RIFF's 108 Best Albums of 2021

“I really wanted to make a whole cohesive project,” Genesis Owusu tells Apple Music of his debut album. “I wanted to make something akin to *To Pimp a Butterfly* and *Food and Liquor* and all the awesome concept albums that I grew up listening to.” The Ghanaian Australian artist named Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s debut LP is a powerful concept album that tackles depression and racism in equal measure, characterized here as two black dogs. “‘Black dog’ is a known euphemism for depression, but I’ve also been called a black dog as a racial slur. So I thought it was an interesting, all-encompassing term for what I wanted to talk about.” The music itself is vibrant and boundaryless, with elements of soul, hip-hop, post-punk, pop, and beyond, showcasing not only Genesis Owusu’s remarkable talent and creativity, but the influence of each band member he worked with to write and record, including Kirin J Callinan on guitar, Touch Sensitive (Michael Di Francesco) on bass, Julian Sudek on drums, and Andrew Klippel on keys—all of whom brought their backgrounds and influences to the table. “The album’s eclectic sound is a reflection of all of us as human beings, and also their interpretation of me from their own musical backgrounds,” he says. *Smiling With No Teeth* is split into two thematic halves, each focusing on one of the two black dogs. Owusu-Ansah talks through the entire concept in the track-by-track breakdown below. **On the Move!** “Up to this point in my career, I feel like I\'ve been categorized as ‘the funk guy,’ but a lot of those songs were created within the same two-week span. After those two weeks I was on to other stuff, but because the process of releasing music is so slow, that perception lingered about. So I wanted the intro to shatter that as soon as you press play. It’s explosive. You know something is coming.” **The Other Black Dog** “This song introduces the internal black dog character. Instrumentally, it feels like a movie chase scene. The internal black dog is chasing me through cracks and alleys, trying to be everywhere at once, reaching out, trying to engulf and embrace me. It was a very intentional, conceptual choice to have these songs sound upbeat, dancy, and sexy. But it\'s all a facade, it\'s all a fake smile when you really delve into it.” **Centrefold** “It’s told from the perspective of the black dog, as a sort of distorted love song from the place of an abuser. It doesn\'t respect you at all. It wants to consume you and use you for its own pleasure. And it manifests itself in this distorted love song that sounds groovy and sexy and alluring.” **Waitin’ on Ya** “It’s a sister track to ‘Centrefold.’ The through line has the same story.” **Don\'t Need You** “It’s back from the Genesis Owusu perspective, where the black dog has tried to lure you in, but you reach a point where you realize you can live without it. You don\'t need it, you can break free of those chains. It’s like an independence anthem: You’re breaking free from its clutches for the first time.” **Drown (feat. Kirin J Callinan)** “It continues on from ‘Don\'t Need You,’ analyzing the relationship from a more detached aspect, where you\'re realizing the black dog’s mannerisms. You can separate yourself from it so you\'re two individual beings. You can realize it’s a part of you that you have to let go. You are not your depression. You can make changes and separate yourself. Which leads to the chorus line, ‘You\'ve got to let me drown.’” **Gold Chains** “As an artist, I feel like I\'m just starting to turn some heads and break out, but I\'ve been touring and playing for years. Going from city to city in a van. Playing to no one. But so many people are like, ‘Oh, you\'re a rapper, right? Where\'s your gold chain? How much money do you have?’ So the song plays into the perception versus the reality—‘It looks so gold, but it can feel so cold in these chains.’ The music industry can exacerbate mental health issues and stuff like that, when you\'re overworked or commodified. Instead of an artist creating a product, you become the product.” **Smiling With No Teeth** “This is the center point. It’s encompassing the themes of the album from the narrator’s perspective rather than the black dog. It’s an intermission between Act One and Act Two.” **I Don\'t See Colour** “So much of Act One had honey and sweetness and upbeat tracks, but now we rip all that away. It showcases the personality of the next black dog, which is much more direct and brutal. They\'ve faced the brunt of racism and there’s no more sugarcoating. The extremely minimal instrumental is intentional, so you can completely focus on the lyrics, which are much more scathing. Being a Black person in white society and having to experience the brunt of racism, I\'m often also expected to be the bigger person and the educator. So this arc is validating the emotions and the venting that should be allowed. It’s therapeutic when you\'re faced with those circumstances.” **Black Dogs!** “It was produced by Matt Corby. This one and ‘Easy’ were the only two not produced by the band. It’s a straight-to-the-point song encompassing a day in the life of me, or just any Black person in Australia. It’s not that I\'m getting abused by police every day, but it\'s all the little microaggressions. Sonically speaking, it plays into how I feel every day, going into white spaces and feeling a bit paranoid.” **Whip Cracker** “It’s the ‘I\'ve had enough’ moment. The lyrics—‘Spit up on your grave/Hope my thoughts behave/We\'re so depraved’—play into the bogeymen that people want to see, but obviously as a satirical guise. And then it goes into bigots of all facets, essentially saying enough is enough, times have changed, it\'s over. And musically speaking, halfway through, it just explodes into this funk-rock section. It was very ‘What would Prince do?’” **Easy** “This one was produced by Harvey Sutherland. I was in Melbourne with him doing sessions, and I\'d just gone to the Invasion Day protest, so it was sparked from that. It’s about the relationship between Indigenous or native communities or just people of color, and the colonized country they\'re living in. One partner—the person of color—is fighting their way through a relationship with the very abusive partner that says they care about them and that they\'ll do things for them, but it\'s all lip service.” **A Song About Fishing** “This song started out as a jokey freestyle in the studio, but it turned into this weird parable about perseverance in dire circumstances. I feel like these last three songs are like Act Three of the album. They’re about both of the black dogs. Even though the circumstances seem so dire in the realms of depression and racism, I’m still getting up every day, trying my best and going to this lake where I can never catch any fish, but hoping that one day I\'ll snag something.” **No Looking Back** “It’s a pop ballad about how I\'ve gone through this journey and now I\'m finally ready to put these things behind me, enter a new phase of my life, and be a bigger and better person. It\'s like the transcendental conclusion of the album. And it\'s kind of a mantra: There’s no looking back. Like we\'ve gone through this and we\'re done, we\'re ready to move on.” **Bye Bye** “‘No Looking Back’ was going to be the final track of the album. It was going to end on a very positive note, but it was too much of a Hollywood ending for me. It felt unrealistic. I\'ve learnt a lot throughout my journey, but there’s no point where you can dust your hands off and be like, okay, racism over, depression over. So with ‘Bye Bye,’ the themes are crawling back to you. It signifies that this is an ongoing journey I\'m going to have to face. I had to be clear and real about it.”

Where Lana Del Rey’s previous 2021 album *Chemtrails Over the Country Club* made no reference to the global pandemic in which it was partly created, *Blue Banisters* is steeped in it. From bringing up Black Lives Matter protests in “Text Book” to facing the loneliness of isolation during quarantine in “Black Bathing Suit,” there’s no shortage of references to the year that kept us all inside. “And if this is the end, I want a boyfriend/Someone to eat ice cream with and watch television,” she sings. When not singing about girls in summer dresses dancing with their masks off, Lana ruminates on her family. She mentions her sister Chuck in the title track and regales with tales about her parents in “Wildflower Wildfire.”

In 2019, BROCKHAMPTON delivered one of their most commercially successful singles in “SUGAR,” a cut from their fifth album, *GINGER*. They were riding high on the wave of its momentum when the pandemic hit, sending the band\'s members into their own bubbles of isolation even as they remained productive, releasing a handful of singles and video content. The fruits of their labor culminate with *ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE*, which brims with both the political and personal tension of the time and stands out as their most clear-eyed and collaborative release to date. In addition to consulting with legendary producers RZA and Rick Rubin, the band finds complementary counterparts in rappers like Danny Brown (“BUZZCUT”) and JPEGMAFIA (“CHAIN ON”), with whom they share a similar kind of eccentric creativity. On their own, though, the sprawling group is flush with a multitude of talent that they thoughtfully showcase without sacrificing cohesion. Decidedly roused and rap-oriented tracks like “WINDOWS” and “DON\'T SHOOT UP THE PARTY” slot nicely alongside more soulful, R&B-leaning songs like “I\'LL TAKE YOU ON” and the gorgeously somber “DEAR LORD.” Together, they make a multihued collage that embodies the spirited fluidity of BROCKHAMPTON. Ahead of its release, Kevin Abstract announced on Twitter that *ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE* would be the band\'s penultimate album. If that proves true, with this release, they will exit having left few stones unturned—evolution is an infinite process, but BROCKHAMPTON\'s (near) final form still resembles actualization.

After rerecording her 2008 album *Fearless* as part of a sweeping effort to regain control of her master tapes—or at least create new ones—Taylor Swift presents *Red (Taylor’s Version)*, an expanded take on her 2012 blockbuster that features nine never-before-released songs written in the same era as the original. “Musically and lyrically, *Red* resembled a heartbroken person,” she wrote in a letter to fans. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.” The hot-blooded breakup anthems you know and love are still there (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” are two), but the new, full collection paints an even richer portrait of heartbreak. She wrestles with change on “Nothing New,” an alt-rock duet with Phoebe Bridgers; contemplates fate on a wistful pop song produced by Max Martin and Shellback (“Message in a Bottle”); and gets the final, piercing word on “I Bet You Think About Me” featuring Chris Stapleton, penned after a high-profile breakup in 2011. Longtime fans will be especially glad to see an extended cut of “All Too Well,” the project’s emotional centerpiece. It features new production from hitmaker Jack Antonoff, but Swift’s original lyrical genius is still remarkable. “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest,” she sings. It’s the line she’s always said she’s most proud of from this album and era. Ten years on, it still cuts deep.

“Hopefully this is the start of something new—no more five-year gaps,” Isaiah Rashad tells Apple Music of his long-awaited third album. It’s been that long between *The House Is Burning* and 2016’s *The Sun’s Tirade*, but the Chattanooga rapper easily proves why he’s worth waiting for. The songs here are kinetic even in their nocturnal wooziness and precise even in their unpretentiousness. Many of them, he says, were born from “scratches” or songs he just made on a whim with a minimal amount of time invested alongside Dallas producer Kal Banx, who’s credited on most of the tracks. True to Rashad’s geographic background, there’s a decidedly Southern and soulful aura that informs the album’s momentum and references. Tucked beneath the layers of syrupy melodies are nods to Pimp C, Goodie Mob, Three 6 Mafia, and Anthony Hamilton. Within the sounds and lyrics, he lights up a map to his musical roots and the proud Dirty South lineage in which he operates. “I tried to hone in on the energy of all the types of music I grew up listening to—Texas bounce, Louisiana bounce, a little bit of neo-soul in there,” he says. “I tried to update it, flip it, and make it apply to how I be feeling nowadays.” Below, he shares a bit of background about a handful of the album’s standouts. **“From the Garden”** “Originally, the beat was something else. I\'d made it at my mom\'s crib about four years ago, and we just switched the beat because it still sounded cool. We were like, \'Why waste it? Why have it just sitting to the side?\' So we put Uzi on it. He said he was going to do some s\*\*t for me if I asked him, so we asked him, and he did it.” **“Lay Wit Ya”** “‘Lay Wit Ya’ came from a lockout that we had had like last January. Again, it was just a scratch—a scratch idea that we turned full once we had listened to it a couple of times. Hollywood Cole threw us the beat. Made it in about 10 minutes. That was it. I just liked it.” **“Claymore”** “I made that song for Smino. And if I didn\'t use it, I was going to try to give it to him. And then he finally got on it, but I think his album was about done and he didn\'t really need it, so we used it. Most everybody on my album I listen to, so most of the tracks were made like \'oh, this would be a tight Smino song\' or that type of s\*\*t if it\'s fitting. I be having that type of stuff in mind.” **“Headshots”** “People say \[this reminds them of\] Outkast, but I was doing an Anthony Hamilton impression more than anything else. The verses is just— maybe I can get how they get some Outkast in that, but that was a whole bunch of Zay right there. But the inspiration behind the track was really Anthony Hamilton, honestly.” **“All Herb”** “\[Amindi and I\] got a nice little chemistry. We got a couple of songs on the project—she did the intro with me too, and another one, ‘True Story.’ But yeah, we made that on the spot. Me and Devin \[Malik\] made the beat. It was like a simple loop. We added a drum, and then I started like mumbling the hook. Once I came up with the hook, the cadence for the verses was easy. But I didn\'t really want to finish the verses, because I was like, \'It sounds like a whole bunch of me.\' So I called Amindi, and she came and she wrote. It\'s pretty quick when we\'re in a zone.” **“Hey Mista”** “Me and Kal \[Banx\] were at his house, and our whole plan was to freestyle—just make a beat and whatever comes to mind. It\'s like trusting the whole idea of \'I don\'t really make nothing bad. I\'m incapable of making something bad, so let me just trust in this.\' We went into it with that type of mentality, and we freestyled that whole motherf\*\*king thing. Like the whole track, it\'s really a big-ass joke. The second verse is a whole joke—every line is some s\*\*t that made me laugh and it just sounded funny.” **“Wat U Sed”** “‘Wat U Sed’ is another homage to the South—I\'m just now realizing that I do those a lot. I didn\'t want to do a whole bunch of tracks with cowbells, but that was one that was like, hell yeah. This sounds like some of that—there\'s this producer named ICYTWAT who has this very specific type of sound. And it kind of gave me some of that old *Kush & Orange Juice* vibes from Wiz, too, like \'Mezmorized\' and s\*\*t.” **“Score”** “For me ‘Score’ is probably one of my favorite songs out the whole album, just because of how f\*\*king different it is. I think I really got off an R&B song, and I hadn\'t got one off for real on the other ones. So I think I\'m probably most proud of that one.” **“THIB”** “That was probably the first track I made for my album. Towards the end of the whole s\*\*t, I was thinking about changing the title to something else, but it was like, nah, we can’t leave that off. It was definitely like the inspiration behind just about the whole soundscape of the album. I wanted it to be like dark and winding, sounds like two or three in the morning. That\'s a pretty constant theme with my music anyway. I like to listen to s\*\*t at night—when all my obligations are done, I\'m a night person. When I\'m in the mix, I\'m an early riser, but when I\'m just enjoying music on some vacay s\*\*t, definitely nighttime. So that\'s the type of stuff I like to make.”

