Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”
In the 18 months after Taylor Swift released *Midnights*, it often felt as though the universe had fully opened up to her. The Eras Tour was breaking records and blowing past the billion-dollar mark; its attendant concert film became the highest-grossing of all time. She generated interest and commerce and headlines everywhere she stepped foot, from tour stops to the tunnels of NFL stadiums. In 2023, she was named both *TIME* magazine’s Person of the Year and—just as iconic, tbh—Apple Music’s Artist of the Year. But do songs about that level of success speak to you? As the news broke that her highly private six-year relationship to Joe Alwyn had ended, Swifties started Swiftie-ing, quickly recirculating a clip on social media of Swift a few weeks earlier, onstage during an early Eras show, in tears as she sang “champagne problems”—a song she and Alwyn had written together. It was a reminder that, despite the superhero-like aura she now radiates, Swift, at her peak, still hurts like the rest of us. What sets her apart is her ability to sublimate that pain into pop. When she announced her 11th studio album in early 2024—while accepting another Grammy, as one does—we probably shouldn’t have been surprised. “I needed to make it,” she’d say of *THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT* a few weeks later, to a crowd of—\[rubs eyes\]—96,000 in Melbourne, Australia. “I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on *TORTURED POETS*.” Working again with trusted collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she returns to the soft, comfortable, bed-like sonics of *Midnights*. But the stakes feel noticeably higher here: This isn’t so much a breakup album as it is a deep-sea exploration of everything Swift has been feeling, a plunge through emotional debris. On “But Daddy I Love Him”—over strings and guitar that faintly recall her country roots—she lashes out at the crush of scrutiny and expectation she’s been subject to from the start. Naturally, catharsis comes after the chorus: “I’ll tell you something right now,” she sings. “I’d rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.” On “Florida!!!” she and Florence + the Machine team up for a pulpy escape fantasy wherein they Thelma and Louise their way down to the Sunshine State in hopes of starting over with new lives and identities: “Love left me like this,” they sing. “And I don’t want to exist.” At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, *TTPD* is a study in extremes, Swift leaning into heightened emotions with heightened, hyperbolic, ALL-CAPS language and imagery—how we think when we’re drunk on love or flattened by its sudden disappearance. Note the dark humor she weaves through the Post Malone-enriched opener “Fortnight” (“Your wife waters flowers/I wanna kill her”). Or the thrilling self-deprecation of “Down Bad,” a foray into science fiction wherein Swift likens the warmth of a relationship to being abducted by love-bombing extraterrestrials—only to be left “naked and alone, in a field in my same old town.” But this remains her most candid and unsparing work to date: As a listener, you frequently get the feeling that you’ve stumbled across emails she’d written but never sent, or into conversations you were never meant to hear. There’s a density and a specificity and a ferocity to her lyrical work here that makes 2012’s “All Too Well” feel sorta light by comparison. If you’re the kind of Swiftie who likes to live in the details, well, this one might be your Super Bowl. “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?” she asks on the devastating “So Long, London,” a high point. “I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” Alone at a piano on the haunting “loml,” she flips the script on someone who’d told her she was the love of their life, by telling them that they were the loss of hers: “I’ll still see it until I die.” The story, as you likely know, doesn’t end there. We get a glimpse of new beginnings in “The Alchemy” (“This happens once every few lifetimes/These chemicals hit me like white wine”) and something like triumph in the montage-ready synths of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” when Swift, shattered on the floor, “as the crowd was chanting, ‘More!’,” still finds the strength to deliver: “’Cause I’m a real tough kid and I can handle my shit.” But we also get a sense of acceptance, of newfound perspective. On “Clara Bow”—named after a 1920s movie star who was able to survive the jump from silent film to sound—Swift reflects on the journey of a small-town girl made good, sung from the vantage of an industry obsessed with the next big thing. She zooms out and out and out until, in the album’s closing seconds, she’s singing about herself in the third person, in past tense, acknowledging that nothing is forever. “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it,” she sings. “You’ve got edge she never did/The future’s bright, dazzling.”
When Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley thinks back to the meteoric rise his band experienced around the time of their multimillion-selling, chart-topping 2004 debut album, *Hopes and Fears*, the trio’s keyboardist and chief songwriter recalls a show they played at London’s Kentish Town Forum on the day the record was released. “I remember someone from the record company casually saying, ‘Oh yeah, the album’s definitely going to be No. 1, it’s already platinum on the first day,’” Rice-Oxley tells Apple Music. “It was like they all expected it but no one had told us. It suddenly felt very weird, obviously amazing, but it was hard to connect that to any sort of reality.” For Rice-Oxley and his bandmates, singer Tom Chaplin and drummer Richard Hughes, playing the 2300-capacity Forum felt like they’d reached the top—but soon, it would represent a very intimate setting for Keane. “We thought 2000 people was vast so when people started saying, ‘Oh, you’ve sold 300,000 records,’ it’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what that looks like.’” With its yearning anthems, soaring balladry, and dynamic grooves, *Hopes and Fears* was the album that made Keane one of the 2000s’ biggest indie-rock acts. There are at least three songs on the record that were unavoidable for a few years around release, the sort of modern classics that seem to be hanging in the air, whistling on the wind. Even after that initial burst of success, some tracks have gone on the sort of shapeshifting journeys that you just can’t plan for. When Keane wrote the stirring sing-along “Somewhere Only We Know,” for example, they couldn’t have known it would become a phenomenon on TikTok—mainly because TikTok was a decade and more away from existing. When Rice-Oxley listens back to the album now, he wonders where these songs came from. “I almost listen to it as a fan,” he marvels. “I just think it sounds so good. It transports me to a different place because you’re hearing your thoughts of my early-to-mid-twenties self. It’s like looking at old photographs.” Like all great coming-of-age albums, it’s a record with a timeless quality, one that repeatedly connects with a new generation of fans. Here, Rice-Oxley guides us through all of the original tracks on a special anniversary edition that also includes demos, B-sides, and rarities **“Somewhere Only We Know”** “It’s so bizarre that ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ is a kind of phenomenon in itself, almost outside of the album. It had its first life when the album came out and then it was always cropping up in films and big syncs, but then Lily Allen did her version of it, and it’s somehow become a Christmas song. Now it’s gone absolutely mad on TikTok and social media so it’s become familiar to so many younger people, probably people who weren’t even born when the album came out. I love that. The life of this song is incredible. That feeling of coming together in hard times crops up through the album, and I think it’s probably also what speaks to people the most about the song.” **“Bend and Break”** “I think it’s a song about us trying to be a band. That ‘Meet me in the morning’ lyric, that was us, we’d meet every day and write and do demos and practice and try and improve the songs. It feels like it was made to play live, this song, but I don’t mean for stadiums, I mean to play in a pub to 50 people, songs that had an energy and excitement to engage people enough to stick around and actually listen.” **“We Might As Well Be Strangers”** “Someone we knew, their parents were having a hard time with marriage and I think this was basically me trying to write about that in my own naive, youthful way, thinking about what goes wrong in our lives—that you suddenly realize you are waking up to someone you don’t know anymore having been so close to them. I have to admit, I don’t remember much about writing it but 20 years later, it’s still one of our most loved songs live. We probably play it at almost every gig. It’s got a drama to it.” **“Everybody’s Changing”** “This was our first song that got on the radio, when we released it on \[London indie label\] Fierce Panda and it got picked up by \[BBC Radio 1 DJs\] Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley. Hearing that on the radio for the first time was so exciting, such a buzz. Again, I wonder where those songs came from. Andy Green, the producer, always used to say that it sounded too much like dodgy disco, and ‘Oh, are you sure about that drumbeat?’ It sounded a bit like ‘Dancing Queen,’ it’s got that open hi-hat thing. It’s a song about friendship and trying to navigate your way through change, life changing from a childhood dynamic or teenager’s dynamic to being more in the adult world, and having to let go of people or accept change.” **“Your Eyes Open”** “I have no recollection of writing this at all apart from the thing I hear when I hear it is that we used to listen to Röyksopp and Air and Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode. There was this whole electronic side of the band because we were trying to navigate our way from being a guitar band. Our guitarist left and we were trying to find a way to be a band without a guitar, so the first thing we turned to really was more of an electronic sound. Quite a lot of that stuff found its way onto the record, and ‘Your Eyes Open’ is a good example of that.” **“She Has No Time”** “This song was basically about Tom having girl trouble. He came back in this raging fury one night because things weren’t working out and someone was treating him very badly, so I was trying to put that into song. It’s a very heartfelt romantic song, I suppose, from a friend to a friend. The thing I hear on this is that sort of Sigur Rós high-vocal thing, I think that’s probably where that came from.” **“Can’t Stop Now”** “To my ear, the biggest influence on the album overall was The Smiths, which very rarely got picked up on—thankfully, because I always thought we were just going to get told that we’d ripped off loads of Smiths songs. But to me, ‘Can’t Stop Now,’ ‘Bend and Break,’ and ‘This Is the Last Time’ are basically trying to be like The Smiths, some quite bouncy rhythms, very melodic and—I’m not claiming to be a Morrissey-esque lyricist—trying to say something meaningful and normally quite melancholy over these very almost ultra-melodic songs. I think ‘Can’t Stop Now,’ consciously or otherwise, was an attempt at that.” **“Sunshine”** “When we first had a little batch of quite good songs, we got spotted by a producer guy called James Sanger. He had this dilapidated farmhouse in Normandy and we went out there in the summer of 2001 and tried to make a record with some of the songs that ended up on *Hopes and Fears*. We got some good stuff out of it, but the wheels fell off a bit. One of the songs I wrote out there was this. It was sitting under an apple tree on a summer evening, it just came out in 20 minutes or something. I think it’s got that lovely atmosphere to it, it’s almost the opposite of all the bangers on the album. Very understated and dreamy. I think there’s probably a third of the album that has that kind of dreaminess to it that you don’t necessarily associate with Keane. I think it really helps to offset the rest of the album. I love this one, it was a love song to my girlfriend at the time.” **“This Is the Last Time”** “This is another very Smiths-y one. Tom and I both used to work in the same office in Dorling Kindersley book publishers in Covent Garden. We were in different departments, but we were both the dogsbody, the office junior. In amongst photocopying, making tea for people, and trying to refill the water cooler, I remember walking around the office with this song in my head and being really pleased with it. I think it was probably the first instance of me doing a soaring chorus where it hit that big note, and then it’s got a sort of rhythmical hook. When I listen to it, I can still hear myself learning to write songs and honing a songwriting style that became the album. This was probably the first song I wrote that ended up on the album.” **“On a Day Like Today”** “I was reading a biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross, *Heavier Than Heaven*. I hadn’t realized how Beatles-influenced Kurt Cobain was and the book made him seem much more relatable and accessible to someone from the other side of the world with a very different life. I remember him going on about how they’d hit upon this idea of the really quiet verses and then the massive choruses and that really stuck with me, that massive dynamic contrast. I think you can hear that in this song starting with a wobbly synth sound and Tom’s vocal and a little distorted drumbeat, and then it gets bigger and bigger as the song goes on into an epic thing. It was one of those where it felt like the soundscape was more important than the actual song, not something we’ve done very often.” **“Untitled 1”** “As I said, we’d been a guitar band, so we were experimenting with new styles and new equipment. That whole world of electronic music and working digitally was all new to us—the idea that you could put in drum loops and then muck around with it a little. There’s hardly anything on this track, again it’s very much like a soundscape. I love the chorus bit where it goes from that big fat synth-y bass into this other bit which sounds completely unrelated and it’s just a wash of sound with these really high ethereal vocals. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it, but we just thought it sounded cool and it seemed to stick and fit on the album even though we didn’t know why, because we didn’t know anything!” **“Bedshaped”** “We used to finish \[gigs\] with this and it was something I got from the Pet Shop Boys. They used to finish with something like ‘Jealousy,’ a slow song, and I remember reading this review that said, ‘A downbeat denouement to a glittering charade.’ It stuck in my head, like, ‘Oh, that’s the way to end the gig, rather than go for your biggest song, go for something understated.’ I don’t know if you’d call ‘Bedshaped’ understated, but it’s a slow song, so we used to finish our gigs with it. The 20 people that were there seemed to like it, so it just seemed natural to put it at the end. My mum was a hospital doctor and she used to talk about people being ‘bedshaped.’ I assumed this was a recognized medical term and I later found out it was just something she made up, but I thought it was a really cool word.”
Ariana Grande is used to being in the spotlight, but over time, she’s gotten savvy at playing it. The pop star’s seventh studio album *eternal sunshine*—a lightly conceptual riff on the head-spinning 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, of whom Grande has said she’s a lifelong fan—feels like a mind game itself, blurring the lines between real-life references and theatrical bits. It arrives in the middle of a whirlwind tabloid-packed stretch—Grande married, divorced, and scored a starring role in Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation of *Wicked*—and she knows fans have questions. What’s true? What’s real? Ari gives a lot of things on this album, but answers aren’t one of them, a cunning reminder of how little transparency celebrities actually owe us. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Grande leans into the project’s thematic murkiness. “true story,” she says, is “an untrue story based on all untrue events,” and when asked about her own experience with the Saturn return, an astrology milestone referenced in the album’s only interlude, she shrugs. “It was chill. Nothing changed. Pretty uneventful.” She says she finds freedom in art because “you can really pull from anywhere,” and she describes the film as another “lovely costume” to wear. Her answers have flickers of defiance that feel like power. Whoever said albums had to be tidy, or true? “It doesn’t have to be an everlasting love story,” she tells Lowe. “Love is complicated. Showcasing both sides of it is what I tried to \[do\].” If there’s one thing these tracks make clear, it’s that she’s still Ari on the mic—she’s still hitting those high highs (“eternal sunshine”); still finding release on the dance floor (“yes, and?”); still sifting gold out of ’90s R&B (“the boy is mine”), a sequel to the leaked 2023 track “fantasize.” Her favorite? “imperfect for you,” a tribute to the friends who make up her inner circle. “We’re so lucky to have loved ones who are accepting and real with us no matter what,” she says. “We live in a time where everything is boiled down, but that song demands room for nuance, humanness, and complexity.”
Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.” It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album *Short n’ Sweet*. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.” With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.” Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”
Ariana Grande is used to being in the spotlight, but over time, she’s gotten savvy at playing it. The pop star’s seventh studio album *eternal sunshine*—a lightly conceptual riff on the head-spinning 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, of whom Grande has said she’s a lifelong fan—feels like a mind game itself, blurring the lines between real-life references and theatrical bits. It arrives in the middle of a whirlwind tabloid-packed stretch—Grande married, divorced, and scored a starring role in Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation of *Wicked*—and she knows fans have questions. What’s true? What’s real? Ari gives a lot of things on this album, but answers aren’t one of them, a cunning reminder of how little transparency celebrities actually owe us. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Grande leans into the project’s thematic murkiness. “true story,” she says, is “an untrue story based on all untrue events,” and when asked about her own experience with the Saturn return, an astrology milestone referenced in the album’s only interlude, she shrugs. “It was chill. Nothing changed. Pretty uneventful.” She says she finds freedom in art because “you can really pull from anywhere,” and she describes the film as another “lovely costume” to wear. Her answers have flickers of defiance that feel like power. Whoever said albums had to be tidy, or true? “It doesn’t have to be an everlasting love story,” she tells Lowe. “Love is complicated. Showcasing both sides of it is what I tried to \[do\].” If there’s one thing these tracks make clear, it’s that she’s still Ari on the mic—she’s still hitting those high highs (“eternal sunshine”); still finding release on the dance floor (“yes, and?”); still sifting gold out of ’90s R&B (“the boy is mine”), a sequel to the leaked 2023 track “fantasize.” Her favorite? “imperfect for you,” a tribute to the friends who make up her inner circle. “We’re so lucky to have loved ones who are accepting and real with us no matter what,” she says. “We live in a time where everything is boiled down, but that song demands room for nuance, humanness, and complexity.”
