Rock Sound's Top 50 Albums Of 2023

The third album from the masked, anonymous Brits of Sleep Token is also the third in a conceptual trilogy that began with their 2019 debut, *Sundowning*. Introduced with the stirring and dramatic leadoff single “Chokehold,” *Take Me Back to Eden* is another genre-defying exploration of music’s outer limits, incorporating elements of techno and tech-metal alongside R&B, post-rock, and pop—often in the same song. “Vore” spins out in Meshuggah djent-isms before swelling with the kind of strings that recall a battle scene from *Game of Thrones*. “Ascensionism” is an inventive and often bizarre mix of piano ballad, gospel, and ultra-modern metal. Closer “Euclid” sounds like a Lana Del Rey tune performed by an R&B singer and a chorus of aliens. Along the way, there are love songs (“The Apparition”), suicide ballads (“Are You Really Okay?”), and songs about loss (the title track). As always, mastermind Vessel’s vocals soar over the proceedings, offering lyrical mysteries in service to the nocturnal muse he calls Sleep. It’s as bewildering as it is impressive.

If the combination of extravagant music and world-weary lyrics on Fall Out Boy’s eighth album sounds appropriate to the current queasy moment, there\'s a good reason for that. *So Much (For) Stardust* was conceived in the spirit of 2008\'s *Folie à Deux*, one of the most ornate and possibly divisive entries in the band\'s catalog. “There was a feeling that I kind of wanted to get,” Patrick Stump tells Apple Music. “I don\'t want it to sound anything like that record, but I wanted to get back to this feeling that we had when we were making it, which was ‘I don\'t know how much longer this\'ll last.’” *So Much (For) Stardust*, appropriately, captures Fall Out Boy going for broke, whether on the speedy opener “Love From the Other Side” (of the apocalypse) or the meditation “Heaven, Iowa,” which has a blow-off-the-roof chorus that gives its verses added emotional weight. Bassist and songwriter Pete Wentz\'s lyrics are drolly on point, with quotable one-liners like “Every lover\'s got a little dagger in their hand” (on “Love From the Other Side”) and “One day every candle\'s gotta run out of wax/One day no one will remember me when they look back” (on “Flu Game”) scattered throughout. At times, though, they have a tenderness to them that belies the nearly two decades he\'s spent in the spotlight, as well as his elder-statesman status. “I\'m my dad\'s age when I thought he had it all figured out, and my parents are starting to look like my grandparents, and my kids are the age that I was,” Wentz says. “And this, I guess, is how the world goes on.” These thoughts reminded Wentz of a speech Ethan Hawke gives in the 1994 slacker comedy *Reality Bites*, which is sampled at the record\'s midpoint, “The Pink Seashell.” “His dad gave him a pink seashell and went, ‘There, this has all the answers in the universe.’ And he goes, ‘I guess there are no answers,’” says Wentz. “There\'s the idea that nothing matters—and that was a weird message for me. I was like, ‘I don\'t think we can bake that into the whole record.’” Instead he channeled the 1989 baseball fantasia *Field of Dreams*, in which Kevin Costner\'s character is guided by the mantra “if you build it, they will come.” “He went out and built the field in the grass because he was doing a crazy thing,” said Wentz. “We all should be doing stuff like that.”

blink-182’s ninth album—and first in 12 years with guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge in the lineup—is far from a self-satisfied victory lap. Even after all these years, the band’s irrepressible cheekiness animates their insouciant riffs, whirlwind drums, and yelped vocals. They may be elder statesmen of punk rock at this point, but they’re still kicking against anyone who might get in their way. The reunion of DeLonge with bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker (who produced *ONE MORE TIME...*) grew out of the members dropping their past differences in the wake of Hoppus’ cancer diagnosis. “I feel like there’s a real sense of brotherhood with us,” DeLonge told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe during a full-band interview. “Like any brothers, you have your little spats over the years, and you grow apart. You come back together. You’ve always got a foundation, you’re connected. You’re still inseparable energetically.” That connection is apparent throughout *ONE MORE TIME...*, which Barker calls “very collaborative.” It calls back to blink’s past at its outset, opening with the speedy “ANTHEM PART 3”—the third part of a trilogy that dates back to the band’s *Enema of the State* era, although this time out, things are more optimistic than the angst-filled first two installments: “If I fall, on some nails/If I win or set sail/I won’t fail, I won’t fail,” DeLonge wails as the song comes crashing to an end. *ONE MORE TIME...* has other moments of introspection: The title track is a very blink-182 take on a power ballad, with DeLonge and Hoppus musing about life being too short to not get over past differences. The anthemic “WHEN WE WERE YOUNG” turns the old phrase about youth being wasted on the young into fuel for one last trip to the mosh pit and closing track “CHILDHOOD” pivots on the always pertinent question, “What’s going on with me?” Not that *ONE MORE TIME...* is exclusively built on self-affirmations and serious business. “DANCE WITH ME” opens with a gag about self-pleasure before jumping off into a peppy chronicle of lust, while the bouncy “EDGING” channels love-’em-leave-’em brashness into a giddy power-pop jam. The brief interlude “TURN THIS OFF!” manages to channel gags about bad sex and old scolds into 23 seconds of blissful riffing. *ONE MORE TIME...* represents a new era of blink-182, although the most important aspect of the music Barker, DeLonge, and Hoppus make remains the same: “Every single time that we’ve just put our heads down and done our own thing,” said Hoppus, “and write music that the three of us love, that’s important to us—it has served us well.”

With their first album since 2016, Avenged Sevenfold takes an unexpected turn into existentialism. Written over a span of four years that included the pandemic, *Life Is But a Dream…* was inspired by the philosophy and writings of French author and Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus. The hypnotic lead single “Nobody” sets a reflective and pensive tone with orchestral strings as singer M. Shadows delivers snaky, overlapping vocal lines. Follow-up “We Love You” is an abrupt change of pace, with dissonant guitar bursts and a frenetic, Mr. Bungle-like arrangement that smashes dizzying old-school thrash into a slide guitar interlude. The entire album is all over the place—ragtime piano (title track), chamber music (part of “Game Over”), electro-pop (a few songs)—but for A7X, it’s a good place to be.

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

“We were done,” Trophy Eyes lead vocalist John Floreani tells Apple Music, referring to the pandemic lockdown that all but crippled the band’s morale and finances. “We were broken up. We told our agents and we told everybody: ‘That’s enough for us.’ But after this, we got back together, we were writing together, and our chemistry was just as good as ever. We all love each other so much.” Floreani labored for almost four years penning the evocative lyrics for *Suicide and Sunshine*, which was recorded in Thailand with longtime producer Shane Edwards. The title comes from the disarmingly sunny day that followed the suicide of a dear friend, it’s an album that explores the broader existential idea that we all thirst for life even though we know it must end—sometimes tragically. “The message behind it all is that negative and positive situations are as valuable as each other,” he says. “One day when you don’t have the chance to feel anything anymore, you’ll wish that you could feel something awful for just one last second. In life, they’re the same thing. We’re lucky to have any of it at all.” Read on for Floreani’s insights into each song on the album. **“Sydney”** “I’m from a little town called Mudgee in New South Wales. It’s tiny. Sydney was the first place I lived once I clawed my way out of there. I was just enamored. I’d go and people-watch, I’d write, I’d sit by the monuments and just breathe it in. I put ‘Sydney’ first because the album’s about life and how insignificant it is, *and* how beautiful it is. I wanted to start the story with the cosmic address of where it first takes place.” **“Life in Slow Motion”** “It’s my assessment of life and how humans navigate it. How small and insignificant everything is. How unlikely everything is, but how beautiful that makes everything. We’re all these weird little nervous systems in meat shells walking around and we communicate with each other. I think it *is* beautiful, and that’s why it’s written in that disassociated way: It’s me observing life without that ‘main character’ feeling. Just watching the world around you.” **“People Like You”** “I grew up really, really poor in a well-off mining and farming town. I lived in hand-me-downs. I had a pretty intense home life, so I had to learn to fight really early. It was rough at school as well. It’s a song for the ugly people, and I consider myself one of those—someone that doesn’t quite fit, bit rough around the edges.” **“My Inheritance”** “This carries on directly from my home life growing up. It’s about domestic abuse and having a rough time at home, being afraid of your father. It’s an intense song. It doesn’t really sound like it. It sounds like Kanye and LINKIN PARK wrote a chorus. Violence, emotional abuse, and psychological abuse: You inherit those things and you pass them on. That’s why it’s called ‘My Inheritance.’ It’s me talking to people I love or maybe future children: ‘Never wanted you to inherit my youth.’” **“Blue Eyed Boy”** “This is about a friend of mine who I’ve known almost from birth. We got in a lot of trouble together when we were kids. It got really out of hand by the time we were 16 and got into doing meth. While looking for inspiration for the album, I went back to my hometown and went to this guy’s house. He lives with his parents again now. That’s where the song starts. The first verse is my conversation with his family.” **“Runaway, Come Home”** “I kind of stole the vibe from a weird ambient song I’ve always liked. I was like, ‘That’s the idea behind this album.’ We went into this expecting it to be our last record. We’re a mid-level band and we’ve been working at this for 10 years. So we said, ‘Let’s do one last record and just do everything we’ve ever wanted. Forget what anybody wants to hear. Let’s just write something real that we’ll be 100 percent proud of when we’re done.’ Vocoder on a Trophy Eyes song? Fuck it. Let’s put it in.” **“Burden”** “It’s got a lot to do with my behavior. Just total and utter annihilation. Drinking and drugs. A couple of really close calls I’ve had at home. If I get really, really fucked up, sometimes I lie naked on the bathroom tiles because it’s cold and cools you down. It’s a huge cry for help without crying for help. You don’t ever want to ask or let anybody know that you’re having a bad time because that’s when you feel like a burden. That’s what kills people: ‘I don’t want to get in anybody’s way.’” **“Sean”** “This is named after a friend of mine who killed himself. The song isn’t about Sean or my feelings. It’s about what happened on the day, about going to the house where my friends were all sitting around grieving. Curtains drawn and people crying, the smell of straight liquor and smoking indoors. People just went, ‘Fuck it. There’s nothing worse than this.’ The music is almost dissonant. I wanted it to feel confusing. You don’t know when it’s going to end, and it feels cold.” **“What Hurts the Most”** “It’s about a friend I went to school with. We had all these big dreams about how to get out of our hometown. We were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s do this thing. Let’s get out of here and start a band. Let’s move to Newcastle. Let’s have a good life.’ I just packed up and was like, ‘Let’s go.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I can’t, I’ve got a job and stuff.’ So I joined Trophy Eyes in Newcastle and we drifted apart because I started touring immediately. I actually never saw him again.” **“Omw”** “The album needed this injection of energy. Deep down we’re a punk band. We needed a punk song. It’s about trying to be better for the people that you love, trying to grow and start anew. It’s got to do with my journey through therapy and my constant fuck-ups. It’s a self-reflective song about outgrowing the shitty person you once were.” **“Kill”** “‘Kill’ is about people who weaponize love. I was seeing someone, but in no way, shape, or form were we dating. This person was expecting a lot more of me, so I had to walk away. It didn’t work like that. This person went after my friends and my relationships, really weaponized what we had, and did their best in every way to hurt me. It’s a reflection of what I went through. She attacked me because I wouldn’t love her.” **“Sweet Soft Sound”** “I’m hopelessly in love with my girlfriend, Bianca. I’ve wanted to write her a song describing how I feel for a long time, but it’s impossible because the feelings…they’re outside of words. It started at home with a synth bell, a ‘boop.’ I kept doing that over and over, and out came this rhythm that gave me this memory of us in bed just talking. Bianca has, without sounding corny, saved my life. She’s shown me that I can be loved, that I’m a human being and I deserve to be here just as much as the next person.” **“Stay Here”** “It was evening, the sky was pink and blue, I had two bags of groceries in both hands, and the whole first verse came to me while I was standing on the curb. Sometimes, you’re in a lot of pain, when you’re down, you just fantasize: ‘Would it all go away if I just stepped onto the road?’ The cars are so close. You feel the cars in your clothes. That was an actual moment when I was standing there, and it’s about the conversation you have with yourself about *not* doing it.” **“Epilogue”** “This was our ‘Thank you, we love you and goodbye.’ ‘Epilogue’ is just a little timeline of the band, then our story, and eventually a thank you. We go through a lot of the different Trophy Eyes sounds in the song as well. Not to be confusing, but after getting back together and writing again, this actually won’t be our last album.”

