In 2016, Alex Turner received a piano for his 30th birthday and started playing seriously for the first time in over 20 years. Songs for Arctic Monkeys’ sixth album eventually emerged—a collection of brooding, cosmic lounge-pop that’s typical of the band only in its disdain for playing it safe. Here, light-years from their previous riff-driven adventures, melodies unspool slowly but stick faster with every listen. A watering hole on the moon provides the conceptual framework for Turner to muse on life, pop culture, and technology with heavy-lidded introspection. “I need to spend less time stood around in bars/Waffling on to strangers about martial arts,” he sighs on “She Looks Like Fun.” He shouldn’t be hasty: Wherever he finds inspiration, it takes his band to daring new places.
BRIT Award-winning folk-rocker Ben Howard spent time in southwest France and Cornwall, England, creating *Noonday Dream*; the result is some of Howard’s most impressive and immersive songs yet. Where his debut *Every Kingdom* favored catchy hooks and rhythms and *I Forget Where We Were* introduced meditative darkness, *Noonday Dream* is, as the album title suggests, a series of unpredictable yet brilliant scenes that disappear too quickly. Ambitious tracks “Nica Libres at Dusk” and “A Boat to an Island, Pt. 2 / Agatha’s Song” move like short films, with Howard’s low voice providing poetic narration. “Murmurations” closes the album with a moving sentiment: Ignore the outside noise and be present for what matters.
Beyond the austere atmospherics and doleful imagery they’re known for, Editors have always had an inarguable facility for choruses huge enough to hit the outer reaches of a packed festival field. That secret sauce comes to the fore on the Birmingham five-piece’s sixth record: an enlivening comeback brimming with industrial grooves and sparkling power-pop anthems. “Cold” sets the tone with its riffy, widescreen bounce and “Darkness at the Door” has a technicolour, electronic shimmer. “Magazine” may be the apex, though. An exhilarating, call-to-arms originally written when the band nearly split, it instead seals their joyous reinvention.
“Before, I thought I ran on a chaos engine,” Florence Welch told the *Guardian* in June 2018, shortly ahead of the release of *High as Hope*. “But the more peaceful I am, the more I can give to the work. I can address things I wasn’t capable of doing before.” This newfound openness gives her band’s fourth LP an unvarnished vulnerability. “Hunger” will sit proudly among her most personal and beautiful songs, while “South London Forever” and “Grace” both make peace with the excesses that decorated her rise to fame. Such lyrical heft affords the Londoners a chance to explore a more delicate, restrained sound, but there’s still space for Welch to blow the roof off. A fiery confessional that majestically takes to the skies and forms the album’s centerpiece, “100 Years” uncorks some vintage Florence. No one, we’re reminded, chronicles sadness quite so exquisitely, or explosively.
In February 2018, Gorillaz won the BRIT Award for Best British Group, bestowed on the back of 2017’s *Humanz*. As Damon Albarn made a drunken, Brexit-bashing acceptance speech, he’d already consigned that album to history. By then, the restlessly inventive songwriter had almost finished this follow-up, intent on having new material for festival season. Binding hip-hop, synth-pop, folk, techno, and funk together with lovely melodies, these songs are immediate enough to reach far corners of main-stage fields. But, conceived by Albarn in lonely hotel rooms while Gorillaz toured the U.S., they contemplate the state of the world with absorbing melancholy. The result is adventurous yet intimate—proof that beyond the cartoons and collaborators (George Benson, Snoop Dogg, and Jamie Principle here), one man’s mournful heart and insatiable creative spirit drives Gorillaz.
The lowercase letters of isaac gracie’s name reflect the minimalist beauty that the London singer/songwriter conjures up on this assertive self-titled debut. He’s remarkably composed, carefully carving out odes to relationships and guilt with an observer’s eye and poet’s pen. gracie’s voice is a wonder to behold, aching and evocative; “silhouettes of you” or “all in my mind” could give Radiohead’s “High and Dry” a run for its money. His songs have the clarity and resonance of Keane or Jeff Buckley, yet when he’s pushed to the edge, as on “the death of you & i” and “running on empty,” you can feel the clouds of despair lift and cathartic release kick in.
On 2015’s *Wilder Mind* Mumford & Sons went electric, ditching the banjos and acoustic guitars for a more plugged-in sound. Those instruments return on their fourth album, but a whole lot more has been added to the palette. *Delta* is their boldest collection to date, marrying their intimate introspection and massive hooks with restless musical curiosity. “I remember when we first played *Wilder Mind* to our booking agent in the States,” Marcus Mumford told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “His first comment was, ‘Now you guys can do whatever you want. You’re not the banjo band anymore.’ It was probably a bit reactionary from us: ‘Let’s do it without these acoustic instruments in our hands.’ And I guess, on this record, it felt like, ‘Look, let’s just not restrict ourselves at all. Let’s use whatever powers we have, whatever kind of instrumentation we have, and let’s try and do the best we can with it.’” Key to reaching new peaks, they decided, was trying to encompass each member’s diverse musical tastes into their songs. So while the quartet’s nu-folk roots are still traceable in the harmonies and troubled soul of opener “42” and the insistent banjo riff on “Beloved,” there are also successful journeys into electronic pop and hip-hop beats (“Woman,” “Rose of Sharon”), alt-R&B (“Picture You”), and foreboding psych-rock (“Darkness Visible”). The centerpiece of their experimentation is “If I Say,” which swells from spartan beginnings to orchestral grandeur and fiery rock crescendo. “We like to explore the idea of epic,” keyboardist Ben Lovett, who wrote the track, told Lowe. “I was actually asleep in an apartment in New York and I dreamt this song. And then I went into my bathroom and recorded it on my voicemail at 3 a.m.. I sent it to everyone the next morning, and they were like, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s a song.’ Sometimes we do send stuff to each other and it’s just like crickets, y’know?” The aching “Wild Heart” recognizes that there can still be great beauty in simplicity, but *Delta* is Mumford & Sons at their most free-spirited. “I think we feel younger,” said Lovett. “I feel like this is us just getting into it. We spent the whole of this year \[2018\] just pouring ideas, and it was just such a fertile period. It’s partly why the album is called *Delta*—the most fertile ground of a river. I think that there will come a time for those quieter, more reflective moments; it’s just not what we’re about right now. We wanna push it on.”
