Radio X's 25 Best Albums of 2023

blink-182’s ninth album—and first in 12 years with guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge in the lineup—is far from a self-satisfied victory lap. Even after all these years, the band’s irrepressible cheekiness animates their insouciant riffs, whirlwind drums, and yelped vocals. They may be elder statesmen of punk rock at this point, but they’re still kicking against anyone who might get in their way. The reunion of DeLonge with bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker (who produced *ONE MORE TIME...*) grew out of the members dropping their past differences in the wake of Hoppus’ cancer diagnosis. “I feel like there’s a real sense of brotherhood with us,” DeLonge told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe during a full-band interview. “Like any brothers, you have your little spats over the years, and you grow apart. You come back together. You’ve always got a foundation, you’re connected. You’re still inseparable energetically.” That connection is apparent throughout *ONE MORE TIME...*, which Barker calls “very collaborative.” It calls back to blink’s past at its outset, opening with the speedy “ANTHEM PART 3”—the third part of a trilogy that dates back to the band’s *Enema of the State* era, although this time out, things are more optimistic than the angst-filled first two installments: “If I fall, on some nails/If I win or set sail/I won’t fail, I won’t fail,” DeLonge wails as the song comes crashing to an end. *ONE MORE TIME...* has other moments of introspection: The title track is a very blink-182 take on a power ballad, with DeLonge and Hoppus musing about life being too short to not get over past differences. The anthemic “WHEN WE WERE YOUNG” turns the old phrase about youth being wasted on the young into fuel for one last trip to the mosh pit and closing track “CHILDHOOD” pivots on the always pertinent question, “What’s going on with me?” Not that *ONE MORE TIME...* is exclusively built on self-affirmations and serious business. “DANCE WITH ME” opens with a gag about self-pleasure before jumping off into a peppy chronicle of lust, while the bouncy “EDGING” channels love-’em-leave-’em brashness into a giddy power-pop jam. The brief interlude “TURN THIS OFF!” manages to channel gags about bad sex and old scolds into 23 seconds of blissful riffing. *ONE MORE TIME...* represents a new era of blink-182, although the most important aspect of the music Barker, DeLonge, and Hoppus make remains the same: “Every single time that we’ve just put our heads down and done our own thing,” said Hoppus, “and write music that the three of us love, that’s important to us—it has served us well.”

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

The sixth album by Bombay Bicycle Club feels like a glorious culmination of everything the North London quartet have done across their entire career. Since emerging, as teens, in 2007 with debut EP *The Boy I Used to Be*, their music has explored anthemic indie rock, propulsive electronica, jerky ’80s pop, plaintive folk, world music grooves, and back again. Here, they take all directions at once to produce their most cohesive record yet. Vocalist Jack Steadman says that the guest-heavy effort—*My Big Day* features turns from Damon Albarn, Chaka Khan, Holly Humberstone, Jay Som, and Nilüfer Yanya—was fueled by the notion that bands should keep trying to cover fresh ground. “It gets harder the more albums you make to keep surprising yourself and your fans and do exciting things,” Steadman tells Apple Music. “Feeling like we’re taking risks is important.” The collaborative nature of *My Big Day* was inspired by the approach Steadman has taken with his solo project, Mr Jukes, working with an array of different artists. “Doing Mr Jukes and having all these different features—I had so much fun that I thought, ‘Why don’t bands do that?’” he says. “You don’t see bands do it very often.” It’s also the first Bombay Bicycle Club record produced by Steadman himself. “On this record, we learned that you have to toughen up a bit and get thick-skinned, speak your mind,” he says. “From the band’s point of view: tell me if they think a song is shit. It’s the only way we’re going to make a good record.” The album, he adds, is a snapshot of where the band—Steadman, guitarist Jamie MacColl, bassist Ed Nash, and drummer Suren de Saram—are in their lives right now: “You can hear it’s quite a happy and optimistic record, we’re less self-conscious and more confident in ourselves. As a band we’ve never been closer and I think that’s reflected in the music.” *My Big Day* is a glorious statement from one of the UK’s most imaginative guitar bands. Steadman guides us through it, track by track. **“Just a Little More Time”** “This is a good indication of where our mindset was with the record. A few albums ago, we would’ve been quite hesitant to put it on. I would’ve sent it \[to the band\] and I think the response would’ve probably been, ‘Look, I really like it, but it’s just not a Bombay Bicycle Club song.’ If I wasn’t singing on it and you heard it on the radio, I’m not sure we would be the first name that sprang to mind. Our ethos for this album was, ‘Let’s not worry so much about whether it’s a guitar-y band song—as long as we’re all digging it, let’s put it on the record.’ It’s my favorite song.” **“I Want to Be Your Only Pet”** “This was the first song \[we wrote\] and the song that kick-started the whole album. It made us all think that we were ready to do this again. It’s quite heavy but it’s all being restrained, the drums are actually quite soft and jazzy. In a sense, it’s that feeling of something pushing against something but not being able to fully get out. The lyrics are a complete stream of consciousness. I was singing gobbledygook to try and finish the demo and Jamie heard it and was like, ‘Oh, keep doing stuff like that, it’s quite surreal.’ It’s quite abstract, almost like a dream sequence, which is a first for us. They’re usually quite heart-on-sleeve.” **“Sleepless” (with Jay Som)** “This started off in a cowriting session that I was doing with beabadoobee. I was making a beat on my sampler and it sampled this old Japanese movie soundtrack from the ’70s or ’80s. We made this song, but they ended up choosing another song that we wrote. I brought it to the band and it had this complete transformation from a quite hip-hop-y, Japanese-sample beat to putting in psychedelic guitars. We got in touch with \[LA singer-songwriter\] Jay Som, who’s the singer on it, and she added all these little bits and actually did lots of production on it, which was really cool. She’s an amazing producer.” **“My Big Day”** “This is maybe the most unique-sounding song on the album, even though whatever you do to the production, however you dress up a song, it still needs to have a pop song underneath it. We thought, ‘Let’s make a statement by coming back with something that’s quite bold.’ When it was first made, it was this sample that made it sound a bit like Eminem’s ‘My Name Is.’ We called it ‘Eminem Meets Smash Mouth,’ it’s almost got this ’90s American pop-punk thing. It’s quite a celebratory title, even though the song itself is about subverting the idea of celebrating a big day. It’s about closing the curtains and turning your phone off and being like, ‘Everybody fuck off!’ But the words ‘My Big Day’, to us, summed up the album, coming back after the pandemic and celebrating and being optimistic and joyful and a bit silly.” **“Turn the World On”** “This was the last song to be written. I was sat on the sofa playing the guitar and Jamie noticed what I was doing and started secretly filming me—because he knows that I’m not organized enough to remember anything or to make voice notes. The amount of times I’ve done something and thought, ‘Oh, that was cool, I’ll remember it’ and then the next day I’ve completely forgot it. I think it’s probably the most heart-on-sleeve and earnest song on the record. It’s about my son and how, since having him, it’s made me think about when I was a kid and also about my dad when he was my age, the new perspective on these things that you get.” **“Meditate” (with Nilüfer Yanya)** “There’s always one song on our albums that’s from old stuff that I used to do before the band. When I was at school, I would make loads of albums on the family computer. We found a song on one of those and developed the bassline a bit. We thought there was something missing because, musically, it had a fuck-you character to it, quite Queens of the Stone Age, but the way I was singing it wasn’t really doing the same thing. I’m not a very fuck-you kind of singer! We’d just played a show with Nilüfer, we’re huge fans of her, and we thought, ‘Oh, that’s completely her vibe vocally.’ She’s got this amazing attitude to her vocals. She came in and the whole song at that point made sense.” **“Rural Radio Predicts the Rapture”** “This is another one where we just thought, ‘Fuck it.’ So many people have been like, ‘Wow, that’s a bit of a weird departure.’ I see this and ‘Just a Little More Time’ as very linked. It’s a sample of \[music from the ballet\] *La Péri* by a French composer called \[Paul\] Dukas. I took that sample—this is in the Mr Jukes era—and put the beat over it. For a long time, Jamie was like, ‘We need to make this into a song,’ but I kept procrastinating and not wanting to do it. Finally, we all got together and finished it. I don’t think we could have made that song if we hadn’t produced it ourselves. It was very much like a surgical procedure to get every bit. I don’t know how I would’ve done that with someone else.” **“Heaven” (with Damon Albarn)** “I’d made a demo of this and we basically said, ‘Either we shelve this or we go completely maximalist with it, there’s no in-between.’ We were imagining strings and brass and we kept referencing ‘A Day in the Life’ by The Beatles, all that ’60s production where you’d get all these players to come in. I played it to Damon \[Albarn\] because I’d been at his studio, wanting to hear what he thought of the record. This was a song where, instead of giving any notes, he was just like, ‘Give me a microphone,’ and started improvising over it, started writing over it. The hard part was getting him to then finish the song, once I’d left, trying to get in touch with him. I think he wrote the lyrics on the way to Coachella in a car \[driving\] across the Californian desert. He managed to find some time!” **“Tekken 2” (with Chaka Khan)** “I played this to Damon and said, ‘Hey, do you hear I’m doing that impression of an old disco thing at the end? Can you think of anyone that would be good on it?’ He was like, ‘Chaka Khan?’ I think I burst out laughing in his face, like, ‘Shut up, maybe you can do that, but don’t rub it in that I can’t.’ But then I walked away and thought, ‘We’ve got nothing to lose.’ Amazingly, she was the most straightforward of all the features to organize, just like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. I love the track. Here’s how much it costs. Come to LA and we’ll do it.’ I flew to LA on the way to mixing the album, so it was the last day that we could do it. She wanted to do it in this massive fancy LA studio with all the bells and whistles, but I just turned up with my little crappy Windows laptop and put it on the mixing desk and just plugged into that. I felt a bit silly. She was totally cool. She was very down-to-earth.” **“Diving” (feat. Holly Humberstone)** “‘Diving’ is another good example of the theme of this album, thinking not only about your future and getting older, but also looking back to when you were young. It’s quite an innocent song, a lot of imagery about those summers you’d have as a kid where the world seems so exciting and anything’s possible. We thought that the way I was singing it, trying to sing in a high voice, wasn’t quite delivering the emotion of it enough. I’d already worked with Holly \[Humberstone\] on a few other things and we knew that she was a fan of the band, so we just got in touch. After she recorded her part, it all clicked and fell into place, the delivery and the emotion of it.” **“Onward”** “When it ends, it’s just two guitars, bass, and drums, very heavy; it almost felt like a way of saying, ‘We’ve been on this crazy journey, but we’re still Bombay Bicycle Club.’ Thematically, it made a lot of sense to put it at the end. It’s saying even after all this, there’s still more to come, after six albums, there’s still loads of ideas to come, and we’re still going to keep making music. It’s a very forward-thinking, optimistic song and it felt right to put that at the very end.”

