Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums of 2022

“I would never title an album *Fórmula* just to keep the franchise alive,” Romeo Santos tells Apple Music. “This is where the trilogy ends.” Three years in the making and coming roughly a decade after the massively popular first installment, *Fórmula, Vol. 3* marks a fitting and phenomenal end to the bachata superstar’s beloved series. “Right away when I named it that title, everybody was like, ‘Who\'s going to sing bachata? What’re the surprises?’” he says of the expectations surrounding his first *Fórmula* record since the 2014 sequel. “I had to push that envelope.” Indeed, the third installment bears many of its predecessors’ hallmarks, from the comedian-led introduction to the inclusion of exciting and unexpected guests, including vanguard pop artists Justin Timberlake and ROSALÍA as well as tropical music heroes like Toño Rosario, Rubby Pérez, and Fernandito Villalona. All the while, he continues to assert his dominance in the genre while also experimenting outside of the sound he made his name with. Whether you’re an Aventura day-one fan or a devotee of solo albums like 2017’s remarkable *Golden*, there’s plenty to enjoy here. Read more about some of the standout songs of *Fórmula, Vol. 3*, in the artist’s own words, below. **“Intro”** “It starts with just the concept, and then I put Artie \[Pabon\] to do all the hard work. It\'s not a walk in the park; it’s a mission. Katt Wiliams was cool, understanding what this means to the Latin industry. And we got it done. It\'s my most personal intro as well, because my three kids participate, so I can honestly tell you that it has a sentimental value. I was good just with my kids, but when you add Katt Williams to that intro, it\'s like, ‘Okay, this is *Fórmula* vibes.’” **“Bebo”** “‘Bebo’ is that typical Romeo bachata. Traditional, fusion—it has a little bit of both. I think that it was just the perfect song to set the tone, because for everyone that I played the song to prior to me setting up the tracklist, there was just always something about that one song. Everybody was like, ‘Oh man, this shit is fire.’ So I said, ‘Let’s start the album with the record, because it has a little bit of everything.’” **“Sin Fin” (feat. Justin Timberlake)** “This was history in the making. My first cover ever with Aventura was an \*NSYNC song, ‘Gone.’ We released our second album *We Broke the Rules*, and I adjusted it to our style at the time. I always said, ‘I need to record with Justin Timberlake.’ It was on my bucket list. We linked up and he\'s like, \'The worst thing that can happen is I tell you I don\'t like this song.’ And clearly that shit would\'ve been terrible to me, but that\'s where I\'m honestly very confident. When it comes to tailoring a bachata to whoever I want to collab with, I did it with Usher, I did it with Drake, and this was not the exception. I linked up with my good friend, producer/songwriter Rico Love, who worked on ‘Promise’ and ‘Odio’ with me, to keep the tradition. But I also brought on board Danja, an amazing producer that has worked on many hits with Timbaland—‘My Love,’ ‘SexyBack.’ The reason why I did that is because I wanted it to feel authentic. I really wanted it to have his essence. JT threw his spice in there producing, tweaked some melodies, songwriting. He just gave it his magic.” **“Boomerang”** “‘Boomerang’ is just that straight-up fusion. It\'s almost difficult to describe what style the intro truly is, because it\'s just a very earthy sound that I don\'t know how to explain or elaborate in the best way what I do. I just do it. It feels good. I don\'t force it. It’s one of those records that it is what it is, but it\'s also one of my favorites.” **“El Pañuelo”** “I\'m terrible with remembering the timeframe, but I know that it was right in the premature stages before ROSALÍA reached stardom. Someone from my team showed me a video, because they know I\'m heavy on flamenco. I was just blown away, not only by her voice, her stage presence, her energy. ROSALÍA is what I like to describe as a unicorn. I just presented her with a verse, not even the hook. I knew that she had collaborated with The Weeknd, and I love the record. But that\'s more like an urban bachata, which allowed me to do something completely different with her and do more like a fusion of flamenco with bachata. She was very hands-on producing, writing. We created this in Dominican Republic, rented out a villa for three days. It was beautiful.” **“Me Extraño”** “For this particular project, just like volume 1 and 2, everyone that participates in this album, I highly admire. This record with Christian Nodal started in such a beautiful way. I\'ve always been a huge fan of Vicente Fernández, his son Alejandro, and Joan Sebastian. And I\'m like, ‘I want to do this, but I need guidance. I don\'t know how to start.’ I wasn\'t aware of how big of a fan Christian was. Before he even heard the song, I remember I called him on FaceTime. He was a really amazing and humble kid. This is one of my favorite songs on the album.” **“15,500 Noches”** “I had this idea for years. It was actually one of the first songs that I recorded for this album not knowing if it was going to be part of this production. It was the most secretive task for me. I didn\'t want to tell \[Toño Rosario, Rubby Pérez, and Fernandito Villalona\], ‘This is what I have in mind.’ I\'m very secretive when it comes to my productions; I love the surprise factor. I was afraid of egos, and it ended up being the complete opposite. These guys never collaborated in 40 years of their careers. Everyone does have a spotlight, but everyone has a spotlight individually. When I reached out to all of them, I said, ‘Look, I just want you guys to come to my studio and lay down some ideas.’ This is not your typical merengue. This is not fusion. This is not mambo. I needed this to sound like \'80s merengue. I\'m truly honored to have them on my album, to have accomplished this.”