On twenty one pilots’ seventh album *Clancy*, the duo of Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun have crafted a project that is both a culmination and a glimpse into the future. Narratively, *Clancy* wraps up a story they’ve been weaving since 2015’s *Blurryface*. Sonically, the Columbus, Ohio-bred group begins forging the next iteration of their style. “It feels like truly the beginning of an era, but an end to one as well—or will be,” Dun tells Apple Music. “I think it\'s been a great place to write songs from having this kind of story in mind, but I think that definitely by no means is it the end of our band.” Take the thriller “Next Semester,” which finds the group diving into elements of synth-pop, emo, dance-punk, and more. It’s equal parts catchy and subtle, with Joseph’s lyrics almost directly in conversation with early themes the group focused on, like alienation, confusion, and loneliness. He sings: “I don\'t wanna be here, I don\'t wanna be here/It\'s a taste test/Of what I hate less/Can you die of anxiousness?/I don\'t wanna be here, I don\'t wanna be here.” “Lavish” is a futuristic psych-pop track buoyed by glimmering keyboards and dusty drums. When Joseph sings, “Welcome to the style you haven’t seen in a while,” before delivering an intoxicating rap, he’s almost speaking to the creation of the album itself. It’s an ambiguity and a breaking of the fourth wall that the band has embraced. “Maybe there are conversations that will happen between friends who have followed the storyline and maybe have some kind of arguments over what the outcome was,” Dun says. “And I think that\'s cool.”
When she emerged from obscurity as a 19-year-old vagabond turned overnight SoundCloud star, Halsey was something of a cipher: You knew her voice (one of the 2010s’ prime examples of “cursive singing”), but very little else. “I think there is a little bit of a grand narrative about me that’s like, ‘I don’t know what she looks like. I couldn’t recognize her on the street because she looks different every time I see her,’” the singer tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Some people get into a creative medium and have a very specific style: ‘This is what works for me, this is who I am and what I’m comfortable with.’ And for me, I just don’t know that it’s fun unless I’m reinventing. I think a lot of people see that and get the sense that I don’t have a very secure sense of self.” In one sense, the lead single from her fifth studio album shows she’s as hard to pin down as ever: For one, she was beginning with “The End.” An unplugged folk ballad co-produced by Alex G and Michael Uzowuru, the song shed light on recent health scares she’d been keeping under wraps. But *The Great Impersonator* is vulnerable in a new way, using the concept of homage as a lens through which to write—hence the series of photos Halsey released leading up to the album’s release in which she posed as David Bowie, Aaliyah, Kate Bush, and more. “As I get older, I love to write about myself, but I find it boring to talk about myself,” she says. “So these reinventions give me these little means of escapism—not in the sense of running away, but just telling the story in a different way.” Themes of identity, mortality, and legacy snake through the album’s 18 tracks, which channel ’70s folk, ’80s power ballads, ’90s alt-rock, and 2000s pop before arriving at the decade in which Halsey herself emerged. At times she reels at her own temporary nature; elsewhere, she craves depersonalization: “I think that I should try to kill my ego/’Cause if I don’t, my ego might kill me,” she yelps on the PJ Harvey-inspired “Ego.” “Hometown” is an ode to Dolly Parton, though it’s Springsteen-esque (“Glory Days” in particular) in its depiction of faded American dreams. And on “Lucky,” she riffs on the Britney Spears hit of the same name, one of the great pop ballads on fame’s diminishing returns. “I turned 20 as *BADLANDS* came out, and I’m turning 30 as this record comes out,” Halsey says, tracing the arc of her career. “I had this 10-year plan, but I didn’t really have anything beyond that. I hadn’t really thought about what was going to happen.” And though she may not know where life will take her in the next 10 years, she’s focused on appreciating the journey rather than racing towards the finish line. “I used to look at the way that SZA or Frank \[Ocean\] make records like, ‘Gosh, I could never spend two or three years on an album. I’m so impulsive and impatient and I just want to get it done,’” she says. “Then I spent a long time writing this record and I understood for the first time—oh, the making is the best part.”
“I really feel like I just hit a specific intersection between what I\'ve always wanted to say, and my skill catching up with what I\'ve always wanted to say,” WILLOW tells Apple Music about *empathogen*. \"That\'s exactly how I feel about this whole album.” Over the course of her nearly decade-and-a-half-long music career, she’s moved through various genre spaces freely. Yet those who enjoyed her recent full-length forays into artfully angsty post-punk will likely find the vibe shift here more drastic than any jagged guitar rock riff. Conveniently albeit loosely categorized as jazz, these dozen tunes showcase yet another side of her maturing craft. Despite the inherent softness of acoustic compositions like “ancient girl,” WILLOW’s strengths burst through each and every time. Informed to some extent by the presence of guests like Jon Batiste and St. Vincent, two vanguard artists who consistently push against convention, *empathogen* gives her ample space to explore and expand. Her lyrics often feel simultaneously confessional and poetic, her voice thick with emotional resonance on “down” and “symptom of life.” Traces of 2022’s sonically tougher ** linger via the frenetic pop-rock fusions of “between i and she” and “false self.” Still, it’s clear that she’s leveled up on all fronts, perhaps most poignantly on “b i g f e e l i n g s,” a finale as grand as any in her discography. “It\'s trying to bring you in, even though it is extremely complicated,” she says. “Obviously it\'s a lot to take in when you listen to it for the first time, but there are moments that you really get into that rhythm.”
The first sign that a new era had arrived was Camila Cabello’s platinum blonde locks. Then came “I LUV IT,” the shake-up of a lead single for the Miami native’s fourth studio album—loud, brash, and diamond-hard, with a hook that interpolates a 2009 Gucci Mane classic (“Lemonade”) and an expressionistic verse from Playboi Carti. Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, the 27-year-old singer emphasizes *C,XOXO*’s most crucial evolution: For the first time in her career, the songwriting feels like her own. “Letting go of the safety net of other co-writers in the room allowed for there to be more space for me to hear my own voice,” she tells Lowe. “When you are younger, you feel like you are looking for other people to point out the way a little bit more, and that voice inside you, you’re listening to, but you don’t totally trust. I think as I’ve gotten older, I’m like, you know what? I’m just going to listen to myself. I’m comfortable being, like, it’s on me today, and whether it fails or succeeds, I can trust myself to do it.” Call it a vibe shift or a reintroduction or, as Cabello cheekily called *C,XOXO*, her “hyper-femme villain arc,” with dreamy production from Spain’s El Guincho. There are odes to her tropical hometown, as she recruits City Girls to twerk out the sunroof on Collins Avenue for “Dade County Dreaming.” She’s covered in glitter and dressed for revenge on “pretty when i cry” and tempting an ex on the scorching “HOT UPTOWN,” which features Drake in peak *Honestly, Nevermind* form. Things get deeper on moody, wispy tracks like “June Gloom” and “Twentysomethings,” downcast odes to messy, complicated relationships: “Twentysomethings, gotta have a sense of humor/When it comes to us/Don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” she coos on the latter. But it’s the gorgeous and strange “Chanel No.5” that best represents Cabello as a songwriter. It’s an ethereal experiment she describes as having “pop melodies, but with rap structure,” with twinkly piano and lyrical nods to Haruki Murakami and Quentin Tarantino, spritzes of perfume, and chipped nail polish. “It is the thesis statement for the album,” she tells Lowe. “I was like, this is literally the voice of *C,XOXO*. It’s playful. She’s in control. She’s putting on her lip gloss. She’s toying with this guy. She’s magical. She’s sensitive.”