“I feel like it’s got something for everyone, this record,” DMA’S guitarist Johnny Took tells Apple Music. “It’s got the DMA’S sing-alongs, it’s got that dance energy that we were flirting with on the last record, but then it’s also got that rock ’n’ roll nostalgia thing that we do. My favorite genre is happy-sad, and there are a lot of happy-sad moments.” The “last record” Took is referring to is 2020’s *THE GLOW*, the album in which he says the group moved on from being a “’90s throwback band” and into a more “modern context.” Part of the reason for that was the presence of famed producer Stuart Price (Pet Shop Boys, Madonna), with whom the band has reunited on *How Many Dreams?*. He’s joined here by co-producer Rich Costey (Muse), the duo working with DMA’S over a three-week period in the UK before the group returned to Australia to finish the LP with Konstantin Kersting (Tones And I). Here, Took walks us through *How Many Dreams?* track by track. **“How Many Dreams?”** “It was one of the first songs that we \[wrote\] with the thought of the live show—like, potentially this could open the show. I don\'t think it crossed our minds until we started playing gigs like Ally Pally \[London’s Alexandra Palace\] and Liverpool Arena and you\'ve got the light show and the LED screens. It\'s quite inspiring musically to go, okay, if I\'ve got that going on, maybe this will actually work live. We started doing that a lot more on this record.” **“Olympia”** “This is one of \[guitarist Matt\] Mason\'s songs. I think he originally wrote it on a ukulele, but obviously it sounds a lot different now. It’s got that old-school DMA’S energy. Just bloody loud guitars and a big vocal hook.” **“Everybody’s Saying Thursday\'s the Weekend”** “I\'ve got a Notes section in my phone called ‘lyrics that sparked feeling.’ And I wrote ‘everybody\'s saying Thursday\'s the weekend’ down in that, and then pretty much the core of the song was written with that as the opening line. And then I came back in with Mason and Tommy \[O’Dell, vocals\], and we wrote the chorus and the rest of the track really quickly.” **“Dear Future”** “I wrote this song about a close friend of mine \[in Sydney\] who grew up in the country, and she’d just broken up with her partner. She tried to get away to clear her head and went back to the country, but then she was thinking about stuff more than she should have been. She probably should have just stayed in Sydney and kept working and been distracted and kept moving on with her life. It was loosely written about her, but kind of about looking to the future. And writing a letter to yourself about, how am I going to change after this life-altering moment?” **“I Don’t Need to Hide”** “That was written in the studio, where I was working with those big synth sounds at the start, wanting to write something where the verses were super melodic and beautiful, but I wanted the choruses to be really rhythmic and aggressive. I really love that song because it was the first time in the demoing stages that I felt like we\'d really reached a nice mix between the dancing and the rock thing.” **“Forever”** “We\'ve been doing a bit of songwriting for some other people recently, and we didn\'t really expect this song to make the album. We thought it might go to a poppier artist. But every time we played the demo to people, they thought it was a really beautiful song and it would be silly for it not to go on our album. It’s about me meeting my wife Hayley, and just about finding new love in general.” **“Fading Like a Picture”** “During COVID I was writing a lot of instrumental tracks. And just to keep Tommy on his toes I would send him these weird instrumentals every couple of days and be like, ‘Hey, write a melody to this,’ as a kind of stimulus. So he\'d be listening on a laptop with his headphones, and he would sing \[the melody\] on his phone in the voice memos. Tommy \[then\] wrote his own chords to the melody that he\'d written, and then he played that to me. I was like, well, that\'s the song.” **“Jai Alai”** “This is one of Mason’s tracks. And it’s got that beautiful piano part. I think he kind of Frankensteined a couple of songs that he had already to piece it together. But it\'s a kind of quirky song. Jai alai is like a weird sport that was invented in the Basque Country. So the song’s basically about that quirky sport.” **“Get Ravey”** “I started listening to Sonic Youth for a while. Obviously it doesn\'t sound like Sonic Youth, but that\'s what happens when you\'re inspired by something—you do your version of it. This is one of my favorite tracks on the album because the verses are like the lowest point of Tommy\'s register and I think the chorus is the highest point of Tommy\'s register.” **“21 Year Vacancy”** “This song I wrote when I was 21 years old. It was like a country song, and Tommy and I actually performed it in our old band. But it was never really finished. And then Mason wrote that chorus and pre-chorus part, and it just came together. We do a lot of that with DMA’S—one of us will have an idea, and then it\'s not till it gets filtered through the three of us that it really sounds like DMA’S.” **“Something We Are Overcoming”** “We wouldn\'t have released a track like this back in the day, but we love the melodies and we\'re a little bit less insecure with trying new things like that now. Funny story about this—Mason would always go in and record this song and have too many beers, and he kept forgetting what he saved it as in the computer. And so I think there\'s like six or seven versions of the song because he’d end up partying while making it and then forgetting what he saved it as.” **“De Carle”** “We learned a lot of things about ourselves from working with Stuart on *THE GLOW*, and for a lot of years became really obsessed with electronic music. I went down this big rabbit hole of listening to bands like The Chemical Brothers and Underworld, and over COVID experimenting with seeing how far we could push that idea. This was the song of, like, how far can we push the sound?”

If the combination of extravagant music and world-weary lyrics on Fall Out Boy’s eighth album sounds appropriate to the current queasy moment, there\'s a good reason for that. *So Much (For) Stardust* was conceived in the spirit of 2008\'s *Folie à Deux*, one of the most ornate and possibly divisive entries in the band\'s catalog. “There was a feeling that I kind of wanted to get,” Patrick Stump tells Apple Music. “I don\'t want it to sound anything like that record, but I wanted to get back to this feeling that we had when we were making it, which was ‘I don\'t know how much longer this\'ll last.’” *So Much (For) Stardust*, appropriately, captures Fall Out Boy going for broke, whether on the speedy opener “Love From the Other Side” (of the apocalypse) or the meditation “Heaven, Iowa,” which has a blow-off-the-roof chorus that gives its verses added emotional weight. Bassist and songwriter Pete Wentz\'s lyrics are drolly on point, with quotable one-liners like “Every lover\'s got a little dagger in their hand” (on “Love From the Other Side”) and “One day every candle\'s gotta run out of wax/One day no one will remember me when they look back” (on “Flu Game”) scattered throughout. At times, though, they have a tenderness to them that belies the nearly two decades he\'s spent in the spotlight, as well as his elder-statesman status. “I\'m my dad\'s age when I thought he had it all figured out, and my parents are starting to look like my grandparents, and my kids are the age that I was,” Wentz says. “And this, I guess, is how the world goes on.” These thoughts reminded Wentz of a speech Ethan Hawke gives in the 1994 slacker comedy *Reality Bites*, which is sampled at the record\'s midpoint, “The Pink Seashell.” “His dad gave him a pink seashell and went, ‘There, this has all the answers in the universe.’ And he goes, ‘I guess there are no answers,’” says Wentz. “There\'s the idea that nothing matters—and that was a weird message for me. I was like, ‘I don\'t think we can bake that into the whole record.’” Instead he channeled the 1989 baseball fantasia *Field of Dreams*, in which Kevin Costner\'s character is guided by the mantra “if you build it, they will come.” “He went out and built the field in the grass because he was doing a crazy thing,” said Wentz. “We all should be doing stuff like that.”

No band could ever prepare for what the Foo Fighters went through after the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, but in a way, it’s hard to imagine a band that could handle it better. From the beginning, their music captured a sense of perseverance that felt superheroic without losing the workaday quality that made them so approachable and appealing. These were guys you could imagine clocking into the studio with lunchpails and thermoses in hand—a post-grunge AC/DC who grew into rock-pantheon standard-bearers, treating their art not as rarified personal expression but the potential for a universal good time. The mere existence of *But Here We Are*, arriving with relatively little fanfare a mere 15 months after Hawkins’ death, tells you what you need to know: Foo Fighters are a rock band, rock bands make records. That’s just what rock bands do. And while this steadiness has been key to Dave Grohl’s identity and longevity, there is a fire beneath it here that he surely would have preferred to find some other way. Grief presents here in every form—the shock of opening track “Rescued” (“Is this happening now?!”), the melancholy of “Show Me How” (on which Grohl duets with his daughter Violet), the anger of 10-minute centerpiece “The Teacher,” and the fragile acceptance of the almost slowcore finale “Rest.” “Under You” processes all the stages in defiantly jubilant style. And after more than 20 years as one of the most polished arena-rock bands in the world, they play with a rawness that borders on ugly. Just listen to the discord of “The Teacher” or the frayed vocals of the title track or the sweet-and-sour chorus of “Nothing at All,” which sound more like Hüsker Dü or Fugazi than “Learn to Fly.” The temptation is to suggest that trauma forced them back to basics. The reality is that they sound like a band with a lot of life behind them trying to pave the road ahead.

As the headquarters of a producer/songwriter who’s won Grammys for his work with Adele, Beck, Foo Fighters, and more, Greg Kurstin’s LA studio is well appointed. “It’s a museum of ’80s synths and weird instruments,” Kurstin tells Apple Music. “Everything’s patched in and ready to go.” Damon Albarn discovered as much when he arrived during a trip to meet prospective producers for the eighth Gorillaz album. Tired and, by his own admission, uncertain about recruiting a “pop” producer, Albarn quietly explored the equipment, occasionally unfurling melodies on the piano which Kurstin would join in with on his Mellotron—two musicians feeling each other out, seeking moments of creative accord. After two or three hours, Kurstin felt happy enough, but Albarn’s manager was concerned. “She goes, ‘Damon just likes to float around. He’s not going to tell you to start doing something, you should just start recording,’” says Kurstin. “That gave me a kick to get down to business.” He opened up the input and added drums while Albarn built a synth part. Before the day was done, they had “Silent Running.” “Damon seemed energized,” says Kurstin. “He was excited about how the song progressed from the demo. I was thrilled too. He gave me a big hug and that was it: We were off and running.” Discovering a mutual love for The Clash, The Specials, De La Soul, and ’80s synth-pop, the pair took just 11 days during early 2022 to craft an album from Albarn’s iPad demos (give or take Bad Bunny collaboration “Tormenta,” which had already been recorded with long-standing Gorillaz producer Remi Kabaka Jr.). They valued spontaneity over preplanning and discussion, forging hydraulic disco-funk (the Thundercat-starring “Cracker Island”) and yearning synth-pop (“Oil” with Stevie Nicks), plus—in the short space of “Skinny Ape”—folk, electro, and punk. As with so much of Albarn’s best music, it’s all anchored to absorbing wistfulness. “I gravitate towards the melancholy, even in a fun song,” says Kurstin. “And Damon really brings that in his ideas. When I first heard Gorillaz, I was thinking, ‘Oh, he gets me and all the music that I love.’ I always felt that connection. It’s what you look for—your people.” Here, Kurstin talks us through several of the songs they created together. **“Cracker Island” (feat. Thundercat)** “Bringing in Thundercat was a really fun flavor to bring to the album. This wild, sort of uptempo disco song. I had just been working with Thundercat and we had become friends. I texted him and he said, ‘Yes, definitely, I’ll do it.’ It was very fun to watch him work on it and to hear him write his melody parts. He sang a lot of what Damon sang and then added his own thing and the harmonies. It’s always fun to witness him play, because he’s absolutely amazing on the bass.” **“Oil” (feat. Stevie Nicks)** “That contrast of hearing Stevie’s voice over a Gorillaz track is amazing. I think my wife, who’s also my manager, had come up with the idea. We’d have these conversations with Damon: Who could we bring in to this project? Who does he know? Who do I know? I had been working with Stevie and become really good friends with her. Damon was very excited, he couldn’t even believe that was a possibility. I think Stevie was just very moved by it. She loved the lyrics and she took it very seriously, really wanted to do the best job. Stevie’s just so cool. She’s always listening to new music, she’s in touch with everything that’s happening and just so brilliant as a person. I love her dearly.” **“Silent Running” (feat. Adeleye Omotayo)** “‘Silent Running’ really was the North Star for me, might’ve been for Damon, too. It just started the whole process for us: ‘Here’s the bar, this is what we can do, and let’s try to see if we can even beat it.’ I think we knocked out ‘Silent Running’ in two or three hours. That was the fun part about it, just this whirlwind of throwing things against the wall and then recording them—and I’m kind of mixing as I’m going as well. By the end of the day, it sounded like the finished product did.” **“New Gold” (feat. Bootie Brown & Tame Impala)** “Kevin Parker’s just great. I was really excited to be involved with something that he was involved with. Damon had started this with Kevin and was a bit stuck, mostly because it was in an odd time signature, this kind of 6/4. It’s a little bit of a twisted and lopsided groove. It was sort of put off forever and maybe nothing was going to happen with it. It needed Damon to get in there and get excited about it. I think he liked how it was started, but finishing it was just too overwhelming. I thought, ‘OK, let me just try to piece this together in the form of a song that is very clear.’ That sort of started the ball rolling again. Damon heard it and then he worked on it a bit and evened out the time signature.” **“Baby Queen”** “Only Damon could come up with such a wild concept for a song. \[In Bangkok in 1997, Albarn met a crown princess who crowd-surfed at a Blur gig; while writing songs for *Cracker Island*, he dreamed about meeting her as she is today.\] When I heard the demo, it was just brilliant. I loved it. As a producer, I was just trying to bring in this kind of dreamy feel to the track. It has a floating quality, and that’s something I was leaning into, trying to put a soundtrack to that dream.” **“Skinny Ape”** “There’s something mad and crazy about ‘Skinny Ape,’ how it took shape. I felt on the edge of my seat, out of control. I didn’t know what was happening and how it was going to evolve. It was a lot of happy accidents, like throwing the weirdest, wildest sound at the track and then muting four other things and then all of a sudden, ‘Wow, that’s a cool texture.’ Playing drums in that sort of double-time punk rock section was really fun, and Damon was excited watching me play that part. That feeling of being out of control when I’m working is exciting because it’s very unpredictable and brings out things of myself I never would have imagined I would’ve done.” **“Possession Island” (feat. Beck)** “I feel like the best of me when I work with Beck, and I feel the same with Damon. I feel pushed by their presence and their body of work, searching into places that I never looked before—deep, dark corners, sonically. What can I do that’s different than I might do with most people? It’s very easy to fall into comfort zones and what’s easy when you’re making music. Working with Damon really awakened some creative part of my brain that was sleeping a little bit. I need to work with these people to keep these things going. Damon had been playing that piano part during his shows \[*The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows* tour\]. That melody was something he would play every time he’d sit down. I started playing the nylon string guitar, and then it became a little bit more of a flamenco influence, and even a mariachi sound with the Mellotron trumpet. I love hearing Damon and Beck singing and interacting with each other that way, these Walker Brothers-sounding harmonies.”