“I always get deep into a record, but now I’m 100% fully operational,” Kurt Vile tells Apple Music. “I got a fully armed battle station.” The Philly singer-songwriter is referring to Overnight KV, or OKV, the new home studio he finished building just before the pandemic hit in 2020. It’s afforded Vile a level of creative independence he’s not felt since he started recording in his bedroom years ago. “Why do I always have to go to some producer\'s studio?” he asks. “It\'s on their terms. I\'m grateful for it, we got a lot of stuff done. But you could say nothing\'s been 100% my personality since my early, more lo-fi records. I was 100% guard down, just doing my thing, man.” His ninth LP (and first for Verve, the legendary jazz imprint) combines the experimental purity of those early recordings with the sort of “completely high-fidelity” feel that he says his studio can provide, though he did, to be clear, collaborate again with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck) both at home and in LA. The result, Vile says, is “kind of like some American folk version of shoegaze music”—a set of sidewinding pop (see: “Flyin \[like a fast train\],” originally written for Kesha) and classic rock (“Fo Sho”) that includes contributions from Cate Le Bon and Chastity Belt, as well as drumming from Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) and Sarah Jones (Hot Chip, Harry Styles). “It’s just lived in, really, the whole record,” he says. “There\'s multiple records that were left behind. But that\'s the way it should be. That\'s like somebody who\'s a carpenter or something, always working in their shop. I feel like you\'re not meant to put everything out. Just the way I live my life.” Here, Vile tells the story behind a number of songs on the album. **“Goin on a Plane Today”** “I got a piano at my house—it\'s very meditative and I can go to it every day. I remember I\'d be touring \[2018’s\] *Bottle It In*, and I\'d be thinking up these records that I was going to make from home, and then when I was home I\'d go over to the piano and be like, ‘Oh, I\'m so stoked, I\'m going to get a lot of music done while I\'m here.’ And then be rudely awakened to the fact that, no, I’ve got to leave in two weeks. I talk about opening for Neil Young in the song, because I wrote it around the time that we opened for Neil Young with Promise of the Real in Quebec, in 2018. That really happened.” **“Palace of OKV in Reverse”** “I love that there\'s more two-minute jams on this record—you could say that’s not been the case since my first album, \[2008\'s\] *Constant Hitmaker*, with ‘Freeway.’ But there\'s a lot of secrets about ‘OKV in Reverse.’ There\'s just a certain groove to it that triggered my mind, and then those lyrics came pretty quick. I didn\'t sing it until later when I was at Rob Schnapf\'s studio in LA, on the fly. He\'s good at capturing that thing.” **“Like Exploding Stones”** “‘Pain ricocheting in my brain like exploding stones.’ Some people attribute that line to migraines, and I do get migraines, so that\'s fine. But in the moment when I wrote it, it\'s more just stress, something weighing down hard on my head. I was pretty bummed out about something when I wrote that song, and then I recorded it right on my Zoom recorder—pretty much just live acoustics, drumming, and singing live. I imagined guitars feeding back, and the Moog synthesizer making noise, feedback massaging my cranium. I had all those things in the demo. Yeah, that\'s the beauty: You can just exorcise demons.” **“Hey Like a Child”** “It’s a love song. I’ve known my wife since we were pretty young, but you don\'t have to take it all so literally, because in the moment when I was writing it, obviously I\'ve got children of my own. It’s got the shoegaze-y bend, but a jangle to it as well. And I knew that song had super poppy potential. We did an early version of it in my basement studio, but then I took it over to Rob Schnapf\'s and I replayed all the parts, and again, Sarah Jones, she just killed it on drums on that song. That song was made really quick.” **“Chazzy Don’t Mind”** “Courtney Barnett turned me on to Chastity Belt—they toured together on \[2017’s\] *I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone*. I liked their music immediately, but it creeps up on you because they sing about everyday things. Julia \[Shapiro’s\] lyrics are really emotional, sometimes funny but pretty real, and they have this cyclical playing that really resonates with me. I knew I wanted them on this song. Lydia \[Lund\] and Julia play guitar on it, and Annie \[Truscott\] plays violin on it, and they all sing. Annie, she\'s such an amazing musician, she’s got perfect pitch on the vocal. They all have an equally important role in the band, but it\'s her bass underneath it all that really gets that melancholy thing.” **“Wages of Sin”** “That\'s been one of my favorite songs of Springsteen’s for a long time—it’s got that melancholy, dark hypnotic thing. I knew I could sing the hell out of it and make it mine, but also stay true to his. Nobody\'s done that lately, but in the country music world that\'s what I like: There\'s a song that speaks to you, and often it\'s a deep cut or somebody hears a song written fresh off the presses, like a demo, and they\'re like, ‘That\'s my song.’ Well, this is that except it\'s been my song since my mid-twenties, and now here I am at 42. We got it. We nailed it. And Springsteen, I don\'t know—it\'d be hard for him to ignore it. He\'d have to make a conscious decision to ignore it. Something tells me him and Obama are going to be enjoying it soon.” **“Stuffed Leopard”** “It’s funny because I felt like ‘Wages of Sin’ was a centerpiece, and I wanted it to fade out. But then ‘Stuffed Leopard’ just crept up on me, and I realized I didn\'t fingerpick throughout the whole record. Lyrically, you\'re just looking at stuff around the house, and you\'re just clarifying it’s a toy, not a taxidermy leopard. Yeah, it\'s just a fingerpicker, man. What can I tell you? Can\'t help it.”