“This is the antithesis to our last record—where that was about heartbreak, this album is about freedom, picking yourself up and moving forward,” Jungle producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “It’s an album made for bringing people together; upbeat tunes to set people free.” Lloyd-Watson is one half of Jungle, the London-based production duo, with childhood friend Tom McFarland. Coming to prominence with their Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut album in 2014 (and, specifically, its ubiquitous single “Busy Earnin’”), the producers went on to establish themselves as hook-writing maestros, giving the warm mahogany feel of 1960s and ’70s soul a chrome polish with their seven-piece live band performances and intricate arrangements. Their third album, *Loving in Stereo* (succeeding 2018’s *For Ever*), takes their melodies squarely to the dance floor, featuring the thumping drum breakbeats of “Talk About It,” the driving disco-funk of “Keep Moving,” and collaborations from rapper Bas (“Romeo”) and singer Priya Ragu on the jazz-influenced “Goodbye My Love.” Read on for Lloyd-Watson’s thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Dry Your Tears”** “This was originally a middle-eight of a B-side called ‘Don\'t You Cry Now.’ It was one of the last pieces to go on the record, and it’s an overture about not feeling sorry for yourself. The vocals on it are quite airy and dreamlike, as if you\'re waking up from a bad dream, and the strings then ease you into the album but also make you question exactly what it is we\'re about to listen to.” **“Keep Moving”** “Those strings crescendo into ‘Keep Moving,’ which is an archetypal Jungle track. It\'s a song that we\'ve been trying to make ever since ‘Busy Earnin’,’ and it\'s almost like the older sibling to that song. It\'s about moving on and moving through hard times; a mantra to not worry about stuff too much but to be hopeful instead.” **“All of the Time”** “We always envisioned this track as what it would sound like if a band from the 1960s or ’70s had heard future garage rhythms but were playing them on acoustic instruments. It feels like a sample but it\'s not a sample, since we\'ve always been obsessed with things that sound old but are new. It\'s supposed to be a super uplifting track, with this gospel feeling in the chorus, which is just like pure euphoria.” **“Romeo” (feat. Bas)** “We met Bas at a festival on Coney Island a few years ago. He came backstage with such amazing energy and we got talking. We\'re all about features that are personal and that happen because they\'re meant to happen. We were at The Church Studios in Crouch End and he texted that he was in London, so he came through. We make a lot of hip-hop and we\'ve got so many of those sorts of beats, it\'s really great for people to hear that element to us.” **“Lifting You”** “This was a beat that I had made and it wasn\'t really supposed to be on the album. I remember sending it out to a load of artists and they really liked it but nothing happened with it. I sat down one day and wrote a vocal and we sang on it, and it just had a really carefree feeling to it. It\'s inspired by bits of KAYTRANADA, with this Moog One bassline that gives it a slightly clubbier feel. There’s also psychedelic influences and an uplifting vocal chorus, which takes it to a different dimension.” **“Bonnie Hill”** “‘Bonnie Hill’ is the oldest track on the record; it was one that was written during the second album at Bonnie Hill, a place in the hills in Los Angeles. We just had this beat for a while and it came together with this other melody we had lying around. At The Church Studios we had this 12-piece strings and brass section, and we added jazz flute, as well as a saxophone—that set the track alight. We don\'t have many solos in Jungle songs, so this was really exciting.” **“Fire”** “This was one of the first tracks to signify the direction of the album. It\'s this free-flowing piece that was very quick to make, in only around an hour. It\'s more of a sonic experimentation, where we\'d just gotten this new profiling amplifier and started putting loads of synthesizers through it, blurring that line between electronics and a band sound. We like to set our music to things, and this feels like it could soundtrack a car chase or heist in a film. It\'s a bit chaotic, and that\'s what we love about it.” **“Talk About It”** “The producer Inflo was in town when we were recording in LA and we just started jamming and came up with this. The drums have a sense of \[The Jam’s\] \'Town Called Malice\' or The Stone Roses to them. It\'s another one of those songs that feels like it\'s taken something from different eras and then pieced them all together. We wanted to hold on to the drum breakbeat that started it off and we just wouldn\'t let go of it until it was finished, not tweaking it or changing it but allowing it to sit in its original form.” **“No Rules”** “It\'s something that came about that wasn\'t supposed to be on the album, just again a track that got made for the fun of making music. It\'s like a synth odyssey, but it\'s also got this power. It\'s a rebellion against government control and surveillance and the ever-evolving world of *1984* that we\'re living in.” **“Truth”** “This is the most leftfield thing from what Jungle is. We were following the train of thought that you accept whatever happens in the studio, and it came very quickly. We used to listen to a lot of the indie rock that was dominating the charts in the mid-2000s, things like The Thrills and The Strokes and Kings of Leon, and there\'s an element of that to it, which is really nostalgic to us. It\'s a song about realizing that you love somebody and getting over those trust issues in the beginning of a relationship to ultimately realize that you only want to be with them.” **“What D\'You Know About Me?”** “This is ESG-inspired and it\'s the fastest track we\'ve ever done. It embodies the anger and passion that this record has—it’s got a darkness to it that ‘No Rules’ also has, again being about surveillance and people knowing too much about you. We\'re playfully asking, ‘What do you know about me?’ It\'s got this stark swagger to it.” **“Just Fly, Don\'t Worry”** “The previous two tracks are quite intense, so we wanted this to segue you down into the end of the album. This was originally a lot longer, but it plays now like a palate cleanser, just giving you the bits that you need. It\'s got a mixture between dub and funk in the groove and feel. We\'re making this music for the fun of it, and what we liked and what we connected with went on the record, rather than songs that we thought other people would know.” **“Goodbye My Love” (feat. Priya Ragu)** “We had been writing all day on this other song at Guy Chambers\' studio in London, where he has some amazing equipment like a vintage harpsichord and vibraphone. Our time was coming up and we challenged ourselves to see if we could get these sounds down for something new. Priya\'s got such a fantastic voice with such a pure tone, and we wanted to get her melody down in a free flow of consciousness. It wasn\'t intended to be a Jungle track, it was just made for us, but then we felt like it was supposed to be on the record.” **“Can\'t Stop the Stars”** “We try to close with something quite cinematic on our records. I remember hearing these strings back in the studio and they are so overwhelming—even to this day, that last 16 or 32 bars of music is so emotional and it takes us back to this feeling of wanting to be young and free. It\'s about someone in your life telling you you don\'t need to worry about everything, because you can\'t stop the stars from moving, so you can\'t control everything in this life. The more you let go, the more free you\'ll actually be.”

The posthumous album is a tough thing to get right. If nothing else, it can be hard for fans to ascertain what’s really representative of an artist’s vision versus what was completed after death to the sometimes less than exacting specifications of the stewards of said estate. In the case of dearly departed hip-hop legend DMX, however, the Dog-loving faithful had nothing to worry about. “All of the songs was finished,” longtime friend, collaborator, and executive producer of his *Exodus* album Swizz Beatz tells Apple Music. “This album was done while he was living. I know they’re saying ‘the album after he\'s gone,’ but really he did the album before he was gone.” Pop Smoke was initially slated to appear on “Money Money Money,” but a leak forced Swizz to switch up the plan and bring on Moneybagg Yo. Otherwise, though, *Exodus* is exactly how X designed it—one of hip-hop’s most impactful MCs making space for the voices he revered, while staying true to a career-long practice of baring his soul on record. “He gave people real shit,” Swizz says. “He gave you a front-row seat into his life, because he loved his fans, he loved his people, and it\'s where he was at. He was comfortable, and I think that every artist should get to that level one day, to where they’re not capping and they’re saying real things that are happening in their life and that they’re going through. And it should be uncut, like Dog did on this record.” Below, Swizz talks us through—track by track—the last musical testament of friend and icon DMX. **“That’s My Dog” (feat. The LOX & Swizz Beatz)** “Setting the tone was very important. This is a real curated body of work, and me and X hadn\'t been in the studio like this for 12 years. The first rapper you hear on the album is Jadakiss, so that\'s letting you know the tone right there for where we going. This is not play-around.” **“Bath Salts” (feat. JAY-Z & Nas)** “Out the gate, we just wanted to put pressure on everybody—and then take them on this journey at the same time. With Hov and Nas, people know what they getting, you know what I’m saying?” **“Dogs Out” (feat. Lil Wayne & Swizz Beatz)** “Wayne always spoke highly of X—when he was living *and* when he passed. If you go and you look at YouTube, you see Wayne bringing out X at \[Miami Beach nightclub\] LIV. His concert I was at, he did a whole tribute about X. They went crazy \[here\].” **“Money Money Money” (feat. Moneybagg Yo)** “I didn\'t want the album just to be artists from when X first came out. I wanted it—and he wanted it—to be energy from today, which is why Pop Smoke originally had this slot. I actually made the beat for Pop Smoke. Pop Smoke was like, \'I want something that sound like X.\' And then I think by mistake or whatever, the verses got out, and they was put on different songs, so we had to change it at the last minute. The song is called \'Money Money Money,\' so I felt like Moneybagg Yo was perfect for it, and I actually like him as an artist. The beat reminded me of \'Stop Being Greedy\' a little bit when I was doing it. It put me in that old X vibe.” **“Hold Me Down” (feat. Alicia Keys)** “‘Hold Me Down’ is one of my favorite records, not only because of my wife on it, but because the way that DMX opens up about his life. If you listen to the record, he starts off, ‘I\'m pulled in opposite directions, my life\'s in conflict/That’s why I spit words that depict a convict.’ And to have a simple chorus that\'s just saying, \'Hold me down\'—’cause that\'s all X wanted. He wanted the people that loved him to hold him down. That\'s what he cared about.” **“Skyscrapers” (feat. Bono)** “Bono is like family to me, and I had \[an early version of the track\]. I asked for his permission to give it to my brother because I felt that he deserved it more, especially with the body of work that we was working on. As soon as X heard it, he automatically went in. And then it was crazy, ’cause Bono was writing him saying, ‘Man, it\'s an honor to have my voice next to yours.’ He drew him a drawing and wrote X a poem and everything right before he passed. It was pretty deep.” **“Stick Up Skit” (feat. Cross, Infrared & Icepick)** “This is the late, great Icepick Jay, who passed away \[in 2017\]. He did all the skits, so that was kind of like paying homage. It just fit, and we can\'t have an album with no skits.” **“Hood Blues” (feat. Westside Gunn, Benny the Butcher & Conway the Machine)** “\[Griselda and DMX\], they was both fans of each other. X liked them cause they was super hard. And they was a fan of X, so that was pretty easy. X kind of did this one on his own, to be honest. I just sent the beat and they did they thing.” **“Take Control” (feat. Snoop Dogg)** “\[Snoop and DMX\], they knew they wanted to do something after Verzuz. We did the song and it was like, ‘Yo, you know what? Snoop would sound good on this.’ That’s Marvin Gaye and that\'s \'Sexual Healing,\' so you know we had to do the right thing. I love that record. It shows you the \'How\'s It Goin\' Down\' vibe.” **“Walking in the Rain” (feat. Nas, Exodus Simmons & Denaun)** “\[DMX’s son\] Exodus was in the studio with us for a lot of \[the album\]. He was loving ‘Walking in the Rain’ and he just started singing it and he was on beat and everything. It was a beautiful sight to see.\" **“Letter to My Son (Call Your Father)” (feat. Usher & Brian King Joseph)** “\[DMX\] pulled me in the corner and was like, ‘I\'m going to let you hear this.’ I kept it acoustic so you could hear every word, and then felt like it needed something else. Then Usher came into the studio and did what he did to it. I left it to where the music had some space for people to reflect instead of it being a whole bunch of words, ’cause X didn\'t put a whole bunch of words on a record. He said what he said. And it was beautiful.” **“Prayer”** “This was live at Kanye\'s Sunday Service. It was his latest prayer. That\'s why we put that one on there. He did another one where he was rapping, but this one feels more like what it should be. He was the master of prayers, for sure.”

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

From Tim Burton’s classics like *Pee-wee’s Big Adventure* and *The Nightmare Before Christmas* to *The Simpsons*, Danny Elfman’s world-class scores have become indelible elements of some of the most beloved movies and TV shows of the past three decades. In preparing for a career-spanning live performance at the 2020 Coachella festival, Elfman began working on a set that would combine his film work with reimagined versions of songs from his old band, LA New Wave pioneers Oingo Boingo, and new chamber pop compositions written for a live rock band. When the festival was canceled due to the global pandemic, Elfman continued writing through lockdown and ended up with two albums’ worth of material, which he duly recorded with assistance from Robin Finck (Nine Inch Nails, Guns N’ Roses), Josh Freese (Weezer, Devo), Stu Brooks (Lady Gaga, Dub Trio), and renowned guitarist Nili Brosh. The result is *Big Mess*, his first solo album since 1984 and a collection of material unlike anything Elfman has previously created. “This came out of the shitstorm that was 2020,” he tells Apple Music. “I was feeling frustrated from every side, but particularly from what I was seeing in society. I haven’t seen the country so divided since the Vietnam War.” In channeling that frustration, Elfman combined symphony orchestration with traditional rock band elements to write some of the heaviest and most chaotic music of his career. “The songs were all coming out in pairs,” he says. “Heavy and fast and crazy, and then light—like each one was a reaction to the other. It felt like I was developing two different albums, hence the title. I became more and more aware of the fact that I have two very functional dysfunctional writers living inside me, and they don’t like each other.” Below, he discusses some of the key tracks from *Big Mess*. **“Sorry”** “This was my first song for *Big Mess*. It started as a concept piece about combining an orchestra and rock band in a way I’d been thinking about for a while. It ended up as an explosion of frustration and pent-up anger.” **“True”** “This song was a new thing for me, writing from such a personal place. It wasn\'t something I set out to do—it just happened. And it was also the song where I was finding a new voice for this album, because I clearly can’t sing as high as I used to. ‘True’ was the song where I was finding myself able to sing in a way that I couldn’t do 30 years ago. I was surprised by how dark it came out, but that’s where I was at in 2020 when I wrote it.” **“In Time”** “This is another personal song, reflecting on the passage of time and the end of everything. I don’t want to overexplain the lyrics, other than to say that the idea of finality was floating around in my mind and just kind of came to the surface in this song. It’s something that artists have been obsessed with for years. If you look at a Titian painting from the Renaissance, it’s about the transient, momentary thing that this life is.” **“Dance With the Lemurs”** “This is another personal reflection on my life and the process of aging. That sounds grim, but I feel like it’s a light song at the same time. I was surprised that I wrote about that topic—it feels like something I wouldn’t normally let out. At first, it felt too personal to even put out. I thought maybe I was going to just release the fun, fast stuff and keep songs like this in my own archives. But eventually I figured I should put it out.” **“Happy”** “I wanted to have a bit of fun creating a song that began like a bubbly pop song and slowly degraded into a subversive, nasty rant. At the beginning, the song pulls in one direction, and by the end you’re going, ‘What is this place I was lured into?’ It was kind of designed to be a little bit of a trap, like, ‘Come on in, it’s a nice safe place.’ And by the end, it’s really despicable.” **“Just a Human”** “This song is kind of a counterpoint to ‘Kick Me’—again, the songs were written in pairs. It’s part of the schizophrenic cacophony I was feeling during lockdown in 2020, when anger, frustration, and pure ridiculous absurdity were mixing all together in my mind.” **“Devil Take Away”** “This was totally off the cuff and just pure fun for me. I decided to just pick up the guitar, let it run amok, come up with improvised lyrics, and then not try to fix it. It was more of a really fun exercise more than anything else. I wrote this one after ‘Everybody Loves You,’ which is really elaborate, and I’m talking about God and my place on the planet. After that, I wanted to do something where no thought goes into it and I don’t go back and reshape it, which is typically how I write. So this was just pure improvisational mayhem.” **“Native Intelligence”** “This was a tricky one. I was still obsessed with ways of combining the orchestra strings and the band, and this was the song I was most pleased with in that exploration. I was also reflecting my feelings about the political moment of living in America in 2020.” **“Kick Me”** “Nothing is more fun for me than poking a stick in the eye of celebrity mentality and the unique love-hate relationship celebrities often have with their fans. People become celebrities for the most peculiar reasons, and we live in a time where one can be an enormous celebrity without even having any particular talent. The concept of celebrity and the relationship between celebrities and the public—this weird interdependency—has always fascinated me. I find it to be constantly humorous.” **“Insects”** “I had so much fun reworking this old Oingo Boingo song, I just had to include it.”

Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.

After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”

Samples have long been part of the lifeblood of Wale\'s catalog, but on *Folarin II*, they are prominent, offering insights about who and what has inspired the D.C. rapper. “I give flowers to my inspirations, my OGs, my contemporaries, my peers, and myself,” he tells Apple Music\'s Nadeska of the album, his seventh. The three lead singles were the first hint. “Angles,” “Down South,” and “Poke It Out” all are built around the familiarity of their samples: Diddy’s 2002 “I Need a Girl (Pt. 1),” Mike Jones\' 2004 “Still Tippin\',” and Q-Tip\'s 1999 “Vivrant Thing,” respectively. Each one is designed to play on nostalgia, while also spotlighting Wale\'s dexterity. Other gems include the regret-tinged “Dearly Beloved,” which features a dazzling loop of Jamie Foxx\'s performance on his eponymous TV show, and the flirtatious “Caramel,” which functions as an homage to legendary producer (and D.C. native) Chucky Thompson, who died in August of 2021 from COVID complications. “He produced the original \'Caramel Kisses\' by Faith \[Evans\],” Wale says. “I just want to send a special shout-out to him, because our last conversation was about that record and sampling it, so that\'s a special piece to the project for me.” But for as much as Wale (deservedly) places himself in dialogue with greats past and present, the thing that separates him remains his ability to bring the lively sound of his hometown to wider audiences. It\'s in the subtle go-go textures of “More Love” and the outright bounce beat of “Jump In,” as the rapper glides across the percussion. *Folarin II* may have been made as a way for Wale to dole out the respect he\'s craved for himself, but it\'s high time to give it back.

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”

Most Mastodon fans probably knew it was only a matter of time before the band dropped a double album. The Atlanta metal squad’s intricate songs and dazzling prog tendencies have been begging for the Pink Floyd treatment for years—and the pandemic’s enforced downtime provided them with the window to do it. “With the extra time to work on material, we just kept writing,” Mastodon drummer, co-vocalist, and lyricist Brann Dailor tells Apple Music. “When we got to the point where we had 20 ideas that were pretty fleshed out, we said, ‘We need to stop now.’ From there, it was hard even narrowing it down to 15 songs, so I’m not sure what we would’ve done if we’d needed to make a single album.” Thematically, *Hushed and Grim* largely deals with the death of Mastodon’s longtime friend and manager Nick John, who was taken by cancer in 2018. “It’s definitely a representation of the time period we went through,” Dailor says. “The pandemic, Nick John’s passing, and other things that transpired for us during that time.” Below, he details some key tracks from the record. **“Pain With an Anchor”** “I think that\'s probably one of the first songs that came about for the album. I strung a couple of riffs together, and then \[guitarist\] Bill \[Kelliher\] and I sat down in his basement and combined a few more. He came up with that big, heavy riff at the end and all that cool stuff in the bridge. I added these weird vocal swells—and some thunderclaps—underneath to make it more evil and sinister. The drum intro didn’t come until much later, when we were about to cut it for real. I just had this idea to do this quads intro thing, which sort of cemented it as being the first song on the record.” **“More Than I Could Chew”** “That’s a big Bill riff. I really drove it straight on the drums and I didn’t deviate too much from that, which is a little bit different for me. I’m more of a frantic player, usually. The kick pattern also opened up a lane for me to sing over the top of it. I don’t think Bill was really expecting there to be this higher, soaring vocal over that. \[Bassist\] Troy \[Sanders\] came up with that last riff, the one that \[guitarist\] Brent \[Hinds\] solos over. I just love that part. Troy hasn’t really been a big writer in the band, but this time around he wrote four or five tracks.” **“The Beast”** “This is one of Brent’s, and I wrote some lyrics for him. It’s got that opening country guitar lick and then it goes into what seems like a blues shuffle to me. Brent’s voice is just awesome there—I think it’s really soulful and bluesy. And then it moves into sort of a proggy King Crimson-type part that leads into Marcus King’s solo, which I love. Brent and Marcus are good friends, so it was cool to bring Marcus in to do that. To me, it’s a real proggy-sounding solo and it really flexes Marcus’ talents as a masterful guitar player. And it’s cool for Brent to hand the reins over like that, being an amazing soloist himself.” **“Teardrinker”** “This is a simple two-part guitar thing I came up with on an acoustic. I’m not the most talented guitar player, so most of what I write is pretty simple—and then I turn it over to Bill to get the magic happening. I wrote this at a time when it wasn’t going well for me. I was in a dark place. I was actually living in this apartment that had no sofa, no TV—just an acoustic guitar and a bed. I was hijacking a bit of service off my phone so I could try to watch some shows on my iPad. It was a rough time, but I’m okay now. So it’s a big emotional song, but it turned out pretty catchy.” **“Pushing the Tides”** “There’s not a lot of rippers on this album, but this is a ripper that just feels good to play. It’s another one that came from sitting in Bill’s basement. The first riff reminds me of early AmRep stuff like Chokebore, Guzzard, or early-’90s Barkmarket maybe. There’s some prog influence there, some Killing Joke—all that stuff we’re into, being kids of the ’90s. We sort of came from that whole scene of underground, mathy stuff that was below the upper echelons of grunge. So it’s cool when that stuff pops up. It’s a fun song with a big chorus.” **“Dagger”** “Once you’ve decided that you’re making a double album, you can sprawl out a bit. I don’t know that this song would’ve been as cool as it ended up being if we didn’t go down the rabbit hole with it. We got a sarangi player, and my friend Dave Witte from Municipal Waste came in to do some percussion on these tribal drums and hunks of metal. Then we had our buddy come in and play some crazy Moog at the end. I’m stoked on it, but if it wasn’t for Troy’s voice, you’d have a hard time convincing even a Mastodon fan that this was a Mastodon song.” **“Had It All”** “This is an important song, and very Nick John-centric. He probably shows up in the lyrics of every song, but this one is specifically aimed at his situation. To have Kim Thayil do the solo was amazing, because Soundgarden was one of Nick’s favorite bands. And what a cool turn of events that Troy’s mom got to virtually jam on French horn with Kim on this one. Kim did a really beautiful, heart-wrenching solo, and then Troy’s mom added another beautiful texture with a nice little horn arrangement. This is the closest I think we’ve come to a ballad, I think, but it’s an emotional song for us. The only bummer is that Nick isn’t here to hear it.” **“Gigantium”** “This is another one I wrote when I was in that apartment. I call it the Sadness Hole. I don’t want to get into why I was there, but just to be clear, I wasn’t strung out on drugs or anything like that. It was a personal time. But the last riff really sounded like the end of something. It’s sad-sounding, but there’s also some hope there. So we put some string arrangements on it and Brent did this really beautiful guitar solo. The last line is for Nick John: ‘The mountains we made in the distance will be with us forever.’ I think it’s a beautiful farewell.”

For Valerie June, spirituality and creativity are one and the same. The acclaimed singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist offered cosmic wisdom on her 2017 sophomore album *The Order of Time*, a collection of folk-leaning tracks that also significantly raised the profile of the Tennessee native. On her follow-up *The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers*, June leans further into her spiritually driven songwriting, telling Apple Music that the impetus of the album was, in part, to inspire others to use their gifts to make the world a better place. “There’s a creative space that you go to inside yourself,” she says, adding that it’s important to “begin to work with the elements in that space and to keep that space sacred and not let people take it.” Opening track “Stay” reminds the listener of the importance of staying present in a given moment, while also introducing the lush, more complex sound that June built alongside co-producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, John Legend). “Call Me a Fool,” which features legendary Memphis soul singer Carla Thomas, and “Fallin’” muse on the power and risk inherent in following a dream. And “Home Inside” channels the transformative power of introspection for an open-minded, open-hearted ode to spirituality. Below, June talks Apple Music through a few of the key tracks. **You and I** “You\'ll notice there\'s two of everything on the record: two drummers, two guitars. We were able to build the sound and take it and make it just that much crazier to meet what I was hearing in my head. The first layering of it I was like, ‘No, I hear it more dimensional, I hear more sonic madness.’ And it\'s a song for sharing, it\'s a song for friendship, for discovery. And for realizing that our thoughts and our intentions, when we join them together with others, that\'s what\'s creating the world we see. And we can\'t have anything without each other.” **Call Me a Fool (feat. Carla Thomas)** “The fool card in the tarot deck represents new beginnings. It represents being on edge and adventurous and crazy and daring. So ‘Call Me a Fool’ is a song for taking the leap. It\'s for being afraid of failure and having the confidence to say, ‘Yeah, I know society might not be ready for my dream of peace and love or whatever the hell it is, or my relationship or whatever, however you relate to it.’ By the end of the song, Carla, the one who was the warning and wise fairy godmother \[in previous track ‘African Proverb’\], she\'s like, ‘Well, I\'m glad you did it, baby.’ And she sings along with you.” **Smile** “It’s a song of transcendence, a song of hope and possibilities and being reborn. And as a Black woman, looking at my people, we\'ve had to continue to be reborn. And sometimes there have been times where all we had was a smile and just to say that that\'s not going to be taken. And for each person, no matter what race they are, to realize that your joy and your positivity and your beauty and the way you see the world—it is a power and it is a tool and it can be manipulated if you let it. But if you don\'t let it, it\'s one of your greatest gifts.” **Within You** “It\'s a mantra song. It is a song for carving out sacred space in your life, inside of yourself, every day.” **Starlight Ethereal Silence** “Jack and I decided that we needed 30 seconds of silence on the record, because I believe that silence is music and that no moment is ever completely silent. And I realized that we, as humans, can\'t hear everything. Your dog can hear things that you can\'t hear, or a dolphin can hear things that humans can\'t hear. So I just wanted to have that moment carved out of silence but then enter into the realm where we\'re being mindful, and we realize that, ‘Hey, yeah, we\'re humans and we\'re special, but we\'re not the only thing on this Earth, making music.’”

“I like to use the inspiration from the past and combine it with the things that are in the present to create the future,” Jon Batiste says about *WE ARE*, a collection of autobiographical sketches that explore pivotal moments from his life and how they connect with his lineage. “We\'re finally at a point where we\'re starting to untangle the way that my grandparents, and even my parents, experienced America. It feels like the culmination in the coming of age of what many generations have built, fought for, and poured into.” The Louisiana-born pianist, composer, and bandleader/musical director of Stay Human, the house band for *The Late Show With Stephen Colbert*, came up with the blueprint for the album during a six-day period from his dressing room at the Ed Sullivan Theater alongside singer-songwriter Autumn Rowe. But it took him eight months of bringing in the right collaborators to help meld his narrative with classic and modern styles of R&B, jazz, gospel, soul, and hip-hop into a body-shaking celebration. “As heavy as these themes are, the overall message of the album is love, joy, and community,” Batiste says. “That, and also the power of social revolution, in the sense of what we have to do in the culture to make room for everybody to be able to fully be who they are.” Here, Batiste guides us through his life journey. **WE ARE** “‘WE ARE’ is the overture of the album. I wanted to have the marching band from my high school on this record, because it\'s a historically Black high school that has a lot of legendary alumni. I was in that high school band and I graduated from that school. It also features three of four generations of my family. My grandfather and my nephews are all on this track. It was a really special one because it goes from Southern marching band culture to gospel to what I call \'horror disco,\' all within the span of four minutes.” **TELL THE TRUTH** “We recorded it at the legendary Sound City recording studios \[in Los Angeles\]. All of us were in the same room at the same time, and it was done in one take. James Gadson, who plays the drums, played with Bill Withers and on all the classic records with the Jackson 5. He\'s a living legend who still plays like he was in his prime. It’s about the advice that my dad told me when I was 17 years old, when I left New Orleans to move to New York and go to Juilliard to start my career. He told me to stay true to who I am, no matter what you\'re looking for, no matter what you\'re looking to do.” **CRY** “The loss of innocence is something that is not quantifiable. It\'s oftentimes something that we can\'t fully understand until generations later. The decisions we make collectively sometimes seep into our consciousness or our subconscious mind. And we don\'t know why we have this weight on our shoulders. You could be living your life every day, and then one day, you just feel this overwhelming weight—and you don\'t understand where it comes from. I think that, collectively, we all felt that in this past year with the pandemic and all the social unrest.” **I NEED YOU** “It’s the same message as ‘CRY,’ but it’s the opposite. ‘I NEED YOU’ is Black social music mixed in with a pop song. It’s like if you took the music that Little Richard or James Brown, or my father and uncles, would play in the Chitlin’ Circuit in the 1940s. The type of dance like the jitterbug and the Lindy hop you would see in Harlem. You mix that with contemporary pop and hip-hop and that\'s what you would get with this song.\" **WHATCHUTALKINBOUT** “I had a vision of the way you come through this career as you become more and more successful—especially as a Black entertainer in America. It’s like going through a video game, where in every level you beat, you get to the next level and the boss is harder. I imagined myself jumping into the TV and running through different levels of a video game. You get to this point in the song where there\'s this 16-bit interlude, and I called my boy Pomo to help me craft this to have more pandemonium. I don\'t even believe in genres, but I will call it \'punk video game jazz rock.\'” **BOY HOOD** “It’s not just a song about growing up; the sound of it feels like what it felt like. We went to the studio with Jahaan Sweet. I remember him when he was 18 and he moved to New York from Florida. Now he’s producing for Drake, Kehlani, and all these people. He called me up and he was like, ‘Man, you’re the only one I know up here.’ We used to rap and make beats in the dorm room. I knew that he could help me to channel the feeling of what it’s like to live in the South.” **MOVEMENT 11’** “‘BOY HOOD,’ ‘MOVEMENT,’ and ‘ADULTHOOD’ is the spine of the record. Those three songs are a literal representation of my coming of age. When you get to ‘BOY HOOD,’ I\'m telling you literally what it was like. And then ‘MOVEMENT 11\'’ is my growth into an adult when I moved to New York at 17 to go to Juilliard.” **ADULTHOOD** “The transition from ‘MOVEMENT’ is this rich, multilayered classical-esque kind of thing where, all of a sudden, you just mature. The first half of the album has all of these different things going on in terms of just the universal and communal. And then on the second half, it goes into this place of just the internal and personal. That’s like how it is when you’re young and you got fire; you’re figuring out who you are and you’re looking at the world around you. And people give you advice, and you hear all these things about the past. You’re trying to reconcile it all. Then, all of a sudden, you\'re an adult. **MAVIS** “Mavis \[Staples\] is fantastic. I was talking to her during the pandemic, and she was dropping all of these gems on the phone. I wanted to really capture that and share it with people because I felt privileged to be able to be her friend and to collaborate with her over the years, to really learn from her. She said the words that are on the song and I said to her, ‘Can you say that one more time and let me record?’ It was one of those things that you can’t plan, because if you try to plan it, it won’t be the same.” **FREEDOM** “If you think about movies back in the day, you wouldn’t show a Black man with a white woman, or you wouldn\'t show a Black relationship, or you wouldn\'t show a woman in a certain role. That is our sexuality and how people are represented. That\'s what people like James Brown, or when we saw Elvis with the twist in the hips, did. They were unlocking something in people that they were trying to hold in. These people became beacons of freedom, and you look at the way they move and the way that they express who they are onstage. That becomes the way that you want to be in life.” **SHOW ME THE WAY** “This is a beautiful song to play when you’re cruising in the car with someone you care about. Or just cruising by yourself and doing your thing. It’s a homage to the many different culture creators who inspire me. I’ve been doing Zoom sessions with my friend Zadie Smith, who is a writer and sings on this record. We’ll do these virtual jam sessions and have real conversations about the music we want to listen to. So it’s really a homage to all the great Black musicians, and also great creators of all races, that have inspired us.” **SING** “‘Sing’ is the closing-credits song of this thing, because the album is like a movie. It\'s meant to be listened to like that. You\'ve had this journey and this experience. When you don\'t have words to say and you feel overwhelmed with emotion, just sing. You really have experienced the power of that through the course of that movie.” **UNTIL** “This is a moment of celebration, but it’s also undetermined. What are we going to do? Who are we? Until this or that happens, it’s all a question. That’s how I wanted to end the album, because if you go back to the beginning in a loop it’ll keep feeding you. It’s constructed to be cyclical.”