Coldplay has been fusing together stadium rock with intricate descriptions of emotion for more than a quarter century, and their 10th album opens with a grand overture that sets the listener up for an uplifting experience. But *Moon Music*’s title track upends expectations quickly, dissolving into a simple piano melody that refracts and folds in on itself until lead vocalist Chris Martin breaks the spell. “Once upon a time I tried to get myself together/Be more like the sky and welcome every kind of weather,” Martin muses in a singsong cadence, picking apart his insecurities and foibles until he finally asks, “Is anyone out there? I just need a friend,” as the instruments backing him melt into a puddle. The show of vulnerability is a startling opening, but being so open felt right for the multi-hyphenate Martin. “With ‘MOON MUSiC,’” Martin tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “I felt like, ‘Well, what if I just really told how I feel every day?’” At this point in their career, closer to the end of their run than not (more on that in a moment), Coldplay has broken up the cycle by touring continuously while making and releasing new music rather than subjecting themselves to predictable album-tour cycles. The band considers *Moon Music* to be of a piece with 2021’s *Music of the Spheres* rather than another era. “I quite like this way of working where you don’t have to attach albums to tours and they don’t have to be these things that start and stop,” says bassist Guy Berryman. “It’s quite nice having the fluidity of what we are doing.” *Moon Music*, like the satellite it’s named after, dips in and out of different phases while still holding fast to Coldplay’s hooky, thoughtful core—appropriate for an album that’s largely about remaining true to oneself. “JUPiTER” is a tale of self-acceptance that opens with Martin in folkie mode, with more voices and instruments coming in as the titular character begins to feel comfortable in her own skin: “I love who I love,” Martin and a choir sing in call-and-response mode on the chorus, and the music grows more ecstatic as Jupiter’s story grows more jubilant. The gorgeously assembled “🌈,” meanwhile, incorporates the late Maya Angelou singing the spiritual “God Put a Rainbow in the Clouds.” “You have to accept all your colors and all the colors of other people—literally and metaphorically,” says Martin. “Once you accept all those colors, then you can be yourself, and then you can let everyone else be themselves.” Coldplay’s and Martin’s flirtations with the dance floor over the years have resulted in some of their biggest hits, and *Moon Music* finds salvation in different eras of clubbing. “AETERNA” brings the band back to the rave, its stretched-out guitars and galloping rhythms framing Martin’s exhortations to “feel it flow.” The duet with Nigerian upstart Ayra Starr “GOOD FEELiNGS” drops by the disco, while “feelslikeimfallinginlove” hearkens back to Coldplay’s grandest pop triumphs, its fist-pumping chorus getting energy from the romantic sentiments Martin’s singing about. Much has been made of Martin’s insisting that Coldplay is going to call it quits after album 12. (“Having that limit means that the quality control is so high right now that for a song to make it is almost impossible, which is great,” he explains.) But Martin wants Coldplay’s listeners to experience *Moon Music* as a representation of where he and his bandmates are in this dizzying moment. “It’s our manifesto, or my way of looking at things right now,” says Martin. “In terms of how to continue, how to not give up, how to accept reality, not run away from it, not hate anybody—even in the midst of always being filled with so many difficult emotions. And it’s with Max Martin: He made sure that it’s really good.”
In the summer of 2023, Lady Gaga began dropping hints about a mysterious project she’d been working on in secret—new music, so she claimed, that sounded nothing like her past work. Fans wondered whether it could be “LG7,” the long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s *Chromatica*, until September 2024, when billboards popped up with the message “LG6.5.” The surprise between the pop auteur’s sixth and seventh studio albums turns out to be *Harlequin*, a concept album delivered from the warped perspective of Lee Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, her character in Todd Phillips’ Joker-fied jukebox musical *Joker: Folie à Deux*. As is often the case for actors who temporarily inhabit Gotham City, Gaga realized shortly after filming wrapped that she hadn’t yet moved on from the character she’d been embodying. She began to conceptualize an album of updated jazz standards sung as the Joker’s main squeeze. *Harlequin*, recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu alongside LG7, works as a companion piece to the film, but it’s also distinctly aligned with Gaga’s singular vision. First, though, Gaga developed Lee’s singing ability for the role. “I did a lot of different kinds of work to create her,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “One of the things that I did was change my voice in the film. It’s Lee’s voice, and it’s really raw, and it’s really naked. It’s very untrained. Not proper breathing.” How did the superstar with the powerhouse vocals achieve this? “I think that Joaquin \[Phoenix\] scared the living shit out of me every day until my voice left my body.” Who else could pull off a reimagining of the 1932 classic “I’ve Got the World on a String” as a gritty surf-rock slow-burner (“What if The Cramps made a French song?”) or deliver a song from an obscure 1964 musical as an ’80s rock ripper? That song, “The Joker,” originates from *The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd*, though it could have been written exactly for Gaga to sing right now—as could the 1952 standard “That’s Entertainment,” popularized by Judy Garland: “Everything that happens in life can happen in a show/You can make ’em laugh, you can make ’em cry/Anything can go!” But listen closely and you’ll hear Gaga’s subtly twisted tweaks: the cheery lyrics of “Good Morning” by way of *Singin’ in the Rain* (“Good morning/Rainbows are shining through!”) are replaced with the gleefully sinister “Bang bang, you’re black and blue!” Considering her professional and personal relationship with the late Tony Bennett and her own jazz residency in Vegas, Gaga is very intimate with the genre. Yet she realizes that Bennett probably would not have approved of her take on the songs this time around: “We did so much that Tony would never have been cool with.” The Oscar winner also delves into the psychology of the album’s original cut “Happy Mistake.” “When women play these broken characters in music or in films or theater, the audience loves it, and they just cheer us on,” she says. “They cheer on the image of pain. It’s super confusing. That song is in a lot of ways about that.”
The first time ROSÉ was interviewed about her debut solo album, she burst into tears. “I ended up crying for the whole 30 minutes,” the K-pop singer recounts to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “It was not a smooth ride, and it just showed how much time and effort and blood, sweat, and tears I actually did put into it.” ROSÉ was born in New Zealand to Korean parents and raised in Australia, shooting to global fame in 2016 as one-fourth of the mega-successful girl group BLACKPINK. The 12-track *rosie*, which is what she’s called by her friends and loved ones, is, as she says, both a “time capsule” and a “therapy session”—a raw chronicle of her twenties as she’s still experiencing them, and an opportunity to be more personal than K-pop artists often get to be. “It\'s just what I talk about with my friends and family, put into an album so that we can all share it and hopefully my fans feel closer to me,” she says. On “toxic till the end,” the singer makes a clear mid-track announcement—“Ladies and gentlemen/I present to you the ex”—before getting even more vulnerable with the world: “I’ll never forgive you for one thing, my dear/You wasted my prettiest years.” While much of *rosie* explores the complexities of romantic heartbreak, ROSÉ also delves into other, lighter subjects. “APT.,” a collaboration with Bruno Mars, gets its name from a popular Korean drinking game ROSÉ played in her early twenties. The infinitely energetic pop-rock track shot to the top of the global pop charts upon its release, ushering in *rosie* along with the subsequent pre-release track “number one girl,” co-written and co-produced by Mars. In the latter, ROSÉ recounts the emotional spiral brought about by a night spent scrolling through social media judgments. Though the pop piano ballad is about superstardom (“Tell me that I’m special/Tell me I look pretty/Tell me I’m a little angel/Sweetheart of your city”), it also “represents every toxic relationship,” she says. While long work hours and a life in the public eye may weigh on ROSÉ, as evidenced by some of *rosie*’s most visceral moments, music is another one of ROSÉ’s love stories. “At the end of the day, it’s what I love to do,” she says, “and that’s the only thing that makes me feel alive and a person.”
