Radio X's 25 Best Albums of 2024

Dan Smith has long been a storyteller. The London-based singer-songwriter has spent the years since founding Bastille in 2010, originally as a solo project, writing moving, anthemic songs about a cast of characters traversing everything from the people killed in the volcanic ruins of “Pompeii” to the tragic fall of “Icarus.” On Bastille’s fifth album, *&*, Smith reaches the apex of his storytelling songwriting, composing 14 tracks entirely about historical figures. “I’ve always used someone else’s story to write about the themes I want to address in my music,” he tells Apple Music. “Now, I’ve collected these story songs to celebrate a group of people who pushed against the times they lived in and who displayed all the complexities of being human.” From softly picked guitar-led folk on “Emily & Her Penthouse in the Sky,” celebrating the poet Emily Dickinson, to the cinematic strings of “Essie & Paul,” honoring the lives of civil rights activists Paul and Essie Robeson, and the anthemic thump of Leonard Cohen tribute “Leonard & Marianne,” *&* is Bastille at its most imaginative and expansive. “I wanted to show these historical figures as real people and encourage listeners to find out more about them,” Smith says. “It’s been a beautiful world to inhabit.” Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Intros & Narrators”** “I always find it’s helpful to introduce people to the world of a record by writing a song that sets the scene and my intentions at the beginning of it. I felt unworthy writing about a lot of the people I’m singing about on this album, and I wanted to tackle that feeling head-on in this track. It’s about how much trust we put into the people narrating the story we’re hearing, which is me in this case!” **“Eve & Paradise Lost”** “I was really interested in imagining this epic story of Adam and Eve that’s been echoed through so much culture and forcing it into a normalized domestic situation on this song. I was imagining how crazy it must have been to be the first woman with no one around to help or give you advice. It was challenging to write as a man but I’m really pleased with it. ” **“Emily & Her Penthouse in the Sky”** “Most of what is written about Emily Dickinson assumes that she’s this tortured, isolated poet but, after researching her life, I realized a lot of it isn’t true. She was hilarious and sociable and wrote fantastic correspondences. This song is written from the perspective of her sister, describing who Emily really is, and it explores people’s perception of someone and how it relates to their real life.” **“Blue Sky & the Painter”** “The painter Edvard Munch wrote a lot about his relationship with depression and spoke eloquently on how he wouldn’t create his art without the way his mind worked. I became fascinated with that tension between minds that are difficult but that also allow us to create. Musically, this track reflects that feeling by sucking you into thinking it’s quiet and acoustic and then pulling the rug out with blaring distortion.” **“Leonard & Marianne”** “I watched this amazing documentary on Leonard Cohen by Nick Broomfield and was inspired to write this song about his complex relationship with Marianne Ihlen. I’m imagining Leonard living in New York, being famous and thinking back to being with Marianne on the Greek island of Hydra where they met. It’s about the duality of wanting to be with someone but also betraying them.” **“Marie & Polonium”** “Marie Curie is another person I wanted to write about because she was constantly pushing against the society that she lived in by finding a way to be educated as a woman and ultimately inventing radiotherapy, which has saved so many lives. It’s easy to see historical characters as caricatures but I wanted to humanize these people through these songs.” **“Red Wine & Wilde”** “I was reading about Oscar Wilde’s life and his relationship with Bosie Douglas, his on-off partner in his later years, which became quite toxic. Wilde was a leading force for being who he was in a time when it was illegal to be gay, he refused to bow down to regressive societal pressures but he was also complicated because he had a family and children and lived an artist’s life. It’s a big story, and I wanted to zoom in on a night between Wilde and Bosie to capture the complexity of their relationship in a snapshot.” **“Seasons & Narcissus”** “The Narcissus myth has been retold in so many ways because it’s so relevant to the way we live our lives now, constantly being confronted by our own image on phones or Zoom calls. I wanted to tackle that obsession by writing an earnest love song that we come to realize is between Narcissus and his own reflection, producing a pretty morbid ending. ” **“Drawbridge & the Baroness”** “This is one of the oddest and most unique songs on the record but I love it. It’s based on a philosophical dilemma called the drawbridge exercise, which is all about power and people’s worldviews. I chased the idea while sitting at my kitchen table, layering up hundreds of tracks of my own voice harmonizing with itself. I’m really proud of it.” **“The Soprano & Midnight Wonderings” (feat. BIM)** “I thought people could do with a break from my voice for a minute on the record, so this track features BIM, who is a fantastic vocalist that has toured with us for many years. It’s a story from her life that we wrote together on tour and then finished at my house. It felt really important for her to sing it since she’s such a beautiful artist.” **“Essie & Paul”** “I wanted to write about Paul and Eslanda Robeson, who were husband and wife and civil rights activists. They had a complex relationship and I wanted to capture the compromises of long-term love on this song, as well as giving a musical nod to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with the track being only strings and vocals. I love Sufjan Stevens and artists that bring in orchestral elements to their songs, so this one is a dream for me.” **“Mademoiselle & the Nunnery Blaze”** “Halfway through writing the album, I got in touch with the historian Emma Nagouse to put me onto unusual stories I could explore. She told me about this incredible French opera singer from the 17th century, Julie d’Aubigny, who had an amazing life and once broke her girlfriend out of a nunnery by burning it down. I wanted to write about that sweeping love story and the two of them not caring about the constraints of her time. It also features me trying my hand at singing in French!” **“Zheng Yi Sao & Questions for Her”** “Another figure that Emma directed me towards was Zheng Yi Sao, who ran a piracy empire that was so big it challenged the Chinese empire in the early 19th century. It’s crazy to me that she isn’t more well-known and this song looks back at her with awe from the present day, asking how she managed to achieve it all. It’s definitely the most bombastic song on the album.” **“Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024”** “When I was 13, my dad gave me a book of poems he wrote when he was traveling across America with my mum, and in it was a verse about homelessness in San Francisco that I decided to turn into a song. It’s always been something I’ve wanted to pick up again and this album felt like the perfect opportunity to do that. I added a verse from my perspective in 2024, addressing my dad’s words and ending the record from my voice, just as I started it. It also features my mum singing backing vocals, which was very special.”

There was a time, not so long ago, when things felt relatively simple for Beatrice Laus: She’d write and record songs in her London bedroom, she’d post them online, the world would come to her or it wouldn’t. But it did—very much so. To such an extent and at such a dizzying clip that, still 23 and just two albums into her career, the Up Next alum found herself taking a meeting with Rick Rubin—part mystic, part producer, part institution. “I think we just wanted to meet each other,” she tells Apple Music. “The entire meeting was about life and just catching up. It was almost like a therapy session. I think at the end I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been making some songs. Do you want to hear them?’” Those songs became part of *This Is How Tomorrow Moves*, a lush and supremely confident third full-length that Laus would go on to record with Rubin at Shangri-La, his legendary studio in Malibu—a long way from said London bedroom. It’s an album about self-realization and growing up, written in the aftermath of a breakup, as Laus—fully online and in the public eye, on tour and away from home—came to terms with a life that had become unrecognizable to her. “I really needed music to help me understand what my brain was going through,” she says. “I just had so much to say. I didn’t really think about the way it sounded. You know when you really badly need to go to the toilet? That’s what it felt like: I really badly needed to write a song.” At Shangri-La, Rubin encouraged Laus to see and hear what she’d written in its simplest and clearest emotional terms. Though she still takes plenty of inspiration from a wide swath of ’90s alt-rock and pop (“Post,” the Incubus-like “Take a Bite”), she is equally at home here at the center of a spare piano ballad (“Girl Song”) as she is amid the fanfare of an incandescent indie-folk cut (“Ever Seen”). It’s the sound of an artist finding clarity and herself, an artist leveling up. “I think being in a space like Shangri-La, and knowing that you’re making this record with Rick, it definitely kind of kicks you,” she says. “Like, ‘All right, it’s time to shine.’” Read on as Laus takes us inside a few highlights from the album. **“Girl Song”** “I think you can argue that ‘Girl Song,’ out of all the songs on the record, is the most tragic. I wrote it because I’m still trying to figure that one out, just in terms of growing up and loving myself and the way I look and physical appearance and all that mumbo jumbo. But it sits at number six, just because I just felt like it was perfect. It had to be perfectly in the middle of the record because it didn’t suit the beginning or the end. It was just how I felt at that moment.” **“Beaches”** “I wrote ‘Beaches’ because of how terrified I was getting into this. I am the sort of person that values feeling comfortable and loyalty and trusting people around me, not changing a lot of things. But I would’ve been an idiot if I had said no \[to Rubin\]. I remember my boyfriend being like, ‘Are you crazy? You have to go.’ I’m so used to making music back at home, not in a massive, fancy place.” **“The Man Who Left Too Soon”** “I actually wrote it in LA, in my hotel room. I’ve never really experienced death in family. I always wondered how that felt like. My current boyfriend, unfortunately, lost his dad around his twenties; I really got to see how that would feel like and how that would affect someone. I wanted to write about it so I can understand what that would mean to other people and what that would mean to him and what that would mean to me.” **“This Is How It Went”** “It makes me so anxious: A very intense thing happened to me, and I needed to write about it. I have to say all this shit.”

