Flowers,” Cyrus’ biggest single since 2013’s “Wrecking Ball.” Tyler Johnson, a fellow Nashvillian with credits ranging from Taylor Swift to Toni Braxton, pairs well with Cyrus, his own catholic tastes dovetailing nicely with hers. Mike WiLL Made-It, a longtime Cyrus collaborator, jumps in on tracks like the Brandi Carlile feature “Thousand Miles,” which feels country-adjacent but ultimately transcends genre, and the dark, industrial Sia collab “Muddy Feet,” which boasts one of the LP’s most biting lyrics: “You smell like perfume that I didn’t purchase.” Lines like that may provoke curiosity into Cyrus’ personal life—she’s made no effort to conceal that much of the material was inspired by her divorce from Liam Hemsworth—but the music itself is sturdy enough to transcend tabloid fodder. There are also other notable—and at times unexpected—co-writers on the LP. Cult-favorite indie filmmaker Harmony Korine (*Spring Breakers*, *Kids*) is credited on the woozy, gauzy “Handstand,” which lyrically references one of his paintings, “Big Twitchy.” Acclaimed R&B/electronic artist James Blake joins on album highlight “Violet Chemistry,” which feels like a spiritual and sonic cousin of Taylor Swift’s *Midnights* cut “Lavender Haze.” Country artist and songwriter Caitlyn Smith, who co-wrote the *Plastic Hearts* standout “High,” contributes to “Island,” a groovy, low-key banger about the double-edged sword of independence. Cyrus closes *Endless Summer Vacation* with a demo version of “Flowers,” the kind of bonus track that can, more often than not, function as little more than filler. In this case, though, the contrast between the song in its infancy and its buoyant, assertive final form is striking and emotional. The hard-won strength of the studio version is there, but it\'s drenched in a raw, gritty sadness that sounds painfully real. In its studio incarnation, you can hear that Cyrus buys what she’s selling, that she’s not only content to be her own companion but actually prefers her own company. In this demo, though, her words seem to function more as a compass than a proclamation, a hopeful road map out of the woods of heartbreak. For an artist whose musical talent is often overshadowed by her offstage antics, this glimpse into Cyrus’ creative process is a welcome one, and a fitting way to end her most fully realized album yet.
Three years before *Gag Order*, Kesha released 2020’s *High Road*, a cheery-sounding LP that attempted to return to her early party-pop days, despite the clear-eyed courage of its predecessor, 2017’s soulful *Rainbow*. After the “TiK ToK,” Jack Daniel’s-swilling early days of Kesha’s career came very public litigation with her former producer and label head Dr. Luke, whom she accused of sexual assault. It’s not something she can legally address on record, but the title of her fifth studio album is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to her ongoing battle. Produced by Rick Rubin, the album is her most innovative to date. There’s the minor-key, Auto-Tuned ode to hallucinogenic transcendence “Eat the Acid” and the indie-folk neuroticism of “Living in My Head.” The minimal synth turned explosive experimentalism of “The Drama” was co-written with Kurt Vile and includes an inspired interpolation of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” If early fans celebrated Kesha for her bravado, now they’ll find her fearlessness expressed in both new sonic textures and a new emotional vocal performance: laid bare, raw, undeniable.
*RUSH!* is the third album from the Italian rock band and the first since lighting up the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest with their unexpected win. Since that victory, Måneskin has become a worldwide pop sensation, with their swaggering rock-star personas and catchy yet gritty songs helping them carve out a distinctive niche in the musical landscape. *RUSH!*, which features behind-the-scenes work from pop architects like Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, comes at the end of a whirlwind 18 months for the four-piece that included collaborations with Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello (who appears on the *RUSH!* track “GOSSIP”) and Iggy Pop as well as chart success. “It’s incredible to think what’s happened in only one year and a half after everything completely changed in our lives,” bassist Victoria De Angelis says. In some ways, the period since Eurovision has been business as usual for Måneskin, who embarked on their first North American headlining tour in 2022. “We feel good because we’ve been touring the whole year,” says drummer Ethan Torchio. “So, now the machine is very well-oiled—everything comes easier than normal for us. In general, we’ve always enjoyed playing live a lot because we feel like it’s the cherry on top of all the work that we’ve done.” But *RUSH!* represents a new chapter for the band, with stylistic shifts that show how their pop savvy is complemented by a bone-deep love of rock and all its trappings. “There’s a lot of variety compared to our previous records,” De Angelis notes. “Instead of starting from the center and trying to \[spin\] out from it, we started from four different places, which are our four individualities,” adds lead vocalist Damiano David. De Angelis says that being generous with her bandmates’ artistic idiosyncrasies made for a more exciting studio process that included added risk-taking—all of which, in the end, added up to a first-class album. “It’s better if we embrace our differences—even if someone has a different taste in a direction I might not be the first fan of,” she says. “Same goes for them. It’s better to embrace all our differences and give space to everyone to express themselves and be happy and be represented by the record. That’s why we had to really open our minds and challenge our boundaries: Some things we do, we would never have done without each other.”
Album length: 68:21 "Carousel" is a marvel of innovation. A foray into ... into ... into ... well. It's a spectacle. Isn't it? Isn't it so. Wonderful? "Carousel". Goes around. And around. And around. The lights are so bright. The lights are so bright. The lights are so bright. We've installed a few mirrors for you to see yourself. Where are you going? Oh. You're right there. I lost track of you. For a moment. It. Well. A carousel. It feels like you're going somewhere. Doesn't it? Sorry. I thought. You were going somewhere. But you're not. Just around. That's a relief. That's a relief?!
*RUSH!* is the third album from the Italian rock band and the first since lighting up the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest with their unexpected win. Since that victory, Måneskin has become a worldwide pop sensation, with their swaggering rock-star personas and catchy yet gritty songs helping them carve out a distinctive niche in the musical landscape. *RUSH!*, which features behind-the-scenes work from pop architects like Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, arrived at the end of a whirlwind 18 months for the four-piece that included collaborations with Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello (who appears on the *RUSH!* track “GOSSIP”) and Iggy Pop. And almost a year on from its release, the band unveiled this edition, *RUSH! (ARE U COMING?)*, which adds four reliably storming, electric new tracks to the original lineup. “It’s incredible to think what’s happened in only one year and a half after everything completely changed in our lives,” bassist Victoria De Angelis says. In some ways, the period since Eurovision has been business as usual for Måneskin, who embarked on their first North American headlining tour in 2022. “We feel good because we’ve been touring the whole year,” says drummer Ethan Torchio. “So, now the machine is very well-oiled—everything comes easier than normal for us. In general, we’ve always enjoyed playing live a lot because we feel like it’s the cherry on top of all the work that we’ve done.” But *RUSH!* represents a new chapter for the band, with stylistic shifts that show how their pop savvy is complemented by a bone-deep love of rock and all its trappings. “There’s a lot of variety compared to our previous records,” De Angelis notes. “Instead of starting from the center and trying to \[spin\] out from it, we started from four different places, which are our four individualities,” adds lead vocalist Damiano David. De Angelis says that being generous with her bandmates’ artistic idiosyncrasies made for a more exciting studio process that included added risk-taking. “It’s better if we embrace our differences—even if someone has a different taste in a direction I might not be the first fan of,” she says. “Same goes for them. It’s better to embrace all our differences and give space to everyone to express themselves and be happy and be represented by the record. That’s why we had to really open our minds and challenge our boundaries: Some things we do, we would never have done without each other.”
Conforming to the expected has never been Amaarae’s strong suit. And it should come as no surprise that the Ghanaian American artist would create a sonic otherworld where the trappings of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, punk, and alternative rock mesh with globe-trotting instrumentation and exist harmoniously without question on her album *Fountain Baby*. The result? A culmination of what a transnational pop star is in 2023—boundless. *Fountain Baby* lends its credence to Amaarae’s continued quest for growth and mastery, but not in a contrived way. There are pockets of carefully crafted yet carefree melodies like the dreamy “Angels in Tibet” and sultry “Reckless & Sweet.” On “Counterfeit,” the singer-songwriter swiftly glides with confidence on production by KZ Didit that’s reminiscent of an early-2000s movie soundtrack. “Wasted Eyes” opens with a quick koto solo and progresses as Amaarae soliloquizes about a wounded romance. The 14-track solo project pushes the ante of its 2020 predecessor, *The Angel You Don’t Know*, towards newer heights.
