PopMatters' 50 Best Albums of 2021 So Far

Andy Stott’s music was never particularly upbeat—on early albums like 2006’s *Merciless* and 2008’s *Unknown Exception*, the Manchester electronic musician bathed Detroit-inspired techno in shadowy reverb—but on 2011’s *Passed Me By*, he plunged definitively into the depths of despair. Slowing the tempo to an agonized crawl, he traded forceful drum programming and clean-lined synths for hazy abstractions and crumpled, lo-fi textures. Ten years later, Stott is still spelunking through the same cavernous murk: *Never the Right Time* opens with plaintive scrapes of post-punk guitar, and the record is awash in similarly suggestive tones, like the expectant crackle of “Don’t know how” or the blown-out pianos of “When It Hits.” But his long-running collaboration with the vocalist Alison Skidmore continues to lead even his most downcast songs toward new forms of grace, balancing out his bruising low end with an air of weightlessness. What’s more, after a decade of dissipation, it sounds like Stott is muscling up again: The drum-driven “Answers,” “Repetitive Strain,” and the title track boast his heaviest rhythms in years.

On their endlessly eclectic sophomore album, Bicep considers a musical inquiry most often circled by jazz and jam bands: What if tracks don’t need to be immutable, permanent records, but should instead transform and evolve? Taking inspiration from their first major tour—a two-year trek between festivals and clubs during which they’d regularly rework their tracks from the road—the Northern Irish duo freed themselves from the idea that songs had to be fixed. “Club music has to draw you out,” Matt McBriar tells Apple Music. “Headphone music has to pull you in. More often than not, we’d wind up with six different versions of each song. Eventually it was like, ‘Why do we have to choose?’” As a result, the album versions on *Isles* are simply jumping-off points—the best headphones-inclined versions the pair could cut (dance-floor edits will inevitably materialize when they bring the tracks into clubbier environments). “There’s no straight house or techno on this album; those versions will come later,” Andy Ferguson says. “We wanted to explore home listening to its fullest extent, and then explore the live show to its fullest extent. Rather than try to do both at once, we decided to serve each.” Taking this approach presented an interesting challenge: In order for the songs to be malleable *and* recognizable, they needed to have a strong foundation. “They couldn’t be reliant on a single composition, they had to work in different forms,” McBriar says. “We had to make sure they had strong DNA.” Below, the pair—self-described geeks and gear-heads eager to get technical—take us inside the creative process behind each track. **Atlas** McBriar: “This was the first track we finished after coming back from the tour. We tried to capture the feelings from the peak of the live show, that optimism and euphoria in the room when we performed. It set the tone for the rest of the album in terms of our process. Although we initially recorded several different melodies, the final form came together a few months later in a single afternoon on our modular. This riff was the strongest.” **Cazenove** Ferguson: “This was another early demo, and was sparked by our obsessive interest in ’90s technology—the old MPC controllers that Timbaland and Dilla used. That old equipment doesn’t produce instantly crisp sounds or perfect beats, but that’s where the beauty is. It’s fuzzy and imprecise. We were experimenting with a lot of ’90s lo-fi samplers and bit crushers, and the idea was to build a rhythm by feeding our MPC through a reverse reverb patch on the Lexicon PCM96. From there we just added layer upon layer. We wanted something fast and playful, but with a lot less emphasis on the dance floor.” **Apricots** McBriar: “This actually began as an ambient piece, and the strings sat on our hard drive for a year before we considered some vocals. One day, we picked up an amazing, recently released record called *Beating Heart - Malawi*. The vocals and polyrhythms of ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ stood out. They were captivating. We pitched snippets of them to our strings before building the rest of the track around them. The second sample is from the 1975 \[Bulgarian folk\] album *Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares*. We connected with the mysterious chanting, and felt like it had parallels to the Celtic folk we grew up hearing.” **Saku (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This began as a footwork-inspired track with a hang drum melody; we’d been looking into polyrhythms and more interesting drum programming. But when we slowed down the tempo from 150 to 130 BPM, it totally flipped the vibe for us. We experimented with several different vocals samples—including ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ before it wound up on ‘Apricots’—but ended up sending a stripped-back version to Clara La San, who brought a strong ’90s UKG/R&B vibe. We added some haunting synths at the end to bring contrast and some opposing dark and light elements. It was great to pull so many of our influences into one track.” **Lido** Ferguson: “This track was born from one of our many experiments with granular synthesis. We cut a single piano note from a catalog of 1970s samples and fed it into one of our granular samplers. As we experimented with recording it live, the synthesizer glitches and jumps added all this character and texture. It was pretty disorderly and hard to control, but we loved the madness it produced. There are a ton of layers to this track despite it sounding so simple. And mixing it was a lot of work, trying to get that balance between soothing and subtle chaos.” **X (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This track was built around our Psycox SY-1M Syncussion. We’d been hunting for a Pearl original for years. It has all these uncompromising, metallic fizzes and bleeps that are so difficult to tame, you really need to start with it as the center of the track. Most tracks on the album began on the piano, but not this one. The frantic synth melody was actually improvised one afternoon on our Andromeda A6; it was a single take on a heavily customized and edited patch that we\'ve never been able to replicate. It was just one of those moments when you hit ‘record’ and get it right.” **Rever (feat. Julia Kent)** Ferguson: “We started this track in Bali in 2016. We were on tour and had access to a studio full of local instruments, and knew right away that we wanted to use them. We recorded long sessions of us playing them live, but never ended up using them in one of our finished tracks. Several years later, we were working with Julia Kent, who had recorded the strings for another demo, but it just wasn’t working. She tried some of the Bali instrumentals instead. It sounded really unique. The chopped-up vocal came last, edited and re-pitched to fit, almost like a melody.” **Sundial** McBriar: “One of the simplest tracks on the album, ‘Sundial’ grew from a faulty Jupiter 6 arp recording. Our trigger wasn’t working properly and the arp was randomly skipping notes. This was a small segment taken from a recording of Andy playing around with the arp while we were trying to figure out what was going wrong. We actually loved what it produced and wrote some chords around it, guided by the feeling of that recording.” **Fir** Ferguson: “We have a real soft spot for choral vox synths, and this track was born from an experiment with those. It\'s actually one of the fastest songs we\'ve ever made, and grew purely out of those days in the studio when we just jammed, trying new things. No direction, no preconceived ideas, we just felt it out.” **Hawk (feat. machina)** Ferguson: “The melody on ‘Hawk’ is actually our voices mapped and re-pitched to a granular sampler. We experimented a lot with re-pitching on this album; it brings this unique quality to vocals and melodies. We have a rare-ish Japanese synth, the Kawai SX-240, which creates all those super weird synth noises. Again, this track was the product of lots of experimentation. Machina\'s vocal\'s were actually for another demo which we were struggling on and it just worked perfectly.”

