Riff Magazine's 75 Best Albums of 2020

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

Code Orange vocalist, drummer, and bandleader Jami Morgan says his band’s fourth album is all about duality. “It’s about societal introspection and looking at where we’re at as a youth culture,” he tells Apple Music. “But it’s also about looking at yourself as a person—and what you present to the world in this digital age versus what’s inside.” On *Underneath*, the unclassifiable Pittsburgh band—equal parts hardcore crew and groove metal enthusiasts, punk rabble-rousers and industrial technicians—imbue their hyper-modern musical style with cold-eyed sociological observations and deep existential malaise. “There’s a journey down this rabbit hole of anxiety and fear and all these regrets and pain,” Morgan explains. “You’re looking at the world and looking at the bitterness and negative stuff you have and trying to work through it and see where it’s leading us in this very noisy world where it’s very hard to stand out but everyone’s constantly talking.” Below, Morgan and guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers guide us through their new underworld. **(Deeperthanbefore)** Jami Morgan: “This intro is a trailer, in some ways—or the scene before the opening titles. It’s introducing a little bit of our narrative voice and setting up a feeling of dread. And it starts off with the theme from the end of our last record, which we continued on some of the EPs that came in between. It’s the theme song, in a lot of ways, for the last era of our career that phased out and this new voice phased in.” **Swallowing the Rabbit Whole** JM: “This is about taking that first step into the realization that you\'re going to have to go on an internal journey—going down the rabbit hole of success and hurt and envy and self-worth. And you can continue to live in shame, or decide to confront this monster that\'s been depicted in our last three albums, and that\'s on the cover of this album as well.” Reba Meyers: “It took us a really long time to put this song together. It was like we were trying to figure out what kind of album we wanted to write. But once we were able to put that song together, it was the centerpiece to everything. It made everything else fall into place. It was almost a testing ground for a lot of the glitchier guitars and layering and overdubs and bringing in the pianos and synths and everything that would really take the main stage on a lot of the verses and everything of the song. It gave us a place to work off of for the other songs.” **In Fear** JM: “In some ways it’s about this culture we have of throwing each other to the wolves, where the jury of public opinion is almost the most important thing. We have to live in fear now of what we do and say and how we behave. And that’s good in some ways. But in some ways you can be stripped of what makes you an individual. So this isn’t anti-callout-culture, because some of that is important. It’s about how important social currency is, and how it’s our most important currency in a lot of ways.” **You and You Alone** JM: “‘You and You Alone’ is the first real touch of bitterness and anger on the record. We find ourselves at odds with all this hate and resentment we have towards those around us. It\'s looking at this bitterness and saying, ‘Is it totally justified, or in my mind? Or even if it is justified, is this something that I need to hang on to?’ But on the other end, I’m saying this to myself: If I have to carry this burden, what’s my part in it?” RM: “Creating this was like bringing back the old-school chaos of the style of writing we did in our riffs. But we then took it to another dimension almost with bringing in all these digital clippings and glitches. The verses started out as a simple chaotic guitar riff, but we gave it to our keyboard player, Shade, and he looped them and added all these accents and spit it back out. Then we went back and relearned the riff that way. So it was a very cool, very modern back-and-forth process.” **Who I Am** JM: “This is an observation on obsession through the lens of stalkers, and how that was looked at in the past, versus how people present themselves through social media. It\'s this unrequited idealization. In the past—and still, obviously—it’s driven people mad and they\'ve done horrible things. But now it’s something that\'s just totally normal: constantly looking at people; stalking them. And using that new media to make excuses for our shortcomings.” **Cold.Metal.Place** JM: “‘Cold.Metal.Place’ is like the environment of the record. It\'s where I\'m envisioning the birthplace of our main character—or our main antagonist, if you\'re thinking of it that way. It\'s like this merciless, barren, glass world—a machine world. This world we\'re depicting inside the record layout and on the cover. It\'s this environmental embodiment of our own self-destructive thoughts and ideas. We’re abused by this echoing noise of criticism that is sometimes necessary and sometimes just pushes you deeper into your own head. And you go into the cold metal place.” RM: “We, as a unit, have all felt like we’re in that landscape and we’re able to relate in that way—which made it so much easier to connect on writing these songs. It\'s almost like being able to see it visualized has helped me, especially, be able to get through that trial of pointed fingers at all of us. And it\'s a very special thing to feel and have gone through that as a unit through our whole journey of all these albums and coming to this one.” **Sulfur Surrounding** JM: “This is about how we manipulate each other without even meaning to. And sometimes, people mean to. Are you corroding your group by making everyone so connected and having to go on? That’s something I’ve struggled with. Is this the wrong thing for these people who are my friends? I want to do the right thing, but these feelings take over. And I feel everyone can relate to that in a way.” **The Easy Way** JM: “This song is like the bridge between the two halves of the album. We had a song called ‘Only One Way’ that we put out a year or two ago, and this is the sequel. And there\'s a part at the end of ‘Only One Way,’ melodically, that actually is the chorus of this song. Reba sings ‘Only One Way’—it\'s awesome—and then at the end, I creep in with this vocal melody, and that\'s the chorus of this song.” RM: “I think all of us knew when we were writing ‘Only One Way’ that it was going to come back around, just because of how strong the melody was at the end. It didn’t feel like it got its full time in the spotlight. And we always like having things connect and weave together so it doesn\'t just feel like a bunch of songs slapped together on an album. We always try to make it more of a journey—not just through this album, but through our whole trajectory as a band. And I think a lot of people who like our band like us because of that. We\'re all very obsessive about music that has more of an overall vision to it. And obviously, you can see Jami has planned all of this out.” **Erasure Scan** JM: “‘Erasure Scan’ is probably the darkest song on the album. Lyrically, it\'s about the school shooting epidemic, and maybe the events and brain trauma that turn people to committing these horrible atrocities. It gets into some light, probably bullshit, very poorly researched psychology, but I was just looking into the Triune Brain theory—about how the three brains can become rigidly locked. That\'s been seen in a lot of school shooters under psychological evaluation. They become very fixated on the external goal and mission that they\'re unable to divert from. We also talk about this parasite that we get deeper into later on ‘Back Inside the Glass,’ but it’s this aquatic worm that exists in grasshoppers, fucks with their brain and controls them and influences their behavior. So I was relating that to these shootings and talking about the government swaying public opinion with pointless gun and freedom debates, but nothing is really done to help reduce it.” **Last Ones Left** JM: “Other than ‘You and You Alone,’ I would say ‘Last Ones Left’ is pretty much the most bitter-ass fucking song on the album. It\'s about pride and it\'s about social climbing. It\'s pretty much saying we\'re the last ones left on the surface of real bands that have worked and climbed that fucking ladder through hard work and not through bootlicking.” RM: “We\'ve always needed to have that song on every record that empowers us. And for me, and I know the other guys, when we play that song, it definitely has that feeling to it—even at shows when we feel like it\'s us against the world, and no one there even cares or wants to see us—we can use that as an empowering song, and we\'re almost screaming it and singing it to ourselves at times.” **Autumn and Carbine** JM: “On the surface, the song is about the quick lives and deaths of these flavor-of-the-year new artists that are being propped up by corporations. They\'re told to be bombastic and loud, and their demise is very similar. It\'s quick and it\'s loud and then it\'s gone.” **Back Inside the Glass** JM: “Sonically, this song is very sci-fi hardcore in a lot of ways. Our main character, the monster on the front cover that we call The Cutter, is trapped inside this glass shell of how the world sees him—and how maybe even you envision yourself, for better or worse. And it’s that monster trying to get out. It’s your own mania getting the best of you. So you want to kill this thing inside you, but it’s going to come out like that monster. So you want it to go back inside the glass.” **A Sliver** JM: “Thematically, ‘A Sliver’ is the culmination of years of overexposure and noise that almost leads us to become deaf to the cries of everyone around us. Because we all watch these tragedies like they\'re a TV show. But it seems in the past, everything matters only for a sliver of time, and then it’s on to the next thing. We’re lost in the rat race, and it’s all been engineered by corporations for this exact purpose. So we all keep posting; we keep promising. But it\'s really for nothing. We\'re not heard at all. You\'re just a dollar or another voice in a sea of voices. Even that only matters for a second, and then people move on.” **Underneath** JM: ‘‘Underneath’ is really about being in that final, most important moment, facing this monster—whether that be proverbial or inner self. It’s the most positive song on the record, I think, because a lot of it is about redemption. It doesn’t really give you a clear ending as to what happened, but there’s a truth and you’re going to find out what it is. So we have to shed who we are and remove that machine inside. We either stand up to it or just disappear and become it.”