“It’s seemingly about relationships with other people, but I think it’s more about a relationship with the higher power,” Jenny Lewis tells Apple Music about her fifth solo full-length. “And I’m not even talking about God—it’s the *details*.” By that, Lewis means the sort of simple, quotidian texture we might normally have overlooked before the pandemic took hold, when the world stood still long enough for us to truly appreciate them. At the time, the LA singer-songwriter had already written a number of songs that would end up on *Joy’All*. But like anything else, they evolved, Lewis continuing to edit and write on her own, at home alone in Laurel Canyon (or as part of a virtual songwriting workshop hosted by Beck) with the windows and doors open. “It was like, suddenly, there were no airplanes overhead, no cars on the street, no hikers even. The animals emerged from the canyon, and the house next to me was empty, so I could make a lot of noise.” Once lockdowns had loosened, she took to Nashville, where she recorded with acclaimed producer (and Apple Music Radio host) Dave Cobb, a perfect fit for Lewis’ work if there ever was one. “The songs pre-pandemic are a little more persons, places, and things, and then the songs post- are a little more existential musing,” she says. “Certainly, one element of *Joy’All* is gratitude and a sort of witnessing of the moment, because the moment was so traumatic for so many of us. It’s having a little breath and reflecting on the whole thing with gratitude. I personally had a profound shift. I can’t say if it’s a positive one, but it’s definitely a shift.” Here, Lewis zooms in on the details of a few songs. **“Psychos”** “‘Psychos’ has been around for a minute—it’s had a couple incarnations. It started out as a bossa nova, on a keyboard I have in Nashville, a CP-70 Yamaha. Then I recorded a version with my friend in the Midwest, kind of a remix version. And then I demoed it on GarageBand, on my iPhone, and took it to Dave. So, it had all these lives so far. If it’s a solid song, it can sort of exist in all the worlds. Some songs don’t translate from the album to a live setting or vice versa, but some are very fluid.” **“Joy’All”** “This one started out with a Purdie shuffle. Bernard Purdie is this famous session drummer, and he would do this thing with his fingers on the snare drum, and that’s fingers on the snare—so that set the tone. And I was so free on top of that rhythm. There’s a little bit of a blue note in there, too, but that’s intentional.” **“Puppy and a Truck”** “I was prompted in the Beck songwriting workshop, and this had been something I really had been living, because I actually do have a puppy and a truck, so it was pretty easy to write. But having the deadline in the workshop was crucial—I’d been thinking about it for a month, but I actually wrote it in 24 hours, and it was done. I wrote every line with my puppy by my side. And I played it every night opening for Harry Styles, and every night my production manager would bring Bobby \[Rhubarb\] out, with little doggy headphones on, and she knew—she knew it was me up there.” **“Apples and Oranges”** “It’s about a skateboarder. It was a waltz, and it had been around for a minute, and I was going to cut it for *On the Line*, but I didn’t for some reason. And I put it aside, and then I revisited my voice notes—which is my most valuable thing, all the stuff in my voice notes, thousands of bits of things—and I went back to it, and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me change the time signature and the key, and then rework the bridge and demo it on my phone.’ And it was just a totally new song.” **“Giddy Up”** “It has a De La Soul reference: ‘The stakes is high, the whistle blows,’ which is kind of a #MeToo nod as well. There’s a lot going on in that song as far as it’s a plea for intimacy, but not without peril or potential peril. It’s like the risk of putting yourself out there. It’s really about cognitive dissonance, that song. Like, get on your pony and ride—you know this isn’t the thing.” **“Chain of Tears”** “It ends with the line, ‘If it ain’t right, it’s wrong.’ So, back on that cognitive-dissonance tip and the same plea in ‘Giddy Up,’ to get on the pony and get out there. I think it’s like, we have the facts, and we’re voting no.”
If the combination of extravagant music and world-weary lyrics on Fall Out Boy’s eighth album sounds appropriate to the current queasy moment, there\'s a good reason for that. *So Much (For) Stardust* was conceived in the spirit of 2008\'s *Folie à Deux*, one of the most ornate and possibly divisive entries in the band\'s catalog. “There was a feeling that I kind of wanted to get,” Patrick Stump tells Apple Music. “I don\'t want it to sound anything like that record, but I wanted to get back to this feeling that we had when we were making it, which was ‘I don\'t know how much longer this\'ll last.’” *So Much (For) Stardust*, appropriately, captures Fall Out Boy going for broke, whether on the speedy opener “Love From the Other Side” (of the apocalypse) or the meditation “Heaven, Iowa,” which has a blow-off-the-roof chorus that gives its verses added emotional weight. Bassist and songwriter Pete Wentz\'s lyrics are drolly on point, with quotable one-liners like “Every lover\'s got a little dagger in their hand” (on “Love From the Other Side”) and “One day every candle\'s gotta run out of wax/One day no one will remember me when they look back” (on “Flu Game”) scattered throughout. At times, though, they have a tenderness to them that belies the nearly two decades he\'s spent in the spotlight, as well as his elder-statesman status. “I\'m my dad\'s age when I thought he had it all figured out, and my parents are starting to look like my grandparents, and my kids are the age that I was,” Wentz says. “And this, I guess, is how the world goes on.” These thoughts reminded Wentz of a speech Ethan Hawke gives in the 1994 slacker comedy *Reality Bites*, which is sampled at the record\'s midpoint, “The Pink Seashell.” “His dad gave him a pink seashell and went, ‘There, this has all the answers in the universe.’ And he goes, ‘I guess there are no answers,’” says Wentz. “There\'s the idea that nothing matters—and that was a weird message for me. I was like, ‘I don\'t think we can bake that into the whole record.’” Instead he channeled the 1989 baseball fantasia *Field of Dreams*, in which Kevin Costner\'s character is guided by the mantra “if you build it, they will come.” “He went out and built the field in the grass because he was doing a crazy thing,” said Wentz. “We all should be doing stuff like that.”
When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame extended an invitation to Dolly Parton in early 2022, the preternaturally unshy megastar demurred. While Parton knows she’s forever changed the country music genre with her historic career, she admitted that she didn’t feel it was appropriate for her to accept one of the biggest honors in rock music, as she’d never made rock music of her own. With a little convincing, Parton eventually accepted the honor—but she wanted to put out an actual rock ’n’ roll album to prove her bona fides and make her enshrinement feel more legit. With *Rockstar* she does just that, enlisting the help of some of the genre’s biggest artists for creative reimaginings of classics. Guests include Elton John, Ann Wilson, Stevie Nicks, Lizzo, Paul McCartney, and many more—proof that Parton’s Rolodex alone justified her Hall induction. John, a true rock star if there ever was one, tells Apple Music he had a remarkable time joining Parton on “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” an updated version of the song John originally made famous on his 1974 album *Caribou* and which later grew more popular as a duet with the late George Michael. “She\'s always led by example,” John tells Apple Music of Parton. “I duet with her, and it\'s the first time I\'ve really ever sang with her. It was just the most incredible experience. So I think she\'s quite a remarkable woman. She\'s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, thank god.” Parton tackles a number of eras and styles of rock music—and hosts a number of legendary guests—across *Rockstar*’s ambitious 30 tracks. Among the other luminaries are none other than Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (“Let It Be”), Stevie Nicks (“What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You,” a previously unreleased cut from Nicks’ 1985 solo album *Rock a Little*), Heart’s Ann Wilson (“Magic Man”), and former Journey singer Steve Perry (“Open Arms”). Miley Cyrus and Chris Stapleton are also on hand to represent the current class of stars with Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” and a version of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” respectively. Though the Rock Hall induction is certainly a prominent new feather in Parton’s cap, she tells Apple Music’s Kelleigh Bannen that she hopes her legacy extends beyond her musical accomplishments to include the philanthropic efforts she’s spent so much of her life pursuing. “I do hope, more than anything, that I\'ve been an inspiration, that I can be an inspiration for all the days that I\'m living and even long after I\'m gone, that I can leave something behind, maybe something I\'ve said or something I\'ve done that might make some difference, maybe sometimes big difference,” she says. “And just to say, ‘Well, if she did it, I can do it. She was just a poor girl from the mountains.’”