Blossoms’ long-term producer James Skelly has always encouraged the band to try working with someone else and, on their fifth album, the UK quintet finally took him up on the suggestion. With Skelly, himself no stranger to adventurous explorations as leader of The Coral, still involved in an overarching production role, *Gary* sees Blossoms triumphantly expand their gang. “This time round we were more open-minded and wanted to try to collaborate with other people,” singer/guitarist Tom Ogden tells Apple Music. The first port of call was reaching out to soul-dance duo Jungle. “I’d realized they produced themselves and loved the way their records sounded,” says Ogden. “We booked some time on New Year’s Day 2023 to start recording and did ‘Nightclub’ and ‘What Can I Say After I’m Sorry?’ They were great but, in hindsight, we didn’t have enough songs to go and start recording the album.” The tone had been set, though, for a celebratory record with a swagger about it. After the filmic introspection of 2022’s *Ribbon Around the Bomb*, *Gary* is Blossoms back at their ebullient, anthemic best. “We always knew we wanted it to be great live and a bit of a party,” says Ogden. “That was the only blueprint.” The recording process was characterized by a series of breakthrough moments. The first was working with Jungle. The second was the emergence of the title track, bringing the live alchemy of the band back to the fore (and almost certainly the only song you will hear this year about the theft of a fiberglass gorilla called Gary). The third essential ingredient was a songwriting collaboration with Irish country-pop star CMAT. “Working with CMAT gave me the final push to be a writer and be inspired, and that seamed the album together,” says Ogden. Let the singer and bandmates Josh Dewhurst (guitar), Joe Donovan (drums), and Charlie Salt (bass) guide you through *Gary*, track by track. **“Big Star”** Tom Ogden: “I wrote this after being in the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. This guy walked in \[the lobby\] and was having a meeting about this magazine. I Googled him while I was sat there, and it turns out he’s this big writer in America who’s got this music magazine and has done since the early ’90s. And I was like, ‘Should I go over to him and be like, “I’m in a band”?’ But then I bottled it. I like the playfulness of the lyrics. I think that was after working with CMAT, it influenced me to be like, ‘You can write something that’s really direct.’ I was literally sat there thinking it and then I just turned it into a song. Not going over to him is kind of very us and very me.” **“What Can I Say After I’m Sorry?”** TO: “This was the song that made me think, ‘Oh, we could work with Jungle.’ The sonic was influenced by Jungle really. I wrote it on the piano, it was a bit more R&B when I wrote it, maybe like Outkast or something. The title was from an old Nat King Cole record but what the song is about is when I’m in a bit of a rut and my emotions are bleeding into my relationship. I imagine it’s probably quite challenging to be with someone who’s in a rut. There’s not that much that the other person can do to snap you out of it. It’s me saying, ‘What can I say after I’m sorry?’, in terms of, ‘I wish I wasn’t like this sometimes.’” **“Gary”** TO: “I was driving home and the news came on: ‘A giant fiberglass gorilla has been stolen from a garden center in Carluke, Scotland. The hunt is on for Gary the Gorilla.’ I went home and started reading about it and then wrote the song in half an hour on the acoustic guitar. It was as if the song always existed, I just had to wait for that moment of inspiration to come over me.” Charlie Salt: “Tom does this really clever thing where he’ll take something quite daft and it’ll be juxtaposed with this lovely arrangement and melody underneath. It immediately \[sounded\] like a classic Blossoms tune and it’s got this strange emotion…and you’re always thinking about the gorilla itself.” Josh Dewhurst: “We bought our own Gary and he lives at the studio. Every day, when you get to work, you see him and you’re like, ‘How are you doing, Gary? You all right?’” **“I Like Your Look”** TO: “This was written with CMAT in Anglesey, Wales. The plan was for me and the lads to go away just for some time on our own. CMAT was going to come and write with me in Stockport but the dates didn’t work, so she was like, ‘I’ll just come to Wales with you.’ One night, we’d been trying something else and it wasn’t really working so Ciara \[Mary-Alice Thompson, aka CMAT\] was like, ‘Right, everyone get a book and start shouting things out from the book that you think could be song titles.’ Joe went, ‘I like your look,’ and I was like, ‘That’s good, it should be a song about fashion, it should be a bit like “Pop Muzik” by M.’ Ciara was like, ‘Yeah, you should do ’80s rapping like “Time Rag” by Joan Baez or Blondie’s “Rapture.”’ It was a really fast burst of creativity. We’d never written like that before, it was really fun and inspiring. Everyone brought something to the table. I think you can hear that on the record.” **“Nightclub”** TO: “This was written after reading a blog about a guy who was in love with his friend’s girlfriend. I had the title and I started reading about people trying to blag their way into nightclubs. It was inspired by my own personal experience of going to nightclubs growing up and also reading online about other people’s experiences. Working with Jungle definitely brought the best out of this song. Josh Lloyd-Watson put his thing on it. He was like, ‘Imagine you’re female backing singers in the ’60s,’ and we’d be doing all this stuff. He’d chop it up and flip the song on its head.” **“Perfect Me”** TO: “Again, this was written as us five in the room very, very fast. I came into the rehearsal room one morning and Josh was messing around on a Moog sequencer. He pressed a button, and it had a bit of that Who, ‘Baba O’Riley’ thing about it. Immediately, I was like, ‘I can hear these chords underneath this.’” CS: “It might have been the first one we recorded for the album and we were sat on it for so long. It became a little bit stale. James Skelly always stood by it and considered it a single.” TO: “Yeah, it had the energy but we shunned it a little bit. We came back with fresh ears six months later and we were like, ‘Hang on a minute, this is really good.’” **“Mothers”** TO: “I wanted to have our version of ‘Bros’ by Wolf Alice, a song about friendship. Me and Joe have been best mates since we were 12. Our mothers were actually friends in the ’80s, and I had a line about that in another song, so when I started writing this verse idea about me and Joe growing up, I was like, ‘Oh, what about the lyrics that I wrote about our mothers in the ’80s?’ I probably refined it over a month and a half and went back and tweaked this lyric, changed the verse melody, pulled the words from a different song I’d written.” Josh Dewhurst: “When we recorded it, we kept on the family theme. My dad’s a pianist. Oftentimes, when we’re in the studio properly recording, he’ll just come down for the craic because he’s a genius and also he’s funny as hell.” TO: “Josh’s dad suggested these insane chords that we would’ve never come across ourselves. It was a nice, full-circle thing, a song about me and Joe references our mothers, and then Josh’s dad played on it. It’s very wholesome.” **“Cinnamon”** TO: “This was written out of a jam in the room. This is the most collaborative record we’ve done in terms of writing, we were just jamming in there. It started off with me, Josh, and Chaz and I was hearing it \[as\] more Vampire Weekend but, when we came back and worked on it the next day, Joe made it more us, helped it become more of an anthem.” Joe Donovan: “I imagined it in a field at a festival, that big, euphoric vibe.” **“Slow Down”** TO: “‘Slow Down’ is only one of three personal songs about my relationship on this album. It usually makes up the bulk of records whereas, this time, I’ve made an effort to write about other stuff. This is saying, in a relationship, we needed to take a moment and slow down and appreciate each other a bit more. We took our eye off the ball in terms of looking after each other a little bit.” **“Why Do I Give You the Worst of Me?”** TO: “Often, I can put too much weight on stuff with the band being my source of happiness. I don’t think it’s necessarily a healthy way to live your life. It’s that thing where your partner always sees the worst of you, warts and all. I was speaking to Ciara about it because we were writing songs and trying to be very open. I was just explaining what was going on and I think my wife Katie had said, ‘Oh, why do I always get the worst of you?’ because it was like I’d gone away and come to life writing. At home, I’d been struggling writing, basically. She wanted that from me at home as well, and then Ciara just started writing it from things I was saying. It’s quite a personal song. It was quite intense.”