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

They began by just playing the hits. In 2017, nearly eight years after Doves had last picked up their instruments together, drummer Andy Williams and his twin brother, guitarist Jez, gave bassist/singer Jimi Goodwin a call. Come over to Andy’s studio, they said, and let’s see if we can remember how to play “Black and White Town” and “There Goes the Fear”—just for fun. “It came back really quickly,” Andy tells Apple Music. “We were all laughing and having fun. As a drummer, hearing that bass—*his* bass—instantly felt very familiar, in a good sense. Pretty soon, there was a real enthusiasm and hunger from us to work together.” When they went on hiatus after 2009’s excellent *Kingdom of Rust* album, Doves were fatigued. They’d been together for a quarter of a century, serving up four albums as one of Britain’s best and more adventurous indie-rock trios—plus one before that as house specialists Sub Sub. They were never meant to disappear for a decade, but when you’ve got families and side projects (the Williams brothers as Black Rivers, Goodwin with his 2014 solo album *Odludek*), life gets in the way. “I don’t want to sound boastful, but I think there’s a chemistry between us three that you don’t run into every day,” Andy says. “That time away from each other has helped us appreciate that.” Fizzing with that chemistry, *The Universal Want* sounds like a Doves album precisely because it doesn’t sound like any other Doves album. The exquisitely measured mix of euphoria and sorrow is familiar, but by experimenting with Afrobeat, dub, and keyboards foraged from behind the Iron Curtain, the trio continues to expand their horizons on every song. “We didn’t attempt to resurrect another ‘The Cedar Room’ or ‘There Goes the Fear,’ because it’s a recipe for disaster when you chase your own tail,” says Andy. “It’s really important for us three to be excited and feel like we’re moving forward.” Let him guide you through that evolution, track by track. **Carousels** “Originally, it started life as Black Rivers and we couldn’t get it to work. We put it down for a while, then Jez had a look at it again. He’d bought a Tony Allen breakbeat album and just sampled some breaks. It just clicked—the song came alive. We felt it was a bit of a progression for us, so it felt like a good song to introduce ourselves back to people again. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a nostalgia thing. We all used to go out to funfairs as kids up here in the North West, and every summer we’d go to a place called Harlech in North Wales and there’d be a funfair near there. It’s a nostalgic look back at that era when you used to hear music for the first time, loud, on loudspeakers, and that excitement at the fair—trying to recapture that feeling. The music’s trying to push it forward, but lyrically, it’s looking back, so there’s that juxtaposition.” **I Will Not Hide** “Really fun memories of making this. Jimi loves his sampling, so when he played it to us, it was like, ‘Wow! What’s going on there?’ I couldn’t really fathom out the lyrics. I mean, I put a couple of lines in there myself, but I still don’t fully understand what it’s about. I don’t think Jimi does. But we quite like that place sometimes, where it’s almost a train of thought. Jimi’s demo stopped, I think, at chorus two. We just looked at the chords, me and Jez, and tacked the guitar section onto the end. That’s the nice thing about Doves—when people present ideas to the band, it goes through the filter of all three of us and it can change. That’s when it’s working well between us three, when someone has an initial idea and then the other two run with it.” **Broken Eyes** “Early doors, we found an old hard drive with loads of material on, stuff we hadn’t actually ever managed to finish, and this was one \[from the *Kingdom of Rust* sessions\]. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s got real heart and soul. Let’s tackle that again.’ Last time, we were maybe overcomplicating it, so we stripped it away and kept it simple. It always had a different lyric, right up until the 11th hour, actually. It had a very different vibe. Jimi sounds brilliant on this. When he did the vocal, it was hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. That’s when you know you’re on the right path. You just hit a brick wall sometimes with songs. I read a Leonard Cohen book and I think he was talking about ‘Tower of Song,’ that it took him 20 years to finish. Started it, put it down, picked it up again, kept going back to it. If a song’s got strength in it, it will keep knocking on your door. We’ve got other songs which I’m hoping we can look at again at some point. There’s a couple of things where I’ve gone, ‘Do you remember this one?’ And it was, ‘Oh no, I can’t.’ Because we’d absolutely hammered it at the time and not made it work, and no one’s ready to go back to that place.” **For Tomorrow** “Again, we had those chords for the chorus kicking round for a while but we never really had a song. The high string in the verses, we were like, ‘Oh god, look, it’s got that kind of Isaac Hayes classic soul thing we were going for.’ I know it didn’t necessarily end up that way, but that’s what we were going for in our heads. We did it live in the room, and I remember going back in the control room and going, ‘Ah, it’s just coming together.’ I’ve got really fond memories, a couple of moments of like, ‘Yeah.’ It’s a really fun one to play on the drums.” **Cathedrals of the Mind** “Initially it was from a Black Rivers session—another song that, down the line, Jimi heard and really loved and worked on with us. We were booked to go to Anglesey, me and Jez, in 2016. We were due to set off at nine in the morning, but at six o’clock, my wife wakes me up and says, ‘Bowie’s passed.’ I couldn’t take it in—like the whole world, I guess. I remember driving to Anglesey with 6 Music on, they cleared their schedule and were just talking about Bowie. We got to Anglesey and it was like, ‘Fucking hell.’ I’m not saying we wrote this song for him, but I think it was an unconscious thing. Jez had some chords and I tried a couple of different grooves. It didn’t work, and I tried that sort of dub groove, and that was the start of the song. The lyrics, as well—‘In the back room/In the ballroom/I hear them calling your name…/Everywhere I see those eyes.’ I think we were referencing the passing of such a musical icon. He was such a towering figure, cultural figure. Him passing felt like your own mortality, essentially.” **Prisoners** “It’s the love affair with northern soul that we’ve had for years. Very English lyrics. The Jam was one reference when we were doing the lyrics, ‘Town Called Malice.’ It was written way before the situation we’re in \[2020’s lockdown\], but it’s got some sort of resonance. We’ve all been stuck in our houses and we’re only just starting to come out. But it’s also got a sense of hope. The chorus is ‘We’re just prisoners of these times/Although it won’t be for long.’ So there is a sense of hope with that. We let everybody know our struggles, I guess, but it’s good to have a sense of hope in there.” **Cycle of Hurt** “Jez came with that \[robotic voice\] sample and those chords. They’re probably the most direct lyrics \[on the album\]. It’s referencing a relationship really, and just trying to get out of a cycle of hurt—a cycle of thought that you’re trapped in. They’re quite collaborative, these lyrics. A lot of them that are \[about being\] just locked in a cycle of your own thought, really, and trying to break free from that. There’s definite references to trying to keep your own mental health on track. Looking back on it, that’s a subject we’ve definitely returned to on this record. We felt this \[track\] was really good for the album because there weren’t really deep strings on the rest of the record, and it just brings a new sound for your ears to keep your interest up.” **Mother Silverlake** “The end result doesn’t bear any relation to an Afrobeat song, but that’s what we had in our heads—something that felt new to us, we’ve never really attempted that. Jez and Jimi combined \[on the\] vocal—that was really nice to hear those two singing together in the studio, the mix of their two voices. Martin Rebelski’s pianos really uplift the chorus. It’s a feel-good track, but the lyrics are slightly melancholic, almost referencing our mum, who’s still around, thank god. We always try and make music as uplifting as possible, or as joyous as possible. It might be offset with more melancholic lyrics, but overall we always want it to be an uplifting experience.” **Universal Want** “I started it in my studio as a ballad. I never intended it to be like a house workout at the end. I was thinking of just a two-and-a-half-minute song about the universal want—this question of always chasing something, be it consumerism or some aspect of your life where you think you’re going to be happy. But Jez took it away and he obviously saw something else for the end section and thought of welding this house section onto the end. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, it was just so unpredictable, and I hope that unpredictability carries through to the listener. I guess it’s kind of a reference to our past, our Sub Sub days—a cheeky doff of the cap to that era. It was a very formative era for all of us.” **Forest House** “Again, this had been knocking around for a while and we were never able to master it, didn’t ever find the key to unlock it. It just felt like it was a really intimate way to finish the record—a small way to wind the album down. A simple song, but with Jez’s Russian keyboard in there—this old Russian ’60s monster of an analog keyboard. It’s almost got a dystopian sound. Once that got brought into the song, it was like, ‘Yeah.’”

