Radio X's 20 Best Albums of 2019

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

“I think on *California*, we really had an idea of what we wanted that record to sound like and it was going back to the foundation of what blink-182 is all about,” bassist Mark Hoppus tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “\[*NINE*\] is everything that blink-182 should be in 2019.” How one reads “2019” in this particular context is a question of sonics and songwriting just as much as social mores. The world has changed a lot in the three years since the kings of pop-punk reunited—with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba in place of founding guitarist Tom DeLonge—for *California*, a wild, wheelie-popping return to form that, by definition, returned to everything that made them unlikely pop stars at the turn of the century: adolescent nursery rhymes taken to almost diabolical lengths, with lines like “There’s something about you that I can’t quite put my finger in,” as heard on the vintage 30-second outburst “Brohemian Rhapsody.” By design, *NINE* finds the trio not only dispatching with dick jokes entirely, but fully embracing modern electronics and textures—as well as beats that drummer Travis Barker had originally intended for other artists. The result resembles the pop and alt-rock of the current moment more than anything they’ve recorded until now, be it in the titanic guitar swells of “Happy Days,” the skittering rhythm of “Black Rain,” or the saturated tones of “Blame It on My Youth.” On the towering “I Really Wish I Hated You,” Hoppus even makes a subtle attempt at rapping, without any wink or trace of irony. To get to this point creatively, he says it was about letting go, “just trying to write great songs and not worrying about ‘Is this the quintessential blink guitar-heavy distorted sound?’ If you plug your guitar into a computer and it sounds great, then run with it.”

“Jacknife took our brains for a walk,” Catfish and the Bottlemen’s Van McCann tells Apple Music about working with Killers and U2 producer Jacknife Lee. “You’d be surrounded by music all day. Every other day, you’d get a knock at the door and it would be new vinyls he’d ordered to show you new stuff. You’d be buzzing off his excitement.” These brain strolls have helped bring extra adventure and exploration to the band’s third album. *The Balance* still contains the key ingredients that have taken Catfish from indie-rock tyros to arena-fillers in a few years: exhilarating choruses, pin-sharp melodies, and relatable lyrics (on “Basically,” McCann even sings about doing housework). “Don’t write anything that isn’t worth a place on a set list some night,” says McCann. “By the end of the year, we would have done every arena in the \[UK\] and probably sold them all out. Where’s it go from there? It has to go outdoors, and you’ve got to start writing songs that are big enough for those occasions. It was always about pushing it.” Here, McCann and guitarist Johnny Bond take us through the album track by track. **“Longshot”** Van McCann: “This is the first one we played to Jacknife. When he heard it, he was like, ‘Let’s get in that room and start it.’ Later on that night, we were all in a little bar at the studio with the acoustic guitar, jumping on the table singing it. It was a great start to the recording process to have that one in the bank from the off; it set everything up.” **“Fluctuate”** VM: “It\'s very just straight and bold and four-to-the-floor. There’s a great solo in there. I think the outdoor slot, when the sun’s coming down, is when this song will come to life, big time.” Johnny Bond: “It’s an important song, like a bookmark for the album, ’cause it’s a burst of aggression that splits up other tracks. We’ve been doing it live, just after the band go off and Van plays \[acoustic track\] ‘Hourglass.’ We come back out and it\'s just a good song to burst out with \'cause it’s so immediate and so snarling.” **“2all”** VM: “This could have gone on \[previous album\] *The Ride*, but we knew it was quite a big one, we knew we needed to push it \[to playing shows\] outdoors first before we could put it in the set. It’s about the people who’ve backed you from the start. They’ve stuck around and said, ‘Go on, go for it, youse lot can really smash through these songs.’ Everyone should have those people around them. Or be that person to someone. A lot of this album’s about togetherness and putting your mind to something and going for it.” **“Conversation”** VM: “I’m speaking to me dad here: ‘I love to find myself/Looking straight up to you for the answers.’ We will still sit back and talk about music for hours, talk about new bands and old bands and gigs, he’s always been like a mate. I don’t normally tell him \[if a song’s about him\]. He doesn’t ask, he pretends he doesn’t listen to the lyrics. But my mum’s always like, ‘That’s about you and your dad, isn’t it? Why don’t you write one about me?’” **“Sidetrack”** VM: “This is one that’s been bopping about for a minute, just waiting for the right album. If you look on YouTube, you’ll find us doing a song with these lyrics from around 2015 or 2016. It was recorded in about two or three hours and we wanted it to sound like that—if you hear us play it live, it sounds exactly the same as on record.” **“Encore”** VM: “We wrote this quick. I thought the chorus was something you could hear on a dance tune: ‘Trust me, it feeeeeeeels like…’ I think it\'s gonna be one of my dad’s favorites.” **“Basically”** VM: “My dad takes over the DJ-ing when you’re having a night out and you’re playing things. He’ll be like, ‘You’ve gotta get on this one!’ It’s partly an ode to him playing old Glen Campbell tunes to me. It also gives you a day in the life of the band from the time we were recording *The Ride*.” JB: “I love how relentless this one is. It’s constantly evolving, it keeps moving into different sections. When you listen to it loud, you don’t get a moment for breath.” VM: “What a solo as well. It’s a beast. Everything drops out and Bondy takes the guitar for a walk, a big mooch.” **“Intermission”** VM: “Yeah we do ‘Intermission’…into…‘Mission.’ It’s like one song chopped into two. The ‘Intermission’ bit is a riff I had knocking about that everyone was loving and said I should put on an album. Jacknife said, ‘Why don’t you just have it as a snippet?’” **“Mission”** JB: “When we first got to the studio, Jacknife had flown over a suitcase full of these mad old fuzzboxes. And that’s when I know I’m going to get on with somebody straight away! Just plug in these insane fuzzboxes—I could do that shit for days. When it gets to the point with a song where we need a sound for a solo, that’s my forte. I did this solo on a 20-quid guitar, kicking the shit out of the pedals on the floor. You can hear them break in the middle.” **“Coincide”** VM: “That was a bit of an underdog as a song, but Bob, our drummer, was loving it. I guess I thought it was a bit E Street Band-y; it has a different energy to all the others on the album. If you put this in your headphones and went for a good run in the sun…it’s got that kind of feel to it. And I think the album needed one of them. I\'m looking forward to playing it live ’cause you can see it in your head: When that chorus drops, people will just be going…*BOMF!*” **“Overlap”** JB: “This is my favorite. It’s all over the shop, but I find it really uplifting, and the beat just forces you to fucking bolt along with it.” VM: “You can actually hear the *bu-du-dum* sound of a Bluetooth speaker turning off in the room—it sounds like a drum roll. It’s one of those little snippets on the album that are happy accidents.”

After launching his solo career with 2017’s platinum-selling *As You Were*, Liam Gallagher had a simple mission statement for the follow-up: Do it again and do it better. “I’m never going to change my genre of music,” he tells Apple Music. “I know what the people who come to see me want and I know what they don’t want, so it’s very easy. I’m not trying to make *Sgt. Pepper*, I\'m not trying to make *The Wall*. It is what it is. Neil Young hasn’t changed his sound for fucking 40 years and no one gets on his case. And I’m not saying I’m Neil Young, because I\'m far from it.” Liam is well aware of what he is: the greatest rock ’n’ roll singer of his generation. On *Why Me? Why Not.*, his voice crackles with love, wisdom, vitriol, and hurt. He’s as magnetic as he was when Oasis was in their imperial period—and these are some of the best songs he’s been on in the last two decades. He’s thrillingly barbed on the punchy glam-rock of “Shockwave” and adrenalizing on “The River,” a set of psych-rock jumper cables for the soul. The tender moments are just as stirring, not least when he pledges enduring love for his daughter Molly on “Now That I’ve Found You.” The centerpiece is “Once,” a reflective heart-sweller with the sort of goosebump chorus that he’s been nailing for 25 years. “It’s one of those songs that you come across every couple of years, or once in your lifetime,” he says. “We had a few of them in Oasis. If Noel had wrote it or if it was going out under the Oasis name, I think a lot of people’d be creaming in their pants. It’s up there, I think, with anything Lennon’s ever done, or Pink Floyd or Bowie. I feel like I levitate when I\'m singing that. So if you see me floating about up in the sky, you know I\'m having a good time.” On “One of Us,” he sings, “Come on, I know you want more/Come on and open your door/After it all, you’ll find out/You were always one of us.” It’s an olive branch extended to Noel—not that Liam thinks it will be accepted. “Oh, god, no. No way, man. He doesn\'t want to get in the ring with me again, for many reasons. You know why? Because he knows that he has to share the load, and standing next to me, he becomes very, very small. He’s already fucking small. So he doesn\'t want that, he wants the limelight for himself. But there you go, you keep trying, don\'t you? I think that’ll be the last one. I’m done. I’m going to get on with me shit, man. “But I’ll still dig him out, because he needs to be dug out. And he’ll dig me out because I need to be dug out. But it is love, love, love, it’s not hate, hate, hate. I don’t hate him. I love him, you know what I mean?” The explosive end of Oasis and his subsequent band Beady Eye’s gentler winding down wasn’t what Gallagher had planned for either group. But having found two collaborators “who know exactly what I’m about”—writer-producers Greg Kurstin and Andrew Wyatt—he’s getting on with the business of being the singular, outstanding voice of big, emotive rock tunes. “Listen, man, I had four years in the wilderness not doing anything,” he says of the tough time between Beady Eye and *As You Were*, which included a divorce. “I wasn\'t stranded in the desert with no food. I wasn\'t captured by the Taliban. I was in the pub getting off me tits, but, still, it was a good thing for me to get my personal life in order. You can\'t have an untidy house. I’ve got a lot of making up to do. As long as people want it, I\'ll do it, because there\'s nothing else to do, and it\'s the best gig in the fucking world.” Twenty-five years after he first emerged with Oasis, Gallagher’s in great shape personally and professionally, and he’s doing what he’s always set out to do: “Sing some tunes and have the craic.” *Why Me? Why Not.* is further proof that the world of rock is a better, brighter place with him in it. “I\'m good at being a rock ’n’ roll star. There’s a new generation out there that want a bit, so they\'re getting it.”