“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

On her sixth LP, Dawn Richard wanted to celebrate the Black DJs and producers who played an instrumental role in developing the early sounds of electronic music. “Dance music has always been culturally from a Black culture,” Richard tells Apple Music. “It’s Detroit house, Chicago footwork, the New Jersey sound, D.C. go-go, and it goes on.” Dismayed by their lack of representation in festivals and playlists, most notably female artists, the New Orleans artist felt the need to speak louder through her art in order to break the glass ceiling. “I have always been a warrior, this Black woman fighting in a space where I didn\'t think I needed to fight,” she adds. “Conceptually, this album became bigger than just a sonic experience—it became an intention.” Also driven by a desire to bring her hometown to the fore, Richard wanted to tell the story of New Orleans filtered through a post-apocalyptic lens—an idea that started from some sketches she drew while working as a creative consultant for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Centered around an android alter ego she created called King Creole, *Second Line* is a futurist, dance-driven voyage intended to narrate her evolution from girl-group reality star to independent artist. “I had to figure out how to stand on my own in a system that didn\'t look at me as belonging in the genre that I was trying to tackle,” she says. “The android was the mainstream journey. Then the independent hustle comes, and you get to see King Creole as the human.” Read on as Richard guides you on her journey through self-discovery. **“King Creole (Intro)”** “It is a call to arms saying, if you thought you knew what this genre or what this electronic idea was, I\'m going to show you what it really is. And I\'m going to add New Orleans all over it right out the gate. So you know it\'s going to drip with soul and presence, and electronic is not just going to be an algorithm—it\'s going to be a soulful experience.” **“Nostalgia”** “I wanted to make sure that I paid homage to those who created and started a genre that is usually not recognized. Larry Heard was one of those incredible DJs and producers that I actually loved. I wanted to say, ‘Let\'s go back to Black, because this genre was started and developed by a culture that is Black.\' I\'m also introducing the mechanics of King Creole and her build—the first half of the album is the machine version of King Creole. It\'s the android—so that\'s why the beats per minute is fast and why we\'re dealing with a more processed sound.” **“Boomerang”** “Now we\'re playing with the vocals as the instrumentation to bring us through. So out the gate, we\'re hearing the vocoder, the harmonization between the vocals. And again, paying homage to a sound that was curated by Blacks. So again, disco becomes the next one. We\'re still in the future, but we\'re paying homage to the root. And with \'Boomerang,\' there are all these messages saying that the love comes back. If you give love out, it\'ll come back tenfold. So it\'s the idea that within this space, each record pays homage to the things that came before.” **“Bussifame”** “The word itself comes from New Orleans. We talk fast so everything we do is bled together. So really, it generally was ‘bust it for me’—like ‘bust a move’—but in New Orleans that sounds like ‘Bussifame.’ I was paying respects to the accent. I wanted to try to take it to the next level, bring New Orleans to the future. We don\'t hear New Orleans in this kind of sound, and that was the fun part—to create something that doesn\'t exist yet.” **“Pressure”** “To me, ‘Pressure’ was taking a traditional pop record and completely de-structuring it—adding bits of Chicago footwork, adding bits of go-go, adding bits of drum and bass, like really playing with movement within the bass and the sound. The record constantly moves. By the end of it, it goes into hip-hop. I\'m just spitting at that point. Like the cockiness to say that, \'I\'m going to give you a record that has four different transitions, and you will never know what to expect.\'” **“Pilot (A Lude)”** “It\'s a bounce record. It\'s an ode to Freedia, Katey Red, and Messy Mya, and I got to show love to my city. If I\'m going to talk about dance, I got to show love to where I grew up in. And again, calling the record \'Pilot,\' saying that we are the flyers of this. We steer this. Call us the pilots, because we are the connoisseurs of this thing that we do.” **“Jacuzzi”** “I always love juxtapositions, like applying something as catchy and melodic to the raunchiest of records. I\'ve always felt like Black women have been severely disrespected within us owning our sexuality. And on every album, I\'ve always had one song that best speaks to that. I really wanted to connect the relationship of one\'s body when you think about the intertwining of android to human; what that physically looks like sexually to the body, and how machine can make sense to human skin.” **“FiveOhFour (A Lude)”** “504 is an area code in New Orleans. You fight very hard to have that 504. The 504 legitimizes you as you\'re legit New Orleans. I produced it myself, showing that I didn\'t need a collaborator for this. It is purposely gritty, it is purposely pitched low. You\'re starting to see the shift in where I\'m getting out of android and going into human. But more importantly, I\'m showing how culturally important New Orleans is as the narrator of this process.” **“Voodoo (Intermission)”** “This is all *Blade Runner* at this point, the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. So King Creole comes out, and she’s telling everyone that she\'s on a mission to give you more. This is the human in her that wants that acceptance and love. She\'s having the vulnerability to say, \'All I want is your love. If you can just see me, I can give you all of this.\'” **“Mornin Streetlights”** “‘Mornin Streetlights’ starts with my mom speaking about how the only person she\'s ever loved is my father. They met when they were 15 and they\'ve been together ever since. I love music, and the reason why I\'ve been so tenacious at it is because I\'ve only known love like that. I\'ve only been taught to love the way my mom and dad have loved. That\'s what I grew up in, but it also makes sense as to the way I love my art. I love it with a tenacity that I can\'t give up.” **“Le Petit Morte (A Lude)”** “I wanted something that was honest. Even just start with the comment ‘This is the last time I\'m going to write a song about you.\' It\'s like going from talking about how I love this music to then saying, \'But I\'m tired of talking about my relationship with art and music.\' It is my purest and most honest moment and I\'m at my most vulnerable. And I freestyled that entire record. I did that as soon as I walked in. My dad played the piano on it and I just wailed. I didn\'t even know what was coming out.” **“Radio Free”** “You see the album now start to transition into hope, because I never sit in that dark place too long. So with ‘Le Petit Morte,’ it felt a little like death. It\'s acknowledging the death, whereas \'Radio Free\' is acknowledging the loss but understanding that you can play your freedom loud.” **“The Potter”** “‘The Potter’ is seeing the loss of worthiness but exposing it and saying, ‘Okay. But how do I see myself as worthy?’ It came to me when I was in church. What happens when you rust, rot, and you sit on the shelf? Will you be loved then? Who am I now? They let you go, and then how do you go on? How do you go on knowing you are this sculpted thing that once was so beautiful that is now worthless to those? And how do you find your worth within that place?” **“Perfect Storm”** “It’s literally being in a storm—having lost everything and being in Katrina and recognizing that we were homeless. It was beautiful the day before. It was hell the day it happened. And then, the next day, it was beautiful again, as if it didn\'t happen, and everything in its path was gone. My biggest theme and aim was to make the record as close to an actual storm as I possibly could—and that breath of fresh air that you feel when you realize that you\'ve lost everything and that you\'re still alive.” **“Voodoo (Outermission)”** “So now we\'re out of it, and now I\'m bringing you to what will be the next album in the trilogy. Because we\'re on album two after *new breed*. I\'m taking myself and removing it out of the art and the music industry, and now it is me as myself. And so I\'m trying to maneuver you guys out of that journey, and I\'m bringing you into what will be the next phase.” **“SELFish (Outro)”** “When people think of selfish, they think of it negatively, and I totally threw that out the window. I\'ve always loved to mess with interludes and make these hidden gems where people are like, \'Why wasn\'t this song longer?\' With this one, I thought it would be really cool to make an outro eight minutes. Black women, especially, we are punished for wanting more for ourselves. And I just want to encourage artists that it\'s okay to put yourself first in the process.”

