Riff Magazine's 75 Best Albums of 2020

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

The first album by Dilla collaborators Madlib and Karriem Riggins as the Jahari Massamba Unit joins music by contemporaries like Jeff Parker and Angel Bat Dawid in reframing jazz for audiences raised on hip-hop. The clearest influence here is the dense, cosmic sound of ’70s artists like Bennie Maupin (“Du Morgon Au Moulin-À-Vent \[Pour Duke\]”), Alice Coltrane (“Les Jardins Esméraldins \[Pour Caillard\]”), and Miles Davis (“Trou Du Cul \[Ode Au Sommelier Arrogant\]”). But while jazz has historically focused on documenting the conversation between instrumentalists, Madlib and Riggins—the former of whom is best known for his work in underground hip-hop, the latter of whom has produced for Common and Erykah Badu but also played drums for Diana Krall and Norah Jones—foreground groove and mood, simple subjects both artists have yet to exhaust in their 20-plus-year careers.

Drums: Karriem Riggins. Instruments: Madlib. We would have called it Spiritual Jazz but Phil Ranelin told us to call it Black Classical Music. We are proud to announce the long-awaited debut album from Jahari Masamba Unit, Pardon My French. Among all of the projects Madlib presented as part of his Jazz Universe, this collaboration was of particular note to fans, who continued to wonder for years if anything else might come from the collaboration. This album, put together by students of jazz in its myriad and historic corms, and also proponents of jazz’s future, reflects a lifetime of record collecting, musical study, woodshopping, and a reverential respect for one another’s craft.

Since Bruce Springsteen last released an album with the E Street Band—*High Hopes*, 2014’s collection of re-recorded outtakes and covers—he’s spent a lot of time thinking about his past. He followed his 2016 memoir *Born to Run* the next year with a one-man Broadway show in which he reimagined his songs as part of an intimate narrative about his own life and career. And while his 20th LP was recorded completely live with the band in a four-day sprint—for the first time since 1984’s *Born in the USA*—the songs themselves bear the deliberation and weight of an artist who knows he’s running out of time to do things like this. “The impetus for a lot of the material was the loss of my good friend George Theiss,” Springsteen tells Apple Music. “When he passed away, it left me as the only remaining living member of the first band that I had, which was a very strange thought, and it gave rise to most of the material. There\'s aging and loss of people as time goes by, and that\'s a part of what the record is. And then at the same time, you\'re sort of celebrating the fact that the band goes on and we carry their spirits with us.” That combination of wistfulness and joy—propelled by the full force of an E Street Band that’s been playing together in some form for nearly 50 years, minus two departed founding members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici—drives “Last Man Standing” and “Ghosts” most explicitly, but imbues the entire project. Though this may have been recorded live and fast, nothing sounds ragged or rambunctious; the efficiency owes to the shorthand of a unit that knows each other’s moves before they make them. While most of the songs were written recently, “Song for Orphans,” “If I Was the Priest,” and “Janey Needs a Shooter” date back to the early ’70s, only adding to the feeling of loose ends being tied. And it’s not lost on Springsteen after this long period of reflection that this album fits into a larger story that he’s been telling for most of his life. “If you wanted to find a body of work that expressed what it was like to be an American, say from 1970 to now, in the post-industrial period of the United States—I\'d be a place you could go and get some information on that,” he says. “And so in that sense, I always try to speak to my times in the way that I best could.” Here he digs deeper into just a few of the highlights from *Letter to You*. **One Minute You’re Here** “It\'s unusual to start a record with its quietest song. The record really starts with \'Letter to You,\' but there\'s this little preface that lets you know what the record is going to encompass. The record starts with \'One Minute You\'re Here\' and then ends with \'I\'ll See You in My Dreams,\' which are both songs about mortality and death. It was just sort of a little tip of the hat to where the record was going to go and a little slightly connected to \[2019\'s\] *Western Stars*. It was a little transitional piece of music.” **Last Man Standing** “That particular song was directly due to George\'s passing and me finding out that out of that group of people, I\'m kind of here on my own, honoring the guys that I learned my craft with between the ages of 14 and 17 or 18. Those were some of the deepest learning years of my life—learning how to be onstage, learning how to write, learning how to front the band, learning how to put together a show, learning how to play for all different kinds of audiences at fireman\'s fairs, at union halls, at CYO \[Catholic Youth Organization\] dances, and just really honing your craft.” **Janey Needs a Shooter** and **If I Was the Priest** and **Song for Orphans** “We were working on a lot of stuff that I have in the vault to put out again at some time, and I went through almost a whole record of pre-*Greetings From Asbury Park* music that was all acoustic, and these songs were inside them. The guys came in and I said, ‘Okay. Today we\'re going to record songs that are 50 years old, and we\'re going to see what happens.\' The modern band playing those ideas that I had as a 22-year-old—and for some reason it just fit on the record, because the record skips through time. It starts with me thinking about when I was 14 and 15, and then it moves into the present. So those songs added a little touchstone for that certain period of time. I went back and I found a voice that really fit them, and they\'re a nice addition to the record.” **House of a Thousand Guitars** “Every piece of music has its demands—what tone in my voice is going to feel right for this particular piece of music—and you try to meet it in the middle. That\'s one of my favorite songs on the record; I\'m not exactly sure why yet. It\'s at the center of the record and it speaks to this world that the band and I have attempted to create with its values, its ideas, its codes, since we started. And it collects all of that into one piece of music, into this imaginary house of a thousand guitars.” **The Power of Prayer** “I grew up Catholic, and that was enough to turn me off from religion forever. And I realized as I grew older that you can run away from your religion, but you can\'t really run away from your faith. And so I carried a lot of the language with me, which I use and write with quite often—\'Promised Land\' or \'House of a Thousand Guitars\' and \'The Power of Prayer\' on this record. Those little three-minute records and the 180-second character studies that came through pop music were like these little meditations and little prayers for me. And that\'s what I turned them into. And my faith came in and filled those songs, and gave them a spiritual dimension. It\'s an essential part of your life.” **I’ll See You in My Dreams** “I remember a lot of my dreams and I always have. But that song was basically about those that pass away don\'t ever really leave us. They visit me in my dreams several times a year. Clarence will come up a couple times in a year. Or I\'ll see Danny. They just show up in very absurd, sometimes in abstract ways in the middle of strange stories. But they\'re there, and it\'s actually a lovely thing to revisit with them in that way. The pain slips away, the love remains, and they live in that love and walk alongside you and your ancestors and your life companions as a part of your spirit. So the song is basically about that: \'Hey. I\'m not going to see you at the next session, but I\'ll see you in my dreams.\'”