On his fourth LP, Fantastic Negrito wanted to draw attention to issues of mental illness from the perspective of both himself and the people he’s known all his life. “I noticed that most of the people that I thought were suffering from what I call mental challenges and hurdles, if you will, were just us regular people,” he tells Apple Music. “Not people walking down the street talking to themselves, but my friends, my family, my colleagues. We are facing the depression and the trauma of the gun violence that happens so much in America. And we take it in as if it\'s nothing.” After his politically charged 2018 LP *Please Don’t Be Dead*, the Oakland bluesman and two-time Grammy winner continues to explore societal concerns that are large in scale and scope. But this time, he focuses on the small details rather than looking at the big picture. “My records are always social commentary—but I wanted to go into that door and dig deep into that,” he says. “I wanted to take a therapeutic and accountable approach all in one and ask myself, \'What did we become that we just accept so many really tragic things that happen?\'” His interpretation of the blues in *Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?* is eclectic and all-encompassing, taking on an uncompromising mix of Delta blues, classic R&B, roots music, and funk, especially. “A lot of this album was about the power and the energy of the ’70s—powerful songs one right after another that just don\'t let up,” Negrito says, as he walks us through this track-by-track guide. **Chocolate Samurai** “When I was confronting a lot of the issues of mental health and illness, I was talking about my fans on that one. The whole world is watching us. My community, my people, my teachers, my soldiers, my doctors, my lawyers, my policemen. All of us. And what does that do to our psyche? And that\'s why, in the video, I got people from all over the world to send in their clips and make an amazing video out of that. I was talking about my community during that song. Like, \'We have to get free tonight.\' Get free from oppression. We have to get free from the construct of racism. We gotta get free from the idea that we\'re victims all the time, too. I was thinking very deep on that song. There was a lot about accountability. And celebration. All my songs are celebrations—even if they\'re all kind of anecdotal. There\'s a lot of Stevie Wonder in that song, too.” **I’m So Happy I Cry (feat. Tank and the Bangas & Tarriona “Tank” Ball)** “I wanted to make history and be the first two Tiny Desk winners \[NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest\] ever to collaborate on a song \[referring to his collaboration with Tank and the Bangas\]. The competition has been on for five years and no one has made a collaboration. But the song’s really about myself. You know, all the things that used to make me so high. And now it’s like, ‘Why don’t they get me high?’ Sometimes we have this hole in our life and we\'re just trying to fill it up with all this stuff, and a lot of it\'s from not wanting to confront who we are. I was reading about a lot of these young rappers, especially Juice WRLD and a lot of these young kids that are just dying from overdoses. I thought, you know what? Wow, it\'s not a real happiness. I have all this stuff, but it doesn\'t really fill me up and it doesn\'t fulfill me. I\'m depressed on my private jet with 70 kinds of marijuana on it, doing drugs. But again, it\'s hopeful. Today we wake up to another morning sun. I\'m happy this morning.” **How Long?** “This song was really about these policemen who are just arbitrarily executing citizens. You say to yourself, ‘Well, how long are we gonna keep living with that?’ It was very, very simple and very easy to write that song, because it was a question I thought a lot about. How long can we keep holding on to the same thing that we\'re repeating over and over again?” **Shigamabu Blues** “I like to create names. It was a name and a character that I used throughout the record. It\'s kind of a spirit; it\'s very African. It\'s all the kinds of things that can happen. We don\'t control the future. We don\'t control the next five minutes. It’s the monster of COVID-19, disease, and death. It\'s life and it\'s happiness, and it\'s Kobe Bryant being a millionaire and dying with his daughter. It\'s me getting into a coma for three weeks \[in 1999\]. A friend of mine, he has HIV. This record is very much that feeling, because the minute we realize that, then we have a much more peaceful existence.” **Searching for Captain Save a Hoe (feat. E-40)** “That song\'s a lot about me being the whore, you know? And about a lot of men. We\'re the whores and we can go around and do our thing as guys, but then if a woman does it, we call her a whore. I took the character of Captain Save a Hoe from the \'90s, where this guy is now saving the men who are actually the whores. He\'s learned, and now he\'s a guy that I\'m searching for to help save me and make me accountable to a lot of my really stupid and destructive ideas about family. And about E-40, what an innovative giant. I was so fortunate that my music got his attention. He was willing to go ahead and spit some bars on that, because he\'s just a giant. I was very pleased and honored to work with him.” **Your Sex Is Overrated (feat. Masa Kohama)** “That was more about the mental condition and using sex as a weapon. Sex as manipulation and sex for sale. Masa\'s a guy that I\'ve played with for 25 years, and we did that track a long time ago. We found it and redid the verses, like, chopped it up. Initially, I really wanted to sing that with Brittany Howard—but we couldn\'t really make it happen. That\'s why it starts off with \'Brittany, I\'m so scared of you \[laughing\].\' That was my initial idea, to get her to sing that with her on the second verse. But hey, another time. And Masa\'s solo on there is tremendous. Really, one of one of the best solos ever recorded. That\'s right. I said it.” **These Are My Friends** “I was just playing it this morning on the piano—it\'s one of my favorite songs on the record. I wrote it about two of my very close friends, best friends who are pretty damaged people that may be suffering from a lot of trauma and mental illness, but they are completely functional. I describe them in the song. Sometimes it\'s hard to get along, but you know what, these are my friends, for better or for worse. They got my back and I got their back, and that\'s what I was trying to write about. Exploring people\'s deficiencies, but celebrating the bond. I\'ve got my friends who are just as flawed as I am, but we support each other all the time. Your friends are your investors, basically; that\'s your investment portfolio.” **All Up in My Space** “It’s a very toxic thing—being a human being and being in relationships. People don’t want you sometimes because you don\'t want them, and I feel like that\'s extremely unhealthy. I think there\'s something wrong when that happens to people, and sometimes it can become extremely dangerous. Those type of interactions between people.” **Justice in America** “I didn\'t wanna write a song about it. I thought the idea itself was so powerful, because of the way that we use immigrants in this country and then we just wanna discard them and throw them away. I think that\'s why I wanted my friend Gina \[Madrid\]\'s voice, who\'s a vocal artist. Sometimes, immigrants, they come here and they\'ll realize, \'Hey, this place isn\'t all that it said.\' America is a place that\'s advertising for people to get free labor. And in the end, it\'s just that America was based on money. We don\'t say that on the Statue of Liberty, now, do we?” **King Frustration** “That was one of the most fun productions that I did, I think. It’s the two organ and guitar solos—and a kind of weird classical interlude thing that I did on it. I thought it was just fun, but it was inspired by one of my drug addict cousins. She\'d been hooked on drugs for 30-something years. I just saw her walking down the street and I wanted to tell some of her story in that song. It was based on the struggle of growing up in the inner city, without some of the opportunities and all the challenges and all the pitfalls. And she has, man, five, six, seven different kids and gave them away to relatives.” **Platypus Dipster** “That song was just about relieving pressure, this pressure of the media and the expectations that people have until it just breaks people. I wrote this about a particular person again, and how they\'re just broken by society\'s expectations. People have this image of what they want you to be. Or, you know, our news cycle is for sale. We\'re bombarded daily with this information that people are trying to sell us. I don\'t think it\'s very normal, and it breaks people.”

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

The times have finally caught up with The Chicks. With *Gaslighter*, their first album in 14 years, the country trio formerly known as the Dixie Chicks seem to have met their moment in the current activist climate. It’s been 17 years since outspoken lead singer Natalie Maines, along with sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire, brazenly risked alienating a large chunk of their audience—and lost the support of the country music industry—when she railed against George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq (controversial opinions at the time, especially for their conservative fanbase). Their last LP, 2006’s *Taking the Long Way*, doubled down on the politics, winning them an armful of Grammys but little notice from Nashville. Now paired with pop producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde) and a who’s who of superstar songwriters (Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels, Teddy Geiger), The Chicks are still not ready to make nice. The incendiary opening title track is a trademark Chicks kiss-off that could as easily be addressing a jealous ex as the current US president. “March March” was inspired by a political rally that all three Chicks attended with their families, but its timely video draws a natural parallel between the song’s broad self-empowerment message and this year’s Black Lives Matter protests. The rest of the album maintains the personal-is-political bent, with universal messages of hope and self-help addressed autobiographically to the band member’s children (“Young Man,” “Julianna Calm Down”), their ex-husbands (“Tights on My Boat,” “Hope It’s Something Good”), and even themselves (“For Her”). “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff,” Strayer tells Apple Music, “but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news stories, but they’ve always been here.” The Chicks spoke to Apple Music and reflected on the making of the album and the inspirations behind a few of the album\'s most memorable songs. **Gaslighter** Natalie Maines: “That was the first song we wrote with Jack Antonoff, who produced the majority of the record. I know I came in with the word ‘gaslighter’ and some lyrics in a notebook and wanted to write about gaslighting, but I\'m sure it was Jack that thought of coming out cold with the chorus.” Martie Maguire: “I remember him loving that word and you having to explain what it meant. I was definitely impressed with him right off the bat. He would start playing and singing that word, and then having us record it. When we went to record it, it took like five minutes.” NM: “And that became the title track just because most Americans didn\'t know what that meant a few years ago. I learned about that in therapy. We never thought of any other title for the album, because it really is a buzzword now because of President Trump. It just seemed like the perfect word and captured this time that we\'re in.” **Texas Man** NM: “Wasn\'t that when Julia Michaels came over here to my house and sat with just like a tape roll? She just has an interesting way of scoring melodies. We\'d just go through a tape, and just let her go. She\'ll go for like half an hour just vamping.” Emily Strayer: “Remember how we did vocals? It\'s literally the smallest closet.” NM: “My coat closet!” MM: “That song is about Natalie. We just wanted to get her groove back. It still hasn\'t happened yet, but maybe that song will bring that energy.” **For Her** ES: “The song is about speaking to your younger self and giving some wisdom. It was written with Ariel Rechtshaid and Sarah Aarons. We were with writers in this room, in this very dark, dingy studio, and I remember just feeling really drained. It was just so tired and gloomy. Wasn\'t it where Michael Jackson recorded *Thriller*? He had this booth built for Bubbles, with a little window. You could just imagine this chimp looking out the window. Sarah was hilarious, just so self-deprecating. She was just a joke a minute, she has such a personality, and her lyrics—it’s different to write with a woman, just to write those kind of female lyrics with another female.” NM: “She was a huge driving force behind those lyrics, for sure. And once she gets going, it\'s like a lyric train that you can\'t stop and you don\'t want to stop. By the time we left that session, we had loads of options, and we kept a lot of her lyrics but changed some as well, just so we could have a part in the song. Sarah Aarons did not need us.” MM: “And she was great writing for Natalie\'s voice, because she has such a strong voice and she can do these acrobatics. Not many people can keep up with Natalie\'s voice and have the same type of inflections.” NM: “But also—and I’m not saying this is what I am but—I loved her soul. She\'s a very soulful singer. It would be interesting to go back and listen to those original recordings, because she made a lot of soul in her voice and her phrasing and I definitely stole some of that.” **March March** NM: “We went to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., with our kids. It was so impactful for me. That\'s the first time I\'ve ever been in a march that large. And we weren\'t there as performers, we were just in the crowds, with my little girls on my shoulders. We took a lot from that, the energy of it. We didn\'t want it to be about one particular march, so on the verses we talk about different things that are important to us.” ES: “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff, but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I do think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news story, but they\'ve always been there.” NM: “You don\'t need a group around you if you\'re on the right side of history. We wanted to empower people who stand up for what they believe. Unless you believe in racism, then sit down. \[laughs\] Know what\'s right, act on it, speak out, be an army of one; you don\'t need to be a follower or go along with a group if you feel strongly about what\'s right.” **My Best Friend\'s Weddings** ES: “It\'s my wedding—weddings.” NM: “Yeah, everybody kept calling it ‘My Best Friend\'s Wedding,\' and I was like, \'No, *weddings*.\' That one\'s definitely got a lot of personal truths in it. There are three songs—\'My Best Friend\'s Weddings\' was one of them—that we consider the Hawaii songs, that we wrote in mostly Kauai. We spent three weeks in Hawaii all together making this record. We\'d go from the studio to my house, and it was a family vacation for everybody as well. It was a lot of fun, and there\'s songs with ukulele, and if you have headphones, you can hear birds chirping and waves, and a rooster.” **Julianna Calm Down** MM: “I\'ll just say that that was one that Julia wasn\'t sure that she wouldn\'t want for herself, but once we heard it, we pounced on it. Unbeknownst to her, Natalie went home and rewrote all the verses to make them about our closest family, our nieces and our cousins. Originally it was called ‘Julia Come Down’—it\'s her talking about breathing, taking a moment, everything\'s not going to be so bad. But Nat flipped it on its head to make it a song about advice to our girls and our nieces.” NM: “When Jack told her that we had written on it and asked if we could have that song, she was like, ‘Oh yeah, they can have the verses and the bridge. But I\'m going to keep the chorus and rework it.’ And I was just like, \'No, no, no!\' We kind of tricked her out of it.”