Call it naivete if you must, but when all three members of Migos unleashed solo projects over the course of a few months beginning in 2018, the idea of the group disbanding was likely the furthest thing from anyone’s mind—they guested on each other’s projects, for goodness sake. But in the timeless words of one Nasir Jones, “a thug changes, and love changes, and best friends become strangers (word up).” If dissension within a crew of three preternaturally talented Atlanta MCs wasn’t inevitable, it was undeniable by summer 2022, when fans discovered that Offset was suing Migos’ label Quality Control Records for exclusive rights to his solo recordings. This may not have had to affect Migos’ members’ relationships with one another—see the continually muddy comings and goings of artists and producers within the Cash Money Records camp at the turn of the century. But it did, which led to Quavo and Takeoff, real life uncle and nephew, affirming the family ties with *Only Built for Infinity Links*. And those guys seem to be getting along fine. “An infinity link, see, that’s the strongest link in the world,” Quavo explains on album opener “Two Infinity Links.” “By far stronger than a Cuban,” Takeoff adds, setting the table for an attempt to push the vision of Raekwon and Ghostface showcase *Only Built 4 Cuban Linx* an iced-out step further. But who, exactly, are Quavo and Takeoff without Offset? To be VVS-quality clear, they are the same MCs they were with him. Across the album, they’ve commissioned beats from longtime Migos collaborators—DJ Durel, Mustard, and Murda Beatz, among others—to talk big money (“HOTEL LOBBY,” “Hell Yeah”), big drip (“Not Out,” “Integration”), and, of course, big jewels (“Chocolate,” “Look @ This,” “Big Stunna”). Life as two-thirds of hip-hop’s favorite trio for roughly a decade running has clearly been good to Quavo and Takeoff, and they have no plans to stop living it to the fullest, whether Offset is in the studio with them or not. Above all, they sound happy, and especially so in the face of doubters still perplexed by their longevity. “We balling on n\*\*\*as they thought it was gon’ be an upset,” Takeoff says on “Tools.” “They look at us like leprechauns, like, ‘Damn, them n\*\*\*as ain’t run out of luck yet’ (No!).”

A great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song can make you feel like you’re on top of the world and have no idea what you’re doing at the same time. The difference here—on their first album since 2013’s *Mosquito*—is a sense of maturity: Instead of tearing up the club, they’re reminiscing about it (“Fleez”), having traded their endless nights for mornings as bright and open as a flower (“Different Today”). And after spending 20 years seesawing between their aggressive side and their sophisticated, synth-pop side, they’ve found a sound that genuinely splits the difference (“Burning”). Listening to Karen O’s poem about watching the sunset with her young son (“Mars”), two thoughts come to mind. One is that they’ve always been kids, this band. The other is that the secret to staying young is growing up.

It could only be called alchemy, the transformative magic that happens during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ most tuned-in moments in the studio, when their unique chemistry sparks opens a portal, and out comes a song like “Maps” or “Zero” or the latest addition to their canon, “Spitting off the Edge of the World featuring Perfume Genius” — an epic shot-to-the-heart of pure YYYs beauty and power. A thunderstorm of a return is what the legendary trio has in store for us on Cool It Down, their fifth studio album and their first since 2013’s Mosquito. The eight-track collection, bound to be a landmark in their catalog, is an expert distillation of their best gifts that impels you to move, and cry, and listen closely.

Dominican star Kiko El Crazy moves the crowd like he was born to do it. In just the past few years, he’s dropped an ample quantity of singles and collabs, including key placements on albums by El Alfa and Jowell & Randy, all the while amassing an even larger fan base. As its title implies, *Llegó el Domi* welcomes listeners into his musical world, one that draws considerable strength from the Dominican Republic. As expected, dembow defines much of the record, as evidenced by “Chukiteo” and the Darell team-up “Háblale de Cualto.” Though his album features fellow Dominican artists like Braulio Fogon and the aforementioned El Alfa, he reaches beyond the country’s borders to vibe with Farruko on “Nube Negra” and to fill the dance floor with the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am on the pop-wise “Latina.”

For fans of ’90s indie rock—your Sonic Youths, your Breeders, your Yo La Tengos—*Versions of Modern Performance* will serve as cosmic validation: Even the kids know the old ways are best. But who influenced you is never as important as what you took from them, a lesson that Chicago’s Horsegirl understands intuitively. Instead, the art is in putting it together: the haze of shoegaze and the deadpan of post-punk (“Option 8,” “Billy”), slacker confidence and twee butterflies (“Beautiful Song,” “World of Pots and Pans”). Their arty interludes they present not as free-jazz improvisers, but a teenage garage band in love with the way their amps hum (“Bog Bog 1,” “Electrolocation 2”).

Horsegirl are best friends. You don’t have to talk to the trio for more than five minutes to feel the warmth and strength of their bond, which crackles through every second of their debut full-length, Versions of Modern Performance. Penelope Lowenstein (guitar, vocals), Nora Cheng (guitar, vocals), and Gigi Reece (drums) do everything collectively, from songwriting to trading vocal duties and swapping instruments to sound and visual art design. “We made [this album] knowing so fully what we were trying to do,” the band says. “We would never pursue something if one person wasn’t feeling good about it. But also, if someone thought something was good, chances are we all thought it was good. ”Versions of Modern Performance was recorded with John Agnello (Kurt Vile, The Breeders, Dinosaur Jr.) at Electrical Audio. “It’s our debut bare-bones album in a Chicago institution with a producer who we feel like really respected what we were trying to do,” the band says. Horsegirl expertly play with texture, shape, and shade across the record, showcasing their fondness for improvisation and experimentation. Opener “Anti-glory” is elastic and bright post-punk, while the guitars in instrumental interlude “Bog Bog 1” smear across the song’s canvas like watercolors. “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” and “World of Pots and Pans” have rough, blown-out pop charm. “The Fall of Horsegirl” is all sharp edges and dark corners.