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

Shirley Manson struggles to explain how a Garbage record comes together. It just happens. “We don’t really speak to each other about anything, we just go into a room and what comes out is what comes out,” the singer tells Apple Music. “It’s usually a shambolic kind of journey. Somehow we end up with a record at the end of it all and we wonder how we did it. It’s a mystery, which I think is probably as it should be.” The quartet refines their chaotic process into another captivating collection of electronic-rock anthems on seventh album *No Gods No Masters*, a record that takes in snarling techno-punk, synth-pop flourishes, and atmospheric balladry across its 11 tracks (this version also includes a bonus disc of covers). Combining themes of personal turmoil with state-of-the-nation temperature-taking, it swerves from defiance to despair and back again, with Manson in exhilarating lyrical form throughout. “I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to articulate somewhat complex issues in quite a colorful way without being too heavy-handed,” she says. It all began with Manson and her bandmates—Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig—in a room together in Palm Springs, California, thrashing out ideas. However, lockdown meant it had to be completed remotely. Manson says they drew on three decades’ worth of experience to get the job done. “I have to commend the whole band on being able to shape-shift and adapt,” she says. “I think one of the reasons we’ve had a long career is everybody in this band is capable of adapting.” Here, Manson unravels some of the mystery of how they do it by taking us through the album, track by track. **“The Men Who Rule the World”** “It was Butch’s call to open with this. I was like, ‘I don\'t know. I feel like maybe not.’ And then I tried a billion different ways of sequencing the record and each time I had to come back to ‘The Men Who Rule the World’—that was really pretty much the only place for it. It’s definitely a mood setter. I think it’s really good-natured, but it’s this sort of retelling of Noah’s Ark, it’s a biblical tale. It’s grand in theme, but it has a lot of humor in it, and also a lot of outrage. To me, that’s the perfect combo.” **“The Creeps”** “These lyrics tell a tale of great change in my mind. I had told myself that at the grand old age of 40, I was over the hill and I would never, ever be an artist again. I got paralyzed and depressed. I was driving along Los Feliz Boulevard, having been dropped by Interscope Records, and I saw a garage sale selling a shop-size poster of my band. I was so humiliated. But from that humiliation, I somehow managed to free myself from public perception and industry perception and expectations and focus on trying to have a good life and being creative and singing and making music and writing. My life bloomed from that point forward, so ‘The Creeps’ is important to me.” **“Uncomfortably Me”** “I think everyone can relate to that feeling of not being fully developed yet and feeling uncertain and fearful and not fitting in. Certainly, an overriding feeling my whole life is that I just never quite fit in at a dinner party, I never quite fit in a festival bill. I feel like I don’t even fit into my own band—I’m the only woman, I’m much younger, I come from Scotland and they’re American. I just feel like a permanent outsider. And the band do too, we just don’t fit in with any scene. It used to upset and frustrate me, but now I’m like, ‘It’s fucking great.’ In this world that has a plethora of bands and artists, we are here in a singular form.” **“Wolves”** “I stumbled upon this Eastern European fairy tale about the idea of two wolves that exist in each human being and wrestle with one another. You choose how you’re going to respond to a situation. Even though you think it’s just instinct, it’s actually a split-second choice. ‘Am I going to be an asshole or am I actually going to try and deal with this situation with kindness?’ It’s hard for me not to be an asshole. I want to attack; that’s just my natural state of being. If someone hurts or offends me, or makes me scared, my instinct is to destroy. As I’m getting older, I want to choose kindness instead and I want to try and control the hardcore wolf and let the kind, soft wolf out instead.” **“Waiting for God”** “I would have felt really disappointed in myself if I hadn’t touched on systemic racism on this record. It really is something that’s just become more and more pressing on me. When Trayvon Martin was murdered—this beautiful 17-year-old kid, walking home at night in a hoodie, holding a bag of Skittles in his hands and he gets shot by a white supremacist—and the way his death was treated in the press, the way that disgusting George Zimmerman got off by pleading his own fear, I think it triggered something in me. I finally started really paying attention. And I have great shame around the fact that it’s taken me this long and I’m 54 years old. But after the death of Trayvon Martin, I just saw this alarming spate of murders of Black kids in America, it was shocking. It felt like it was every day and nobody gave a shit.” **“Godhead”** “‘Godhead’ is really tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also stating the obvious, which is: If I was a male, I would be treated very differently in the world. I know this because of some of the misogyny and sexism I have endured as a professional musician. When I was in my thirties, it infuriated me to the point that I couldn’t really see straight. Now, I find it almost funny that the male is given all this gravitas in society because he’s got a silly cock and balls between his legs and women aren’t given the same amount of gravitas because we’ve got vaginas. When you start examining that patriarchal coloring of absolutely everything, that even God is sold to you as a male figure, you start to see this insidious madness that conditions males into feeling they’re more important. And it conditions females into thinking they are less important. And it’s really beginning to wear on me terribly.” **“Anonymous XXX”** “We kept on obsessing over Roxy Music and how modern they still sound, and how exciting and dangerous. The idea of danger in music seems to have been almost eradicated entirely, certainly in mainstream pop music. We were obsessing over Andy Mackay’s sax sound, and so we wrote a song using a synth sax. I wanted to write about this idea of anonymous sex. I find it so fascinating. What attracts us to having sex with people we don’t know? And why do we project all our longing onto these kinds of dalliances? It was that fascination with the hidden and the secrets and the self-deception.” **“A Woman Destroyed”** “I think this is my attempt to flip the narrative on what was happening with the Me Too movement, where I felt women were being portrayed poorly by the media. And it pissed me off that so much of the discussion was focusing on the victimization of women and what had women done to encourage their attacks on their bodies and on their freedoms. I wanted to create a female superhero who took revenge much like *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night*, which is the Persian movie by Ana Lily Amirpour. I love that notion of this vampire taking revenge on those who hurt her. And so the song is a cinematic fantasy of revenge.” **“Flipping the Bird”** “I was inspired by *Men Explain Things to Me* by Rebecca Solnit, and this idea of suddenly being aware that a lot of the time, when you’re choosing to engage with men about certain subjects, they automatically assume that you know nothing and that they are the ones who know everything. I was also inspired by hanging out with Liz Phair and feeling a little taken over by her spirit. I wanted to sing a song like she does, where she always picks a really low register in her voice. It’s an acerbic look at the male ego and how women often choose, myself included, to form ourselves around this ego in the room in order to keep the peace and not have an angry man. We make these little compromises on the surface, but behind our eyes, there’s a whole other perception of what’s going down.” **“No Gods No Masters”** “I sing on this song, ‘No masters or gods to obey,’ and I was like, ‘Great, “no gods no masters” is the old punk slogan’ and that seemed like the perfect title for the whole record because of what was going on socially at the time. There was just so much dissent and rebellions against governments and the people really rising up, whether it was the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement—it was a glorious, beautiful thing to see. We all want good things for our babies, our families, our friends. And yet we so often then want to crush someone else’s spirit, who’s not our friend, who’s not our baby, who’s not our family. And it’s a mystery to me. And yet the world tumbles on, evolution continues. The future still holds. And that is a glorious thing. I love feeling hopeful about new generations who will eventually sort this shit out.” **“This City Will Kill You”** “This song is a goodbye and it’s an elegy, but it’s also hopeful. If you find yourself in shit, it doesn’t mean you have to stay there. It doesn’t mean your life is over. I still believe in the possibilities \[that\] you can turn pretty much anything around. I wanted that sense of comfort to be there, because it’s a dark record, it’s a difficult record. I wanted this to be, at the end of everything, like an embrace, like, ‘It’s going to be OK.’”