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

The follow-up to 2018’s *BALLADS 1* builds on the Japanese singer’s daring aesthetic—an arty blur of bedroom trip-hop, alt-R&B, and slow-winding IDM that always seems to zig when you think it\'ll zag. *Nectar*, his sophomore effort, feels designed for bigger stages, with more muscular vocals, riskier production, and an impressive spectrum of instrumentation. But don’t mistake bigger for safer; these songs are immersive and resolutely strange. Even his expertly curated guests—a who’s who of experimentalists like Yves Tumor, Diplo, and Lil Yachty—have been pulled into Joji’s magnetic field. Here, they bend to meet his sound, not the other way around. Joji\'s affinity for reverb and warped electronic textures allows *Nectar* to spread widely and retain a sense of flow and consistency, as if the songs have all been run through the same lo-fi Instagram filter. There are explosions of soul and electric guitar, off-kilter psychedelic lullabies, and atmospheric ballads that unfold into abstractions. “Run” blends watery James Blake-style coos with the thrust of Tame Impala, and “777” rattles along with PC Music\'s Auto-Tuned delirium. The final track, “Your Man”—a pulsing ode to eyes-closed, four-on-the-floor escapism and another left-turn for the low-key artist—is a fitting end to an album that feels like a head rush: You’re walking out of the venue, body still tingling, trying to reacclimate to the world around you.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.

In the third installment of Black Thought\'s *Streams of Thought* series, the Roots\' frontman links with producer Sean C for a fiery display of the sharp lyricism that consistently keeps the rapper in conversations about the greats. He\'s joined by a star-studded cast that includes Killer Mike and Pusha T (the charged “Good Morning”) and ScHoolboy Q (the sinister “Steak Um”) and pleasantly surprising cameos from indie rockers Portugal. The Man alongside Portland rapper and singer The Last Artful, Dodgr. *Streams of Thought, Vol. 3* strikes a balance between disparate sounds and modes with ease—whether in political screeds or in personal confessions, soul, hip-hop, and tinges of rock congeal for a collection that feels at once immediate and requiring repeated listening. Black Thought takes aim at systems and institutions as well as mentalities that keep those who look like him in a perpetual state of war and survival, and true to the reputation he\'s earned, no one gets out unscathed.

Over the last 20 years, a Pearl Jam studio album has come to signal more of something else—more tour dates, more bootlegs, more live films and live albums, more reason for them to come together onstage, that place that’s come to define them most this millennium. But *Gigaton*—the Seattle rock outfit’s first LP since 2013’s *Lightning Bolt*, and a clear response to our current political moment—feels different: Self-recorded and self-produced in tandem with longtime band associate Josh Evans, their 11th full-length merges the sheer power and unpredictability of their live experience with an experimental streak they haven’t embraced so fully since the late ’90s. For every midtempo guitar workout (“Quick Escape” is especially heavy), there’s a sliver of Talking Heads-like post-punk (“Dance of the Clairvoyants,” in which bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard swap instruments). Where there’s a weathered acoustic ballad (“Comes Then Goes” finds Eddie Vedder at his Who-iest), there’s also a psychedelic lullaby (“Buckle Up,” whose lyrics and kazoo-like backup vocals come via Gossard). It’s an album whose anthemic moments (see: the six-minute epic “Seven O’Clock,” whose cloud-parting coda bears echoes of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”) are matched—if not enriched—by its subtleties, namely a welcome attention to texture and arrangement. And with every band member represented in various phases of the songwriting process, it’s arguably their most collaborative studio effort to date, as clear a document of the chemistry they’ve developed over three decades as anything they’ve recorded live. “In the end, when we listened to it, it\'s like we really achieved something,” Gossard tells Apple Music. “It’s really us.”

After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”

\"Our first couple of records were certainly intentionally abrasive, and short, and concise, and we didn\'t really want to do too much musically,\" vocalist/guitarist Alex Edkins tells Apple Music about METZ\'s new album *Atlas Vending*. \"But that can get old, for the player and for the listener. So we\'re definitely excited to be stretching out a bit and giving things time, giving all the instruments space.\" The album\'s 10 tracks maintain the band\'s furious nature, but Ben Greenberg\'s production gives each song the space to explore new dynamics, resulting in METZ delving into new sonic territories on songs like the soaring \"Framed by the Comet\'s Tail\" and the hypnotic seven-and-a-half-minute closer \"A Boat to Drown In.\" \"This record doesn\'t feel quite as like you\'re trapped,\" says Edkins. \"We wanted to make it really listenable. We\'re really pleased with how it all turned out. And, you know, also kind of happy that we still seem to be growing.\" Here, Edkins takes Apple Music through *Atlas Vending* track by track. **Pulse** “Usually it doesn\'t work this way, but \'Pulse\' was the first song written for the album. And it really didn\'t change from the demo, other than the instrumentation. We took out the drum machine. We considered leaving it in, because that would be something new, but we\'re always thinking about how to perform it. And I think we kind of knew right away on hearing it that it would kind of fit the bill for an album opener. Kind of like a slow burn, to let people into the album before kind of opening the door.” **Blind Youth Industrial Park** “We almost left it off the record because we felt, although it felt great to play and really had kind of a great feel, we didn\'t know if it was pushing forward enough. But we were excited by the fact that the chorus seemed to really juxtapose the main kind of hefty riff. It was a little bit of a Cro-Mags thing, followed by like a dreamier chorus.” **The Mirror** “That was one of the toughest ones to wrangle. We had to cut it down a few times, because its runtime was getting super long. We just kind of got locked in that groove and never wanted to stop it. So it was all sort of this Gang of Four-inspired, kind of choppy thing. It’s kind of one of the more complex songs on the record.” **No Ceiling** “For every kind of ‘The Mirror’ or ‘Hail Taxi’ song we have, I usually have a couple that are just straight-up more old-school punk-rock songs. Influenced by Buzzcocks or The Damned and stuff like that. It\'s about my son being born and kind of how he changed my outlook on life and the world and everything. So it\'s, dare I say, a happy song.” **Hail Taxi** “That beginning riff has been around forever. On this version, it\'s got this really weird \'60s drum feel thing that ties it all together. And yeah, I\'m glad we didn\'t give up on it, because I think, as a whole, it\'s one of my favorites we\'ve ever done. By adding new melody and a sort of patience to a song that maybe if we had approached six years ago or so we would have probably just pummeled through it.” **Draw Us In** “This has a type of groove we\'ve never attempted, really. Just that tempo and that kind of groove is something we\'ve just never been drawn to before. It shows off the production. Like that drum intro kind of shows off Seth \[Manchester\] and his insane skills, basically. I just love the drums sound on that intro.” **Sugar Pill** “We kind of spliced two songs together, to be honest. I think it\'s noticeable, but feels really good to do this kind of abrupt switch on the verses. It\'s got this bit of a doomy opening riff, and then gets super poppy at the end, too. It\'s just about social media and how it is completely addictive and I don\'t think offering anything of value to anyone, really. Other than being able to communicate across long distances. I think it\'s becoming a bit of an interruption in my life more than anything. And I see it mostly for the negative things it brings to everyone around me.” **Framed by the Comet’s Tail** “Maybe my favorite song on the record, just has a different vibe for us. More open, more meandering and flowing than anything we\'ve done. It\'s just got this seasickness, but also reminds me of bands I liked, like The Sound, and Echo & The Bunnymen, as far as where it gets to at the end. It’s one of those songs where it shows that we\'ve progressed as musicians and a band. Being able to play that song is challenging for us. And I\'m glad that we\'re being able to spread our wings a bit and get to that new place. It\'s a little bit more demanding. It\'s a little bit more intricate. And it\'s a little bit more beautiful in the end.” **Parasite** “I see punk music and hardcore and whatever you want to call it as such a positive influence on my life, and just music in general. And I just want to keep it that way. I don\'t want to let kind of negative influences ruin it for me. A lot of people want to try to cut people down to make themselves feel, I think, bigger or stronger. And it\'s kind of speaking to that. Now I want to stay focused on what matters. As I get older, and am a father, it\'s just like, don\'t get caught up in the small stuff.” **A Boat to Drown In** “This one is obviously a departure for us. In some ways. I\'d say it could be connected to something like \'Raw Materials\' from *Strange Peace*, in that there\'s certainly a part A and a part B. But I love the dreaminess. I think the intention was to get into this hypnotic zone, into this, you know, maybe slightly inspired by bands like Neu! and stuff like that. Just kind of let the groove take over. I can see the protagonist kind of driving off into the sunset, leaving the album behind or something. You know, like leaving that world behind. You\'re in this sort of pretty intense landscape, and then that ending can just take you out of it.”