Released in the midst of TWICE’s READY TO BE world tour, mini album *With YOU-th* deepens the discography of one of the most successful girl groups of all time. Almost a decade into their careers, the nine-member group has found a musical niche for themselves as masters of bubblegum dance-pop. The six-track EP doubles down on the third-generation veterans’ commitment to bright tunes and heartfelt optimism. “We were lightning from the start and it keeps me going to know that,” TWICE member DAHYUN sings in album opener “I GOT YOU,” a synth-driven English-language tribute to the group’s togetherness and to their fandom, known as ONCE. The “you” highlighted in the album’s title is a reference to the same bonds, and is a theme that ties the entirety of *With YOU-th* together. Members CHAEYOUNG, JEONGYEON, and DAHYUN participated in the songwriting for three of the album’s tracks, adding a more personal touch to B-sides “RUSH,” “BLOOM,” and “YOU GET ME.” Here the members comment on each song. **“I GOT YOU”** NAYEON: “‘I GOT YOU’ is about the friendship our members share and the whole journey we’ve been on. Even when we were lost or struggling, we had each other to rely on. This song’s about sticking ‘together’ no matter what comes next.” SANA: “There’s a line: ‘No matter what you got me, I got you.’ It’s saying we’re always going to be there for each other, either as a family or a team.” **“ONE SPARK”** MOMO: “This is the ‘title track’ of our 13th mini album. TWICE’s sparkling moment of youth and passion—that’s what we wanted to express here.” JIHYO: “\'ONE SPARK\' is our first attempt at the drum ’n’ bass style. It’s got a dreamy sound and melody that I hope listeners will find exciting.” **“RUSH”** CHAEYOUNG: “I wrote the lyrics for this one. In a relationship, there are moments sometimes when it seems like your feelings are stronger than theirs. So here I\'m giving them a cheeky nudge that a bit more attention would be appreciated.” **“NEW NEW”** MINA: “We went full-on peppy and lovely for ‘NEW NEW.’ The song kicks off with a tropical-sounding synth lead, which gives the track a refreshing feel.” TZUYU: “Like the words suggest, this song’s perfect for enjoying the sweet springtime breeze.” **“BLOOM”** JEONGYEON: “In the lyrics I wrote for ‘BLOOM,’ I wanted to express the long wait, the drawn-out process until a flower can finally blossom in all its splendor. All nine of us sing in harmony on this track.” **“YOU GET ME”** DAHYUN: “This song is like an extension of ‘I GOT YOU.’ The story of ‘you’ and ‘I’ that begins in ‘I GOT YOU’ culminates in ‘YOU GET ME,’ where we share memorable moments and find a better world together. Pay attention to the lyrics, I wrote them!”
“Do you think the world is going easy only on us?” the members of K-pop girl group LE SSERAFIM ask in unison on “Good Bones,” the guitar-driven musical manifesto that introduces the five-track EP *EASY*. Mostly spoken—in Korean, English, and Japanese, covering the first languages of the group’s five members—and seemingly a reference to Maggie Smith’s 2016 viral poem of the same name, “Good Bones” reminds the listener that despite being idols and evoking angelic beings in their name, LE SSERAFIM lives on the same mortal plane as the rest of us: “We\'re all gonna die evеntually/And half of our life will be in pain/The othеr half depends on what we do.” What LE SSERAFIM does is *work*. As a mini album, *EASY* is presented as a laidback listening space to poetically allude to the sweat behind the group’s signature brand of fearlessness. The distinction between “easy” and “making it *look* easy” is central to the R&B title track “EASY,” which juxtaposes a smooth vocal delivery and rolling trap beat with the stuttering tension of its lyrics: “After the lights turn off, I wander in the night/Don’t know what is right, don’t know ’bout my rights/Envy, doubt, distrust, now friends of me, yuh/To the world, I\'m half seraphim, yuh.” The cyclical chorus of B-side “Swan Song” glides right by the phrase’s common definition to the perceived grace of the bird the members can most relate to: “Pretending to be elegant again/Dive like a swan/Although I\'m out of breath.” On the groovy, amapiano-inspired “Smart,” the members suggest it’s not just effort but also cleverness that informs their continued success (“I\'m a kid who will become a butterfly/I’m a smarter baby”), while the vocal flourishes of fan song “We got so much” defines with gratitude what all that hard work is for: “We got so much love/I won\'t take it for granted.”
“During production, as we concentrated more and more on the songs, it occurred to me that ‘CRAZY’ is a word that perfectly suits the music,” K-pop idol KAZUHA tells Apple Music about the lead single from LE SSERAFIM’s fourth mini album, also titled *CRAZY*. Phonky and upbeat, the song is a part of an eclectic five-track album from the Korean girl group, who debuted in 2022. In an effort to explore the various meanings of the title word, *CRAZY* moves from the EDM-fueled spoken-word track “Chasing Lightning” to the hip-hop hype song “Pierrot” (sampling Kim Wan Sun’s 1990 hit “Pierrot Laughs at Us”) to the Coachella-debuted dance-pop number “1-800-hot-n-fun.” It all culminates in the tender ballad “Crazier,” titled something closer to “the reason I can’t go crazy” in its original Korean. “Having this as the last track on the album is like us posing a question to you,” shares YUNJIN. “What does CRAZY mean to you?” Here’s what the five members of LE SSERAFIM—SAKURA, KIM CHAEWON, HUH YUNJIN, KAZUHA, and HONG EUNCHAE—had to say about each track. **“Chasing Lightning”** SAKURA: “This is the five of us sharing thoughts about things we’re into, stuff that we’re crazy about. And it has a message: ‘Listen to your own heart and change this moment!’ Unlike the intro tracks from our previous albums, we switched things up here by opening with everyday conversation.” **“CRAZY”** KAZUHA: “‘CRAZY’ is the title track of the album. It’s about moments when you discover something that you can go crazy about. When I first saw the title I was like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty intense!’ \[laughs\] During production, as we concentrated more and more on the songs, it occurred to me that ‘CRAZY’ is a word that perfectly suits the music. The melody on this track has a great hook that gets you humming along to it, anytime and anywhere. It’s perfect for when you need a burst of excitement or a boost in self-esteem.” **“Pierrot”** KIM CHAEWON: “The sample here is from ‘Pierrot Laughs at Us’ by Kim Wan Sun. Personally, I’m a fan of the hip-hop style. I was really glad to do ‘Pierrot’ because it\'s in my favored style and also showcases a fresh new side to us as a group.” **“1-800-hot-n-fun”** HONG EUNCHAE: “I like how the title is in the form of an American toll-free number. The track is all about the message: ‘Call us at “1-800-hot-n-fun”! Let’s have a hot and wild time together!’ It’s filled with fun little details, too. My favorite lyric from this is ‘Where the heck is SAKI?’—‘SAKI’ being our nickname for SAKURA. The track is brimming with a rock feel, so please enjoy.” **“Crazier”** HUH YUNJIN: “I think the word ‘crazy’ means different things to different people. The members before me talked about four songs that each have their own take on ‘crazy.’ But this last track, ‘Crazier,’ is different. It’s about the absence of ‘crazy.’ The message of the song is that youthful life can be beautiful, even if lacking in crazy, which we wanted to convey with sincerity and empathy. Having this as the last track on the album is like us posing a question to you: ‘What does CRAZY mean to you?’”
