“I know that my world is grown old,” Robert Smith says in “And Nothing Is Forever,” one of the many standout tracks on The Cure’s 14th studio album and first in 16 years. *Songs of a Lost World* deals almost exclusively in death, dying, and the relentless march of time; the songs move slowly, and many go on for minutes before Smith opens his mouth. There’s no pop hits, no hooks, and—let’s face it—no fun. It’s also some of the band’s most engrossing work, a statement that, like most great Cure songs, can’t be taken lightly. The glacially paced opener and lead single, “Alone,” is majestic and mournful, with string swells and apocalyptic lyrics about birds falling out of the sky. But mostly it’s about dying alone, the shattered pieces of a regret-filled life, and the forgone conclusion that is our mutual demise: “This is the end of every song that we sing.” On “A Fragile Thing,” a plinking piano gives way to a thudding bassline as Smith sings of heartbreak, distance, and fait accompli. It might be the closest the album comes to vintage ’80s Cure, but now the 65-year-old Smith’s customarily downbeat lyrics come with the weight of lived wisdom and cruel inevitability. “Warsong” twists the screws with a churning, droning meditation on domestic battles and bitter regret; at a bit over four minutes, it’s also the shortest song on the album. “Drone:Nodrone” is the catchiest and most upbeat of the bunch—musically speaking, anyway. Smith’s lyrics are no picnic, of course. They’re not a completely hopeless death spiral, but they certainly acknowledge a tumultuous relationship: “The answers that I have are not the answers that you want” and “I can’t anymore/If I ever really could.” The track also features squalling guitar leads from former Tin Machine/David Bowie sideman Reeves Gabrels, who joined The Cure in 2012 but makes his first studio appearance with the band here. “I Can Never Say Goodbye” laments the death of Smith’s brother Richard with the refrain “Something wicked this way comes,” a phrase popularized by the title of Ray Bradbury’s influential 1962 novel. (The Cure debuted the song in concert in 2022 in Poland, where Richard Smith apparently lived for many years.) Like much of *Lost World*, it’s a tearjerker. With all this loss and mortality, *Songs of a Lost World* recalls Bowie’s 2016 swan song, *Blackstar*. Finishing an album about death with a sprawling, gorgeous track called “Endsong” isn’t necessarily ominous, but who knows? For what it’s worth, Smith is already promising a follow-up to *Songs of a Lost World*. Hopefully, it won’t take 16 years.
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.
It was over a meal towards the end of touring their second album, *Gigi’s Recovery*, at the end of 2023 that the artistic blueprint for what would become *Blindness* came into being for The Murder Capital. *Gigi’s Recovery* was a mesmeric leap forward for the Irish quintet, the tightly wound post-punk of their 2019 debut, *When I Have Fears*, unfurling into something more wide-screen and dramatic. However, extended bouts of touring, including support slots with heavyweights Pearl Jam and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, had turned The Murder Capital into a dynamically thrilling rock band. They wanted their next move to reflect that. “There’s quite an expansive and indulgent cinematic approach on our second record,” singer James McGovern tells Apple Music. “We went for dinner, and we all came together in agreement that we wanted to inject an urgency and an energy back into the music again. It was probably the first time we had a shared manifesto going into making a record.” It has resulted in an epic but lean rock record, the grooves a little looser-limbed, the hooks sharp—the sound of a band realizing exactly who they are three albums in. “We stripped back our process completely to a whole different way of working,” says McGovern. “We made no demos going into the studio, just phone recordings, and that really refocused us on what the substance of a song actually is, what we’re drawn to and what it means when it’s just those bare things.” Exploring themes of patriotism and nationalism alongside reflections on love and romance, *Blindness* is a gripping listen from start to finish. Let McGovern and guitarist Damien Tuit guide you through it, track by track. **“Moonshot”** Damien Tuit: “We wanted to open the record with this because it just bursts out of the speakers.” James McGovern: “It kicked the door down. It stood for everything that we’d set out to do in the very beginning. As you make a record, you’re brought down all these other garden paths that you don’t expect, but ‘Moonshot’ really just kind of stood for that. It had that exact character.” **“Words Lost Meaning”** DT: “This is an example of us being more than the sum of our parts. Gabe \[bassist Gabriel Paschal Blake\] had the bassline for the verse, and then I got some chords together for the chorus, and then James has this hook. It’s everyone working together, and it came together in a couple hours.” JM: “Months later, we were talking about this tune, and Gabe told us he was having a row with his girlfriend, and he’s not really a man of conflict, so he took some space for himself and went to play some bass and do a bit of writing, and that’s where he wrote this bassline. It’s kind of funny how the subject matter of the song unknowingly became about friction within a relationship itself.” **“Can’t Pretend to Know”** JM: “This has been through many different footings. It was a tune that I started out at home on the acoustic. I felt a love for it pretty quickly and then brought it in, and it went through a few different phases.” DT: “The initial version was slowed down: Pump \[guitarist Cathal Roper\] was doing a Chili Peppers kind of rhythm. When we were in the studio, John \[producer John Congleton\] forced us to push it full tilt. It was one that really grew in the studio.” **“A Distant