No band could ever prepare for what the Foo Fighters went through after the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, but in a way, it’s hard to imagine a band that could handle it better. From the beginning, their music captured a sense of perseverance that felt superheroic without losing the workaday quality that made them so approachable and appealing. These were guys you could imagine clocking into the studio with lunchpails and thermoses in hand—a post-grunge AC/DC who grew into rock-pantheon standard-bearers, treating their art not as rarified personal expression but the potential for a universal good time. The mere existence of *But Here We Are*, arriving with relatively little fanfare a mere 15 months after Hawkins’ death, tells you what you need to know: Foo Fighters are a rock band, rock bands make records. That’s just what rock bands do. And while this steadiness has been key to Dave Grohl’s identity and longevity, there is a fire beneath it here that he surely would have preferred to find some other way. Grief presents here in every form—the shock of opening track “Rescued” (“Is this happening now?!”), the melancholy of “Show Me How” (on which Grohl duets with his daughter Violet), the anger of 10-minute centerpiece “The Teacher,” and the fragile acceptance of the almost slowcore finale “Rest.” “Under You” processes all the stages in defiantly jubilant style. And after more than 20 years as one of the most polished arena-rock bands in the world, they play with a rawness that borders on ugly. Just listen to the discord of “The Teacher” or the frayed vocals of the title track or the sweet-and-sour chorus of “Nothing at All,” which sound more like Hüsker Dü or Fugazi than “Learn to Fly.” The temptation is to suggest that trauma forced them back to basics. The reality is that they sound like a band with a lot of life behind them trying to pave the road ahead.

The day that Manchester band Hot Milk began work on their debut album, singer/guitarist Han Mee walked into the studio and immediately started crying. “I had a breakdown,” Mee tells Apple Music. “It was the pressure of it, like ‘I want it to be good and I don’t know if I can do it.’” Rather than be cowed, though, Mee and fellow singer/guitarist Jim Shaw channeled their fears and doubts into the music. “It became an actual diary entry, it became us and what we were going through at that time,” continues Mee. “That’s what music should be. Sometimes you just write to make yourself better.” Following three EPs and a string of exhilarating singles released since 2019, *A Call to the Void* takes in fierce metal riffing, explosive drops, and pummeling grooves alongside urgent beats, swaying synth-pop, and ’80s melodicism. It’s the sound of a forward-thinking rock band. Somewhere in the middle of the maelstrom are Mee and Shaw trying to make sense of early adulthood. “We’ve grown up a lot in four years with the experiences we’ve had, life moving around us, having to deal with loss for the first time,” says Shaw. “It’s the overwhelmingness of those questions,” adds Mee. “It’s where *A Call to the Void* came from as a notion, where, when you go through all those things, life in the trenches, it’s like there’s this overarching black hole. That’s what we wanted to encapsulate: the light and dark side of life, the reality of it all.” It’s all in there on Hot Milk’s debut album. Mee and Shaw guide us through it, track by track. **“WELCOME TO THE…”** Jim Shaw: “We always had the idea that we wanted to start the album with both our voices. It’s always been me and Han, that’s how it started, with our two voices. We wanted to introduce the album from both of us with this almost-hymn and a euphoric feel, like the church doors have opened and the choir is singing.” Han Mee: “Lyrically, it is an intention and a mission statement of what you’re about to hear. I think the fans will appreciate the grandiose sound of it. We’re about to enter the pearly white gates or maybe the spiky black gates of Hell. Who knows which one it is?” **“HORROR SHOW”** HM: “We’d been listening to a lot of The Prodigy, Pendulum vibes, and we love drum ’n’ bass, so that was sonically where we wanted this song to sit. It’s built to have this structure where you want it to get to that release. When it goes crazy, it works with the meaning of the song itself, which is me not being afraid to be the weirdo. I remember getting called a ‘horror show’ growing up and it’s leaning into that. This way of life that we’ve followed, this rock music identity, it gets in your DNA and it gets in your bloodstream and becomes your whole life. So, it’s like, ‘I might be a bit of a nightmare, might be a horror show, but fuck you.’” **“BLOODSTREAM”** HM: “It’s still a rock song, but it’s like a house or EDM track as well. We love putting everything together and we love that kind of music, it working as two genres married together. It was a fun song to write.” JS: “Me and Hannah \[Han\] have always loved house music. We’ve always gone to Creamfields, we’ve gone to The Warehouse Project \[Manchester’s annual season of club nights\]. The whole spectrum of electronic music is very much in our veins. We’ve always had in our head this scene of this dark and dirty club, like a \[Berlin nightclub\] Berghain kind of vibe.” **“PARTY ON MY DEATHBED”** HM: “This is quite nihilistic. A lot of people are like, ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ but it does because the point is that it’s supposed to be everything or nothing. It’s supposed to be darkness in a light place. It’s that whole feeling of, ‘I’m just going to keep doing this until the day I die.’ I’ve always said, ‘I’m going to try heroin on my deathbed. I’m going to get my son to inject it between my toes.’ It’s the funny thing I say to my friends, so it came from that.” JS: “It’s a ‘fuck it!’ song. It’s seizing life as it comes at you and trying to get the most out of it and saying, ‘I’ll be partying on my deathbed, I’ll be singing my way out all the way through.’” **“ALICE COOPER’S POOL HOUSE”** HM: “This was an idea I had while I was on mushrooms in America. I was watching a lot of music documentaries at the time, and a lot of them mentioned the same thing: how they always used to go back to Alice Cooper’s pool house for afters. I thought it’d be quite funny if I wrote a song about him telling you something at afters—you know how you get all deep and stuff at afters?—and it just blew your mind. It ended up getting to Alice Cooper himself and he ended up doing a skit on the end of it, which was insane. I always say it’s the mushroom trip that never ended.” **“ZONED OUT”** JS: “We’ve played this for maybe three years and it’s changed drastically every single time. When we wrote it, it was about how consumed we are with technology and social media. I can’t stand social media and it was the frustration of being like, ‘Unless it’s online, it didn’t even happen.’ It’s asking people basically to get their heads out of the phone and see the world.” **“OVER YOUR DEAD BODY”** HM: “There was a feeling I wanted to write about but I wasn’t sure how to convey it. Also, I think saying, ‘Over your dead body’ can be quite strong if you’re being serious. I’d been listening to and reading a lot of John Cooper Clarke poems. I love the way that he is so tongue-in-cheek and cheeky with it all. I was like, ‘That’s where the song has to be. Let’s go really cheeky in the lyrics and the verses and let’s just have a bassline and vocal and see where this song’s going to take us.’ It’s about the way that we talk about people that have done us wrong. At the time, I was pretty angry about the way that someone had done something, so it was kind of about them.” **“MIGRAINE”** JS: “This is probably my favorite track and it’s got no right to be because it’s basically a Frankenstein of three other songs plus another. We were in LA and \[blink-182’s\] Mark Hoppus hit us up and was like, ‘Do you want to try writing a song together?’ We were like, ‘Fuck, yeah.’ It started in his basement and we took it back and sewed it into stuff that we already had. From a sonic perspective, I really wanted something that started synth-driven and then moved into something super aggressive.” **“BREATHING UNDERWATER”** HM: “I feel like this song is the greatest encapsulation of my pain that I’ve ever managed to create. Even now, when I listen to it, it makes me upset because I’m still feeling like that. This song is probably the most important song we’ve ever written just for my own sanity and my own brain and the way that I managed to create the lyrical content and it flew out. It needed to be written. It’s never been hard for me to share, to talk about my emotions. I’m blessed and gifted, but at the same time, it’s not a very great thing for everybody all the time. It’s not hard for me to talk about my feelings, so I feel like it was like, ‘Of course Hannah’s written this.’” **“AMPHETAMINE” (feat. Julian Comeau & Loveless)** HM: “This is another social commentary song about the fact that you’re kept awake all night because of the stuff that happens in the world, and it’s just a bit of a mad place that we live in. This is a tongue-in-cheek thing about the amphetamine that’s built into the news, this notion that we’re controlled by fear.” JS: “Originally, this was the end of the album. We collected these 10 songs and the way that ended, we wanted to bookend the album the way we started it, so we got Julian Comeau \[TikTok star and one half of emo-pop duo Loveless\] involved and wanted this big vocal ending where all of us were singing different things and then all came together at the end with that big ending, the same way it starts.” **“FORGET ME NOT”** JS: “This is about the passing of my granddad through dementia. That was something I was dealing with right then and there and I wasn’t sure—I’m the complete opposite to Hannah, I’m not very good at expressing my emotions and telling people how I feel.” HM: “I had an idea of how he was feeling, so I would write lines and show them to him, and he would say yes or no. If he said yes, I’d go, ‘Why don’t you write the next one?’ just to prise it out of him.” JS: “We wanted to do something that didn’t really have any guitars or live drums, something that was different. I’m super happy how this song came out. It’s everything that I thought it would be and more.”