Coldplay has been fusing together stadium rock with intricate descriptions of emotion for more than a quarter century, and their 10th album opens with a grand overture that sets the listener up for an uplifting experience. But *Moon Music*’s title track upends expectations quickly, dissolving into a simple piano melody that refracts and folds in on itself until lead vocalist Chris Martin breaks the spell. “Once upon a time I tried to get myself together/Be more like the sky and welcome every kind of weather,” Martin muses in a singsong cadence, picking apart his insecurities and foibles until he finally asks, “Is anyone out there? I just need a friend,” as the instruments backing him melt into a puddle. The show of vulnerability is a startling opening, but being so open felt right for the multi-hyphenate Martin. “With ‘MOON MUSiC,’” Martin tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “I felt like, ‘Well, what if I just really told how I feel every day?’” At this point in their career, closer to the end of their run than not (more on that in a moment), Coldplay has broken up the cycle by touring continuously while making and releasing new music rather than subjecting themselves to predictable album-tour cycles. The band considers *Moon Music* to be of a piece with 2021’s *Music of the Spheres* rather than another era. “I quite like this way of working where you don’t have to attach albums to tours and they don’t have to be these things that start and stop,” says bassist Guy Berryman. “It’s quite nice having the fluidity of what we are doing.” *Moon Music*, like the satellite it’s named after, dips in and out of different phases while still holding fast to Coldplay’s hooky, thoughtful core—appropriate for an album that’s largely about remaining true to oneself. “JUPiTER” is a tale of self-acceptance that opens with Martin in folkie mode, with more voices and instruments coming in as the titular character begins to feel comfortable in her own skin: “I love who I love,” Martin and a choir sing in call-and-response mode on the chorus, and the music grows more ecstatic as Jupiter’s story grows more jubilant. The gorgeously assembled “🌈,” meanwhile, incorporates the late Maya Angelou singing the spiritual “God Put a Rainbow in the Clouds.” “You have to accept all your colors and all the colors of other people—literally and metaphorically,” says Martin. “Once you accept all those colors, then you can be yourself, and then you can let everyone else be themselves.” Coldplay’s and Martin’s flirtations with the dance floor over the years have resulted in some of their biggest hits, and *Moon Music* finds salvation in different eras of clubbing. “AETERNA” brings the band back to the rave, its stretched-out guitars and galloping rhythms framing Martin’s exhortations to “feel it flow.” The duet with Nigerian upstart Ayra Starr “GOOD FEELiNGS” drops by the disco, while “feelslikeimfallinginlove” hearkens back to Coldplay’s grandest pop triumphs, its fist-pumping chorus getting energy from the romantic sentiments Martin’s singing about. Much has been made of Martin’s insisting that Coldplay is going to call it quits after album 12. (“Having that limit means that the quality control is so high right now that for a song to make it is almost impossible, which is great,” he explains.) But Martin wants Coldplay’s listeners to experience *Moon Music* as a representation of where he and his bandmates are in this dizzying moment. “It’s our manifesto, or my way of looking at things right now,” says Martin. “In terms of how to continue, how to not give up, how to accept reality, not run away from it, not hate anybody—even in the midst of always being filled with so many difficult emotions. And it’s with Max Martin: He made sure that it’s really good.”

In 2023, Manchester’s Courteeners celebrated the 15th anniversary of debut album *St. Jude*. Reflecting on indie-rock songs such as “Not Nineteen Forever” and their early-adulthood tales of yearning, frustration, joy, and misadventure, singer/guitarist Liam Fray told Apple Music “It’s good to be 18, 19, kicking against something.” However, what’s ensured Courteeners can still fill arenas after almost two decades of active service is heeding the advice of one of their biggest hits: You’re not 19 forever so you can’t keep returning to that well. Youthful bluster quickly gave way to considered introspection on 2010’s *Falcon* before the band hovered around the dance floor on *Anna* (2013) and slid gracefully onto it for 2016’s *Mapping the Rendezvous*. There’s also been a cross-pollination of post-punk and synth-pop (*Concrete Love* in 2014) and the psychedelic adventures of 2020’s *More. Again. Forever*. On the band’s seventh album, the sands shift again, this time exposing their poppiest instincts. These are songs colored with the warm tones of escapism and optimism: breezily psychedelic grooves that recall The Beta Band (opener “Sweet Surrender”), whistle-powered jaunts (the title track), and urgent guitar anthems (“Love You Any Less,” “First Name Terms”). And they’re all fitted with some of the stickiest, most uplifting hooks the Courteeners have produced. *St. Jude*’s breathless energy has inevitably dimmed over the years but it’s been replaced by the confidence the band have to do exactly as they please—and they’ve rarely sounded as bright and accomplished as they do here.

Perhaps more so than any other Irish band of their generation, Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums were intrinsically linked to their homeland. Their debut, 2019’s *Dogrel*, was a bolshy, drizzle-soaked love letter to the streets of Dublin, while Brendan Behan-name-checking follow-up *A Hero’s Death* detailed the group’s on-the-road alienation and estrangement from home. And 2022’s *Skinty Fia* viewed Ireland from the complicated perspective of no longer actually being there. On their fourth album, however, Fontaines D.C. have shifted their attention elsewhere. *Romance* finds the five-piece wandering in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Japanese manga classic *Akira*, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film *La Grande Bellezza*, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s *Pusher* films. “We didn’t set out to make a trilogy of albums but that’s sort of what happened,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music of those first three records. “They were such a tight world, and this time we wanted to step outside of it and change it up. A big inspiration for this record was going to Tokyo for the first time. It’s such a visual, neon-filled, supermodern city. It was so inspiring. It brought in all these new visual references to the creative process for the first time.” Recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford (their previous three albums were all made with Dan Carey), *Romance* also brings in a whole new palette of sounds and colors to the band’s work. From the clanking apocalyptic dread of the opening title track, hip-hop-inspired first single “Starburster,” and the warped grunge and shoegaze hybrids of “Here’s the Thing” and “Sundowner,” it opens a whole new chapter for Fontaines D.C., while still finding time for classic indie rock anthems such as “Favourite”’s wistful volley of guitars or the Nirvana-like “Death Kink.” “Every album we do feels like a huge step in one direction for us, but *Romance* is probably a little bit more outside of our previous records,” says Coll. “It’s exciting to surprise people.” Read on as he dissects *Romance*, one track at a time. **“Romance”** “This is one that we wrote really late at night in the studio. It just fell out of us. It was one of those real moments of feeling, ‘Right, that’s the first track on the album.’ It’s kind of like a palate cleanser for everything that’s come before. It’s like the opening scene. I feel like every time we’ve done a record there’s been one tune that’s always stuck out like, ‘This is our opening gambit...’” **“Starburster”** “Grian \[Chatten, singer\] wrote most of this tune on his laptop, so there were lots of chopped-up strings and stuff—it was quite a hip-hop creative process. It’s probably the song that is furthest away from the old us on this album. This tune was the first single and we always try and shock people a bit. It’s fun to do that.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “This was written in the last hour of being in the studio. We had maybe 12 or 13 tracks ready to go and just started jamming, and it presented itself in an hour. \[Guitarist Conor\] Curley had this really gnarly, ’90s, piercing tone, and it just went from there.” **“Desire”** “This has been knocking around for ages. It was one of those tunes that took so many goes to get to where it was meant to sit. It started as a band setup and then we went really electronic with it. Then in the studio, we took it all back. It took a while for it to sit properly. Grian did 20 or 30 vocal layers on that, he really arranged it in an amazing way. Carlos \[O’Connell, guitarist\] and Grian were the main string arrangers on this record. This was the first record where we actually got a string quartet in—before, people would just send it over. So being able to sit in the room and watch a string quartet take center stage on a song was amazing.” **“In the Modern World”** “Grian wrote this song when he was in LA. He was really inspired by Lana Del Rey and stuff like that. Hollywood and the glitz and the glamour, but it’s actually this decrepit place. It’s that whole idea of faded glamour.” **“Bug”** “This felt like a really easy song for us to write. That kind of buzzy, all-of-us-in-the-same-room tune. I really fought for this one to be on the record. I feel like, with songs like that, trying to skew them and put a spin on them that they don’t need is overwriting. If it feels right then there’s no point in laboring over it. That song is what it is and it’s great. It’s going to be amazing live.” **“Motorcycle Boy”** “This one is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins a bit. We actually recorded it six months before the rest of the album. This tune was the real genesis of the record and us finding a path and being like, ‘OK, we can explore down here...’ That was one that really set the wheels in motion for the album. It really informed where we were going.” **“Sundowner”** “On this album, we were probably coming from more singular points than we have before. A lot of the lads brought in tunes that were pretty much there. I was sharing a room with Curley in London, and he was working on this really shoegaze-inspired tune for ages. I think he always thought that Grian would sing it, but when he put down the guide vocals in the studio it sounded great. We were all like, ‘You are singing this now.’” **“Horseness Is the Whatness”** “Carlos sent me a demo of that tune ages and ages ago. It was just him on an acoustic, and it was such a powerful lyric. I think it’s amazing. We had to kind of deconstruct it and build it back up again in terms of making it fit for this record. Carlos had made three or four drum loops for me and it was a really fun experience to try and recreate that. I don’t know how we’re going to play it live but we’ll sort it out!” **“Death Kink”** “Again, this came from one of the jams of us setting up for a studio session. It’s another one of those band-in-a-room-jamming-out kind of tunes. On tour in America, we really honed where everything should sit in the set. This is going to be such a fun tune to play live. We’ve started playing it already and it’s been so sick.” **“Favourite”** “‘Favourite’ was another one we wrote when we were rehearsing. It happened pretty much as it is now. We were kind of nervous about touching it again for the album because that first recording was so good. That’s the song that hung around in our camp for the longest. When we write songs on tour, often we end up getting bored of them over time but ‘Favourite’ really stuck. We had a lot of conversations about the order on this album and I felt it was really important to move from ‘Romance’ to ‘Favourite.’ It feels like a journey from darkness into light, and finishing on ‘Favourite’ leaves it in a good spot.”