During the pandemic, Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten returned to Skerries, the town on Ireland’s East Coast where he’d spent his teenage years. One night, walking along the beach, something came to him. “It was when the moon conjures a strip of light along the horizon towards you, like a path to heaven,” he tells Apple Music. “And there’s the gentle ebb and flow of an invisible ocean around it.” As he looked to sea, new music seeped into his head—a sort of pier-end lounge pop played out on brass and strings. It didn’t really fit with the ideas Fontaines had been fermenting for their next record; instead it opened up inspiration for a solo album. There were, thought Chatten, stories to be told about lives being etched out in coastal areas like Skerries. “The whole atmosphere of the place, there’s something slightly set about it,” he says. “I’m really into fantasy, the Muppets movies and *The Dark Crystal*, or even *Sweeney Todd*, where they demand a slight suspension of disbelief of the audience in order to achieve, or embellish on, a very human emotion. I wanted to live the town through those kind of lenses.” By late 2022, as Chatten endured some heavy personal turbulence, the songs he was writing helped process his own experiences. “It was like, ‘How do I actually feel right now?’” he says. “Just by painting a picture of the darkness, I gleaned an understanding from it. I was then able to cordon it off.” Unsurprisingly then, *Chaos for the Fly* is as intimate as Chatten has sounded on record. Built from mostly acoustic foundations, the songs explore grief, isolation, betrayal, and escapism—but their intensity is a little more insidious and measured than on Fontaines’ sinewy music. Even the corrosively jaundiced “All of the People” is delivered with steady calm, Chatten warning, “People are scum/I will say it again” under a soft shroud of piano and precisely picked guitar. “There’s probably times on the record where it becomes almost self-indulgent, the personal nature of it,” he says. “It’s a startlingly fair reflection of me, I suppose. I didn’t really realize that was possible.” Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“The Score”** “I had a 10-day break in between two tours. I find it very difficult to switch off, and my manager said, ‘You need to go off somewhere,’ so I went to Madrid. I got antsy without being able to write music—the whole point, really, of me being away—and I actually asked Carlotta \[Cosials, singer/guitarist\] from Hinds if she knew any good guitar shops, so I could grab a Spanish guitar, a nylon. She sent me the name of a place that was just around the corner, and I had ‘The Score’ later on that day. When it comes to the second chord, I think that opens the curtain a bit. There’s a sort of subverted cabaret about it, which I really like. And there’s also a misdirection of the modalities of the chords. It goes to a kind of surprising chord. There’s a nice sleight of hand to the first few seconds of it. I really wanted that to be the tone-setter of the album.” **“Last Time Every Time Forever”** “This was inspired by the sound of these fruit machines and slot machines that I grew up with. There was this casino in town, called Bob’s Casino. It’s about addiction or dependence on something, and I’m not really talking specifically about drugs and booze or anything like that. I’m just talking about compulsive behavior and escapism, which are things that kind of shift my gears—I can relate to the pursuit of another world. It has that weird push that it does in the drums. I think it sounds kind of like stunted growth, like it’s glitching.” **“Fairlies”** “After Madrid, we went down to a town called Jerez, which was the birthplace of flamenco, I believe. We were going to go out to get a beer or something, myself and my fiancée. She was getting ready and I wrote that tune. There’s loads of bootleg recordings of The La’s, and I think they really affected me when I was slightly younger, when we were setting off the band. There’s a tune, ‘Tears in the Rain.’ There’s something about the way Lee Mavers does all that weird stuff with his vocals that really affected the way I write a lot of melodies. The snappy, jaunty, almost poke-y, edgy melody of the chorus, that was inspired by Lee Mavers. The verses are more Lee Hazlewood and Leonard Cohen, maybe.” **“Bob’s Casino”** “I heard the intro to ‘Bob’s Casino’ \[that night on the beach\]. Similar to ‘Last Time Every Time Forever,’ ‘Bob’s Casino’ is a tune about a kind of addiction and inertia and isolation. I wanted it to sound as beautiful as it sounds in the addict’s head, or the isolated person’s head, when they achieve those moments of respite. I think that’s a much more realistic picture than a tune that sounds scared straight or something. A play, or any good piece of screenwriting, is usually helped by the bad guys or the antagonist being relatable, or seeing a side of them that makes you empathize with them, or even love them, briefly. It creates this nice 3D effect. I enjoyed writing from that character’s perspective because I feel like I’m expressing something. I’m not saying that I am that character. But the character has a good chance of winning sometimes within me. The more I write about it and express it, then maybe the less chance that character has of taking over.” **“All of the People”** “This is probably my proudest moment from the album. I’m giving myself compliments here, but I think there’s a surgical kind of precision to it. There’s nothing wasted. I really like the natural swells. I like how it swells when the lyric swells. I really do feel that fucking shit sometimes, as do a lot of people. I’m grateful for that song, for what it did for my head when I wrote it. I can stand back and look at it now. It’s like I’ve blown that poison into a bottle and I’ve sealed the bottle, and now I’ve put it on a shelf.” **“East Coast Bed”** “‘East Coast Bed’ is about the death of my beloved hurling coach, who was like a second mother to me growing up, a woman called Ronnie Fay. The whole idea of the East Coast bed is firstly this refuge that she offered me when I was growing up. And then eventually, we laid her in her own East Coast bed when we buried her. The song is essentially about death. Not necessarily in a grim way, but in a sad, melancholic, moving-on way. That synth part that Dan Carey \[producer\] did sounds like the soul moving on for me. That was him exercising his great sympathy for the music that he works on.” **“Salt Throwers off a Truck”** “I remember the title coming to me when we were writing \[2022 Fontaines D.C. album\] *Skinty Fia*. There were lads on the back of a truck, salting the road outside the rehearsal space. I thought that was an interesting sight: ‘Oh, that’s a good title to have to justify with a good lyric.’ I like the fact that it scours the world a little bit. There’s New York in there and, although they’re not mentioned explicitly, other places too. The last verse is inspired by my own granddad’s death last year in Barrow-in-Furness. It’s different people at different stages. To me, it feels like when a director puts the audience in the eyes of a bird. There’s an omnipresence to it that I really like. It’s like when Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Future, and he gets to fly around, and visit all of these different vignettes, or all these different families in their houses.” **“I Am so Far”** “I wrote that one during the dreaded and not-very-aesthetic-to-talk-about lockdown. It was this kind of bleak and beautiful, ‘all the time in the world and nothing to do’ sort of thing that interested me then. That’s why there’s so much drudgery on the track. I wrote that on the East Coast again. It does sound to me a little bit like water, with light on it.” **“Season for Pain”** “I think it’s an abdication. It’s like cutting something you love out of your life. It sounds sad, and it is sad, and it is dark, but it’s putting up a necessary wall. It’s terminating a friendship or relationship with someone that you truly love. It’s not going to be easy for anyone, but it’s gone too far. I think there’s something about the production that slightly isolates it from the album. It feels slightly afterthought-ish, which I like. I like the end, which came from a jam. We’d finished recording the track, the tape was still rolling, and we just started playing, and then that became the outro. The song is about moving on and it sounds like I’m moving on at the end.”