When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”

Poignant musings on loss and rebirth against a Cornish canvas.

“Fifth records are actually a lot of people’s best records,” James Blake tells Apple Music. “You’ve had all the practice of making albums, taken a few different directions, and by then have usually reached your thirties where you’ve got a bunch of stuff out of your system. So you finally decide to just be yourself. And suddenly, everyone’s thrilled.” *Friends That Break Your Heart* is Blake’s fifth album. While he’s too coy to personally anoint it his best work, the record does feel invigoratingly apart from the North London-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s first four. There’s the emotional payload of any Blake enterprise, but here he detonates through an earthier and more unguarded sonic arsenal. “It’s the most direct songwriting of anything I’ve done,” he says. “Whether it’s a sad song or an uplifting song, each emotion I’ve gone for is a more raw version of that thing on at least the last two records. I was working stuff out on those records, and I am here, too, but at 32, I’m starting to become more sure of myself in lots of ways. This record is very sure of itself.” The title here suggests a twist on a classic breakup album—a documentation of how we negotiate non-romantic partings. “There doesn’t seem to be a protocol for how to treat someone who’s breaking up with a friend,” he says. “We’re expected to move on pretty quick from deep lifelong friendships. But you can’t make old friends, as they say.” Can the COVID-inspired events of 2020 and 2021 take the blame for the demise of certain relationships? “I think what’s happened partly makes the topic of this album so pertinent,” he says. “We lost some of the parameters that kept friendships together. And it’s been a time for analyzing and reflecting what the qualities in friends that you actually need in your life are—and facing up to your own failings as one. Being an infantilized C-list pop star doesn’t really set you up to be the best friend in the world. But also, when I needed them and help most, I realized that most of those people just didn’t know what to do.” Blake has been candid about requiring that help in the past, and fortunately, the various COVID lockdowns proved beneficial to the creation of this record—which had a positive knock-on effect for his mental health. “I realized that I actually have a lot of control over my mental health,” he says. “What the lockdowns did was force me to say, ‘I can actually do this. I can actually block this out, and actually lift myself out of certain things.’ Previously I’d relied on other means. And I think that allows music to flow easier because being present and overcoming mental ill health is good for creativity.” Below, Blake takes us through his beautiful album, track by track. **“Famous Last Words”** “I don\'t agonize over tracklisting. I think it\'s like a DJ set, and a DJ set needs its peaks and troughs and moments of reflection. I spend so long writing the actual song and producing the song, by the time it comes to sequencing the tracklist, I\'m like, ‘Oh god, just put it in an order, man.’ This isn\'t a love song. But it is kind of a love song. It\'s kind of a breakup song. It\'s weird. I think it blurs the line between friendship and romance. With friendships, it’s not necessarily that the feelings are romantic, but you can genuinely love someone and it hurt like that.” **“Life Is Not the Same”** “You meet some people and they can just have an effect on you. It could be that they just sparkle, and you’ve got no idea why, but you’re doing things differently, or saying different stuff to impress them, and it doesn’t mean you’re weak or easily influenced—well, maybe it means you’re easily influenced a little bit—but it takes a special person to do that. I can take accountability for being willing to bend for someone. Certain people, for example, have taught me that I needed to develop a thicker skin and that I was too ready to give up control to someone else. I clearly needed to have more self-belief, because if I was so easily swayed then maybe I’d miscalculated my own self-worth.” **“Coming Back” (feat. SZA)** “I was doing a session with \[US artist and songwriter\] Starrah, who casually mentioned SZA was going to come by the studio. So I played her a bunch of stuff, she sang over it, and we hit it off straight away. It took a while to figure out how to produce what we landed on, though. Long story short: My production wasn’t hitting. You could hear that SZA and I sounded good together—but I hadn’t figured out how to best support her vocal because it was a song with no chorus. We are used to those structures as a society, so when you start taking apart those structures, you’ve really got to replace it properly. A bit like gluten-free bread. I realized I needed to put a donk on it, essentially. I just had to make it more banger-y. I tried doing the ambient thing, I tried making it really beautiful, and it didn’t work. I have it in my locker, and occasionally that power needs to be drawn upon.” **“Funeral”** “This song is all me, done on a very sunny but slightly miserable day. I was thinking about how it feels not to be heard, and to worry that people have given up on you. During lockdown I specifically felt that. It had been many years since I had really popped up and done forward-facing stuff like interviews.” **“Frozen” (feat. JID & SwaVay)** “Quite a spooky instrumental, and my vocals come in a little off-kilter, a little creepy. JID and SwaVay kill it over a beat I actually originally wrote for JID. It ended up not really fitting his record, which I found very lucky because secretly I wanted it for myself. It felt a bit like when you set someone up to cancel on you—my favorite feeling. Jameela \[Jamil, Blake’s partner and co-producer on the album\] suggested putting SwaVay on it because I’d been working with him for a couple of years. Totally right. Good A&R instincts.” **“I\'m So Blessed You\'re Mine”** “The album is sort of split between these Frankenstein’s monsters that were very exciting to put together and songs that happened very quickly. This was somewhere in the middle, and I got to work with some of my favorite people on it—Khushi, Dominic Maker, Josh Stadlen, Jameela. I want to get out of the way so we end up with the best piece of music we can make. And maybe have a nice chat about something before we start. There was no chatting back on album one, say, because I had way too much social anxiety.” **“Foot Forward”** “Metro Boomin is back! He knows I’m often into his more esoteric stuff so played me this piano sample he’d made on the MPC \[music production center\] that sounded like it was from the ’70s but had this Metro-y bounce on it. I started improvising in the studio, and I remember seeing him dancing in the booth because it sounded so up. It felt very anthemic. Eventually I turned it into a song with Frank Dukes and Ali Tamposi—another genius who wrote the chorus melody.” **“Show Me” (feat. Monica Martin)** “Monica is an incredible singer and incredible person—she’s fucking hilarious, and we’ve become friends. The song felt quite bare without her. It needed someone to step in, and it had to be exactly the right person, otherwise it’s not going to work. Again, Jameela made the suggestion. She came into the studio with Khushi and I, did the take in exactly the way I imagined, and it was glorious. I was just so excited, she was excited, it was a lovely moment.” **“Say What You Will”** “Ah, those those dreamy ’60s vibes. This is my favorite song I’ve written in years. It’s the song that carries the most meaning in terms of my overall life. It’s more representative of my headspace as a whole, and I like songs that have a wider commentary baked into them. I was pleased with the reaction to it because I really tried to communicate where I am right now in an authentic way. At this point in my career, it can’t be any other way. The formula to putting a song out has never changed. A good song will out in every single scenario. It needs to resonate with people, or it will disappear. And I know that feeling—I have released songs that for whatever reason have not resonated with people.” **“Lost Angel Nights”** “It’s about a lot of things, but primarily it’s about worrying that you’ve missed your shot. And *maybe* there’s a little bit of finger-pointing in there as well. The way people take your original essence, copy it and move on, really. I’ve been super lucky in my career, but I think there was a time where there was a lot of looking at what the shiny new thing is, doing that, then moving on. You don’t need them anymore. It happens to a lot of people, but you have to contend with being a permanent person, a permanent artist. I want to be here for as long as I can and be as naturalistic and true to myself as I can be, and what other people do doesn’t affect that.” **“Friends That Break Your Heart”** “Perhaps weirdly, it was album title first, then this song. I wrote the melody in the car on the way to meet \[US songwriter and producer\] Rick Nowels. There were a couple of others that we didn’t put onto the record, but this one was just standout right away. It was a really fun process, because he just played the keys and I was left to singer-songwriter duties for once. The line ‘I have haunted many photographs’ is something we can hopefully all relate to—well, hopefully not, actually, because that would be terrible, but I feel like that’s a common feeling.” **“If I\'m Insecure”** “I like to go out on something either where it’s all harmonies or it just feels huge. This is the latter. It’s an apocalyptic love song—the world is ending, but you’re in love, so it’s all right. Which maybe captures where we are as a society in 2021, so perhaps I’ll come to think of this record as one big externalization of my COVID experience, but that wasn’t the original intention. I make a load of music and then eventually realize, ‘Oh, yes, roughly, it was about this.’”

When The Killers couldn’t tour their 2020 album *Imploding the Mirage* because of the pandemic, lead singer Brandon Flowers didn’t sit around waiting for a chance to get back on the road. Instead, he came up with an idea during quarantine that would eventually become the band’s seventh studio album, where he also reunited with founding member Dave Keuning on guitar. For Flowers, the introspection that came from lockdown kept leading him to the town of Nephi, Utah, where he grew up. “There was some trepidation at first,” he tells Apple Music. “Because it’s such a small town, and you wonder how that’s going to resonate with people all over the world. And it’s such a specific place in the Southwest. But then I couldn’t escape it. Every time I went to the keyboard, these ideas kept coming out, all based on characters that I grew up observing, or experiences that I had in town, or memories. So I went with it.” *Pressure Machine* is unlike anything in The Killers’ repertoire. From the use of instruments like harmonica and fiddle to the deeply personal storytelling and interviews with people who still live in the town, the album is a love letter to the places you grew up and the people you left behind—anchored in melancholy and dotted with hope. “Tragedy and religious disenchantment were the launchpads,” Flowers explains. “When you’re a kid, you’re getting new experiences all the time, so when something shocking or tragic happens, it really resonates. Those experiences are the things I was gravitating towards.” Flowers explains more about those experiences and how they influenced each track on *Pressure Machine* below. **“West Hills”** “There\'s a whole subculture in Utah, in my experience, because we associate Utah with Mormonism. Having grown up there, a lot of people \[outside of Utah\] aren\'t aware of people that don\'t adhere to religion. There’s this whole thing of dirt bikes and four-wheelers and beer and finding different ways to find your salvation, other than in a church pew on Sunday. I took some liberties on the song, but it\'s based on a real story.” **“Quiet Town”** “I was in eighth grade when two seniors got hit by a train. Their names were Raymond and Tiffany. I was surprised to find 25 years later how much I was still affected by it. I felt like it was the end of an innocence for me and for the town, because afterwards I noticed things started to happen. It was almost like opening this door of darkness. A lot of times we talk about stagnation with snarky terms, and I think it’s one of the things that\'s associated with towns like Nephi, but it can also be a beautiful thing, because it\'s these people that are holding on to ideals and traditions. I hope that it never changes in that respect.” **“Terrible Thing”** “Years after high school, you hear about a kid you went to school with that was gay and nobody knew. It\'s just such a cowboy, football, hunting country town. I tried to work through this person\'s experience in town and how hard it must be to be in a culture like that. To not even feel safe to tell anyone who you are. Because when you were a kid or you\'re in high school, you don\'t have that courage, and I don\'t blame them.” **“Cody”** “‘Cody’ is a culmination of a bunch of my friends\' big brothers. I had two friends that had older brothers that seemed particularly dangerous. And so, again, those memories stand out, that you might\'ve been afraid of them, or you hear stories about what they\'re doing, or getting arrested, or whatever it is. And so I was able to sort of melt them into this one character.” **“Sleepwalker”** “The first line that I knew was good in that song was ‘It doesn\'t come from without/It comes from within.’ So I built all the rest of the lyrics around that. I had just recently moved back to Utah and was experiencing seasons again. Because in Vegas, it gets hot and then it gets cold, that’s it. You don\'t get to go through the beauty and the sometimes stark changes of the weather. I was caught up in that, the anticipation for spring and new life. I was able to use that sort of analogy for a person becoming a new creature and coming back to life.” **“Runaway Horses” (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)** “Life\'s going to be hard for whatever choice or whatever road you take. There\'s going to be obstacles and hurdles. In this case, it\'s about two people that think that they\'re going to finish the race together, and then they end up sort of going in different paths. It’s also about coming home. No matter where you go, how far you drift, you’re always trying to get home.” **“In the Car Outside”** “This song started really quickly, and it was one of those moments that you\'re always waiting for. One of the reasons why you get in the garage in the first place is just this communal experience that you can share with people. And it was born really fast, and it was really exciting to be a part of it.” **“In Another Life”** “I think everyone goes through things like wondering what life would\'ve been like if we\'d done things differently. Or if not, at least you wonder if your significant other is going through that. And I think this guy\'s just questioning the choices that he\'s made and wondering if he\'s measuring up to what his wife had hoped that he would be. It’s definitely a sad song, seeped in melancholy.” **“Desperate Things”** “This was a little scandal that took place \[in Nephi\] that I took some liberties with in the third verse, where I take it off the rails. I like telling stories, and there\'s people like Nick Cave and Johnny Cash and people that are great storytellers who are really influential to me. You don\'t get a lot of third verses in pop songs, and it\'s not something you associate with a typical Killers song, but I needed that third verse to tell the story. This is probably as dark as I\'ve ever gotten.” **“Pressure Machine”** “I think there\'s a sadness to how quickly we grow up, and being a parent and watching that. Everybody tells you when you have a kid, ‘Make the most of it. They\'re going to grow up before you know it.’ And it sort of gets redundant, and then it really is true and it\'s kind of a heartbreaker.” **“The Getting By”** “Even though there is struggle, and even though there is strife and toiling, there\'s still hope. That\'s what makes these people who they are. They get up and go to work every day. I have a lot of respect for them, and I don\'t feel that far removed from them. And I thought about people like my uncles and my dad and my nephews and my cousins. And really wanted to capture what I saw in their lives.”