A few years before releasing this debut album, Sam Fender entered a period of personal turbulence that included being diagnosed with an illness serious enough to have him contemplating his mortality. “I wrote a lot of my best stuff in that place,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “It was just a mad time in my life. Some crazy things happened when I was about 20. It changed my perspective on everything.” One decision he reached was to stop writing songs for the wider world and concentrate on music that simply connected with *him*. “It was purely a selfish thing. It didn’t matter if I ever played them to anybody. And then it worked! You spend a lot of time looking outwards, at everybody else, but you should stick to your guns, man.” While he’s learned to trust his instinct, his lyrical focus has remained outwards. The people-watching and social conscience that ran through his early singles are expanded on *Hypersonic Missiles*, a chronicle of the everyday frustrations, dreams, and dramas of working-class towns such as the one he grew up in, North Shields, on England’s north-east coast. Prompted by the passing of a friend, “Dead Boys” examines male suicide and the reluctance in certain communities to talk about depression, while other subjects include abusive relationships, the patriarchy, one-night stands, and the politics of leaving a small town. The music moves between the title track’s full-blooded Springsteen-style rock, knottier indie (“Play God,” “That Sound”) and sparer folky moments (“Two People,” “Leave Fast”). Throughout, its urgency sits well with the emotionally charged lyrics. “You can hear the desperation in \[‘Play God’\],” he says. “I’d come out of this mad place, my producer was going to quit \[music\], I was going to quit. It came from a time where I needed to prove myself: ‘I need to do something that’s going to cut through.’ Half of the album comes from that time, and you can tell because they’re all ‘Ahhhhhh!’ on the moon, singing like it’s your last day on Earth.” A potent transmitter of feeling, Fender’s voice often recalls Brandon Flowers’ emotive surges and the haunted delicacy of Jeff Buckley. Buckley has been an influence ever since Fender’s older brother handed him a copy of *Grace* when Sam was 14. It’s hard to miss on a debut that packages yearning, desperation, anger, and escape in twisting, brooding guitar music. “I remember being blown away by the sheer power and vulnerability in \[*Grace*\],” he says. “It’s rock music, but it’s not like that macho thing. I realized rock music could be delicate.”

With that hard-won richness to his vocals, it was perhaps inevitable that Kelly Jones would try guiding Stereophonics toward countrified plains. Don’t panic: This isn’t some calculated, Stetson-donning lurch for the Nashville dollar; it’s far more becoming. This is the Welsh rockers at their heartiest, and the country tinges suit these sincere, earnestly affecting songs. “Street of Orange Light” might be their most gorgeous music since 1997’s “Traffic,” the stately “Make Friends With the Morning” takes it to church, while “Bust This Town” proves that 11 albums in, there’s still the passion to send people hurtling toward the indie dance floor.