‘Sun Racket’ is the brand new album from legendary Boston trio Throwing Muses, consisting of Kristin Hersh, David Narcizo and Bernard Georges. The follow up to 2013’s ‘Purgatory/Paradise’ is an outpouring of modal guitars, reverbed shapes, echoey drums and driving bass set behind Kristen Hersh’s well-thumbed notebook of storylines. A ten-song opus of suitably wrought tales set against a wall of sound that’s at once calm and ethereal before building into glorious cacophonous crescendos. When Throwing Muses wrote their last album, they were shattered. Pieces were coming and going, elements repeating and charging the whole. “It sounded beautiful jumping around like that”. Two-minute songs reappearing as twisted instrumentals or another song’s bridge. They mimicked the effect live which kept them on their toes. Whatever was happening was already over in other words. ‘Sun Racket’ is the opposite. It refused to do anything but sit still. It says, “sit here and deal”. “All it asked of us was to comingle two completely disparate sonic vocabularies: one heavy noise, the other delicate music box. Turns out we didn’t have to do much. Sun Racket knew what it was doing and pushed us aside, which is always best. After thirty years of playing together, we trust each other implicitly but we trust the music more” - Kristin Hersh And so, they continue. Business unusual.

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

“I needed to change things in my personal life, but also in the way that I was working,” Jehnny Beth tells Apple Music of her debut solo LP. “It was exhilarating for me to begin from a clean slate, starting something new and feeling that fear of the unknown again.” Best known as the lead singer and co-writer for UK post-punk band Savages, Beth was repeatedly told that it was too much of a risk to branch out on her own and that she should build on what she had done before. She followed her instinct instead, relying on her own resources and several collaborators to bring her project to life, including British producers/audio engineers Flood and Atticus Ross and longtime creative partner Johnny Hostile. *TO LOVE IS TO LIVE* is a natural display of Beth’s experimental curiosity—unleashing unsettling synths and industrial percussive elements as she gets in touch with feelings of self-doubt and her sexuality. “It was an inner voice, something that was calling me to do this—otherwise, there’s the danger of losing myself completely,” Beth says. “I didn\'t want to be enslaved to one genre of music, and I didn\'t want to be one of those singers who are slaves to their dance.” Here, Beth walks us through the album, one song at a time. **I Am** “When I heard Atticus Ross’ production, I knew it was going to be the opener. With Savages, my voice was connected to the intensity of the guitars and the drums with that classic punk-rock band scenario. And he was creating the same intensity but with strings, and instruments that were different. I love that it creates a sense of suspense and wonder. When you finish the track, you\'re left with questions like \'What is coming next?\' The song was written by me and Johnny Hostile, and it was during the very early stages of exploration. During one of our lab experiments, we tried to pitch my voice in different styles and tonologies, and we found one that was really pitched down. There\'s a multiplicity of voices on the record. And I think the purpose is to unlock the forbidden thoughts and intimate thoughts that we believe are shameful. I think that we push them down. But as humans, we have contradictory thoughts—and we battle with the idea of identity and the idea of good and bad all the time. There is danger in trying to repress those hidden voices and not giving the space for them. So that\'s why it was important to open with that voice and not my voice.” **Innocence** “It was produced by Flood in his studio in London. He has this capacity of getting obsessed with details and muting all the important parts. You don\'t understand what he\'s listening to or why he\'s even listening to that. So I got frustrated, and he kicked me out of the studio and asked me to come back an hour later. And then I was very frustrated and angry. I came back and heard the mix, and then came this moment where I was hearing myself in a way that I had never heard myself before. It brought me to tears. I wrote the lyrics early on in the process of making the record; I placed it as the starting point of the journey—the same way a novelist would start with the shameful thoughts for his novel, and start from there to grow. Not trying to avoid it, but put it at the center—and I asked myself what is the thought that keeps you up at night that you never reveal to anyone. And it was the idea of lost innocence, in the sense of feeling isolated and not being able to connect with the rest of humanity. It\'s about the reality of living in busy cities as well. The more you close your eyes to people, the more walled up you become. You see the reality of a city which doesn\'t treat everybody equally or the same way, and the anger that it creates.” **Flower** “It\'s a classic scenario of distance being sexier than the touch, and celebrating female nudity in a hypnotic way. I was inspired by all the girls in Jumbo\'s, which is an LA pole-dancing club I go to when I\'m in LA. I really love the atmosphere of the club and how freeing it is, and how exciting and frightening it is at the same time. I love that tension. Hostile composed it for me, and when it was finished, I felt it wasn\'t for me. I wasn\'t sure, so I sent it to my friend Romy Madley Croft \[The xx vocalist/guitarist\], and she replied in capital letters that I have to have this song on the record and that it was great to hear me in a different context. I decided that I was going to check with myself if I was feeling uncomfortable. And if I was feeling uncomfortable, it was a good sign that I was going in the right direction.” **We Will Sin Together** “It’s an invitation to do bad things together and the realization that love is part of that. That there\'s no right or wrong; there\'s only in and out. If you decide to break a sweat and participate in life, you are going to make mistakes. So for me, it\'s what I call a post-romantic love song. It tries to reach beyond the ancestral codes of romanticism, because they too often generate frustration. Romy sang backing vocals on it. We were working on the song in LA and I asked her to sit behind the mic. I love her voice. I think it naturally carries a lot of emotion and never sounds fabricated, and it also suits the song perfectly. It\'s one of my favorite tracks of the record.” **A Place Above (feat. Cillian Murphy)** “I had written the texts and I wondered if \[Irish actor\] Cillian could read it. Because, again, I wanted this multiplicity of voices on the record. I knew he was a fan of Savages, and I was a fan of his; I think he has one of the best voices in modern cinema. He did it without hearing any music, which I think was great and perfect. I remember what Cillian wrote to me when he wrote the text. He said, ‘It\'s big stuff.’ And then he said, \'It should be done in a slow way, a quiet way.\' He made it personal, as if you were hearing someone\'s personal thoughts that you suddenly had access to. It’s a little bit like in *Wings of Desire* \[German film director Wim Wenders’ 1987 film\]. The angels have access to people\'s thoughts and minds, and they can hear their secret thoughts.” **I’m the Man** “What I wanted to say with this song is that the root of evil isn\'t just on the other side—it lives inside of each of us. It\'s implanted in our core by generations of parents or grandparents in society, and we must stay strong and aware to overcome the aggressive power to control us. It\'s about facing my own responsibility for the evil of this world. It\'s important for arts, in general, to show our own complexities to our faces. I wanted to portray the evil of this world and put it on me, wear the mask of people. Because it\'s impossible for me, as an artist, to draw a line between good and bad and just pretend that I\'m always standing on the right side of the fence. Sometimes it\'s about looking on the other side, trying to understand your own thoughts and your own darkness and your own violence.” **The Rooms** “It’s a resolution moment, kind of a resting in contrast to ‘I’m the Man.’ I wrote and recorded hours of piano and vocals on my own in the studio. It\'s a calm description of an orgy where women have all the power. It comes from a line by Francis Bacon, who said something like, ‘When I went into the rooms of pleasure, I didn\'t stay in the rooms where they celebrate acceptable modes of loving, I went into the rooms which are kept secret.’ It\'s a beautiful way to describe desire and exploration.” **Heroine** “I think ‘Heroine’ is a cry to be free. I have had quite a journey with this song, because it was originally called ‘Heroism.’ Because I wanted to talk about the idea of freedom and role models and the fact that freedom is, in fact, frightening. I was told I should play the heroine in ‘Heroine.’ I couldn\'t really step into the shoes of that big character that way, that was positive in a way. You need to be able to embody positive characters as much as you embody frightening and contradictory characters. So that was the realization for me. Sometimes you look for role models around, but you have to also be able to see what\'s within you. And for me to hold the people around me to get there, to take me there.” **How Could You (feat. Joe Talbot)** “One of my favorite songs about jealousy is ‘Why’d Ya Do It?’ by Marianne Faithfull from *Broken English*, and I always wanted to write something about jealousy. I\'ve had to work very hard to conquer jealousy in order to live, and it wasn\'t easy. I had to fight against all my conditioning and invent new rules for myself. I\'ve learned so much from the process, but it\'s something you constantly need to check yourself with. Because jealous people always think they\'re right. Which I think is my main problem with it; when I was jealous, I was tempted to think I was right, because jealousy makes you think that there isn\'t a greater pain than yours. I couldn\'t imagine a better person as Joe \[Talbot, IDLES vocalist\] to be a jealous man on this song. Because he knows, and he understands, what it means to take control of this human instinct. And he\'s been jealous. He\'s been a bad guy; he knows what it\'s like. When I discovered IDLES, I thought they were shining a light into what it means to be a man in a band. I knew Joe was going to write something brilliant about anger and jealousy, and he did.” **French Countryside** “I wrote it as if I was writing a soundtrack for *Call Me by Your Name*. That\'s what I had in mind: the summer, the countryside, and the promise of love. I wrote the lyrics much before that. I wrote them in a plane when I thought we were going to crash, and I was making a list of promises of what I would do better if I survived. And obviously when the plane landed safely, I forgot about my list of promises. When I revisited the idea I realized, oh god, we forget about the urgency of life. I was suddenly facing those ideas again, and I really wanted to make something before I go too. It contrasts so much with the rest of the record, but that\'s really on purpose.” **Human** “I knew I wanted to make a record that would give a sense of the journey, holding a narrative from start to finish. It was part of my early discussions with Atticus. I didn\'t want to make a collection of songs. I wanted the record to be a world you can live in. He had this idea of reintroducing the dark voice at that point with the same lyrics. And again, bringing in those orchestral strings, and that sort of drama and intensity and suspense. So we\'re going back to the beginning, but we\'ve evolved. The idea of the lyrics came to me when I was reading about people who go to digital rehab, because they\'ve lost the sense of self and connection to their life. It felt that it was interesting to finish the album by saying I used to be a human being and now I live in the web. Because I think we can relate to that more and more.”