Arriving 20 years after the open political ire of *American Idiot*, Green Day’s 14th album sees the veteran California punk trio energized by a new wave of worrying trends. Now in his early fifties, singer/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong retains the snotty defiance that has always been his calling card, whether the stakes are high or low. He doesn’t mince words on opener and lead single “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” calling out the nation’s boom in conspiracy theories and reimagining the classic patriotic lyric “my country, ’tis of thee” as “my country under siege.” While less of a concept album than the rock opera turned stage musical *American Idiot*, *Saviors* still latches on to some recurring themes in the name of getting a point across, such as updating 1950s-era rock ’n’ roll tropes: “Bobby Sox” swaps the aw-shucks question “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?” with “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?” while the timeless-sounding romantic ballad “Suzie Chapstick” is timestamped with a reference to absently scrolling Instagram. And “Living in the ’20s” may flash a guitar solo ripped straight from rock’s earliest days, but it also cites the more modern markers of mass shootings and pleasure robots. Armstrong’s urgent venting is delivered within some of Green Day’s catchiest songs since the 1990s, and longtime producer Rob Cavallo proves just as crucial to the album’s punchy, uncrowded sound as bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool. After all, Cavallo helmed the band’s 1994 smash *Dookie*, and *Saviors* sneaks in a few nods to that ripe era too. The sheer simplicity of the chugging chords opening “Strange Days Are Here to Stay” evokes the former album’s hit single “Basket Case,” while the mortality-minded closer “Fancy Sauce” borrows Nirvana’s coupling of “stupid and contagious.” The bubblegum anthem “Look Ma, No Brains!” harks back even further to Green Day’s DIY roots (and before that, pop-punk godfathers the Ramones), further cementing the idea that righteous anger goes down easier smuggled inside a pop song.

The White Stripes were nothing if not a formal exercise in exploring the possibilities of self-imposed limitation—in instrumentation, in color scheme, in verifiable biographical information. Since the duo’s dissolution in 2011, Jack White has continued playing with form (and color schemes), from the just-one-of-the-boys-in-the-band vibes of The Raconteurs to 2022’s sonically experimental *Fear of the Dawn* and its more restrained companion *Entering Heaven Alive*. Despite—or perhaps *to* spite—those who longed for a simpler, noisier, more monochromatic time, White tinkered away. The rollout for *No Name*, White’s sixth solo album, was characteristically mischievous: It first appeared as a white-label LP given away at Third Man Records before being posted online without song titles, sparking an excitement that felt fresh, largely because the sound did not. Meg White is not walking through that door anytime soon, but the 13 tracks here channel the unadorned, wild-eyed ferocity of the band that made him famous more efficiently and consistently than anything he’s done since. There’s plenty of swagger from top to bottom, but most of all there’s *hooks*: big, fat, noisy guitars played in the catchiest combinations possible. “That’s How I’m Feeling” may not relieve “Seven Nation Army” of its ubiquity anytime soon, but it is a ready-made capital-A anthem with a euphoric jump-scare chorus that sticks on first listen and doesn’t get unstuck. “Bless Yourself,” “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago),” and “Number One With a Bullet” are just as infectious, while “Bombing Out” may be the fastest, heaviest thing White has ever put out in any of his many guises. The casualness of it all is a flex—as meticulous and exacting as White can be, *No Name*’s modest arrival is a reminder of how easily he could have kept churning out earworm White Stripes songs. Good for him that he didn’t want to; good for us that he does now.

Six days before Kasabian released its eighth album, the Leicester band played a surprise gig on the Woodsies stage at Glastonbury 2024. A tent-wide mosh pit lit up by burning flares and equally luminous grins confirmed that Kasabian’s knack for bonding pop nous and everyman swagger to psychedelic adventure and club-ready grooves still commands the sort of devotion that helped earn them a headline slot at the festival 10 years earlier. On *Happenings*, their always restless lead singer/guitarist/creative engine Serge Pizzorno revitalizes that mix by filtering out the flotsam with an every-note-counts approach. He indulges his musical curiosity but never lets it meander, restricting the 10-song album to a 28-minute running time. So “Hell of It” might draw on garage rock, hardcore rave, and synth pop but it does so with satin-smooth gear changes and an urgency that sees the song done in three and a half minutes. In these surrounds, you’re rarely more than 60 seconds away from a stirring chorus, and the stickiest hooks—in disco-rock thumper “Coming Back to Me Good” and the crisp, unburdened pop of “Algorithms”—feel fit to be sung from shoulders in festival fields for a few years yet. *Happenings* may be short but it’s consistently sharp.

There had been moments when John Squire wondered how little the future held for him as a musician. In 2020, a thumb he’d broken while playing basketball with his son was struggling to heal and he worried he might never be able to play guitar again. Before that, The Stone Roses—the Manchester band with which he’d helped to completely dilate the horizons of indie music during the late ’80s and early ’90s—had seemed to wither to a final close when their 2016-17 reunion produced two new songs but no desire on any member’s part to make another album. Going into the 2020s, Squire seemed more consumed by his work as a visual artist. Nevertheless, in early 2022, his thumb righted by physiotherapy, Squire had a nagging sense that he wasn’t quite done with music. “I started thinking I’d like to get back out there,” he told Apple Music’ Radio’s Zane Lowe. “‘Have I still got it in me?’ I started putting some ideas together. I wouldn’t say they were songs, they were more like glorified riffs.” He’d had a thought that he might find a female singer to help flesh out those ideas, but then his guest appearance at Liam Gallagher’s Knebworth concert that June sparked a different idea: What if he asked the Oasis man to sing them? It was a question worth asking. Before the end of the year, Gallagher was in Squire’s home studio in Macclesfield, recording demos and igniting Squire’s creative zeal again. “On paper, it’s a slam dunk but to actually hear it and feel that magic was amazing,” said Squire. “The buzz for me has always been that moment of conception when you realize you’ve got something great. When you’re doing that within the framework of a band and an album and gigs, you know all that’s coming down the line at you once you’ve completed the song—there’s nothing better than that feeling. It’s like, ‘I’m the first person that’s heard this and it’s going to travel, it’s going to be released into the wild and do some damage.’” For his part, Gallagher was just chuffed to be working with one of his musical heroes. “John going, ‘Look, I’m back to writing songs and that again,’ made me happy regardless of me singing on them,” Gallagher told Lowe. “These songs came my way and I was double pleased to sing them. I love them. I think John’s equally as good \[at songwriting\] as he is playing a guitar. I’m sure people know that anyway, but it’s nice if more people get to know it.” You can sense the duo’s mutual satisfaction in an album that was recorded over a two-week period in L.A. with producer Greg Kurstin, a collaborator on Gallagher’s three solo records. While the core elements are familiar—Squire’s roaming, nimble guitar lines, Gallagher’s serrated voice—nothing feels tired or overcooked. Instead, buoyed by the strength of Squire’s melodies, the two turn in performances that might be their best since the Roses and Oasis heydays. Writing the words and music, Squire gives Gallagher moods and colors he’s always worked well with—sneering disdain (“I’m so Bored”), sore-headed yearning (“Mars to Liverpool”), and measured psychedelia (“Love You Forever”)—and successfully coaxes him onto relatively new ground (the blues on “I’m a Wheel”). The world’s recording studios are littered with the ghosts and abandoned recordings of stellar collaborations that should have worked on paper but didn’t create any chemistry on tape. Gallagher thinks his particular super-duo has succeeded for a simple reason. “John’s guitars are lairy, man, and my vocals can be as well,” he said. “I think it lends well to it. \[It’s not that\] one’s light and one’s heavy. They’re both just fucking coming at you.”

Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody says the band’s new record was a process of two extremes. The first was the group’s initial attempt at making an eighth album, an undertaking that hit a dead end and left the indie-rock trio from Northern Ireland wondering where to go next. “It was genuinely nobody’s fault,” Lightbody tells Apple Music. “It was a constellation of things but it was a chaotic mess and we were very stressed. We were also on a deadline—technically, the record should’ve come out a year earlier. We now know never to work to a deadline again, because that’s no way to make art.” Lightbody and bandmates Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid regrouped and gave it another go. In Stormzy and Adele producer Fraser T. Smith, they found a collaborator who made the creation of *The Forest Is the Path* feel like a comparative walk in the park. “The second time we made it was so calm and it all filtered down from the way Fraser not just works in the studio, but lives his life—calm and chill, sweet and funny,” Lightbody says. “There was so much laughter and silliness. It took five months the first time and five weeks the second time.” You can almost hear the relief lighting up *The Forest Is the Path*, a record of space and breadth, where the band’s long-established melodic knack has room to recline over expansive, atmospheric instrumentation. All the Snow Patrol hallmarks are present and correct—stirring pop-rock sing-alongs, poignant balladry, and uplifting contemplatives delivered by a band that sounds like it has a new lease of life. “I firmly believe this is the start of something,” states Lightbody. “We’re 30 years into a career. We’ve never been here before, we’re in uncharted territory no matter what we do.” Read on as Lightbody guides us through Snow Patrol’s new dawn, track by track. **“All”** “Fraser and I went in together for the first time to write in October, November 2022 and we’d never met. He was the first outside person I’d written a song with for Snow Patrol. It’s a kind of blind date. You arrive in a room, and the intention is to write a song in a day. I walked in and Fraser had the guitar around him and was like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. What do you think of this?’ I hadn’t taken off my coat yet and we were already in it. I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds great!’ I started singing something, took my coat off and started writing words down and we had the song in an hour.” **“The Beginning”** “When Johnny and I got together in earnest to write the record, it was ‘The Beginning’ that we started with. I had been writing a lot of lyrics over the last three or four months, in notepads and notes on my phone. I had that line ‘I wanna be in love/Without being loved in return.’ It just sprung up from there. Johnny came up with the piano part and I started singing the melody over that and working on the lyrics. He worked more on the music, him and his team. Will Reynolds is credited on this song and one or two others on the record, he’s one of Johnny’s guys and he came up with that incredible wonky, woozy guitar part in the chorus.” **“Everything’s Here and Nothing’s Lost”** “‘The Beginning’ was done on the first day we were writing in Somerset and this was done the second day. Johnny and I were just sparking off each other. I came up with a little melody and it happened pretty quickly. I wandered around the garden, writing the lyrics, and it was beautiful sunny day. When I came back in, Johnny had that really massive chorus. It was even bigger originally but it was so big that people’s ears would’ve been blown off because they’d be turning up the quiet bit of the song and then we would pulverize them with a loud bit.” **“Your Heart Home”** “This was recorded by me at home on GarageBand, and then I sent it to Fraser and Scott, who engineered the record, and they brought it into glorious Technicolor. I’m half-decent at GarageBand, but I’m not a producer. My production is more about the ideas of what the song needs than the actual technical ability of manifesting that. When we all got together in the studio on this one, it really started to shift and move and grow. It was not what I was expecting it to be and I love that.” **“This Is the Sound of Your Voice”** “It’s a slightly strange melody for us. The first time I played this to someone I really trust and love and work with quite a lot, he went, ‘It’s just like a West End musical melody.’ I hadn’t even thought of that. Johnny put in so much intricate detail into this song. There were 200 strands of audio on it. Johnny does it so beautifully where everything is played, everything is real, everything is an authentic sound—he does an awful lot of found sounds. I think that’s why it doesn’t overload everything and everything finds its place in the song and some things come in and out. Johnny did a beautiful job, as did Nathan. The guitars are so beautiful and incredible all the way through.” **“Hold Me in the Fire”** “Johnny and I wrote it in his house. Right from day one, it sounded like a rock song that was going to expand outwards and we’d just have to get out of its way and let the balloon inflate. But when we got in to record it the first time, it didn’t do that. It felt like we were adding and nothing was happening. It’s a hard puzzle to fix because you’ve got to keep taking it apart and putting it back together again, and sometimes it just doesn’t ever fit together right. This is the thing about going in with Fraser: Everything we put on \[with him\], it felt like it was expanding, it felt like it was inflating in a very good way. Everything was floating up into the sky and it started to make a lot of sense. Fraser helped an awful lot. And Nathan’s guitars on it are just absolutely scorching.” **“Years That Fall”** “This was me in the house in Bangor. I wrote it on GarageBand and it actually was an unusual little thing to begin with, not the rock song that it turned into. There was a lot of that version we drew from, but in the studio, this absolute monster appeared. This small, rock, chuggy, indie-ish thing just went off somewhere else. It was really exciting.” **“Never Really Tire”** “Jesus Christ, the work that Johnny McDaid put into this—again, another 200-plus pieces of the song. And the way things come in and out, you can just play any section of the song and there’ll be something different happening. Right from the start, I had this vision of an eagle flying over a forest canopy. It can see the tree line rise and fall and undulate like waves in the deep ocean and that’s what I wanted this drum part to be. I was explaining it to Ash \[Soan, drummer\], thinking, ‘He’s going to think I’m fucking insane,’ and he went, ‘Yep, got it.’ We were like, ‘We’ll play this whole thing live as a spontaneous thing, see what happens.’ It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve had in the studio. That vision that I’d had for this song just came to life.” **“These Lies”** “I’d been numb for the year since my dad died. This was late 2020. I didn’t cry or I couldn’t feel anything. I thought I was broken. I thought that was it, forever. It was a couple of days before the anniversary, and I read a Rumi poem and burst into tears. The tears came like a torrent. A year’s worth of tears were just pouring onto the floor. And then, the next day I was exhausted. I went to sleep. The next day, I woke up and I was like, ‘I feel connected to something.’ I felt like, ‘I need a pen and a piece of paper right now,’ and I wrote a song about my dad. And then a song that followed about 10 minutes after that was ‘These Lies,’ which obviously wasn’t about him, and that came out in a flow state as well. It was just like all these things were trapped in there behind the tears that wouldn’t release.” **“What If Nothing Breaks?”** “This is all Johnny’s production. It went through many different forms. It started as a Motown song with a Motown beat, and it had a different chorus. It wasn’t quite working, something felt wrong about it. Johnny was playing around the chords of it and I was singing it in a different way and it felt like, ‘Oh, this is the place for this song, feels like it needs to be here.’ Then I came in one day and he was like, ‘What about these for the chords for the chorus?’ and I started singing the chorus as it became, and the song just came to life.” **“Talking About Hope”** “I’m proud of the lyrics on this record. I’ve allowed myself to be open to whatever happens rather than trying to force my way to the words, which sometimes has to happen if you’re staring at a blank page for months on end. This time around, there was no writer’s block. This song came from a true place, especially the verses. I love the lyrics and the verses. I don’t really say that about my own lyrics very often.” **“The Forest Is the Path”** “Michael Keeney deserves a big mention on this record. He produced Foy Vance’s *Joy of Nothing*, which for me is the greatest album by a Northern Irish artist, and produced many other things besides. He wrote and produced some of the strings on this record. We were in his studio and Nathan was playing that lead line. I recorded it on my phone and took it home and built the song around it on GarageBand. I sent that to Fraser and the thing that goes the whole way through the song, Nathan’s guitar, that’s the recording on my phone. I find that a quite nice way to finish a record—the spontaneity captured in one moment without having to go, ‘OK, well let’s go and set up the microphones.’ It was just like, ‘Oh, I love that, can I use that?’”