It’s been 13 years since the last album from electronic-metal experimentalists Genghis Tron. Though much of that time was an extended hiatus, founding duo Hamilton Jordan and Michael Sochynsky have completely revamped their lineup with new vocalist Tony Wolski and the band’s first-ever live drummer, Nick Yacyshyn (also of extreme-metal favorites Sumac and Baptists). The result is *Dream Weapon*, a decidedly more spacious and hypnotic album than the band’s frenzied, critically acclaimed 2008 opus *Board Up the House*. “We wanted the instruments and arrangements to have a little more breathing room so the listener could hear all the details,” Jordan tells Apple Music. “Having Nick and Tony involved really helped us arrive at a more cohesive, streamlined set of songs that really flow together. They really elevated everything.” Below, Jordan discusses each track on *Dream Weapon*. **Exit Perfect Mind** “We knew we wanted an intro track on the album, and we knew we wanted an interlude. At some point about halfway through the mixing process, Michael stayed up late one night and put together the core components of what would become ‘Exit Perfect Mind.’ He had the idea to pull the same melodies that conclude the last track on the album, ‘Great Mother,’ and use them to start the record. So that was a cool way to bookend the album, by starting and ending with a similar vibe.” **Pyrocene** “Many of our songs—and not just on this album—start with drums, and this is one of those songs. ‘Pyrocene’ started when I was visiting my wife’s family in the Arizona desert and I just wrote this funky little drumbeat that I really liked. I sent it to Michael and he added some more synthetic-sounding samples on top and a deep, heavy bass synth stab. Then we just kind of tricked it out over a two- or three-week period. It was exciting writing this song because it was our first full demo for this album—the first real song we wrote in, at that point, 12 years. It’s also the song we used to entice Nick into playing with us.” **Dream Weapon** “This is the first song we started writing, but the last one we finished. I wrote about half of the guitar parts on this song in the summer of 2008, a couple of months after *Board Up the House* came out. It was also a couple of weeks after my dad died, and this was the first thing I’d written since his death. But I really liked those riffs, so we held on to them for a long time. We always knew that if we were going to do another album that it would show up in some form. Fast-forward 12 years and we had a lot of ideas over that time that didn’t age well, but this is one of the few that Michael and I still really loved.” **Desert Stairs** “This was based on something that Michael had written a while before we entered the studio, but we were having trouble coming up with tones that really worked. When we were at GodCity with \[producer\] Kurt Ballou, he busted out a guitar and a metal slide and recorded some really nice guitar ambience where he was moving the slide over the neck and getting harmonics. Then Michael chopped them up and made these samples that sounded more like a synth pad. They really brought track together and made it sound warmer.” **Alone in the Heart of the Light** “My wife and I drove to visit Michael in upstate New York, and we were staying in a motel in Virginia the night before. I had a little MIDI controller with me, and I came up with this arpeggiated melody that I really liked. We ended up with like a 20-chord progression that you can’t really follow, but it doesn’t matter. You can just lose yourself in it. This is also the first song we sent our new vocalist, Tony, when we were in the exploratory phases of working with him. What he came up with really subverted our expectations, and we knew we had to work with him.” **Ritual Circle** “I have a super vivid memory of this song, because my wife and I were staying in Colorado for a family funeral when I woke up one morning to this idea that Michael had sent. It ended up being one of the more challenging songs to write because we didn’t know what that idea needed around it. So there were a lot of different versions of this song before the one you’re hearing. Our goal was to keep the listener engaged, because you\'re hearing new melodies and textures and sounds, but you\'re still in that same driving rhythm. Hopefully you get lost in it.” **Single Black Point** “This is another one that started with a drumbeat. And it\'s another song, kind of like ‘Ritual Circle,’ that has a very distinct part A and part B. The second half of the song is all Michael, and to me it’s more of a classic Genghis Tron electronic jam-out.” **Great Mother** “This is another one that has some really old elements in it. I think the opening pulsating synth and some of the other synth melodies toward the end of the song, before the last loud chorus comes in, came from a demo that Michael wrote in 2011 or 2012. But we had trouble turning it into a song until I came up with the main guitar riff and started sketching out a new arrangement. So I kind of stripped his old demo for parts and rolled it into something new. At first we felt maybe this had too many parts, but then Tony came into the picture and his vocals were the glue that brought the song together.”

During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums are typically accompanied by a collective ideological statement of intent from the Montreal instrumental ensemble. And coming in the midst of a pandemic that has greatly magnified the societal inequalities they’ve always railed against, the missive/press release that accompanies *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* practically reads like a ransom note, with calls to “take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise” and “tax the rich until they\'re impoverished,” among others. But where they were once the doomsday prophets of pre-millennium post-rock, the band\'s response to the intensifying turmoil of 21st-century life is to radiate an ever-greater degree of positivity through their music. Godspeed\'s seventh album adheres to a similar structure as their post-reunion releases (with two mammoth, multi-sectional movements each flanked by a shorter piece) while tapping into a similar spirit of hard-fought perseverance. However, *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* is distinguished by its heightened sense of clarity and levity. In contrast to the sustained, swelling drones of 2017’s *Luciferian Towers* and the defiant doom-metal behemoths of 2015’s *Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress*, this set’s opening four-track suite gradually blossoms from a minimalist, militaristic march into a delirious orchestral swirl, before entering an extended comedown jam that suggests ’70s Floyd jamming with Crazy Horse. The equally expansive companion piece (spread over tracks 6 and 7) likewise travels from desolate valleys to staggering peaks and back again, but rallies for a triumphant victory-lap gallop that could very well count as the most elating piece of music this band has ever produced. Even the brief meditative ambient symphony that closes the record is embedded with inspirational energy—it’s called “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN,” so consider *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* a sonic premonition of the better, more humane world that awaits us on the other side.

Full-length album (Ozunu) by Ground .This album was inspired by the various folklore stories of his hometown, Soutn Osaka. The album contains his dance music.  Mixed & Produced By Ground ( linktr.ee/Ground_jp ) Mastered By Kabamix ( soundcloud.com/kabamix ) Design By Reza Hasni (www.instagram.com/reza.hasni/ ) Special Featuring Guest Track 10 Juan Diego Illescas (Guitar/synthesizer) www.instagram.com/juandiegoillescas/ Track 12 Kaloan (Voice) soundcloud.com/kaloan

“Things should change and evolve, and music is an extension of that, of the continuity of life,” Hiatus Kaiyote leader Nai Palm tells Apple Music. The Melbourne jazz/R&B/future-soul ensemble began writing their third album, *Mood Valiant*, in 2018, three years after the Grammy-nominated *Choose Your Weapon*, which featured tracks that were later sampled by artists including Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Anderson .Paak. The process was halted when Nai Palm (Naomi Saalfield) was diagnosed with breast cancer—the same illness which had led to her mother’s death when she was 11. It changed everything about Nai Palm’s approach to life, herself, and her music—and the band began writing again from a different perspective. “All the little voices of self-doubt or validation just went away,” she says. “I didn\'t really care about the mundane things anymore, so it felt really liberating to be in a vocal booth and find joy in capturing who I am, as opposed to psychoanalyzing it. When you have nothing is when you really experience gratitude for what you have.” The album had largely been written before the pandemic hit, but when it did, they used the extra time to write even more and create something even more intricate. There are songs about unusual mating rituals in the animal kingdom, the healing power of music, the beauty and comfort of home, and the relationships we have with ourselves, those around us, and the world at large. “The whole album is about relationships without me really meaning to do that,” she says. Below, Nai Palm breaks down select lyrics from *Mood Valiant*. **“Chivalry Is Not Dead”** *“Electrons in the air on fire/Lightning kissing metal/Whisper to the tiny hairs/Battery on my tongue/Meteor that greets Sahara/We could get lost in static power”* “The first couple of verses are relating to bizarre mating rituals in the animal kingdom. It’s about reproduction and creating life, but I wanted to expand on that. Where else is this happening in nature that isn’t necessarily two animals? The way that lightning is attracted to metal, a conductor for electricity. When meteors hit the sand, it\'s so hot that it melts the sand and it creates this crazy kryptonite-looking glass. So it\'s about the relationship of life forces engaging with each other and creating something new, whether that\'s babies or space glass.” **“Get Sun”** *“Ghost, hidden eggshell, no rebel yell/Comfort in vacant waters/And I awake, purging of fear/A task that you wear/Dormant valiance, it falls”* “‘Get Sun’ is my tribute to music and what I feel it\'s supposed to do. Even when you’re closed off from the world, music can still find its way to you. ‘Ghost, hidden eggshell’ is a reference to *Ghost in the Shell*, an anime about a human soul captured in a cyborg\'s body. I feel that within the entertainment industry, but the opposite—there are people who are empty. There’s no rebellion. They’re comfortable in this vacant pool of superficial expression. I feel like there\'s a massive responsibility as a musician and as an artist to be sincere and transparent and expressive. And it takes a lot of courage but it also takes a lot of vulnerability. And ‘Dormant valiance, it falls’—from the outside, something might look quite valiant and put together, but if it\'s dormant and has no substance, it will fall, or be impermanent. And that\'s not how you make timeless art. Maybe it\'ll entertain people for three seconds but it will be gone.” **“Hush Rattle”** *“Iwêi, Rona”* “When I was in Brazil, I spent 10 days with the Varinawa tribe in the Amazon and it changed my life. On my last day there, all the women got together and sang for me in their language, Varinawa, and let me record it. There were about 20 women; they\'ll sing a phrase and when they get to the last note, they hold it for as long as they can and they all drop off at different points. It was just so magical. So we\'ve got little samples of that throughout the song, but the lyrics that I\'m singing were taught to me: ‘Iwêi,’ which means ‘I love you,’ and ‘Rona,’ which means ‘I will always miss you.’ It’s a love letter to the people that I met there.” **“Rose Water”** *“My hayati, leopard pearl in the arms of my lover/I draw your outline with the scent of amber”* “There’s an Arabic word here: *hayati*. The word *habibi* is like ‘You’re my love,’ but to say ‘my hayati’ means you\'re *more* than my love—you\'re my life. One of my dear friends is Lebanese. He’s 60, but maybe he\'s 400, we don\'t know. He’s the closest thing to a father that I\'ve had since being an orphan. He makes me this beautiful amber perfume; it’s like a resin, made with beeswax. There’s musk and oils he imports from Dubai and Syria. So it’s essentially a lullaby love song that uses these opulent, elegant elements from Middle Eastern culture that I\'ve been exposed to through the people that I love.” **“Red Room”** *“I got a red room, it is the red hour/When the sun sets in my bedroom/It feels like I\'m inside a flower/It feels like I\'m inside my eyelids/And I don\'t want to be anywhere but here”* “I used to live in an old house; the windows were colored red, like leadlight windows. And whenever the sun set, the whole room would glow for an hour. It\'s such a simple thing, but it was so magic to me. This one, for me, is about when you close your eyes and you look at the sun and it\'s red. You feel like you\'re looking at something, but really it\'s just your skin. It’s one of those childlike quirks everyone can relate to.” **“Sparkle Tape Break Up”** *“No, I can’t keep on breaking apart/Grow like waratah”* “It’s a mantra. I’m not going to let little things get to me. I\'m not going to start self-loathing. I\'m going to grow like this resilient, beautiful fucking flower. I\'ve made it a life goal to try to at least be peaceful with most people, for selfish reasons—so that I don\'t have to carry that weight. Songs like this have really helped me to formulate healthy coping mechanisms.” **“Stone or Lavender”** *“Belong to love/Please don’t bury us unless we’re seeds/Learn to forgive/You know very well it’s not easy/Who are they when they meet?/Stone or lavender/Before the word is ever uttered/Was your leap deeper?”* “‘Please don\'t bury us unless we\'re seeds’ is a reference to a quote: ‘They tried to bury us, they didn\'t know we were seeds.’ That visual is so fucking powerful. It’s saying, ‘Please don\'t try to crush the human spirit, because all life has the potential to grow, belong to love.’ This song is the closest to my breast cancer diagnosis stuff; it’s saying, ‘All right, who are you? What do you want from life? Who do you want to be?’ Do you emit a beautiful scent and you\'re soft and you\'re healing or are you stone? Before anyone\'s even exchanged anything, before a word is ever uttered, your energy introduces you.” **“Blood and Marrow”** *“Not a speck of dust on chrysanthemum/Feather on the breath of the mother tongue”* “I think is one of the most poetic things I\'ve ever written; it\'s maybe the thing I\'m most proud of lyric-wise. The first lyric is a reference to a Japanese poet called Bashō. I wanted to use this reference because when my bird Charlie died—I had him for 10 years, he was a rescue and he was my best friend—we were watching *Bambi* on my laptop. He was sitting on my computer, and we got halfway through and he died. The song is my ode to Charlie and to beauty in the world.”