Ten months after the release of chart-topping mini album *With YOU-th*, K-pop group TWICE released *STRATEGY*. The 14th mini album in their near decade-long career leads with the English-language “Strategy,” a smooth song outlining the pop powerhouses’ ultra-confident seduction plan: “I got you on my radar, soon you\'re gonna be with me/My strategy, strategy will getcha, getcha, baby.” Megan Thee Stallion, who is becoming increasingly prolific as a K-pop collaborator, features on the main version of the title track, lending her precise flow to TWICE’s buoyant pop: “I\'m a man-eater, you just a light snack/I got him pressed like he\'s workin\' on his triceps.” The K-pop collaboration is a follow-up to TWICE’s feature on the Houston rapper’s “Mamushi” remix, also released in 2024. Elsewhere on the seven-track album, TWICE gives their fans, known as ONCE, a holiday gift with the seasonally minded love song “Magical”: “I always hated the winter season/My heart was right on the brink of freezing/Then you came around and suddenly/It\'s like I\'m never gonna be cold again.” Notably, TWICE member Dahyun co-wrote the lyrics for “Keeper,” one of three tracks (in addition to “Like It Like It” and “Sweetest Obsession”) that feature Korean-language lyrics.
On *Access All Areas*, FLO deliver a fierce, shapeshifting debut album of tracks that explore the hopes, fears, and burning ambitions that come after a breakthrough which saw them tagged as *the* great hopes for British R&B. On 2022’s “Cardboard Box,” Jorja Douglas, Stella Quaresma, and Renée Downer’s tidy chemistry and harmonic timing referenced greats of the sound from yesteryear, while providing a glimpse of the future. “We know better than anyone what a journey it has been to get here,” Quaresma tells Apple Music. “But this is actually only the beginning. Those years, filled with lessons, learning, and even trauma…it’s all in the past as the *AAA*-era starts from today. This album signifies us letting our supporters in, sharing more of our lives, and giving out more of *us*.” *Access All Areas* strikes at the sounds they’ve always dreamed of—guided by the razor-sharp writing, education, and smooth production chops of exec producer MNEK. “He’s a really big part of helping us unlock different parts of our voices,” Quaresma says of the British multi-hyphenate. “We’re still so young with so much to learn, so we do lean on him for guidance.” And the results speak for themselves. FLO tangle with trifling partners (“Caught Up”), sizzling rap-style production (“Shoulda Woulda Coulda”), and self-acceptance (“I’m Just a Girl”) on the album which is a big-time flex session from a trio of stars stepping into their power, with even greater goals in sight. “We want to push the perception of girl groups so we had to start and finish with really strong statements on this album,” adds Renée. “We just had to. Because, as young Black women on the rise in this industry, when we reflect on our come-up and everything that we’ve been through, there are bittersweet but also positive messages that mean so much to us. So here it is, this is our truth.” Here, the London trio talks us through *Access All Areas*, track by track. **“Intro” (feat. Cynthia Erivo)** Jorja Douglas: “We wanted to start this up in a really clear environment. And we spent the time to get it right. This is sultry and musical, we even added in bits with lovely strings—and finally asked \[British actor and musician\] Cynthia Erivo to narrate. She’s Black, British, and so talented, she’s someone we adore. This intro sets everything off nicely as we tap into our history here—and share how the journey so far has been for us these last few years.” **“AAA”** Stella Quaresma: “We recorded this out in LA, in what was probably our favorite session for this whole album \[working with Pop Wansel, MNEK, and Sevyn Streeter\]. So the title of the album feels slightly different to this song, but it still felt like a nice way to continue with this start. This feels like a mix between throwback and current \[R&B sounds\], which we love.” **“In My Bag” (feat. GloRilla)** SQ: “This is about being on top of your game in any situation or scenario—physically, mentally, just whatever makes you feel good. We’re tapping into that confidence with this song. So it’s big and braggy, but also centers on being authentic to you. We don’t have Birkins, and we don’t have a \[Rolls-Royce\] Wraith, but we’re still true to ourselves.” **“Walk Like This”** Renée Downer: “We love trying out different \[singing\] styles like we did with this song. If you feel this, you’ll really appreciate a few more songs of this vibe across the album, some really fun ones. Even now as we listen back, I feel that \[variation\] we went for really adds so much.” **“How Does It Feel?”** JD: “We were instantly attracted to this pretty much as soon as we heard the demo. It was written by \[American songwriter\] Theron Thomas, and it’s the type of music we love to listen to, and always dared to be a part of. We want to push perceptions and this is the perfect sonic fit for that. If male artists are comfortable singing across any kind of style and approach, then why not us?” **“Soft”** JD: “This reminds me of my favorite Justin Bieber project, \[2013 compilation\] *Journals*. I think that’s why I fell in love with this song, even if others around us disagreed. Maybe they didn’t connect with the song, whatever, but we had to be clear and tell them where to go! This song is an R&B dream. And this is *our* album—so we don’t believe in persuading, anyway. So here it is.” **“Check”** RD: “We’re so happy that this song came about. MNEK and \[British songwriter\] Ryan Ashley were involved in writing this, and I feel they know us so well. At times, we struggle to write love songs that aren’t cringe! Honestly, we’ve made a few of those. But this one just had a vibe to it, like \[USHER and Alicia Keys’ 2004 single\] ‘My Boo,’ and we were who keen on adding in a sound that people could dance to.” **“On & On”** SQ: “This was written by \[British singer-songwriter\] KABBA, who did many songs for our last EP \[2023’s *3 of Us*\]. We were so captivated by this song it’s a straight old-school love song. I can still remember being in the room when we first heard it. We haven’t performed it yet, but we honestly can’t wait.” **“Bending My Rules”** SQ: “An inspiring vibe here. We’ve made sexy songs before, but this one just sounds so grown-up. It’s complex yet simple, it’s great to sing live and really shows off our voices.” **“Trustworthy (Interlude)”** JD: “This was a really pretty song to create \[with MNEK and NOVA WAV\] in London. It’s very easy to talk about the great things in a relationship but not so much with the difficulties. This is about the sensitive stuff, but it’s always easy when you speak from the heart and your own experiences, then everything flows easily.” **“Caught Up”** RD: “What I find so cool about this song is just how passionate it is. It takes me back to being 12 years old, listening to \[Jazmine Sullivan’s\] ‘Bust Your Windows,’ even when I obviously don’t know anything about that kind of behavior. But it fueled our imaginations and, as girls, we were still able to relate. We all play through these scenarios in our heads, even if they drive us crazy. Sometimes you have to remind your partner: You don’t know who you’re dealing with!” **“IWH2BMX”** RD: “If you could imagine \[pulling\] your stank face, with gun fingers in the air? That’s how we imagine this song— it’s ‘I Would Hate to be My \[E\]X,’ essentially. That’s it really—we’re flexing on them in a big way. Why not? If you feel good then stunt!” **“Nocturnal”** RD: “This song is a testament to FLO. We’ve been working so hard this last few years, hardly getting sleep, just trying to do things the right way. Not the easy way; we want longevity. This is about the lifestyle of not getting any sleep. We want to be ahead of up here even if that’s not immediately visible.” **“Shoulda Woulda Coulda”** SQ: “At first, it was hard for us to wrap our heads around this beat. It’s a really nostalgic sound that we wanted to sink our teeth into. Once we finished this song, we knew that our album was on a good path.” “Get It Till I’m Gone” RD: “The way that we layer our ad-libs here, and it’s mainly for the outro \[section\], is something we’ve done in the past: on ‘3 of Us,’ definitely, and some others. Now it’s a FLO thing. I just love it. One of us says \[the line\], and the rest come in and overlap. It’s really cool.” “I’m Just a Girl” SQ: “The writing process of this song was interesting. It started off about sex, as they always do. But somehow it wasn’t resonating. But we loved the sound here, this Rihanna-inspired rock vibe, think of maybe her *Rated R* era \[in 2009\]. We put this one aside until MNEK revealed to us a few days later in a session, that he had reworded, reordered, and completely reworked it. It went from this awkward, almost jokey vibe to now being something that’s deep and personal, and it’s because MNEK has been with us for so long. He’s heard us rant on his sofa over the years. He gets it, so he was able to capture five years’ worth of trauma and wrap it up into one angry song.”