“When we started making this record and throughout a lot of it, I was feeling like life was trying to devour me.” That’s what Pierce the Veil vocalist/guitarist Vic Fuentes says about the San Diego post-hardcore band’s fifth album. “It was testing me, really seeing what I was made of. I had that feeling of being sort of trapped or stuck, or like something was eating me.” It’s a feeling that Fuentes and his bandmates—bassist Jaime Preciado and guitarist Tony Perry—know a lot of people can relate to after suffering through the pandemic. “I think this record was the thing that got us through all that personally—and also as a band,” he tells Apple Music. “The process was what brought us back into the light. A lot of it is about fighting your way back to feeling better again. Not just moving there calmly, but actually clawing your way, digging your way, scratching your way back to feeling like a human again.” All of which goes a long way toward explaining the album’s title. “The Jaws of Life is a machine that’s meant to save people’s lives, to pry them out of things,” he offers. Below, Fuentes comments on each song. **“Death of an Executioner”** “The visual of this song, to me, is a car that’s following you—like the video for ‘Karma Police’ by Radiohead. It’s got its headlights on your back, and it’s just kind of slowly creeping on you. To me, it represents social media and people expecting perfection out of you and always waiting for you to make a mistake so they can run you down and destroy you. I like the title ‘Death of an Executioner’ because it describes killing the person who’s trying to kill you.” **“Pass the Nirvana”** “Every time we’ve played this song live, I’ve dedicated it to all the youth in the crowd who didn’t get a graduation or a prom. It’s describing how the youth of America went through so much in such a small amount of time. I just feel like they’re going to be traumatized forever because of COVID and insurrection and all these school shootings. It’s just too much. ‘Pass the Nirvana’ is about trying to find a good feeling after all of that.” **“Even When I’m Not With You”** “This started with a text that my manager sent me. She wrote, ‘Even when I’m not with you, I’m still with you.’ I was going through a rough time, and she was consoling me with these beautiful words. It hit me so hard that I wrote it down, and it all just naturally fell together into a song about devotion and staying connected through love, even over long distances. I dedicated it to my wife, and it’s a reminder that we’re always connected no matter where I am in the world.” **“Emergency Contact”** “When you’re young and you go to the doctor, you always put down your mom or dad or guardian as your emergency contact. And then there’s this funny moment when you get older, and your emergency contact becomes your wife or your partner. God forbid something happens to me; my wife will be the one to help me. I got to record this one when I was staying up in Seattle at this amazing 100-year-old house owned by Mike \[Herrera\] from MxPx.” **“Flawless Execution”** “This one’s kind of hard to describe. I feel like it’s about people blurring the lines between love and sex and vice versa. It’s almost about when you’re OK with being used because you want to be close to the person so badly. You want love so badly that you’re actually OK with being used or abused, kind of like the Bill Withers song ‘Use Me.’ So, it’s about those extremes that we go to just to be validated. If you’re always desiring someone’s approval, it can go to some toxic places.” **“The Jaws of Life”** “It’s about trying to get released from life’s grip and finding your way. There’s a line in it where I say I’m having the time of my life rotting in the sun, inside the jaws of life. It’s trying to be OK with where you are and starting to feel happy again—I’m making my way, and I know that I can see some light. There’s a lot of ’90s influence in this song musically, which I’m super stoked on. The verse feels like Tripping Daisy or Superdrag—I was thinking about their song ‘Sucked Out’ a lot when I was writing this one.” **“Damn the Man, Save the Empire”** “I’ve been trying to use this title for years, but it’s never felt right until now. It’s a quote from one of my favorite movies, *Empire Records*. Lyrically, it’s about how no one can really know who you are until they’ve really spent some time with you. I feel that way sometimes when people follow our band on social media and think they have me pegged, but you’re seeing what I want you to see, not who I fully am. So, it’s just reminding people about that superficial experience.” **“Resilience”** “With this song, I had this vision of that classic scene in the movies when the hand pops out of the dirt after they’ve been buried alive, and the person starts pulling their body up to the surface. It’s like when you’re digging your way out of this hole, and your eyes finally see the sun and they adjust. Also, one of my most proud moments on this record is that we got to use a quote from *Dazed and Confused* to start the song. We actually had to have the actors approve that. It was such a win for the album.” **“Irrational Fears”** “This is an interlude that sets up the next song. It was inspired by that first scene in the movie *Garden State*, with Zach Braff, where he’s on a plane that’s going down and everyone is freaking out around him, but he’s perfectly calm. We wanted to set the scene with this British flight attendant being all chipper but saying really dark things. Jaime made the music, and then my friend who’s a voice actor recorded the voiceover in London. It was a fun challenge, and I’m really proud of how it came out.” **“Shared Trauma”** “The title kind of speaks for itself. I’ve always felt that shared trauma and going through a traumatic experience with somebody can be one of the strongest bonds in human existence. Knowing that you’ve both been through something together will always connect you in such a powerful way. I think that’s beautiful—it’s the good that can come out of the bad. Musically, it was very much a collaborative band effort that came out of this loopy analog beat that Jaime sent me. It was really fun to write.” **“So Far So Fake”** “This song was written in 2017, so we’ve had it for a long time. It was one of the only ones that made it from some of the first writing sessions we did before the pandemic. It’s about if you’ve ever been betrayed by somebody you felt was a friend, and the wound never really mended—where even an apology doesn’t feel like it’s enough. It feels like it can never really be resolved. So, it’s a bit angry, a bit sour, a bit difficult to think about. But I always want to write about things that are affecting my life.” **“12 Fractures” (feat. chloe moriondo)** “The song was called ‘12 Fractures’ before it became the 12th song on the album. We didn’t plan it like that. I’m glad it worked out that way, but it also makes things confusing. I’m actually looking at our vinyl right now to make sure it doesn’t just say ‘Fractures.’ But this one came from a deeply personal story about a friend of mine who went through a divorce. I watched two of my favorite people in the world just fall apart. When friends break apart like that, it’s like losing a family member. It’s super difficult, even as a bystander. It was cool to get Chloe on the song to bring the story to life. I’m a big fan of hers, and I think she did an amazing job.”

For Beartooth’s fifth album, lead vocalist and mastermind Caleb Shomo wanted to go in the opposite direction of 2021’s *Below*. Where that album is dark and depressing, *The Surface* is full of positivity. Where *Below*’s front cover is black and ominous, *The Surface*’s cover is bright pink and hopeful. The dramatic shift comes from Shomo’s decision to quit drinking and move from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles. The result is possibly the metalcore band’s poppiest album to date. “This album is a story of change,” Shomo tells Apple Music. “This album is a story of growth. At the end of the day, it’s about doing what it takes to be happy. That can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to me being happy is chasing what I love with every ounce of my being. This record is me manifesting that and speaking it into existence.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Surface”** “It’s me trying to describe the manic high I had when I first quit drinking alcohol. It truly felt like I had unlocked something that was going to change my entire life. I felt invincible in that moment.” **“Riptide”** “This is the first song I wrote for this album. I wrote it a week after I quit drinking and realized that I wanted to do something different with this record. ‘Riptide’ is really the mission statement of this whole album, and hopefully every album to come.” **“Doubt Me”** “It’s about when people doubt what you’re doing, doubt your vision, and don’t see the bigger picture that you see. Sometimes you have to just trust that you know what’s best for you, and that you need to do whatever it takes to be true to yourself and get done what you need to get done.” **“The Better Me”** “This is simply about making that change in your life that you know you need to make. I think everyone has those moments when you look in the mirror and know there’s something that could make us happier or healthier, whatever that may be. This song is about chasing that.” **“Might Love Myself”** “It’s about the first time I felt self-love. That’s something that was very unusual and confusing, but absolutely amazing. So I tried to just put it into words and turn it into a song.” **“Sunshine!”** “This is about me realizing that my seasonal depression is getting out of hand and I really need to make a change. I ended up moving to Los Angeles about seven or eight months after I wrote that song, and never looked back.” **“What’s Killing You”** “This is about dealing with loss. Throughout the process of this record, I went through a very significant loss in my life. It’s something that we all deal with in this world, so this song was just me trying to put those emotions into words.” **“Look the Other Way”** “It’s a song about speaking out into existence that you need help with something. There were a lot of things in my life that I was dealing with and hiding. They were killing me, and not good in the slightest. This song is about the moment that I told somebody that I want to change those things in my life for the first time.” **“What Are You Waiting For”** “It’s about doing whatever you gotta do to be the best version of yourself and not making excuses and just going for it. Sometimes the only way to make big changes in your life is to take a leap of faith and go for it.” **“My New Reality”** “This is another song about manifesting what you want out of life. For me, it’s understanding that I still have a whole life ahead of me that I can do anything I want to with—and I need to take advantage of that.” **“I Was Alive”** “This was inspired by the last conversation I had with my late grandfather. He talked about how he lived a life that he was happy with, and he was ready to go. He was one of the most amazing and inspiring people in my life, and this song is—as many of these songs are—me manifesting the best version of myself that I can possibly be for the rest of my life.”