'Flock’ is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation. The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but ‘Flock’ is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk. Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is ‘The Revolution Of Super Visions’, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates ‘Flock’ and concludes on ‘Solarised’, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night. The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphosise…

When she debuted in 1993 with the seminal *Exile in Guyville*, Liz Phair planted her flag as indie rock’s resident acid-tongued queen. The Chicago singer-songwriter, who recorded the project as an alleged track-by-track response to The Rolling Stones’ *Exile on Main St.*, challenged the machismo of the scene with a deadpan frankness that was just as evocative as it was shocking. In the years since, Phair has lived nine lives in the music biz: She released two follow-ups (’94’s *Whip-Smart* and ’98’s *Whitechocolatespacegg*) before unleashing 2003’s self-titled LP—a step into the mainstream that many critics interpreted as an anodyne attempt at radio success and, more importantly, a betrayal of her brusque beginnings. In classic Phair fashion, of course, she had the last laugh—it was her highest-charting album to date—and what followed was a pair of records that pushed the envelope even further. It’s been 10 years since Phair released *Funstyle*, a see-what-sticks sort of adventure in experimentalism that traversed everything from Bollywood to hip-hop. In that time, she focused on raising her son while juggling live performances and scoring TV shows—until quarantine, when she felt inspired to pick up where she left. “I cannot \[emphasize\] how weird it was to work on a record in a pandemic,” she tells Apple Music. “There were so many reasons why that ended up being stranger than anyone could have possibly imagined. And in fact, it’s the same as always.” The resulting album speaks to that sentiment, marking a reunion with *Guyville* producer Brad Wood, who brings a pop sheen to a collection of songs rooted in Phair’s DIY beginnings. It’s a record that examines how relationships work, and how distance can manipulate your perceptions of longing and intimacy. Below, Phair walks us through how each song on *Soberish* conveys her view of the world today. **Spanish Doors** “Anyone who’s a fan of my music knows that I’m fascinated by ordinary moments in conversations that somehow take on greater significance in the larger scope of a person’s life—how simply one piece of information can rock your world. And I really resonated with the idea that \[my friend, whose divorce inspired the song\], was in a public place when she found out that she was no longer going to be living the life that she was accustomed to. And how jumbled your internal landscape can be when you’re dealing with denial—‘I don’t want to face this.’ Bargaining, maybe there’s a way out of this. Devastation, in the sense that everything’s going to change and there’s nothing you can do about it. The stages of grief. How can you put that into a pop song? That’s the tricky challenge.” **The Game** “I think most of my romance these days is amped up. It’s not day-to-day, it’s overly large. And sometimes I think ‘The Game’ is really talking about how much you need ordinariness and day-to-dayness in a love relationship. And as exciting as it is to have a kind of a dramatic affair, it gets old, you get tired. You don’t want to keep resurrecting it—you want it to evolve into something more subtle. I think that surprises me.” **Hey Lou** “\[Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson\] are icons to me. Independent of each other, they were huge influences early on in my life. I just loved both of their music when I was a teenager. Both were making groundbreaking, compelling art. And then, when they got together as a couple, it just seemed impossible: How can these two titans coexist in an ordinary life? And it was really an accidental inspiration that turned into a real sort of love letter to two challenging, difficult artists who, by all accounts, had a very peaceful, loving relationship. So, I’m fascinated.” **In There** “It’s like you’ve been saying no to someone for a while and when they start to lose interest because they’ve been rejected a number of times, you’re like, ‘Goddamn it. I miss them.’ And then, you have to break in with your own inability to commit or your own inability to open yourself up to someone. Because for the longest time you could just say no, and you felt like they’d keep coming. And now you are realizing that you’ve said no, and it might be you that has the problem.” **Good Side** “‘Good Side’ is my mature ‘F\*\*k and Run.’ Instead of being in a pithy funk about my hookup, I can just kind of say to myself, ‘Well, he got a pretty good impression of me. So, no harm, no foul.’” **Sheridan Road** “That inspiration came from a longtime partner that also grew up in the same area \[in Chicago\] that I did. And there’s this particular road in it, Sheridan Road, that is the main artery connecting the suburbs to downtown. And every time you want to go home or any time you want to go out, you travel on this road. So, our being together on this road in the song brings up all the different life experiences that we’ve had. And yet, we’ve walked the same walk all our lives, but his life is totally different from mine. He’s got special places and I’ve got special places. How could we have been growing up in the same place the whole time and not have been aware of each other?” **Ba Ba Ba** “I’m hooking up with someone, it’s a new romance, I’m very excited about it. And in the space of a single song, it starts and is already over before it even began. I think of it as a boomerang song, because where you think it’s going and the person you think I am at the beginning of the song is sort of my ambassador self, the more appealing broadly to mainstream people, like, ‘I’m happy. Yay. Woo.’ And then, by the end of the song, I’m back to my usual self and the relationship is already over.” **Soberish** “I feel like we’re all doing the best we can right now. I feel like we, as a country, have gone through a time period that was very dark and difficult and an existential threat, so to speak. So, a lot of people felt the need to stay connected with reality without actually being entirely sober. How much of reality can I stand to absorb and how much do I need to push away from me and keep myself insulated from? ‘Soberish’ is just a more romantic and innocent way to look at that. I used to be the kind of person that could do this sober, but right now I need a shot.” **Soul Sucker** “You know when, if on a certain night, you have a hookup with someone and you like that person and it was perfectly fine, but it was just, like, that night. And then you keep running into them in your real world, and maybe they weren’t the person that you would be most excited for people to see that you hooked up with. You’re in your more elegant persona, and then here comes your hookup from back in the day. And you’re like, ‘I don’t know who this is. I don’t know.’ Like that.” **Lonely Street** “That is a very modern love song, because it sort of speaks to, yes, we can be connected by a screen, but what I really need is for you to be lying next to me, whispering in my ear. And there’s a sense of sadness in the relationship, but also a sense of isolation that we get by in our modern world with a substitute for what we really need, which is actual intimacy.” **Dosage** “I think of it as a modern-day ‘Polyester Bride’ in that I wrote it with the idea of going back to that bar, where Henry the bartender gave me all that good advice when I was young, and coming back as an older woman and seeing a young woman who is basically in the position I used to be in. So, I’m now looking at myself in the younger person who’s wasted, giving her advice, but also saying, ‘By the way, you’re doing fine. Nobody has it all together. Even now, at my age, none of those decisions were even the impactful ones.’” **Bad Kitty** “‘Bad Kitty’ is just embracing the mess that is my life. It’s an ongoing theme I have that I will always be out of place no matter where I go or who I try to be. And the manifestos that people think that I have, or that I have the answers, I really don’t. At the end, it’s the poem of just no helmet, no brake, no net, no rope, no more cocaine. You don’t really believe that I’m never going to do those things, do you? That’s really a kind of a throwing your hands up: I am a bad kitty. To this world, that’s how I am perceived. That’s how I identify myself as. It’s not such a bad thing, really—I get nine more lives. But at the same time, it doesn’t all make sense. It’s my emotional state and that’s how I make art. And it doesn’t always have to make sense. One thing does not have to be like, ‘Now I will never do this, and now I will do this.’” **Rain Scene** “I was here in my house, and I had bought a 3D microphone thing that I can put on my ears that will record surround sound of whatever space I’m in. And I knew I wanted the approaching storm of ‘Sheridan Road’ to break. I wanted the storm to actually release at the end of the album. So, this unexpected rain happened here in Southern California, and I just practically threw clothes on and threw this thing on. And I was, like, yelling to my son, ‘I’m going out in the rain! I’m going to record the rain!’ And I just stomped up and down the street around my house, recording puddles and me splashing in puddles. And I had Brad edit it in such a way that it took on a flavor of synthesizer of manipulated sounds at the end, and then I wrote a little song about it.”