From the stark gospel soul of his 2013 breakthrough “Take Me to Church,” to the T.S. Eliot-inspired visions of 2019’s *Wasteland, Baby!*, Andrew Hozier-Byrne traverses literature, religion, and classical imagery to chart his own musical course. For the third Hozier album, *Unreal Unearth*, he’s followed that impulse further than ever before. During the pandemic Hozier found himself catching up on literature that had long been on his to-read pile, including Dante Alighieri’s *Inferno*. Not the lightest of reading, but a line from Dante stuck a chord. “There’s a passage in Dante’s *Inferno*, when he’s describing what’s above the door to Hell. The third line is: ‘Through me, you enter into the population of loss,’” the Irishman tells Apple Music. “That line just resonated with me. It felt like the world we were in. The news reports were just numbers of deaths, numbers of cases. It was a surreal moment.” It struck him that the format and themes of Dante’s 14th-century epic, in which the poet descends through the nine circles of Hell, could be the perfect prism through which to write about both the unreal experience of the pandemic and the upheavals in his personal life. “There’s such a rich tapestry there. I didn’t study classics and I’m not an academic, but for me, all those myths are happening around us all the time,” he says. “You can play with them a lot and reinterpret them and then subvert them as well.” The result is Hozier’s most ambitious and emotionally powerful album to date. It’s a remarkable journey, taking in pastoral folk, soaring epics, and tracks addressing the devastation caused by colonialism. Here, Hozier guides us through, one track at a time. **“De Selby (Part 1)”** “I didn’t know the song was going to reference de Selby until it started taking shape. He’s a character in a book by Flann O’Brien called *The Third Policeman* \[written in 1939 but not published until after O’Brien’s death in 1967\]. The book is like *Alice in Wonderland*, and it’s a classic piece of surreal Irish storytelling. De Selby is this lunatic philosopher who—and I don’t want to spoil the ending—doesn’t know he’s dead and in the afterlife. It felt like an appropriate reference for the opening track, to reflect on this darkness that he’s entering into, this infinite space.” **“De Selby (Part 2)”** “Part two comes out in a totally different place. It was always in this funk, rock place, even in the early demos. Part one ends in the Irish language, it’s basically saying: ‘You arrive to me like nightfall. Although you’re a being of great lightness, I experience you like nighttime.’ It’s that idea of ‘I don’t know where you begin and I end,’ and the song explores that a bit lyrically.” **“First Time”** “It felt like a nice place to come out of the heaviness of the previous track. It represents limbo. This cycle of birth and death, of being lifted by an experience and then that experience ending and it feeling like your world collapsing in on you, and then going again. Alex Ryan, my buddy who is also my bass player, sent me this bassline one day and it was really colorful and light and playful to work with. I really enjoyed writing the lyrics, they’re not too structured. It’s almost like talk-singing and I hadn’t really explored that much before this album, so I wanted to try it out.” **“Francesca”** “I had written a song that was very specific to Francesca \[from the Second Circle (Lust) in Dante’s *Inferno*\], that was written from her perspective. I was even trying to write it in terza rima, which is the interlocking triplets that Dante wrote in. But that’s where I was a like, ‘OK, I have to step back a little bit from this.’ When this song came around, it started from personal experience and then I allowed those themes and some of the imagery from that character in and then let the two mix. It’s an example of letting the song have a life above ground and resonate with a life below ground in regard to that character.” **“I, Carrion (Icarian)”** “It’s trying to capture that feeling when you’re lifting off. That sometimes when you’re falling in love with somebody, you’re met with this new lightness that you haven’t experienced ever before, but it’s also terrifying. To fully experience the best of that, you have to take into account that it could all collapse inwards and that you’re OK with that. It’s trying to hold those two realities in both hands and just playing with the imagery of it. It felt appropriate to come out of the hurricane of ‘Francesca,’ where two characters are trapped in a hurricane forever, into someone who is just on the wind.” **“Eat Your Young”** “I don’t know how intentional the reference to Jonathan Swift was in this. That essay \[Swift’s 1729 satirical essay *A Modest Proposal* in which he suggests the Irish poor sell their children as food\] is such a cultural landmark that it’s just hanging in the air. I was more reflecting on what I felt now in this spirit of the times of perpetual short-term gain and a long-term blindness. The increasing levels of precarious living, poverty, job insecurity, rental crisis, property crisis, climate crisis, and a generation that’s inheriting all of that and one generation that’s enjoyed the spoils of it. The lyrics are direct, but the voice is playful. There’s this unreliable narrator who relishes in this thing which was fun to write.” **“Damage Gets Done” (feat. Brandi Carlile)** “I’ve known Brandi Carlile for years, she’s an incredible artist and I’m lucky to call her a friend. As that song was taking shape, I wanted it to be a duet. It’s kind of like a runaway song. It’s not as easy to access that joy, that sense of wonder when you’re young that captures your enjoyment for a moment and then it’s gone. Brandi has one of those voices that is powerful enough to really achieve that feeling of a classic, almost power ballad. There’s very few artists that I know that have voices like that, who can just swing at notes the way Brandi swings at notes and hit them so perfectly with this immaculate energy and optimism.” **“Who We Are”** “This song was like a sneeze. Once we had the structure down, we jammed it and I just started wailing melodies that felt right at the time, and then took that away and came back with a song very quickly. Something I wanted to get into the album was this idea of being born at night, of starting in complete darkness. It’s a song that starts in childhood in this cold and dark hour, being lost and then just scraping and carving your way through the dark. It’s an idea that I wanted to put into a song for years, but never did.” **“Son of Nyx”** “A real collaboration between my bass player Alex Ryan, \[producer\] Daniel Tannenbaum \[aka Bekon\], and myself. Alex sent me a piano piece he recorded when he was at home in County Kerry. What you hear at the beginning is the phone memo, you can hear the clock ticking in his family’s living room. Alex’s dad is called Nick, so the song’s name is a play on words. In Greek fable, Nyx is the goddess of night and one of her sons is said to be Charon, the boatman who brings people to the underworld. All those voices that you hear are the choruses or the hooks from the other songs on the album distorted or de-tuned, so you’re hearing the other songs spinning around in that space.” **“All Things End”** “‘All Things End’ started from a personal place. There was a number of songs that could have taken the place of Heresy \[the Sixth Circle\]. In the medieval or the classic sense of heresy, ‘All Things End’ took that place. In those moments as a relationship is crumbling and it’s slipping away from you, it was something that you truly believed in and you had all your faith in and you had all of your belief in. In approaching that concept of that not happening it feels like something heretical. It’s a song about accepting, about giving up your faith in something.” **“To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”** “The previous song reflects upon a parting of ways. I suppose in that context, this reflects upon the great loss of this experience and making sense of love after the fact, which is very often the case. If you’ve grown up in a cold climate like Ireland, you learn to warm up the bed quickly so you’re not shivering for too long. It’s a song I wrote for somebody who is from a warm climate who had never experienced that before. \[It’s about\] the significance of something so mundane but so remarkable—to experience a bed that has been warmed by somebody else in a space that you now share now with somebody new. It’s a love song.” **“Butchered Tongue”** “This reflects upon what is lost when languages are lost off the face of the earth. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world for the last 10 years, going into places that had either Native American or Australian place names—some of the places I mention in the song—and asking people what the place name means and being surprised that no one is able to tell you. The song nods to some of the actions, some of the processes that are behind the loss of culture, the loss of language. There is a legacy of terrible violence, but we have to acknowledge not just that, but also bear witness to this generosity and welcomeness that I experience in those places.” **“Anything But”** “This one falls into the circle of Fraud. It was fun working with American producers on this. They thought it was a very sweet, caring love song. The lyrics in the verses are like, ‘If I was a rip tide/I wouldn’t take you out...If I was a stampede/You wouldn’t get a kick,’ The song is saying on paper that these are kindnesses, but the actual meaning is a joke—what you’re saying is I want nothing to do with you. The third verse says, ‘If I had death’s job, you would live forever.’ So that’s where it fits into the circle of Fraud. I was having fun with that.” **“Abstract (Psychopomp)”** “As a kid I saw somebody running into traffic to try and pick up an animal that had just been hit by a car. This song looks at that memory in an abstract way and sees all of this tenderness and somebody going to great risk to try and offer some futile gesture of care towards a suffering thing. But it’s also about acceptance and letting go. The alternate title is ‘Psychopomp,’ which is a Greek term for a spirit guide—somebody who moves somebody from one part of life into the next. Charon the boatman would be a psychopomp, so it seemed appropriate for a memory of seeing somebody pick up a dead animal off a road and then place it on the sidewalk where it dies.” **“Unknown/Nth”** “This is pretty much just me and a guitar which is what I enjoy about this. It’s very similar to the approach of my first record. I really enjoyed the space that’s in that song and then letting that space be something that had a lot of stillness and a lot of coldness in it.” **“First Light”** “It seemed like an appropriate ending song—of coming out and seeing the sunlight for the first time. Dante talks a lot about how he misses the sky, how he hasn’t seen the stars for so long. He hasn’t seen clouds, he hasn’t seen the sun. I wanted to put that feeling of being in this very oppressive space for a long time and then to see the sky, as if for the first time. I was writing this song with that feeling in mind, of this great opening, a great sense of furtherance and great open space. The record needed something like that. It needed this conclusive deep breath out, this renewing of the wind in the sails and then going on from there.”

Where Inhaler’s 2021 debut, *It Won’t Always Be Like This*, was a gloriously defiant document of what it meant to be a band making your breakthrough steps during a global pandemic—with all the hope and doubt that came with it—the Dublin indie-rockers celebrate being freed into the wild on this follow-up. It’s an album snapshotting different facets of the Inhaler experience. “We were on tour for a year and that naturally informed the album, being together,” bassist Robert Keating tells Apple Music. The record also dramatically expands the sonic template the quartet set out on *It Won’t Always Be Like This*. The choruses are bigger and bolder, the playing more confident; the grooves adopt the sort of swagger you get from seeing your music connect on a huge scale. “There’s an emotion that carries through this record,” lead vocalist Eli Hewson tells Apple Music. “It was easy to write about what was going on inside Inhaler because we were with each other all the time.” There’s also a striking minimalism to the tracks. “We believed these songs were better, so we thought they needed less information,” says drummer Ryan McMahon. “We wanted everything to feel like they could breathe a bit more.” Inspired by US tours and the storytelling approach of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, this is Inhaler broadening the scope of their music. The band, completed by guitarist Josh Jenkinson, talks us through it, track by track. **“Just to Keep You Satisfied”** Robert Keating: “I think we always said, ‘This was the first song written for this new album, might as well open with it.’ Lyrically, it sets that scene, early in the morning, first day of the week. It doesn’t get much more fresh with the sense of starting completely over again.” Eli Hewson: “We were mindful that the first track on the first album was such a big-sounding album opener, whereas this one’s a little bit more minimal. It’s a bit more intriguing; it pulls you in.” **“Love Will Get You There”** Josh Jenkinson: “The demo for this one was a lot darker.” EH: “We didn’t have a chorus, so we didn’t know if it was going to make it. Then the chorus came and it became really positive and we decided that it was going to be one of the singles. I think we were also excited by that Northern soul beat, that rhythm felt very fresh for us, because we’re very used to doing a lot of straight, fast indie beats. It made us feel like we were moving in the right direction.” **“So Far So Good”** Ryan McMahon: “This was the last track written for the album. It was after the Arctic Monkeys tour that we did in August, and I went over to Eli’s house one day and he played me the demo for it and I thought it was really good and really exciting. We were looking for another song to pull the whole album together, and I think it being written so late in the process, there was a spontaneity about it. We were influenced by being on tour and going out and seeing different bands at festivals.” **“These Are the Days”** JJ: “None of us were actually too excited about this when it first came around because it wasn’t fully formed.” EH: “Then we realized we needed something uptempo. The thing with this song is that it felt like a gateway into the second album for us, a transition song. It feels like it could fit on the first album, but it does have a different sound.” **“If You’re Gonna Break My Heart”** EH: “This is very influenced by the American music that we were listening to at the time. It’s our way of musically paying homage to America and being on tour there. It feels like an American show-band-type song, playing it in a theater or something like that. It was probably the one we had the fewest issues making because it’s got that live-band feel to it.” **“Perfect Storm”** RK: “The music for this one was pretty much written and finished on the spot. I think we started playing all the same things at the exact same time without playing them before, which was quite funny. That happens every once in 50 jams that we do. We did it in the studio and then it snowballed there. Eli did some real good lyrics. It feels like a story, this song, it feels like it goes on a journey.” **“Dublin in Ecstasy”** RM: “This the oldest song on the record and we thought that it went nicely with us sounding more like a band than the first one. We used to play this song live when we were about 17 or 18. Our really early fans gravitated towards it, and we were never really too sure why, but if we thought that we sounded more like a band on this record than the first, it just made sense to just try and go back to that place.” EH: “And because the album is about being in a band, it felt right to put a tune that we had played so much in our early days on the record. It felt like a bit nostalgic for us.” **“When I Have Her on My Mind”** RK: “The music for this was pretty much written during sound checks when we were on tour in America. We were listening to Deftones before we jammed this one. Musically there’s a bit of a nostalgia in it because that was one of our favorite tours that we’ve ever done, it took us to all these different territories that we’d never been to before.” **“Valentine”** RM: “You can take a guess what day of the year this one was written…” RK: “Yeah, we wrote this one on Valentine’s Day, a genius marketing move from us. Shows how our big brains were that day: ‘We’ll just call it “Valentine.”’ Sonically we found a really nice place with this one. It sounds really fresh; it reminds me of so many different bands while also not really sounding like anyone—which I always think is a good sign.” **“The Things I Do”** EH: “I remember doing the chords for this the same time as ‘Just to Keep You Satisfied’ and sending it to Josh, being like, ‘Here, would you put a beat over this?’ No joke, literally five minutes later he comes back with that beat over it. We took it into the live room and started playing it, and it snowballed from there. We got Martin Slattery, who’s amazing and used to play in Black Grape and is a master of the keys, to play piano on it.” RM: “He was our Billy Preston for this record. He inspired us in the room. We had to pull up our socks playing with someone who wasn’t us.” EH: “Yeah, it is like that bit in *Get Back* where Billy Preston comes in and they all just go, ‘Oh shit.’” **“Now You Got Me”** RM: “We were doing a jam on this other song that didn’t make the record and it just wasn’t going anywhere. Out of frustration, we were going to call it an early night, and then Rob turned on his pedal and started playing this riff out of nowhere.” EH: “Within an hour and a half, the whole structure and the chorus was there. You’ve gotta keep your net out for these songs, because they can just come out of nowhere. You don’t really write them, they write themselves.” RK: “With the first album we were still learning our craft, doing hundreds of takes sometimes because we just weren’t able to play as well as we could. This time, because we’ve done so many gigs, it’s like being able to ride a bike finally. It just felt right, and that definitely influenced our music.” JJ: “Although I never want to make a second album ever again.” EH: “Which is completely fair enough.”