For many rock bands, there comes a moment when they have to confront a particular question. It’s one that has often inspired dazzlingly inventive and progressive work. Occasionally though, it only brings shame and derision. For Southend-formed five-piece Nothing But Thieves, that question became too loud to ignore while they gathered ideas for their fourth LP. So they finally asked themselves, “Is it time to make a concept album?” Released in October 2020, NBT’s third album *Moral Panic* presented their most adventurous work to date—absorbing drum ’n’ bass, hip-hop, Balearic dance pop, and R&B into their sound. With the group unable to tour during the pandemic, their heads stayed with that record for longer than they normally might, and they eventually extended its universe the following summer with the *Moral Panic II* EP. They were keen to continue their sonic explorations on this follow-up but needed to ensure they were completely detached from *Moral Panic*. “A concept was almost like a tool to feel automatically fresh,” guitarist Joe Langridge-Brown tells Apple Music. “But it wasn’t lost on us that it’s kind of a cliché. ‘How do we do this and not make it too pastiche?’ was very much a daily conversation and consideration.” While starting to write songs for the record, Langridge-Brown pondered a few concepts, eventually settling on the idea of a city-sized members-only club. Here, the stories and characters within and outside its walls could reflect on the potential consequences of the way we live today. “The concept is pointless unless there is real-world meaning behind each of the songs,” he says. “*Moral Panic* felt like it was about the health of our society and what I was viewing on Twitter, the chaos of that. This album feels like it’s in the future—what the nth degree of \[that chaos\] is if things kept going. What might happen in this sort of dystopian, segregated, members-only city?” Read on as he guides us through that vision, track by track. **“Welcome to the DCC”** “This is the advertisement for this world we’d created. We were like, ‘Can this be a single, because it’s so conceptual?’ I think that was a lesson in giving fans and listeners more respect, as in, ‘People are going to understand that this is a metaphor.’ You haven’t always got to hold the listeners’ hands so tightly the whole way through a song and an album. As with a lot of the record, it’s a lot more sort of synth-based and widescreen, cinematic. That’s kind of how I hear a concept record, that sort of expanse—which really made sense with this city vibe. The riff after the intro changed massively in the studio. It had more of a Justice thing before, but then it turned into this Prince-style thing. With Conor \[Mason, singer\]’s vocal, as well, that was a big consideration. More ’80s-style stuff is what we’re referencing a lot.” **“Overcome”** “I’m a huge Tom Petty fan, so some of that definitely found its way into this song. I think I actually wrote about 80 different verses for this, like a stupid amount. What I found was that when the verse was getting almost too intricate, and you were trying to say too much, it was taking away rather than adding to the song. It felt like you really just wanted to curate this feeling of a road trip into the DCC—creating a world with the words rather than saying a load of things.” **“Tomorrow Is Closed”** “The first draft was written in 2019 maybe. We recorded it twice before and abandoned it. We went about recording in the wrong way. It was all a bit too soft, a bit polite. The unhinged nature of the song, it sounding a bit blown out and raucous, it’s part of the charm. It feels incredibly desperate, that song, and we had to record it in that way. Once we gathered some songs for the concept, it really welcomed itself into the world—with ‘the only piece of heaven I have ever had,’ feeling like there was this desperation, there was no choice but to get to the Dead Club City.” **“Keeping You Around”** “This has more of a hip-hop-leaning thing to it, which has formed in NBT quite recently—for *Moral Panic* and *Moral Panic II*. That’s maybe a hangover from there. There’s also a ‘chicken or egg’ thing with the lyric ‘I’m still a broken machine, babe.’ The song reminded us a little bit of ‘Soda’ on \[2017 album\] *Broken Machine*—the nature of Conor’s singing, and, thematically, it’s got a particles thing to it. I don’t know whether the lyrics came because of the way the song was sounding, or that we leaned into that sound because the lyric allowed us to do that. I like this sort of peek, just a bit of a cue, from old NBT.” **“City Haunts”** “I think this was the first time I had the beginnings of the city concept. That initial chorus idea, with Conor singing in that very Al Green, higher register, soul-y thing, was a reaction to other stuff we’ve been doing. Conor said before that he feels he’s done a lot of the big, belting rock thing. In another effort to try to keep this fresh, he’s always creating singing characters. We have a list of characters almost, like Prince, Al Green, or whoever, voices. When we’re the studio, it’s ‘Can you make it a bit more like this or more like this?’ I’d say this is a few new characters that Conor’s been trying on.” **“Do You Love Me Yet?”** “I think we really leaned into that disco thing. It’s got a Motown vibe in the chorus as well. Within the concept, this is the first introduction to a fictional band called The Zeros. I had this idea for one of the songs, which I later called ‘Talking to Myself,’ being about this lonely character who’s been chewed up by Dead Club City. I was thinking, ‘Well, what’s different about this character? Maybe he’d be part of a band.’ Finding their way to Dead Club City, they’re trying for this level of stardom and success. I really reveled in writing in character. Obviously, there’s real-world meaning behind all the songs and it gave me an excuse to talk about the music industry in general.” **“Members Only”** “This took a bit of a left turn in the studio. It kind of felt a little dull before we went in. I think that was one of the songs we were less sure about going into the recording process. And then there was a lot of work in the studio that kind of made it feel a little bit more modern—the feedback loop, using that on the drums, and leaning into more of a hip-hop nature so it didn’t feel too rock standard.” **“Green Eyes :: Siena”** “Normally, as a writer, I find it quite daunting writing love songs. I’ve actually avoided it a lot because there are just so many. But because it’s got this backdrop of Dead Club City, it made it feel very, very fresh to write. Before the album, I think this is just after the pandemic, I went to a writing course by Jay Rayner, the writer and food critic. He did a course on writing about the same subjects a million times and making it feel different. For a songwriter, that’s invaluable. When you’ve only got two verses and a chorus and a middle eight to write about love, or something else that’s been written about a million times before, it’s incredibly useful.” **“Foreign Language”** “I had that lyric for a while, ‘Well, it’s a foreign language to me, baby/But I love hearing you talk.’ Once I figured out the concept, I was like, ‘Oh, that just works so well as a love story between someone who felt they were in the club and someone who was outside.’ That sort of cross-borders love story was what I was trying to get at. Dom \[Craik, keyboardist and co-producer\] really buried himself away for a long time in the studio, getting all the synth textures perfect. There’s almost like an orchestra of synths going on, which sounds amazing. I really love the guitar sounds that happen after the first chorus. It’s got a very harmonized guitar solo. To me, it was kind of the order of the day—feels new and old at the same time. It kind of feels prog. And that was another conversation for the whole album: It kind of feels prog, it’s got those notes, but it also feels different.” **“Talking to Myself”** “This lives quite well with ‘Keeping You Around.’ They’ve both got that ‘The Macs: Mac Miller, Mac DeMarco’ sort of thing. I’d say it’s the same characters, the same band, as in ‘Do You Love Me Yet?’ It’s the fallout of that—this band have been chewed up by Dead Club City. It was pretty much a one-take thing for Conor. A lot of the time, he’ll do vocals and we’ll do a load of verses, then we’ll do load of choruses, and we’ll see what’s working better. But for that song, we were like, ‘Just give it one go the whole way through.’ I’m pretty sure nearly everything you hear is his first take. He absolutely smashed that.” **“Pop the Balloon”** “It’s an ending of sorts. It’s not a perfect ending. It feels very messy and noisy. And that’s really different for Nothing But Thieves to end an album that way. Normally, we’d end on quite a soft moment or, very purposefully, an emotional touch. This song felt almost like the start of a revolution or something. We wanted all the characters to be wrapped up into this big finale. I think it comes back home again as well. It comes back to ‘Welcome to the DCC’ with \[the lyric\] ‘Kill the Dead Club City.’”

With his first proper solo album since the dissolution of his former band, ex-HIM leader Ville Valo is testing his personal vision under the moniker VV. On *Neon Noir*, the Finnish vocalist and songwriter explores new facets of gothic rock by turning up his ’80s influences in tandem with moody David Lynch-isms and ’60s folk rock in an effort to, as he puts it, find the sweet spot between Depeche Mode and Black Sabbath. “After playing with HIM for a quarter century, it felt very daunting to call it a day,” he tells Apple Music. “It was such a huge part of my life. I really didn’t have any expectations about what would happen afterwards because I didn’t know if the inspiration would be there, or if I would just feel like I’d lost a limb. So, it took me a while to get inspired again.” After HIM split up in 2017 as one of the most commercially successful Finnish bands of all time, it took Valo over two years to pick up a guitar again. “I ended up producing and engineering and writing and doing everything by myself,” he explains. “I was stupid enough to think that that’s what a solo album’s supposed to be like. Some of it has to do with COVID because there was no chance to put a band together. But I’ve also always had a strange fascination with artists like Prince, who do everything by themselves. Because if you work completely in a solitary fashion, the vision is very undiluted. It doesn’t necessarily mean the result is better, but I think it’s more unique and special because you can hear who the artist really is.” Below, he details each track on *Neon Noir*. **“Echolocate Your Love”** “It was written during the darkest times of the pandemic. I’ve always been fascinated by bats and how they navigate using echolocation. I started thinking that maybe people should use the same at times—close your eyes and you can actually see and understand things better in the dark. And also, the classic line of ‘love is blind.’ In this case, you could interpret the darkness as being the pandemic. Let it wash you over because you’re going to be stronger afterwards.” **“Run Away From the Sun”** “That’s the first song I wrote for the album and the first song I wrote after HIM disbanded. So, it was a big deal for my self-confidence to be able to show myself that I can still pull it off and actually get a song that makes me tickle in just the right spots at the right time. I think the song is very ’80s—the whole album is pretty ’80s—but it’s quite anthemic. I was in a very bad place mentally and spiritually when I wrote it, and I couldn’t see a way out. So, I asked the one I love to join me in the darkness as opposed to trying to drag me out. It’s a love song.” **“Neon Noir”** “When I wrote this, I was still trying to find the right spot for me, which is somewhere in between Depeche Mode and Black Sabbath. The song has a very classic-rock feel to it with the guitars, but then the midsection has this shoegaze-y Cocteau Twins/Jesus and Mary Chain feel to it. I think I found a way to combine all that stuff within a single song and send as many mixed messages as I could for the listener. For me, the song represents the dance of life—all the good and bad that we go through in order to develop and grow as individuals.” **“Loveletting”** “It’s weird that this was the first single because it’s quite a departure. It does have similarities to my previous band, and you can recognize who’s singing, but it has a lot of folky influence to it. The verses of the song are very ’60s. I love Cat Stevens and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and all of that melancholy folk music of the time, and I was trying to bring some of that into the music, which is very new to me. It has a lot of ’80s dance-goth feel to it, too. That is very un-HIM.” **“The Foreverlost”** “That’s the second single, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s definitely the most gothic-rock song on the album. I was able to bring a lot of the musical perversions into the song that I wasn’t able to fulfill with HIM. The guys in HIM were more hard rockers, God bless them, but this time I didn’t have them holding me back. So, it’s very Sisters of Mercy, and it’s quite tongue in cheek as well because there’s a lyric about the ‘nyctophile’s Shangri-la,’ and that’s obviously Helsinki because it’s dark all the time here.” **“Baby Lacrimarium”** “‘Lacrimarium’ is a weird Latin word that I heard about from a friend. It’s what’s called a tear vessel, where back in the day people would weep and save their tears in a tiny jar. I just thought the idea was quite extraordinary. Lyrically speaking, I love combining good old ’50s or ’60s American, ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’ pop music with semi-poetic goth themes. Musically speaking, it’s the poppiest track on the album. It’s got a lot of jangly, clean guitars with the super-chorus \[effect\], like The Cure.” **“Salute the Sanguine”** “This is a fast rock track with a bit of The Cult in the guitars. The chorus is, ‘Go salute the sanguine, red in tooth and claw. It has to feel.’ It’s about the animalistic, instinctual aspect that is so important in life. To me, it’s not about ones and zeroes or social media. It’s about letting yourself go and letting the animal out—howling at the moon a bit. It’s probably the most HIM-like track on the album. It’s like a freight train, and it’s probably going to work great live.” **“In Trenodia”** “I was trying to think of a melancholy utopia. ‘Threnody’ means a sad song, usually a solitary song sung by one person, so I turned the idea of that into a world-building exercise. Trenodia is the land of the sad song, a place where I would feel at ease and at home. It’s a beautiful place where the sun is always setting, and the birds sing the most melancholy tunes. It has a bit of *Siamese Dream*-era Smashing Pumpkins guitars coming together with a sort of Type O Negative gothic pop. It’s one of the odder bits ’n’ bobs on the album.” **“Heartful of Ghosts”** “That’s my favorite of the album because it’s something very different. It has this weird lava lamp sort of feeling. It’s very ’60s and—rest in peace—Angelo Badalamenti, talking about *Twin Peaks* and all that stuff. I think the theme from *Twin Peaks* was such a big influence on all the musicians my age. You want to be able to create something that’s beautiful but ominous at the same time. ‘Heartful of Ghosts’ has this brooding sense of something terrible about to happen, and super-weird lyrics about tarot cards and a planchette, the thing you use with a Ouija board.” **“Saturnine Saturnalia”** “That’s the most Black Sabbath thing on the album. I’m a huge Black Sabbath geek. I grew up with that stuff, and they were one of the main idols for HIM. We were such fanatic fans when it came to Sabbath, and I think we still are. So, you have to have a couple of really big, monstrous, fuzzy guitar riffs on a rock album. I also grew up with Type O Negative and that sort of stuff in the early ’90s that incorporated a sense of the romantic and melancholy pop with the very Sabbath-y riffs, so that’s what I was aiming for here.” **“Zener Solitaire”** “Zener cards are the telepathy cards—the ones with the crosses, the circles, the waves. One person holds them to themselves, and the other person is trying to guess them. I thought the saddest thing in the world would be to play solitaire with Zener cards because that’s something you can’t really do by yourself. This is an instrumental track, kind of a Phil Spector production meeting up with Goblin, who did the music for the original *Suspiria*. It’s meant as an intro for the next song, ‘Vertigo Eyes.’” **“Vertigo Eyes”** “I didn’t purposefully set out to do an eight-plus-minute song, but that’s what happened. I was thinking of the dream sequences from David Lynch’s *Lost Highway*, those subliminal messages he keeps giving the viewers with the editing. There’re so many weird things. You know that semi-surreal feeling when you have a really high fever? You’re not sure what’s true and what’s not true. You’re not well, and you’re in this in-between state. That’s what I wanted to create with this song. Musically, it’s like psychedelic U2 coming together with Sisters of Mercy and then *Welcome to Sky Valley*-era Kyuss at the end.”