When Ari Lennox dropped her debut album *Shea Butter Baby* in 2019, the D.C. native was a young woman exploring love and heartbreak while trying to understand her self-worth beyond sex. Now, with her sophomore outing, Lennox ditches the romantic uncertainty and frustrations about not receiving the love she deserves for a sultrier, sexier, more self-assured collection of songs. “I just was being my regular hopeless romantic self and crushing on just completely terrible individuals that for whatever reason in that state I completely romanticized, and I’m recognizing I love the idea of love,” Lennox tells Apple Music radio’s Nadeska. “Sometimes it can feel like something that’s really unavoidable or unhealthy or avoidant. So it’s just really me just trying to maneuver through this dating life, which can be so exhausting.” Described by Lennox as a “transitional space before my current ‘eat, pray, love’ journey,” *age/sex/location* is a play on online dating and AOL chat rooms, where Lennox’s adventures in dating began. The opening track, “POF,” named after the dating site Plenty of Fish, introduces Lennox’s frustrations with the lack of good men in her life. However, despite experiencing not-so-good outcomes with these lackluster relationships, she still desires companionship. Over a bluesy bassline and gentle percussion, Lennox yearns for love but asserts her power in understanding what she doesn’t want. “Young Black woman approachin’ 30 with no lover in my bed/Cannot settle, I got standards,” she sings. Not every song on the 12-track project is about setting boundaries and lovelorn texts; the best moments are when Lennox pivots into the salacious details of her sensual pleasures. On the seductive and hypnotic “Hoodie,” Lennox lustfully crushes on a potential lover while trying to get underneath his clothes. She continues to express her passion and desires on tracks like “Pressure,” “Stop By,” and the Chlöe Bailey-assisted “Leak It.” Other guests on the album include Summer Walker, who lends her buttery vocals on the Erykah Badu-esque closer “Queen Space,” and Lucky Daye, who does his best to woo Lennox on the flirtatious duet-skit “Boy Bye.” The song plays like a game of cat and mouse with Daye’s slick talk and player-like lines, and Lennox, who’s dismissive but secretly is kind of into him too, offers up her cheeky one-liners in response, singing, “Those lines belong in 1995/Just like them funky Nikes.” “I love people who play,” Lennox says of the song. “Or not play with my feelings, but we’re playing around. We’re goofing around as long as your actions or your energy can show that you’re a secure, nice person. Me and Lucky, it was just really innate and natural. And we’re just lovers of soul. I feel like lovers of love.” *age/sex/location* showcases Lennox’s storytelling as the album starts with her search for authenticity in her suitors and ends with removing negative influences (“Blocking You”) and setting boundaries while emphasizing her self-worth (“Queen Space”). The evolution is evident in comparison to her *Shea Butter Baby* debut: Where she was hoping for reciprocation from her lover, now she demands it with a promise of cutting the relationship off without it.