Even guitar gods sometimes get bored. In his years with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Frusciante became known as one of the world’s most formidable players, while his shape-shifting solo music explored the breadth of the instrument’s capabilities: psychedelic shredding, power-pop crunch, full-on noise. “I love rock music,” Frusciante tells Apple Music. “It’s very meaningful to me, and I’ve studied it quite a bit more than most rock musicians.” But he reached a point where the surprise wore off. “The things I think are the best, I know how to play all of them,” he says. “I’ve learned them multiple times throughout my life. Whereas electronic music still feels to me the way rock music felt when I was a teenager. I’m still constantly learning from it.” A tribute to ’90s jungle and the frenetic sounds of IDM musicians like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Luke Vibert, *Maya*, his 13th solo album, is a thrilling testament to Frusciante’s passion—and also to his aptitude for new skills. *Maya* isn’t Frusciante’s first electronic outing. In 2010, he teamed up with Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk in the breakcore group Speed Dealer Moms, then paired drill ’n’ bass with grunge on 2012’s *PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone*. He began putting out stripped-down acid tracks under his Trickfinger alias in 2015—“mainly just because it seemed simple enough,” he says—but *Maya* immediately stands out, both in style and assuredness. From the chiming synths and chock-a-block percussion of the opening “Brand E,” it would be easy to mistake the album for a lost classic from the peak years of Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. Sped-up breaks give the acidic “Usbrup Pensul” (even the titles are authentically IDM) the feel of a pinball game played back on fast-forward; “Pleasure Explanation” flips Wagon Christ-like trip-hop into jump-up drum ’n’ bass; and “Blind Aim,” glowing like a sunrise, channels all the exuberance of early breakbeat hardcore. Those IDM references are no accident, says Frusciante: Aphex and his ilk constitute his most listened-to music, though while he was recording the album, he immersed himself in ’90s jungle pioneers like Doc Scott and Dillinja. “Between that and my love for abstract things like Mark Fell and Pita,” he says, “I was trying to make the drums more abstract than jungle, to take it to points where the rhythm starts to feel like it’s falling apart.” If *Maya* sounds like a major step up in ambition, that’s no accident. “I wanted to spend a year just making things as hard as for myself as possible,” he says. “I started programming in specific ways that were challenging, and focusing on specific machines that were the hardest to use. After a year of that, I developed enough skills where when I started doing *Maya*, I could make tracks as quickly as I ever made them.” Much of the album’s cohesiveness derives from his relatively stripped-down toolbox of modular synths, a Yamaha DX7 keyboard, and just one drum machine per track. “There’s a certain power that comes out of trying to get the most out of one drum machine,” he says. “Each drum machine has its own capacity to receive human energy.” There were exceptions, however. The dizzying breaks of “Reach Out” were cobbled together out of so many different samples that even Frusciante can’t quite untangle his Frankenstein’s monster. “It gets to the point you don\'t even know what breaks you\'re using anymore,” he laughs, “because you\'re putting so many together and you\'ve mangled them so much.” But for all the album’s high-tech experiments and dazzling formal complexity, the colorful leads of tracks like “Brand E” and “Flying,” which nod to Jean-Michel Jarre and Art of Noise, underscore Frusciante’s emphasis on musicality. “I have a thing with melody and rhythm,” he says, “and *Maya* was really just me making music that I would want to listen to.” Perhaps for that reason, it’s named after his cat, who died after 15 years with Frusciante. (“She’d sit in the studio and listen,” he recalls. “She’d knead my stomach while I practiced guitar, and while I was programming machines, she was in my lap.”) The result is an album that is as emotional as the most vulnerable singer-songwriter records in his catalog—just cut from different cloth. “I don\'t think music is better just because it\'s more complex,” Frusciante says. “It\'s really about the soul.”

John Frusciante releases the first instrumental electronic album under his own name on Aaron Funk's Timesig label. The record is dedicated to his cat Maya who recently passed away, a fellow traveller in his otherwise solitary music making sessions. He says "Maya was with me as I made music for 15 years, so I wanted to name it after her. She loved music, and with such a personal title, it didn't seem right to call myself Trickfinger, somehow, so it's by John Frusciante." 'Maya' is inspired by his favourite music: '91 to'96 UK breakbeat hardcore and jungle. It’s a varied and personal take with sophisticated, authentic production balanced against John’s acute sense of melody, an inspired blending of machines and samples infused with a joyful energy. After discovering early UK rave music, John started dancing at drum & bass club nights in Los Angeles. He then got into Venetian Snares' music at the Autechre curated ATP in 2003, eventually becoming friends with Aaron resulting in the Speed Dealer Moms collaboration which boosted his confidence in making electronic music. The process of making his tracks changed over time as John explains; “For a full year before I started this record, I worked within self-imposed limitations and rules that made the music-making process as difficult as possible, programming for programming's sake. After a full year of that, I decided to make things easier, to the degree that I could regularly finish tracks I enjoyed listening to, while continuing many of the practices I‘d developed. Throughout the recording of Maya, I would prepare to make each track very slowly, but would finish tracks very quickly. I'd spend weeks making breakbeats, souping up a drum machine, making DX7 patches, and so on. By the time an idea came up that seemed like the beginning of a tune, I had a lot of fresh elements ready to go." John says his solo music has changed; "I don't have that interest in singing or writing lyrics like I used to. The natural thing when I'm by myself now, is to just make music like the stuff being released this year. I really love the back and forth with machines and the computer." The fun he’s having on 'Maya' is infectious.