“It is a reflection of the highs and lows of my own journey of self-discovery, rehabilitation, and reflection across the past two years,” Zach Choy, drummer, vocalist, and de facto spokesperson for Crack Cloud, tells Apple Music about the Canadian collective’s debut full-length. “I can hear where I was when it started, and I can hear where I was when we ended it.” Crack Cloud has been described as its members’ “recovery program” from their own personal battles, and Choy assesses *Pain Olympics*’ blend of post-punk, hip-hop, electronica, and industrial sounds as being a concept album of sorts, fundamentally about “finding your way through the world with a lot of baggage and trauma in tow. The medium is the message. Each individual song operates as an organ upon which the others rely.” Allow him, then, to act as your guide through the labyrinthine world of *Pain Olympics*. **Post Truth (Birth of a Nation)** “We wanted to create a world for the album, and to set the tone in a really grandiose, melodramatic way. This is that world’s ‘big bang’—it was a very visual concept. A frame of reference was the original Willy Wonka movie—going down that tunnel that Willy Wonka guides the children down, with its psychedelic nightmare sequence and range of emotions. The joy of working with a collective of people is that everyone specializes in and is geared towards different things. Here, a lot of the string arrangements were facilitated by one of our members who’s a connoisseur of that sort of thing—similarly, the industrial section. You hear these different elements and you hear the different people in our collective. This track is one of the best representations of the stitching-together that takes place within the collective and how things are pooled together based on one fundamental idea.” **Bastard Basket** “‘Bastard Basket’ felt like the natural antithesis to ‘Post Truth.’ It’s pensive and brooding where ‘Post Truth’ is big and bombastic. We wanted to strip away the magnificence and extravagance and sober the listener down. The general concept for reference for all of us while constructing the album was the idea of the rise and fall of a society, all of the discovery and contention and plateaus that you’ll read about in history. We wanted to represent those plateaus and draw parallels with personal life. I think anyone can relate to retaining an ambition and aspiration, and then waking up the next day and feeling the complete opposite. COVID even is a very tangible manifestation of that. One day you have your trajectory for 2020—and the next it’s out the window.” **Somethings Gotta Give** “This retains a despondency, but with a chorus that delivers more aggression and frustration. Musically, every song reveals the microscopic influence of what we were listening to along that two-year timeline. This was our attempt at an homage to the pop music we were listening to at the time, everything from The Tea Party to The Cure to blink-182. *Pain Olympics* as a whole concept took direct influence from Pink Floyd’s *The Wall*, The Beatles’ *Sgt. Pepper’s*, and Kendrick Lamar’s *To Pimp a Butterfly*. Those albums were lifesavers for me. They showed me how far you can take music and how visual it can actually be, and how emotionally engaging it can become when there’s a story that lasts not three minutes, but 45. As an artist, I want to tell stories that are informed by my personal experiences and hopefully resonate with people who have gone through similar things.” **The Next Fix** “This is a particularly personal song for me, and I think it came out onto the page in only 20 minutes. Daniel \[Robertson, multi-instrumentalist\] came with a riff and a rhythm, and the lyrics just poured out of me. I generally find lyrical inspiration to be very sporadic. This album was my first attempt at being more personal and more vulnerable as a songwriter; in the past I’ve written in a more abstract and broader manner. That was perhaps more to fit the niche of the genre we were operating within—a lot of punk music is steered by broader politics, whereas we approached this album without any sort of stylistic limitations. I’ve found it exciting to learn how to translate thoughts and emotions without hiding behind abstraction.” **Favour Your Fortune** “‘The Next Fix’ and ‘Favour Your Fortune’ are companion pieces—the two songs directly feed off one another, in terms of their conflicting energy, and I very much thrive off exploring those dichotomies. They’re two sides of the same coin, and I find it hard to manifest one side but not the other. I think there was a bit of a subliminal link in the songs’ creation, a certain residual headspace that carried into ‘The Next Fix’ from writing ‘Favour Your Fortune’ first. They were flipped in their positioning on the record to meet the album’s flow of high-low-high-low. Presenting the alternation in that way is a projection of my own personality and navigation of the world. I think I’m a pretty motivated person, but I supress a lot of anxieties and doubts. There’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows—and it’s not consistent, either.” **Ouster Stew** “I wanted this song to be really funny—and I thought it would be really funny to have a drum solo in the middle. That one’s an anthem. Musically it’s a ‘high’ moment, but it’s balanced by lyrics that are pretty sardonic, pretty cynical. If there’s any song on the album that has an equilibrium, it’s ‘Ouster Stew.’ It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing—it’s manufactured as the ‘radio song’ but deals with conflict, morality, the world’s dog-eat-dog nature. I think it’s direct projection of the contention within our culture when it comes to all politics, and I thought it’d be opportunistic to cloak that within a pop song.” **Tunnel Vision** “For all intents and purposes, ‘Tunnel Vision’ is a classic climax: It has a meandering jam in the middle, and its lyricism and use of dual vocalists with back-and-forth lines is there to fully realize the contention and duality that is such a major theme on the album. It was the most straightforward track, and one of the earliest we wrote for the album. I felt like I didn’t want to end the album with a rock song, though, which is ultimately why it wasn’t positioned to close the album.” **Angel Dust (Eternal Peace)** “We end with a pseudo resolution to an otherwise chaotic story, to bring the cyclical nature of *Pain Olympics* across. This isn’t the end, it’s merely the beginning. *The Wall* and *To Pimp a Butterfly* were heavily influential on the narrative device of closing an album and yet trying to leave it open-ended. We want to leave the listener in a state of mind where they are compelled to consider what they have just heard. Art can be such a profound experience when you abandon any societal or cultural hindrances that would otherwise prevent you from being able to experience a record or a painting in a pure, instinctual way. It’s about open-mindedness, and letting the music drive you on a spiritual level, as opposed to letting your own analysis drive your interpretation.”