The Black Keys have spent the past two decades carrying the banner of blues-rock revivalism into the present. The duo have sold more records than most pop stars and have proven, time and time again, that rock has always been here—if you were willing to look. The band, made up of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, emerged from Akron, Ohio, in the early aughts as a welcome counterbalance to what was monopolizing record shelf space at the time. The New York City alternative scene was thriving, with bands including The Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, and Interpol dictating the sound coming out of venues, warehouses, and loft spaces up and down the East Coast. Auerbach and Carney, meanwhile, were crafting a sound that was more Mississippi Delta than Mercury Lounge. The duo’s shared love of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Thin Lizzy, and T. Rex formed the foundation of their lo-fi sound, and they spent the next two decades expanding their range, introducing elements of psychedelia and big-chorus anthems that made them festival-headlining mainstays. Now, The Black Keys are returning with album number 12, the aptly titled *Ohio Players*, a project that bubbles over with the energy of two dudes just here for a good time. “I think once we experienced success, it was like, ‘Let’s try to keep it going and not make the same record again,’” Carney tells ALT CTRL Radio’s Hanuman Welch. “But what happened during this process was the pandemic hits, and after a year of not seeing each other, we walk in the studio to start working on our next record, and something had just changed between us. It was like we finally became best friends; everything was enjoyable. Creatively, we were starting to kind of push things a little bit, but as soon as we finished \[2022 album\] *Dropout Boogie*, before it was even released, we started working on this record. The intention was to call our friends to come in and work with us.” Past collaborations have netted The Black Keys the sort of accolades other bands work their entire careers hoping to achieve. The duo’s *El Camino*, co-produced by Danger Mouse, won Grammys for Best Rock Album and Best Rock Performance in 2013. But *Ohio Players* is the first time the band has truly collaborated in the sense of sharing writing and performing duties. And then they brought on some friends. The album’s first single, “Beautiful People (Stay High),” was co-written by Beck and Dan the Automator, and is the result of supporting Beck on tour 20 years ago after meeting him at a 2003 *SNL* after-party. “I just busted out this promo CD,” Carney remembers. “And I was like, ‘This is my band.’ And two weeks later, Beck reached out and took us on tour. So, this track is a result of this relationship and fandom that I have for Beck. We’ve been talking about making music off and on for years, and right when we finished our last record, we’re like, ‘Get down, it’s time.’” The Black Keys managed to enlist another generational talent for the project: Oasis’ Noel Gallagher. “\[Collaboration\] can always fall flat on its face,” says Carney. “And so, we basically spent 80 grand running the gamble of, ‘This could not work,’ because we didn\'t have a song. So, we booked the smallest, tiniest studio in London, really, Toe Rag—it’s where The White Stripes did *Elephant*. It was, like, zero frills. We showed up, and Noel was there—a guy we’ve briefly met a couple of times, and a legend—and we’re now going to write a song from scratch. Within two hours, we had it, and within another two hours, we had the take. Noel was like, ‘I’ve never actually done this before.’” Two decades in, the novelty of working with people whose music they love still hasn’t worn off. “The thing I’m most proud of, as a fan of music, is to have gotten in the studio with people who I’m a fan of and make something I’m proud of and that they’re proud of,” adds Carney. “It just is a really amazing feeling.”