“It’s fun to give a lot of options and different types of music to the people,” Rauw Alejandro tells Apple Music about the purposeful creative process behind his new album, *SATURNO*. “I always want to be innovating in my music and my art.” Progression and a diversity of styles have been integral to the Puerto Rican singer’s ascent to stardom, beginning with his arrival during Latin trap’s R&B wave and continuing through enormous pop moments like “Todo De Ti” and “Baila Conmigo” with Selena Gomez. Like so many artists before him, Alejandro grew up listening to his parents’ music collection. His impressionable youth just so happened to occur amid reggaetón’s emergence in the ’90s. “I was listening to freestyles because of my dad,” he recalls of those formative years. “It wasn’t even called reggaetón; it was called ‘underground.’” As he forged his own path in the now more mature genre, rising through the ranks to become one of its biggest performers, his love for the sounds that preceded him remained. And while out dazzling live audiences on his extensive *VICE VERSA* world tour, further inspiration struck that led to the decidedly upbeat and immersive *SATURNO*. “I was thinking more about, performing-wise, what my show is missing. For next tour, I need more energy.” Nostalgic and even melancholic inclinations drive this counterintuitively forward-thinking effort, one occasionally interrupted by world-building segues and skits. Though his R&B beginnings manifest from time to time, as on tracks like “LEJOS DEL CIELO” and “QUÉ RICO CH\*\*GAMOS,” the ambitious *SATURNO* more often looks further back to yield retro refurbishments like the dancehall throwback “RON COLA” and the nu-electro jam “CAZADORES” featuring his influential predecessor Arcángel. His choices speak to his intentions of integrating past and present, reviving Playero mixtape gems by Maicol & Manuel for “DE CAROLINA” and by Daddy Yankee for “PANTIES Y BRASIERES” as well as reinventing a reggaetón staple in “PUNTO 40” with Baby Rasta himself. “I’ve always paid tribute to the OGs, since the beginning of my career,” Alejandro says. “Now that reggaetón is around the world, I have this responsibility to show people what are the roots and who are the real ones.” Read more about some of his favorite *SATURNO* songs below. **“SATURNO”** “My motivation was the tour, so you already know what song is going to start the tour. As soon as you hear that intro, you know something’s coming. So, everything is prepared for the show, and I put it in an album. I recommend people listening to it in order. It makes sense in order, with all the transitions and how I build it up. The first track is insane. It’s just to be in your car at nighttime and just go and start the adventure.” **“PUNTO 40” (feat. Baby Rasta)** “It was going to be a single just by myself. I took the sample, and I created the beat from scratch. Then I was hearing the beat going, and I was like, ‘It doesn’t make sense if Baby Rasta is not here. I need him with me here. He needs to give the approval to make it more special.’ I created a space for him on the track, and he killed it. When he went into the studio, I remember he was really, really impressed. It’s a classic song, so there’s so many artists that tried to do a remake or a new song inspired about that.” **“PANTIES Y BRASIERES” (feat. Daddy Yankee)** “The last tour of mine was called Vice Versa: The Bras and Panties Tour, because it was a lot of crazy stuff going onstage. And then Yankee, at his show, some girl threw a bra to him and he said, ‘Hey, Rauw, you\'re not the only one!’ The video went viral. I called him, \'You know what? Our song should be called like that, like “Bras and Panties,” bro.\' We got this amazing track and I\'m really happy, because Yankee\'s been in so many styles, with the years he changed. He\'s really versatile. I was a really, really big fan of this Yankee of the ’98, early 2000s. He brought it back.” **“QUÉ RICO CH\*\*GAMOS”** “At the same time that I’m trying new stuff, I also maintain the essence of Rauw, the R&B, those ‘2/Catorce’ vibes, the sexy songs that people like about me. ‘QUÉ RICO CH\*\*GAMOS’ is a happy medium of *SATURNO* sounds and what people are used to listening about Rauw. This song is for my fans—more for my fans than for me. But it’s one of my favorite ones. I know people are going to love it.” **“VERDE MENTA”** “It’s everything connected from that era—late ’90s, the beginning of the 2000s. I was strictly using sounds just in that era. That’s why I used the sample of Ivy Queen in that song. And it’s funny because the same time the underground it was coming up, the mainstream was freestyling. Freestyle in the ’90s was the mainstream songs in the radio. So, in this album, I got both sounds together. I did maybe 30 versions. When I try something new, I study a lot of the melodies of that sound, giving my touch of urban and more explicit lyrics, just trying to create that mix. And I wasn’t feeling it. It was a process, but I think we did it.” **“DE CAROLINA”** “It’s going to be a nostalgic and melancholic album. Even the image that I have right now is this young Rauw. I know it’s going to connect with the older generation and with a new one. With Maicol & Manuel, ‘La Gente Sabe’ is an iconic song. There’s so many people that don’t know about them. And I was like, ‘Yo, people need to hear this again, but I’m going to do it in my own way and create my own sound.’ I sit down with Playero in that song. It’s a banger.”

Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

What better vessel for Lil Durk’s most personal raps to date than an album named for the address of his beloved grandmother’s home? “7220, that’s where I went through it,” Durk says on the album’s “Headtaps.” “Like my first life experience, know what I mean.” He then goes on to rap about the time he wished he could watch cartoons with his children when he was locked up and how news of a cousin’s passing once sent him into a state of disbelief. Durk has seen more than his fair share of loss over the course of his young life, and *7220* is peppered with references to the many friends and family members he’s already outlived. Music-making has functioned as therapy for nearly every MC who’s ever picked up a mic, but you can’t help but feel for Durk listening to him talk about a real-life home invasion he suffered on “Shootout @ My Crib,” remind listeners that tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone on “Love Dior Banks,” or live out a revenge fantasy for friend and collaborator King Von on “AHHH HA.” Guests on *7220* include stars like Future, Gunna, Summer Walker, and, most peculiarly, country singer Morgen Wallen, who more than anything else serve as emblems of how far the MC has come since his childhood address.

Rather than a set of songs, think of Colombian-born, Berlin-based artist Lucrecia Dalt’s eighth album, *¡Ay!*, as a room cast in sound: smokey, low-lit, seductive but vaguely threatening; a place where fantasy and reality meet in deep, inky shadow. Dalt’s takes on the bolero, son, ranchera, and merengue that form the romantic spine of Latin pop are genuine enough to feel folkloric and off-kilter enough to conjure the art and experimental music she’s known for—a contrast that pulls *¡Ay!* along on its hovering, dreamlike course. Squint and you can imagine hearing “Dicen” in a dusty bar somewhere or swaying to “La Desmesura” or “Bochinche.” But like the great exotica artists of the ’50s, Dalt teeters between the foreign and the comforting so gracefully, you don’t recognize how strange she is until you’re in her pocket. *¡Ay!* is lounge music for the beyond.

Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began.

