PopMatters' 70 Best Albums of 2025 So Far

Alison Krauss and her band Union Station aren’t what you’d call prolific. After all, this eighth studio album from the bluegrass outfit comes 14 years after its predecessor, the critically acclaimed *Paper Airplane*. As any Krauss fan knows, though, the 27-time Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate prioritizes quality over quantity, and the 10 new songs comprising this collection are no exception to that rule. Krauss and the band produced *Arcadia* alongside fellow Grammy winner Gary Paczosa (Dolly Parton, Sierra Ferrell), with IIIrd Tyme Out’s Russell Moore joining Union Station in place of longtime guitarist Dan Tyminski, whose own solo and side projects have picked up significantly in the near decade and a half since *Paper Airplane*’s release. *Arcadia* opens with the Jeremy Lister-penned “Looks Like the End of the Road,” a dusky and dramatic ballad with a sparkling vocal from Krauss, whose voice sounds as pristine as it ever has. Moore’s guitar retains the Southern gothic moodiness once brought by Tyminski, and his lead vocal on tracks like “The Hangman” offers a sturdy, soulful counterpoint to Krauss’s honeyed soprano—notably, Moore is the most decorated male vocalist in International Bluegrass Music Association history. Other highlights include the Tyminski co-write “The Wrong Way,” which lets Jerry Douglas shine on dobro and lap steel guitar, and closer “There’s a Light Up Ahead,” another Lister tune with gorgeously atmospheric production that really gives Krauss space to soar.

Bartees Strange’s third album finds the Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter stretching his sonic limbs further than ever before—an achievement, to be sure, since Strange’s first two records (2020’s *Live Forever* and 2022’s critical breakthrough *Farm to Table*) cemented his ability to effortlessly hop between anthemic rock, dusky blues, and rap cadences within just a few minutes. With a slightly darker sound befitting its namesake, *Horror* adds a few impressive guises to Strange’s genre menagerie: There’s the explicitly Fleetwood Mac-esque jangle of “Sober,” the melancholic trip-hop skitter of “Doomsday Buttercup,” and the lucious house thump of “Lovers,” which might count as Strange’s starkest left turn to date. Across these 12 tracks, Strange also fine-tunes his winning formula of countrified balladry and propulsive riffs, both of which are given a big-ticket pop spit-shine courtesy of contributions from studio wizards Yves and Lawrence Rothman as well as the ever-ubiquitous Jack Antonoff. Don’t mistake big names for unnecessary flashiness, though: *Horror* retains the down-to-earth POV that’s made Strange an increasingly powerful presence in indie, even as his ambitions grow.

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What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.

Justin Vernon has never been shy about bearing the weight of his instantly mythical origin story and his fast, unlikely trajectory into global stardom. Four albums and 18 years after *For Emma, Forever Ago*, *SABLE, fABLE* is a document of finding peace—joy, even—and a testament to the work it’s taken to get there. “This record, as much as that first record, if not more, was really just a keystone for healing and growing away from this time period where I felt trapped,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Once COVID wiped out the tour plans for 2019’s *i,i*, Vernon, like pretty much everyone, used the time to take stock, and he came to understand, among other things, that touring might not be the healthiest thing for him. So he made songs. “It really was like, ‘Okay, I’m not well and I won\'t make it if I don\'t do something to change this pretty drastically and stop the whole touring engine,” Vernon says. “There was a sense of relief and an incredible grief to say goodbye to the team that we built. I was like, ‘Let me just get these songs done and just sneak them out there so I can just get them off my chest,’ because that’s what I really needed: to finish them, to learn what was inside them.” The first of these songs, written at the beginning of lockdown, “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is a snapshot of that lonely, uncertain time, but it feels bigger and more hopeful than that to Vernon with five years of hindsight. “In the short term, it makes you feel better, but it’s also a way to lean into your grief and lean into your pain and lean into your guilt,” he says. “I think eventually when I hear that song now, I feel clean from everything that I was dealing with when I had to write it and after I wrote it. But it takes years for things to take shape and for internal things to budge.” From there, the album begins to let more light in with songs like the evidently more hopeful “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (“It’s just all about celebrating this moment right here and just sort of trying to express that heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest feeling”) and “If Only I Could Wait,” featuring vocals from Danielle Haim of HAIM, which Vernon considers nothing less than his favorite American rock band. The album splits the difference between the immediacy of *For Emma* and the often inscrutable maximalism of *22, A Million* and *i,i*. It was during the album’s long gestation that Vernon’s profile was boosted by his work with Taylor Swift, even as his own project remained in the shadows, Vernon exercising a patience and restraint and creating a healthier perspective that was nothing less than career-saving, if not life-saving. “We are insanely beautiful creatures,” he says. “And so I think where I’ve got to with the simplicity of this music, it was just like, I just want to give it to you. I just want to have it be my version of Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’—just boom, here it is. We’re not going to hide, we’re not going to put it behind any drapery. We’re going to just give it to you as much as humanly possible.”