Despite its title, The Amazons’ second album was partly inspired by an archeological dig into music’s past. “What we want to do, and what we are going to continue to do after this record, is keep on tapping into something that’s greater than we are,” singer/guitarist Matt Thomson tells Apple Music. “There’s no shame in looking back and acknowledging where we\'ve come from. And rock \'n\' roll comes from black, African American music—blues, early country, and jazz. It’s about acknowledging it and being inspired by the spirit and the rawness and the fire of it all.” A heavier and more expansive-sounding Amazons have emerged from these excavations. Drawn from personal experiences and emotions, these muscular and melodic rock songs often reflect the turbulence and confusion of society at large. “We wanted to make something slightly darker,” Thomson says. “We wanted to have more of a voice, to have something to say.” In an exclusive track-by-track guide, he reveals more about the themes and ideas behind *Future Dust*. **”Mother”** “The themes of this song are influenced by ‘Grinnin\' in Your Face,’ a track by Son House, the Delta blues musician. I really wanted to get the fire and inspiration behind that and tackle something more modern. There\'s a lot of righteousness and judgment today that I\'m getting bored of. It’s probably exacerbated by the internet and social media because that’s a nice anonymity cloak for throwing cheap shots without any direct consequence. Forms of communication change, but people\'s behavior hasn’t really.” **”Fuzzy Tree”** “‘Fuzzy Tree’ is a real practice room jam, arranged in as many minutes as it takes to hear it. It’s about digging yourself into a hole and not being able to get out—saying things in the heat of the moment but the morning after, you don’t feel the same way. The title comes from an Elvis lyric, from ‘All Shook Up,\' but because I eat loads of broccoli, the boys all thought I meant that.” **“25”** “This reflects the confusion I felt at reaching the middle of my twenties: I don\'t really know where I’m at and I don\'t know where people my age are at. Are we narcissists who are obsessed with trivial Twitter spats? Or are we woke and climate-conscious? It’s probably a bit of everything. I don’t know what will define us. It’s really hard to get real answers because there’s so much going on, a cacophony of information being blasted in our faces every day. It’s a lot more interesting to reflect it in a way that says you don’t have the answers.” **“The Mire”/“Doubt It”** “These two tracks sit together, inspired by a \[1982\] biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, *Hellfire*. He’s at the beating heart of rock and roll, right at the beginning. He enjoys going to these clubs, he enjoys drugs, alcohol, and women, this new lifestyle that he’s getting paid for. But his background is super conservative and he’s in a constant to and fro—whether he’s going to become a pastor or immerse himself in the devil’s music. It’s about submitting to temptation—all the bad stuff but all the fun stuff as well, for better or for worse.” **“All Over Town”** “I was talking to my parents about what it was like being single in the ’80s. It was a different vibe: Your world was just in front of you. Your choices were in your immediate sight. ‘All Over Town’ tackles this constant searching for what’s better, never settling—and ending up alone as a result. What actually might make you happy is in front of you, but you can’t see it because you’ve got access to the most amazing, beautiful, interesting, creative, intelligent people right at your fingertips. It distorts what\'s important.” **“End of Wonder”** “It’s basically about someone who’s struggling with something and the more you scrape at the surface, you see it’s a much bigger problem than you first thought. It’s looking at the struggles that women deal with from a male point of view. Sometimes it takes a more extreme experience to open your eyes a little bit. It’s one of those things that you can’t really imagine but you’ve got to try to do your best to understand.” **“Dark Visions”** “Through my twenties, I’ve got progressively worse at sleeping. Worries and ideas—the hive of activity in my brain—start when the lights go out. I’ve always loved fantasy, whether it’s *Lord of the Rings* or *Game of Thrones* or whatever, and that’s how I wanted to tackle it: a battle between me and some dark visions or beasts that howl at my door.” **“25 (Reprise)”** “Catherine \[Marks, producer\] was obsessed with ‘25’ being fun, but I had some alternative lyrics that were more apocalyptic, drawn straight from *Hellfire*, and I needed somewhere to put them. There was a gorgeous pump organ at the studio, and I thought it matched this biblical, apocalyptic side. We were really afraid Catherine wasn’t going to let us use it because we were running out of time to get everything else down. So we waited for her to go to bed on the final night, then we mic\'d up the pump organ at 5 a.m. and started recording. It really makes the record for us.” **“Warning Sign”** “This started as very personal. It’s tackling someone who’s in a very self-destructive moment: ‘Can’t you see what you’re doing? What you think are isolated incidents feel like they’re tallying up to me.’ I guess you can assign it to something broader, but I certainly didn’t until after writing the song. It always has to come from a really personal place. I’m not like, ‘We’re a band, we *have* to talk about something political.’ You can do whatever the fuck you want as long as it’s real, it’s genuine. So if you want to talk about the ins and outs of Brexit, do it—but in a way that is inspired to you.” **“Georgia”** “We wanted to give this song a lush, West Coast ’70s feel and then attack the lyrics very bluntly. The line ‘You put coins in your all pockets ’cause you know they fool the scales’—if you’ve got an eating disorder, that’s a tactic to fool the scales. But there’s a lot of different interpretations to that as well. Ultimately it’s ‘You don\'t need to do this; you’ve got so much to do, so much to give. You don\'t have to succumb to the darkness.’ It\'s a bit more optimistic and hopeful than ‘End of Wonder’ is.”

Sometimes an album just names itself. “We were in the studio and reading the local news in Nashville,” The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “They executed the first prisoner in 16 years in Nashville the week we were recording. They asked for his final words and he said, ‘Let’s rock.’” There isn’t a lot of overthinking on The Black Keys’ first new record in five years. It’s the sound of the duo kicking out the jams in Nashville. Topics of escape and confusion are seeded in Auerbach’s dueling guitar overlays and propped up by Patrick Carney’s steady hands. Songs recall the joy of traveling up and down a transistor radio dial in the ’70s; there are nods to Stealers Wheel (“Sit Around and Miss You”) and The Amboy Dukes (“Every Little Thing”), as well as dips into glam and Texas boogie-woogie. Carney digs for “When the Levee Breaks” bedrock on “Go.” Then “Lo/Hi,” “Fire Walk With Me,” and “Get Yourself Together” are classic Black Keys, complete with strutting backbeat and Leisa Hans and Ashley Wilcoxson’s backup vocals, which are so key to their chemistry and continuity.