Life”** DT: “That was written on tour. All the venues on this UK tour were freezing for some reason, and I had my guitar on. I was just plucking away, and James came up to me and was like, ‘Let’s just write a song.’” JM: “We were in transit to one of the many inspiring service stops in the UK, and I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, *Poetry Unbound*, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama. It’s a beautiful podcast, and he was doing Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bread,’ and she had a line in it about the salt taste of a mouth or something like that, so I nicked that line and started writing in the service station. That night, I went up to Irv \[Tuit’s nickname\], and he had two chords, but it was where he took it.” DT: “I played the first two chords and then just started following where he was going vocally, and that was that—the song pretty much done.” **“Born into the Fight”** DT: “We fucked around with a couple of different time signatures on this. You have to do that on one song every album before you go back to the time signature you can play in. This was Pump working his magic. Those were his chords, and it’s always nice when he’s playing keys because he just adds a different dimension.” JM: “I was really enjoying writing about rejection of faith and exploring that, having conversations with the lads about their experience of growing up in Ireland and saying prayers in class and all those things. There was a good tinder there that we wanted to keep exploring.” **“Love of Country”** DT: “We were jamming in the room in Dublin, and James was writing in his notebook, and then we stopped, and he read us out this poem and the room was just silent. We were like, ‘Yeah, that feels great.’” JM: “I know a lot of artists say this, but sometimes you are writing, and it does feel like you’re observing it a bit. The whole poem came out fully formed, really. I don’t think I edited anything in it. It was something that I’ve wanted to express for a long time. It’s not just the fact that we’ve just seen the riots in Dublin, or it’s not just the fact that there’s a hyper fixation on national ideologies globally now. It’s also feeling, as a kid, the anti-British sentiment on the playground or all these things and feeling rubbed up the wrong way by that stuff, this kind of ownership over land. It all seems to have come together into this tune in some way, as a small part of that conversation.” **“The Fall”** JM: “This was the first thing in my lyric notebook from this whole record. I’d written them in Cologne on tour. I remember all us really buzzing on the chords for this tune. We had a really good time playing it in our road-testing shows that we did at the MOTH Club in London and The Grand Social in Dublin. People were absolutely going mad for it, so it had something—we just had to put it together. It’s about how no one can change you but yourself, no matter what you’re going through, really.” **“Death of a Giant”** DT: “We were in Dublin, and Shane MacGowan’s funeral was on \[in December 2023\]. We all went and watched the hearse go by in the streets and then went straight into the room, and James just put some words about it to the music.” JM: “It just so happened that the procession was that day. We were just there to pay our respects. I think if the Irish do anything well, they celebrate death well. There was a real beauty to everything about the hearse, these black horses—the most majestic horses you’ve ever seen—and the young marching band. I didn’t really grow up on too much of The Pogues or Shane MacGowan’s work; it was only in my early twenties and starting this band, hanging out with mates and other bands, that I started to get into the breadth of his work. You could feel it that day with people singing on the street that there’s just something about him. I think, through all of his personal struggles, he as an artist really had his finger around the pulse of humanity more accurately than a lot of artists—and with such vulnerability and \[as\] a real true romantic as well. It’s nice to tip our cap in the only way we really can.” **“Swallow”** DT: “This began in my apartment with a loop, and James came over, added his part. Pump came over another day and added a part, edited it together, and then we sort of had demo-itis with it for a long time. One of the big lessons doing this album in the studio was trying to be kind to the music—something I think we struggled with generally. It’s difficult when you’re writing music—being gentle with how you critique and how you try and mold it and how you collaborate, because when you’re writing an album in the way we do—which is real true collaboration where we’re all bringing in stuff—there’s going to be some stuff that you don’t see for a long time.” JM: “That was me. I couldn’t see this song’s place in our world, but by the time it started to get recorded, I understood it. I had a great struggle with seeing this tune. Now I love it when I listen to the record.” **“That Feeling”** JM: “This was a really exciting one because it just fell out of a jam. We were in London in our studio in Holloway \[north London\]. We came back from a lunch break or something, picked up the instruments, started playing together, and there was ‘That Feeling’ almost in its entirety.” DT: “This one might be the only one that was born from a true jam on this album.” **“Trailing a Wing”** JM: “There’s a sweetness to this. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it’s there. It’s also a funny one. We played a show in Belfast, and I was out for dinner with my couple of cousins and aunties and stuff up there. We were in a Thai restaurant, and an actor who will remain unnamed walked into the restaurant, and my aunt said, ‘There’s that fella, he’s always trailing a wing.’ So, I was like, ‘What does that mean?!’ Obviously, he just cheats on his wife loads, but I thought it was a beautiful adage!”