If The Smile ever seemed like a surprisingly upbeat name for a band containing two members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, joined by Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner), the trio used their debut gig to offer some clarification. Performing as part of Glastonbury Festival’s Live at Worthy Farm livestream in May 2021, Yorke announced, “We are called The Smile: not The Smile as in ‘Aaah!’—more the smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” To grasp the mood of their debut album, it’s instructive to go even deeper into a name that borrows the title of a 1970 Ted Hughes poem. In Hughes’ impressionist verse, some elemental force—compassion, humanity, love maybe—rises up to resist the deception and chicanery behind such disarming grins. And as much as the 13 songs on *A Light for Attracting Attention* sense crisis and dystopia looming, they also crackle with hope and insurrection. The pulsing electronics of opener “The Same” suggest the racing hearts and throbbing temples of our age of acute anxiety, and Yorke’s words feel like a call for unity and mobilization: “We don’t need to fight/Look towards the light/Grab it in with both hands/What you know is right.” Perennially contemplating the dynamics of power and thought, he surveys a world where “devastation has come” (“Speech Bubbles”) under the rule of “elected billionaires” (“The Opposite”), but it’s one where protest, however extreme, can still birth change (“The Smoke”). Amid scathing guitars and outbursts of free jazz, his invective zooms in on abuses of power (“You Will Never Work in Television Again”) before shaming inertia and blame-shifters on the scurrying beats and descending melodies of “A Hairdryer.” These aren’t exactly new themes for Yorke and it’s not a record that sits at an extreme outpost of Radiohead’s extended universe. Emboldened by Skinner’s fluid, intrepid rhythms, *A Light for Attracting Attention* draws frequently on various periods of Yorke and Greenwood’s past work. The emotional eloquence of Greenwood’s soundtrack projects resurfaces on “Speech Bubbles” and “Pana-Vision,” while Yorke’s fascination with digital reveries continues to be explored on “Open the Floodgates” and “The Same.” Elegantly cloaked in strings, “Free in the Knowledge” is a beautiful acoustic-guitar ballad in the lineage of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and the original live version of “True Love Waits.” Of course, lesser-trodden ground is visited, too: most intriguingly, math-rock (“Thin Thing”) and folk songs fit for a ’70s sci-fi drama (“Waving a White Flag”). The album closes with “Skrting on the Surface,” a song first aired at a 2009 show Yorke played with Atoms for Peace. With Greenwood’s guitar arpeggios and Yorke’s aching falsetto, it calls back even further to *The Bends*’ finale, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” However, its message about the fragility of existence—“When we realize we have only to die, then we’re out of here/We’re just skirting on the surface”—remains sharply resonant.

The Smile will release their highly anticipated debut album A Light For Attracting Attention on 13 May, 2022 on XL Recordings. The 13- track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contempoarary UK jazz players including Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde. The band, comprising Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, have previously released the singles You Will Never Work in Television Again, The Smoke, and Skrting On The Surface to critical acclaim.

Drake and 21 Savage’s *Her Loss* is the culmination of a relationship that dates at least as far back as 2016, when the pair linked up for “Sneakin’.” Back then, 21 was a burgeoning Atlanta rapper with a lot of promise (and an association with producer of the moment Metro Boomin), while Drake was arguably the most impactful singer and MC in the world and the guy whose co-sign could be counted on to usher bubbling talents into proper rap stardom. Some eight years and three additional collaborations later, 21 Savage is most assuredly a bona fide rap star and Drake is still arguably the most impactful singer and MC in the world, but the 16 tracks that make up *Her Loss* reveal the pairing as somehow larger than the sum of its parts. It was likely *Honestly, Nevermind* standout “Jimmy Cooks” that inspired, or at the very least prioritized, *Her Loss*. The song was a stylistic outlier from that album’s house and techno-adjacent dance music thread, allowing Drake and Savage the chance to do what they’ve always enjoyed doing together: rail against entitled love interests, revel in the lifestyle they’ve earned, and, for 21 Savage specifically, remind listeners that his guns still do go off. *Her Loss* is much of the same, with the pair leaning into a shared disdain for less-accomplished artists (“On BS,” “Privileged Rappers,” “Broke Boys”), sharing their views on contemporary courtship (“Spin Bout U,” “Hours in Silence”), detailing what life as a superstar rapper entails (“Circo Loco,” “Pussy & Millions”), and, in one instance, rapping about how much they appreciate one another (“Treacherous Twins”). The love they profess for one another might at first play as eyebrow-raising, but to question it would be to willfully ignore the notion that laying down raps, like nearly anything else, is just that much more fun with your bestie in tow.

The Beths’ third album finds the Aotearoa indie rockers tighter and brighter than ever, packing chiming melodies and big, buoyant choruses. Elizabeth Stokes’ poignant vocals and diaristic lyrics continue to translate everyday foibles into memorable asides (“Here I go again, mixing drinks and messages”), while lead guitarist Jonathan Pearce proves animated at every turn (see the wild splay of a solo capping off “Silence Is Golden”). For all its noisy freshness, *Expert in a Dying Field* also plays like a studied parallel to the classic power-pop songbook, dispensing sunny harmonies and sharp dynamic shifts. Recorded mostly in Pearce’s own studio, this outing sees all of the band’s strengths balanced across the board. That means Stokes’ witticisms enjoy just as much attention as the fuzzy push-and-pull of the music, alternately driving ahead and pulling back with increasing precision. Stokes may label herself an expert in a dying field when singing about love on the opening title track, but The Beths make whip-smart indie rock look like a flourishing profession indeed.

On The Beths’ new album Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships -- platonic, familial, romantic -- and more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life? The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz. With Expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. They wanted it to be fun in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope. Most of Expert was recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s studio on Karangahape Road in Ta–maki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown. They traded notes remotely for months, songwriting from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone. The following February The Beths left the country to tour across the US, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road, culminating in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. There, Expert finally became the record they were hearing in their heads. The album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. “Love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.” The rest is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum: “Silence is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving. “Knees Deep” was written last minute, but yields one of the best guitar lines on Expert. Stokes strings it all together through her singular songwriting lens, earnest and selfeffacing, zeroing in on the granules of doubt and how they snowball. Did I do the wrong thing? Or did you? That insecurity and thoughtfulness, translated into universality and understanding, has been the guiding light of The Beths’ output since 2016. In the face of pain, there’s no dwelling on internal anguish -- instead, through The Beths’ music, our shortcomings are met with acceptance. And Expert In A Dying Field is the most tactile that tenderness has been.