“We weren’t really expecting it at such a rate,” The Last Dinner Party’s guitarist and vocalist Lizzie Mayland tells Apple Music of the band’s rise, the story of which is well known by now. After forming in London in 2021, the five-piece’s effervescent live shows garnered an if-you-know-you-know kind of buzz, which went into overdrive when they released their stomping, euphoric debut single “Nothing Matters” in April 2023. All of which might have put a remarkable amount of pressure on them while making their debut record (not least given the band ended 2024 by winning the BRITs Rising Star Award then topped the BBC’s new-talent poll, Sound of 2024, in January). But The Last Dinner Party had written, recorded and finished *Prelude to Ecstasy* three months before anyone had even heard “Nothing Matters.” It meant, says lead singer Abigail Morris, that they “just had a really nice time” making it. “It is a painful record in some ways and it explores dark themes,” she adds, “but making it was just really fun, rewarding, and wholesome.” Produced by James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Jessie Ware), who Morris calls “the dream producer,” *Prelude to Ecstasy* is rooted in those hype-inducing live shows, its tracklist a reflection of the band’s frequent set list and its songs shaped and grown by playing them on stage. “We wanted to capture the live feels in the songs,” notes Morris. “That’s the whole point.” Featuring towering vocals, thrilling guitar solos, orchestral instrumentation, and a daring, do-it-all spirit, the album sounds like five band members having an intense amount of fun as they explore an intense set of emotions and experiences with unbridled expression and feeling. These songs—which expand and then shrink and then soar—navigate sexuality (“Sinner,” “My Lady of Mercy”), what it must be like to move through the world as a man (“Caesar on a TV Screen,” the standout, celestial “Beautiful Boy”), and craving the gaze of an audience (“Mirror”), as well as loss channeled into art, withering love, and the mother-daughter relationship. And every single one of them feels like a release. “It’s a cathartic, communal kind of freedom,” says Morris. “‘Cathartic’ is definitely the main word that we throw about when we talk about playing live and playing an album.” Read on as Morris and Mayland walk us through their band’s exquisite debut, one song at a time. **“Prelude to Ecstacy”** Abigail Morris: “I was thinking about it like an overture in a musical. Aurora \[Nishevci, keys player and vocalist\] composed it—she’s a fantastic composer, and it has themes from all the songs on the record. I don’t believe in shuffle except for playlists and I always liked the idea of \[an album\] having a start, middle, and end, and there is in this record. It sets the scene.” **“Burn Alive”** AM: “This was the first song that existed in the band—we’ve been opening the set with it the entire time. Lyrically, it always felt like a mission statement. I wrote it just after my father passed away, and it was the idea of, ‘Let me make my grief a commodity’—this kind of slightly sarcastic ‘I’m going to put my heart on the line and all my pain and everything for a buck.’ The idea of being ecstatic by being burned alive—by your pain and by your art and by your inspiration—in a kind of holy-fire way. What we’re here to do is be fully alive and committed to exorcising any demons, pain or joy.” **“Caesar on a TV Screen”** AM: “I wrote the beginning of this song over lockdown. I’d stayed over with my boyfriend at the time and then, to go back home, he lent me a suit. When I met him, I didn’t just find him attractive, I wanted to *be* him—he was also a singer in another band and he had this amazing confidence and charisma in a specifically masculine way. Getting to have his suit, I was like, ‘Now I am a man in a band.’ It’s this very specific sensuality and power you feel when you’re dressing as a man. I sat at the piano and had this character in my head—a Mick Jagger or a Caligula. I thought it would be fun to write a song from the perspective of feeling like a king, but you are only like that because you’re so vulnerable and so desperate to be loved and quite weak and afraid and childlike.” Lizzie Mayland: “There was an ending on the original version that faded away into this lone guitar, which was really beautiful, but we got used to playing it live with it coming back up again. So we put that back in. The song is very live, the way we recorded it.” **“The Feminine Urge”** AM: “The beginning of this song was based on an unreleased Lana Del Rey song called ‘Driving in Cars With Boys’—it slaps. I wanted to write about my mother and the mother wound. It’s about the relationship between mothers and daughters and how those go back over generations, and the shared traumas that come down. I think you get to a certain age as a woman where your mother suddenly becomes another woman, rather than being your mum. You turn 23 and you’re having lunch and it’s like, ‘Oh shit, we’re just two women who are living life together,’ and it’s very beautiful and very sweet and also very confronting. It’s the sudden realization of the mortality and fallibility of your mother that you don’t get when you’re a child. It’s also wondering, ‘If I have a daughter, what kind of mother would I be? Is it ethical to bring a child into a world like this? And what wound would I maybe pass on to her or not?’” **“On Your Side”** LM: “We put this and ‘Beautiful Boy’—the two slow ones—together. Again, that comes from playing live. Taking a slow moment in the set—people are already primed to pay attention rather than dancing.” AM: “The song is about a relationship breaking down and it’s nice to have that represented musically. It’s a very traditional structure, song-verse-chorus, and it’s not challenging or weird. It’s nice that the ending feels like this very beautiful decay. It’s sort of rotting, but it sounds very beautiful, but it is this death and gasping. I really like how that illustrates what the song’s about.” **“Beautiful Boy”** AM: “I come back to this as one that I’m most proud of. I wanted to say something really specific with the lyrics. It’s about a friend of mine, who’s very pretty. He’s a very beautiful boy. He went hitchhiking through Spain on his own and lost his phone and was just relying on the kindness of strangers, going on this beautiful Hemingway-esque trip. I remember being so jealous of him because I was like, ‘Well, I could never do that—as a woman I’d probably get murdered or something horrible.’ He made me think about the very specific doors that open when you are a beautiful man. You have certain privileges that women don’t get. And if you’re a beautiful woman, you have certain privileges that other people don’t get. I don’t resent him—he’s a very dear friend. Also, I think it’s important and interesting to write, as a woman, about your male relationships that aren’t romantic or sexual.” LM: “The flute was a turning point in this track. It’s such a lonely instrument, so vulnerable and so expressive. To me, this song is kind of a daydream. Like, ‘I wish life was like that, but it’s not.’ It feels like there’s a deeper sense of acceptance. It’s sweetly sad.” **“Gjuha”** AM: “We wanted to do an aria as an interlude. At first, we just started writing this thing on piano and guitar and Aurora had a saxophone. At some point, Aurora said it reminded her of an Albanian folk song. We’d been talking about her singing a song in Albanian for the album. She went away and came back with this beautiful, heart-wrenching piece. It’s about her feeling this pain and guilt of coming from a country, and a family who speak Albanian and are from Kosovo, but being raised in London and not speaking that language. She speaks about it so well.” **“Sinner”** LM: “It’s such a fun live moment because it’s kind of a turning point in the set: ‘OK, it’s party time.’ I was quite freaked out about the idea of being like, ‘This is a song about being queer.’ And I thought, ‘Are people going to get that?’ Because it’s not the most metaphorical or difficult lyrics, but it’s also not just like, ‘I like all gendered people.’ But people get it, which has been quite reassuring. It’s about belonging and about finding a safe space in yourself and your own sense of self. And marrying an older version of yourself with a current version of yourself. Playing it live and people singing it back is such a comforting feeling. I know Emily \[Roberts, lead guitarist, who also plays mandolin and flute\] was very inspired by St. Vincent and also LCD Soundsystem.” **“My Lady of Mercy”** AM: “For me, it’s the most overtly sexy song—the most obviously-about-sex song and about sexuality. I feel like it’s a nice companion to ‘Sinner’ because I think they’re about similar things—about queerness in tension with religion and with family and with guilt. I went to Catholic school, which is very informative for a young woman. I’m not a practicing Catholic now, but the imagery is always so pertinent and meaningful to me. I just thought it was really interesting to use religious imagery to talk about liking women and feeling free in your sexuality and reclaiming the guilt. I feel like Nine Inch Nails was a really big inspiration musically. This is testament to how much we trust James \[Ford\] and feel comfortable with him. We did loads of takes of me just moaning into the mic through a distortion. I could sit there and make fake orgasm sounds next to him.” LM: “I remember you saying you wanted to write a song for people to mosh to. Especially the breakdown that was always meant to be played live to a load of people throwing themselves around. It definitely had to be that big.” **“Portrait of a Dead Girl”** AM: “This song took a long time—it went through a lot of different phases. It was one we really evolved with as a band. The ending was inspired by Florence + the Machine’s ‘Dream Girl Evil.’ And Bowie’s a really big influence in general on us, but I think especially on this one. It feels very ’70s and like the Ziggy Stardust album. The portrait was actually a picture I found on Pinterest, as many songs start. It was an older portrait of a woman in a red dress sitting on a bed and then next to her is a massive wolf. At first, I thought that was the original painting, but then I looked at it again and the wolf has been put in. But I really loved that idea of comparing \[it to\] a relationship, a toxic one—feeling like you have this big wolf who’s dangerous but it’s going to protect you, and feeling safe. But you can’t be friends with a wolf. It’s going to turn around and bite you the second it gets a chance.” **”Nothing Matters”** AM: “This wasn’t going to be the first single—we always said it would be ‘Burn Alive.’ We had no idea that it was going to do what it did. We were like, ‘OK, let’s introduce ourselves,’ and then where it went is kind of beyond comprehension.” LM: “I was really freaked out—I spent the first couple of days just in my bed—but also so grateful for all the joy it’s been received with. When we played our first show after it came out, I literally had the phrase, ‘This is the best feeling in the world.’ I’ll never forget that.” AM: “It was originally just a piano-and-voice song that I wrote in my room, and then it evolved as everyone else added their parts. Songs evolve by us playing them on stage and working things out. That’s definitely what happened with this song—especially Emily’s guitar solo. It’s a very honest love song that we wanted to tell cinematically and unbridled, that expression of love without embarrassment or shame or fear, told through a lens of a very visual language—which is the most honest way that I could have written.” **“Mirror”** AM: “Alongside ‘Beautiful Boy,’ this is one of the most precious ones to me. When I first moved to London before the band, I was just playing on my own, dragging my piano around to shitty venues and begging people to listen. I wrote it when I was 17 or 18, and it’s the only one I’ve kept from that time. It’s changed meanings so many times. At first, one of them was an imagined relationship, I hadn’t really been in relationships until then and it was the idea of codependency and the feeling of not existing without this relationship. And losing your identity and having it defined by relationship in a sort of unhealthy way. Then—and I’ve never talked about this—but the ‘she’ in the verses I’m referring to is actually an old friend of mine. After my father died, she became obsessed with me and with him, and she’d do very strange, scary things like go to his grave and call me. Very frightening and stalker-y. I wrote the song being like, ‘I’m dealing with the dissolution of this friendship and this kind of horrible psychosis that she seems to be going through.’ Now this song has become similar to ‘Burn Alive.’ It’s my relationship with an audience and the feeling of always being a performer and needing someone looking at you, needing a crowd, needing someone to hear you. I will never forget the day that Emily first did that guitar solo. Then Aurora’s orchestral bit was so important to have on that record. We wanted it to have light motifs from the album. That ending always makes me really emotional. I think it’s a really touching bit of music and it feels so right for the end of this album. It feels cathartic.”