On Melanie Martinez’s third LP, her Cry Baby trilogy comes to an end. If 2015’s *Cry Baby* debut introduced the titular character (and reintroduced Martinez as a fearlessly creative avant-pop creator outside of her covers on *The Voice*) and 2019’s *K-12* “used school as an analogy for life and the systems of power our society continues to live under,” as she tells Apple Music, *PORTALS* is about death and what lies beyond. “I wanted to challenge my listeners’ perspective by essentially saying: Just like us, after Cry Baby’s vessel on earth has died, she lives on as a spirit in the cosmos. It was important for me to show the immortality of being a human with this record—to give people hope that there’s life after death.” Across 13 tracks largely written in her home’s “portal room”—a space she describes as “an entry point for benevolent spirits to come and rest on their journey”—*PORTALS* is a synthy vaudeville, from the sped-up heartbeat production and spoken-word intro “DEATH” to the uptempo alt-pop of closer “WOMB.” The lines between life and the afterlife are blurred. “I hope grief becomes easier for people while listening to this record,” she adds. “That they can enjoy this life to the fullest knowing we’re all just here to grow, create, feel, and have shared experiences with one another to help each other evolve.” Below, Martinez walks through her new album in a track-by-track guide she wrote exclusively for Apple Music. **“DEATH”** “One day, I sat in the portal room alone and started singing melodies. I heard a spirit with a completely different tone than mine repeat a melody I had sung out loud in the silence and it sent a chill down my body. I was really scared at first, then continued on, using that moment as confirmation from the other side. I laid down the chords; I added a simple drum loop in the chorus. That was later replaced by production from my favorite collaborator CJ Baran, as well as live drums from Ilan Rubin of Nine Inch Nails, who also put drums down for a couple of other songs.” **“VOID”** “This is the first song I fully produced on my own, also in the portal room. The first thing I put down was that bass guitar top line—it was an exact melody from a voice memo I had recorded a few days prior. The chorus melody and lyric came all at once just from looping the bassline. I put down a simple programmed drum loop that was later replaced and mixed in with live drums by Rhys Hastings.“ **“TUNNEL VISION”** “I wrote this song while in Hawaii in February 2021 with Kinetics & One Love. We were surrounded by coqui frogs singing to us, the sound of rain hitting the roof, and pure connection.” **“FAERIE SOIRÉE”** “There were many days I sat in the portal room wanting to create outside of my own perspective. I asked Jeff Levin (my A&R) to send me as many folders as possible of instrumental tracks created by different producers. After searching through the folders for a while, there was one track labeled ‘Respect Vol 1’ by this producer named Hoskins that struck me. It was an infectious drum groove over a guitar top line. I wrote the song very quickly.” **“LIGHT SHOWER”** “There is a place in the afterlife people under hypnosis describe as a soul cleansing, a place where gem-colored rays of light shine through every inch of your soul, cleansing your spirit of the trauma it had experienced during your last lifetime. I remember reading about this sitting on the roof of my garage. A few weeks later I sat in my bathtub with my guitar and stayed up all night writing a love song about this light. It was also the very first song I ever wrote for this album.” **“SPIDER WEB”** “‘SPIDER WEB’ is written about social media’s chokehold on society. I wrote this one on my guitar in the portal room, recorded a voice memo of it, and sent it to CJ. He created an incredible instrumental track for it that same day and even created the perfect drop using his own mouth sounds that gave it that extra spidery feel.” **“LEECHES”** “The next few songs are about conflict on earth. Living in the most vapid and isolating city of Los Angeles, I decided to write ‘LEECHES’ about people who live here for the wrong reasons, and how they act around people in the spotlight.” **“BATTLE OF THE LARYNX”** “This was the last song that was written and added to the album. I wrote this one to be about two different conflict styles: one person who yells a bunch of nothing really loudly to try and intimidate, and the other who can calmly and concisely use their words and wit to prove their point.” **“THE CONTORTIONIST”** “This conflict song is about bending over backwards for someone who doesn’t accept you as you are.” **“MOON CYCLE”** “I wrote this song in the portal room alone over a guitar loop by Pearl Lion. On each of my albums, I like to include at least one ‘taboo’ song about something many people deal with, but no one talks about in music: I wanted to write a fun, lighthearted song about being a person who experiences menstruation, how blood represents vitality and life. I wanted the chorus to be pretty and to use analogies for bleeding that were sweet. The rumbling sounds that lead into the song are my actual period cramps, recorded on my phone. With the conflict of patriarchal society brainwashing straight cis men to believe they should have any kind of say over other people’s bodies, I wanted to make the song extra uncomfy for them by going on to describe a man who lives for period sex.” **“NYMPHOLOGY”** “The ending interlude of this song is actually called ‘Amulet.’ My partner Verde was cleaning out his computer and an instrumental randomly started playing and my ears perked up. It was a track he had produced years ago that was just sitting there collecting digital dust. I immediately wrote over it, but writing a full song for it was difficult. I loved it so much and had no idea what to do with it. One day in the studio I randomly was like, ‘Hmm, maybe “Amulet” can be an interlude after a song,’ and as fate had it, the very last note of ‘NYMPHOLOGY’ is the very first note of ‘Amulet.’ A perfect puzzle piece.” **“EVIL”** “My favorite of the conflict songs. It flowed. It was a mental turning point, where I was finally able to articulate perfectly what I had dealt with in my last relationship. I wanted the lyrics to be the most savage—every time I wrote something, I was like, ‘No, it’s not mean enough.’ It’s about dealing with a narcissist who ironically calls you evil because you’re able to see through them. I spent the entire day blowing out my vocals recording it.” **“WOMB”** “I knew I wanted the album to end on the title ‘WOMB.’ This was one of the earliest songs, written in 2020. I had a session one day with Omer Fedi, and he started playing these guitar chords that were so beautiful, I asked him to play it on loop while I stared at the corner of the room, quickly writing lyrics. CJ and I had Rhys come in and record live drums around two years later to complete it. This song is written from the perspective of entering a new lifetime—the nerves and excitement that arises when you’re about to let your human experience on earth move your progression forward.”
Sam Smith’s fourth album, *Gloria*, opens with the kind of music we’ve come to expect from the British singer-songwriter: “Love Me More” is a gospel-inflected ballad celebrating the power of self-acceptance. But after that, Smith goes off script. “I wanted it to be a patchwork of pop, it’s something that I was really passionate about,” they tell Apple Music. “I want to be flipping from genre to genre to genre to genre.” *Gloria*, then, brings us sensual R&B, dazzling dance floor moments (“Lose You” is perhaps Smith’s best sad banger yet), twisting hyperpop, a dancehall-indebted earworm, and even choral music, with embraces of sex, the power of community, and queer joy and history along the way. “My aim with this record was to make sure there is not one song on this album that I don\'t like,” adds Smith. “I\'ve put so much into this record in terms of the production and the time. I became obsessed. I lived inside the music. I\'ve never worked that hard before.” There’s a confidence present that most artists reach a few albums deep, but it’s more than just the gains of experience you can hear here. Made between Suffolk, LA, and Jamaica, *Gloria* is an album of rebellion, liberation, and letting go of the past, as one of modern pop’s biggest voices unveils their most assured music—and self—yet. “I don’t want to sound cheesy, but *Gloria* for me is like when a butterfly leaves a cocoon,” says Smith. “That’s what I wanted this record to feel like all the way through. I wanted there to be strength within every single song. I feel like my true artist self has arrived in a way.” Read on as Smith delves deep into every track on *Gloria*. **“Love Me More”** “I knew I wanted to write a song that said how I was feeling. I find the whole self-love thing quite cringey. Self-love sometimes feels like a destination; with self-acceptance, every day I have to try and accept myself and show myself love. That\'s what I was trying to put across in this song. I started this album like my old music. ‘Love Me More’ is the last opportunity I was giving my older fans to come into this next stage with me. This is a song written for my fans, and every song after it is written for me.” **“No God”** “This comes from a personal story about someone in my life who I’ve lost to drastic opinions. But as me, \[songwriters and producers\] Jimmy \[Napes\] and Stargate were writing it, it became a rhetoric on a certain type of person with a god complex. It’s about the ignoring of a human being and allowing someone’s drastic politics to get in the way of caring for someone else. The magic of this song came from the production: the live playing, the backing vocals. We just picked away at it until it sounded perfect. To me, it sounds super expensive.” **“Hurting Interlude”** “I found this amazing piece: a news anchor speaking at the first-ever Gay Pride in New York. What he says in this interlude broke my heart and took me back to ‘Lose You,’ a song written about a lesbian friend who had her first queer relationship with a woman. Someone\'s first heartbreak as a queer person can be very intense because of what we do go through when it comes to love. I felt like it was the perfect quote before ‘Lose You.’” **“Lose You”** “As a queer community, we love our sad dance songs. With this album, you could dedicate every song to a pop diva of mine. ‘Love Me More’ would be Whitney, ‘No God’ would be Brandy, and ‘Lose You’ would be Robyn or George Michael. I wrote this song with some of the most amazing pop writers and it felt like a mastering of a beautifully formed pop song. The production wasn’t taking me to Berlin, though, and I needed it to take me to a German gay club. The little things we did towards the end of this song really took it there—it gives me this really Euro, unashamed, gay, chic feel. It\'s drama, drama, drama.” **“Perfect” (feat. Jessie Reyez)** “This is where sex starts to come into the record. I feel like I’ve been a bit desexualized during my career, and I was very young when I started. Being 20 years old and moving onstage in the way I would in a gay bar was petrifying. Jessie really taught me to be brave: I would say things to her in the studio and she wouldn’t laugh or feel uncomfortable. The whole concept of the song is saying, ‘I’m a hot mess,’ and feeling yourself in a really imperfect way. This song is the Rihanna moment—we worked with Stargate on it, who worked on *Rated R*, one of my favorite Rihanna records. Stargate got hold of Nuno Bettencourt, who does guitar solos on *Rated R*, and he just ripped all over the song—I love it so much.” **“Unholy” \[with Kim Petras\]** “We were in Jamaica and \[producer\] Omer Fedi was fucking around on the guitar and playing this scale, which I started singing to. Everyone in the room was really confused; they didn’t know if they liked it or not. I had someone on my mind who was pissing me off and I just had to get it out. After we got back, everyone liked the song but said, ‘This is not on brand.’ But it kept prodding at me. I said everything I needed to in the first verse, and that’s when Kim came into the picture. There were about eight guys in the studio who were trying to push Kim’s verse in one direction. We spent all day doing it that way, but then something in my gut said, ‘This is shit.’ There’s a certain humor that only a queer person can understand because we’ve been through it and we live it. And that’s what the verse needed. We needed to tease the man, we needed to make him a ‘Balenciaga daddy.’ This is the most powerful part of the album and it\'s the most powerful piece of music I\'ve ever been a part of. It’s like an exorcism.” **“How to Cry”** “This is about the same person ‘Unholy’ is about. I wanted that breath, but I also only wanted one of these moments, because this isn’t the record for super organic, stripped music. In ‘Unholy’ I’m laughing and taking the piss. But at the heart of that emotion is a very sad story. It’s also about a relationship I was in, and about how I think being an emotional person is such a strong characteristic. I really do believe it’s a superpower. So it’s a love letter to me.” **“Six Shots”** “It’s a paragraph change—after ‘How to Cry,’ this is the pre-drinks to a night. But they’re intense pre-drinks, because we start having sex. This is the first proper sex song I wrote—I just felt really freed by it. At the time, I was insanely single and that’s where the lyric ‘There’s no loving me’ comes from. I was so single that I was almost taken. I wasn’t open to love.” **“Gimme” (feat. Koffee and Jessie Reyez)** “I’m obsessed with this song—it’s possibly my favorite on the album. It’s the most sexually intense lyrics I’ve ever written, and the verse lyric is actually filthy! The song is basically about wanting the dick so much you can cry. I love dancehall music and have tried many times to write songs that have a dancehall feel. I needed to be in Jamaica to do it in a way where it felt authentic, and I’m so proud that ‘Gimme’ did that. Like a lot of the record, this song is about sharing the moment—I didn’t want to be in the song too much.” **“Dorothy’s Interlude”** “The opening quote is Divine, which is just pure sass and fabulousness. Next is Judy Garland—there are so many queer connotations with Judy, namely the famous myth that when she died, everyone congregated in New York at Stonewall and the riots started the same night. Then after that you’ve got Sylvia Rivera. It’s quite a harrowing speech at Gay Pride in New York, talking about all of the awful things that are happening in the homeless hospitals to trans people, and her own community of gay men were booing her onstage. After that it goes into RuPaul saying one of the most incredible sayings we have out there. This interlude goes through the ages.” **“I’m Not Here to Make Friends”** “This song was made with Calvin Harris, Stargate, me, and Jessie Reyez. It was a joy to make. I went on a date the night before and I was just so sick of going on dates where people treated me like a friend or just wanted to meet me because I’m Sam Smith. Even though the song has nothing to do with it, the song title is also an attitude and spirit on the record that I have: I’m done trying to please people now.” **“Gloria”** “The sound of this song is one of the most beautiful sounds I\'ve ever created. And the reason I think it’s one of my favorite songs is that I’m not on it. \[Producer\] David Odlum helped convince me to actually sing on this song. At the beginning of my career, I remember everyone telling me I was a good singer, but no one ever really gave me credit for my songwriting. And what I love about this song is it\'s not about me, it\'s about something I wrote. This song is about opening your arms to the sky and singing your song as loud as you can. And I really think that my younger self needed it. I went with this idea of, I want this to be an album for a younger me that will give me joy and hope. The lyric is incredibly deep, but it\'s also playable like a lullaby.” **“Who We Love” \[with Ed Sheeran\]** “Ed sent me this song, and I was fearful to begin with because I don’t usually take songs and make them mine. Ed and I have been friends for a long time. I’m not interested in doing an Ed collab that sounds like a hit—I wanted it to mean something. And when I heard this, I felt truly touched. I felt like it was a queer ballad anthem written from a friend. There was something so poignant and beautiful about it. Ed has personally guided me through tough times and been a friend in a very cold industry. I wanted everything about this song to feel warm.”
“We have to be friends”—the first song written for *PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE*—had a profound impact on its author. “I was like, ‘What the hell is going to be this record? This is going to be my awakening,” Chris tells Apple Music’s Proud Radio. “The song was all-knowing of something and admonishing me finally to stop being blind or something. So I started to take music even more seriously and more spiritually.” Even before that track, the French alt-pop talent had begun to embrace spirituality and prayer following the death of his mother in 2019—a loss that also colored much of 2022’s *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*. But letting it into his music took him to deeper places than ever before. “This journey of music has been very extreme because I wanted to devote myself and I went to extreme places that changed me forever,” adds Chris. “An awakening is just the beginning of a spiritual journey, so I wouldn\'t say I\'m there, it would be arrogant. But it\'s definitely the opening of a clear path of spirituality through music.” After the high-concept, operatic *Redcar*, this album—a three-part epic lasting almost two hours that’s rooted in (and whose name nods to) Tony Kushner’s 1991 play *Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes*, an exploration of AIDS in 1980s America—confirms our arrival into the most ambitious Christine and the Queens era yet. The songs here will demand more of you than the smart pop that made Christine and the Queens famous—but they will also richly reward your attention, with sprawling, synth-led outpourings that reveal something new with every listen. Here, Chris (who collaborated with talent including superproducer MIKE DEAN and 070 Shake) reaches for trip-hop (the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears can be so soft”), classical music (the sublime “Full of life,” which layers Chris’ reverbed vocals over the instantly recognizable Pachelbel’s Canon), ’80s-style drums (“We have to be friends”), and the kind of haunting, atmospheric ballads this artist excels at (“To be honest”). Oh, and the album’s narrator? Madonna. “I was like, ‘If Madonna was just like a stage character, it would be brilliant,’” says Chris. “I pitch it like fast, quite intensely: ‘I need you to be the voice of everything. You need to be this voice of, maybe it\'s my mom, maybe it\'s the Queen Mary, maybe it\'s a computer, maybe it\'s everything.’ And she was like, ‘You\'re crazy, I\'ll do it.’” Chris gave the narrator a name: Big Eye. “The whole thing was insane, which is the best thing,” he says. “The record itself solidified itself in maybe less than a month. I was writing a new song every day. It was quite consistent and a wild journey. And as I was singing the song, the character was surfacing in the words. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a character.’ Big Eye was the name I gave the character because it\'s this very all-encompassing, slightly worrying angel voice, could be dystopian.” For Chris, this album was a teacher and a healer—even a “shaman.” “I discovered so much more of myself and rediscovered why I loved music so hard,” he says. “And it\'s this great light journey of healing I adore.” It also cracked open his heart. “This record for me is a message of love,” he adds. “It comes from me, but it comes from the invisible as well. Honestly, I felt a bit cradled by extra strength. Even the collaboration I had, this whole journey was about friendship, finding meaning in pain too. It opened my heart.”
*Barbie The Album* was *almost* as anticipated as *Barbie* the movie—and for good reason. Executive-produced by Mark Ronson and featuring a global all-star lineup, the soundtrack is full of bangers and clever pop-cultural winks meant to capture the zeitgeist the same way the movie and its marketing machine have. It starts appropriately loud with “Pink,” a roséwave bop by Lizzo that makes you feel like Malibu Barbie driving her beach cruiser down the Pacific Coast Highway and features one of the album’s best sound bites—a cheer-style call-and-response spelling out “P, pretty! I, intelligent! N, never sad! K, cool!” Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” comes next, kicking off a stretch of songs that belongs on any summer going-out playlist: “Barbie World (With Aqua)” by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice is a true Barbie multiverse moment, interpolating the Danish group’s 1997 global hit “Barbie Girl.” Charli XCX’s “Speed Drive” is basically “Vroom Vroom” but Barbie-fied, followed by KAROL G’s bouncing reggaetón track “WATATI” and “Man I Am,” a rousing himbo anthem by Sam Smith. But it’s not just banger after banger: Tame Impala’s trippy intergalactic disco jam “Journey to the Real World” shifts the tone, while “I’m Just Ken,” an ’80s-style power ballad sung by Ryan Gosling himself, threatens to steal the whole show here. With “Home,” HAIM provides Tauruses everywhere with their very own theme song, while Billie Eilish’s spare and surprisingly existential “What Was I Made For?” contributes a healthy measure of emotional depth. But it’s Ava Max’s empowerment anthem “Choose Your Fighter” that may best sum up the hectic but high-minded spirit of the entire project: It’s a celebration of self-expression and freedom from rigid, outdated standards of beauty and femininity. Her point is that anyone can be Barbie, and by the time the Korean girl group FIFTY FIFTY is singing about that “pretty state of mind” in the album’s finale, we are all living our own P-I-N-K Barbie dream.