As Kasabian’s chief creative officer, Serge Pizzorno has never been afraid to engage his experimental impulses. However, his first solo album presented an opportunity for that adventurous spirit to fly freer and further than before. “The usual parameters of record-making were gone,” he tells Apple Music. “There’s things you have to bear in mind making a Kasabian album: a definite vision and sound, like, ‘I need to make sure this is going to be OK to play in front of 50,000 people at a festival.’ But this was like waking up and being able to do whatever—the freedom of making stuff for the sake of making it.” As a result, *The S.L.P.*—it stands for Sergio Lorenzo Pizzorno—is a mercurial adventure in sound. Built around the “Meanwhile…” trilogy of songs—three pieces salvaged from an unused film score Pizzorno worked on—it unfurls as “a little story of where I’m at in Britain right now.” To tell that tale, the album takes left turns through ’70s Lagos, Ibiza, and English motorway service stations—often in a taxi with the radio blasting the Wu-Tang Clan, French touch, Meat Puppets, and the cream of UK rap. In this track-by-track guide, Pizzorno explains it all. **“Meanwhile… In Genova”** “I’ve always been obsessed with soundtracks; it’s been in my work from the start, really. I just like the idea in movies when the melody comes back—and comes back in different forms. You have a few iconic notes that tell the story. I had these three ‘Meanwhile…’ songs, a beginning, middle, and end. Then I went to fill in the gaps in between—visit different parts of my personality, become a different character for each track.” **“Lockdown”** “I always saw ‘Lockdown’ as, like, *Sin City*, sort of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg—a futuristic version of that. \[It’s\] fragments of nights I’ve been out on, things that people say. Those nights when you’re supposed to be keeping your head down and you’re telling everyone that you are but you’re sneaking out the bedroom window. ‘Yeah, I had an early night!’ You definitely *did not* have an early night, you were out until god knows when. It’s little pieces of that kind of life.” **“((trance))”** “It’s sort of French sophistication. Daft Punk, Cassius—they have a really innate coolness. I had this song, it was really beautiful but it needed a twist. I added this beat that suddenly made it quite interesting because it’s really anthemic but it’s not really fast enough for a disco tune; it’s something just underneath that makes you move along. It was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we just opened up into a chorus at the end, a huge sing-along that you were not expecting?’ Then when you listen to it a few times, you just can’t wait for that moment. You’re in this journey, traveling late at night. There’s something amazing about being in taxis or cars, when you’re going to a night out with your mates—the brake lights and your eyes blur. Then when you get there, it opens up and you’re all together on this mad vibe.” **“The Wu”** “Someone sent me some music from Lagos in the ’70s. I was really into the rhythm and the pace: a half-time bassline with a really insistent kick to it, keeping everything minimal and not allowing layers, so when the snare comes in it’s like the biggest thing in the world. This was one of those times when a song just tells you what it wants to be. I didn’t really have any notes on it or any lyrics hanging around, I just played the groove and then the melody came. I listened back and it sounded like I said ‘Wu-Tang’ and I was like, ‘I get that, I know what I’m trying to do here! What better way to shout out the influence they’ve had on everything I’ve done?’ It’s about those nights scuttling around \[hotel\] corridors, listening for the echo of someone playing music, like, ‘Hey, they’re in there. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!’” **“Soldiers 00018”** “This came from a depressing cab ride. One of those where you get a bad \[driver\] spouting off hatred and their point of view on what’s going wrong, why Britain’s fucked. The lyric ‘I’m a soldier but I never hurt no one’—it’s that passion to be heard and to make a statement in a nonviolent, non-hateful way, putting *joy* out into the world. I wanted to have an aggressive tune but it be about soldiers putting out positive vibes and good energy and not taking this negativity and letting it consume you.” **“Meanwhile… At the Welcome Break”** “‘Meanwhile… At the Welcome Break’ is like romantic Italian cinema, a really powerful, emotional tune, and I always thought—just to flip it on its head—about getting a hip-hop verse on it. I read an interview with slowthai and discovered he’s from Northampton and it struck a chord. It’s like reading that someone’s from \[Pizzorno’s hometown\] Leicester: *no one*’s from Leicester, *no one*’s from Northampton. I went to see him play in Birmingham and was blown away. We spoke about the track, set at a motorway service station, and how the whole album is about seeing someone one way but then meanwhile they’re someone else—like the superhero thing. I heard \[the verse\] as being quite aggressive and venomous, but when he sent it back, he’d turned it into this psychedelic tune. I was like, ‘Man, that is genius.’ It shows how talented he is to hear that, be inspired, and *sing*.” **“Nobody Else”** “‘Marvin Gaye in Ibiza’ is the tongue-in-cheek vibe on this. I like the idea of the album’s second half starting with these chords and then going into a real dance moment. There’s that tune from back in the day, ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ \[by Stardust\]—I really like that energy. And I don’t tend to do feel-good music, you know? It’s quite a heavy experience with \[Kasabian\]; it’s annihilation, really. So this was a moment to get the piano out and hit a summer tune.” **“Favourites” (feat. Little Simz)** “It’s a little comment on online dating and the way that we project these perfect versions of ourselves to the world. I used a first date as a metaphor for that: In your head, you have this voice moaning about the bill, but you can’t let on because you put out there that you’re, like, a left-wing activist. I felt you needed a retort or a comeback to that, so I got in Simz, who blew me away and was absolutely phenomenal. I get in her face and she gets in my face. There’s something quite comical about the line ‘She was my favorite’ and ‘You’re on thin ice ’—something about that reminds me of Mark E. Smith, a venomous, cheeky little line.” **“Kvng Fv”** “I wanted to calm the onslaught as you come out of that Haiti carnival sound \[on “Favourites”\]. I’ve always been a massive fan of the Meat Puppets—I love the brittleness and the out-of-time, throwaway nature. It makes it so beautiful, and the dirt in it makes it so authentic and real. This is just having 30 seconds of ‘\[sighs\] OK’ before being thrown back in.” **“The Youngest Gary”** “My mate told me he’d seen a story that the youngest Gary in the country is, like, 28 years old. It’s complete and utter nonsense. But humor’s very important to me, and a title like that, if it was done by another artist, I’d want to hear what that was. I definitely wouldn’t expect it to sound like this. It’s this character wandering about, Ziggy Stardust-like, being in a band, moving to London and going through all the trappings of that. Then it goes into that sort of Parliament/George Clinton second half—and there’s no way you’re expecting that. The whole record is based on surprise and ‘I *did not* expect that to happen.’ I think they’re the albums that stand the test of time.” **“Meanwhile… In the Silent Nowhere”** “The end of the ‘Meanwhile…’ trilogy is about the need to communicate. The importance of surrounding ourselves not just with people we agree with but people we don’t agree with, to try to understand where everyone is coming from. It’s quite a heavy ending, but that’s what the music felt like it was saying to me. It ends on those three notes, and there’s something powerful about dropping off there. Just a reminder that it’s OK to have a great time, but we have to try and figure this out—and we\'re not going to get there without communication.”

“It feels right that our fourth album is not 10, 11 songs,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig explains on his Beats 1 show *Time Crisis*, laying out the reasoning behind the 18-track breadth of his band\'s first album in six years. “It felt like it needed more room.” The double album—which Koenig considers less akin to the stylistic variety of The Beatles\' White Album and closer to the narrative and thematic cohesion of Bruce Springsteen\'s *The River*—also introduces some personnel changes. Founding member Rostam Batmanglij contributes to a couple of tracks but is no longer in the band, while Haim\'s Danielle Haim and The Internet\'s Steve Lacy are among the guests who play on multiple songs here. The result is decidedly looser and more sprawling than previous Vampire Weekend records, which Koenig feels is an apt way to return after a long hiatus. “After six years gone, it\'s a bigger statement.” Here Koenig unpacks some of *Father of the Bride*\'s key tracks. **\"Hold You Now\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “From pretty early on, I had a feeling that\'d be a good track one. I like that it opens with just acoustic guitar and vocals, which I thought is such a weird way to open a Vampire Weekend record. I always knew that there should be three duets spread out around the album, and I always knew I wanted them to be with the same person. Thank God it ended up being with Danielle. I wouldn\'t really call them country, but clearly they\'re indebted to classic country-duet songwriting.” **\"Rich Man\"** “I actually remember when I first started writing that; it was when we were at the Grammys for \[2013\'s\] *Modern Vampires of the City*. Sometimes you work so hard to come up with ideas, and you\'re down in the mines just trying to come up with stuff. Then other times you\'re just about to leave, you listen to something, you come up with a little idea. On this long album, with songs like this and \'Big Blue,\' they\'re like these short-story songs—they\'re moments. I just thought there\'s something funny about the narrator of the song being like, \'It\'s so hard to find one rich man in town with a satisfied mind. But I am the one.\' It\'s the trippiest song on the album.” **\"Married in a Gold Rush\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “I played this song for a couple of people, and some were like, \'Oh, that\'s your country song?\' And I swear, we pulled our hair out trying to make sure the song didn\'t sound too country. Once you get past some of the imagery—midnight train, whatever—that\'s not really what it\'s about. The story is underneath it.” **\"Sympathy”** “That\'s the most metal Vampire Weekend\'s ever gotten with the double bass drum pedal.” **\"Sunflower\" (feat. Steve Lacy)** “I\'ve been critical of certain references people throw at this record. But if people want to say this sounds a little like Phish, I\'m with that.” **\"We Belong Together\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “That\'s kind of two different songs that came together, as is often the case of Vampire Weekend. We had this old demo that started with programmed drums and Rostam having that 12-string. I always wanted to do a song that was insanely simple, that was just listing things that go together. So I\'d sit at the piano and go, \'We go together like pots and pans, surf and sand, bottles and cans.\' Then we mashed them up. It\'s probably the most wholesome Vampire Weekend song.”