“I like the simple stuff,” murmurs Loraine James on “Simple Stuff,” a standout track on the London producer’s second album for Hyperdub. Perhaps her idea of simplicity is different from others’, because *Reflection* (like its predecessor *For You and I*) is a virtuosic display of dazzlingly complex drum programming and deeply nuanced emotional expression. James’ music sits where club styles like drum ’n’ bass and UK funky meet more idiosyncratic strains of IDM; her beats snap and lurch, wrapping grime- and drill-inspired drums in ethereal synths and glitchy bursts of white noise. Recorded in 2020, while the club world was paused, *Reflection* captures much of the anxiety and melancholy of that strange, stressful year. “It feels like the walls are caving in,” she whispers on the contemplative title track, an unexpected ambient oasis amid a landscape of craggy, desiccated beats. Despite the frequently overcast mood, however, guest turns on songs like “Black Ting” show a belief in the possibility of change. “The seeds we sow bear beautiful fruit,” raps Iceboy Violet on the Black Lives Matter-influenced closing track, “We’re Building Something New.” Tender and abrasive in equal measure, *Reflection* is that rarest of things: a work of experimental music that really does make another world feel possible.

When *Strangers to Ourselves* arrived in 2015, Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock let on that he actually had another LP’s worth of material ready for release, if only his label would let him. “These are not those songs,” he tells Apple Music of *The Golden Casket*. “I went into the studio with \[producer-composer\] Dave Sardy and a blank slate. One plan was just to not touch a guitar, but that didn\'t last long—the guitar is fun. Another plan was to make a kalimba record, but I knew that that wasn\'t realistic—I’m talking out of my ass now, as I was then.” What Brock did record, ultimately, was an album he’d enjoy making and listening to—a thick collage of spidery riffs, woozy synths, and the odd snippet of found sound, the opening of cans or the cracking of his knuckles included. Lyrically, he took inspiration from a line he loved in the song “Private Execution,” from Australian rock outfit The Drones’ 2016 LP *Feelin Kinda Free*: “What do fish know about water?” It is, he says, “a very simple, concise way of saying we don\'t know what we don\'t know and there\'s a lot we don\'t fucking know. I\'m a proponent of psychedelics, and there\'s more to the universe than we understand. That\'s not even an existential question.” But in light of that, there is a real sense of gratitude and optimism coursing through *The Golden Casket*, from “We’re Lucky” to “The Sun Hasn’t Left,” a reassuring response to the tumult of 2020. Much of that can be traced to Brock’s recent embrace of parenthood. “Everything I do is influenced by this now,” he says. “Unless you\'re an asshole, once you\'ve brought people into the world, it\'s necessary to figure out ways to make things better for your brood, to make things work. You can\'t be too fucking cynical—it’s only right.” Below, Brock walks us through some of the album’s key tracks. **“F\*\*k Your Acid Trip”** “It\'s just kind of a lot of fun. It’s not too heady. I\'m not making people get deep into the thickets too quick or anything. That\'s why it\'s the opener, you know? That song could be as basic as a story about an acid trip—which it kind of is—but it\'s also about any ride you didn\'t agree to take, any conversation or situation where your participation wasn\'t asked of you.” **“We Are Between”** “I don\'t know where it began, but I know where it ended up. It\'s just about how lucky it is to be here—you know? How lucky we are to get to live in an ocean of oxygen, how lucky we are just to even get between a rock and a hard place. Fuck. There\'s a limit to feeling good about life on earth, I\'m sure, but most of the time, it shouldn\'t be there.” **“We’re Lucky”** “That just one fell out—I don\'t know that I ever had to put pen to paper. It’s kind of a love song, for getting to be here in the fucking universe, against all odds. Probably one of my favorite moments on the record, because it just feels right.” **“The Sun Hasn’t Left”** “That one kind of culminated because of the riots going on at the same time as a pandemic and the fucking sky was blacked out basically for parts of the days from forest fires and shit up here in Portland. I *had* to write that song. For no other reason, as a reminder. I saw a lot of people I knew really, really get pretty fucking bummed out and I felt like I needed to say something encouraging.” **“Never F\*\*k a Spider on the Fly”** “It ended up being a gentle reminder to trolls and anyone who is trying to fuck with other people\'s rights or whatnot: All this negative shit, it usually actually ends up preying on them too. There are no fucking winners. Yelp reviews are like a really pedestrian version of this. Yes, everyone fucking has an opinion, everyone fucking should be allowed an opinion, but the way you feel about your fucking meal is now like an act of war. It’s a bummer to see how bad we are at getting along or even just dealing with a bad sandwich like it wasn\'t some sort of personal assault.” **“Leave a Light On”** “Everyone got to spend a lot of time in their homes and whatnot. I got to think about everyone\'s looking at their same four walls over and over again and what that was. And then I got to thinking about how other people\'s walls are new. It’s a song of being welcoming and being welcomed.” **“Back to the Middle”** “I love this song. It’s one that was around before the recording session, around the time of the last record. I\'ve always really liked it. My mom, believe it or not, is the reason this is on this record, because she\'s very politically charged and felt like it was a strong statement for just getting closer to a centered place.”

Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.