Girl-group rookies ILLIT returned in late 2024 with *I’LL LIKE YOU*, a five-track follow-up to their debut EP *SUPER REAL ME*. The latter included the fleet-footed pop magic of “Magnetic,” one of the breakout K-pop singles of 2024, and *I’LL LIKE YOU* is constructed to continue the TikTok virality while also building the young group’s dreamy discography of bubbly young-love songs. In a debut year where ILLIT’s debut single perhaps broke out more than the group itself, single “I’ll Like You” explicitly calls to mind the group’s name, a moniker that is constructed for fans to choose their own verb to place between “I’ll” and “it.” A slight track in both length and construction, “I’ll Like You” invites listeners into the teen girls’ pop-youth perspective on innocent attraction: “When I look at you/The world is in a moment, filter mode on.” In “Cherish (My Love),” the theme of a willful young love continues, starting with the lulling declaration, “You know what?/Not even god can stop me/I\'ll like you,” before building to the stuttering delivery of the song’s catchy “ch, ch, ch, ch, cherish my love” chorus. Meanwhile, “IYKYK (If You Know You Know)” doubles down on new-gen K-pop’s habit of spelling out acronymic English-language internet slang—this time in service of further expressing the album’s central theme of “falling in like”: “This feels like sunshine/That sweet smile.” Acne has never sounded as romantic as it does on “Pimple,” a hazy pop song that uses the metaphor of a zit to express the sweet agony of developing an unexpected crush: “Little pimple/One day suddenly/Pimple sprouts/It stings, it’s you.” On the energetically onomatopoeic album closer “Tick-Tack,” ILLIT brings listeners into the sounds of a like: “Oh, oh my god/You\'re looking at me again/The coolest mode, click, click!”). The song and album have members Yunah, Minju, Moka, Wonhee, and Iroha signing off with an abrupt “Oh, nice to see ya,” just as dreamily casually as they came.
Gracie Abrams may be fresh off her teenage years, but she’s old enough to know risk and reward belong together. That’s part of why she’s done leading with fear on her stripped-down new record *The Secret of Us*. She tells Apple Music: “This album is kind of like the inner tornado, I guess, when you’re trying to present a way and then it just doesn’t actually really ultimately work.” Since Abrams began releasing music in 2019, the singer-songwriter has homed in on emotional leaps of faith, her tremulous vocals expertly evoking the tear-splattered diary scribbles a great young love inspires. On *The Secret of Us*, she takes stock of every crush and contradiction that led her to this chapter, reflecting the glow of formative past romances through soft prisms of pop, folk, and indie rock. The through line between these different shades of Gracie’s warm style, of course, is the kind of intimate writing she developed in a private journal long before songwriting with partners as esteemed as Aaron Dessner and Taylor Swift. “I think the most important thing with songwriting, and it’s what we really wanted to do with this album, is just if you can articulate a feeling,” Abrams tells Apple Music. “I’ve always worked with people who I genuinely love and trust. And so, it’s been such a privilege that that’s been the baseline for me, because I know that that’s a really rare thing for young musicians—for musicians, period.” Anyone who missed Abrams’ coveted stint as an opener on the Eras Tour will welcome Swift’s feature on “us.,” a soaring centerpiece addressed to an older partner Abrams can’t be sure ever took her seriously. She isn’t afraid to face the anxiety around her own legitimacy or face it alone—Swift is the only feature across these 13 tracks. (“She’s been an unbelievable friend to me,” Abrams says of Swift.) But between the cathartic power chords of “Tough Love,” the twinkling balladry of “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” and the delicate simplicity of “Free Now,” the real secret to Abrams’ success shines through in her craftsmanship: She’s as serious as it gets. “I hope I’ll always feel like I’m chasing the next best version or whatever I actually need for myself at any given time with each album that I’m lucky enough to make,” Abrams explains. “But this \[album\] just matched where I’m at in such a real way.”
On *LOOM*, Imagine Dragons’ sixth LP, Dan Reynolds and his band weave dexterously between poles. The album is playful at times but intense during others, building from the act’s signature pop-rock style to incorporate more elements of rap and electro than ever before. On *LOOM*, they also reckon with their own legacy, noting how the project simultaneously marks the end of one era and the beginning of something new. On “Take Me to the Beach,” Reynolds infuses his signature melodic delivery with a hopping pace, giving the song a gleeful edge even as he digs into hot-button issues like the surveillance state that surrounds us. The chorus extols the virtues of a warm, relaxing day on a sandy hideaway, but Reynolds uses the refrain as an opportunity to dig at his personality: “You take the snow/It’s way too cold/My heart is cold enough,” he sings. It’s funny, but the vocalist grimaces as he chuckles.
“Whatever I do/Now you just keep your eyes on me,” K-pop girl group ITZY sings on “UNTOUCHABLE,” the thumping, energetic lead single from their 10-track album *BORN TO BE*. The fourth-generation Korean quintet has proven itself a force to be reckoned with since their 2019 debut. *BORN TO BE* delivers more signature charismatic dance tracks that allow the performance-oriented group to shine, including the aforementioned “UNTOUCHABLE,” pre-release singles “BORN TO BE” and “Mr. Vampire,” and “Dynamite” (not that one) and “Escalator.” But perhaps its most exciting contribution to the ITZY discography is five solo songs (including one from main vocalist Lia, on hiatus during *BORN TO BE*’s promotions)—a first for the girl group. Each of the five solo tracks includes lyrical input from its respective member, allowing them to put their individual stamps on the songs. Yeji’s “Crown on My Head” is a rock ballad about the pressures of ruling the K-pop roost. Lia’s “Blossom” is an R&B exploration of growing for oneself: “I’ll call myself a flower/’Cause I really want, I really want/I truly want to be bloomed.” Ryujin’s “Run Away” is a tonally diverse pop-rock banger about the power of being the one to let go. In the smooth, sultry “Mine,” Chaeryeong sings to someone she knows has feelings for her, asking for them to admit it. Finally, Yuna’s “Yet, but” completes the solo set with a gloriously bubblegum K-pop ode to self-confidence in bloom: “Flawless, that’s what you are/I mean, maybe you don’t know it yet, but.”