clipping.\'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019\'s *There Existed an Addiction to Blood* by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes\' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop (\"Say the Name\" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while \"Eaten Alive\" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of \"Make Them Dead\"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent \"Pain Everyday\"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs\' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today\'s modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the \"final girl\" cliché on its head on the uptempo \"’96 Neve Campbell,\" while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning \"Looking Like Meat.\" Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record\'s many horrors. **Say the Name** William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about *Candyman*. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it\'s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That\'s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there\'s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, *Candyman* already does that for you. It\'s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” **’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)** Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn\'t clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that\'s a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: \"We didn\'t have our *Halloween*, *Friday the 13th* slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed\'s lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There\'s a Benny the Butcher song called \'’97 Hov,\' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that\'s the vibe you\'re going for. So some of the suggestions were like, \'’79 Jamie Lee Curtis\' or \'’82 Heather Langenkamp.\' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a *Scream* reference, \'’96 Neve Campbell\' made more sense.” **Something Underneath** DD: “There\'s a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we\'d work all day and then I\'d go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn\'t stand the vocal performance on. It\'s obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” **Make Them Dead** WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let\'s do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let\'s try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There\'s something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it\'s ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” **She Bad** WH: “That\'s our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn\'t a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It\'s mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I\'ve been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I\'m just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” **Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)** WH: “It\'s a joke about Alvin Lucier\'s beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” **Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)** DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don\'t write whole rap songs in 7/8. It\'s not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it\'s all down, I can\'t hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it\'s in 7/8, it\'s about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” **Check the Lock** WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” **Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9)** DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn\'t going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don\'t work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” **Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)** DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey \[Hussle\] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it\'s like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn\'t know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That\'s why it\'s called \'Eaten Alive,\' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” **Body for the Pile (with Sickness)** WH: “It already came out \[in 2016\]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called *NOISE*. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren\'t going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it\'s out and it\'s done.’ We looked around and I don\'t know, that comp isn\'t really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” **Enlacing** WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on *Splendor & Misery*, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” **Secret Piece** WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended *midcity* with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended *CLPPNG* with a John Cage piece, and then *There Existed* ends with Annea Lockwood\'s \'Piano Burning.\' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it\'s dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you\'re safe, right? The end of *Friday the 13th* one, the sun comes up and she\'s in the little boat, but that doesn\'t end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like *Friday the 13th*.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”

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Playing video games has served as a reprieve for many during the lockdown, but for Oli Sykes, these virtual post-apocalyptic adventures also influenced the shaping of Bring Me The Horizon\'s new EP. Drawing inspiration mainly from DOOM Eternal, the Sheffield quintet tapped Mick Gordon, who composed that game\'s soundtrack, to produce this collection and capture the spirit of a big-budget video game. The angsty \"Dear Diary,\" begins the record with an airing of grievances, the LINKIN PARK-leaning \"Teardrops\" channels nu-metal\'s glory days, and tracks like \"Parasite Eve\" and \"Ludens\" build off the heavier moments from 2019\'s *amo*. The EP features collaborators that span multiple genres: \"Kingslayer\" fuses *Suicide Season*-era deathcore with BABYMETAL\'s kawaii metal stylings, while \"Obey\" weaponizes YUNGBLUD\'s raspy vocals alongside Sykes\' menacing growl to tackle societal oppression and corruption. And the haunting kiss-off \"One Day the Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest as You March Towards Your Death\" features a chilling duet between Sykes and Evanescence\'s Amy Lee, the track\'s glacial funeral march offering nothing more than a bleak look into the future.

On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”

“I had a lot to write about,” beabadoobee tells Apple Music of her debut album *Fake It Flowers*. “I’m just a girl with girl problems, and I feel like there are a lot of girls who have the same problems.” Over 12 songs, Beatrice Laus explores those issues in what she calls “diary entries,” written in her bedroom over just a couple of months in late 2019. Here, she shakes off what people think of her (“Further Away,” the hook-laden “Care”), screams out her sadness (“Charlie Brown”), and gives way to the abandon of young love (the woozy, self-aware “Horen Sarrison”). “I made sure that there was a song for every mood and for every Bea that exists,” says the Philippines-born, London-raised singer. “This is a very personal album. It was everything I was supposed to tell someone but couldn’t, or just, like, never did.” The songs here are an unabashed love letter to the \'90s artists—and movies—she was devoted to growing up. (“Everyone glorifies the past,” says Laus of her obsession with a decade that ended a year before her birth.) Only three years after the first song she ever wrote, the hushed, ultra-lo-fi “Coffee,” earmarked beabadoobee as a name to know, the singer wants *Fake It Flowers* to do for other young women what those artists—from The Cardigans to Oasis, via Elliott Smith and Alanis Morissette—did for her. “When I’m really sad, I like to dance in my underpants in front of my mirror,” she says. “I always pick a good album to dance to. And I want *Fake It Flowers* to be that album for someone.” Hairbrushes at the ready: Let beabadoobee take you through her raw debut, track by track. **Care** “As soon as this came to life, I was like, ‘This is the first song.’ It describes the whole sound of *Fake It Flowers*—the big guitars, that nostalgic feeling. And lyrically the song talks about the fact that no one is ever going to get me. But it’s the idea that I\'m going to sing my heart out and not give a fuck if you don\'t like it. I just wanted a really good radio pop song, something that could end \[1999 rom-com\] *10 Things I Hate About You*.” **Worth It** “This song is about the temptations you get when you\'re on tour and when you\'re away—the stupid things you can do when you\'re alone in a hotel room. It was hard to get through it, but I\'m glad I wrote it because it was like an ending of that bit of my life. But sonically, it’s something good out of a bad situation. I wanted to make an album for people to dance to in their bedrooms, despite how depressing the songs are.” **Dye It Red** “This song isn’t actually about me. It\'s stories I\'ve heard from other people, and it’s about stupid boys. I have no filter with the lyrics. It’s also about being comfortable with who you are. At times, I feel like a hypocrite for singing this song, because I always care about what my boyfriend thinks. But I shouldn\'t, right? I wanted ‘Dye It Red’ to fizzle out into a beautiful mess at the end, especially around the lyrics where I\'m like, ‘You\'re not even that cute, that cute.’ I thought it was funny and sassy.” **Back to Mars** “I feel like this is where the album takes a shift into a darker-sounding side. ‘Care’ and ‘Worth It’ are the surface level of my problems. This is where it gets really deep into, like, ‘This is why I\'m fucked up.’ This song pays homage to the space theme of my EP *Space Cadet*, which this song was originally supposed to be for. This was the second take I did—it was just me and my guitar, and then Pete \[Robertson\] put all these amazing atmospheric sounds around it. It was meant to be a really fast-paced track with loads of drums, but it’s a very innocent song.” **Charlie Brown** “This is very heavy! And screaming on this song was probably the funnest moment of recording this album. They asked, ‘Are you sure you can scream?’ But I scream so much in my bedroom when I’m alone, so I was like: ‘I was born ready.’ I wanted to talk about a situation in my life as if I was just taking it out of my system. And what better way to do that than scream? I have a Charlie Brown strip tattooed on my arm—I was obsessed with Snoopy when I was a kid.” **Emo Song** “Originally, this was going to be another heavy one, but Pete suggested making it a super sad and slow one. The songs at this point all bleed into one another. And I did that on purpose, because they were all made together. The song talks about my childhood and how it affected me during my teenage life and what I did to kind of just drag myself of everything that happened to me.” **Sorry** “If my voice sounds vulnerable in this song, it’s because I was half crying while I was singing it. And it was a hard one to sing, because it is just so honest. It speaks about a really sad situation with someone I know and someone I really love. I had a pretty wild teenage life. I think me and my friendship group did what college kids did when we were 15. Anything in excess is bad. And we just did a bit too many drugs, really. And for some, \[it was\] too much—to the point they had to get \[involuntarily hospitalized\]. It\'s just sad to watch someone\'s life kind of wither away, especially knowing that they could have had an amazing life ahead of them. I wish I was more involved. But when something\'s too hard to watch, you just kind of separate yourself from it. Getting all of that off my chest was so relieving. And I said sorry. At least, in my head, I apologized.” **Further Away** “I\'ve always wanted to be a Disney princess. The strings come into play and I wanted to feel like a princess. This is where the positivity comes in the album—there’s a feeling of hope. This song is about all the people who were really mean to me growing up, and I’m just saying how dumb they were. But really, nothing’s real. They were going through the same shit.” **Horen Sarrison** “Literally a six-minute love song of me saying, ‘I\'m in love.’ It\'s supposed to be ridiculous. It\'s supposed to be very outwardly Disney Princess vibes. I was playing it to Pete and I was like, ‘And then the strings go like this,’ humming how I wanted it to sound. And he really brought it to life, and I owe it to him. It definitely is the most grand song on the album. And it’s really fun to play as well, because it just is me talking about how in love I am. I wanted a song for every mood, and this is definitely for that happy mood. And it\'s about Soren Harrison. I thought it was kind of funny to switch the two letters and call it ‘Horen Sarrison.’ It’s just so stupid.” **How Was Your Day?** “I recorded it in my boyfriend’s garden. Lyrically, it talks about my journey and about how hard it was being away from home and missing people. And I feel like it only made sense to go back to my roots on the way I recorded it, on a really shitty four-track, just me and my guitar with a missing string. It was really refreshing. There was always talk about doing a ‘Coffee’ moment on this album. Like, ‘Let\'s strip it back to just you and your guitar.’ And I really wanted it, but we didn\'t know how we were going to do it. Then lockdown happened and I was like, ‘I\'m going to do it, Daniel Johnston style.’” **Together** “This is paying homage to chicks who rock onstage. Like Veruca Salt and Hole. Writing this song made me realize a lot of things—for example, that I have this dependency thing as a person. But ‘Together’ made me realize that sometimes it\'s okay to be by yourself. Togetherness is cool, but being together all the time is kind of unhealthy. Again, I guess it was taking a sad situation and pouring my heart out into a song, and screaming it. And that felt pretty empowering.” **Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene** “The name of this song is simply the names I want to call my children. I\'m literally saying in the song, ‘You\'ll never leave me because you think I\'m pretty, so we\'ll have lots of babies called Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene.’ And it\'s supposed to be really stupid and fun to finish the album off on a positive note. I wanted it to be very messy—like so disgustingly distorted that you can\'t even hear a sound. We recorded it live in Wandsworth in a studio. There were two drum kits and we were just bashing the drums. It was fun, and very Flaming Lips-inspired. The last mood of this album is the really strange, weird Bea. And I think that’s my favorite one.”