On their third album, Liverpudlian boys Courting continue to invite favorable comparisons to UK pop-rock phenoms The 1975. They both have an obvious predilection for long album titles, and *Lust for Life*’s bait-and-switch opening tracks—the orchestral place-setting of “Rollback Intro” followed by the rude rave music of “Stealth Rollback”—is practically and lovingly ripped from Matty Healy and George Daniel’s playbook. But pithy comparisons otherwise elude Courting’s delightful multifariousness as they smash a brief interpolation of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” turducken-style into the upbeat jangle of “Namcy” and follow the snarling alt-rock of “After You” with a six-minute odyssey of a title track that includes multiple suites and heavy vocal processing. Courting is the type of band to try anything once and immediately knock it out of the park.

There has always been something deeply old-fashioned about DJ Koze’s music, a sense of wonder and invention more closely related to the rush of a Bugs Bunny cartoon or the moony romance of a prewar pop song than anything from the modern era per se. *Music Can Hear Us* is only his fourth album in 20 years—DJ work keeps him busy, and in general he does not seem like one to hurry—and builds on the pan-electronic style he developed on *Amygdala* and *Knock Knock*. The songs shuffle between tropical pop (the Damon Albarn-featuring “Pure Love”), melancholy ambience (“A Dónde Vas?”), lightly psychedelic club tracks (“Aruna,” “Buschtaxi”), and doo-wop sweetness (“Unbelievable,” “Umaoi”) with a fluidity that can feel both playful and dizzying. Music for tickling your third eye.

One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting *The Crow* reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). *EUSEXUA*, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, *Caprisongs*), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style. The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from *EUSEXUA*’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.

Whatever conversation remains ongoing about Goose’s taxonomical classification as a jam band or just a really excellent and adventurous pop-rock one should end with *Everything Must Go*. Shaggy enough for the tapers (“Iguana Song”) and emotionally direct enough for a movie montage (“Give It Time”), they cover a huge amount of musical ground while always sounding like themselves. There’s the irrepressible ’80s funk pop of “Animal” and “Feel It Now” (which are somehow both Michael Jackson and Talking Heads) alongside the woodland epic of “Silver Rising”—poles of the same spectrum the Dead and Phish spent decades reconciling. But if you really want to know why this so-called jam band succeeds on record, it’s because they carefully choreograph each point in their long-ish songs to lead organically to the next—in that sense, they barely jam at all.

Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”

Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan took very different paths to their off-the-cuff debut performance together at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2014. A Massachusetts native who was raised singing Irish songs and loving American folk, O’Donovan had just made her solo debut after years in the kinetic Crooked Still. A decade her junior, the multi-instrumentalist Jarosz was already a rising Americana star, her Texas roots balanced by an interest in subtly cinematic sounds. Watkins, meanwhile, had been a figurehead of modern bluegrass for at least a dozen years, her trio Nickel Creek having helped usher in a new generation of listeners. Nevertheless, when they sang together that first time, they recognized the instant connection and soon started I’m With Her, a supreme roots supergroup with a soft heart and a sharp sense of humor. *Wild and Clear and Blue* is their sophisticated sophomore album, with every trace of hesitation from their 2018 debut erased by years of tours and a 2019 single so strong it netted a Grammy. Written and rendered by all three members together, these 11 spellbinding tunes shape a loose concept album about origins and exits, beginnings and endings. The tender title track is an homage not only to the late hero Nanci Griffith but to that emotional spark that lights the way to a life in music; closer “Rhododendron” drops down by the river with a soulful gospel sway to contemplate where it is we all come to rest. The tracks between those points are revelatory documents of age, of lives being lived—the astral existentialism of “Only Daughter,” the relational tension of “Different Rocks, Different Hills,” the mature contemplation of “Year After Year.” Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman produced *Wild and Clear and Blue*, fostering a textural flexibility that gives these songs extra warmth and gravity. That is especially true for the staggering “Standing on the Fault Line,” a heartfelt interrogation of what it means to call a place home and then consider leaving. Rising from a luminous drone to a sweeping ballad with three-part harmonies, the song steadily ushers in rivulets of electric guitar and a tide of simple, emphatic drums. “Just put one foot in front of the other,” they all sing in the last chorus, voices crisscrossing for extra resolve. “Don’t look back.”

Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.

It was during a time-out after the whirlwind success of his 2019 debut *Hypersonic Missiles* and its 2021 follow-up *Seventeen Going Under* that Sam Fender realized what his third album needed to be. Those two records had made the singer-songwriter from Northeast England one of the breakthrough artists of the past decade, a homegrown superstar who’d gone from playing local venues to stadiums and now had a pair of BRIT Awards sitting on his mantelpiece. But Fender had felt a little rushed making *Seventeen Going Under* and he was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, no matter how long it took. Allied to that, he also wanted to hold to a simple and concise aim. “When writing the past two albums I started with a clear goal and concept, but towards the end of recording it always morphed into something else—at least for me it did,” Fender told Apple Music when announcing *People Watching* in November 2024. “I wanted to go in there and write good songs; not think about some grandiose overblown message, just 10/11 good songs about ordinary people.” His patience paid off. *People Watching* is Fender’s most perfectly realized release to date. Its title neatly sums up the emotional connection at the heart of the 30-year-old’s music and his supernatural gift for wrapping everyday tales in an exhilarating, euphoric release. It’s still his beloved hometown that remains the primary focus but in Fender’s dexterous hands, the place has become a prism through which he sings about grief, family, mental health, poverty, homelessness, the government, and more. Sonically, *People Watching* is the most sumptuous work of his career, one that builds on the bounding, Springsteen-style expanse and emerges with a technicolor indie-rock masterpiece stacked with another raft of killer choruses for the masses to sing along to. Fender nodded to his love of The War on Drugs on *Seventeen Going Under* and here he goes one step further, enlisting the band’s mercurial leader Adam Granduciel as co-producer alongside Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine). Nothing here is overloaded. Even at its most epic, there’s an intricacy and airiness about these songs, Granduciel’s synth flourishes adding a dynamic counterpoint to Fender’s rousing hooks. It’s a record of many shapes and textures, taking in the urgent classic rock of the title track, yearning anthems (“Little Bit Closer”), contemplative Americana with a bit of a swagger about it (“Wild Long Lie”), and wistful ’80s pop (“Crumbling Empire”). At its best, it pairs his love of US heartland rock with an Oasis-style jubilance. In its minor chord acoustic strums, “Chin Up” even has echoes of “Wonderwall” about it. But it’s hard to imagine Noel and Liam attempting a song like “Remember My Name,” the stirring, stark closer made up of nothing but Fender’s vocals and the moving horns of the Easington Colliery Band, an emotive salute to his northeast roots and a song that places Sam Fender out there on his own. *People Watching* may well be the sound of an artist entering his imperial phase.

On “Slugger,” the first track from SASAMI’s third album, *Blood on the Silver Screen*, the singer stamps out one of the oldest clichés in the book. Over shuffling hi-hats and a rubbery bassline she sings, “Whoever said that it’s better to have loved and to lost/Than to not have loved at all/Should just shut up forever.” Alongside co-producers Rostam and Jenn Decilveo, the LA-based indie rock star takes aim at the lovers and lust-hungry obsessives throughout. On “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things,” guitars screech and shout before SASAMI rolls through with a metal-worthy solo during the introduction. “Bet it all on you, now I gotta leave town,” she sings, exposing the dark underbelly that exists beneath the surface of pop music’s romanticism. The album finds her moving away from the experimental songwriting of previous records like 2022’s *Squeeze*, instead turning in a streamlined and diamond-sharp ode to the parts of love that suck.