Gen Z pop star and low-key fashion icon Conan Gray summons the glam-pop gods on his third studio album, *Found Heaven*, which builds on the synth-pop odysseys of his 2022 breakthrough *Superache*. The album finds Gray singing of love lost and heartbreak, shining a light on the lonely and desperate, those looking for a hand or simply a path forward. On the disco-tinged “Lonely Dancers,” he implores those looking for a temporary home to follow him as he sings, “We’re lonely dancers, join me for the night/We’re lonely dancers, baby/Dance with me so we don’t cry.” There’s a beauty in owning your vulnerability, and Gray makes that a philosophy of the album. “Miss You” is an icy number with ’80s New Wave chic during the verses—before reaching for the dance floors during the euphoric choruses. “Forever With Me” is built for the credit sequence of a John Hughes film, mixing Queen-esque harmonies with ecstatic dedications to the underdog. This theme is most apparent on the triumphant album closer “Winner,” a piano ballad in the vein of pop classics from Elton John and Warren Zevon. He sings, “The only thing you’ve proven is that there’s no one who ever has done better/At makin’ me feel worse/Now you really are the winner.” Even in the jaws of heartbreak, there’s a certain grace in owning the pain.
“Pain makes you more humane,” Shakira tells Apple Music. “Being able to take that pain and transform it into something else, that is an opportunity and a luxury that us artists have.” Assuredly, the Latin-pop superstar’s romantic and professional woes in recent years have been significant, often converted into cruel tabloid fodder that, no doubt, amplified the issues and surrounding emotions. Yet with *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran*, her first new album in nearly seven years, she transforms the numbingly dull lead of personal hardship into a glorious musical gold. “In a way, it’s kind of good not to have a husband,” Shakira says of the impact her breakup had on her creativity. “Now I feel like working. It’s a compulsive need of mine that I didn’t feel before.” Even before the album emerged, that compulsion came through clearly and eventfully with the release of singles like the award-winning “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” showing the world that she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind during trying times. “No one should tell any woman how she’s supposed to heal and lick her wounds.” *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran* exemplifies that sentiment. As expected, given her prior hits, she retains a mastery of the dance floor with the benefit of autobiographical lyricism. Here, she provides such expertly executed versions as the Bizarrap-assisted “La Fuerte” and the emotionally potent “Tiempo Sin Verte.” One of many successors to Shakira’s bilingual pop lineage, Cardi B joins for the opener “Puntería,” a sweat-inducing track dripping with erotically charged metaphors. More than willing to branch out beyond what her legacy already holds, she also demonstrates just how integral she’s become to the modern reggaetón landscape, lending her cosign to Manuel Turizo on “Copa Vacía” and finding a kindred spirit in KAROL G on “TQG.” Far more surprising are her successful forays into other genres represented throughout the album, namely the música mexicana team-ups “(Entre Paréntesis)” with Grupo Frontera and “El Jefe” with Fuerza Regida, as well as the brisk bachata cut “Monotonía” with Ozuna. Still, Shakira hasn’t forgotten her long-standing rock listenership, bringing energy and grace to the cathartic “Cómo Dónde y Cuándo.” Similarly, her balladry remains exemplary, the revelatory messages of “Acróstico (Milan y Sasha)” and “Última” obviously driven by her experiences and in response to these challenges. Ultimately, against all odds, she emerges from this album with a sense of hope and optimism. “Love is the most amazing experience a human can live, and no one should take away that opinion from you,” she says. “It doesn’t matter the shitty experiences you go through in life; there’s always a lot more to look forward to.”
Aptly titled, *2* is the second full-length album from (G)I-DLE, the early-fourth-generation K-pop girl group known for their self-production, meaningful lyricism, and eclectic concepts. On *2*, member SOYEON is back in a songwriting, arranging, and producing role, contributing to the composition of four of the LP’s eight songs: “Super Lady,” “Revenge,” Fate,” and “Wife.” Members MIYEON (for the first time), MINNIE, and YUQI also all pop up in the album’s production credits, ensuring that at least one (G)I-DLE member had a hand in writing every song featured on *2*. Sonically, “Vision” is a notable outlier, trading in the group’s recent signature bombast for a smoother, UK-garage-influenced lullaby encouraging the listener to give in to desire. Other themes highlighted on the album include a call to self-confidence for women looking for a win (“Super Lady”); the deliciousness of even ill-advised vengeance (“Revenge”); and, of course, love (“7Days,” “Rollie”). Both “Doll” and pre-release banger “Wife” offer a resistance to objectification, while “Fate” (called “I Hate Being in Pain” in Korean) pairs a bright pop melody with melancholic lyrics like “I feel like I\'m going to throw up because I\'m worried all day long.” On *2*, (G)I-DLE does it all with *la-la-la*s and percussive panache, refusing to choose between making a point and making a bop.
Three and a half years after their debut, fourth-generation K-pop girl group STAYC crafts their first studio album—and it’s a proper one. With 14 tracks, *Metamorphic* is far more substantial than most other contemporary K-pop offerings, and it notably eschews the common tactic of adding instrumental, sped-up, and English-language versions of the same tracks to pad out a release. Looking to expand beyond the “teen fresh” self-descriptor they debuted with in 2020 which defined much of their first three years as a musical group, STAYC makes a declaration of musical evolution with *Metamorphic*. Rather than leaning into the bouncy brightness of 2023 hits “Teddy Bear” and “Bubble,” STAYC’s first full-length album leaves behind much of the group’s energetic earnestness for something slightly more muted, measured, and mature in its expression of confidence. Nowhere is this more apparent than in lead single “Cheeky Icy Thang.” Reminiscent of the group’s 2022 retro synth hit “RUN2U,” the runway-ready electro beat shuffle launches with a killer hook: “If it’s beauty and the beast, I’m the beast.” Elsewhere on the album, the individual members get a chance to take up more of the spotlight. *Metamorphic* includes two unit songs—“Find,” featuring main vocalist Sieun, vocalist Seeun, and rapper J, and “Fakin’,” featuring rapper Sumin and vocalist Yoon—as well as a solo track, “Roses,” from vocalist Isa. All the members contributed lyrics for fan song “Stay WITH me.” Eight of *Metamorphic*’s tracks come from High Up Entertainment’s producer-founders Black Eyed Pilseung, aka B.E.P., who have crafted much of STAYC’s discography thus far. Under B.E.P.’s continued guidance, the album is not a departure from the group’s signature singles, but rather a more textured expression of STAYC’s high-teen homage to classic K-pop sounds.
“I think I am a songwriter first, which is always how I’ve felt about myself,” FINNEAS tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. The 27-year-old has already made his name as a producer through his chart-dominating, award-accruing work with his sister Billie Eilish. But when he was finished with his workload for 2023, which included working on Eilish’s blockbuster album *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* and scoring the Apple TV+ show *Disclaimer*, he wanted to, as he put it, “dive back into my stuff.” So he went to work in a new space—a studio outside his home laboratory—surrounded by musicians with whom he felt comfortable feeling out new material, flexing his muscles as a producer while also testing out his songwriting chops. That collaborative ease is audible on *For Cryin’ Out Loud!*, an inviting album that combines soft rock’s slickness and indie’s choppy guitars with unexpected twists like the jittery epilogue to the chilled-out sophisti-pop flirtation “Sweet Cherries” or the brass that rises up at the end of the hooky, longing title track. FINNEAS’ songwriting strengths shine throughout, with his keen knowledge of how pop songs work shining alongside modern touches, as well as lyrics that channel their strong sentiments through fleeting imagery. The album’s emotional peak arrives on “Family Feud,” a story told through snapshots of moments when a brother-sister link grew stronger. Written 10 days after Eilish and FINNEAS won their second Academy Award for the *Barbie* ballad “What Was I Made For?,” “Family Feud” came from FINNEAS winding down from the siblings’ high-energy 2024 awards season by, he says, “thinking about my relationship with her, devoid of all of the other stuff.” It’s delicately put together, allowing for FINNEAS’ quiet rumination on how his bond with his sister feels as unbreakable as it did before fame swooped in to be gently placed at the forefront.