Written and recorded between July 2017 and December 2019 Produced by Crack Cloud Engineer Jonathan Paul Stewart Mastering Christian Wright Logo by Wei Huang Cover by Marc Gabbana

Coming at the tail end of a steady wave of solid 2020 Griselda Records projects, the Buffalo, New York-based imprint may very well have saved the best for last. While his core labelmates Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine may have had more prolific release years, Benny the Butcher’s first project since the 2019 trio effort *WWCD* for Eminem’s Shady Records presents him in a singular context. Part of what makes *Burden of Proof* such a standout stems from the beat selection, all of which comes via Hit-Boy. Fresh off of a career highlight with Nas’ *King’s Disease*, the producer meshes exceptionally well with Benny’s street-informed verses on cuts like “Famous” and the animated boom-bap “Trade It All.” And as if his vibrant and boisterous bars weren’t enough, esteemed guests like Freddie Gibbs and Rick Ross sound energized by the upstate lyricist’s dynamic flows here.

Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.

The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

Sir Robert Bryson Hall II announced his retirement via Instagram like this: “It’s been a great decade. Now it’s time to be a great father.” While the birth of a child (“Little Bobby” was introduced to the world in a subsequent post) can inspire a new parent to work even harder than when childless, the artist professionally known as Logic has earned a break. *No Pressure*, his sixth studio album, arrives following a tear that began with 2014’s *Under Pressure*. This latest and alleged final effort is executive produced by NO I.D., the man responsible for the sound of *Under Pressure* and the person Logic credits with the bulk of his artistic development. If the two coming together one last time means anything for longtime Logic fans, it’s that they get the most polished and well-rounded version of their favorite MC, touching on how far he’s come as a rapper (“Celebration”), his faith (“Hit My Line”), and the handling of his successes (“man i is”) across the project’s 15 tracks. Clever bars come first here, as they always have—“I’m too alive like twins in a womb,” he raps on the title track—and he’s largely unsentimental about walking away. Around the same time he announced his retirement, Logic also revealed an exclusive deal with the livestreaming platform Twitch, so even if he isn’t focused on making music, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever really have to live without Logic.

A general observation: You don’t go see Rick Rubin at Shangri-La if you’re just going to fuck around. For their sixth LP, The Strokes turn to the Mage of Malibu to produce their most focused collection of songs since 2003’s *Room on Fire*—the very beginning of a period marked by discord, disinterest, and addiction. Only their fourth record since, *The New Abnormal* finds the fivesome sounding fully engaged and totally revitalized, offering glimpses of themselves as we first came to know them at the turn of the millennium—young saviors of rock, if not its last true stars—while also providing the sort of perspective and even grace that comes with age. “Bad Decisions” is at turns riffy and elegiac, Julian Casablancas’ corkscrewing chorus melody a close enough relative to 1981’s “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol and Tony James are credited as songwriters. Though not as immediate, “Not the Same Anymore” is equally toothsome, a heart-stopping soul number that manages to capture feelings of both triumph and deep regret, with Casablancas opening himself up and delivering what might be his finest vocal performance to date. “I was afraid,” he sings, amid a weave of cresting guitars. “I fucked up/I couldn’t change/It’s too late.” For a band that forged an entire mythology around appearing as though they couldn’t be bothered, this is an exciting development. It’s cool to care, too.