*RUSH!* is the third album from the Italian rock band and the first since lighting up the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest with their unexpected win. Since that victory, Måneskin has become a worldwide pop sensation, with their swaggering rock-star personas and catchy yet gritty songs helping them carve out a distinctive niche in the musical landscape. *RUSH!*, which features behind-the-scenes work from pop architects like Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, arrived at the end of a whirlwind 18 months for the four-piece that included collaborations with Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello (who appears on the *RUSH!* track “GOSSIP”) and Iggy Pop. And almost a year on from its release, the band unveiled this edition, *RUSH! (ARE U COMING?)*, which adds four reliably storming, electric new tracks to the original lineup. “It’s incredible to think what’s happened in only one year and a half after everything completely changed in our lives,” bassist Victoria De Angelis says. In some ways, the period since Eurovision has been business as usual for Måneskin, who embarked on their first North American headlining tour in 2022. “We feel good because we’ve been touring the whole year,” says drummer Ethan Torchio. “So, now the machine is very well-oiled—everything comes easier than normal for us. In general, we’ve always enjoyed playing live a lot because we feel like it’s the cherry on top of all the work that we’ve done.” But *RUSH!* represents a new chapter for the band, with stylistic shifts that show how their pop savvy is complemented by a bone-deep love of rock and all its trappings. “There’s a lot of variety compared to our previous records,” De Angelis notes. “Instead of starting from the center and trying to \[spin\] out from it, we started from four different places, which are our four individualities,” adds lead vocalist Damiano David. De Angelis says that being generous with her bandmates’ artistic idiosyncrasies made for a more exciting studio process that included added risk-taking. “It’s better if we embrace our differences—even if someone has a different taste in a direction I might not be the first fan of,” she says. “Same goes for them. It’s better to embrace all our differences and give space to everyone to express themselves and be happy and be represented by the record. That’s why we had to really open our minds and challenge our boundaries: Some things we do, we would never have done without each other.”

Incubated at producer David Holmes’ Belfast studio, where pre-written songs were banned and music grew spontaneously from listening to records and jamming out ideas, High Flying Birds’ third album *Who Built the Moon?* provided an epiphany for Noel Gallagher. “A creative bomb’s gone off…David directed me to places I wouldn’t ordinarily go,” he told Apple Music on its 2017 release. Naturally then, he planned to make this follow-up in the same intrepid way—until his new horizons suddenly collapsed. “The pandemic happened,” Gallagher tells Apple Music, “and all hell broke loose.” Familiar to us all, it was an uncertain hell of “weird days, endless days.” Penned in at home, he returned to more traditional ways of working, sketching out ideas alone in a room on his acoustic guitar. The songs eventually coalesced into *Council Skies*, recorded and co-produced by Gallagher in London at the Lone Star Studios he built during lockdown. Despite the claustrophobia of the time, his sense of adventure remained strong. “Pretty Boy” is Johnny Marr-assisted krautrock, while the title track sets council-estate romance to bossa nova rhythms played out on digital gongs. But there’s also a yearning, midtempo anthem that matches Oasis at their heart-swelling best (“Easy Now”), and “Dead to the World” is a delicate ballad whose melancholy carbon-dates its conception. “\[The pandemic\] affected the mood and the color of the record,” says Gallagher. “It added to the reflective nature, thinking about what had happened and where we were going. I guess that’s got a dual meaning because you could use that about relationships.” At times, Gallagher found himself writing more candidly than ever. “Like most people, my life going into the pandemic was not the same as it was coming out of it,” he says. “I wouldn’t have written ‘Dead to the World’ and ‘Think of a Number’ had it not been for what was happening on a personal level. I learned that when I’m going through a turbulent period in life, not to be afraid to write about it. Not only does it help yourself, it helps other people because they are going through the same things. Go there, say it.” Here, he talks us through the tracks on *Council Skies*. **“I’m Not Giving Up Tonight”** “‘I’m Not Giving Up Tonight’ started as a track on *Who Built the Moon?* called ‘Daisies’ that never went anywhere. It was a bit more electronic and French, but I always liked that chord progression. I hammered away at that song for months and months and months and nothing happened. Then one afternoon, I picked up the guitar at home and out came this song. I can’t tell you where these things come from, they just fall out of the sky. It’s a song of defiance, which is why I thought it would be a good opening track. There is absolutely no chance on God’s green Earth that I’m ever going to play it live because it is a fucking bastard to sing. I needed at least 20 takes to do it.” **“Pretty Boy”** “It was the first demo that I did and first song that I completed, so \[making it the first single\] seemed like the right thing to do. I won’t lie, I perversely thought, ‘Well, when people hear that it’s yet another drum machine, I shall bathe in their tears.’ Although I don’t go out of my way to challenge my audience, I do like to engage with them. So it keeps them on their toes a little bit. And you are in a pretty good spot if you’ve been making music for 30 years and you’re still dancing on the edge of ‘Is this acceptable or not?’ I haven’t fallen into a rut of trying to rewrite ‘Little by Little’ endlessly, I’m still pushing it a little bit.” **“Dead to the World”** “I happened to be in the studio one very, very quiet evening, and I hit those two chords that I’d never played before. They set the mood immediately. It’s very melancholy. It’s a personal song, and I don’t do many of those. Well, at least I don’t admit to doing many of those. But it speaks for itself. I always stay in the same hotel \[in Argentina\] and the fans are outside 24 hours a day, singing Oasis tunes. They’re always getting the words wrong. One night, I could hear them and that line just came to me. The original lyric said, ‘You can *learn* all the words, but you’ll still get them wrong.’ But when I did it here, for some reason, I sang ‘change.’ Those kids in Argentina, that’s for them.” **“Open the Door, See What You Find”** “If people can get as far as the chorus, they’ll love it. Even when I was writing it, I was a bit like, ‘Yeah, the strings are great, that’s going to fit. The verses are a bit…whatever.’ But when you get to the chorus, it’s like a burst of sunshine. If it’s about anything, it’s about looking in the mirror and accepting who you are. There’s a saying that once you get into your fifties and you look in the mirror, you see all that you are and all that you’re ever going to be. That’s where the line ‘I see all that I will ever know’ comes from. It’s about saying, ‘I see all that I am and all that I’m ever going to be. And you know what? It’s all right.’” **“Trying to Find a World That’s Been and Gone Pt. 1”** “Just, again, in lockdown, wondering what the fuck it was going to be like on the other side of this thing, when we were all allowed to mix together. There were weird days, endless days at home in the silence, homeschooling the kids, the conspiracy theories, and all this bullshit that was going on. \[The song\] also has a dual meaning because it could be about a loved one or the breakup of a relationship. It’s ‘Pt. 1’ because it had this second part to it where the drums came in and the big production, but I had a moment of clarity in the studio and went back to the original demo. When it was cut down to this two-minute thing, it said more to me.” **“Easy Now”** “I had the longest phone call with \[Pink Floyd’s\] Dave Gilmour. I said, ‘I’ve got this tune and it’s very reminiscent of the mighty Floyd, and I was just thinking, if you could do one of your uplifting guitar solos…’ He was like, ‘Well, look, I love the song, but I don’t think I can do that kind of thing anymore.’ Honestly, I begged him on the phone and, fair play to him, he was not for turning. It was in the middle of the pandemic and everybody was isolated, and it was going to be a ball ache anyway. I said to my co-producer \[Paul ‘Strangeboy’ Stacey\], who’s a brilliant guitarist, ‘You’re going to have to mimic Dave Gilmour.’ And that’s what he did.” **“Council Skies”** “I was in Ibiza and maybe that’s where the feeling, the rhythm of it, came from. I had the melody, but I didn’t have any of the words. I always tend to write from the chorus backwards, so if I can get the chorus, the verses will fall into place. Back in England, that book \[Sheffield painter Pete McKee’s *Council Skies*\] happened to be on a shelf underneath the coffee table. There it was: *Council Skies*. That set off a chain of events where it’s like, ‘Right, underneath the council skies…’ The song is about trying to find young love on a council estate, trying to find beauty in the big, bad city. \[The intro\] is me playing some digital tuned gongs. Tuned gongs—it doesn’t get any more prog than that, right? I’ve got no other life outside of music, so I buy musical instruments, any old shit, that’s what I do. It was just like a digital percussion thing—I didn’t even know there was tuned gongs in it.” **“There She Blows!”** “I have no idea why I would write a song about some nautical bullshit. So I’m in LA working on another project with \[producer\] Dave Sardy, and in the hotel, one of the books on the bookshelf is Hemingway’s *The Old Man and the Sea*. Not that I would ever read it, but I can only surmise that it might have something to do with that. When the *Get Back* documentary came out, I was so glad that it captured the haphazard, winging-it kind of way that The Beatles were writing. George is going, ‘Oh, I’m stuck on this one.’ They’re saying, ‘Just make it up. Write the first thing that comes into your head when you get up in the morning.’ I’m like, ‘That’s what I fucking do!’ I think I’ve met everyone apart from Bob Dylan, and you realize they’re all just like you, with varying degrees of talent. It’s like they’re all shitkickers trying to make it, and nobody’s better than the other. We’re all blagging it. Nine times out of 10, you’re just throwing enough shit at the wall and seeing what sticks—and then trying to make it rhyme.” **“Love Is a Rich Man”** “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I actually wrote that while I was riding a bike. I’ve got a place out in the country, and I was just riding a bike down the country lane. It’s very kind of ’80s-period Bowie. And it’s got a marimba on it, for fuck’s sake. It’s a funny old song. I do like it though. I love the backing vocals and the chorus bit is great, and the guitars on it are brilliant.” **“Think of a Number”** “It’s quite a personal song and it’s quite bleak, which is why I thought, ‘Can it open the album?’ And really, in hindsight, it should have done. I love the words, and it’s quite epic. There’s three solo breaks—a piano solo, a guitar solo, another instrumental break. There’s a couple of drop-downs. That’s me playing bass, funnily enough. I was doing it in here with \[drummer\] Chris Sharrock, saying, ‘Look, it’ll be like a bit like XTC or Bowie or that kind of New Wave thing.’ He came up with the drum beat, I had the bassline, and it went from there.” **“We’re Gonna Get There in the End”** “I wrote that in lockdown and put it out on YouTube, just as a gift to fans. And wouldn’t you know it, everybody went apeshit for it. So when I was doing this record, my people were saying, ‘Is that not going to be on the album? Everybody loves that song.’ I was like, ‘Sadly, the one person in the world who doesn’t love it is me. I’m not having a jaunty Britpop song in the middle of this reflective, kind of melancholic record.’ However, I recorded it and it sounded great. I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to play it live, so I’ll just stick it on as a bonus track.’ And as no one does B-sides anymore, you can assume this is one of the great B-sides of my career.”