For Latin music, 2022 was a banner year, with albums like ROSALÍA’s *MOTOMAMI* and Rauw Alejandro’s *SATURNO* inventively reshaping the landscape sonically and thematically. Both records explored nostalgia and futurism in their own respective and radical ways, so it’s not altogether surprising that the romantically linked pair found their way into the studio to create something together. Though more concise than their fans might crave, the three-song *RR* EP reflects the push-and-pull of two of today’s most compelling recording artists navigating a shared space. Saturated by mutual feelings of love and longing, the lyrics behind “BESO” make clear how challenging it must’ve been to bring them together for these recordings in the first place. A secretive escapade set to a reggaetón beat, “VAMPIROS” builds its atmospheric unease under their vocal interplay until an earth-shattering industrial crescendo on par with *MOTOMAMI*\'s *Yeezus*-level peaks arrives. (That’s no coincidence, given the presence of producer Noah Goldstein on each of those projects.) “PROMESA,” however, departs from the preceding two tracks musically, though a picturesque intimacy remains.
“People say your songs are like your children,” Bono tells Apple Music. “Wrong: Your songs are like your parents. They tell you what to do, how to dress. But after a while, if you\'re successful, songs become big. They\'re owned by other people, not you. And with this collection, we were sort of trying to listen to them again and trying to think, well, first of all, will they hold up? Will they stand up to being broken down outside of the firepower of a rock ’n’ roll band like U2?” In their 45 years as a band, U2 has done little in the way of looking backwards. Bono’s 2022 memoir *Surrender* changed that—a story of his life and career told through the prism of 40 songs. Thanks to a global pandemic shelving whatever grander plans the band had, this compilation is an extrapolation of that, with 40 songs from across their vast catalog—10 selected by each band member—completely reworked, largely acoustically. “Suddenly we had the space and time to just make music without there being any kind of pressure or any expectation,” says The Edge. “This idea I\'d been knocking around for a while was to try some more of our songs in a stripped-down way that we had done over the years. But also the joy of it was there was no necessity to put it out if we didn\'t like it.” For Bono, revisiting the past in such depth would not have been an option had the band not been doing so much work on new music; the project was as much a taking stock of where they’ve been as a map of where they can still go in their fifth decade. “*Songs of Surrender* is only possible because of so much amazing momentum for the future,” he says. “And to be fair, we have a drummer who is injured and can\'t be playing rock ’n’ roll. And so if we take this interest in acoustic music and intimacy being the new punk rock—which it is—I really believe in the force of intimacy and these earbuds and the way we listen to music now.” This intimate end result is not just a chance to revamp (or, in some cases, make corrections to) arrangements, but also to revisit lyrics that have changed meaning over time. Songs like “Out of Control” and “Stories for Boys,” loose punk rave-ups written when they were teenagers, have a different gravity here. “Bad,” from 1984’s *The Unforgettable Fire*, was rewritten in the first person, as Bono relates differently to the notion of being an addict than he did 40 years ago. As U2 gets set to revisit their larger-than-life *Achtung Baby* era during a Las Vegas residency later in 2023, Bono’s acceptance of his rock-star ego is very much intact as he weighs what *Songs of Surrender* means. “It’s both a vanity project,” he says, “and a grudge match.” Below, read some insight into some of the album’s reimaginings from Bono and The Edge. **“Stories for Boys”** Bono: “I guess it\'s a teenage fantasy, kind of, but it\'s not sketched out. And then for this collection, not only did we sketch it out, Edge sang it, and it\'s quite unsettled. And it has a whole other resonance.” The Edge: “We were writing it now about ourselves as we were—boys, back in 1979 when we first started that song. From the safety of this amount of distance of time and experience, you can actually look at who we were and finish out that lyric, which we could never have written at the time.” **“Bad”** Bono: “Some songs, I almost trembled to sing them. And making this song, which is about my friend who nearly lost his life a couple of ways—as a child in a bombing, in a terrorist bomb attack in our city, and then later to heroin. And then to ask the question, ‘Can I sing that?’ Because I must be an addict too. I\'m not quite sure of what is my drug of choice, but I have things clearly I need to let go of. I rewrote it in the first person, and it was really hard and really easy to sing at the same time.” **“All I Want Is You”** Bono: “I reveal this trick that I did on ‘All I Want Is You’ where I was singing from the point of view of the muse: ‘So you say you want a diamond on a ring of gold.’ As you hear it as a U2 fan, you think that\'s Bono singing to his wife. And when you realize, no, that\'s his wife singing to him saying, ‘I don\'t need this.’ And so it was nice to be able to really declare that and to go to the text and the melody and treat it with some respect.” **“If God Will Send His Angels”** The Edge: “You know, the thing is, I realized that we\'d not really fully underscored the melody right. We\'d left it very abstract and the melody was much better than the song would suggest. So I changed the chords, changed a lot of the stuff. Same melody, same lyrics, but it\'s a better song now.” Bono: “Not the same lyrics.” The Edge: “Oh, that’s right. We changed the lyrics.” **“City of Blinding Lights”** The Edge: “What\'s fun is to hear things like \'City of Blinding Lights,\' which sounds like a completely different song lyric to me, because Bono\'s interpreting it in a way that he couldn\'t possibly have done with the rock version. The same is true for a lot of them, where you\'re hearing it in a different way. And that\'s, I think, why \[Bono\] went for new lyrics in a lot of songs is because there was a kind of opportunity there, there was a platform to deliver lyrics that wasn\'t there before.”
As much as Romy Madley Croft’s debut solo album is an absorbingly personal record, its roots lie in music intended for other people. In 2019, The xx singer/guitarist met—and immediately gelled with—Fred again.. during a period of creative exploration that lead her to Los Angeles to try writing chart-topping pop songs for other artists. “I ended up writing some quite honest songs about myself, thinking someone else was going to sing them, and realizing, ‘Actually, maybe these are my songs…’” Romy tells Apple Music. Arriving in 2020, airy, anthemic debut solo single “Lifetime” was written to uplift herself during the pandemic. In stark contrast to the hush and restraint of The xx, the song leaned into the rapturous dance music influences of Romy’s youth, and it’s a direction continued on *Mid Air*. “At the time \[that The xx emerged\], I was genuinely just suited to feeling more shy and being more guarded,” she says. “It was nice to share a different side, and it definitely opened up a lot more doors in terms of the way people see me. I wanted to find a way to balance melodic, storytelling pop writing with club-referenced music, and Robyn was a big reference. She makes very emotional songs within a dance/electronic sphere. Robyn is someone that I really admire. I’ve met her a few times and I’ve sort of mentioned to her that I’m on this journey with it and she’s been really encouraging and supportive.” Co-produced with Fred again.., bandmate Jamie xx and veteran hitmaker Stuart Price, *Mid Air* succeeds in building a dance floor on which Romy can shake out her feelings. The joy and freedom of the shiny synths and skyscraping melodies serve as a misdirect to the lyrical themes of grief and heartbreak, rooted in the loss of both her parents at a young age and, recently, another very close family member. “I wrote \[lead single\] ‘Strong’ and ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as part of an ongoing ambition to remember to check in and talk to people and let things out,” she says. “I’ve had to talk about grief and my parents way more than I would if the whole album was just love songs. I’m ready to talk about it more. It’s been amazing having conversations with people that I wouldn’t normally have, and hearing and learning and connecting. People come up to me in a club to talk to me about grief and I’m like, ‘Wow, actually, this is very special.’ The fact that people feel like they can talk to me means a lot.” Let Romy guide you through *Mid Air* track by track. **“Loveher”** “This is the first song that I made with Fred after writing these songs for other people, the first track that I wrote thinking, ‘This actually is my song to sing.’ Very much the first tentative steps into this project. It opens the album because I can hear that slight nervousness in it and I shed that as the tracks go on. I had done a songwriting session with King Princess and she was like, ‘This is who I love, I’m writing a song about a girl, there’s no question.’ I was really inspired by the way that she was very comfortable with that. I thought about myself at that similar age and I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel comfortable or reassured that it would be chill for me to say that. Maybe it would’ve been fine, but in my head I was worried about it. The more young, queer artists I hear talking about their exact experiences and being really amazing, visible, inspiring people, the more I’m inspired to do my own thing and talk about my actual experiences in a clear way.” **“Weightless”** “This song is about realizing, ‘Wow, I’m really feeling all these things and that’s OK,’ and really embracing that. It still feels like it’s from the earlier, tentative time, lyrically. It was originally written as an acoustic ballad, and I wanted it to become more than that, so I went on a journey to take it into an electronic space. It was a challenge I set myself—I still wanted it to work when you take it off the track and take it back to the guitar. That’s something I admire about a well-written song.” **“The Sea”** “The lyrics for ‘The Sea’ are inspired by a trip to Ibiza. Or my vision of what it would have been like in the early 2000s—the dream of Ibiza. I went for the first time for Oliver’s \[Sim, The xx bandmate\] 30th birthday. We went out clubbing and we went on a boat and it was exactly what I had hoped it was. I’ve been back since, for my honeymoon. I also got to play Pacha in 2022, which was really amazing. But that first time, I was listening to the instrumental while I was driving around and I was thinking, ‘I want this song to feel connected to this place. I want it to feel like a home in a summer situation.’ So that’s how I framed it, lyrically.” **“One Last Time”** “I wrote this thinking it was for someone else—I didn’t have anyone specifically in mind, but just as a fan, if I had to pick someone, Beyoncé is my number-one person. Thinking it wasn’t going to be me singing pushed me to try out something new, vocally. Just pushing my voice. It was fun to come back to it and sing it in my own way. It’s one of my favorites to sing.” **“DMC”** “I love an interlude. I feel like that’s quite a pop-album thing. My friend always says that she loves a DMC corner in the club—I don’t know if everyone knows DMC is a deep, meaningful conversation, but that’s what it means to me. Those moments where you have a kind of emotional exchange somewhere that ends up being the right place, even though it’s not typically the place you have those chats. This is just a little moment of stepping outside of where we’ve been, like we’re outside the club. You have a little reset and you carry on.” **“Strong”** “I wrote this one for myself, using songwriting as a way of processing grief and my relationship to it and putting it out there. I internalized a lot of things for a long time and thought I’d put it out of sight, out of mind. I think having time off tour and being in a good place in a relationship was when it all started to come up and I had to face those things. ‘Strong’ was me just reflecting on that at that point, and just feeling it out, and trying to write around that. It was great to put it in a song that is quite uplifting and high tempo. It keeps giving different meanings to me in different contexts.” **“Twice”** “I worked on this with an amazing songwriter called Ilsey, who co-wrote ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart’ \[by Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus\]. I’d been writing for other people for a while and finding it hard to make connections. I wanted something a bit more real. Ilsey has got quite a country style, so when I got paired up with her, I opened up and said, ‘This is what I’m going through,’ and she helped me write this very storytelling-like song. I’d never had a songwriter help me lyrically before, but it was really cool. It’s another one that started as a guitar ballad, but I didn’t want it to stay that way. Stuart worked on it and it evolved into what it is now—echoes of a club and then building into being a big club-experience track.” **“Did I”** “This was sonically created around the same time as ‘Strong.’ I’ve written a lot of acoustic music and I wanted to put it into a different frame, so I was playing a lot of early-2000s trance to Fred. There’s already a blueprint embedded in trance—a haunting vocal and huge chords and builds and euphoria. It’s one of my favorites, so I’ve been playing it out in clubs recently. Lyrically it reflects a part of my relationship \[with my wife\], from back when we were younger and we broke up.” **“Mid Air” (feat. Beverly Glenn-Copeland)** “I consider this to be a transitional moment on the album. The fact that Fred and I made this piece of music together is a reflection of a weird moment we were both in—it’s more winding and introspective than everything else we did together. Although there’s a lot of euphoric sounds on the album, I’m not always super upbeat, there’s times when I have a bit of a weird time mentally. It’s kind of the aftermath of the night out: ‘Twice’ and ‘Did I’ connect as a mix and ‘Mid Air’ is the musical comedown. \[American singer and composer\] Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s voice comes in as a reminder, a self check-in. Then you come back into ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as a reaction to that.” **“Enjoy Your Life”** “This was probably the most challenging song to make because it contains a lot of different elements. I’m trying to say quite a lot in it and make it danceable and contain lots of samples. Finding the balance took quite a long time. When I heard \[Beverly Glenn-Copeland\] say, ‘My mother says to me/Enjoy your life,’ I thought it was such a beautifully simple disarming sentence, but I didn’t want to just say, ‘Yeah, life’s amazing.’ I wanted there to be a journey in the song. In the verses, I’m processing some stuff, I’m having a bit of a weird time, but I’m reminding myself: Life is short, enjoy your life. I wanted there to be enough of a narrative to give that context. Just to acknowledge and then also celebrate.” **“She’s on My Mind”** “I wanted to end the album with this because it feels like the end of the night when you’re at a party and someone puts a disco song on and everyone just has their hands in their air. It’s a fun one to end on. Just embracing and accepting how you feel. From the way that I start the album—the more tentative way of singing—to the end where the last thing I sing is, ‘I don’t care anymore,’ it’s a bit of a release of pressure.”
TWICE, one of the world’s largest K-pop girl groups, has long been celebrated for its cheer-y pop bops and buttery harmonies. *READY TO BE*, their 12th EP, is no exception. But instead of middling with a workable formula, they push boundaries: disco production on the single “SET ME FREE” (available in Korean and English here), asymmetrical falsetto on “MOONLIGHT SUNRISE,” shout-along gang chants on the 2010s electro-pop “GOT THE THRILLS,” even energetic rap-rock on “BLAME IT ON ME.” When they sing, “We can keep going at all hours,” on the synth slow-burn “WALLFLOWER,” one of a couple co-written by Dahyun of the group, it’s easy to believe them.
Our last collaboration for the indefinite future Special thanks to: Cici - saving the project multiple times Cam - co production drumming for free. Keeping the project focused. The fans - for supporting Willy Rodriguez with there words, money, art, posts, listens. Seriously made this project worth it for the two of us. Recorded in parts of America and Canada, from November 2021 - December 2023.
It was the hypnotic club groove of her 2022 single “Kerosene” that set Biig Piig on the path to making *Bubblegum*. There was something about the song that told Irish-born, Spanish-raised singer-producer Jess Smyth that it shouldn’t be a stand-alone single. “It felt like something that was going to branch out into a whole project,” she tells Apple Music. “It didn’t feel fully formed—it felt like a sentence rather than a paragraph. Initially, there was no idea for a mixtape, but the more I kept writing, I pieced it together slowly.” Recorded in New York, Los Angeles, and London and exploring the blossoming and breaking of a relationship, *Bubblegum* is an imaginative leap forward for Smyth, pairing confessional pop with techno soundscapes, garage beats, airy hooks, and cut-up samples across its seven tracks. For Smyth, it was a reminder of what her relationship with music is. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world or what state you’re in, music will still find you. When I feel like a track hits is when it can take you out of your experience and transport you into \[the song\].” Let Smyth guide you through *Bubblegum*, track by track. **“Only One”** “This song felt quite innocent to me, the first hurdle of a relationship where you’re a bit like, ‘I’ll give you everything. I’ll be everything for you.’ There’s that thing where you’re almost besotted with someone and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s nothing else for me,’ and getting that across in a way that felt so childlike. I had it for ages and I loved it but I didn’t know I had a mixtape until the end of the process where I was looking back and was like, ‘Actually all of these belong together.’ In that context, it was obvious that this was the start.” **“Liquorice”** “This is a lot sweeter, a lot less like, ‘Oh, I’ve done something wrong’ and more like a love letter to the nostalgia of early love. It’s weird thinking about it in order lyrically, where you already started blaming yourself at the start of the relationship. This second track is almost an obsessive thing over someone. I was working with \[US producer\] Hazey Eyes in New York and I wanted something that felt a little bit more in a dance world. He started bringing out this garage-y beat with it and I was like, ‘Sick.’ Sometimes with choruses, you want to pack it out with stuff and make it really busy but, for this track, I was like, ‘Actually, the space is nice.’ It’s a dream-like, spacey track.” **“Kerosene”** “This was made in London with \[UK producer\] Zach Nahome and Maverick Sabre. We went in and we were playing around with some different stuff and then we came across some melody and chopped that up. When we started to build on the production of it, the first thing that came to mind was the Spanish track \[Daddy Yankee’s\] ‘Gasolina.’ I was like, ‘That’s the energy I felt the track has and if there’s a way to get that across…’ So I was thinking, ‘What’s similar to gasoline but is not gasoline? Maybe kerosene…’ I went off the back of that and it was summer and I was desperate to get that energy on it.” **“This Is What They Meant”** “This was made with \[US producer\] Andrew Wells in LA. I was writing about a time really recent to that when I was with Hazey Eyes in New York. I caught up with a friend out there and was maybe in a state of just wanting to feel loved. I was like, ‘I wonder what it would be like if we were together,’ and then I kind of went through this delusional thing where I convinced myself I was in love with him for five days. I came back and we wrote that track and then got it out of my system and I was fine!” **“Ghosting”** “I did this with \[US producer\] Aaron Shadrow in LA. This is where things kind of take a turn a little bit, where it’s like, ‘Oh, right. I can’t get the feeling from a person and I can indulge all I want and the thought of someone or build them up in my head. Or I can escape into other people for so long and then it’s never resolved and it\'ll never satisfy the thing that I’ve actually been looking for, which is just to escape.’ With ‘Ghosting,’ it\'s the first time that comes into the project.” **“Picking Up” (feat. Deb Never)** “This is about going out and trying to follow the adrenaline, the anxiety that comes with just being on a bit of a run and being scared to stop—stuck in this headspace angry at the world and at the person that you were with as well as everything around it, but also being almost self-indulgent. It’s a song about getting fucked up and not being able to stop, then getting in a loop with it because it feels better than having to face reality where being alone is scary because you don’t know how to be with yourself. It’s that kind of journey in the track. It was written with Deb Never as well, who I love. She’s the best.” **“In the Dark”** “This is kind of the eclipse of the whole project where you’re at a very different place to the beginning of it. You started off at this very innocent relationship where you’re like, ‘I can change, I’ll be different,’ and then you get to the very end. I had the image in my head when you’re the last man standing or you’re on a night out on your own, just dancing and closing your eyes and being stuck on a loop of that. That encapsulated the feeling of this track.”