“This feels like \[2017’s\] *Crack-Up*’s friendly brother,” Robin Pecknold tells Apple Music of his fourth LP under the Fleet Foxes name. Written and recorded alongside producer-engineer Beatriz Artola (Adele, J Cole, The Kills) throughout much of 2019 and 2020, *Shore* is an album of gratitude—one that found its lyrical focus in quarantine, as Pecknold began taking day-long drives from his New York apartment up to Lake Minnewaska and into the Catskills and back, stopping only to get gas or jot down ideas as they came to him. “It was like the car was the safest place to be,” he says. “I had this optimistic music but I’d been writing these kind of downer lyrics and it just wasn\'t gelling. It was realizing that in the grand scheme of things, this music is pretty unimportant compared to what\'s going on.” At the album\'s heart is “Sunblind,” an opening statement that pays glimmering tribute to some of Pecknold’s late musical heroes—from Richard Swift to Elliott Smith to David Berman, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Judee Sill, and more. “I wanted the album to be for these people,” Pecknold says. “I’m trying to celebrate life in a time of death, trying to find something to hold on to that exists outside of time, something that feels solid or stable.” Here, Pecknold walks us through every song on the album. **Wading in Waist-High Water** “I would have a piece of music and then I would try and sing it, but I would always try and pitch my voice up an octave or manipulate my voice to make it match the calming, mourning tone of the music a little more. And then a friend of mine sent me a clip of Uwade Akhere covering \[2008’s\] ‘Mykonos’ on Instagram, and I was just in love with the texture of her voice and just how easy it was. That was a signal that this was going to be a different kind of album in some ways. It was like I finally found a song where I was like, ‘You know what? This is just going to be more of what I want it to be if someone else sings it.’ And that\'s been an awesome mindset to be in lately, just thinking more about writing for other voices and what other voices can naturally evoke without just trying to make my voice do a ton of different things to get to an emotional resonance.” **Sunblind** “I knew I wanted it to be kind of a mission statement for the record—kind of cite-your-sources energy a little bit. And then find a way to get from this list of names of dead musicians that I\'m inspired by—whose music has really helped me in my life—to somewhere that felt like you were taking the wheel and doing something with that feeling. Or trying to live in honor of that, at least in a way that they\'re no longer able to, or in a way that carries their point of view forward into the future. ‘Sunblind’ is like giving the record permission to go all these places or something. Once it felt like it was doing that, then the whole record kind of made more sense to me, or felt like it all tied into each other in a way that it hadn\'t when that song wasn\'t done.” **Can I Believe You** “That riff is the oldest thing on the album, because I wrote that in the middle of the *Crack-Up* tour and tried working on it then but never got anywhere with it really. Once I was thinking less about some second party that\'s untrustworthy and more just one person\'s own hang-ups with letting people in—like my own hang-ups with that—then the lyrics flowed a little better. Those choral voices are actually 400 or 500 people from Instagram that sent clips of them singing that line to me. And then we spent days editing them together and cleaning them up. There\'s this big hug of vocals around the lead vocal that’s talking about trust or believability.” **Jara** “I wanted ‘Can I Believe You’ to be kind of a higher-energy headbanger-type song, and then after that, have a more steady groove—a loop-based, almost builder-type song. That\'s the single-friend kind of placement on the record. Jara is a reference to Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer. A national hero there who was killed by Pinochet’s army. But it\'s not about Victor Jara— it\'s more like with ‘Sunblind,’ where you\'re trying to eulogize someone, to honor someone or place them in some kind of canon.” **Featherweight** “It\'s the first minor-key song, but it\'s also the first one that\'s without a super prominent drumbeat. It’s lighter on its feet. I thought it was following a train of thought—where with ‘Jara’ there is a bit of envy of a political engagement, in ‘Featherweight,’ I feel like it\'s kind of examining privilege a little bit more. This period of time accommodated that in a very real way for me, just making my problems seem smaller. Acknowledging that I\'ve made problems for myself sometimes in my life when there weren\'t really any.” **A Long Way Past the Past** “Everything I tried was either too Michael McDonald or too Sly Stone or too Stevie Wonder. At that tempo it was just hard to find the instrumentation that didn\'t feel too pastiche or something. While I was writing the lyrics to it, I was thinking, ‘How much am I living in the past? How much can I leave that behind? How much of my identity is wrapped up in memories?’ And asking for help from a friend to maybe fend through that or come on the other side of that. So I thought it was funny to have that be the lyric on the most maybe nostalgic piece of music on the record in terms of what it\'s referencing.” **For a Week or Two** “The first couple Fleet Foxes records, it was a rural vibe as opposed to an urban vibe. I think on the first album, that was just the music I liked, but it wasn\'t like the lyrics were talking about a bunch of personal experiences I had in nature, because I was just 20 years old making that album and I didn\'t have a lot to draw from. ‘For a Week or Two,’ that\'s really about a bunch of long backpacking trips that I was taking for a while. And just the feeling that you have when you\'re doing that, of not being anyone and just being this body in space and never catching your reflection in anything. Carrying very little, and finding some peace in that.” **Maestranza** “Musically, I think for a while it had something in it that had a disco or roller-skating kind of energy that I was trying to find a way out of, and then we found this other palette of instruments that felt less that way. I was trying to go for a Bill Withers-y thing. I feel like a lot of the people that get mentioned in ‘Sunblind,’ their resonance is there, influencing throughout the record. In the third verse, it’s about missing your friends, missing your people, but knowing that since we\'re all going through the same thing that we\'re kind of connected through that in a way that\'s really special and kind of unique to this period. I feel more distant from people but also closer in terms of my actual daily experience.” **Young Man’s Game** “I thought it would be funny if Hamilton \[Leithauser\]’s kids were on it. My original idea was to have it sung by a 10-year-old boy, and then that was just too gimmicky or something. But I wanted there to be kids on it because it\'s referencing immaturity or naivete—things about being young. Because people say ’a young man’s game’ in kind of a positive way. Sometimes they\'re sad they aged out or something. But in this song I use it more in the negative sense of ‘glad you\'ve moved on from some of these immature delusions’ or something. When I was younger I would be much too insecure to make a goofy song, needing everything to be perfect or dramatic or whatever mindset I was in.” **I’m Not My Season** “A friend of mine had been telling me about her experience helping a family member with addiction. As she was describing that, I was imagining this sailing lesson I had taken where we were learning how to rescue someone who had fallen overboard and you have to circle the boat around the right way and throw the ropes from the right place. Time is just something that\'s happening around us, but there\'s some kind of core idea that you\'re not what\'s happening to you. Like wind on a flag.” **Quiet Air / Gioia** “The chords had this kind of expectant feel or something, like an ominous quality, that\'s never really resolving. And I think that kind of led me to want to write about imagining someone, speaking to somebody who is courting danger. Some of the lyrics in the song come from talking to a friend of mine who is a climate scientist, and just her perspective on how screwed we are or aren’t. Just thinking about that whole issue hinges on particulate matter in air that is invisible. You can just be looking at the sky and looking at what will eventually turn into an enormous calamity, and it\'s quietly occurring, quietly accruing. It\'s happening on a time scale that we\'re not prepared to accept or deal with. The ending is this more ecstatic thing. Just imagining some weird pagan dance, like rite of spring or something, where it just kind of builds into this weird kind of joy. Like dancing while the world burns.” **Going-to-the-Sun Road** “The Sun Road is a place in Montana, a 60-mile stretch of road that’s only open for a couple months every year. It’s where they filmed the intro to *The Shining*, where they\'re driving to the lodge and it’s just very scenic. I grew up fairly close to there. A lot of the studios that I worked at on this record were places that I had always wanted to go and work, places where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, one day I\'ll make a record there.’ That song is about being tired of traveling, wanting to slow down a bit and wanting to not fight so hard personally against yourself. Or trying to have as many adventures as possible, but then having this one place—almost like a Rosebud kind of thing—where it\'s like going to the Sun Road is the last big adventure. The one that\'s always on the horizon that you have to look forward to that keeps you going.” **Thymia** “Getting back to work on the record \[after the pandemic hit\] was so rewarding. And I feel like if there was a relationship being discussed on the record, it\'s between me and my love affair with music. ‘Thymia’ I think means ‘boisterous spirit’ or something. The image and the lyrics to that song in my head were kind of me driving around with some camping gear in my back seat that\'s clanging out a rhythm of some kind. And that feeling of, even if I\'m driving alone, there\'s something. That sound is pulling me to the thought of music. It\'s kind of accompanying me. I\'ve known it for a long time. Even though it\'s ephemeral, it\'s the most solid thing that I have.” **Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman** “I wanted to use the sample of Brian Wilson because that clip meant a lot to me growing up, him layering vocals on ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).’ That song has the most stuff I\'ve ever put on a song, and it\'s the most overdubby—very much in that lineage of just layer after layer after layer. Emotionally, it’s similar to that idea of, like, ‘My clothes are torn but the air is clean.’ That feeling like it can be okay to be a little ragged and you can still feel good, like being exhausted at the end of a long run or something. That image of the maternal and feminine would again be a reference to music. Like my receiver, cradling me again. Kind of like being subsumed by music and comforted and consoled by it.” **Shore** “‘Cradling Mother’ could be the climax maybe, and ‘Shore’ felt like an epilogue. In the same way that ‘Wading in Waist-High Water’ is a prologue. Lyrically, it\'s tying up some loose ends, talking to the kin that you rely on—your family or your heroes—and thanking them. It references the shore as this stable place and questions whether you\'re really at the boundary between danger and safety when you\'re there. I\'d actually had a surfing accident where I snapped my leash and I really felt like I was going to drown. It took me 15 minutes to swim to shore and I kept getting pummeled by waves. I was so happy to make it back. I\'ve been pretty afraid since then to do that much surfing in bad conditions. But to me, that image was this comforting thing that then kind of dissolves. The vocals break apart and then it\'s like you\'re getting back in the water and you\'re catching one sound and your voices are blending together and falling apart. You\'re subsumed by water, and then the seas calm, but you\'re floating into the future.”