Whether making hits in English or Spanish, Becky G. has been at the fore of global pop for the better part of a decade now. The rapid and undeniable success of her 2022 single “MAMIII” with KAROL G set the stage for the Mexican American star to return with her second studio album. Coming more than two years after *MALA SANTA*, a noteworthy record that aligned her with several other Latin hitmakers, *ESQUEMAS* allows fans to bear witness to the growth of her artistry. Compared with its predecessor, the quantity of features is fairly limited here, though the femme-forward Natti Natasha team-up “RAM PAM PAM” and the Dominican-dembow-infused “FULANITO” with El Alfa leave strong impressions. But even without the aid of flashy and fashionable guests, she proves repeatedly that she is a musical force to be reckoned with. There is both diversity and complexity in her craft, evident in the dawn confessional “BAILÉ CON MI EX” and the playfully nostalgic “FLASHBACK” as well as her select reggaetón permutations, such as “GUAPA” and “KILL BILL.”

Ashley McBryde delivers her most ambitious project yet with *Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville*, a concept album set within a fictional town named for the late Nashville songwriter Dennis Linde, known for hits like The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” and Joe Diffie’s “John Deere Green.” Like William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the town features a recurring cast of characters, a nod to Linde’s own occasional habit of carrying characters over from song to song. “We wrote a song called ‘Blackout Betty’ and we\'ve had a good time with it,” McBryde tells Apple Music of the concept’s genesis. “I feel better. Therapy is complete. And then I\'m like, you know what? ‘Blackout Betty,’ \[*Girl Going Nowhere*’s\] ‘Living Next to Leroy,’ \[*Never Will*’s\] ‘Shut Up Sheila,’ Aaron\'s got ‘Jesus Jenny,’ Nicolette is Pillbox Patti—we have all these characters that accidentally, over the years, they\'ve popped up… What we should do is make them neighbors on purpose, and then a place to live.” The resulting collection listens like a fever-dream tour of small-town America, with McBryde’s expansive vision fleshed out by contributions from fellow artists like Aaron Raitiere, Pillbox Patti, Brandy Clark, the Brothers Osborne, and more. While *Lindeville* is an album that begs a start-to-finish listen—a compelling narrative quickly develops and sprawls outward, not unlike a novel-in-stories—standout tracks include the tender, realist “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” and a show-stopping cover of The Everly Brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved,” on which Clark, Caylee Hammack, and Pillbox Patti join McBryde in showing that at the end of the day, these small-town characters, these women, just wish to be seen. But McBryde’s doing them one better: Their voices are being heard. Below, McBryde shares insight into several key tracks on *Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville*. **“Jesus Jenny” (feat. Aaron Raitiere)** “Nobody delivers like Aaron Raitiere. I didn\'t notice this until I\'ve been working things up this week to do an acoustic show, but when Aaron sings it, we\'re all laughing and we\'re going, ‘Oh, I don\'t know if I should be laughing at this.’ And then I went to go sing it and pick it and it\'s so sad. I had no idea how sad this song was. Because when Aaron delivers, his phrasing is just absolutely his own. And I\'m like, ‘Well, if I say it that short, or if I say it this way, then it\'s going to sound like I\'m trying to sound like Aaron.’ Then when I sing the line ‘All I can do for you right now is pray that your demons go away and you get home okay’—maybe that\'s what it is that\'s making me so like, ‘Oh my god,’ is that we know that person. And up until recently, I\'ve been that girl, that people are looking at you and going, ‘Well, I hope you get home okay.’ How eye-opening.” **“The Girl in the Picture” (feat. Pillbox Patti)** “‘The Girl in the Picture’ is one of the more somber situations on the record, because that chorus ends with ‘It\'s a shame that all she\'ll ever be is the girl in the picture that won the blue ribbon at the Faulkner County Fair.’ So all we know, as we\'re writing it, is she was at this event and she had her picture taken and that photographer entered that \[photo\] into the county fair and it won the blue ribbon. It\'s also what they use for the ‘missing’ poster now. And nobody knows where she is, so right now all she is is just ‘the girl in the picture.’ We still don\'t know what happened to her.” **“Play Ball” (feat. Brothers Osborne)** “The song is about Pete, but it\'s sung from the point of view of a person who\'s an adult now who, when they were little, Pete took care of a little bit and put his arms around. We didn\'t start with that hook. We started with ‘Who is Pete?’ And so we literally started with ‘Pete chalks the ball field down at Dennis Linde Park.’ And then what else does that mean? That means he turns the sprinklers on at sunup and the lights on after dark. Okay. And then Benjy Davis is the one that comes out with ‘The grass is always greener on his side of the fence.’ And then we got tickled. I\'m like, ‘He lost his wife to cancer and a thumb to Vietnam, and jokes he used to be a hitchhiker, but not for very long.’” **“Gospel Night at the Strip Club” (feat. Benjy Davis)** “‘Gospel Night at the Strip Club’ is a title that I dreamt. I had a dream that me and Brandy \[Clark\] had all this cash in our hands and our friends were like, ‘Where have you girls been?’ And I was like, ‘Gospel night at the strip club.’ And I took that to the table and I was like, ‘It feels like Kris Kristofferson-style spoken word. I know that spoken songs aren\'t \[commercial\]. But it doesn\'t matter. We\'re not going to work that to radio. So let\'s write this.’”