Weezer are no strangers to familiar takes on pop classics—they did The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” for *Shrek Forever After* and The Cars’ “You Might Think” for *Cars 2*. But after a fan’s successful viral campaign to get them to cover Toto’s “Africa” gave them their biggest hit in ages, they made a project of it—with ground rules. Inspired by Phil Collins’ version of “You Can\'t Hurry Love,” they would stick to largely faithful readings of pre-’90s songs and avoid alt-rock peers as well as obvious classic-rock staples like “Hotel California.” “We don’t wanna be a bar band,” Rivers Cuomo tells Apple Music. “The Teal Album is what was left.” Cuomo and guitarist Brian Bell explain their picks for this set of other people’s greatest hits. **“Africa” (Toto)** “The first verse is longer than the second one, which is shorter than the third, and the verse is in a different key than the chorus,” says Bell. “Things like that just get you thinking different ways. But it’s so smooth.” “The lyrics seem like he’s just rambling off the top of his head and they don’t really make sense but nobody seems to mind,” says Cuomo. “I’ll spend weeks working on lyrics and it’s like, ‘Maybe people don’t really care.’” **“Everybody Wants To Rule the World” (Tears for Fears)** “This and ‘Sweet Dreams’ are from the same lineage as Weezer, it’s not that much of a stretch,” Cuomo says. “It’s such a great guitar song, too,” says Bell. “The riffs are so neat.” **“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (Eurythmics)** “The biggest challenge for me,” says Cuomo, “was how to pronounce ‘this.’ It drove me nuts as a listener. \[Annie Lennox\] somehow finds the exact way to pronounce it so it rhymes. It took me so many takes to get right.” **“Take On Me” (a-ha)** “I’ve been doing that live acoustically by myself for a long time, it’s just great to hear the crowd singing along,” says Cuomo. “It’s such a beautiful song and just coincidentally, it’s exactly my range. So I come across as a better singer than I am, just by luck.” “And it’s like Nordic pop at its finest,” adds Bell. **“Happy Together” (The Turtles)** “Spike Jonze wanted us to do this for his movie *Adaptation*. He didn’t like our version. I think we sent him a live recording and he was like, ‘Ah, this isn’t right.’” **“Paranoid” (Black Sabbath)** “On our tour last summer with the Pixies, I’d get to the end of the set and we were ending with ‘Say It Ain’t So’ and there was this incredible feeling of emotion,” says Cuomo. “The set was over and we just played this kinda slow, sludgy song, so I just started playing ‘Paranoid’ because I wanted to play a fast guitar riff. I had a lot of energy and I was excited.” **“Mr. Blue Sky” (Electric Light Orchestra)** “I hope that doesn‘t become a hit because it‘s so challenging,” says Bell. “I‘m afraid it sounds too good. I‘d never heard the song before. I‘ve always loved ELO but that wasn‘t my top choice of an ELO song to do. But hearing it, I was definitely like, ‘Weezer could do a good version of this.‘” **“No Scrubs” (TLC)** “I just thought it‘s one of those songs that‘s freakishly popular,” says Cuomo. “I was trying to decide which gender perspective to sing it from then I saw this tweet that said, ‘If you’re a guy covering a song by a girl, you gotta keep the pronouns. For those three minutes you‘re gay.‘ So I was like, ‘Cool, let’s try this.‘” **“Billie Jean” (Michael Jackson)** “It took me seven hours to sing this song,” says Cuomo. “He had somewhere around 75 tracks of vocals, doubling and tripling everything. It was all cool, hooky stuff I remember from listening as a kid and I was like, we gotta get *all* of this. And then there‘s the energy, the athleticism.” **“Stand By Me” (Ben E. King)** “We got an email from Rivers: ‘I wanna do ‘Stand By Me,‘ I know I can kill it,‘” Bell says. “That’s all I needed to hear, it was done in a day. And it‘s very Weezer, this 1-6-4-5 chord progression.” “Wasn’t it in that River Phoenix movie \[*Stand By Me*\]?” asks Cuomo. “I was always attached to the song because of that connection.”