Today, on the Autumnal Equinox, Fleet Foxes released their fourth studio album Shore at 6:31 am PT/9:31 am ET. The bright and hopeful album, released via Anti-. Shore was recorded before and during quarantine in Hudson (NY), Paris, Los Angeles, Long Island City and New York City from September 2018 until September 2020 with the help of recording and production engineer Beatriz Artola.The fifteen song, fifty-five minute Shore was initially inspired by frontman Robin Pecknold’s musical heroes such as Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guebrou and more who, in his experience, celebrated life in the face of death. “I see “shore” as a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death,’” commented Pecknold. “Tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.” Pecknold continues: Since the unexpected success of the first Fleet Foxes album over a decade ago, I have spent more time than I’m happy to admit in a state of constant worry and anxiety. Worried about what I should make, how it will be received, worried about the moves of other artists, my place amongst them, worried about my singing voice and mental health on long tours. I’ve never let myself enjoy this process as much as I could, or as much as I should. I’ve been so lucky in so many ways in my life, so lucky to be born with the seeds of the talents I have cultivated and lucky to have had so many unreal experiences. Maybe with luck can come guilt sometimes. I know I’ve welcomed hardship wherever I could find it, real or imagined, as a way of subconsciously tempering all this unreal luck I’ve had. By February 2020, I was again consumed with worry and anxiety over this album and how I would finish it. But since March, with a pandemic spiraling out of control, living in a failed state, watching and participating in a rash of protests and marches against systemic injustice, most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together. In its place came a gratitude, a joy at having the time and resources to devote to making sound, and a different perspective on how important or not this music was in the grand scheme of things. Music is both the most inessential and the most essential thing. We don’t need music to live, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. It became a great gift to no longer carry any worry or anxiety around the album, in light of everything that is going on. A tour may not happen for a year, music careers may not be what they once were. So it may be, but music remains essential. This reframing was another stroke of unexpected luck I have been the undeserving recipient of. I was able to take the wheel completely and see the album through much better than I had imagined it, with help from so many incredible collaborators, safe and lucky in a new frame of mind.