“I’ve had a lot of controversies in my short period being an artist,” slowthai tells Apple Music. “But I always try making a statement.” In 2019, there was the Northampton rapper’s establishment-rattling appearance at the Mercury Prize ceremony, hoisting of an effigy of Boris Johnson’s severed head. A few months later, sexualized comments he made to comedian Katherine Ryan at the 2020 NME Awards caused a fierce Twitter backlash and prompted the Record Store Day 2020 campaign to withdraw an invitation for slowthai to be its UK ambassador. Ryan labeled their exchange “pantomime” but it led to a confrontation with an audience member and slowthai’s apology for his “shameful actions.” Since releasing his 2019 debut *Nothing Great About Britain*, then, the artist born Tyron Frampton has known the unforgiving heat of public judgment. It’s helped forge *TYRON*, a follow-up demarcated into two seven-track sides. The first is brash, incendiary, and energized, continuing to draw a through line between punk and UK rap. The second is vulnerable and introspective, its beats more contemplative and searching. The overarching message is that there are two sides to every story, and even more to every human being. “We all have the side that we don’t show, and the side we show,” he says. “Living up to expectations—and then not giving a fuck and just being honest with yourself.” Featuring guests including Skepta, A$AP Rocky, James Blake, and Denzel Curry, these songs, he hopes, will offer help to others feeling penned in by judgment, stereotypes, or a lack of self-confidence. “I just want them to realize they’re not alone and can be themselves,” he says. “I know that when shit gets dark, you need a little bit of light.” Explore all of slowthai’s sides with his track-by-track guide. **45 SMOKE** “‘Rise and shine, let’s get it/Bumbaclart dickhead/Bumbaclart dickhead.’ It’s like the wake-up call for myself. It’s how you feel when you’re making constant mistakes, or you’re in a rut and you wake up like, ‘I really don’t want to wake up, I’d rather just sleep all day.’ It’s explaining where I’m from, and the same routine of doing this bullshit life that I don’t want to do—but I’m doing it just for the sake of doing it or because this is what’s expected of me.” **CANCELLED** “This song’s a fuck-you to the cancel culture, to people trying to tear you down and make it like you’re a bad person—because all I’ve done my whole life is try and escape that stereotype, and try and better myself. You can call me what you want, you can say what you think happened, but most of all I know myself. Through doing this, I’ve figured it out on a deeper level. When we made this, I was in a dark place because of everything going on. And Skep \[Skepta, co-MC on this track\] was guiding me out. He was saying, ‘Yo, man, this isn’t your defining moment. If anything, it pushes you to prove your point even more.’” **MAZZA** “Mazza is ‘mazzalean,’ which is my own word... It\'s just a mad thing. It’s for the people that have mad ADHD \[slowthai lives with the disorder\], ADD, and can’t focus on something—like how everything comes and it’s so quick, and it’s a rush. It’s where my head was at—be it that I was drinking a lot, or traveling a lot, and seeing a lot of things and doing a lot of dumb shit. Mad time. As soon as I made it, I FaceTimed \[A$AP\] Rocky because I was that gassed. We’d been working here and there, doing little bits. He was like, ‘This is hard. Come link up.’ He was in London and I went down there and \[we\] just patterned it out.” **VEX** “It’s just about being angry at social media, at the fakeness, how everyone’s trying to be someone they’re not and showing the good parts of their lives. You just end up feeling shit, because even if your life’s the best it could be, it just puts in your head that, ‘Ah, it could always be better.’ Most of these people aren’t even happy—that’s why they\'re looking for validation on the internet.” **WOT** “I met Pop Smoke, and that night I recorded this song. It was the night he passed. The next morning, I woke up at 6 am to go to the Disclosure video shoot \[for ‘My High’\] and saw the news. I was just mad overwhelmed. Initially, I’d linked up with Rocky, making another tune, but he didn’t finish his bit. \[slowthai’s part\] felt like it summed it up the energies—it was like \[Pop Smoke’s\] energy, just good vibes. I felt like I wouldn\'t make it any longer because it’s straight to the point. As soon as it starts, you know that it’s on.” **DEAD** “We say ‘That’s dead’ as in it’s not good, it’s shit. So I was like, ‘Yo, every one of these things is dead to me.’ There’s a line, ‘People change for money/What’s money with no time?’ That’s aimed at people saying I changed because I gained success. It’s not that I’ve changed, but I’ve grown or grown out of certain things. It’s not the money that changed me, it’s understanding that doing certain things is not making me any better. If I’m spending all my time working on bettering myself and trying to better my craft, the money’s irrelevant. I don’t even have the time to spend it. So it’s just like saying everything’s dead. I’m focusing on living forever through my music and my art.” **PLAY WITH FIRE** “Even though we want to move far away from situations and circumstances, we keep toying with the idea \[of them\]. It plays on your mind that you want to be in that position. ‘PLAY WITH FIRE’ is the letting go as well as trying to hold on to these things. When it goes into \[next track\] ‘i tried,’ it’s like, ‘I tried to do all these things, live up to these expectations and be this person, but it wasn’t working for me.’ And on the other foot, I *tried* all these things. I can’t die saying I didn’t. You have to love everything for how it is to understand it, and try and move on. You’ve got to understand something for the negative before you can really understand the positive.” **i tried** “‘Long road/Tumble down this black hole/Stuck in Sunday league/But I’m on levels with Ronaldo.’ It’s saying it’s been a struggle to get here. And even still, I feel like I’m traveling into a void. You feel like you’re sinking into yourself—be it through taking too many drugs or drinking too much and burying yourself in a hole, just being on autopilot. It’s coming to that understanding, and dealing with those problems. It’s \[about\] boosting my confidence and my true self: ‘Yo, man, you’re the best. If this was football, you’d be the Ballon d’Or winner.’ We always look at what we think we should be like. We never actually look at who we are, and what our qualities are. ‘I’ve got a sickness/And I’m dealing with it.’ I’m trying. I\'m trying every avenue, and with a bit of hope and a bit of luck, I can become who I want to be.” **focus** “From the beginning, even though I’m in this pocket of people and this way of life, I’ve always known to go against that grain. I didn’t ever want to end up in jail. You either get a trade or you end doing shit and potentially you end in jail. A lot of people around me, they’re still in that cycle. And this is me saying, ‘Focus on some other shit.’ I come from the shit, and I pushed and I got there. And it was through maintaining that focus.” **terms** “It’s the terms and conditions that come with popularity and...fame. I don’t like that word. I hate words like ‘fad’ and ‘fame.’ They make me cringe so much. Maybe I’ve got something against words that begin with F. But it’s just dealing with what comes with it and how it’s not what you expected it to be. The headache of being judged for being a human being. Once you get any recognition for your art, you’re no longer a human—you’re a product. Dominic \[Fike, guest vocalist\] sums it up beautifully in the hook.” **push** “‘Push’ is an acronym for ‘praying until something happens.’ When you’re in a corner, you’ve got to keep pushing. Even when you’re at your lowest. That’s all life is, right? It’s a push. Being pulled is the easy route, but when you’re pushing for something, the hard work conditions your mind, strengthens you physically and spiritually, and you come out on top. I used to be religious—when my brother passed, when I was young. I asked for a Bible for my birthday, which was some weird shit. Through this project…it’s not faith in God, but my faith in people, it’s been kind of restored, my faith in myself. Everyone I work with on this, they’re my friends, and they’re all people that have helped me through something. And Deb \[Never, guest vocalist\]—we call each other twins. She’s my sister that I’ve known my whole life but I haven’t known my whole life.” **nhs** “It’s all about appreciation. The NHS—something that’s been doing work for generations, to save people—it’s been so taken for granted. It’s a place where everyone’s equal and everyone’s treated the same. It takes this \[pandemic\] for us to applaud people who have been giving their lives to help others. They should have constant applause at the end of every shift. We’re out here complaining and always wanting more. I don’t know if it’s a human defect or just consumerism, but you get one thing and then you always want the next best thing. I do it a lot. And there’s never a best one, because there’s always another one. Just be happy with what you’ve got. You\'ll end up having an aneurysm.” **feel away** “Dom \[Maker, co-producer and one half of Mount Kimbie\] works with James \[Blake\] a lot. They record a bunch of stuff, chop it up and create loops. I was going through all these loops, and I was like, ‘This one’s the one.’ As soon as we played it, I had lyrics and recorded my bit. I’ve loved James from when I was a kid at school and was like, ‘We should get James.’ We sent it to him, and in my head, I was like, ‘Ah, he’s not going to record on it.’ But the next day, we had the tune. I was just so gassed. I dedicated it to my brother passing. But it’s about putting yourself in your partner’s shoes, because through experiences, be it from my mum or friends, I’ve learnt that in a lot of relationships, when a woman’s pregnant, the man tends to leave the woman. The woman usually is all alone to deal with all these problems. I wanted it to be the other way around—the woman leaves the man. He’s got to go through all that pain to get to the better side, the beauty of it.” **adhd** “When I was really young, my mum and people around me didn’t really believe in \[ADHD\]—like, ‘It’s a hyperactive kid, they just want attention.’ They didn’t ever see it as a disorder. And I think this is my way of summarizing the whole album: This is something that I’ve dealt with, and people around me have dealt with. It’s hard for people to understand because they don’t get why it’s the impulses, or how it might just be a reaction to something that you can’t control. You try to, but it’s embedded in you. It’s just my conclusion—like at the end of the book, when you get to the bit where everything starts making sense. I feel like this is the most connected I’ve been to a song. It’s the clearest depiction of what my voice naturally sounds like, without me pushing it out, or projecting it in any way, or being aggressive. It’s just softly spoken, and then it gets to that anger at the end. And then a kiss—just to sweeten it all up.”