In the early 2000s, few would have bet on The Libertines making it to a fourth album album at all, let alone one as robust as *All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade*. Intra-band strife, prison, and Pete Doherty’s well-documented drug problems seemed to have scuppered the mercurial talent shown on 2002 debut *Up the Bracket* and 2004’s self-titled follow-up for good. However, following 2015’s galvanizing reformation album, *Anthems for Doomed Youth*, *All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade* finds the good ship Albion coming ashore with one of the strongest sets of songs of the band’s career. On an album recorded at The Albion Rooms, the group’s studio-cum-hotel in (UK seaside town) Margate, Kent, the ramshackle charm which sometimes felt like their songs could collapse at any moment has been bolstered by something far more muscular and sturdy. Rollicking opening track “Run Run Run” lands like The Clash at their anthemic peak, while closer “Songs They Never Play on the Radio” transforms a tune Doherty has been tinkering with in various forms for years into a swooning, Beatles-esque ballad. Where Libertines songs of old sprung from a mythical vision of England conjured from Doherty and fellow singer/guitarist/songwriter Carl Barât’s imagination, here they’re more rooted in the here and now. “Mustangs” is populated by a litany of colorful characters observed around Margate, Barât singing about day-drinking mums, day-dreaming nuns, and 24/7 ne’er-do-wells over a glorious Stones-y groove. While “Merry Old England” looks at a land of discarded crisp packets and B&B vouchers from the perspective of migrants traveling to the UK looking for work. “It’s a rich tapestry,” Doherty tells Apple Music. “It’s not just about Margate, it’s about England. I don’t think the English realize how the rest of the world gazes upon us with curiosity and wonder and bafflement, really.” Read on for Doherty and Barât’s track-by-track guide. **“Run Run Run”** PD: “It’s a bit of a belter that one, I love it. It’s got a bit of a Squeeze thing going on.” CB: “The song doesn’t have to be about running away from your past. It’s about running because that’s what you do. It can be in terror, or it can be a thing of great elation or purpose.” PD: “It’s just how you get your kicks, baby.” CB: “Yeah. It can be processing a trauma or getting your kicks. Either way.” **“Mustangs”** PD: “We spent an endless amount of time trying to get this together which isn’t normally our style. At one point it had 10 verses.” CB: “It was like a Velvet Underground epic. It was my \[T.S. Eliot poem\] ‘The Waste Land.’ It took a lot of shuffling in the sand to get that one to settle. It’s got a summer air to it, that kind of looseness. It’s got a Lou Reed-y narrative to it about all these characters in Margate.” **“I Have a Friend”** CB: “That’s a topical song given it’s about war and what’s going on in Ukraine.” PD: “It’s hard to look away from that. A few of us in the band have got Russian and Ukrainian roots. It was too much for me to take, we had to sit down and talk about it which merged into ‘I Have a Friend.’ It was just a desperate cry from all the darkness and confusion of all of this. I kept saying, ‘NATO are going to step in any day, are we too old to enlist?’ I said to my wife, ‘We can’t just sit here and watch it, we’ve got to go!’ She said, ’We’ve got a two-week-old baby.’” **“Merry Old England”** PD: “The people who travel here and risk life and limb to come to England and try and make a life for themselves is something we spend quite a lot of time talking about. A lot of these people are trained doctors, they speak four or five languages. It’s not that I’m pro-illegal immigration, I’ve just got this thing against borders. It’s very easy to create fear and anger and hostility about people.” CB: “It’s about discussing something that’s topical. There’s no didactic approach from us. Maybe we do have opinions, but it’s just a good song.” **“Man With the Melody”** CB: “That’s as old as time, that song.” PD: “From back when we were in Kentish Town. We didn’t have a B&B or our own recording studio or a bar. All we had was John \[Hassall, bassist\]’s basement with our little amps. He’d sit there in his skintight Dairy Queen T-shirt and his cowboy boots strumming this mad little song. We were secretly jealous of it because it was so melodic. So we took it apart, stripped it down and put it back together, put our own bits in and gave it a lick of paint. It’s got this creeping, gothic, Bram Stoker-ish element to it.” CB: “That’s Gary \[Powell, drummer\]’s singing debut. I think it’s the first time we’ve all sung on a song and shared it like that.” **“Oh Shit”** CB: “It’s essentially about the proprietor of The Albion Rooms and her husband. It’s about these young people jacking in their lives and just doing something different and worlds apart. It’s that sort of romance of the road, having no regard for their own immediate safety or life past what’s just straight in front of their faces, and being in love and all the experiences that come with that.” **“Night of the Hunter”** PD: “There’s a lot of references to tattoos. I’ve always been fascinated by that thing of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on the knuckles. When we play it live it really slows down and I like this idea of all these people singing along to ‘ACAB’ which stands for ‘All coppers are bastards,’ which is an old skinhead tattoo. Prison is mostly full of young men, but you always get that old lag in there and they’ve got these weird tattoos and you make the mistake of asking, ‘Oh, what do those dots mean?’ Then you’re like, ‘Oh, fuck…’ You hear some really dark stuff.” **“Baron’s Claw”** PD: “That was mostly born in The Albion Rooms. We were all sleeping there and trying to put the album together. I had these chords and I was playing them and Carl’s room is directly above where I was sitting. It was six or seven in the morning and I was playing it louder and louder, just hoping that it would somehow penetrate his dreams. So I opened the window and then I was playing it on the stairs. He finally came down a bit grumpy, as he tends to be in the morning, and I thought, ‘I’ll wait for him to say something…’ And he didn’t. I waited and waited and then finally I got a little ‘So, was that a new tune, then?’ \[from him\]. Because I don’t think he believed it was.” CB: “You’re lucky. In the old days, if you were playing outside my window I would have told you to shut the fuck up.” PD: “The song’s about this quite shameful episode in our history when we \[Britain\] funded the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. This guy is over there with a unit of White Russians fighting the Red Army and then comes back without a hand. Is it based on a true story? Why not? It could have happened!” **“Shiver”** PD: “If you did a DNA test on that song it would be 23 percent me, 25 percent American bully, a bit of sausage dog, a bit of Scottish terrier, a dash of dachshund…It went on a lot of weird deviations that song.” CB: “We were in Jamaica and we wrote a really misty-eyed ballad about 25 years of friendship and going from rack and ruin and dreams and reasons for staying alive. We cut it down and used the middle eight for ‘Shiver’ and the other song got thrown on the scrapheap. That’s how decadent art can be.” PD: “It turns out with ‘Shiver’ that we’ve actually made a half-decent pop song. That song’s had more radio play in its first month than \[debut single\] ‘What a Waster’ has had in 25 years.” **“Be Young”** PD: “The message of this song was to be young and fall in love, because we were coming out with all this depressing data about the planet’s impending doom. We wrote it in Jamaica as this hurricane was crashing through the Caribbean. We just thought, ‘Well, we’ve got all this stuff in here about being born astride a grave and the world boiling in oil, so let’s throw in a chorus about just being young and in love.’” CB: “It’s difficult to write a song like that. Jim Morrison could say, ‘I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.’ But he died in 1971, do you know what I mean? Now, you can’t have that mentality. You can’t say, ‘Just be young and fall in love.’” PD: “A lot of people do though, a lot of them just don’t give a fuck.” CB: “And more fool them.” **“Songs They Never Play on the Radio”** PD: “We got that song together years ago, at the very beginning. It’s got a checkered past. It’s like an old mate who you really believed in and you’ll always have a place for him in your heart, but he just sort of seemed to fade away. But then, it turns out he’s written the jingle for the new Audi advert and he’s sitting in a fucking mansion.” CB: “The bastard.” PD: “I took it under my wing and made it all jangly and jazzy. I could never quite do it with Babyshambles and I could never quite do it on my own, so I brought it to the table for this one. And then John said, ‘Why don’t you try it like this?’ He turned it into this Beatles thing, and it completely turned it on its head. I was aghast. We wrote another verse, gave it a lick of paint and here it is.”

There’s a sense of optimism that comes through Vampire Weekend’s fifth album that makes it float, a sense of hope—a little worn down, a little roughed up, a little tired and in need of a shave, maybe—but hope nonetheless. “By the time you’re pushing 40, you’ve hit the end of a few roads, and you’re probably looking for something—I don’t know what to say—a little bit deeper,” Ezra Koenig tells Apple Music. “And you’re thinking about these ideas. Maybe they’re corny when you’re younger. Gratitude. Acceptance. All that stuff. And I think that’s infused in the album.” Take something like “Mary Boone,” whose worries and reflections (“We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same”) give way to an old R&B loop (Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”). Or the way the piano runs on “Connect”—like your friend fumbling through a Gershwin tune on a busted upright in the next room—bring the song’s manic energy back to earth. Musically, they’ve never sounded more sophisticated, but they’ve also never sounded sloppier or more direct (“Prep-School Gangsters”). They’re a tuxedo with ripped Converse or a garage band with a full orchestra (“Ice Cream Piano”). And while you can trainspot the micro-references and little details of their indie-band sound (produced brilliantly by Koenig and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid), what you remember most is the big picture of their songs, which are as broad and comforting as great pop (“Classical”). “Sometimes I talk about it with the guys,” Koenig says. “We always need to have an amateur quality to really be us. There needs to be a slight awkward quality. There needs to be confidence and awkwardness at the same time.” Next to the sprawl of *Father of the Bride*, *OGWAU* (“og-wow”—try it) feels almost like a summary of the incredible 2007-2013 run that made them who they are. But they’re older now, and you can hear that, too, mostly in how playful and relaxed the album is. Listen to the jazzy bass and prime-time saxophone on “Classical” or the messy drums on “Prep-School Gangsters” (courtesy of Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes), or the way “Hope” keeps repeating itself like a school-assembly sing-along. It’s not cool music, which is of course what makes it so inimitably cool. Not that they seem to worry about that stuff anymore. “I think a huge element for that is time, which is a weird concept,” Koenig says. ”Some people call it a construct. I’ve heard it’s not real. That’s above my pay grade, but I will say, in my experience, time is great because when you’re bashing your head against the wall, trying to figure out how to use your brain to solve a problem, and when you learn how to let go a little bit, time sometimes just does its thing.” For a band that once announced themselves as the preppiest, most ambitious guys in the indie-rock room, letting go is big.