Since he made his debut in 1962, very rarely has a year gone by without the release of *at least* one Wille Nelson record. On his 70th solo LP, the 87-year-old singer-songwriter continues to reflect without showing any signs of slowing down. Bolstered by two new originals he wrote with longtime friend and producer Buddy Cannon (“Blue Star,” “Love Just Laughed”), *First Rose of Spring* is a powerful comment on the passage of time that would feel like a valediction were it coming from anybody else. The title track tells the story of a husband and wife, of “a love affair from the beginning to the end,” Nelson tells Apple Music. “It’s one of the best songs I’ve heard in a long time.” On “Stealing Home,” he sings from the perspective of a kid overwhelmed by memories as they help pack up their family home. Elsewhere, he galvanizes the Chris Stapleton-penned “Our Song” and adds gravitas to Toby Keith’s Clint Eastwood-inspired ballad “Don’t Let the Old Man In”—and even takes a crack at the orchestral lament “Yesterday When I Was Young,” made famous in the US by Roy Clark in 1969 but originally written and released as “Hier encore” by French icon Charles Aznavour five years earlier. “There\'s a lot of good songs that we still have that will be on the next album or the next one,” Nelson says. “Over the years, we\'ve built quite a backlog. Whether you record them today, tomorrow, last year, it don\'t matter—a good song will always be a good song.”