“I wanted to show myself as a human being,” J Balvin tells Apple Music about his new album. “I wanted to show the things that Jose has gone through to be where I’m at right now.” After breaking past both musical and language barriers with 2018’s *Vibras* and subsequently sharing his artistic brilliance with the follow-up *Colores*, global superstar J Balvin returns with the decidedly more personal *JOSE*. A revelatory blend of personal reflections and peak nightclub vibes, his namesake project shares more of himself and his expansive pop music vision than ever before through forthright and even confessional cuts like “7 De Mayo” and the deeply moving “La Familia.” From the seductive sounds of “Una Nota” to the entrancingly tropical “Que Locura,” he’s pushing forward without abandoning his reggaetón roots. This becomes most evident on the album’s dance-floor-centric moments, such as the irresistibly salacious “Perra” with Dominican rising star Tokischa and the house music throwback “In Da Getto” with Skrillex. “That was really important because that’s what I love to hear,” Balvin says about this vital and gratifying aspect of the project. “*JOSE* is like my own playlist,” he adds. And, as such, he’s brought on an impressively curated selection of guests, with Latin titans Ozuna and Zion & Lennox joining his fellow pop adventurers Dua Lipa and Khalid on this sonic journey into his ever-expanding musical universe. Below, read some of J Balvin’s thoughts on a few of *JOSE*’s noteworthy collaborative tracks. **“Una Nota” (feat. Sech)** “Sech sent me an idea, like a year ago. I was looking for a vibe that I’d been missing from the album. That is the one I found and was like, ‘Yes! This is the one.’” **“Te Acuerdas De Mí” (feat. Yandel)** “It’s me giving respect to one of the pioneers of the genre, giving him just one track by himself.” **“Billetes De 100” (feat. Myke Towers)** “Myke Towers is one of my favorite MCs, and it’s really cool to be with him on a rap song in his style. I love the way we sound together.” **“La Venganza” (feat. Jhay Cortez)** “Jhay Cortez is like my little brother. We have each other’s backs and we elevate each other. So it’s really cool every time we work together.” **“Qué Más Pues?” (feat. Maria Becerra)** “I’m a big fan of looking for new artists. I heard all the buzz about Maria Becerra in Argentina. I checked and found out she was so talented that I wanted to have her on my album. I did this song especially for her.”

“There were three potential titles for this album,” Rostam Batmanglij tells Apple Music. “One of them referenced gender, another was referencing America and nationality. As I’m saying this, I’m realizing that’s what I like about this title—that it can apply to gender or politics, and yet you might hear this record and not think about either of those things.” Listen to *Changephobia*, the former Vampire Weekend talisman’s second solo record, and plenty of things hit you. To name a few: Americana; unexpected time structures; guitar solos; gorgeous melodies; a lot of sax. “Stylistically, I was seeking to make a clean break from a lot of the music that I’ve made over the last 10 years,” he says. “I wanted to be a bit more abstract. I was thinking about minimalist art, and that was kicking around in the back of my mind in very simple shapes.” Accordingly, there’s a joyful union between a desire to keep things, as he says, to “one or two colors” and Batmanglij’s natural musical curiosity and invention. Let him talk you through the story of his second album, one track at a time. **“These Kids We Knew”** “I was just working on music to get out of my bedroom during lockdown, and then these lyrics started coming out of me. I really didn\'t think it was for the album. But then, as more time passed, I started to realize that it was not only for the album, but eventually that it was track one. I think as a queer musician I identify a little bit more with the younger generation because I relate to their attitudes towards sexuality and gender—it\'s a little bit distinct from people that grew up in the \'90s and early 2000s. That made me think about the generation above mine, and just how each generation has different things that we have to contend with, whether it\'s climate or gender or equality. I kept thinking, ‘Who are these kids?’—and maybe in some ways it’s also me coming to terms with the fact that I\'m not a kid anymore. I\'m fully in my mid-thirties.” **“From the Back of a Cab”** “It started with this drum part without many chords, and it just kicked around on my iPhone but I knew there was something exciting there. One day I started playing this Americana piano along to these drums, and it felt very disconnected from the drum part, because the drum part is in 12/8, which is something that you hear in African music and Iranian music. I\'ve become more interested in trying to use lyrics as the driving force, as opposed to just writing vocal melodies and figuring out what lyrics should go along with.” **“Unfold You”** “This features a sample from Nick Hakim \[2015’s ‘Papas Fritas’\] and features Henry Solomon’s sax playing which I later brought into HAIM’s \'Summer Girl.\' Even though \'Summer Girl\' came out within a few months of us starting to record it, \'Unfold You\' took years. In some ways it had to—because the recording of the song tracks an evolution and a personal change.” **“4Runner”** “I was in a store in Japan when I heard this song, and to this day I haven\'t been able to find it. But I remembered how it sounded in my brain—it had 12-string acoustic guitar and had brush drums, and I just filed that away knowing it was a palette I should try one day. Years later, I was in the studio wanting to realize this idea. I started building it up with 12-string acoustic, drums, and Moog Voyager bass. I made a track that felt fresh and then spent a lot of time just driving around and sitting in my room listening to it, piecing it together what it should be about.” **“Changephobia”** “A few years ago I was sitting at a park bench in Massachusetts and someone told me change is good, and it just stuck with me. No one had ever said to me that change is good. This idea informed the whole album. I’ve also had a fascination with sax that dates back maybe a decade. I knew where I wanted to go musically, and wanted to push myself away from the same chord progressions I’ve used in so many songs. This was a new kind of chord progression for me, inspired by jazz. I asked Henry to play a solo over those chords, and he did about 36 takes. The second take had the magic, so that’s what you hear.” **“Kinney”** “The first day that I worked with Henry, I sang this melody to him—and he played it back on the saxophone. I didn’t think I was able to play it myself on any instruments, but Henry played it back to me, we put the melody on top, and the next thing I knew I had a song written—a sort of crazy 182 BPM drum ’n’ bass song. I was very doubtful on the outro, because it’s fully grunge. I worried there are some places you should never go. Ultimately, though, I’m glad I went here.” **“Bio18”** “I was on tour in Houston years ago and recorded these drums on my iPhone. I’d honestly been hearing the rhythm in my head since I was a kid in D.C. played on buckets on sidewalks. I was curious about where stuff like Charlie Mingus and Charlie Parker, that how that stuff kind of intersects with, like, the French classical composers like Debussy and Ravel. I was curious about the way those things overlap.” **“\[interlude\]”** “I have a rule that I need every song to be at least two minutes, even if it doesn\'t have lyrics. This was supposed to be a song on the album, but I could just never figure out what to sing. I had Henry play sax on it, and originally the sax was supposed to be a solo, and there would be a song on either side of the solo. Eventually I said to myself, ‘I don\'t know exactly what I want to say, but maybe the music is saying what I want to say.’ And so I kept it on. The original version of this album also had two other interludes, and I cut those but I kept this one. I don\'t know why.” **“To Communicate”** “Therapy and psychology are probably a huge part of what was on my mind as I was writing the lyrics of this album. But I think that shouldn\'t be something that\'s too obvious if I did it right. I like the idea that someone might hear the song and feel, ‘This is clearly about psychology.’ And another person might hear it and think, ‘This is clearly about someone that betrayed Rostam or Rostam feeling that he betrayed himself.’ Dave Fridmann mixed this song, and the one thing I told him was I wanted it to sound like The Zombies. His response was, ‘Then maybe you should speed it up about 10 BPM.’ And I think he\'s right. I did experiment with that. But it was too late in the game to speed it up that much. And maybe it\'s good that it doesn\'t sound *too* much like The Zombies. But hopefully it sounds a little bit like The Zombies.” **“Next Thing”** “It wasn\'t supposed to be on this album. I\'d given up on it for a couple years. And then as I was finishing the album, I thought to myself, ‘You\'re going need to have a special bonus track for Japan, or it\'ll be good to have one extra thing.’ But once it was done, I liked it too much. The drums and the piano were recorded live at the same time, they were not recorded with a click track, which, for people who make music, you know that almost everything we hear is steady. And this song is not steady. If you dropped it into one of your DAWs \[digital audio workstations\] like Ableton, Logic, or Pro Tools and tried to line it up, it will constantly infuriate you. But that\'s exactly what I wanted from the song.” **“Starlight”** “Even before I had written the rest of the album, I knew that this was going to be the last song. It started on a bullet train in Japan, so it was originally called ‘Shinkansen.’ I was at a friend\'s wedding and he sang Chet Baker to his wife, which made me think there hasn\'t been a futuristic update of Chet Baker. This is my attempt.”

Los Angeles, CA – Internationally acclaimed singer/songwriter Chris Pierce stands by the notion that music can cut through the isolated and static feelings for those of us worn down by the chaos of everyday life. He calls out to unite us under one sonic roof to speak up, sing out, rise up and resist with the offering of his new 21st century Americana freedom and justice album titled “American Silence” released on February 26, 2021. On the LP, Pierce channels legendary justice and freedom songwriters. With sparse acoustic instrumentation and unmistakable soulfully passionate vocals, Pierce creates an authentic sound all his own removed from time or trend. The full-length LP, “American Silence” soulfully spins original songs about a wide range of issues including justice, oppression, homelessness, black self-love, racism, mass incarceration, Immigrant Transcontinental Railroad workforce, Native American boarding schools, and a tribute to the American statesman and civil rights leader, John Lewis. The self produced album was recorded during a socially distanced session at Boulevard Recording in Los Angeles, California with only Pierce and the studio owner/engineer Clay Blair in attendance. Lead vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica and background choir parts on the album were performed by Pierce. The music video for the title track of Pierce’s forthcoming album, ‘AMERICAN SILENCE’ recently premiered in Rolling Stone: “L.A. Singer-Songwriter Chris Pierce channels Richie Havens and Bob Dylan... It’s the sound of everyone who’s hungry for change, steadying themselves and marching toward a common goal.” NPR’s Ann Powers called the ‘American Silence’ single “...A good old fashioned folk music broadside” and “…the song white allies need to hear because it so beautifully says that loving protest songs isn’t enough.”

When a veteran band decides to self-title an album, it’s often a way to reintroduce themselves. After years apart—and eight LPs behind them—My Morning Jacket felt like the moment had arrived. “I’ve always loved that phenomenon,” frontman Jim James tells Apple Music. “I was so excited that we even got to make another record that I was like, ‘This is the time for our self-titled.’ With all the insanity in the world right now, I wanted to do something as simple as we possibly could. Just, ‘Here we are. We’re back.’” Finished days before the pandemic took hold in early 2020, *My Morning Jacket* finds the Kentucky rock outfit luxuriating in one another’s company, feeling out familiar grooves (“Never in the Real World,” “Complex”) while still allowing for wild adventures (“In Color”) and loose experiments (“The Devil’s in the Details”). The hiatus, James says, was not due to any interpersonal drama, but rather the toll that “getting ground up in the machinery of touring” had taken on his health. Being together again lent him a sense of perspective and gratitude that courses through every song. “We weren’t really sure what was going to happen, but we took the time to have it be just the five of us,” he says, “which, I think, was really important for us to be able to get together and be vulnerable and be willing to make mistakes and not be precious about things and just get back to the core of the band. I feel so thankful—it’s almost like another lifetime you got to live. No matter what happens tomorrow, here’s another album. We did another one.” Here, James takes us inside a few songs from the collection. **“Regularly Scheduled Programming”** “It just felt like a natural, funny way to start it off because we had been interrupted and it was like, ‘Now we’re back to your regularly scheduled programming.’ Some songs just have that intro thing to them that feels like a first song in the way it builds. I call it a ramp song, where it starts with nothing and goes all the way up. I had been thinking about it so much before the pandemic, about how much screens have taken a place in our life. Then, obviously, the pandemic hit and we became even more addicted.” **“Love Love Love”** “It came to me on a walk, the rhythm of it. I wanted it to be powerful and propulsive at the same time, to have this weird combination of power and a super-mellow, super-beautiful vocal thing in the choruses. Mainly, it’s from working on myself and going to therapy and realizing how mean I can be to myself. If we walked into a room and heard somebody saying the terrible things we say to ourselves to a friend, we’d get super pissed. The song is really about trying to find a way to love yourself, so you can be more present for other people.” **“In Color”** “I thought it would maybe just be a minute-long acoustic song, really simple, like a nursery rhyme. Then I had a dream where I got the main riff and needed it to be a part of this thing. We started incorporating it and improvising, but something wasn’t right about it, and our drummer Patrick \[Hallahan\] said, ‘Why don’t we just start it acoustic and then go into all this other stuff that we’re doing?’ That’s what I love about the art of learning the recording studio: You find all the parts that really have heart and passion and real magic in them, and if you know how to edit correctly, you weave it into this thing that hopefully feels all of one body.” **“Never in the Real World”** “That was one of my favorite moments on this record, a really fun one in the studio: Through playing it, you just get into these places that you never thought you would get into. It’s about struggling to feel like I belong in this world, feeling so lost so much of the time that I could only find some kind of magic through drugs and alcohol, through altered states. The daytime was often so unmanageable for me because the only way I could find that magic was at night. It’s holding a sacred place for that as well because I think that’s still something that I enjoy. At the same time, just feeling wildly out of balance and trying to deal with that, like I never found magic in the real world, in the way I was supposed to live. The way society tells you to live, what people do, doesn’t make any sense to me.” **“The Devil’s in the Details”** “I got this old Sears drum machine for ten bucks, and it has this really nice pulsating pattern. I would play with it at night, sing over it, and then I put it in a demo box for things that I was going to work on later. I thought I would just do it by myself, because it didn’t really seem like a band song. While we were making the record, one night we went to this weird, really beautiful light show at the Arboretum in LA. The whole time I was walking, ‘The Devil’s in the Details’ kept coming into my head over and over. I was like, ‘Shit, we need to do this tomorrow.’ I brought the drum machine with me, and we just let it go. I showed them the chords, and we just all started improvising to the drum machine, getting hypnotized as we played along.” **“Lucky To Be Alive”** “I’ve had lots of accidents on tour. I’ve been hospitalized, had back surgery and heart trouble. Everybody knows what it feels like to be sick at least, but when you’re super sick, you can get down in this pit where your life starts to feel meaningless or starts to feel too hard, and you start to question, ‘Why am I even here? What am I even doing?’ I feel like after I’d been in several of those, once I got out, there’s a resonance to just feeling lucky to be alive, to having a normal day where I can walk. When simple things are taken away from you, you don’t really realize their value. When I came back and recovered, I was like, ‘Try to remember this feeling of just being grateful to be alive in any capacity, just what a gift it is.’” **“I Never Could Get Enough”** “It’s really just a sweet love song, about that feeling of loving somebody—not being able to get enough of that feeling, feeling so loved and so loving towards somebody that it’s all you can think about and it’s all you want to do. It’s that feeling, if we’re lucky enough to feel it, and it’s such a strange thing to try to manage, because everybody knows that everything changes, and everything ebbs and flows, and nothing lasts forever. It’s just about trying to enjoy that while you have it.”