“How can I ever write anything again?” That was Self Esteem—aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s—first thought when it came to following up her second album, 2021’s *Prioritise Pleasure*, with its five-star reviews and album of the year accolades. But after she followed an exhausting bout of touring in 2023 with almost six months of playing Sally Bowles in West End show *Cabaret*, Taylor packed herself off to Margate and got down to business. The result is *A Complicated Woman*, a massive album full of joy, anger, and humor which is made to be blasted out of stadiums. Except Taylor opted for an intimate theater run in London to showcase it to fans. Complicated, indeed. “I’m proud of how it’s come out,” Taylor tells Apple Music. “It’s dense and it’s complicated, because this time in my life is dense and it’s complicated.” The sound is big and unapologetic. “This is the first time I’ve had access to a proper choir and string arrangement, which was amazing,” she says. “I’m not one of those people who goes into the studio and jams, but if you leave me alone to think I can do it. Back in the day, I would try and write from nine to five, but it doesn’t work like that for me.” *A Complicated Woman* is a collection of songs that stop you in your tracks, from uplifting anthems (“If Not Now, It’s Soon”) to pounding electronica (“69”) and vulnerable confessions (“The Deep Blue Okay”). Eating cheesy chips and rewatching *Gladiator* gave Taylor an unlikely moment of inspiration: “The way he \[Oliver Reed’s character Proximo to Russell Crowe’s Maximus\] goes, ‘Win the crowd and you’ll win your freedom’—with *Prioritise Pleasure* doing how it did, and then that Glastonbury show (her 2022 performance at a packed-out John Peel Stage), that felt like I’d won the crowd. Before that, it always felt like you needed a moment on TikTok or you need this or you need this ad campaign or you need...all these things. Then I was like, ‘Oh, it was all here already. It’s your people.’” A lot of positivity sits alongside the anger on the album and Taylor is conscious she doesn’t have all the answers. “Women are still meant to be this one thing,” she says. “You can have everything, but you have to stay in line. It’s a kind of collection of national anthems for that idea.” Read on as Taylor takes you through it, track by track. **“I Do and I Don’t Care”** “The point of the album is that things are shit, but you have to just keep finding those little pockets of resistance, even if they’re tiny, and then try and be OK. This lyric came when I went home to Sheffield and someone asked how I was and I probably was whinging. But I thought, ‘Of course we’re complaining. What else are we going to do? You would be too if the system wasn’t moving for you in the way that it does.’ I suppose my ethos is I’m a complainer, I’ll always whinge, even when I’ve got what I want. But I’ll always meet it with some action. Whinging and doing nothing about it: bad. Whinging and trying: good.” **“Focus Is Power”** “‘Focus Is Power’ is a bit feel-good and I’m trying to say, ‘Keep going, keep trying, keep your eye on the prize.’ Not in a cheesy way. But I do wonder, ‘Am I a modern-day M People?’ For so long I wanted to be in the middle of the stage with the lights on me, I wanted to wear the clothes and have the shit and be invited to all the things. Then obviously I’ve learned that that’s all bollocks, and the best bit by a mile is helping people and having them go, ‘Oh, I feel like that too.’ I felt so alone until I was 35, and now I get to feel less alone by doing this. People have really responded to this song and been like, ‘Fucking hell, I needed to think like that again.’ And so do I.” **“Mother”** “This isn’t just about men and women, but it’s about the way that in heteronormative relationships it’s so often you teaching the man, and then you break up and some other fucker benefits from them being better dressed and not as much of a twat. It’s just so annoying. A lot of gay men are really responding to the track as well. It’s just relationships, isn’t it? One person is mother. I don’t want to be in control—I would absolutely fucking love to be some swooning, looked-after thing, but it’s not going to happen unless I fundamentally change everything about myself.” **“The Curse”** “I didn’t want to get bogged down in singles but then, for me, ‘The Curse’ could be one. It’s about when I was partying after *Prioritise Pleasure* came out. I was having to go to these red carpet dos and I’ve never had a problem with booze, but it’s the first time I realized I was drinking to be able to do things. Since writing that song, I’ve had a really good relationship with alcohol. I feel like if I’d have heard it a couple of years ago that would have made something click. So again, it’s another song where I’m like, ‘This helped me so it might help you.’” **“Logic, Bitch!” (feat. Sue Tompkins)** “I’m really proud of this song—it’s about realizing just because love is no longer romantic doesn’t mean it’s not valid. I hate hearing and being a woman that’s like, ‘I just can’t find a relationship and that means I’m sad.’ I love watching *Love Island* and *Love Is Blind*, but then I’m like, ‘Why is having a relationship still front and center to everyone’s existence?’ The song features Sue Tompkins from Life Without Buildings, who I think is really cool. We’ve never met, she did it on her phone from Scotland—it started out as a long-form piece but we couldn’t fit it all on there.” **“Cheers to Me”** “This is about skinny indie boys who make women feel crazy and unwanted. I’m worried about people saying, ‘Why are you mentioning body type?’ But it’s about those men who are like, ‘I’m not the problem because I read’ or ‘I watch arthouse films.’ And it’s about how the word ‘lonely’ is overused. Being on your own is fucking brilliant. Alone time is wonderful. But it’s on the tip of people’s tongues to be like, ‘I’m lonely.’ And it’s like, ‘I don’t think you are. You’re having a nice time, but you just don’t have a boyfriend.’” **“If Not Now, It’s Soon”** “You know that Elbow song, ‘One Day Like This’? I wanted to make something like that, with a Team GB feeling. It was definitely a conscious decision to make it feel hopeful, but trying to make a video for it was really hard until I figured it out. It’s basically a very big group hug of women who are like, ‘Same time next week?’ And it’s personal and political, so when I’m at my lowest, it’s a reminder to be patient and persistent. The speech originally comes from Julie Hesmondhalgh \[Coronation Street, *Happy Valley*, and *Mr Bates vs The Post Office* actor\] at an NHS rally saying, ‘Change is in the air’. She and I spoke through it and wrote it together, then she recorded this powerfully rousing speech in her kitchen.” **“In Plain Sight” (with Moonchild Sanelly)** “I hate being like this, but it does feel like women are judged to such a different standard to men. And men’s behavior gets explained away—and so much more easily than women’s. I did feel like a lot of things in my life have been harder because I’m a woman and I didn’t realize it—I grew up not knowing there was any difference. This song is special to me. Moonchild Sanelly wrote the poem in 10 minutes, and what you hear is the first time she read it out loud. She cried, I cried. It was a really special moment in my life. We’d done ‘Big Man’ together and obviously she was comfortable in that space, and I don’t fully know her story and she doesn’t know mine, but it’s that feeling-seen thing.” **“Lies” (feat. Nadine Shah)** “I’ve been a fan of Nadine Shah for years and then met her and we became buddies. And I wanted to start a girl band with her and Florence, but obviously, no one’s got any time. I do have an ambition to make a version of ‘Lies’ with 20 women doing a verse each. It’s one of those songs that has polish, but then you undercut it with the hardcore lyrics. None of the songs are meant to be background music—you can’t work to them, you have to stop and listen. I don’t want to be making music unless it’s like that.” **“69”** “I’d like to write Christina Aguilera’s ‘Dirrty’ for today, but ‘69’ isn’t that. The lyrics just fell out of me. I’d had an idea for ages to do a dance song that is just listing sex positions and rating them out of 10, then it augmented into what you now see before you. A lot of people have been like, ‘Oh, it’s very brave to put that out.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t even notice.’ It’s pretty political to do a sexy song, but it’s instructive and it’s inherently not sexy. I’m saying it without the MO being to turn men on. So many overwhelming responses have been like, ‘Finally, someone said it.’ What else are we mass nodding along to and pretending we like here? Like heels.” **“What Now”** “This is an idea I’ve had in my head for such a long time of getting everything you want and then it still not being all right. Disney created happy ever after and that’s a fallacy. Worse than that, I really do still adhere in my soul to feeling like, ‘Oh, well, when I’ve got that, I’ll be all right. And when my hair’s down to here, it’ll be better.’ And then you realize, you get somewhere and then it’s just more and then you’ll die. So it’s more dense than that. I don’t think the album is all female-based issues, it’s finding the world a bit tough and not getting everything as seemingly as quick as everyone else does, and no one admits it. We’re all still faking it.” **“The Deep Blue Okay”** “This is one of the most important songs I’ve ever written. It had to be the final track on the album, so it might suffer from people not bothering to listen to it. When I was writing this, I thought, ‘What’s my version of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”?’ I wrote it in about 10 minutes and it’s insanely emotional. It’s so personal to me, but everyone is finding their own journey in it. I’m conscious that people-pleasing felt like it kept me safe and I’d love to be able to have more conflict and say what I mean more. The songs sound like they do, but in my actual life you wouldn’t believe how scared and shy I am about saying what I want.”