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

Ernest Greene has no issue with being called an escapist. “When I write,” he tells Apple Music, “I\'m very much someone that\'s scoring a film or something: I like to have a picture in my head as I\'m putting the music together. Oftentimes, they\'re idealized situations or romanticized versions of reality. But that\'s what I love about music: The stuff that I keep coming back to just has a way of taking me somewhere else, for better or for worse.” For *Purple Noon*, his fourth LP under the Washed Out alias, Greene traveled to Greece for inspiration—images and atmosphere he could evoke once he returned home to Atlanta and began writing. (That’s him on the cover, photographed by his wife on the island of Santorini.) Sonically, it’s his most direct work to date, influenced in large part by writing sessions with LA R&B artist Sudan Archives in 2018. “The real eye-opening thing was just stepping outside of the Washed Out world,” he says. “I feel like I pretty much have a sound and a certain palette, but if I\'m writing for someone else, I can try new things. I had never really written with 808s and more modern pop elements. Early in my career, I was really influenced by a lot of older recordings and I wanted my records to have a warmer sound that might sound slightly vintage. With this one, it was very much just trying to sound as bright and as powerful as possible.” Here, he takes us through the album, track by track. **Too Late** “It\'s one of the more modern-sounding productions I\'ve done. I felt like when I was starting out, 10 years ago, the traditional approach was to have your chorus be the busiest, most euphoric moment in the song. And nowadays, I think it\'s really interesting: In so many pop songs, the chorus is a moment where oftentimes things are really stripped back and intimate, but maybe there\'s a big payoff at the very end. I’ve never really tried that with a song, and I felt like it worked fairly well with ‘Too Late.’” **Face Up** “It\'s like when you\'ve reached that point in a relationship where you\'re not sure whether you should just try harder or sort of cut your losses. I\'m very happily married, but I\'ve been in relationships like that in the past, and I\'d say probably 90% of the stories from the record are from my own past, stories that are 10 or 15 years old now. There was definitely a period of my time where my love life was a little bit more all over the place. I was so sick of doing the sample thing, and with this whole record in general, I wrote pretty much all of it when I was just sitting down at a piano or a keyboard. And because of that, not only did I move much faster, but the focus was a lot more on traditional songcraft and has to do with experimenting with sound. It was like there was a song from the very beginning, with a melody and lyrics, and then the production was sort of figured out after the fact, which is the first time I\'ve ever really done that.” **Time to Walk Away** “I didn\'t think that as I was writing it, but a few people have mentioned that it reminds them of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game.’ And it\'s not a surprise—I\'m a huge fan of that song. I think its melody shares a lot sensibility-wise with what comes most naturally to me: It’s quite sad, but there\'s also this kind of weirdly uplifting quality about it too. One of my earliest influences was the photographer Herb Ritts, who was a pretty famous fashion photographer in the early ’90s and then kind of graduated into making music videos. He made the video for ‘Wicked Game,’ the black-and-white video where he and the model are rolling around in the sand and stuff. I literally had Herb Ritts\' photos all over my studio, hung up. Maybe that seeped into my unconscious.” **Paralyzed** “The melody and the lyrics that I came up with, for me at least, felt like the closest thing I\'d ever really done to an R&B-style song. Believe me, I don\'t kid myself into thinking that I could ever really sing R&B, but I kind of took that approach with just the instrumentation and just the production in general. It has kind of a natural swing to the rhythm that I rarely really do in my records, but it just sort of felt right, so I kept following it. I think this song has taken on a new meaning in our current pandemic situation. It’s about a long-distance relationship and missing someone, and when I was writing it, I was thinking more about me going on tour, being gone for a couple of weeks or a month. For so many people right now, I imagine, they might be a long way away from their loved ones.” **Reckless Desires** “There\'s this song called ‘Why’ by Carly Simon, a song I’ve really loved for a while now. It\'s produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic. And not only is it just a great pop song, but I feel like it\'s quite interesting. It has this sort of reggae bounce to it, but it doesn\'t feel like a traditional reggae song. There\'s a lot happening with the bass and the drums that are a little bit more funky than what a reggae song would be. I\'ve always wanted to write a song like that, and this is the one. That sound was particularly relevant with the coastal kind of vibe I was going for.” **Game of Chance** “If you would\'ve told me five or ten years ago that I was going to put an acoustic guitar ballad on my album, I would have said, ‘Definitely not.’ I\'m not a very good guitar player, but I happened to be just doodling around one day, and just started playing the chords and it sort of happened naturally. And one of the components is the style of music called Balearic music, which has loose ties with the Mediterranean and Ibiza. So much of that music has this very resonant sort of acoustic guitar element that I\'ve always really liked. I knew I wanted to include that acoustic guitar vibe somewhere on the record, but I didn\'t realize it was going to be probably the most stripped-down song I\'ve ever done. At times, it\'s just an acoustic guitar, vocal, and maybe a little bit of percussion. It’s actually one of my favorite songs, surprisingly. It’s just so different than anything I\'ve really done before.” **Leave You Behind** “The producer I was working with \[Ben H. Allen\] was like, ‘You know, your sense of melody is quite similar to Sade’s.’ And I’d never made that connection before, so I dove into some of her records, and sonically it was really inspiring. The music is so lush and it makes me think of some really posh European beach resort or something. I mean that in the best possible way. This is very much a song where I was hoping to channel a little bit of Sade’s influence. I never would have thought that I would use a steel drum sound in my work—that just seemed too obvious—but there\'s a little musical motif in the intro and a few other times, and it’s an actual steel drum sound. One of those things where if it didn\'t happen so easily and just fit so well, I never would have considered it really. But it totally worked.” **Don’t Go** “I did most of the instrumentation on the computer, with virtual instruments and this software called Omnisphere. It’s really, really popular with film composers like Hans Zimmer. There’s some sounds that are over the top, like the war drums that you hear in every fight sequence of a big-budget Hollywood movie. I try to stay away from anything like that, but the texture that opens the song sounds like a Middle Eastern stringed instrument or something. I thought it sounded unique, and immediately for me it kind of conjured up these images right off the bat—and that\'s where the song started from. The melody came naturally; it just needed that huge support around it. In times past, I might have held back a little bit, but so much I was trying to do with this album was really make it as powerful sonically as I could.” **Hide** “I think this was the last song that I wrote for the album, and at that point, I had a rough sort of track sequence and I was thinking a little bit more strategically about what was missing. I felt like deeper into the record, after some slower ballads, it would make sense to have something a little bit more rhythmic. I think the synth bassline is the one thing that kind of keeps the song kind of driving forward. I kind of shaped the song around that. The guy that was mixing the record \[Ben H. Allen\] compared it to Kate Bush\'s ‘Running Up That Hill.’” **Haunt** “It shares some similarities with ‘Don\'t Go’ in that sonically it gets quite dramatic at times. I think it\'s probably the emotional climax of the record, so why not end that way? That was one of the most challenging songs I\'ve ever sung. I mean, not only is it just a dense arrangement, but the emotion really had to be in the performance for it to work. I actually had to do it a couple of different times to get it right. And it was frustrating. I record my own vocals, and it\'s just incredibly frustrating process because I\'m not a very good singer. But to do that and have the emotion right was really tough.”