“What’s your mantra? What’s your look? Do you have a manifesto? What are you trying to say?” Yonaka frontwoman Theresa Jarvis is running Apple Music through the questions a fledgling (and hotly tipped) band faces. After emerging in 2016 with a glorious racket built on bulletproof riffs and Jarvis\' skyscraping vocals, the Brighton four-piece took some time to figure out the big stuff. Spin on three years and we have answers. “We want the music to help people stick up for themselves,” she says. “Life can be suffocating. I’d like people to feel inspired to ask for help if they need it, and then fucking go and get what you want. The album title has a bit of a double meaning in that way.” Here, Jarvis offers up a track-by-track guide to her band’s self-produced debut album. **“Bad Company”** “Quick fact: The track listing here is not actually the one we wanted. We were asked to send it through, then gave it an hour and listened to it again before moving it all around. But we were told it was too late as it had gone to printing! So, this is the original sequence. ‘Bad Company’ was first in both versions, though. It’s a very precious song. We open live sets with it now, and it creates a good vibe where you feel like there’s urgency there—but there’s also a release, too.” **“Lose Our Heads”** “I had been a bit on the fence about this song, while everyone else was telling me what a big tune it was. But now it’s one of my favorites. It’s about how this generation live their lives through social media rather than actually experiencing real life. People should be going out falling in love, getting into fights, and having their hearts broken. I’m guilty of it, too. I’m forever living through other people’s lives on Instagram.” **“Awake”** “This one used to be called ‘Ignorance’ and is the second song we ever wrote. We revamped it with new production and it just sounds so fresh now. It’s very cool to have one of the first things we ever wrote together on our debut album. Nothing else from the earliest days felt quite right, but this one still stays with us.” **“Guilty (For Your Love)”** “We’ve started doing this song acoustically live, as our set is very in-your-face the whole time. It’s nice to be able to show off a different side to us for three minutes. I’m so proud of us for writing a song this gorgeous.” **“Rockstar”** “So much fun to play live. It’s proper euphoric—and it’s ambitious. It conjures these old-school David Bowie otherworldly rock-star dreams for me. We had a little bit of trouble with the song, actually. I had the pre-chorus, which felt very cool, but then we couldn’t work out if I was going to sing across the chorus. We finally settled on the ‘Wo-op’ you hear now, which was quite hard for me because I’m usually constantly singing on our songs. I’m greedy. I always want to be singing.” **“Creature”** “This is about love, but in the way you don’t hear about love. When you’re younger, you only ever get told about the romance, the fairy tales, the holding hands. But that’s not it. Love is the part where you stay with someone when they’re in their lowest moments and all their demons are out. And that person stays with you and still loves you.” **“Don’t Wait ’Til Tomorrow”** “My favorite song on the album. It best distills the message we’re trying to get out there. When I was going through rough times with anxiety, I found it really helpful knowing someone else was going through the same thing. That might sound quite selfish, but it brought me comfort as I suddenly realized I wasn’t going to shrivel up and die right here on my own because I’m the only one who’s ever felt like this. I just think it’s important for people to know they’re not alone, and you should always speak up at any time. Get it off your chest. Reach out to someone.” **“Punch Bag”** “This song is all thanks to my brother’s terrible ex-girlfriend. I was on the phone to him whilst trying to write lyrics, and he was going out with this girl who was horrible—really manipulative. I was telling him sisterly things about how he deserved better and that he was being used as her punch bag. I quickly got off the phone and it came tumbling out. Thank you, next, as Ariana would say.” **“Fired Up”** “The fans seem to really love this song. It was an easy one to write, but very hard to record. I developed a very bad habit of writing really high songs for myself and then telling myself I can’t do it. But I do get it. Eventually.” **“Wake Up”** “This is basically a mash-up of all the various things that happen in my dreams. The boys in the band are utterly fed up of me insisting I recount all the crazy things I dream about. I’ve murdered so many different people in my sleep. I get very upset and think I’m going to jail and that I’ve ruined the band. You have no idea how relieved I am when I wake up. I also dream a lot about being best mates with gorillas, so God knows, to be honest.” **“The Cure”** “The middle eight is literally me having a panic attack, but in lyrics. It was the last song we wrote for the album, and it fits perfectly as the closer. Everyone’s always looking for a cure for something, aren’t they? For me, it was trying to be free of anxiety. Despite the subject matter, I feel like it’s an easy one to listen to. Our songs aren’t always ones you’d put on at any time—they’re probably ones you’d listen to to get a bit raged, or revved up. Whereas I think this is one that you can listen to in the car, calmly. It felt like a nice sound to round off the album with.”