\"I knew this day was coming,\" Rivers Cuomo tells Apple Music. \"I\'ve always been such a fan of classical music and opera. And yet, I feel like it\'s overdue, like I just kind of got stuck in this pattern of, \'Okay, we\'re a rock band. This is what we do. We don\'t want to get soft too soon.\' But really getting encouragement from \[producer\] Jake \[Sinclair\], and then just a light went off like, \'Oh, this is going to be great.\'\" After delaying the release of their long-promised shred opus *Van Weezer*, Weezer instead dove into *OK Human*, a 12-track change of pace that features a 38-piece orchestra, no click tracks, no computers, and, most surprisingly, no electric guitar. And the tonal shift matched the pandemic neuroses that fueled Cuomo\'s lyric writing. \"I\'m so anxious about looking around my house and seeing, okay, there\'s one child on that device, there\'s the other child on that device, my wife\'s over there on that device,\" Cuomo says. \"Everyone\'s looking in a different direction at a different device, and that\'s the way things are going. Nothing I can do about it, but I just can\'t help but feel a sense of loss and anxiety about it.\" Those worries take center stage on whimsical tracks like \"All My Favorite Songs,\" \"Playing My Piano,\" and \"Screens,\" while the sprawling orchestration adds drama to \"Numbers\" and \"Bird With a Broken Wing\" as Cuomo stares down his inadequacies. \"I was just feeling pretty irrelevant and passed over and past my prime,\" says the 50-year-old singer-songwriter. \"I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.\" It\'s not all dark clouds, however—Weezer fashions a sliver of optimism with the triumphant \"Here Comes the Rain\" and luscious closer \"La Brea Tar Pits.\" \"Hearing it back for the first time with the orchestra, it\'s like, yeah, those are the chords I wrote, and that\'s the melody I wrote,\" Cuomo says. \"But man, it\'s like seeing in three dimensions for the first time or something. It\'s just gorgeous. And I can\'t believe we haven\'t done it before.\"

“This whole album is in questions,” Jack Antonoff tells Apple Music about the meaning behind *Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night*, his third album as Bleachers. “I kept going back to these really dark stories that somehow spin you around and you\'re in this character, and you don\'t know why this hope exists. I was trying to access that part of myself.” The much-in-demand singer-songwriter and producer—whose credits in the past year alone include work with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and St. Vincent—is awash in joy and optimism as he lets things fall into place on these 10 tracks, trading the synth-pop glitz of his previous albums for sweeping, sax-tinged anthems and intimate acoustic confessionals. Antonoff wrote the songs in bits and pieces over the course of four years, though it wasn\'t until early 2020 that he began to record the album—mostly live in a studio with his touring bandmates. “I\'m always writing, and then at some point, an album will form or it won\'t—and when it starts to form, that\'s when I chase it,” he says. “It\'s a window into how I hear music. I don\'t craft records to be instant. I don\'t craft records to be growers. I just craft what I hear and feel in myself.” Here, he tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“91”** “The song, much like a poem, which Zadie Smith helped me write, functions where every lyric is tied to every verse but from a different angle. In the first verse, there’s this child version that can\'t understand what\'s happening. And you only recognize that you\'re here, but you\'re not, through the anxiety of your mother. In the second verse, it\'s a little bit more about anger. You\'re recognizing this part of yourself that you don\'t like through someone else, which is a pretty intense way of understanding it. If you have a feeling that\'s pretty harsh about someone else, there\'s a good chance it\'s really about you. And then, in the third verse, you finally get this unearned hope, and this lightness of actually having all the magic of being alive.” **“Chinatown” (feat. Bruce Springsteen)** “A lot of the music that I love to play sits in that place where it\'s doing two things: There\'s a literal and emotional thing that\'s coming from the same concept. It is going from New York over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. Literally and sonically, the song does that. The music sounds a little bit New York-y in the beginning, and then it gets more innate and hopeful and becomes more New Jersey and more suburban. It feels like going home.” **“How Dare You Want More”** “‘How Dare You Want More’ is this feeling I was seeing with friends and family. Everyone\'s going through this big struggle to have more, to ask for more, and to be in control of their life. I saw it was producing so much shame in other people, and therefore, really just myself. Why is it so hard? And I\'m not talking about more square footage. I\'m not talking about more money. I\'m talking about more of who you are so you can not have that strange feeling that keeps you up at night or makes you feel all fucked up in the morning, or makes you not grab at the things you want. It\'s a question that, if you keep asking yourself over and over and over again, can start to sound silly. And that\'s a good thing, because it is silly. It was a hallmark of the album, trying to move past this shame.” **“Big Life”** “It\'s a sibling track to ‘Secret Life.’ It\'s, in the most real and non-cynical way, falling so in love where you want to have a big life. You want to have all the experiences, and you want to take them with you on all these crazy journeys. And ‘Secret Life’ was the opposite, when you want to close every door. It\'s a pretty romantic concept to me. But the song is all about posing these wants. In a funny, funny way, I think it\'s the most vulnerable song on the album, even though it might not come off as it because the music is so confident.” **“Secret Life” (feat. Lana Del Rey)** “I do this thing a few times in the album where you have a feeling and you look at it from two polar-opposite positions. ‘Big Life’ is this ‘let me go out there, let me get burned, and let the world knock me over because I\'m trying to find love,’ right? I want a secret life where you and I can get bored out of our minds. It\'s not a chase. It\'s not running out there to prove something. It\'s a very optimistic song, which is basically when the chemicals wear off and you\'re really in it with someone. At first, maybe I thought it would be a duet with Lana where it could be conversational, but then I realized that if I just put some reverb on her voice and have her kind of crest over the second verse and the chorus, she\'s more like a dream of this person I\'m talking to.” **“Stop Making This Hurt”** “This one is a sibling song to ‘How Dare You Want More.’ ‘Stop Making This Hurt’ is just sort of a more petulant, pissed-off version. There\'s all this joy and hope about the next phase of your life. But then there\'s all this frustration about ‘I can\'t get through this doorway. Whatever I\'m carrying does not let me through.’ I was able to access this rage by talking about other people: my dad, my friends and their kids, the world, and a whole new generation of people that are inheriting so much crap. But at the end of the day, I\'m right in that struggle with all of them.” **“Don’t Go Dark”** “I\'d never written a song like this. It\'s not \'I love you.\' It\'s not \'I hate you.\' It\'s \'you\'ve got to get off my back. You\'ve got to let me go.\' I can\'t be me for new people who I\'m trying to love if I\'m holding your darkness. I can hold you and I can hold our past and all these things, but it can\'t happen. That\'s why the song is so tense. It feels like this plea and this release. I just didn\'t know what else to do besides write that song. It\'s probably the angriest song I\'ve ever written.” **“45”** “There\'s these pieces of us that, to the world, are gone. They\'re not gone—the people we love see them. When you meet someone new, or someone has been in your life for a while, they\'re bringing these pieces that, even if you know this person, you don\'t know and can learn to love them. It\'s exonerating. I can walk back into it in one second, even though no one else can see it.” **“Strange Behavior”** “I wrote the song a long time ago. I wanted to put it on the album because it’s the only song I\'ve ever written in the past that feels like it\'s still in the future for me. And at the time when I wrote it, I made it really loud and bombastic. I think I was a little bit afraid of it. I wanted to reapproach it with the confidence and vulnerability of how I feel now.” **“What’d I Do With All This Faith?”** “It\'s in many ways the most important song in the album, because the past two Bleachers albums I\'ve closed with this idea of being ready to move on. It\'s a literal lyric I\'ve put in the titles. They\'re these sort of ending pieces. And what I really came to is, that\'s it. I don\'t have God. I don\'t have a sureness about certain things in my personal life that I wish I did. But for some reason I\'m spilling over with faith, and I don\'t even know where to put it. That is the biggest question of the album: What do I do with all this faith?”

“I was ready to go to different places and get a little deeper,” Amy Shark tells Apple Music about her second album, which focuses as much on her past as it does her experiences during the last five years, since the Gold Coast-born singer-songwriter found fame after a 15-year journey. With help from everyone from Ed Sheeran and producer Joel Little to blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and country icon Keith Urban, her songs are as genuine as ever, but musically, they venture into new places. And while the last few years have, unsurprisingly, been as difficult as they’ve been rewarding, Shark (real name Amy Billings) trained herself to channel those feelings into songs. “I just learned to capitalize on every hypersensitive moment, whether I was upset or tired or anxious or happy,” she says. “I just make sure that I pick up a guitar and try and get it out that way. It\'s a balance of wanting to be really raw and authentic and the artist that I want to be, but also not an idiot—I\'m wanting to sell records. So I try and find a healthy balance of that world.” Below, she talks through each song on *Cry Forever*. **“The Wolves”** “It was one of the hardest songs to write. I started writing it around the end of 2018, when I was really confused and bitter about working out the industry, working out who\'s on your side. By the time I finished it, I was like, ‘I think I\'m good. I don\'t need anyone. I just need good songs. I\'m just going to put out good music and not stress about all those things that artists stress about, because it just takes up too much time and too much emotion.’ So the whole idea of ‘The Wolves’ is just learning to run with the pack, to keep on my path and not really care about what everyone else is doing.” **“Everybody Rise”** “It’s one of the biggest pop songs I think I\'ll ever write. I can thank Joel Little for that. He really turned my demo around. Even to this day, it sounds like such an uplifting song, but it’s a really emo unrequited love story that was a big part of my life for so long. It\'s still one of those things that I still enjoy writing about because it\'s not a nice feeling. Especially now, being a musician, people really adore everything that you do. And it\'s funny because I\'ve just been that person where I\'ve worshipped others. So it’s a tongue-in-cheek song about that as well.” **“Worst Day of My Life”** “It rolls on from ‘Everybody Rise,’ but it’s a little darker, about having to witness this happiness of someone else being with someone else. I feel like there\'s been times where I\'ve just tried to keep it cool, but you’re just continuously being let down or not being seen. It’s such a shitty experience.’” **“C’MON” (feat. Travis Barker)** “I had felt myself turning into someone I just didn\'t want to be. The industry can do that to you. You just keep going and going, and one night I was so exhausted and just felt like I wanted to stop for a second. I hope I haven\'t pushed anyone away by being this mouse on a wheel, just running and running, for 15 years to try and get here. I loved every second of writing it because it\'s everything that I wanted to say. When we were building it in the studio, I thought it might\'ve been a ballad, but the second we put a beat to it, we realized it was going to be an anthem. And I had Travis\' number just burning a hole in my pocket.” **“All the Lies About Me”** “It speaks for itself. As an artist, it\'s really hard to just take the bullets and sit back and let it all happen. There\'s been times where I want to get a milk crate, sit it in the middle of the city, and just scream everything I want to say. But you’ve just got to be cool and calm and not respond.” **“Miss You”** “It’s the sexiest song on the album. It just reminds me of those super sexy times, when things were new and exciting and naughty. I’ve been through those times of just missing someone that is a little bit forbidden, and it\'s just those fun times. They don\'t last forever, and you’ve got to really think about them. As a songwriter, it’s like the one good thing about having this annoying memory where you’re able to think about things and teleport yourself there.” **“Love Songs Ain\'t for Us” (feat. Keith Urban)** “I just learnt so much from Ed \[Sheeran, who cowrote the song\]. He just has such a good balance in his life; I think that\'s why he\'s able to work the way he works. He just keeps going. We hit a couple of stumps of, like, ‘I don\'t know where to go here,’ and I would usually switch it up and just change up the chords. But he loved the chords so much and just kept grinding and grinding until we got it. He’s just so in tune with not overcooking songs, and giving them what they *want*, not what I think they need. He was really strict with the production. And before I left, he was like, ‘Let’s keep this pretty bare-bones. It\'s a beautiful story, it’s a great melody. Don’t overcook it.’ And Keith was the icing on the cake. When he added that slide guitar and his melodies and the little country licks, it really took it to another level.” **“I\'ll Be Yours”** “It\'s a cool love song and it\'s just got that big sound—I\'ve been calling it elephant acid. It\'s the sound that comes in, explodes, and kind of crushes your heart, too. It’s like a sound of heartache. I didn’t even put a bridge in because that sound is just so powerful when it comes in. I absolutely love that song.” **“You\'ll Never Meet Anyone Like Me Again”** “This is another favorite of mine. It was heading in a crazy direction until I decided to really pull back. It had a drumbeat and everything, but I thought about that Ed quote, gave it what it *wanted*, and it sounded so much better. I was trying to sum up who I am and how much I care about people. This song is me reconnecting.” **“That Girl”** “I got really badly cheated on once, and I just hated her so much. My friends would be like, ‘It takes two to tango, Amy,’ but I was like, ‘No, he was tricked.’ You look back now and it’s like, ‘Jesus, Amy, you were just so obsessed with hating this girl that you didn\'t even realize how much of an asshole that guy was. You’re so blinded, you’re just seeing one side.’” **“Lonely Still”** “It’s about not quite knowing how to feel whole, and reminiscing when I should be moving on. I\'ve always been a bit of a melancholy person like that, and I\'m constantly in tune with the dark side. ‘Lonely Still’ is exactly what it says: I’m still lonely. When is it going to stop? What\'s going to actually make everything happier? I\'m sure people will relate, but for me it\'s personal and very honest and autobiographical.” **“Baby Steps”** “It’s another piece to the puzzle of why I\'m a little weird now. The song is about a time where I was just losing at everything. I was doing really shit at uni, losing jobs, my love life was horrendous. At home, it was all falling apart. I was obsessed with the wrong people and just into bad shit. I was home in the Gold Coast and ran into someone who kept reminding me about all these times, and when I got on a plane the next day, I couldn\'t stop thinking about our conversation. It’s just a life that I\'ve left behind. So the second I got to LA, I was really keen to write this song.” **“Amy Shark”** “If there\'s any song that describes a real, current feeling that I\'m living right now, it\'s this. That\'s why I called it ‘Amy Shark,’ which I know it sounded weird and probably confused a lot of people, but it\'s just such a personal song. The journey to get here has almost killed me. It almost killed mine and Shane’s marriage. I needed help when I was struggling, I needed guidance, love, and support, and I didn’t get it then. Now, I\'m stronger, I’m working, I\'m busy. No one will ever understand the sacrifices, the things I\'ve missed. A lot of the time I’m just a typical self-deprecating Australian, but here I just fucking went for it. I really have worked so hard to get to where I am right now. It hasn\'t all been fun, but let’s enjoy this bit.”

Allison Russell has long been a fixture of the roots scene, crafting melodic roots-pop as part of the duo Birds of Chicago and inventive, socially conscious folk with the acclaimed supergroup Our Native Daughters. The Nashville-based, Montreal-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist steps out on her own on her debut album, an expertly rendered and powerfully delivered collection that proves Russell to be just as adept a solo artist as she is a collaborator. (Though, in the spirit of collaboration, Russell invites friends and fellow musicians like Yola, Erin Rae, and the McCrary Sisters to join her.) Thematically, *Outside Child* navigates difficult terrain—such as abuse, neglect, and racism—though it does so with an undercurrent of healing, transformation, and compassion. In an album full of standout moments, it’s hard not to point to “4th Day Prayer,” a brutally frank recollection of Russell’s sexual abuse at the hands of her adoptive father, built atop a soulful, gospel-adjacent arrangement that suggests empowerment rather than victimhood. Russell is one of roots music’s finest musicians in any form, but with *Outside Child*, she stakes her claim as one of its finest visionaries too.

Baroque flourishes, fingerpicking arrangements, complex instrumental parts: These are some of the elements that characterize Ryley Walker’s crafty songwriting on *Course in Fable*, his fifth solo album. For an artist who’s regularly summoned the spirit of \'70s British folk rock while peppering in just a dash of rootsy flair—from 2015’s *Primrose Green* to his Dave Matthews Band covers album *The Lillywhite Sessions*—Walker builds on these foundations as he pushes further into improvisational jazz and prog rock. The native Illinois musician enlisted some of the major players in Chicago\'s experimental music scene to flesh out his vision, embracing virtuosic guitar tapping (“Clad With Bunk”), dub-tinged grooves (“Pond Scum Ocean”), and rough-edged jamming (“Rang Dizzy”) to bring his high-flying sound to life. And even if his city-dwelling observations are just as free-flowing, they capture the everyday essence of going on aimless strolls past nail salons and fluorescent-lit corner stores: “If only I gave to charity more often/The city streets would have a spit shine that is glowing.”