Cage the Elephant’s *Neon Pill* arrives five years after their 2019 Grammy-winning global breakthrough *Social Cues*. Brothers and bandleaders Matt and Brad Shultz lost their father in the interim, the group mourned the death of friends, and Matt spent time in the hospital with severe depression. This tragedy, fight, spirit, and resolve is messily and triumphantly wrapped into *Neon Pill*, an album that finds the band forging their own sound devoid of outside influence, channeling their rollicking live show into a meditation on life, death, and music’s healing power. Take the psych-folk-leaning title track, which tells the story of Matt’s battle with mental illness, looking for answers but only finding more questions. As the band so often does, they mask dark and searching lyrics with melodic candy, making these philosophical queries go down more easily. On the track, Matt sings: “It\'s a hit and run, oh no/Double-crossed by a neon pill/Like a loaded gun, my love/I lost control of the wheel/Double-crossed by a neon pill.” Just like the story of the band over the past five years, the track includes a phoenix-like resurgence: “Knocked down, not out, let\'s roll.”
On their sixth album, Swedish metal conjurers Tribulation allow the goth side of their personality to overshadow their death-metal roots. *Sub Rosa in Aeternum* sees vocalist/bassist Johannes Andersson mostly ditching his demonic growl for a clean, stentorian delivery akin to that of Sisters of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch. “We wanted to do something new,” guitarist Adam Zaars tells Apple Music. “I was looking back at the previous three albums, and they’re each very much their own thing, but still similar enough for me to be craving something else. At first, we didn’t really know what that new thing would be.” Then Andersson, who hadn’t written a Tribulation song in nearly 20 years, presented his demo for what would become *Sub Rosa*’s closer, “Poison Pages.” “Obviously, the biggest change is the clean vocals,” Zaars says. “But we didn’t know if it was going to work. We’d been talking about it, but just using it as another instrument, like background harmonies or maybe a cool chorus on some song. When Johannes showed us ‘Poison Pages,’ it felt liberating—and a lot of fun to explore new ground.” *Sub Rosa* is also the first album Tribulation wrote without guitarist Jonathan Hultén, who left the band before the release of 2021’s *Where the Gloom Becomes Sound*. As a result, new guitarist Joseph Tholl contributed quite a bit of material here. “The overall sound on the album absolutely has to do with Joseph being in the band,” Zaars says. “He wrote more songs than I did. With Joseph being another type of songwriter, another type of guitar player, it feels like the beginning of a new era.” Below, Zaars comments on each track. **“The Unrelenting Choir”** “Johannes wrote this song. He hasn’t written a song since our first demo, so this was something very new for everyone. And he did great, I would say. The original version was actually longer. Where it stops now, it went into this very cool Death SS-sounding part that we might use in the future. But we needed an intro, we felt, and Johannes did this one. It has a very ‘welcome to the show’ kind of feel. He got the idea for the bass at the beginning from some podcast he listens to. He won’t tell us which one.” **“Tainted Skies”** “That’s a Joseph song sounding very much like Tribulation, but in his own special way. This is one of the things that he brought to the table that really challenged us, daring us to try new things out. The lyrics are about reincarnation, I guess, but more specifically about the in-between stage—the bardo, as the Buddhists call it. Dying and being reborn has been a Tribulation theme since forever.” **“Saturn Coming Down”** “What made me write this song with that weird intro riff was, I wanted a guitar sound that was something different, where it almost feeds back, where it’s chaotic in a way. I don’t even remember how I did it because I’m far, far from being a sound gear guy. I want to be, but I have no interest. So, it was just sheer luck that I found this strange, almost surf-guitar sound that’s a little bit Dead Kennedys. The song is about Saturn, obviously, but when I write lyrics for Tribulation, it’s like a game of association. It’s Saturn from every possible direction, so people shouldn’t be looking for a coherent theme. Well, not too coherent at least.” **“Hungry Waters”** “This is another Joseph song. It’s not as Tribulation as ‘Tainted Skies.’ The first time he showed this to me, I loved it, but I didn\'t think it could be on the album. I think that was before we decided to have a bunch of clean vocals on the album. That really was a catalyst for a few of these songs that would probably never have happened if we hadn\'t made that decision. It’s something fresh and new for us. The mid-section with the solos is very Tribulation, very Italian horror-soundtrack sounding. I was almost surprised by how well Joseph knew the sound. I’m still amazed by him writing this song.” **“Drink the Love of God”** “What the fuck is the love of God and how do you drink it? I know the answer, but I don’t want to be transparent. But I can say this: It’s the second song that was written specifically from that guitar sound from ‘Saturn Coming Down.’ It’s very rare for me to write songs quickly, but I did for this. The only other one I can remember like that is ‘The Motherhood of God’ from *The Children of the Night*. It was our producer Tom Dalgety’s idea to add the key change after the solo. Being European, I think it’s a very schlager way of writing a song. But he was right, and I was wrong, I’m happy to say.” **“Murder in Red”** “This is probably my baby on the album. Most of it wasn’t very difficult to write, but it was difficult to finish. I made a demo of this that sounded almost industrial, but Johannes took it in a completely different direction with his vocals. That was very cool, almost like a Chris Isaak song to some extent. We were pushing our boundaries in a very satisfying way. Lyrically, I’ve been into gialli and violent Italian cinema since I was 13, when I bought *Cannibal Holocaust* on VHS. Since then, I’ve been hooked. Early Tribulation lyrics were oriented more towards zombie cannibal flicks, but this is more like earlier Argento and Mario Bava.” **“Time & the Vivid Ore”** “This is a song by Joseph that’s as much a part of something old as it is of something new. It almost sounds as though it could be from *Where the Gloom Becomes Sound*, but since it’s written by Joseph, it has its own distinct *Sub Rosa* flavor to it. It’s got one of the coolest solo sections on the album, displaying both mine and Joseph’s style of guitar playing and how they, in our opinion, complement each other. It’s also the only song with exclusively growling vocals!” **“Reaping Song”** “It’s one of the songs on the album that’s quite out there in comparison with our old material—somber, melancholic, romantic, haunting, and beautiful. It wasn’t supposed to be a Nick Cave homage to begin with, and I didn’t even think of it before Tom started talking about it. Then, of course, Joseph wanted it to be called ‘Reaping Song,’ which is an obvious reference to Nick Cave. But I know it wasn’t, at first, written to be that—it just happened to sound somewhat like Nick Cave. The ‘Reaping Song’ is a song within a song, as that is what the protagonist of the story sings every year when the harvest season is upon us. Death meta.” **“Poison Pages”** “This is the song that really settled the new direction with the clean vocals. Johannes wrote it, and in the demo, he was singing. It wasn’t a decision that happened instantaneously, but after listening to it a lot, I think we all realized that this could be something to pursue. It’s a very goth-rock kind of song about *The Name of the Rose*, specifically the movie. Umberto Eco’s book, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s movie, and the soundtrack by James Horner have all been a huge source of inspiration for the band for a very long time, but this is the first time we’re this explicit about it. There’s so much in there that is just a very good fit for Tribulation. The beast is among us!”
The Wombats—Matthew “Murph” Murphy, Tord Øverland Knudsen, and drummer Dan Haggis—are widely associated with the British indie-rock revival from the early 2000s. As they’ve matured in the ensuing years, though, their sound has evolved beyond the scope of that world. On their sixth studio album, 2025’s *Oh! The Ocean*, they update the band’s geographic influence, too. After Murphy moved to LA, the band recorded in the city’s Echo Park neighborhood. Though the album title suggests a cheery, awestruck disposition, Murphy’s writing is as biting as ever. He takes aim at “see and be seen culture” on opener “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come” and wades into the murky anxiety of modern politics on “I Love America and She Hates Me.” The cultural, though, is balanced by plenty of introspective moments, like on “My Head Is Not My Friend,” in which Murphy dives into the ecstatic highs, crippling lows, and run-of-the-mill mundanities that animate the band’s best work.