It was the hypnotic club groove of her 2022 single “Kerosene” that set Biig Piig on the path to making Bubblegum. There was something about the song that told Irish-born, Spanish-raised singer-producer Jess Smyth that it shouldn’t be a stand-alone single. “It felt like something that was going to branch out into a whole project,” she tells “It didn’t feel fully formed—it felt like a sentence rather than a paragraph. Initially, there was no idea for a mixtape, but the more I kept writing, I pieced it together slowly.” Recorded in New York, Los Angeles, and London and exploring the blossoming and breaking of a relationship, Bubblegum is an imaginative leap forward for Smyth, pairing confessional pop with techno soundscapes, garage beats, airy hooks, and cut-up samples across its seven tracks. For Smyth, it was a reminder of what her relationship with music is. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world or what state you’re in, music will still find you. When I feel like a track hits is when it can take you out of your experience and transport you into [the song].” Let Smyth guide you through Bubblegum, track by track. “Only One” “This song felt quite innocent to me, the first hurdle of a relationship where you’re a bit like, ‘I’ll give you everything. I’ll be everything for you.’ There’s that thing where you’re almost besotted with someone and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s nothing else for me,’ and getting that across in a way that felt so childlike. I had it for ages and I loved it but I didn’t know I had a mixtape until the end of the process where I was looking back and was like, ‘Actually all of these belong together.’ In that context, it was obvious that this was the start.” “Liquorice” “This is a lot sweeter, a lot less like, ‘Oh, I’ve done something wrong’ and more like a love letter to the nostalgia of early love. It’s weird thinking about it in order lyrically, where you already started blaming yourself at the start of the relationship. This second track is almost an obsessive thing over someone. I was working with [US producer] Hazey Eyes in New York and I wanted something that felt a little bit more in a dance world. He started bringing out this garage-y beat with it and I was like, ‘Sick.’ Sometimes with choruses, you want to pack it out with stuff and make it really busy but, for this track, I was like, ‘Actually, the space is nice.’ It’s a dream-like, spacey track.” “Kerosene” “This was made in London with [UK producer] Zach Nahome and Maverick Sabre. We went in and we were playing around with some different stuff and then we came across some melody and chopped that up. When we started to build on the production of it, the first thing that came to mind was the Spanish track [Daddy Yankee’s] ‘Gasolina.’ I was like, ‘That’s the energy I felt the track has and if there’s a way to get that across…’ So I was thinking, ‘What’s similar to gasoline but is not gasoline? Maybe kerosene…’ I went off the back of that and it was summer and I was desperate to get that energy on it.” “This Is What They Meant” “This was made with [US producer] Andrew Wells in LA. I was writing about a time really recent to that when I was with Hazey Eyes in New York. I caught up with a friend out there and was maybe in a state of just wanting to feel loved. I was like, ‘I wonder what it would be like if we were together,’ and then I kind of went through this delusional thing where I convinced myself I was in love with him for five days. I came back and we wrote that track and then got it out of my system and I was fine!” “Ghosting” “I did this with [US producer] Aaron Shadrow in LA. This is where things kind of take a turn a little bit, where it’s like, ‘Oh, right. I can’t get the feeling from a person and I can indulge all I want and the thought of someone or build them up in my head. Or I can escape into other people for so long and then it’s never resolved and it'll never satisfy the thing that I’ve actually been looking for, which is just to escape.’ With ‘Ghosting,’ it's the first time that comes into the project.” “Picking Up” (feat. Deb Never) “This is about going out and trying to follow the adrenaline, the anxiety that comes with just being on a bit of a run and being scared to stop—stuck in this headspace angry at the world and at the person that you were with as well as everything around it, but also being almost self-indulgent. It’s a song about getting fucked up and not being able to stop, then getting in a loop with it because it feels better than having to face reality where being alone is scary because you don’t know how to be with yourself. It’s that kind of journey in the track. It was written with Deb Never as well, who I love. She’s the best.” “In the Dark” “This is kind of the eclipse of the whole project where you’re at a very different place to the beginning of it. You started off at this very innocent relationship where you’re like, ‘I can change, I’ll be different,’ and then you get to the very end. I had the image in my head when you’re the last man standing or you’re on a night out on your own, just dancing and closing your eyes and being stuck on a loop of that. That encapsulated the feeling of this track.”
In typical Lewis Capaldi fashion, the title of the singer-songwriter’s second album, *Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent*, is both a bit of a joke and a sign of something more profound. “I’m a big fan of The 1975, and I like their long titles because it’s a bit silly,” he tells Apple Music’s Rebecca Judd. “I thought, ‘I’m going to have me some of that.’” But the (rather wordy) title is also a neat encapsulation of where Capaldi was as he came to craft his second record: crumbling under the pressure to match the mammoth success of his first, 2019’s star-catapulting *Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent*. “I think we all attempt to be heavenly sent. I think what I mean by that is to be good at something,” he says. “\[But\] the pursuit of perfection or satisfaction in one’s work can leave you feeling a bit dejected and just a bit broken. I really want to be good at this. And sometimes, I feel like I fall short of that.” The album was never, says Capaldi, about “reinventing the wheel”—he just wanted to return to the music he enjoys making. So you can expect plenty of the colossal ballads he’s made his name on, with songs about heartbreak (“Wish You the Best,” “Burning”) as well as unerring love (“Pointless,” “Love the Hell Out of You”). All of which proves that Capaldi is indeed very good at what he does. But there are also moments that reveal new sides to the Scottish superstar, from the upbeat, ’80s-inflected, and completely inescapable “Forget Me” to the spacious, synth-led, and Max Martin-assisted “Leave Me Slowly.” And in this album’s most powerful moments, you’ll hear the rocky route to this point breaking through, with Capaldi delivering startlingly frank assessments of impostor syndrome (“The Pretender,” arguably the album’s standout track) and his mental health (on the raw, vulnerable “How I’m Feeling Now”). Here, discover the stories behind every song on Capaldi’s second album and hear exclusive orchestral versions of two of its tracks. **“Forget Me”** “We wrote this song in Scotland in an Airbnb in some guy’s front room. I wrote it with Michael Pollack, Phil Plested, and Froe from \[British songwriting and production team\] TMS. I actually had to go to see Scotland versus Croatia in the Euros that afternoon \[in June 2021\], so I wanted to get it written quickly so I could get to the pub! It’s a song I wrote about a relationship that I had been in where I was seeing the other person move on.” **“Wish You the Best”** “This was the last song I finished for this album. It was written by myself, JP Saxe, and Malay. We initially started writing it in LA and it came out of an idea I had for a song called ‘Good News,’ which was: ‘Tell me the good news that you got what you want and you’re finally happy, I guess I’m sorry I was the problem.’ It was my first time writing with JP and we just very quickly bashed this out. The chorus that you hear on the song is the chorus that we did on the day.” **“Pointless”** “Ed Sheeran, Johnny McDaid, Steve Mac, and myself wrote this one. The first day I met Johnny and Steve, we wrote a different song in the morning. We had a bit of time before we had to leave, so they played me an idea they were knocking around with Ed, but which they couldn’t find a chorus for it. That call and response in the verse was already an idea, then I went in and sang a chorus.” **“Heavenly Kind of State of Mind”** “Myself and \[songwriters and producers\] Nick Atkinson and Edd Holloway were in Scotland working on some other songs. We started this synth-led ballad that was all falsetto in the style of Bon Iver, which I don’t usually do. We couldn’t work out where to go with it. Cut to a few months later, we’re in Hitchin recording in a studio with \[British songwriter and producer\] Jamie Hartman, who I worked with on the first record. We showed him this idea and he just sang, ‘Whether you were heaven.’ The first kernel of the chorus melody came out of his mouth and from there it just kinda flew out. There was a worry that people would think this song was about how much I love Jesus, and listen, big fan of JC. I wanted it to sound like I’d been saved by a partner, rather than Jesus, but it works both ways. So if you love Jesus, this song’s for you.” **“Haven’t You Ever Been in Love Before?”