For many rock bands, there comes a moment when they have to confront a particular question. It’s one that has often inspired dazzlingly inventive and progressive work. Occasionally though, it only brings shame and derision. For Southend-formed five-piece Nothing But Thieves, that question became too loud to ignore while they gathered ideas for their fourth LP. So they finally asked themselves, “Is it time to make a concept album?” Released in October 2020, NBT’s third album *Moral Panic* presented their most adventurous work to date—absorbing drum ’n’ bass, hip-hop, Balearic dance pop, and R&B into their sound. With the group unable to tour during the pandemic, their heads stayed with that record for longer than they normally might, and they eventually extended its universe the following summer with the *Moral Panic II* EP. They were keen to continue their sonic explorations on this follow-up but needed to ensure they were completely detached from *Moral Panic*. “A concept was almost like a tool to feel automatically fresh,” guitarist Joe Langridge-Brown tells Apple Music. “But it wasn’t lost on us that it’s kind of a cliché. ‘How do we do this and not make it too pastiche?’ was very much a daily conversation and consideration.” While starting to write songs for the record, Langridge-Brown pondered a few concepts, eventually settling on the idea of a city-sized members-only club. Here, the stories and characters within and outside its walls could reflect on the potential consequences of the way we live today. “The concept is pointless unless there is real-world meaning behind each of the songs,” he says. “*Moral Panic* felt like it was about the health of our society and what I was viewing on Twitter, the chaos of that. This album feels like it’s in the future—what the nth degree of \[that chaos\] is if things kept going. What might happen in this sort of dystopian, segregated, members-only city?” Read on as he guides us through that vision, track by track. **“Welcome to the DCC”** “This is the advertisement for this world we’d created. We were like, ‘Can this be a single, because it’s so conceptual?’ I think that was a lesson in giving fans and listeners more respect, as in, ‘People are going to understand that this is a metaphor.’ You haven’t always got to hold the listeners’ hands so tightly the whole way through a song and an album. As with a lot of the record, it’s a lot more sort of synth-based and widescreen, cinematic. That’s kind of how I hear a concept record, that sort of expanse—which really made sense with this city vibe. The riff after the intro changed massively in the studio. It had more of a Justice thing before, but then it turned into this Prince-style thing. With Conor \[Mason, singer\]’s vocal, as well, that was a big consideration. More ’80s-style stuff is what we’re referencing a lot.” **“Overcome”** “I’m a huge Tom Petty fan, so some of that definitely found its way into this song. I think I actually wrote about 80 different verses for this, like a stupid amount. What I found was that when the verse was getting almost too intricate, and you were trying to say too much, it was taking away rather than adding to the song. It felt like you really just wanted to curate this feeling of a road trip into the DCC—creating a world with the words rather than saying a load of things.” **“Tomorrow Is Closed”** “The first draft was written in 2019 maybe. We recorded it twice before and abandoned it. We went about recording in the wrong way. It was all a bit too soft, a bit polite. The unhinged nature of the song, it sounding a bit blown out and raucous, it’s part of the charm. It feels incredibly desperate, that song, and we had to record it in that way. Once we gathered some songs for the concept, it really welcomed itself into the world—with ‘the only piece of heaven I have ever had,’ feeling like there was this desperation, there was no choice but to get to the Dead Club City.” **“Keeping You Around”** “This has more of a hip-hop-leaning thing to it, which has formed in NBT quite recently—for *Moral Panic* and *Moral Panic II*. That’s maybe a hangover from there. There’s also a ‘chicken or egg’ thing with the lyric ‘I’m still a broken machine, babe.’ The song reminded us a little bit of ‘Soda’ on \[2017 album\] *Broken Machine*—the nature of Conor’s singing, and, thematically, it’s got a particles thing to it. I don’t know whether the lyrics came because of the way the song was sounding, or that we leaned into that sound because the lyric allowed us to do that. I like this sort of peek, just a bit of a cue, from old NBT.” **“City Haunts”** “I think this was the first time I had the beginnings of the city concept. That initial chorus idea, with Conor singing in that very Al Green, higher register, soul-y thing, was a reaction to other stuff we’ve been doing. Conor said before that he feels he’s done a lot of the big, belting rock thing. In another effort to try to keep this fresh, he’s always creating singing characters. We have a list of characters almost, like Prince, Al Green, or whoever, voices. When we’re the studio, it’s ‘Can you make it a bit more like this or more like this?’ I’d say this is a few new characters that Conor’s been trying on.” **“Do You Love Me Yet?”** “I think we really leaned into that disco thing. It’s got a Motown vibe in the chorus as well. Within the concept, this is the first introduction to a fictional band called The Zeros. I had this idea for one of the songs, which I later called ‘Talking to Myself,’ being about this lonely character who’s been chewed up by Dead Club City. I was thinking, ‘Well, what’s different about this character? Maybe he’d be part of a band.’ Finding their way to Dead Club City, they’re trying for this level of stardom and success. I really reveled in writing in character. Obviously, there’s real-world meaning behind all the songs and it gave me an excuse to talk about the music industry in general.” **“Members Only”** “This took a bit of a left turn in the studio. It kind of felt a little dull before we went in. I think that was one of the songs we were less sure about going into the recording process. And then there was a lot of work in the studio that kind of made it feel a little bit more modern—the feedback loop, using that on the drums, and leaning into more of a hip-hop nature so it didn’t feel too rock standard.” **“Green Eyes :: Siena”** “Normally, as a writer, I find it quite daunting writing love songs. I’ve actually avoided it a lot because there are just so many. But because it’s got this backdrop of Dead Club City, it made it feel very, very fresh to write. Before the album, I think this is just after the pandemic, I went to a writing course by Jay Rayner, the writer and food critic. He did a course on writing about the same subjects a million times and making it feel different. For a songwriter, that’s invaluable. When you’ve only got two verses and a chorus and a middle eight to write about love, or something else that’s been written about a million times before, it’s incredibly useful.” **“Foreign Language”** “I had that lyric for a while, ‘Well, it’s a foreign language to me, baby/But I love hearing you talk.’ Once I figured out the concept, I was like, ‘Oh, that just works so well as a love story between someone who felt they were in the club and someone who was outside.’ That sort of cross-borders love story was what I was trying to get at. Dom \[Craik, keyboardist and co-producer\] really buried himself away for a long time in the studio, getting all the synth textures perfect. There’s almost like an orchestra of synths going on, which sounds amazing. I really love the guitar sounds that happen after the first chorus. It’s got a very harmonized guitar solo. To me, it was kind of the order of the day—feels new and old at the same time. It kind of feels prog. And that was another conversation for the whole album: It kind of feels prog, it’s got those notes, but it also feels different.” **“Talking to Myself”** “This lives quite well with ‘Keeping You Around.’ They’ve both got that ‘The Macs: Mac Miller, Mac DeMarco’ sort of thing. I’d say it’s the same characters, the same band, as in ‘Do You Love Me Yet?’ It’s the fallout of that—this band have been chewed up by Dead Club City. It was pretty much a one-take thing for Conor. A lot of the time, he’ll do vocals and we’ll do a load of verses, then we’ll do load of choruses, and we’ll see what’s working better. But for that song, we were like, ‘Just give it one go the whole way through.’ I’m pretty sure nearly everything you hear is his first take. He absolutely smashed that.” **“Pop the Balloon”** “It’s an ending of sorts. It’s not a perfect ending. It feels very messy and noisy. And that’s really different for Nothing But Thieves to end an album that way. Normally, we’d end on quite a soft moment or, very purposefully, an emotional touch. This song felt almost like the start of a revolution or something. We wanted all the characters to be wrapped up into this big finale. I think it comes back home again as well. It comes back to ‘Welcome to the DCC’ with \[the lyric\] ‘Kill the Dead Club City.’”

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

The deskbound among us might first interpret the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album as a reference to the font, but a few minutes with the music and you’ll realize that what Josh Homme refers to is a sense of decadence so total it ends with the city on fire. They remain, as ever, the hardest hard-rock band for listeners who don’t necessarily subscribe to the culture or traditions of hard rock, channeling Bowie (“Emotion Sickness”), cabaret (“Made to Parade”), and the collars-up slickness of British synth-pop (“Time & Place”) alongside the motorcycle-ready stuff you might you might expect—which they still do with more style than most (“Obscenery”). And like ZZ Top, they can rip and wink at the same time. But *In Times New Roman...* plumbs deeper personal territory than prior records. Homme has weathered the deaths of friends, the dissolution of his marriage, and other painful developments since the release of 2017’s Villains, and the album touches on all that—but he also wants to be clear about assumptions listeners could make from his lyrics. “I would never say anything about the mother of my kids or anything like that,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also, by the same token, you must write about your life, and I think I\'m soundtracking my life. These songs and the words that go with them are an emotional snapshot where you stop the film, you pull out one frame. One song it\'s like, \'I\'m lost.\' And another one, \'I\'m angry.\' They need to be these distilled versions of that, because one drop of true reality is enough flavor. I think the hatred and adoration of strangers is like the flip side of a coin. But when you\'re not doing it for the money, that currency is worthless. I can\'t get involved in what the people say. In a way, it\'s none of my fucking business.” For Homme, the breakthrough of *In Times New Roman...* came *because* he was unflinchingly honest with himself while he was writing through some of his darkest moments. “At the end of the day, the record is completely about acceptance,” Homme says. “That\'s the key. My friends have passed. Relationships have ended. Difficult situations have arisen. I\'ve had my own physical and health things go on and things like that, but I\'m okay now. I\'m 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of what\'s going on, you know what I mean? But in the last seven years, I\'ve been through a lot of situations where it doesn\'t matter if you like it or not, it\'s happening to you. And so I\'ve been forced to say, yeah, I don\'t like this, I need to figure out where I\'m at fault here or I\'m responsible here or accountable here. And also, I need to also accept it for what it is. This is the reality. Even if I don\'t like it, it would be a shame to hold on too tight to something that\'s slipping through your hands and not just accept it for what it is.”