In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”

In the lexicon of jazz band configurations, the trio is perhaps most challenging. Triangulating compositions through just three instruments, there is ample space for each member to either sink or fly. For New York-based composer, professor and pianist Vijay Iyer, it\'s the perfect setting in which to showcase his intuitive, emotive approach to improvisation, one that feeds off collaboration as much as it is propelled by uncompromising individual thought. Despite having spent the past decade playing informally with bassist Linda May Han Oh and two decades recording and performing with drummer Tyshawn Sorey, *Uneasy* is his first in this trio configuration. “The impetus behind this album wasn’t necessarily a theme—it was just about the three of us playing together,” Iyer tells Apple Music. “As soon as we sat down together in 2019, I realised our playing had its own energy and drive, it demanded its own space for a project.” The result is eight reimagined compositions from the past 20 years of Iyer’s work, as well as a tribute to his long-time mentor and friend Geri Allen and a reinterpretation of the jazz standard “Night and Day”. *Uneasy* takes its title from a 2011 collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage, and its reference to the emotions of anxiety and discontent come to epitomise the ensuing narrative of the record as a whole. “We want you to inhabit this slightly turbulent space of the album, since life is not stable, as is increasingly revealed to us every day,” Iyer says as he guides us through each of *Uneasy*\'s tracks. **“Children of Flint”** \"I had been invited in 2019 to write a piece for a classical music context, and the theme was \'the year of water\'. Immediately, I thought, ‘The year of water for whom? What about people who don\'t have it?’ In the US context, it becomes a political question, and with the Flint crisis, this was a moment where a political disaster caused an environmental disaster that disproportionately affected communities of colour. So I wrote a piece for solo viola called \'Song for Flint\', which had a mournful and harrowing quality to it. There was a fragment of it that kept haunting me, and I wanted to keep that sense of rage and to direct energy and money to that community. When it came to the trio, I included this piece called \'Children of Flint\' on the record, as it is both a child of the \'Song for Flint\' and I imagined it playing for children or giving it to children.\" **“Combat Breathing”** \"This was originally created for the occasion of a Black Lives Matter protest that we did at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014, which was the year of the birth of the movement. That year, things came to a boil and we all wanted to divert energy in the direction of the people on the ground who were doing the work. With the trio’s interpretation, it has a sense of urgency to it, but then it also has a space where it imagines a different reality and it stretches out. Something that this group does best is to stretch out without too much provocation, to allow the music to blossom into a river of energy.\" **“Night and Day”** \"Joe Henderson made a version of this Cole Porter composition in 1966, which remakes the song. Musicians in the jazz lineage have always repurposed and reinvented pre-existing material on their own terms. It’s a transformative tradition of creating something else using a found text as a vehicle. With the trio, we wanted to capture the very colourful, bright energy of Henderson and McCoy Tyner’s version. I\'ve been listening to that recording for 30 years and I\'ve studied McCoy Tyner, trying to understand how he sets things in motion, how he anchors the sound and how he creates this spectrum of colours. Since he passed away last year, this is a tribute to him.\" **“Touba”** \"The poet Michael Ladd and I collaborated on an album called *In What Language?* in 2003, and there is a piece on there called \'Plastic Bag\', which is based around a poem about a Senegalese street vendor in New York. He was part of this community that practised a version of Islam called Mouride; their mythic homeland is called Touba, and wherever they settle and build community, like in Harlem, you\'ll find these businesses called Touba. They carry this sense of home with them throughout the diaspora. That piece was called \'Plastic Bag\' because this guy carried all his earthly belongings in this gigantic plastic sack, and this version is a travelling blues.\" **“Drummer’s Song”** \"I\'ve been a fan of Geri Allen’s music and her playing since the late ’80s. I first heard her when I was 16, and later, in the early 2000s, I got to know her better, and she\'s been a hero to me ever since. She became a very nurturing and endlessly generous member of our community. Very few of us knew that she was suffering when she died of cancer at the age of 60 in 2017. I wanted to continue to study her music and to perform it and uphold her legacy as best as I can. Playing this composition of hers for the record was a nice challenge. It\'s really hard to pull off in the trio context because there\'s a lot of polyphony going on and everyone has to cover a lot of bases. She always made it look effortless.\" **“Augury”** \"For this track, we were all done with the recording sessions. Tyshawn and Linda went home and I just asked the engineer to hit record. In those moments, especially after a long day of recording, you\'re depleted and in a vulnerable state, which attunes you intuitively to certain things. I went in with no real agenda; I didn\'t know if I would make anything worth salvaging, I just decided to play something. This was what came out in that moment, and I call it ‘Augury\' because it feels like a certain kind of divination. In that moment at the end of 2019, at the cusp of a disastrous year, what am I hearing?\" **“Configurations”** \"It had been almost 20 years since I\'d last performed this piece with Tyshawn and I dared him to play it to see if he remembered, and of course he did—he has a genius memory. We had fun pulling it together, particularly trying to do it as a trio because it has a challenging structure, but Linda and Tyshawn always rise above any challenge and make it into something better. It ended up becoming a set piece for us where there\'s all this energy being passed around rapidly and then there is a wild ending referencing different rhythmic techniques from South Indian music.\" **“Uneasy”** \"This piece was written for a collaboration with a dance company in 2011, and we were thinking about what it was to be an American 10 years after 9/11. It was the thick and thin of the Obama years—optimism and surveillance, truth and deception. \'Uneasy’ was the word for how none of that felt quite right. We were asking with the piece, what does it mean to come together with a certain kind of exuberance and yet to also know that there\'s something sinister beneath the surface that we are not talking about yet? Now, 10 years on, it still fits well with the current moment—perhaps even better. In American life, we\'re living in the echo of that time.\" **“Retrofit”** \"I wrote this originally for my sextet, since I wanted to make something that was dealing with new ideas rhythmically and harmonically. Reducing it to the trio format meant that it could be split open differently to become an interactive vehicle for us. Especially in the last few minutes, it becomes molten—it keeps changing shape, and that\'s something that we can do with the trio because we’re a rhythm section. A lot of what is happening in our work is rhythm being expressed and then shifting.\" **“Entrustment”** \"So often with the trio, we\'re creating an intimate version of something more grand, which is the case with ‘Entrustment’, a composition I wrote as part of a larger suite for a string orchestra. The suite was called ‘City of Sand’ and it was inspired by me visiting the site of an incredible network of several hundred Buddhist cave temples in the Gobi Desert. It was this crossroads of all these different cultures, and ‘Entrustment’ was the closing meditation, a processional embrace of that kind of openness, expansiveness and emptiness. It\'s only two chords—it’s made of almost nothing, it\'s just those qualities coming together.\"