** “This was the first song we wrote for the album, at the peak of lockdown. I wrote it with Nick Atkinson and Edd Holloway. I had the melodies and the actual verses were born from listening to The 1975 and trying to work on a melody that I could imagine Matty Healy singing. In the past, I’ve leaned more into ‘could I imagine Adele singing this lyric?’ But Matty’s a massive inspiration to me and I’m a huge fan of The 1975. This was the first song where I was like, ‘I think we’re onto something here.’” **“Love the Hell Out of You”** “We wrote this the same day as we did ‘Forget Me’—a very, very fruitful day, it turns out. Again, very quick. When I came in, Phil and Michael were knocking around this idea of, like, loving the hell out of someone in the sense you love them so much but that idea of also someone loving you so much that they’ve taken away all this shit that you’re going through.” **“Burning”** “Another song that was written at the height of lockdown. It was written by myself, Nick Atkinson, and Edd Holloway. I had all the melodies and a fair whack of the lyrics, and Nick and Edd are two guys I really trust when I just can’t get a song over the line, so to speak. The lyric \'Can’t set fire to my soul just to keep you from burning alone’ was actually from a conversation with my mother. I was kinda seeing this girl and there was a point where I felt a bit overwhelmed by my problems and her problems. I felt I wasn’t in a position to be helping someone else, and my mum said to me, ‘You can’t set fire to yourself to keep someone else warm.’ I thought that was just an interesting lyric, so thanks to my mum for that one.” **“Any Kind of Life”** “This was written with Froe and Merf from TMS and \[British songwriter and producer\] Jimmy Napes. It was the first time I’d worked with Jimmy and TMS together, and this song really just flew straight out. I was listening to a lot of *folklore* by Taylor Swift and I really liked some of the melodies, so it was trying to write something that had that sort of feel to it. It’s not as good as Taylor Swift, but we definitely tried.” **“The Pretender”** “\[British songwriter\] Phil Plested is one of my favorite writers in the world. He’s also an artist, so he gets where the artist is coming from and he wants to help. We were up in Scotland; I had been loaned a piano from Yamaha—it was the first time I had an upright piano in my house and I wrote quite a lot on it. ‘The Pretender’ sort of came from that. This was the most honest I’d been about my mental health and the feeling I have with impostor syndrome. Speaking to people like Elton John and Ed Sheeran, it’s interesting to hear people at all levels of their careers who’ve felt like they’re not good enough for something, or friends of mine who’ve been promoted recently who didn’t feel worthy. I thought that was an interesting concept to explore.” **“Leave Me Slowly”** “This was written in Sweden with producers Oscar Holter, Savan Kotecha, Fat Max, and Max Martin. The way they work really blew my mind, and the attention to detail with regards to melody is second to none. When we were tracking the vocal to this, it was incredible to watch them work, to see the slight changes they make to make a song so much better. Also, I never expected in a million years to come away with \[a song sounding like this\], it was very bizarre. They had the idea of ‘If you’re gonna leave me, don’t leave me slowly’ and I said it should be ‘If you’re gonna leave me, leave me slowly.’ That switch made it feel better. They had set up this soundscape that was this sort of ’80s power ballad, which I was so up for—something completely different.” **“How This Ends”** “‘How This Ends’ was the first melody I wrote for this album. It’s quite up in my register rather than starting low and getting high. Some of the chords here are very Radiohead-esque. Production-wise it leans towards ‘Iris’ by The Goo Goo Dolls, which I’m a massive fan of, obviously. It was initially supposed to be the last song on the album, which would have been nice with the title, but then we wrote the song after it, which felt like a better ending to me. I can’t wait to play it live. I absolutely love it.” **“How I’m Feeling Now”** “Genuinely my personal favorite on the album. It’s just got this raw emotion I haven’t had in any other songs. The version you hear on the album is the demo—I didn’t want to go back in and rerecord anything. This song in particular took the openness I had on ‘The Pretender’ to a whole other level—I felt like I was being much more honest and much more vulnerable than I\'ve ever been. I don\'t think I\'d have been able to write this song had I not written ‘Pretender.’ It’s about one of the lower points in my life over the last couple of years and not feeling strictly fulfilled or feeling like I should be happier all the time with the life that I’m living. Everyone I played this song to fucking hated it, which is exactly why I had to put it on the album. I felt like a lot of it had to do with the things I was saying. Being fully open and honest is not the easiest song to hear if you care about me, but I love it and I’m really glad it’s on the record.”
In the 2020s, AJR have experienced dizzying highs and crushing moments of sadness: Their swaggering 2020 single “Bang!” became their first Top 10 hit on the Hot 100; they got tapped to write songs for the musical version of treasured children’s book *Harold and the Purple Crayon*; and Gary Metzger, the father of AJR members Adam, Jack, and Ryan Met, passed away after a brutal illness. The Met brothers channeled those peaks and valleys into their fifth full-length, *The Maybe Man*, a maximalist pop odyssey that faces its existential crises head-on with brutally self-effacing humor, devastating honesty, and densely ornate music. Big hooks and huger arrangements abound; “Hole in the Bottom of My Brain” is a rollicking chronicle of how climbing the ladder soothes the ego that recalls an amped-up cross between Harry Nilsson and Fun., while the stressed-out “I Won’t” pairs its lyrics about feeling boxed in by 21st-century norms with horror-movie strings. The band also adds to its own mythology with the sweeping “Turning Out Pt. iii,” which sprinkles angst over the perception that “everyone’s got it all figured out”; it culminates with Jack Met’s voice slicing through the mix with an important message—“don’t overthink it”—as the music drops out. *The Maybe Man* digs in on “God Is Really Real,” which opens with a striking line: “My dad can’t get out of bed,” Jack Met sings over gently strummed guitars. Its simple melody highlights its wrestling with the big issues (mortality, theology, the notion that “we can’t face our feelings, so we’re makin’ lots of jokes”) and puts the status anxieties and petty squabbles of previous songs into sharp relief. Following it with the sprawling mini-rock opera “2085,” where the brothers ruminate on what their life will be like when they’re older, shows how their lengthy journey has taught them hard lessons; its interpolation of the title track brings the album full circle, and its curtain-call ending signifies a closing of this chapter in AJR’s wild ride.
With a string of energising hits and impeccable dance routines, IVE took the fast track to fame—and they’ve never looked back. A little over a year after their first tracks dropped, their debut LP *I\'ve IVE* shows fans what the K-pop sensations are really all about. Discover “Five Facts You Didn’t Know About IVE” in an exclusive video they created for Apple Music to celebrate the release—then hit play on the sextet’s high-powered debut studio album. **Five Facts You Didn’t Know About IVE** **1. What would your superpower be if you had one?** JANGWONYOUNG: I want to teleport! LIZ: I want to see the future! REI: I wish I could get fully energised if I sleep for a second. ANYUJIN: Time travelling! LEESEO: I never really thought about this, but teleporting sounds like a good idea! GAEUL: The power to be invisible! **2. What song on *I’ve IVE*’s tracklist is your (secret) favourite?** JANGWONYOUNG: I would have to go with “Shine With Me”. LEESEO: “Cherish” is really good too! LIZ: “Lips” is great! 💋 REI: All of our songs are great. ANYUJIN: All songs from IVE. LIZ: Please check out all of our tracks! ☺️ JANGWONYOUNG: All eleven tracks! **3. What is your favourite scent or fragrance?** JANGWONYOUNG: I like sweet perfumes! GAEUL: I like something fruity and floral. ANYUJIN: Something woodsy, for me. LEESEO: I like citrus and bright scents! 🍋 REI: For me, it really depends. I go for something different everyday. For today, I felt like wearing something sweet like cotton candy. LIZ: I have a perfume that I wear daily but I don’t know what it is...! Someone said it smelled like sweet potato. I guess it has a bit of a heavy and nutty note. **4. What is the emoji you use most often?** JANGWONYOUNG: ☺️ Smiley ones, like this! GAEUL: 😝 This one with the tongue sticking out. Or, 😎 this one with the sunglasses! ANYUJIN: 🫶 LIZ: 🥹 REI: 🦭 LEESEO: 🫠 **5. Kimchi mandu vs meat-filled mandu (Korean dumplings)?** Everyone: One, two, three! ANYUJIN/REI/GAEUL: Kimchi mandu! JANGWONYOUNG/LEESEO/LIZ: Meat-filled mandu!