With his first proper solo album since the dissolution of his former band, ex-HIM leader Ville Valo is testing his personal vision under the moniker VV. On Neon Noir, the Finnish vocalist and songwriter explores new facets of gothic rock by turning up his '80s influences in tandem with moody David Lynch-isms and '60s folk rock in an effort to, as he puts it, find the sweet spot between Depeche Mode and Black Sabbath. "After playing with HIM for a quarter century, it felt very daunting to call it a day," he tells Apple Music. "It was such a huge part of my life. really didn't have any expectations about what would happen afterwards because I didn't know if the inspiration would be there, or if I would just feel like I'd lost a limb. So, it took me a while to get inspired again." After HIM split up in 2017 as one of the most commercially successful Finnish bands of all time, it took Valo over two years to pick up a guitar again. "I ended up producing and engineering and writing and doing everything by myself," he explains. "I was stupid enough to think that that's what a solo album's supposed to be like. Some of it has to do with COVID because there was no chance to put a band together. But I've also always had a strange fascination with artists like Prince, who do everything by themselves. Because if you work completely in a solitary fashion, the vision is very undiluted.

The Gaslight Anthem’s 2023 LP *History Books* serves as their first since 2014, and the band brings such ferocity to their return, it sounds as if they’re trying to wipe away a near-decade’s worth of cobwebs in a single riff, cymbal crash, and lyric. Somber but not sad, *History Books* recalls the urgency and triumph of the band’s sophomore effort and breakthrough, 2008’s *The \'59 Sound*. Singer Brian Fallon sounds reinvigorated and as tenacious as ever, yet also a bit wiser since the last time he and his band checked in. Opener “Spider Bites” shines with soaring guitar solos and a galloping drum groove. Fallon’s voice is awash in distortion, less desperate but no less passionate than he sounded as a young man 15 years prior to *History Books*. The Jersey-bred band still pays homage to their chief influence Bruce Springsteen on *History Books* (they even recorded a version of the title track with him), but the inspirations are more varied, less indebted to a particular time, place, and Boss. “Autumn” is a blues rock bar sing-along, and “Michigan, 1975” shows a restraint and tension reminiscent of alt-rock anthems that populated radio playlists when The Gaslight Anthem’s band members were still boys. Sort of like Faulkner once said, the past is never dead. It ain’t even the past.

“This record is pretty much saying, ‘You’ve got to keep moving forward and go through every day as it comes,’” Ahren Stringer tells Apple Music about The Amity Affliction’s eighth LP, *Not Without My Ghosts*. It’s objectively heavier than the Australian group has ever been—both musically and thematically. “You lose people on the way, you carry your grief, but you’ve just got to keep going and going. You’ve always got your ghosts, whatever that may be—grief, losing a friend, or addiction, mental health, all that stuff,” says Stringer, the band’s bassist and clean vocalist, of the album’s title and themes. “Joel \[Birch, vocalist\] comes up with the words, but sometimes he’ll hand me some lyrics and I’ll just be like, ‘This is pretty much exactly how I feel.’ I think he’s got a good way of telling his own story and people can connect with that in any way.” Read on as Stringer talks through each track on *Not Without My Ghosts*. **“Show Me Your God”** “This song is actually a metaphor for guns. There’s so much gun violence in America. I think something like 40 percent of gun deaths are suicides. \[In the lyrics\] ‘Show me your God, does he come with a clip?/Are his teeth made of steel?’ Joel’s talking about a gun. He’s just basically saying if he lived in America, with such easy access to guns, he would have shot himself in the head. I think a lot of people do that because it is so easy. You have a bad day, you’ve got a pistol in your bedside drawer. It doesn’t take much thought process and it’s just a bit too easy.” **“It’s Hell Down Here”** “This is my favorite song on the album. It’s very meaningful to me. It’s about one of our friends, Shane, who committed suicide. It’s a collective grieving song, I guess. Just telling them that dealing with their loss is very hard on Earth. Joel and I aren’t religious, but the sentiment is universal: ‘Is it heaven up there, because it’s hell down here.’ It’s cathartic in a way. We haven’t performed it live yet, but we’ve already done songs about friends who’ve passed. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard to sing them on stage—but it’s a good outlet for grief.” **“Fade Away”** “If you listen to sad music while you’re sad, it almost makes you happy. That’s where we come in. Joel was in a real dark place when he wrote this song. He basically writes poems and then gives them to me, and then I’ll put them to the music and kind of place the lyrics. So I’ll be like, ‘This is really fucking sad, I’ll put it to a really sad-sounding song.’ But it also works vice versa. You can have a happy-sounding song and really dark lyrics. We don’t really ever have any happy lyrics. Either way, it’s going to be a sad song!” **“Death and the Setting Sun” (feat. Andrew Neufeld)** “Neither myself or Joel could do what Andrew \[Neufeld, Comeback Kid vocalist\] did. You know how high that is? We’re not going to be able to play this one unless we’ve got Comeback Kid on tour, because no one can do that part. We realized we hadn’t really had any guests since *Severed Ties*, our first album. So we were like, ‘Let’s get some friends in.’ It makes it more interesting for a listener, I think, because you hear us over and over and over. Andrew’s voice is unreal. He’s one of the best of our genre, I think. Maybe even the greatest.” **“I See Dead People” (feat. Louie Knuxx)** “It’s definitely the heaviest song we’ve ever written. Dan \[Brown, guitarist\] had been listening to real heavy death metal and deathcore. He came to us with this song and everyone else was just like, ‘I think that’s a bit too heavy for us.’ And I was like, ‘No fucking way. That’s awesome.’ Joel had just written one single line and it went, ‘I see the ghosts of my friends.’ I also wanted to sample this Christian folk song and it sounded cool, but we were just like, ‘We can do better than that.’ Dan said, ‘Leave it with me.’ He went back to his studio at home and sampled \[rapper\] Louie Knuxx and gave it back to us. We were just like, ‘Hell yeah, that’s perfect.’” **“When It Rains It Pours” (feat. Landon Tewers)** “The Plot In You and their vocalist Landon \[Tewers\] are great friends of ours. I love his voice. Again, neither myself or Joel could really do what he does, so we got Landon in. Originally we were meant to get Jamey Jasta from Hatebreed in. He was keen to do it, and then all of a sudden he goes, ‘Oh, I’ve lost my voice from going on tour.’ That’s why this track has kind of like a Hatebreed-y breakdown. But I think Landon killed it.” **“The Big Sleep”** “I’m a big *Ren & Stimpy* fan, and in the \[pilot\] episode, Ren is trying to describe to Stimpy what death is and he’s like, ‘It’s the big sleep.’ Like, you know, getting put down is the big sleep. Joe \[Longobardi, drummer\] works overtime on this track. He’s getting better because we’re forcing him to play this shit and he keeps learning it, you know? He’s never been like a blast beat metal drummer and we’re just forcing him to do it. It’s very fun to play live. Well, for us. I don’t know about him.” **“Close to Me”** “When I heard this in this studio, I was like, ‘Why the fuck are there 27 tracks of this one girl just singing all different things?’ It’s over the top, but Dan and the engineer were having fun and seeing what they could do with it. There’s a lot of the same girl singing. She was working at the studio, interning or something. She did some more on the second-to-last track. It just called for it. This needed a hook, because that first part is really boring without a vocal. It feeds throughout the record, because we’ve got the ‘Ha, ah, ah’ in ‘Show Me Your God,’ and then we’ve got this part and then ‘God Voice.’ We’ve always had a bit of choir, like on ‘Pittsburgh’ \[from 2014’s *Let the Ocean Take Me*\].” **God Voice** “Yeah, that riff at the start is definitely new for us. My girlfriend Casey does the spoken word before the chorus. It’s hard to get clearance for stuff from movies, so sometimes we’ll just make it up and people will be like, ‘Oh, what’s that from?’ I’m like, ‘It’s not from anything.’ It’s meant to sound like a movie sample, because we were hardcore kids in 2003-04 when everyone was using movie samples and we’re just like, ‘We haven’t done that in ages. Let’s do that again.’” **Not Without My Ghosts (feat. phem)** “The whole record is so balls-to-the-wall. You need a palate cleanser after that many blast beats and breakdowns, so I think it’s nice to end with a soft soul. We’ve got so many dudes screaming their arse off and then we’ve got this pretty song. Our engineer said, ‘Could you be a little more pretty?’ We had a version of it with just me singing and we all agreed: We need a female feature on this song. Phem was the only one who said yes. We asked a bunch of other people: Snail Mail, because I was a big fan of her. She said no. And then we asked Courtney \[LaPlante, Spiritbox vocalist\] and she said no. I was like, ‘Do we stink or something? No one wants to work with us.’ Yeah, so thank you, phem.”