For Femi and Made Kuti—respectively the son and grandson of Afrobeat pioneer and prolific Nigerian artist Fela Kuti—music isn’t just the proverbial family business. It’s their heritage. “We researched our legacy and found we have seven generations of musicians,” Femi tells Apple Music. “My great-grandfather was the first West African artist to record for the BBC. My grandfather wrote the national anthem of the Ogun state in Nigeria. And of course we all know my father.” A unique dual-album release, *Legacy +* carries the influence of Fela Kuti into its next chapter, pairing Femi’s latest studio album *Stop the Hate* with Made’s first, *For(e)ward*. And even as the art form invented by the late Fela Kuti expands across Africa and continues to influence musicians further afield, the sons Kuti remain its chief custodians, never shying away from delivering the same blend of socially conscious lyrics and genre-bending melodies for which their patriarch became known. “Afrobeat is not a tool for quick cash, or for fame,” says Made–who plays every single instrument on his album. “It’s not a tool for the surface. And it’s not without integrity. It’s a means to depth. In whatever we communicate, musically, politically—there has to be purpose in it.” Here, the heirs of Fela Kuti discuss key tracks from their double album. **Pà Pá Pà** Femi Kuti: “The phrase ‘pà pá pà’ means ‘quickly, urgently’ in Yoruba, and here I’m trying to relay that the people in power should get out of power quickly if they cannot get the job done. When my father was speaking about politics, I was nine years old. I\'m 58 \[in 2021\], and we\'re still talking about the same issues. If you know you\'re not going to get the job done, stop wasting our time.” **Stop the Hate** Femi: “This song was really inspired by the migrant crisis—people going through Africa into Europe and dying, and the world taking so long to help save them, and to understand why people were doing this. When wars are going on, everyone says, ‘Okay, this war doesn\'t concern me.’ But then when the migrants started to come to Europe, it’s ‘Close the border.’ I’m saying, ‘Hey, stop the hate.’ Humanity has to understand itself. It\'s not about hate anymore. It\'s more about love.” **Young Boy / Young Girl** Femi: “Here I\'m telling the young boy or young girl that it\'s their time now. They are in a position of power, but they should be careful. Their journey will have people who will come in disguise as friends, but aren’t—so they need to be careful. They need to seek knowledge. I want to inspire the next generation that people like me are here to give them our full support morally, and they need not be afraid.” **Free Your Mind** Made Kuti: “I was in London for seven years, returning to Lagos twice a year for holidays. And every time you come back to Lagos, you can\'t navigate away from the obvious differences; the many, many obstacles we have to face, from electricity to water to education and health care. So what I started to question was the level of consciousness of the average Nigerian. It is clear that the average Nigerian is misinformed, and he is uninformed. He\'s not prepared to actually deal with the current obstacles that he has been forced to face. I heard one of my dad\'s songs called \'Set Your Minds and Souls Free,\' which is what inspired \'Free Your Mind.\' \'Free Your Mind\' is very much about using your brain to its fullest potential.” **We Are Strong** Made: “This was my attempt at ending the album on a high note. Nigerians are successful in almost every field, be it boxing, medicine, law. We are very, very talented and we\'re very, very capable. However, whenever we come together as a people, we always seem to go down the wrong path. Sometimes, education misleads us into thinking that a community is built simply by individual successes. And it\'s not. We\'re supposed to support each other. My dad said that when a person comes first in the class, his job should be to teach the person that came last, and be graded based on how well he\'s able to teach the other person. That is community building.” **Blood** Made: “This song expresses the euphoria of independence, and trying to figure out how we managed to arrive at this point. The kind of blood I speak of is the kind of blood that \[was shed\] during the #EndSARS movement. Innocent people came \[under fire\], simply for expressing their right to not want to be killed by law enforcement. I was inspired by a speech by my dad. He was singing in Paris, and he said, ‘I know you\'re happy I\'m in Paris. But respect what I\'m doing in Paris. You have to know what I\'ve come to Paris to do.’ I thought that was so powerful, because we mustn\'t forget the message, no matter how much we might enjoy the music.”

Since the release of their collaborative 2005 LP *Superwolf*, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) have remained close, to such a degree that writing together again felt almost inevitable. “Honestly,” Sweeney tells Apple Music, “it was just a matter of timing. It was always clear that we were down to make another record. But once we committed, we committed.” That was in 2016, and after they began putting songs together in “fits and spurts,” Oldham says, a recording session with Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar for another project saw *Superwolf*’s long-awaited sequel finally begin to take shape. “We were sitting on a powder keg and Mdou gave off sparks,” Oldham adds. “It just kept growing from there.” Recorded alongside personal hero and legendary Nashville studio engineer David Ferguson (Johnny Cash, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson), *Superwolves* proves that the chemistry between the two has only deepened over time. As has been their process, Oldham—moved by the recent birth of his daughter and loss of his mother to Alzheimer’s—would send lyrics to Sweeney, who would respond with his guitar. “Will’s voice can fly,” says Sweeney, who fronted ’90s indie outfits Skunk and Chavez before becoming an in-demand session player. “So it’s a combination of writing melodies but also having these guitar parts that are as interesting as his voice is. Guitar parts that are like, ‘Wow, what the hell just happened? That went down really easily, but I know that I just took in a lot of information.’” Much of its magic can be ascribed to the ways in which they’ve continued to learn to communicate over time, as friends and collaborators. “When me and Will first started playing together, it was kind of thrilling, because I really had no fucking idea what to do,” Sweeney says. “I\'d never really played this kind of music before, and if it was like walking into a dark, exciting room 20 years ago, now it\'s like I could just keep on going, deeper and deeper and deeper. I’m more confident in where things are and where I could go.” Here, Sweeney and Oldham take us inside a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Make Worry for Me”** Will Oldham: “My relationship to a guitar is light years away from Matt\'s, so I\'m more witness: When Matt\'s in there working on a solo, he\'s on the luge and I\'m kind of the track, just keeping him from flying into outer space. I can see when Matt\'s in it. I\'m back in the booth and I can look through the glass and I can see this lost, intense, possessed expression on his face, his hands kind of shaking.” Matt Sweeney: “This is different than all the songs that I\'ve written with Will. I had all these goals that I wanted to fucking have happen in the song. One of them was it has to lead to this solo, and then the solo—because Will says, ‘I\'ve got to blow this horn’—has got to be a really good solo. I had it in my mind that I had to do a solo that was kind of like a horn solo anyway, which is an old Keith Richards trick.” **“Good to My Girls”** WO: “I had just acquired this big photography book that was about the red-light district in Mumbai. Each page is a big picture with a quote from somebody who\'s represented in one of the photographs. There was an image of the matron, the madam of a filthy whorehouse in Mumbai, and in one sentence, she said something that summed up what it took to do her job and to do her job well. I sort of went from there, put myself in the position of a South Asian whorehouse proprietress.” MS: “What\'s neat about words is that you don\'t really have to know exactly what it means at all. The more particular something is, the more universal it can be. It\'s a feeling, like this is what Will has in common with this person.” **“God Is Waiting”** WO: “I oftentimes think of the idea that ‘God’ is really just a word for everything—every action, every dynamic, every aspect of time. A number of years ago—maybe I was stoned or something—I thought, ‘God can suck my dick and does.’ Because anytime my dick is sucked, it is being sucked by God. God is the dick, God is the mouth, God is the ejaculation, God is the lust, God is the shame, God is everything about that. Everything. So it was really rewarding to be able to find a place for that to fit, and when Matt gave it that lift at the end, when we\'re going, ‘Hardcore,’ it feels so wonderful because it\'s not intended to be just a bumper-sticker line.” **“Hall of Death”** MS: “Mdou’s band is from Niger—except for the bass player, who lives down the street from me, this guy Mikey Coltun who I highly recommend. We went over to Mikey\'s and we jammed and Will sat in the corner doing melodies and writing lyrics. We all jumped in and came up with it inside of an hour, with the knowledge that we were going to a studio the next day and that we had to record something. It was really loud, so I could hear Will\'s melody but I didn\'t know what the words were, which was a difficult, unusual situation for how we work, because it usually starts with the words.” **“Shorty’s Ark”** WO: “I’m inordinately fond of list songs or lists within songs. This was just having a blast, talking about animals, laid out in a rhythmic fashion. It’s cool because it reminds me of ‘Rudy Foolish,’ from the first record, which is also animal-centric and has the same *Lawrence of Arabia* thing, camels walking across the desert. But for good reason, people who make music aren\'t given a lot of authority or responsibility, and this is sort of embracing that idea by being like, ‘Well, what would you do if you were president? You know, I\'d play with fucking animals.’” MS: “That\'s what the fuck I\'d do.” **“Watch What Happens”** MS: “‘God Is Waiting’ and ‘Watch What Happens’ I wrote on the same day in Jamaica. I’d never been to Jamaica before, and I\'d never gone to one of these really nice hotels where you don\'t have to leave. But I had a guitar, and I was so aware, like, ‘I am this fucking asshole who brought a guitar to Jamaica to write songs.’ But then I embraced that. I’m sitting on the porch, and I have these lyrics from Will, and I’m like, ‘I\'m going to fucking do this.’ There were some dudes working nearby, and I just remember thinking that I have to really sound good, to work hard and impress these guys who were just going to be ignoring me anyway because I’m a tourist. There was an audience who was stuck with me.’” WO: “It makes you understand why assholes go to Jamaica to write songs.” **“My Blue Suit”** WO: “Matt brought a melody to the table that’s going up, up, up, then down, and then up, up, up, and down, then up, up, up, and down, and it\'s tremendously fun to sing and tremendously rewarding to sing. But it\'s got none of the pomp, because it\'s just the two of us. It\'s definitely my favorite thing that is a love song that I\'ve ever written some or all of, just because of the way that it presents.” **“My Body Is My Own”** MS: “On the *Superwolf* record, there’s an unspoken dude—or maybe a spoken dude—but a sort of a character who is consistently going through some shit. And now it\'s as if that human shows up one more time, comes out of the water like, ‘All right, I\'m still here.’” WO: “Lyrically, this feels like it\'s the only song that\'s coming from that first record in kind of a direct way: There are attitudes and themes and ideas that aren\'t there in any of the other songs on this record. But with most of these songs, there’s a moment when we\'re in the studio working on them where I feel like, ‘You know what? I think this is the best song on the record.’ Not every song, but half of them are that way, and I definitely remember thinking—when I\'m inside of this song, when I\'m listening to this song—‘Yeah, there\'s nothing else this good on this record. I don\'t even know how we did this. I really have no idea.’”

In 2019, Maxïmo Park found themselves at a crossroads when founding member and keyboardist Lukas Wooller left the band to immigrate to Australia. “Another member of the gang has left,” frontman Paul Smith tells Apple Music. “We knew we would have a very different feel for the next record, and the dynamic between us had changed again. After the sadness of that, we started thinking this is a really good opportunity for us to do something different.” Seizing the opportunity to reinvent themselves, for their seventh LP, Smith and his bandmates recruited Grammy-winning Atlanta producer Ben Allen—who quickly bonded with the trio after visiting them in Newcastle to discuss the project before the pandemic hit. Staggered remote sessions on opposite sides of the Atlantic yielded a body of anthemic guitar music, turning more inward after 2017’s politically charged *Risk to Exist*. “You want to give people that pop thrill that hooks you in immediately,” Smith says. “Hopefully, there\'s something a little bit mysterious or emotional that has depth, too.” Read on for Smith\'s track-by-track guide. **Partly of My Making** “It\'s about priorities shifting. We try and wrong-foot people a little bit, and I think me singing about losing luminosity and getting older while this totally rocking, uplifting song comes on with all of these buoyant strings is a little bit of a joke. It\'s me saying, \'I\'ve lost it a bit,\' and then saying, \'Not really.\'” **Versions of You** “As a new dad, I wanted to try and write about my daughter in a positive way and about parenthood in a negative way—because there are lots of ups and downs. I look at lots of pictures and videos when I\'m away from home, as people do when they\'re away from their loved ones. And in some senses, these moments are very detached from who you are and what you\'re doing right now. And in the end, the only thing you can think of is how that person is right now, or the last time that you saw that person.” **Baby, Sleep** “The approach was to focus on sleep deprivation, though make it quite fun. I remember watching *Dazed and Confused* and NBA basketball, which I usually can\'t watch live. So yeah, all of those things kind of popped into the song, and the usual sort of TV shows where you have people telling you what they think about politics and you think, like, \'What are these buffoons doing in my front room?\'” **Placeholder** “It’s that idea of having one last opportunity and saying, ‘Let\'s have one more go, and we\'ll try and make the shot.’ I think that\'s one thing that is typical of Maxïmo Park, that kind of bittersweet quality.” **All of Me** “We actually collaborated with Ben on this one, and he sent us a demo which had this amazing keyboard riff. That allowed me, as a songwriter, to contrast the big emotions of the chorus with the more statement aspect of the song. You can make it into something more domestic and family-oriented, but it\'s this idea of ordinary life being exciting and romantic.” **Ardour (feat. Pauline Murray)** “We were out for a curry with Ben when he came over to Newcastle before the record was made, and Pauline Murray of Penetration and The Invisible Girls was there. We didn\'t ever think about asking her to sing with us, possibly because we\'re maybe a bit too reverent of her. She takes it somewhere else and does enhance the sort of punk vibe. But again, that idea of domestic life being quite hard, Pauline\'s got two kids and has definitely felt those kind of feelings that are in the song. It just adds an emotional heft to the song, I think.” **Meeting Up** “It\'s looking back at a sort of former life and thinking, \'Am I still part of this?\' There\'s a few lyrics that cross over on this record. And on this one, it talks about the prefabricated buildings that are bound to outlive me. They were temporary housing, and they\'re still there. In our song \'Write This Down,\' it has the word \'prefabricated\' in it, because that song was about partially listening to Prefab Sprout, one of my favorite bands.” **Why Must a Building Burn?** “It\'s about empathy, as a lot of our music is. One of our old merchandise sellers, Nick, was involved in the Bataclan tragedy and was killed. I saw his photograph on the news in our country, and I couldn\'t quite believe what I was seeing. These are human people, they\'re not just statistics and names and demographics; they\'re people who meant something. It connected with the idea of what do I want to do with my life, and how do I want to remember people. It became a tribute to living life and commemorating somebody that you love.” **I Don’t Know What I’m Doing** “When Duncan \[Lloyd, Maxïmo Park guitarist\] sends me a song, I just try and tap into the atmosphere of what he\'s doing. This was one of those songs where I just sang at the top of my voice, and at the end of the song I\'m almost barking like a dog. I sent them all through to Ben in Atlanta and said, \'Do what you want with them.\' The song retains that kind of vitality and first-takeness, probably because I can\'t actually do it more than two or three times without my voice disappearing entirely.” **The Acid Remark** “The title reminded me of some sort of short story, and so I tried to go with that for the rest of the song. I felt like I wanted to leave it fairly mysterious, but also give people a sense of it being a romantic, perhaps more youthful song. My own domestic life is quite settled, and I was using my own errant youth as a sort of springboard for this one.” **Feelings I’m Supposed to Feel** “Now that I\'ve had a child, I want to be well and I want to see as much of her life as possible and be there for her. People do try and say that by 40 you should be settled and have your own house, or by 20 you should be at university. From whatever background you\'re from, you\'ll have these kind of societal norms that you\'re supposed to subscribe to. And I find that quite oppressive, really. I\'ve always tried to disengage myself from them, and yet I live a normal life. I\'m subject to all of those different pressures everybody else is.” **Child of the Flatlands** “It\'s a song about childhood and how much I cherish those places on the outskirts of town where things don\'t quite fit together, and nature has made a bit of a comeback and taken over and reclaimed its former territory. We plucked the line \'nature always wins\' from this song to represent the album, because we felt that it does refer to the natural world and how we\'re at nature\'s mercy a lot of the time—whether it\'s California wildfires and big freezes in Texas or earthquakes in Mexico. Climate change and all of those things are very real. Sometimes, we just have to accept that we\'re the smaller guy in this fight.”