As a newcomer to the electronic scene, Nicolas Jaar, then still a college student, made his mark by slowing minimal techno into a form both woozy and sensuous. Since then, his music has become steadily hazier and less rhythmic, exploring a rich mixture of ambient atmospheres and electro-acoustic textures. *Telas* is the Chilean American musician’s second album of 2020, following *Cenizas*, and it might be his gauziest record yet. The title translates as “Veils,” and the music, created to accompany visual works by the artist Somnath Bhatt, is meant to encapsulate a world where, according to Jaar, “no matter—whether existing in thought, physical form, or other—has a solid or unmovable origin.” The results are fittingly fluid: Incorporating sounds from cellist Milena Punzi, vocalist Susanna Gonzo, and instrument makers Anna Ippolito and Marzio Zorio, *Telas* flutters like bedsheets in the breeze. Divided into four long tracks, the hour-long album drifts across brushed percussion, free-jazz reeds, and an ever-shifting expanse of luminous, synthetic sounds. There are echoes of Japanese ambient, German cosmic music, and turn-of-the-millennium microsound, but mostly *Telas* is a world of its own—a multidimensional space so amorphous that it never sounds the same way twice.

Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien was 51 by the time he’d readied this, his first solo album. Even though he’d been writing his own material since the making of *OK Computer* almost a quarter of a century earlier, a couple of things slowed his path towards turning his ideas into songs. One was confidence. “I didn’t know how to write,” he tells Apple Music. “I had lots of little musical motifs, but, kind of ridiculously, I don’t know why I didn’t ever sit down with Thom \[Yorke\] and say, ‘How do you do it?’ And anything that I started writing, it was like, ‘Well, it’s not as good as “Street Spirit.”’” The other was family—which wasn’t an obstacle as much as an involving step in O’Brien becoming a songwriter. “I *wanted* to be a dad,” he says. “Most people in our game, it’s like the art comes first: ‘I am a fucking artist and that rides roughshod over everything.’ I say this to people all the time: Don’t be scared of being a parent, and don’t be scared that whilst your children are young your creative output isn’t as great as it was. Because I believe that in the long run, you feed that humanity back into your music. For me, it was like a mirror on all my weaknesses. And I had to sort my shit out—it wasn’t easy, but you have to do it. Being an artist, that humanity is really important. It feeds your art and it nourishes you in a way that gives you longevity.” It’s no surprise then that *Earth* pulses with life’s many moods and tones, beginning with the percolating rhythms and guitar growls of “Shangri-La” before eventually falling to a gentle, hushed close with the Laura Marling-assisted “Cloak of the Night.” In between, O’Brien is seething at the 2007-8 financial crisis (“Banksters”), but the prevailing mood is positivity as he considers solidarity, hope, and mortality. He may have taken his time to get here, but O’Brien’s restless sense of musical adventure ensures *Earth* never sounds wearied—“Brasil” alone travels from pastoral folk to dance-tent euphoria in little more than eight minutes. And the spiky agitation of “Banksters” might even have Thom Yorke wondering why his bandmate didn’t break out those little motifs a bit sooner.

On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”

Who could’ve seen them coming—a K-pop girl group reaching total global ubiquity and instantaneous virality without a full-length album to their name? And yet BLACKPINK has been announcing their plans for world domination since their first single, 2016’s “Boombayah,” when rapper Jennie Kim opened the song with the quartet’s now-illustrious slogan, “BLACKPINK in your area!” It was not a request or a demand—it was a declaration of arrival. Jennie, Lisa (Lalisa Manoban), Rosé (Chae-young Park), and Jisoo (Ji-soo Kim) have been meticulously preparing for this moment since meeting as trainees in 2011: the release of their long-awaited debut LP, appropriately titled *THE ALBUM*. (If most new artists go the eponymous route for their definitive work, BLACKPINK has taken it a step further, claiming the format as a whole.) From their A-list collaborations (2018’s “Kiss and Make Up” with Dua Lipa, 2020’s “Sour Candy” with Lady Gaga) to their world-record-breaking hits “DDU-DU DDU-DU” and “Kill This Love,” BLACKPINK has worked hard with their longtime producer, YG Entertainment’s Teddy Park, to establish their sonic signatures: big, brassy production; sprightly raps; stacked multilingual harmonies; and genre-ambivalent transitions. On *THE ALBUM*, they’ve perfected the equation, offering saccharine girl-crush confections (“Ice Cream” with Selena Gomez, cowritten by Ariana Grande and Victoria Monét—their “pink” side) and fierce, no-nonsense empowerment messaging (“Pretty Savage”—their “black”) in equal measure. Across eight tracks, *THE ALBUM* is expansive. “Bet You Wanna,” cowritten by OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder and BTS songwriter Melanie Joy Fontana, is BLACKPINK’s first collaboration with a rapper, the preeminent Cardi B. “Lovesick Girls” echoes big, loud, and feminist Icona Pop-esque dance music, and “Love to Hate Me” is Y2K-era R&B pop worship. Even *THE ALBUM*’s closer “You Never Know” traverses unexpected territory: an anti-judgment anthem, a ballad for their beloved Blinks. *How you like that?*

A third Korean-language album brings a cinematic narrative.