After parting ways with guitarist/clean vocalist and band co-founder Jason Cameron in 2021, Bury Tomorrow had some soul-searching to do. At first, they seriously considered dissolving the band. But ultimately, the British metalcore stars decided to carry on with two new members—keyboardist/clean vocalist Tom Prendergast and guitarist Ed Hartwell—in Cameron’s stead. To test the waters, they released two stand-alone singles in 2022: “Death (Ever Colder)” and “Life (Paradise Denied).” “They went down really, really well,” vocalist Dani Winter-Bates tells Apple Music. “You rarely get a chance to litmus test an album—essentially a sound and a feel—but we did, and we’ll probably do it again.” Bury Tomorrow’s appropriately titled seventh full-length, *The Seventh Sun*, picks up where those singles left off. “People have asked if there was more pressure on this album, but it almost feels like the pressure’s off somewhat,” Winter-Bates says. “We chose to continue in this band, and we chose to continue in a different way. That choice has given us a bit of freedom, and we’re super proud of how it turned out.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Seventh Sun”** “For human beings, the cycles are around the sun. For the band, this is our seventh time ’round, because each one of those suns is your album, essentially. And seven is quite a significant number, obviously, in lots of things. I usually fixate on the negative, like seven circles of hell or seven deadly sins. But for us, *The Seventh Sun* is about our journey, this next chapter and this next cycle. It’s a statement of intent: ‘We’re here, and we’re going as hard as we possibly can.’” **“Abandon Us”** “Lots of people connotate the title with our lineup change, but it’s not actually about that. This is about the fact that we, as humans, operate in a very negative and consumerist light. We take and we take and we take, and then we leave for dead. For me, the ethos of our band is about acting with kindness in all that we can do. The borders that we create, the issues that we create, the segregation that we create are all man-made. These aren’t concepts that exist in any other form, other than in mankind. For me, this song is about recognizing that and calling it out.” **“Begin Again”** “This is very much about renewal. On our last album, *Cannibal*, I wrote heavily about my own journey with mental health and my own experiences. It was very, very introspective—the most so of any record we\'d done. This song is recognizing that sometimes you have to go through that fire to be able to come out the other side. There’s a couple of really poignant lyrics in there about crawling when you can no longer walk. There’s always something you can do to step forward.” **“Forced Divide”** “In the studio, I contracted COVID, which is mental considering we were in an isolated studio in an old manor house. I had septic tonsillitis and COVID at the same time, which for a vocalist was not the best. And I still had ‘Forced Divide’ to record. The song is all about that rip and pull that we find when we have to cut off the dead weight that goes along sometimes with relationships. It’s a really hard thing to do, but sometimes you’ve got to trim the leaves for growth. And it’s a metalcore slammer. It’s as thrashy as you get from us.” **“Boltcutter”** “This is probably the most savage song on the record. It’s not like anything we’ve ever really written before. It’s nodding to the seventh-sun element of this togetherness, this being able to push through. It is as anti-hierarchical as you could probably get from me, a very anti-establishment song. It’s not necessarily that I’m fully anti-establishment; it’s just more so that, at this moment in time, in not just the UK but worldwide, there seems to be a need for a reset. So, again, there’s that renewal theme.” **“Wrath”** “This is a real heartstrings one, very emotional. Our guitarist Kris \[Dawson\], one of his friends lost their mum recently. He was going through the stages of grief that you go through, and Kris told me that he wanted a song about that. I lost my nan at the start of COVID, so I started pulling in that feeling. Some people think about what happens after death, and other people think about what happens right now. That all depends on whatever spirituality or faith people have—or don’t have. After you go through all the anxiety and anger, you come to that realization within grief that all you want to do is make that person proud.” **“Majesty”** “Before Tom joined the band, him and Kris had been writing together for years. They’ve grown up with each other, and they wrote this one in lockdown. I was listening to it on my own, and I loved it. So, when Tom joined, I was like, ‘I’ll be taking that song off your hands, thank you very much.’ Lyrically, it’s about this feeling of isolation and how we need to be together. They’re calling out to, I suppose, that love and togetherness that we had prior to the pandemic, and that hopefully we’ll gain once more.” **“Heretic” (feat. Loz Taylor)** “This is as pissed off as you probably get me as a vocalist. It’s a particularly violent song, and it has to do with living in chaos and understanding that we can use that to our advantage sometimes. For the middle bit, we got Loz Taylor; While She Sleeps are our boys and have been for years. And Loz has never done a guest vocal before. The whole of the song is call-and-response, and his vocals fit so perfectly with that feel. It’s a real contrast to my vocals.” **“Recovery?”** “Lyrically, this is a bit of a throwback to *Cannibal*. When I wrote that album, it was very much how I felt in that moment, talking about anxiety, depression, and OCD. ‘Recovery?’ is how I feel now. I have to accept the fact that, even though I’ve had a long-standing journey with my own mental health, I’m never going to recover. I’m never going to get rid of my anxiety or chronic depression. It’s just part of my life. I have this new understanding that it’s a long-term condition. And that’s nothing to be ashamed about.” **“Care”** “This was the first song that Kris and Tom sent, and they’d written it prior to Tom joining the band. It’s an expression about how the world is incredibly unkind, especially to those people that are drowning. We care more about how shiny our boat is than we do about chucking a life raft to someone else. And for good measure, we might as well chuck a load of rubbish on top of them. But this world is nothing without kindness. It’s pivotal to our survival.” **“The Carcass King” (feat. Cody Frost)** “Cody Frost is an unbelievable human being, just a force to be reckoned with. An artist in the truest sense, I think. The producer we were working with, Dan \[Weller\], is Cody’s producer as well. When he showed me her stuff, it was just like this unbelievable level of vocals. ‘The Carcass King’ is very heavy and very emotive, which is a blend we’ve always wanted but have been really scared of it sounding conceited. The song is very much about self-defamation, but I wanted it to be theatrical and poetic. And I think Cody really ramped that up. It’s something special.”

It might seem odd for a band from the UK to call themselves Empire State Bastard, but according to vocalist Simon Neil, it’s all about energy. “New York City inspired the very essence of this band, and I think the energy of New York suits us—we’re kind of eccentric, nonstop, 24-hour, a little bit of everything.” Musically, Empire State Bastard was born in the back of Biffy Clyro’s tour bus. Both Neil and guitarist Mike Vennart play in the Scottish alt-metal band (Neil also handles vocals) and would spend the drives between cities playing each other some of their heaviest and most avant-garde favorites. Mr. Bungle and Cardiacs took turns with Converge and the Melvins, forming a unified sensibility. “We’ve known each other for over two decades now, so I remember really trying to force Cardiacs and Mr. Bungle on Simon back in those days,” Vennart tells Apple Music. “Then it became, ‘This is the freakiest thing I’ve got—show me yours.’” The ultimate irony is that Empire State Bastard managed to coax Mr. Bungle’s drummer—and former Slayer legend—Dave Lombardo into their band. (“It’s almost too much for me to handle,” Vennart says.) Along with bassist Naomi Macleod (Bitch Falcon), they combine modern sociopolitical themes with ’90s AmRep heaviness and unusual time signatures. “We both look for similar things in music,” Neil says. “We like things to be pushed to the very edge and the very limit.” Below, the duo discuss each track. **“Harvest”** Neil: “It’s about identity, especially during the lockdown. It\'s tough these days to know exactly what you think because everything\'s pushed towards you. Everything\'s telling you what to think, how to look, what to feel about things. You have very little time to consider things yourself. This song is about trying to take that time to process things rather than just following your nose down the internet or down social media and think that\'s the way you need to live your life.” **“Blusher”** Vennart: “It\'s one of the only moments on the record where I\'m threatening to give myself carpal tunnel. There\'s some serious alternate picking, and you have to really dig in to get it tight, but it feels really good. The pain feels so good, man.” Neil: “Lyrically, it’s about not being afraid to feel a bit embarrassed about shit. Not feeling afraid to say, ‘Oh, I really got that wrong.’ Just being aware that mistakes are all right. Unfortunately, mistakes live online forever, but that’s a dangerous thing to view ourselves with because we spend our whole lives walking in a minefield.” **“Moi?”** Vennart: “This is definitely one of a couple of Melvins-esque moments on this record. If it wasn\'t for Simon\'s input, we could probably get done for plagiarism on this one.” Neil: “I feel like this song could only really exist in this band. I know Mike\'s saying that it sounds a bit like the Melvins, but to me it feels like there\'s an awakening in the melodies and the way it pushes and pulls. Lyrically, it’s the classic ‘Me, my fault?’ There’s a lot of people that don’t take accountability these days, and it seems like you get rewarded for denying reality.” **“Tired, Aye?”** Neil: “This is one of the first songs that Mike presented for the record. Over the years, I’ve always wanted to do a duet with just my vocal and a drum set. When you’ve got Dave Lombardo on your album, that’s when you do it. And the composition of the song was so complex that it felt like I had enough dimensions to justify it having no guitars. So that was a little bit of a headbutt because Mike’s guitar work on the original version is absolutely superb. And people will hear that at some point.” **“Sons and Daughters”** Vennart: “There\'s moments in this where we get to use the guitar as a sort of sound bath, so it’s just me and Naomi droning on a couple of chords. It\'s the first point in the record where you really get to meditate for a moment. But again, some of the choppy riffs are pure Osbourne-ian. And then Simon just took it to a completely different place.” Neil: “For me, this song just felt like a monolith rolling through the desert. It made me think of the front cover of *Dopesmoker* by Sleep. It’s about how cheap our governments see human life, how quickly we go to war for things, how quickly things get out of proportion. There’re no victors in any wars. The romance we see in all these war movies is just not reality.” **“Stutter”** Vennart: “Throughout all of this stuff, the idea subconsciously was to try and bend metal into shapes that I had not heard before. The meter of the opening riff is quite odd, so it\'s geometrically a bit wonky and lopsided. And then at the end, the song does something that I don\'t think I\'ve heard before, where you\'ve got the guitar and bass just sort of droning together for like eight bars while Dave Lombardo is playing within an inch of his life as fast as he can. It’s like tantric metal or something.” **“Palms of Hands”** Neil: “Lyrically, it was written during the time when we were all isolated. I just kept picturing the thought of going to a sex party after the pandemic, when everyone’s lost their mind. No one knows how to conduct themselves, so it’s basically a comedy of errors.” Vennart: “There’re definitely points in this song that are some of the most trad thrash moments of the whole record, where just for a few bars here and there, you really feel like you’re actually in Slayer. It’s like levitating.” **“Dusty”** Neil: “This, to me, is probably one of the most avant-garde songs on the record. It sounds like something a band like Daughters would do. It took me a while to figure out what to do vocally on this song because it’s got a weird time signature, 11/8, which Mike didn’t tell us. It’s called ‘Dusty’ because I’ve watched a few things about the Dust Bowl over the last few years, and it really struck me that it’s a similar thing to what people are going through in Europe at the moment, where people are having to move because the climate is making it uninhabitable.” **“Sold!”** Neil: “I think we all had this weird connection with spending money during the pandemic because it was one of the only things we were in control of. Some people were still working and had money, some people weren’t working and didn’t have any money, but commerce was the one thing that we were all drawn towards. I found myself spending money on things that aren’t important, thinking, ‘Life will be better once I buy this thing.’ But these are just stories we tell ourselves.” Vennart: “It’s hard to keep everyone on track because it’s got a couple of weird time-signature tricks. It\'s got a bit of a surf-rock moment, and it\'s got some stabs that are really hard to play live. But I love it. It’s one of the more hatstand, crazy-ass, gonzo moments on the record.” **“The Looming”** Neil: “As soon as I heard this, I knew it was going to close the record. Even before I\'d done any vocals, there was a power, there was a progressiveness, there was an ecstasy to this song that is hard to achieve in an oppressively heavy piece of music. I think the breakthrough in this song was the keyboards—those little bits of nonsensical, celestial-type sounds are keeping the listener bubbling up on top of the song, almost like you’re a swan or a duck sat on the surface, and underneath everything’s going crazy. Lyrically, it’s about the end of the world.”