It would be difficult to think of a recording artist currently working who has less to prove than Paul McCartney. Yet in the past decade alone, the former Wings frontman has released, between stops on a seemingly endless stadium tour, one classical album, one electronic album as The Fireman, and now two contemporary pop albums—all of which have managed to burnish what was already rock’s most unburnishable résumé. His 17th solo effort is casually ambitious power pop, delivered with the ease and confidence of someone who invented it. At 76, McCartney finds hooks in relatable topics such as ditching weed for domestic bliss (“Happy With You”) and weathering petty criticism (“Who Cares”), while “Despite Repeated Warnings” and closer “Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link” each clock in at over six minutes, juggling their moving parts in ways that feel complex but never complicated. Producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Foo Fighters) navigates the middle ground between low-hanging nostalgia and trend-chasing modernity, but the biggest curveball comes courtesy of the Ryan Tedder-helmed “Fuh You”—the Macca song you’ll least want to play around little kids since “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”
“I’m making pop records,” The 1975 frontman Matty Healy told Beats 1 host Matt Wilkinson. “When I say we’re a pop band, what I’m really saying is we’re not a rock band. Please stop calling us a rock band—’cause I think that’s the only music we *don’t* make.” It’s a fair comment: Thanks to their eclecticism and adventure, attempting to label The 1975 has been as easy as serving tea in a sieve. On their third album, the Cheshire four-piece are, once again, many things, including jazz crooners, 2-step experimentalists and yearning balladeers. What’s most impressive is their ability to wrangle all these ideas into coherent music—their outsize ambition never makes the songs feel cluttered. “I hate prog, I hate double albums, I hate indulgence,” said Healy. “I hate it when the world goes, ‘Hey, you’ve got our attention!’ and someone goes, ‘Right, well, if I’ve got your attention, how many guitar solos…’” Crucially, Healy’s lyrics add extra substance to—and bind together—the kaleidoscope of styles. On the neo-jazz of “Sincerity Is Scary,” he rails against a modern aversion to emotional expression. Broadly an album about love in the digital age, *A Brief Inquiry…* offers compelling insights into Healy’s own life. “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)” provides an unvarnished account of his heroin addiction, while “Surrounded By Heads and Bodies” draws on his experiences in rehab and “Be My Mistake” examines guilt and compulsion. “Honestly, you can look at your work and be like, ‘What did I do there that someone likes?’” he said. “Me, when I’m, like, really personal or really inward, really honest, that’s when I get the best reaction.” Introspection needn’t breed a somber mood though. From the tropical pop of “Tootimetootimetootime” to the spry electro-indie of “Give Yourself a Try,” this is an album full of uplifting, melodic rushes. “My favorite records are about life,” said Healy. “It may be a bit of a big thing to say, but I like the all-encompassing aspect of life: You can have these bits, the sad bits, but don’t leave the dancing out, you know what I mean?”
The Wombats’ gift of making indie pop sound fresh and effortless continues unabated on its fourth album. Guitars shine like mirror balls, rhythms invite fresh dance-floor poses, and sky-high vocal melodies inspire the kind of sing-alongs that ensure you extra space on the bus. Their penchant for clever wordplay might cause head scratches—cue “Lemon to a Knife Fight” and “Out of My Head” for prime examples—but make perfect sense in The Wombats’ world.
“I wanted to create a classic-sounding album that hopefully lasts for years,” Tom Grennan told Apple Music. “An album that doesn’t sound like anything else right now.” To achieve this for his full-length debut, the London singer/songwriter opted against using a single producer to oversee the entire record, instead picking particular producers for particular songs (including Fraser T. Smith, Sam Dixon, and Eg White). “They all worked differently and all got something different out of me,” he said. Once his fledgling soccer career was shelved, Grennan endured a brutal gang attack at 18 and a time-honored shift on London’s pub-gig trail before he met any sort of acclaim. *Lighting Matches* benefits from this circuitous path. He has clearly soaked up the varied expertise of his producers to craft a gloriously unpretentious pop-soul album as in thrall to gargantuan bangers (listen to standout “Aboard” immediately) as it is campfire love songs. “It’s got orchestras, brass, choirs,” he said. “It’s just a big-sounding record.”