In 2021, Royal Blood’s third album, *Typhoons*, proved that Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher could fashion an entirely new musical chassis from the base materials that had powered their first two albums. Minting a sound they nicknamed AC Disco, the Sussex duo brought new dance-floor swagger to their bass-and-drums assault. On their self-produced fourth album, the pair have blown the very notion of what constitutes a Royal Blood album wide open. The thumping, one-two wallop of lead single “Mountains at Midnight” might sound familiar, but much of *Back to the Water Below* finds them traversing entirely new musical terrain. From “The Firing Line”’s stripped-back, Smashing Pumpkins-like slink to the sumptuous Beatlesque melodies and wide-screen arrangements of “There Goes My Cool,” singer/bassist Mike Kerr’s songwriting has matured and reached places that few could have imagined while listening to the visceral thrills of their self-titled debut album back in 2014. “In the past, I might have worried about whether or not something was a Royal Blood song,” Kerr tells Apple Music. “At this point, we’ve stopped asking ourselves that because we realized that’s a crazy question. You just chase the song and chase the idea and see where you end up. I think that’s what the amazing process of this record has been. The palette was so much wider this time around, and we didn’t have to worry about how these songs wanted to present themselves. It was so freeing.” Steering the band down new musical vistas yet retaining the high-voltage energy and dynamism that comes whenever Kerr and Thatcher lock into a groove together, Royal Blood have thrown away the rule book and entered an entirely new phase. Here, Kerr takes us through it, track by track. **“Mountains at Midnight”** “In a way, it’s well-trodden ground for us. It’s not a song we go looking for anymore—but it’s hard to fight it when ideas like that come along. That riff came in a sound check, and I laughed it off and thought, ‘I don’t know how to do that in a fresh way.’ But every time we played it, it just blew the roof off. The songs are in charge on this album, and that song cornered me and was like, ‘You need to finish me.’ The thing that felt fresh was the tempo. We’ve attempted a song that has that punk-rock feel so many times because we’ve been aware that we could do with one, just from watching the live show. There’s a moment at the end of \[2014 fan-favorite\] ‘Loose Change’ where everyone goes crazy and goes into a mosh pit, and we were like, ‘We need another one of these.’” **“Shiner in the Dark”** “The drumming approach that Ben has is what makes him a unique rock drummer, because he’s very well versed in classic hip-hop. He knows every single one of those beats like the back of his hand. That kind of low-rider drumbeat comes so naturally to him, and for me, it gives me a platform to dance over. This song was born out of the bass sound. I made that sound and was so excited about it. It just sounded so weird. It sounded so fizzy and wide and kind of piggish. There’s something piggish about it to me and very groove-centric. It had some *Typhoons* residue to it. It was the first thing we wrote after *Typhoons*, so it feels like we’ve half slipped out of the jacket.” **“Pull Me Through”** “My style of piano playing comes from when I was a kid learning Beatles songs. The Beatles always used a piano at Abbey Road Studios called Mrs. Mills, which, at the end of the hammers, has pins put into it to give it a metallic, almost-harpsichord sound. The Beatles were always doing this kind of regal thing that I really love. It’s classical and almost comically so. It was almost like that piano is constantly wearing a cape. We tried different pianos and different piano sounds on this song, and it just didn’t gel the same way, so that piano sound became the glue that held this record together. It brought me back to being a kid and playing the piano.” **“The Firing Line”** “I tried to turn it into this punk-rock song by putting it in double time and just pulling at it. Not having a producer, you can feel that it’s your job to play with songs and push things because there’s no one else there to do that. Really, it’s a waste of time because the first thing you do *is* the thing. I learned that from Jack White. The majority of what you got right is going to be in the demo. It’s about respecting that and leaving it be. I’m really happy that it’s in the original state that it was written in because that’s the best version of it, and a lot of the other songs are in harmony with it.” **“Tell Me When It’s Too Late”** “It was a nightmare getting the bass sound on this. The majority of the bass is from the demo, but we added a section, and I didn’t want the sound to change, so I had to work out how I’d made the sound in the first place. I had to kind of reverse engineer it, and it took so long. I couldn’t fully remember it. There’s octaves in it, and some of it sounds like an organ, but it’s not. Each layer on its own sounds terrible, but when they all come together, it creates this...*thing*. It reminded me of the intros to those cheesy Hollywood trailers for action movies.” **“Triggers”** “I was living in New York when I wrote the song, and I was watching a lot of Tarantino movies. Sometimes I put a movie on mute when I’m writing riffs, so there was a lot of grotesque violence onscreen while I was playing. The song doesn’t have anything to do with that, but it can give me a bit of direction or purpose when I’m writing. It just puts your head somewhere else.” **“How Many More Times”** “Five years ago, if I’d started writing ‘How Many More Times’ at the piano, I would’ve asked that question \[‘Does this sound like a Royal Blood song?’\] and probably have thought, ‘No’ and then left it. But it’s got my voice on it, Ben’s playing drums on it, so there you go. It’s just about making the best song you can. I love this song. It’s got a lot of sunshine to it and, lyrically, I’m really proud of it. It’s a good example of the song leading the way, and the song being the thing that holds it all up. It feels like a nice break to allow our musicianship to support the song rather than having a riff bashing you over the head for three minutes.” **“High Waters”** “The imagery in it was really in sync with where I found myself—dipping below and above the surface. That appears throughout the whole album. It’s about saying it in a new way. This song is one of the only ones on the album where the music juxtaposes against the sentiment of the lyrics. I like that sometimes—when the melody is quite euphoric and feel-good, but you get beneath that and then the lyrics are quite dark. It’s nice to do that sometimes.” **There Goes My Cool“** “I had that lyric for a while, and it really made me laugh. But in my head, it was this kind of badass line. It was going to go over something like ‘Shiner in the Dark’ and it was about masculinity and testosterone and anger. But then, I had this über-Beatles chord progression, and I sang that line over the chorus, and it hit me so differently. That idea of ‘Does this sound like a Royal Blood song?’—that ship had sailed by the time this came along. We were doing whatever we wanted. ELO are definitely in there, and T. Rex, this whole glam rock thing. We were putting cellos on it and doing things that we’ve never done and finding new tricks. It was really inspiring. You don’t know where the line is until you cross it, so you might as well just keep going.” **“Waves”** “We were trying to wrap up the album, and it was very obvious to me something was missing. It really was at the 11th hour at this point, and the clock was ticking. I work pretty well under those circumstances. When there’s no time to waste, the decision-making becomes clearer. For me, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the record. It’s about looking inwards and feeling strong enough to be that vulnerable. It’s funny sometimes: These bigger rock songs we’ve written can make you appear tough, but you’re not. There’s an irony to ‘Waves’ where I was like, ‘Oh, I feel invincible now because I’m kind of naked, and I feel able to do this. I feel comfortable.’ The toughest I’ve ever felt in a Royal Blood song is on ‘Waves.’”

From the instant that a disorienting, time-stretched vocal loop collides with a rock-steady four-to-the-floor beat in the brief but invigorating “Intro,” it’s clear that The Chemical Brothers are here to rave. The duo’s 10th album, their first since 2019’s *No Geography*, is a no-holds-barred attempt to channel all the energy and euphoria of their live shows into the album format, and it’s a testament to their success that the record’s compact, 47-minute runtime can barely contain all the four-dimensional dynamism within. It’s even sequenced like a DJ mix, careening almost seamlessly across gnarly acid bangers, slow-motion big-beat throwbacks, and the sorts of stadium-sized, hands-in-the-air, sun-emerging-from-behind-the-clouds anthems that they do better than just about anyone. The duo’s Tom Rowlands tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that the album came together in pursuit of “the moment of feeling like something is lifting off in the studio.” That’s the perfect metaphor for “Live Again”: The song’s opening bars of surging shoegaze swirl, segueing directly out of “Intro,” have all the pent-up energy of a NASA launchpad, and once the song kicks off—serenaded by a dulcet refrain from Paris’ Halo Maud—it just keeps rocketing upward, propelled by endlessly rising glissandi. They describe their approach as a kind of deconstruction—“Sometimes you start with a quite songy song, but then you spend about three years destroying that song,” says Rowlands—and it’s audible in “No Reason,” a late-night epic that’s stripped down to little more than funk bass, extended snare rolls, and the occasional crowd-stoking whoop. Throughout, they keep finding new ways to mix up the essential components of big beats, bigger basslines, and titanic hooks. “Fountains” is psychedelic disco set to a Neptunes-inspired drum pattern; “Magic Wand” pairs breakbeat rave with old-school hip-hop ad-libs and a spooky a cappella; “The Weight” calls back to the slow-motion grind of their earliest hits and then turns all the dials to 11. Part of The Chemical Brothers’ genius has always been their balance of kinetic oomph and transcendent melodies, and that’s all over this album, most noticeably in the heavenly “Skipping Like a Stone,” a shoegaze-flavored jam featuring Beck at his melodic best. He paints a forlorn picture—“When you feel like nothing really matters/When you feel alone/When you feel like all your life is shattered/And you can’t go home”—before promising to “come skipping like a stone” in a chorus imbued with both childlike innocence and reassuring empathy. Going into the album, Rowlands says, was the idea to “make something that had a real direct emotional heart,” but to sculpt it in such a way “where it would still feel like our world.” Their Beck collab is exactly that: It’s a super-sized song about overwhelming feelings and all-encompassing love, the emotional cornerstone to one of the most ebullient albums in the duo’s career.