Meet Me @ The Altar, the pop-punk trio of lead vocalist Edith Victoria, drummer Ada Juarez, and guitarist Téa Campbell, met on the internet—from different corners of the United States, all three knew they wanted to start a band, and they wanted to do it with other women of color, a rarity in their chosen musical genre. Not only did they serve to move the once progress-proof scene forward, but they also reminded listeners why they fell in love with it in the first place: earworm hooks, shout-along melodies, and caffeinated riffs. Their EPs, all self-released (with the exception of 2021’s *Model Citizen* on Fueled by Ramen), confirmed their talent. But it\'s their debut LP, *Past // Present // Future*, that amplifies their songwriting, from the industry-plant kiss-off “Say It (To My Face)” to the Disney Channel 2000s-pop-rock-inspired closer “King of Everything.” With the guidance of producer John Fields (Demi Lovato, Jonas Brothers, P!nk), the album is 11 tracks of full-speed mall-punk adrenaline, palm-muted power chords, and self-esteem-boosting lyrics.

℗ 2023 BABYMETAL RECORDS / Amuse Inc. under exclusive licence to Cooking Vinyl America Inc. / 5B Records

On his second solo album, Slipknot and Stone Sour lead singer Corey Taylor takes on toxic relationships, mental health issues, “sappy, stupid hippie songs,” and more. Singles “Post Traumatic Blues,” “Talk Sick,” and “Beyond” lock in an upbeat alt-rock tone, while the latter—along with “Starmate” and “Someday I’ll Change Your Mind”—were written for his wife, dancer and Cherry Bombs co-founder Alicia Taylor. “*CMF2*, as a whole, is a glimpse of where my solo music is going,” Taylor tells Apple Music. “It’s more focused; sharper, better songwriting, better performances, just *better*. It’s a journey covering dozens of emotions and issues, and you never know where it will take you each time.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Box”** “The curtain draws back, the band begins slowly rolling along on its climb to the top of the mountain, and \[then\] the inevitable slide towards the gravity of life. This song sets the tone for what’s to come without giving away the secrets inside.” **“Post Traumatic Blues”** “Dedicated to those struggling with PTSD and their families. This song is a fiery message building a bridge between the ones who suffer and the loved ones trying desperately to understand what’s happening to them.” **“Talk Sick”** “A taste of the medicine that comes with toxic relationships and the melancholy aftermath that comes when you get even. Everyone loses.” **“Breath of Fresh Smoke”** “I wrote this in 2005 as I started to get my life back together. Classic case of a person with a huge soul being bigger than the town they grew up in.” **“Beyond”** “I got tired of every love song being sappy, so I wrote one that has the same feel and urgency as when I’ve been away from my wife too long. Why can’t a love song kick ass?” **“We Are the Rest”** “A rowdy anthem that lets the upper 1 percent know they’re on borrowed time. We represent the wave that will wash them all out to sea.” **“Midnight”** “A song about getting in your car in the depths of a quiet depression and driving through a city without seeing it at all.” **“Starmate”** “One rocking love song works, why not two? This is a banger that will definitely fit in perfectly with our live set.” **“Sorry Me”** “A song about trying to figure out for yourself the mistakes that may have gotten you to the present place you reside. The silence speaks for itself.” **“Punchline”** “A satire about trying to get rid of the people in your life who fill you with guilt for being who you are, even when who you are is amazing.” **“Someday I’ll Change Your Mind”** “One more song for my wife. I wrote this for her on her birthday and had all our friends help me sing the *whoa*s to her. This song is very special. And the piano on the track is my actual piano that I have at home that my wife spent a year finding for me.” **“All I Want Is Hate”** “There are a lot of sappy, stupid hippie songs in the world that have no pragmatic solutions, just syrupy emotions. This song is an answer to those songs—one in particular.” **“Dead Flies”** “A vision of the future for a leech of a person who you’ve cut out of your life—a person who used to mean a lot. Now, because of the choices they’ve made in life, the only beings that will be left hanging around them will be dead flies.”

The music that Jordan Benjamin creates as grandson has always felt like a live news dispatch from the middle of a societal breakdown, as he hot-wires together mosh-rock riffs, trap beats, industrial noise, and searing social commentary into tracks that feel as volatile as a homemade bomb. But on his second album, the chaos is largely confined to his head. As its title unsubtly suggests, *I Love You, I’m Trying* is a more personal and vulnerable work than 2020’s pandemic-era address *Death of an Optimist*, as Benjamin comes clean about addictions (of both the substance and social-media varieties), career insecurities, and past experiences with suicidal ideation. “This album for me was, first and foremost, an acknowledgment that I’ve had a problem with my mental health for a while that I’ve been kind of running away from, or pushing down in some ways,” Benjamin tells Apple Music. “I needed to address it as directly and bluntly as I could.” Sharing his darkest thoughts with his fans has been a healthy, therapeutic process that’s ultimately brought him to a happier place in life. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” he says. “I’ve managed to take these little songs that I’ve been writing and turn it into a lifelong connection with people across the world.” Here’s his 12-step program to finding inner peace. **“Two Along Their Way”** “The main recording is actually my father when he was my age. He was signed to a record label, but it got bought by another label, and my father’s record never got to come out. But this is a beautiful song about heartbreak and reminiscing on the way things were versus how they are. So, I recontextualized it and worked with a producer to bring it to life and then had my partner and girlfriend Wafia—who sang across the whole album—add some harmonies on it. The focus was setting up this kind of fantasy: We’re going to be looking backwards while moving forwards.” **“Eulogy”** “The song speaks to this overwhelmed feeling that I have and that I share with so many people right now, where everything is all being delivered in the same place. When I swipe through my phone, I can go from this horrifying demonstration of police brutality, and then swipe to some couple that’s managing to backpack around the world in 45 days. All these things just culminate in this fantasy of just kind of opting out of the whole thing.” **“Something to Hide”** “It’s an exploration of my own personal relationships to the themes that my music covers, as it relates to addiction, mental health, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation. In many ways, we come across as a happy, healthy family, but this is what families are going through. As the youngest sibling, I was always the peacemaker, the class clown, and I think that’s where my desire to perform came from. We’d be in the middle of a really awkward family dinner, and there was this impulse to not address the problem. That’s what inspired this song.” **“Drones”** “The line that sticks out in this song is ‘Just tell me one good lie.’ We have these secrets, and would you rather try and address them and then move through the world with this anxiety and unease? Or do you bury it and deal with those consequences somewhere down the line. ‘Drones’ is about that bomb going off in the distance and saying, ‘Oh, that’s just fireworks’—like the sort of thing a father might tell their child to keep them from knowing just how unforgiving the world can sometimes be.” **“I Love You, I’m Trying”** “All I wanted was for things to feel easy, and easy just couldn’t come, between dealing with my own mental health and the various temptations that come with living on a tour bus. Long-distance relationships are just hard to navigate. Whether or not you’ve been through what I’ve been through, you can understand this feeling of desperation: ‘I want to be there for you, and I’m doing my best, but I’m really in over my head here.’” **“Half My Heart”** “It speaks to the cyclical nature of falling apart, only to have to build it back up again—like, you’re only hurting yourself by throwing these tantrums. If I want to throw a plate at the wall, at some point, I’m going to be the one that has to sweep it up. This is when I begin to reflect on this album: Is this productive? And if not, then what is the point of getting so worked up about the world at large if you’re not going to do anything about it?” **“When the Bomb Goes”** “I have my own relationship to substance abuse and, frankly, it’s kind of worked out for me so far—knock on wood. Especially on tour, it feels like pressure builds up inside of me, and then one of the ways that I can release that tension is to get blackout drunk and make a mess. I’ve just had these nights that I barely remember. And it’s not a good feeling the next day, but there’s some sort of clarity that comes from being really, really hungover and trying to find my wallet, and my phone is dead.” **“Enough”** “In the verses, I’ve got this kind of back-and-forth conversation going on. Again, the vocals are supplied by Wafia, who provides this subconscious voice where I’m admitting to myself, ‘This party sucks,’ but out loud, I’m saying, ‘This is awesome!’ And again, this is when I start to ask, ‘If not now, when am I going to be the kind of person I want to be, make the album I want to make, and live the life I want to live?’ I think this song is meant to be this unifying call to a certain action in your personal life.” **“Murderer”** “I wrote this exaggerated homage to narrative hip-hop songs like ‘Stan’ by Eminem. I wanted to tell this story of a one-hit wonder who loses his mind. And I wanted it to be contextually relevant to my life, and I wanted to give it a sense of urgency. Thankfully, it isn’t based on a true story. But there’s absolutely truth in the frustration that I felt during the pandemic, with this onset explosion of pop-punk music, which I felt was super derivative and detached from soul. And I just wanted to make something that was fun and poke the bear a bit.” **“I Will Be Here When You’re Ready to Wake Up” (feat. Wafia)** “Amidst all of this turmoil in my personal life, and these fantasies of annihilation, I’ve been in a loving relationship. And I think we all have someone who would be really sad to see us go, or who will be there on the other side of these episodic breakdowns that I suffer from. And so, I wanted to give this sort of reassuring lullaby that I’m so fortunate to have to somebody else that might not have it.” **“Heather”** “A really necessary step in getting out of your own way is being there for somebody else and realizing that it’s not all about you. I’ve had fans now for years, and sometimes those early super-fans grow up and move on—they used to message you every day, and you’re left wondering what happened to them. And so, ‘Heather’ is about a fan who ultimately committed suicide, and it will serve for the rest of my career as this promise to myself—and hopefully to my fans—that we can be there for one another as we continue to move through life together.” **“Stuck Here With Me”** “‘Stuck Here With Me’ poses the question ‘If this is the one life that we do have, are you going to waste it wishing you had somebody else’s?’ At the end of the day, I have so much to be grateful for, and it’s a life that’s really worth living. We took all of these human experiences—laughing, crying, fucking—and turned them into a hundred voices shouting at you, and it just ends with this big cathartic release, and then the sound of me crying. And that’s what it’s all about: You get up and wipe your tears and you go to sleep, and you wake up the next day and keep doing it. That’s my second album.”