With their seventh album, Swedish death metal masters At The Gates have delivered a finely crafted concept album about pessimism. “I guess I had an amateur view of pessimism, as most of us do,” vocalist and lyricist Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg tells Apple Music. “I thought it was just the ‘glass is half empty’ kind of thing.” Some initial research led him back to American author Thomas Ligotti, whose horror fiction Lindberg had read while working on his 2017 side project The Lurking Fear. Then At The Gates guitarist Martin Larsson recommended Ligotti’s nonfiction. “It’s basically an introduction to pessimism,” Lindberg says. “I got about halfway through and realized that this worldview is very death metal.” The result is *The Nightmare of Being*, a ripping and majestic death metal album influenced by the writings of Ligotti, Emil Cioran, Peter Zapffe, and contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker, whose ideas surfaced in the first season of HBO’s *True Detective*. Below, Lindberg takes us through each track on *The Nightmare of Being*. **“Spectre of Extinction”** “Since \[1995’s\] *Slaughter of the Soul*, we’ve written almost every track to fit the sequence and flow of the record. So ‘Spectre of Extinction’ was really written as an opener with the classic metal intro thing—acoustic guitar, big Judas Priest chord swinging out, and then At The Gates after that. The middle part was written specifically for Andy LaRocque to play a solo. I call it the Death part because it really sounds like *Human* by Death. Lyrically, it’s basically the introduction to the idea that we’re the only species conscious of our own mortality.” **“The Paradox”** “This is the only one that was not written for this place in the sequence. It was written very early on in the songwriting process, and it turned out to be this weird death metal song, but it has a lot of the classic Mercyful Fate vibes to it—very melodic at certain points. We had it hidden later in the album, but then \[mixing engineer\] Jens Bogren said, ‘This is a monster. This has to be the second or third track, guys.’ And then Andy LaRocque and \[engineer\] Per Stålberg said the same thing, so we put it at number two. It’s a little bit of a rager in that sense.” **“The Nightmare of Being”** “I’ve done this on a few records now, where the title track is the whole concept of the album in one song, basically. This has a line about the ‘parasites of the subconscious’ which I really like—even if we are aware of our mortality, we’ve got to have a defense mechanism to keep us sane. Our subconscious is always tricking us because all this pain and suffering is too much to take in. So the ‘nightmare of being’ is basically the pain of existence. It’s a heavy, slow song with lots of acoustic parts, and the end is almost like a breakdown—we never wrote something that heavy before.” **“Garden of Cyrus”** “This is one of the curveballs of the record. I think the big challenge of this album for us was to build upon what we started on *At War With Reality* and *To Drink From the Night Itself*—the orchestration, different arrangements—just seeing how far we could take that without losing what is At The Gates. This one has the dreaded saxophone, so my hope is that someone listens and recognizes At The Gates, even if it sounds like a Goblin or King Crimson song in a way.” **“Touched by the White Hands of Death”** “Again, it’s about the instrumentation. This was really written to come after ‘Garden of Cyrus’ with a really slow build by a low flute. If you were to play that on electric guitar, it wouldn’t have the same emotional impact, because every instrument has its own voice and emotional tone. But then it turns into a classic At The Gates thrasher in a way. Lyrically, it connects to the opening track because it’s about the knowledge of mortality again, and this song is about those defense mechanisms being attacked.” **“The Fall Into Time”** “If you get the vinyl, this would be the start of side B. It’s really heavy, with a slow build and almost like a free-form prog part in the middle. It reminds me of the more epic songs we’ve had before, like ‘Neverwhere’ from the first album or ‘Primal Breath’—like a triumphant, majestic kind of piece. Lyrically, it connects to Cioran’s ideas about the fall into time, the whole Adam and Eve thing with the apple of knowledge, which connects with his pessimist philosophy.” **“Cult of Salvation”** “This one is based more directly on the defense mechanisms which I talked about before. The first person to talk about this was a Norwegian philosopher called Zapffe. He talks about religions, states, and worldviews as distractions, and about trying to live your life aware that you have these defense mechanisms. For example, we create music as an escape from the everyday struggle. But as long as I’m aware that I’m using it as a defense mechanism, then I can actually live my life a bit more fully and understand why I work the way I work. I love the middle part here—an homage almost to Goblin.” **“The Abstract Enthroned”** “I think this is the one that changed places with the ‘The Paradox,’ actually. It was a latecomer to the record, with a big orchestral part in the end and a great guitar solo. This one is a little bit more like pure death metal. You can almost hear the Morbid Angel in parts of the verses. It’s the only really aggressive song on the record. It deals with religion and how we enthrone the abstract, basically putting blinders on ourselves to be able to cope with life. I unintentionally put the word ‘virus’ in there somewhere. That’s the only pandemic reference there is.” **“Cosmic Pessimism”** “Musically, we really wanted to do something different here. We wanted a monotonous, almost oppressive musical landscape, similar to some of the krautrock bands like Neu! or Tangerine Dream. I had read three books by one of the current writers about pessimism, Eugene Thacker, and then I stumbled upon his personal email. I sent him a really long email explaining the concept of the record and dared to ask if he would want to participate in some way. He allowed me to use some passages from his book *Cosmic Pessimism* in the lyrics, which I did as a spoken-word part.” **“Eternal Winter of Reason”** “This was written specifically as a closer. I feel it’s the most emotional song on the record. \[Bassist\] Jonas \[Björler\] really wanted to try something else, too—if you notice, only the chorus riff returns. All the other riffs just build and build. I think there’s eight riffs or something, but they never come back. Lyrically, I tried to describe the emotional impact that this concept had on me as a person. There are some really strong, melancholic riffs, so I couldn’t do anything else but give in emotionally. So it’s like closure: What did I learn emotionally from this record?”

“I think we approach releasing music like one would approach dating someone,” The Marías frontwoman María Zardoya tells Apple Music about wanting to take it slow with their debut LP. “At the beginning of a relationship, you don\'t want to throw all your cards out there. You don\'t want to give away too much of yourself until you get to know the person.” If the double-volume *Superclean* EPs allowed the LA-based bilingual band to give us a first taste of their lush indie pop, then *CINEMA* expands on their vision with a new set of influences and experiences. Recorded in fits and starts before and during the 2020 quarantine, the album flows with a clear sense of cohesion—like watching a film where, in Zardoya\'s own words, “each song is its own individual scene in its own individual world.” Zardoya also believes her relationship with her partner and bandmate, producer/multi-instrumentalist Josh Conway, strengthens their songwriting. “Our relationship, and our love, is very karmic,” she says. “I think we complement each other in the best ways, and we\'re always pretty much on the same page about the songs and about the creative end. And if we\'re not, we embrace those differences.” Here, Zardoya and Conway take us on a cinematic journey, track by track. **“Just a Feeling”** María Zardoya: “When we came up with the title and the concept of the album, which ties back to our roots of making music together, we knew that we wanted lots of lush string arrangements. And in some of our favorite movies, you can see this motif throughout where they use the same melody, but make different arrangements of it. I just love it so much. During quarantine, we became obsessed with the soundtrack for this ’60s Italian movie called *Amore mio aiutami*. Throughout its soundtrack, there’s this theme that\'s mainly always strings, but also other instruments as well. We heard how lush one of the tracks was on that soundtrack, and that\'s how we wanted it to feel to set the tone for the album as a whole.” **“Calling U Back”** Josh Conway: “‘Calling U Back’ was the first one on *CINEMA* that, once the first idea was written, we were like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got an album coming.’” MZ: “The bark you hear in the beginning is our dog Lucy. You get this really beautiful lush string arrangement. And then, right after, you get this in-your-face dog bark followed by an in-your-face chorus hook. That was definitely very intentional. We wanted to shock the listener in a sense.” **“Hush”** MZ: “In terms of the song’s overall message, there\'s always someone with something to say about what you\'re doing or how you\'re living your life. And this was a song where it was basically telling them to just shut the fuck up and hush. It\'s like, ‘Okay, you\'ve got all these opinions, I\'m going to write a revenge song for you.’ It also has a futuristic sort of feel to it, and so we definitely leaned into that with the visuals for it as well.” **“All I Really Want Is You”** MZ: “This song was written during quarantine while we were putting the finishing touches to the album, working day in and day out on the videos and editing them at 1 or 2:00 in the morning. There was a lot going on during the time that this song was written, so we wanted to go back in time to a month or two prior where Josh and I decided to go on a little LSD journey throughout our neighborhood. We couldn\'t leave or travel in a sense—so we decided to go on a mental trip or a mental journey. We were tripping, just enjoying nature and the stars at night.” **“Hable con Ella”** MZ: “*Hable Con Ella*, or *Talk to Her*, is my all-time favorite film by Pedro Almodóvar. At this point, I think it\'s common knowledge, because he just inspires me so much and I want the world to know about him. There\'s a particular scene in the movie where Caetano Veloso is singing \'Cucurrucucú paloma.\' Obviously, that moment can never be recreated by anybody, but we wanted to recreate the feeling of that beautiful moment with the layered trumpets and this sort of mystic melody.” **“Little by Little”** MZ: “It\'s a classic Marías love song about self-reflection in a relationship and knowing that you need to change things about yourself, but not putting the pressure on yourself to change everything at once. I think it\'s just taking things slow, not putting so much pressure on yourself all at once.” **“Heavy”** JC: “We do this game sometimes where I\'ll pull up some good pictures online, from Pinterest, maybe, and I\'ll show them to María and tell her to sing a melody or anything that comes to mind when she sees it. I pulled up the picture of a woman in a desert, I believe. And María says, ‘I\'m heavy, I\'m nice-eyed.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, here we go.’ And within minutes, we had the verse and the chorus there. This one’s more about wanting to be alone and not wanting to deal with anyone or anything at all. Anyone knocking at your door, you\'re just like, ‘Just go away, let me be alone here.’” **“Un Millón”** MZ: “We approached ‘Un Millón’ like, ‘What would it sound like if The Marías made a reggaetón-inspired song?’ I grew up listening to reggaetón. In my first job ever, at 15, all I wanted to do was save enough money to go to reggaetón concerts with my brother in the VIP section. I ended up saving enough money for Don Omar and Daddy Yankee concerts. It was a huge part of my life and it’s in my blood. We had never made a reggaetón-inspired song, so we were like, ‘Let\'s just try it.’ ‘Un Millón’ happened, and then everybody wanted it on the album.” **“Spin Me Around”** MZ: “It’s definitely our psychedelic ‘what would we listen to while on acid’ song. It’s got that trippiness and waviness that we needed, because psychedelics is a huge part of our life. And we wanted our fans to experience how we feel on psychedelics.” JC: “I think it was the last song written for the album. I personally felt like it needed something a little more open and lighthearted with an indie-rock-type vibe as far as production goes. I\'m stoked that it made it onto the album, because I feel like without it, the album feels a little synth-heavy and very electronic in certain ways. It kind of took those fears of mine away.” **“The Mice Inside This Room”** MZ: “It\'s our most abstract song on the album. Conceptually, it\'s sort of about paranoia. Sometimes, even to this day, I can\'t fall asleep by myself if I don\'t have a light on or hear white noise. I hear one thing and my mind just races. Any little sound could be this mouse inside my room that\'s preventing me from sleeping and from my sanity. It could also be symbolic in how there\'s internal voices, and internal and external chatter, that get in the way from you being completely calm and being able to think clearly.” JC: “It\'s definitely our most Radiohead-inspired song. I think we\'re both very aware of that. Luckily, we didn\'t infringe on anything on it.” **“To Say Hello”** JC: “It was another late one to the album party. María probably spent a good hour and a half recording the vocals to it. I vividly remember there was a moment, about 30 minutes in, when she’s saying the entire first verse—with lyrics and a pre-chorus—and I just remember thinking, ‘This is the song right here.’ After she was done riffing, we went back and I was like, ‘Yo, did you realize that you sang the entire first verse and chorus of this song?’” MZ: “A lot of times when we riff, it\'s subconscious thoughts that need to be released. And I think this one was a subconscious release of me making the shift in moving to LA and leaving my life in Atlanta behind. So when the chorus says, ‘I belong in here,’ it\'s ‘I belong here in LA.’ This is my life, and sometimes I can call you and say hi, but I belong here in LA. It\'s kind of the duality of cities and moving.” **“Fog as a Bullet”** MZ: “This one was written at the start of 2020. I remember sitting in our apartment on a Friday. It was really foggy out on the hills. I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful. I just love when it\'s foggy in LA.’ And just how inspiring that was. And then, two days later, Kobe Bryant and his daughter passed away on the helicopter because of the lack of visibility due to that same fog. I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow, something that, just two days ago, I found so beautiful can cause so much destruction.’ I was just feeling the pain of the city and feeling sad, of being in LA and of him being such an iconic figure.” **“Talk to Her”** JC: “One night, María was reading some poetry from her little tour diary. She was reading it and all the guys in the band were there. It was about being on tour. We were all totally taken aback by it because none of us had ever heard that before.” MZ: “It was just my tour notebook, where I would write random thoughts on. I think we all share very difficult moments on that particular tour. You get to see inside our minds during that time, because I don\'t know if a lot of people know how difficult touring is for, I think, most artists. We didn\'t have a lot of money for things.” JC: “There\'s so many ups and downs. There\'s not really any middle ground. It\'s either, as Eddie \[Edward James, The Marías keyboardist\] says, ‘peaks and pits.’ The line towards the end where it says to don’t stop giving up is restorative too. It’s a call and response, like a train of thought that tells you to not stop and that it’ll be fine.”

It’s hard to know what to make of the steady stream of releases to flow from Prince’s legendary vaults. On one hand, even a casual fan can marvel at the sheer scope of his output, and how he would regularly cast aside entire albums’ worth of songs that would be career highlights for any other artist. On the other hand, he was a meticulous artist with impossibly exacting standards that these songs didn’t meet for whatever now-unknowable reasons, so what does it mean to listen to them without his blessing? *Welcome 2 America* does not offer any immediate clues as to its pariah status. Recorded in 2010 with New Power Generation, these are fully realized funk, R&B, and rock songs, often sharp and lyrically prescient—nothing necessarily revelatory or adventurous by the measure of Prince’s own formidable canon, but far from anyone’s idea of detritus. “Yes” is a rowdy rave-up, while Prince pays tribute to fellow Minneapolis lifers with a perhaps unlikely cover of Soul Asylum’s 2006 “Stand Up and B Strong.”