After the brutal one-two punch of 2018’s *Book of Ryan* and the DJ Premier team-up *PRhyme 2*, the game needed time to recover. Yet as his trio of ferocious features on Eminem’s *Music to Be Murdered By* made clear, Royce da 5’9” can’t stay away from the mic. Coming mere weeks after that surprise Shady set, *The Allegory* offers that raw pugilistic rhyme style across a selection of uncompromising and enlightening tracks and interludes. He finger-wags fly-by-night fad rappers on “Pendulum,” exposes the racist history of a famous jingle on “Ice Cream,” and gives sweeping condemnations across “Rhinestone Doo Rag.” His multiple New York connects come through too—swapping off with Griseldan Buffalo kids BENNY THE BUTCHER, Conway The Machine, and Westside Gunn, as well as with Queens’ own Grafh on the swirling street soul of “I Play Forever.”

“I think most of it takes place in dreams,” Caleb Landry Jones says of his debut solo album, The Mother Stone. “I’m talking more about dreams than I am about what’s happened in the physical realm. Or I’m talking about both, and you’re not sure what’s what.” This is the kind of conversation you end up having about a record like this one, a sprawling psychedelic suite built from abrupt and disorienting detours and schizoid shifts of voice, its manic energy forever pulling the tablecloth out from under classic pop orchestration. One minute you’re squarely in the realm of biographical fact and a moment later you’re having a discussion about lucid dreaming and how Jones once punched up a dream set on a soccer field by willing himself to experience it from the POV of the ball. But maybe that’s just another story about grabbing the wheel of your own hallucination; maybe this pertains to the music after all. Some biographical facts: Caleb Landry Jones was born in Garland, Texas in 1989 and comes from a long line of fiddle players. Three, maybe four generations back, on his mother’s side. His grandfather wrote jingles for commercials, his mother was a singer-songwriter who taught piano lessons in the house, and his father was a contractor who did a lot of work for the Dallas music-equipment retailer Brook Mays and knew a guy if you needed a bass or a banjo. But Jones is not sure if you can hear any of this in his music and he does not play the fiddle. What you can hear on this record are the marks left by conversion experiences, two in particular. First there’s Jones’ formative encounter with the Beatles’ “White Album,” the Fabs record most obviously composed by four Beatles rowing in different directions, and the beginning of what Jones calls “this British Invasion of my soul,” which is still ongoing. Second, there’s Syd Barrett, cracked vessel of Pink Floyd’s most intergalactic ambitions, and the “falling-down-the-stairs” quality of his solo work in particular. “I was dating a girl who was obsessed with him,” Jones remembers, “and the fact that I’d never heard him really pissed her off. So we went and got The Madcap Laughs and we listened to it and I could see why it pissed her off.” “John keeps knocking at the door, and so does Syd,” Jones says of these songs. “And I’m in there somewhere. And so are a few other people, I think. It would be really boring if it was just one guy.” Jones has been writing and recording music since age 16, around the same time he started acting professionally. Played in a band called Robert Jones for a minute, lost his guitar player to higher education, moved into his own place, and broke up with somebody, at which point the songs really started coming hard and fast. “I started playing guitar and playing more keys,” he says, “and then started writing record after record after record after record, because I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a good way of healing. And it felt like as soon as I started doing it, it felt like it needed to happen all the time.” In the ensuing years he’d spend a lot of time carrying unrecorded songs around in his head like goldfish in a bag, waiting for a chance to record them in marathon sessions in his parents’ barn. “You gotta play the songs every day, or every two or three days, to keep ‘em,” he says. “Otherwise I forget them.” Sometimes the ideas fuse together, one chapter to the next; this is how songs grow into seven-plus-minute epics like the ones on The Mother Stone. His back catalog is around seven hundred songs deep— a whole discography of full albums, most of them unheard outside the barn, at least for now. Before long Jones’ other job started to keep him away from the barn for longer stretches. You may have seen him playing the drums on television as a member of Landry Clarke’s death-metal band on Friday Night Lights. You may have seen him in other things, too. But enough about acting, except for this: A few years ago Jones had a pivotal meeting with Jim Jarmusch, the movie director and musician. “I was a big fan of his work,” Jones says, “and I know how I act with people that I’m big fans of their work. So instead of wanting to talk, I thought I’d write him a piece that would somehow let him know who I was.” So Jones spent a few nights composing a new instrumental work for solo piano, and showed up ready to play it for the director at their meeting— which turned out to be at a diner somewhere in Canada, where the amenities did not include a piano, so they had a conversation instead. Jones did slip Jarmusch Microastro and Macroastro, two collections of songs from the barn, most of them four or five or maybe eight years old at that point. Jarmusch liked what he heard, told Jones he should talk to Sacred Bones founder Caleb Braaten, and before long Jones was making the record you’re about to hear— whose opening track, “Flag Day/The Mother Stone” incorporates that piano piece Jones wrote to explain himself to Jim Jarmusch. A few more germane facts: The Mother Stone was recorded at Valentine Recording Studios, where everyone from Bing Crosby to Frank Zappa once logged time, refurbished to time-capsule retro standards in 2015 by studio manager and Mother Stone producer Nic Jodoin. Jones brought his collection of battered Yamahas and Casios up from the barn and played them alongside vintage equipment from Jodoin’s collection. Working in a real studio gave Jones a chance to slow his creative process down. They built the songs up from acoustic guitar, let them sit a while, circled back. Sometimes Jones and his girlfriend would decompress at the Shakey’s down the street, home to a range of acceptable video-arcade options. “They got that thing where you throw it in the clown’s mouth,” Jones says. “That’s fun. I like the look of those clowns.” Maybe the clowns are the key. This isn’t a concept album, it’s a parade led by multiple unreliable narrators who rail against the universe and profess their love and vacate the stage before we can ask them a question. The circus comes to town, the circus leaves town. A young man from suburban Texas winds up and a clown opens its mouth as wide as the sky. -Alex Pappademas

The 11th Jayhawks studio album XOXO was released July 10, 2020 on Sham/Thirty Tigers. Recorded in late 2019 at Pachyderm and Flowers Studios in Minnesota, XOXO represents a bold step forward. For the first time, all four members contribute writing and lead vocal duties. XOXO is the most diverse and wide-ranging in the group’s storied history. Rather than marking a sonic departure, though, the collection signals a sharpening of focus for the band, an elevation in understanding of who they are and what they do best. In classic Jayhawks fashion, the songs here mix the influence of American roots music with British invasion and jangly power-pop, but there’s a newfound vitality at play, as well, an invigoration of confidence and energy that could only come with the injection of fresh blood. The result is an album that, much like the band’s lush harmonies, brings multiple distinctive voices together into a singular whole, a collection that, ironically enough, finds unity in individuality and identity in reinvention.

SONGHOY BLUES is a band whose experiences in Mali have opened their eyes to universal problems plaguing people everywhere. Using the pain and lessons learned from having to leave their hometowns in northern Mali, the band realizes that human rights is a concept that extends far beyond what they have seen with their own eyes and far beyond just the borders of Mali. In order for the band to see their homes restored, they understand the fight must be fought on all fronts, for everybody across the spectrum. They are no longer refugees or exiles or four people with instruments—they are SONGHOY BLUES, a musical voice for empowerment and equality. Working with Matt Sweeney, who encouraged the band to make the album they want to make, OPTIMISME confronts our world today. On “BADALA” and “GABI,” SONGHOY BLUES seeks the empowerment of women, asking for centuries-old misogynistic practices to be done away with. With “WORRY,” the band advises both the young and the old that positive vibes and persistence are the best tools to fight our struggles. In “ASSADA,” the band praises and thanks the everyday warriors who wake up everyday to sweat for the betterment of their communities and in “DOURNIA,” the band laments the lack of compassion and empathy between humans today in the face of increasing materialism and selfishness. “BON BON” warns of being fooled by shiny promises, and in “BARRE” the band asks for the youth to get involved at home for change while warning off those who wish to divide in “FEY FEY.” Each time SONGHOY BLUES steps to the mic on OPTIMISME the band confronts, consoles, praises, thanks, and encourages the listener toward a better world tomorrow.

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”