There are rock bands and then there are Rock Bands—groups who embody a particular and baldly mythological definition of the term so completely that it’s difficult to imagine them doing normal things like taking the garbage out or wearing shorts. (This is why people have spent years marveling at a photo of Glenn Danzig buying cat litter.) And few bands have embodied this ideal more than The Hives have across three decades. Which is why the most shocking moment on the Swedish garage-punk traditionalists’ first album in over 11 years is on “Rigor Mortis Radio,” when Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist sneers, “I got your emails, yeah/Delete, delete.” With their matching custom suits and quasi-supervillain alter egos—bassist Dr. Matt Destruction is no longer in the band, but that name is forever—the whole idea of The Hives is rooted in timelessness, and breaking character feels like a record scratch. “It’s very much on purpose,” Almqvist tells Apple Music. “It\'s been 11 years, but in The Hives\' world, it\'s the same.” While so many of the bands they were lumped in with during the great Rock Is Back! bonanza of the early 2000s are gone or diminished, The Hives have doubled down on their Hivesness, right down to the title referencing the demise of their mysterious Svengali and mentor (who may not have been alive to begin with). “We\'re five individuals who are in the band, but The Hives are something different than that. It\'s not a sum of its parts at all,” Almqvist says. “We wanted to invent our favorite band and then become that band. We have too much respect for what we do onstage to treat it like it\'s a fucking living room. We\'re like The Last Samurai or something.” Below, Howlin\' Pelle talks through each of the songs on his favorite band\'s comeback album. **“Bogus Operandi”** “I think it was always a favorite of ours when we were rehearsing. And even in the demo stage, it always felt like a thing; the riffs felt great. It had a bunch of different verse things, or a bunch of different choruses at some point, but we decided to use them all. We have a lot of songs where we\'re not even in agreement on what is the chorus. That\'s also a thing The Misfits and ABBA have in common, where you think this is where the chorus ends and then there\'s another fucking chorus.” **“Trapdoor Solution”** “We always have those songs that are really, really fast and really, really short. It\'s like to put a shot of adrenaline into the record. And we love playing that stuff live, where it\'s like, \'Oh, it\'s a cool song. Oh, it ended. Okay, well, play it twice.\' We\'ve always loved that type of song, and most of our records have one or two of them. It seems like a thing that some of our favorite bands were doing a long time ago, but I don\'t think anyone\'s really doing that anymore.\" **“Countdown to Shutdown”** “It was actually two songs from the beginning; we took the chorus from one and the verse from one and just like, ‘Oh, this sits together really well.’ It all just fell together in an afternoon. So I think it\'s the one we spent the least amount of time on. But it\'s also one of the best ones, I think.” **“Rigor Mortis Radio”** “Amy Winehouse did this thing where the music\'s super retro and old-soul, it sounds like it could be the ’40s or something, but she\'s singing about getting Slick Rick tickets. And it\'s such a cool mood, we wanted to use that. Because otherwise in song lyrics it ends at \'magazine\' and \'telephone.\' Nobody sings about anything more modern than that. But it\'s so fun to go just like, \'I\'m going to delete your email.\' It\'s such a lame burn.” **“Stick Up”** “To me, it sounds very traditional, like a blues thing almost, like a crooner. There\'s probably an early YouTube recording of it from maybe 2015. The demo is all piano and voice, but we wanted to play it live so much that we made that version. We even had a weird version of it where it was a soft version in one headphone and the energetic version through one headphone. It was so bizarre to listen to them at the same time.” **“Smoke & Mirrors”** “It\'s way more pop in structure, chords, melodies, and that kind of thing. It\'s not riff-based. And usually there\'s some fight in putting some of those songs on the record. It\'s a great change of pace, I think. It reminds me of Ramones or power-pop or something.” **“Crash Into the Weekend”** “Even though the music\'s at times pretty extreme, we still want there to be a tune somewhere in there. But \'Crash Into the Weekend\' was also like, \'Oh, this weekend\'s going to be fun, but it\'s also getting kind of weird.\' It wasn\'t just a fun weekend, there was also something scary about it. The Damned, The Cramps, and The Misfits were some of the first bands we really loved together and we always thought that aesthetic was kind of cool. I guess it just kind of came out more on this album and the title. And that\'s as dark as we\'ve been.” **“Two Kinds of Trouble”** “It\'s one of the oldest songs of the record, but it\'s also kind of a style. It feels like it belongs more on like \[2004\'s\] *Tyrannosaurus Hives*—really robotic, almost like we were trying to play synth music or program music on instruments, which we did a lot of on that album. So it was cool to put it after \'Crash Into the Weekend.\' It\'s like a juxtaposition, if you would.” **“That’s the Way the Story Goes”** “It always sounded good in our heads, but it was hard to get it to sound that way when we recorded it. I guess that riff was kind of inspired by Ty Segall or something like that. At first it was kind of really rocking, and it was kind of all over the place. There was a version that sounded a lot like Saul Williams’ ‘List of Demands (Reparations),’ where it was just kind of the beat and a bass. And then we went back to the rocking thing, and put a lot of reverb on it, and then we liked it again.” **“The Bomb”** “It\'s a dumb idea and then we did it. But we spent years trying to make that what it is. In the beginning it was, \'What do you want to do? Party. What do you not want to do? Not party.\' It\'s one of the ones we put the most effort into, but most bands wouldn\'t even have put it on the record. It\'s kind of self-referencing a little bit—it\'s what the Ramones did and Motörhead did, like, *Grow some confidence, man*.” **“What Did I Ever Do to You?”** “When we were making that, we were not sure that The Hives were going to do anything. We weren\'t getting anything to float and it just kind of felt boring. And we stopped rehearsing and stopped trying for a bit, to see if something came out of that. I bought this thing on Swedish Craigslist, an organ connected to a guitar, connected to a microphone, connected to a drum machine. Some guy built this one-man-band machine, and he sold it to me for 300 bucks with the patent. This was the first thing we wrote when we got that. It\'s almost not meant for The Hives, but the album needed a palate cleanser.” **“Step Out of the Way”** “We always had a fast short blast at the beginning of the record, at the top of the record. What was the last song? ‘What Did I Ever Do to You,’ right? So that one feels like it\'s the end of the record, but then it was cool to just, like, \'Oh no, we got another one.\'”

Veteran LA noise-rock trio HEALTH’s 2023 LP *RAT WARS* builds on their noise-centric industrial exercises, accentuating their hardcore tendencies with dance grooves, haunted synths, and wall-of-sound guitar lines. Taking influences from Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and contemporaries like A Place to Bury Strangers, HEALTH builds deeply twisted odes to sweaty nights on the club floor and long mornings trying to fend off the sun. Like its predecessor, 2019’s *VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR*, *RAT WARS* blends pain and catharsis, emptiness and ecstasy. On “UNLOVED,” the trio of Benjamin Miller, Jake Duzsik, and John Famiglietti cook up a track built around military-grade snare drums, gnarling synths, and hi-hats that slosh like boots in deep rain puddles. Duzsik takes the vocal lead, conjuring up a deeply dark tale as he croons in an almost-snarl, “And it was not my fault you were unloved when you were a child/I wasn\'t there.”

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

*RUSH!* is the third album from the Italian rock band and the first since lighting up the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest with their unexpected win. Since that victory, Måneskin has become a worldwide pop sensation, with their swaggering rock-star personas and catchy yet gritty songs helping them carve out a distinctive niche in the musical landscape. *RUSH!*, which features behind-the-scenes work from pop architects like Max Martin and Rami Yacoub, comes at the end of a whirlwind 18 months for the four-piece that included collaborations with Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello (who appears on the *RUSH!* track “GOSSIP”) and Iggy Pop as well as chart success. “It’s incredible to think what’s happened in only one year and a half after everything completely changed in our lives,” bassist Victoria De Angelis says. In some ways, the period since Eurovision has been business as usual for Måneskin, who embarked on their first North American headlining tour in 2022. “We feel good because we’ve been touring the whole year,” says drummer Ethan Torchio. “So, now the machine is very well-oiled—everything comes easier than normal for us. In general, we’ve always enjoyed playing live a lot because we feel like it’s the cherry on top of all the work that we’ve done.” But *RUSH!* represents a new chapter for the band, with stylistic shifts that show how their pop savvy is complemented by a bone-deep love of rock and all its trappings. “There’s a lot of variety compared to our previous records,” De Angelis notes. “Instead of starting from the center and trying to \[spin\] out from it, we started from four different places, which are our four individualities,” adds lead vocalist Damiano David. De Angelis says that being generous with her bandmates’ artistic idiosyncrasies made for a more exciting studio process that included added risk-taking—all of which, in the end, added up to a first-class album. “It’s better if we embrace our differences—even if someone has a different taste in a direction I might not be the first fan of,” she says. “Same goes for them. It’s better to embrace all our differences and give space to everyone to express themselves and be happy and be represented by the record. That’s why we had to really open our minds and challenge our boundaries: Some things we do, we would never have done without each other.”