There are rock bands and then there are Rock Bands—groups who embody a particular and baldly mythological definition of the term so completely that it’s difficult to imagine them doing normal things like taking the garbage out or wearing shorts. (This is why people have spent years marveling at a photo of Glenn Danzig buying cat litter.) And few bands have embodied this ideal more than The Hives have across three decades. Which is why the most shocking moment on the Swedish garage-punk traditionalists’ first album in over 11 years is on “Rigor Mortis Radio,” when Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist sneers, “I got your emails, yeah/Delete, delete.” With their matching custom suits and quasi-supervillain alter egos—bassist Dr. Matt Destruction is no longer in the band, but that name is forever—the whole idea of The Hives is rooted in timelessness, and breaking character feels like a record scratch. “It’s very much on purpose,” Almqvist tells Apple Music. “It\'s been 11 years, but in The Hives\' world, it\'s the same.” While so many of the bands they were lumped in with during the great Rock Is Back! bonanza of the early 2000s are gone or diminished, The Hives have doubled down on their Hivesness, right down to the title referencing the demise of their mysterious Svengali and mentor (who may not have been alive to begin with). “We\'re five individuals who are in the band, but The Hives are something different than that. It\'s not a sum of its parts at all,” Almqvist says. “We wanted to invent our favorite band and then become that band. We have too much respect for what we do onstage to treat it like it\'s a fucking living room. We\'re like The Last Samurai or something.” Below, Howlin\' Pelle talks through each of the songs on his favorite band\'s comeback album. **“Bogus Operandi”** “I think it was always a favorite of ours when we were rehearsing. And even in the demo stage, it always felt like a thing; the riffs felt great. It had a bunch of different verse things, or a bunch of different choruses at some point, but we decided to use them all. We have a lot of songs where we\'re not even in agreement on what is the chorus. That\'s also a thing The Misfits and ABBA have in common, where you think this is where the chorus ends and then there\'s another fucking chorus.” **“Trapdoor Solution”** “We always have those songs that are really, really fast and really, really short. It\'s like to put a shot of adrenaline into the record. And we love playing that stuff live, where it\'s like, \'Oh, it\'s a cool song. Oh, it ended. Okay, well, play it twice.\' We\'ve always loved that type of song, and most of our records have one or two of them. It seems like a thing that some of our favorite bands were doing a long time ago, but I don\'t think anyone\'s really doing that anymore.\" **“Countdown to Shutdown”** “It was actually two songs from the beginning; we took the chorus from one and the verse from one and just like, ‘Oh, this sits together really well.’ It all just fell together in an afternoon. So I think it\'s the one we spent the least amount of time on. But it\'s also one of the best ones, I think.” **“Rigor Mortis Radio”** “Amy Winehouse did this thing where the music\'s super retro and old-soul, it sounds like it could be the ’40s or something, but she\'s singing about getting Slick Rick tickets. And it\'s such a cool mood, we wanted to use that. Because otherwise in song lyrics it ends at \'magazine\' and \'telephone.\' Nobody sings about anything more modern than that. But it\'s so fun to go just like, \'I\'m going to delete your email.\' It\'s such a lame burn.” **“Stick Up”** “To me, it sounds very traditional, like a blues thing almost, like a crooner. There\'s probably an early YouTube recording of it from maybe 2015. The demo is all piano and voice, but we wanted to play it live so much that we made that version. We even had a weird version of it where it was a soft version in one headphone and the energetic version through one headphone. It was so bizarre to listen to them at the same time.” **“Smoke & Mirrors”** “It\'s way more pop in structure, chords, melodies, and that kind of thing. It\'s not riff-based. And usually there\'s some fight in putting some of those songs on the record. It\'s a great change of pace, I think. It reminds me of Ramones or power-pop or something.” **“Crash Into the Weekend”** “Even though the music\'s at times pretty extreme, we still want there to be a tune somewhere in there. But \'Crash Into the Weekend\' was also like, \'Oh, this weekend\'s going to be fun, but it\'s also getting kind of weird.\' It wasn\'t just a fun weekend, there was also something scary about it. The Damned, The Cramps, and The Misfits were some of the first bands we really loved together and we always thought that aesthetic was kind of cool. I guess it just kind of came out more on this album and the title. And that\'s as dark as we\'ve been.” **“Two Kinds of Trouble”** “It\'s one of the oldest songs of the record, but it\'s also kind of a style. It feels like it belongs more on like \[2004\'s\] *Tyrannosaurus Hives*—really robotic, almost like we were trying to play synth music or program music on instruments, which we did a lot of on that album. So it was cool to put it after \'Crash Into the Weekend.\' It\'s like a juxtaposition, if you would.” **“That’s the Way the Story Goes”** “It always sounded good in our heads, but it was hard to get it to sound that way when we recorded it. I guess that riff was kind of inspired by Ty Segall or something like that. At first it was kind of really rocking, and it was kind of all over the place. There was a version that sounded a lot like Saul Williams’ ‘List of Demands (Reparations),’ where it was just kind of the beat and a bass. And then we went back to the rocking thing, and put a lot of reverb on it, and then we liked it again.” **“The Bomb”** “It\'s a dumb idea and then we did it. But we spent years trying to make that what it is. In the beginning it was, \'What do you want to do? Party. What do you not want to do? Not party.\' It\'s one of the ones we put the most effort into, but most bands wouldn\'t even have put it on the record. It\'s kind of self-referencing a little bit—it\'s what the Ramones did and Motörhead did, like, *Grow some confidence, man*.” **“What Did I Ever Do to You?”** “When we were making that, we were not sure that The Hives were going to do anything. We weren\'t getting anything to float and it just kind of felt boring. And we stopped rehearsing and stopped trying for a bit, to see if something came out of that. I bought this thing on Swedish Craigslist, an organ connected to a guitar, connected to a microphone, connected to a drum machine. Some guy built this one-man-band machine, and he sold it to me for 300 bucks with the patent. This was the first thing we wrote when we got that. It\'s almost not meant for The Hives, but the album needed a palate cleanser.” **“Step Out of the Way”** “We always had a fast short blast at the beginning of the record, at the top of the record. What was the last song? ‘What Did I Ever Do to You,’ right? So that one feels like it\'s the end of the record, but then it was cool to just, like, \'Oh no, we got another one.\'”

For The Lathums, making their second album was all about capturing humanity. “The humanity of us and the humanity of music, just figuring all this crazy stuff out as human beings,” frontman Alex Moore tells Apple Music. Picking up the thread that was woven through their 2021 debut *How Beautiful Life Can Be*, this follow-up melds the mundane and the magical, the gently euphoric indie-rock sing-alongs wrought from everyday struggles, and the quiet defiance of getting through troubling times. Emboldened by the success of their first record, the Wigan quartet wanted to push the boundaries. “We wanted to show that we’re progressing and trying new things and that we won’t ever get comfortable in a certain place,” says Moore. You can hear it in how these songs dynamically shift from panoramic ’80s rock to epic ballads, from storming indie anthems to sweetly melodic skiffle-pop. “We feel like this is a step up,” says Moore. “We’re very proud of it.” Moore and guitarist Scott Concepcion talk us through the album, track by track. **“Struggle”** Alex Moore: “I felt that this was a powerful song to start with—it sets off the narrative for the rest of the album. It felt right to be the spearhead. I started writing it when I was a lot younger, and I couldn’t finish it because I wasn’t old enough to understand it at that point—but the end of it came out of me later down the line.” **“Say My Name”** AM: “We wanted something with a lot of energy that people can get behind, like when you’re in a crowd and there’s a certain kind of noise going on. Being on stage you can see it, everybody naturally either jumps at the same time or sings along at the same time. We wanted to capture that in a song. We played it live before we recorded it and it became a bit of a fan favorite. It went up on YouTube and then, at the next couple of gigs, there were people singing the words back to us. It became its own entity.” **“I Know Pt 1”** AM: “There’s a bit of love in this one. There’s a lot of love, really. I wanted to take myself out of my own shoes and see things from somebody else’s perspective. In this scenario, it’s the perspective of a woman, which is hard for a man to do. I’m not saying I’ve learned how to do that but I wanted to give it a go and not think just about me. I think I learned more about myself—ways that I’m selfish but hadn’t really realized, and certain things like that. I think it was owning up to things, things that you could change to better yourself.” **“Lucky Bean”** AM: “I wanted to have a song that brings an old, nostalgic feel but in a modern way. We always want to keep it fresh, we used to talk about that when we were playing in pubs as young lads. We wanted to have a song for everybody, it doesn’t matter who’s listening—there can be a song for everybody.” **“Facets”** AM: “This was a very fun song to record. There’s a lot of melodies, and I know Scott had a whale of a time on it.” Scott Concepcion: “I did. There’s plenty of little guitar parts and overlapping intricacies that form melodies when listened to together. Jim Abbiss \[producer\] brought out his Höfner electric thumb piano too, it was incredible.” AM: “The end is like a climax of music. It’s amazing.” **“Rise and Fall”** AM: “This was a sweet little number me and Scott started when we were whippersnappers. We neglected it for a while, and it got pushed to the side. Then it presented itself again. There was a lot going on at the time that fitted a lot of the words—and the idea of being in a headspace all the way at the top and then all the way at the bottom and the different parts of a journey. It felt right, and obviously we were older and a bit more experienced, so it was easier to revisit the song and let it be itself.” **“Sad Face Baby”** AM: “A lot of the album is music for an individual—personal music—and we wanted something for everybody in the crowd to get behind, where everybody takes the song for themselves and the energy from everybody is just so good. We’re conscious about stuff like that now. We’re never selfish with it, we never wanted to keep it to ourselves. We always wanted to express it to people but now we understand that, at a show, it’s their time to have a laugh and have a jump around. You have to write a song that’s sat in that category.” **“Turmoil”** AM: “This is a gorgeous piece of music, especially if you take the vocals away! It was fun recording this because it was out of our comfort zone. I was very proud of us after we’d finished it because we’d never done a song like this before. We didn’t really know what we were doing with it at the beginning, but we kept at it and it’s become quite special. It’s of its own kin, there’s not many songs like it about at the moment. It gives us more confidence to express things in different ways.” **“Land and Sky”** AM: “In the beginning, this was more of a dark, complex, fingerpicking kind of tune. But we got in the studio with John Kettle \[producer\], and the arrangement we created transcended what I envisioned in my head when I first wrote it.” SC: “We all felt we were channeling Dr. Dre.” AM: “It’s like Lathums but in a ’90s hip-hop way. It was fun crafting it in the studio. It excited us, like, ‘What can we do now to make it better or make something strange? Where can we push these songs to?’” **“Crying Out”** AM: “This was another oldie and goldie, but it never really got its chance to breathe. A lot of fans mentioned it being special to them, but it was forgotten about. It felt good to give people that and let the song have its time to breathe and just be. We loved the song, and we’d already lived with it for years, so it was nice to revisit it.” **“Undeserving”** AM: “It’s a journey, this one. It’s one of those songs where you have to be in bed on your own, just in your own world, trying to figure things out with your headphones on. Let the words just take you on a journey. It sums up a lot of our journey, personally and musically. I think it rounds off the album in a really nice way. It’s almost like I’m trying to explain to you that we’ve not got this figured out yet, this life, but we’re giving it a go and we’re very happy and grateful for the position that we’re in and the opportunity people have given us—because without everybody else, music doesn’t have any connection.”

The Murder Capital’s second studio album Gigi’s Recovery, produced by John Congleton, will be released on January 20, 2023 via Human Season Records. Painting by Peter Doyle and designed by Aidan Cochrane.

Near the end of The Rolling Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years, Keith Richards takes the microphone to ask a series of emotional questions, pleading for honesty about what might lie ahead for him: “Is the future all in the past? Just tell me straight,” he asks. The answer is, remarkably, no: *Hackney Diamonds* is the band’s most energetic, effortless, and tightest record since 1981’s *Tattoo You*. Just play “Bite My Head Off,” a rowdy kiss-off where Mick Jagger tells off a bitter lover, complete with a fuzz-bass breakdown by...Paul McCartney. “At the end of it, I just said, ‘Well, that\'s just like the old days,’” Richards tells Apple Music of that recording session. *Hackney Diamonds* was indeed made like the old days—live, with no click tracks or glossy production tricks—yet still manages to sound fresh. After years of stalled sessions, and the death of their legendary drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, Jagger and Richards decided on a fresh start, traveling to Jamaica (the same place they wrote “Angie” in 1973) for a series of writing sessions. Based on a recommendation from McCartney, Jagger hired producer Andrew Watt, who’d also worked with Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ozzy Osbourne, Post Malone, and more, to help them finish the tracks. “He kicked us up the ass,” Jagger tells Apple Music. With Steve Jordan on drums, Watt kept it simple, bringing in vintage microphones and highlighting the interwoven guitars of Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The whole point is the band being very close, eyeball to eyeball, and looking at each other and feeding off of each other,” says Richards. In the spirit of 1978’s genre-spanning *Some Girls*, the album comprises sweeping riff-heavy anthems (“Angry,” “Driving Me Too Hard”), tortured relationship ballads (“Depending on You”), country-tinged stompers (“Dreamy Skies”), and even dance-floor grooves (“Mess it Up,” featuring a classic Jagger falsetto). The capstone of the album is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a stirring seven-minute gospel epic featuring Lady Gaga. Halfway through, the song goes quiet, Gaga laughs, and Stevie Wonder starts playing the Rhodes keyboard, and then Gaga and Jagger start improvising vocals together; it’s a spontaneous moment that’s perfectly imperfect, reminiscent of the loose *Exile on Main St.* sessions. “Playing with Stevie is always mind-blowing, and I thought that Lady Gaga did an incredible job, man,” says Richards. “She snaked her way in there and took it over and gave as good as she got with Mick, and it was great fun.” Richards didn’t expect to make an album this good as he approaches his 80th birthday. But he’s using it as a moment to take stock of his career with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. “The fact that our music has managed to become part of the fabric of life everywhere, I feel pretty proud about that, more than any one particular thing or one particular song,” he says. “It is nice to be accepted into this legendary piece of bullshit.”