RIBBON STAGE - "HIt With The Most" LP desperate melody with true love's aim. A voice subtle in its delivery and powerful in its affect. Hooks, lyrics, melody, tears. I'd call it a teen tragedy but everyone's getting older, Hearts are getting bigger but head and heart can't ever line up. 11 tracks 45RPM . ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Ribbon Stage are a trio from NYC with no small amount of love for the noise pop days of Dolly Mixture and the Shop Assistants. The group does perfectly what only punks playing pop music can do- create chaotic noise in tandem with the sweetest hooks and most sophisticated nihilism. Ribbon Stage makes noise pop so catchy you swear you've heard before then can't get out of your head. Featuring Mari Softie (Ratas del Vaticano, Tercer Mundo, Exotica, and Pobreza Mental) as well as scene stalwart Jolie M-A (Juicy II, Boys Online) and vocalist Anni Hilator. Recorded by Hayes Waring on 1/2” 8 track tape in Olympia, WA. Mixed by Capt. Tripps Ballsington. Mastered by Amy Dragon.

*I NEVER LIKED YOU*, the first Future project since his and Lil Uzi Vert’s *Pluto x Baby Pluto* and his first solo outing since 2020’s *High Off Life*, was likely titled to cause a stir. Future has been a poster boy for the kind of toxic romantic engagements that turn well-intentioned social media users into self-certified relationship experts since about the time of his split with one-time fiancée Ciara. But rather than defend his lifestyle choices in earnest or make a case for himself as misunderstood, he drops an album whose title posits him as either a vindictive lover or a victim of a betrayal. But Future is nobody’s victim. With *I NEVER LIKED YOU*, he\'s more likely a master of marketing. The album has far less to do with the rhetoric that surrounds his dating life than it does the MC’s lifestyle, drawing open the blinds within a single bar of “HOLY GHOST”: “I was in my big truck, my wrist up, getting my dick sucked.” The MC sounds as happy as ever across *I NEVER LIKED YOU*, lamenting only—in the rare instance that he laments—a perceived lack of credit for his stylistic influence (“I\'M DAT N\*\*\*A,” “PUFFIN ON ZOOTIEZ”). There are two instances, however, wherein his influence is wholly undeniable: “I’M ON ONE” and “KEEP IT BURNIN,” where Drake and Kanye West each take a turn paying tribute to one of their most cherished collaborators, rattling off volatile non sequiturs in classic Future style.

Chicago rapper/producer Saba’s first full-length since 2018’s critically acclaimed *CARE FOR ME* looks existentially inward instead of projecting outward. Whereas its predecessor was often perceived through the lens of grief, with his cousin John Walt’s tragic death weighing considerably on the proceedings, his third album explodes such listener myopia with a thoughtful and thought-provoking expression of American Blackness. Though its title might suggest scarcity on a surface level, these 14 songs exude richness in their textures and complexity in their themes. “Stop That” imbues its gauzy trap beat with self-motivating logic, while “Come My Way” gets to reminiscing over a laidback R&B groove. His choice of collaborators demonstrates a carefully curated approach, with 6LACK and Smino bringing a sense of community to the funk-infused “Still” and fellow Chicago native G Herbo helping to unravel multigenerational programming on the gripping “Survivor’s Guilt.” The presence of hip-hop elder statesman Black Thought on the title track only serves to further validate Saba’s experiences, the connection implicitly showing solidarity with sentiments and values of the preceding songs.

Rina Sawayama thought she was done with trauma. Her debut album, *SAWAYAMA*, which was released to widespread critical acclaim under the isolating restrictions of the global pandemic, was a deceptively bombastic pop record, the production serving as a disguise for the heavy, existential lyrical content. Had it not been for the paradigm-shifting events of 2020, which left Sawayama experiencing her breakthrough success through screens, the electrifying follow up, *Hold the Girl*, would probably have been a very different record. “The thought I was really confronted with during lockdown was that I just did not feel connected to myself or my body,” Sawayama tells Apple Music. “I was constantly running on adrenaline because so many exciting things were happening, the album was doing better than I ever imagined, but I was so mentally unwell and completely numb to any real emotion.” *Hold the Girl* is the result of two years’ worth of forced self-reflection and “brutal” therapy, or what Sawayama calls a “‘can you be alone with your thoughts for two years?’ experiment.” Musically rooted in country and western—inspired by what she calls the “beautiful” writing on Kacey Musgraves\' *Golden Hour* and Dolly Parton’s appearance in the film *Dumplin’*—the album was intended to be recorded in Nashville to ground the songs in the culture she was referencing, but closed borders made travel impossible. Despite the unavoidable limitations, Sawayama has succeeded in capturing the spirit of the genre, tipping a Stetson to Shania Twain on the irreverent lead single “This Hell,” tapping into the atmosphere of a saloon at closing time with “Forgiveness,” and stitching mismatched elements of other genres like industrial metal and electronica into tracks like “Your Age” and “To Be Alive.” “I really connect with the storytelling aspect of country,” says Sawayama. “It’s very authentic, and grounded in reality, and that’s what I needed to tell the story of this record.” Here, she takes us through that story, track by track. **“Minor Feelings”** “The title of this song is kind of the secondary title of the record. It was inspired by a collection of essays called *Minor Feelings* by Cathy Park Hong. It’s the name she gives to this collective feeling that a lot of Asian Americans have about racial microaggressions, and I really connected with that, because for me it was a collection of all these minor feelings that has now led to a pretty major shutdown of emotions. In the music I wanted to play with the minor and the major chords, so in the chorus when I say ‘minor feelings’ it’s minor and then major when I say ‘majorly getting me down.’” **“Hold the Girl”** “I wrote this with Barney Lister and Jonny Lattimer in the first session I ever did with Barney. He was producing the song and I was throwing out all these ideas, like: ‘So, I want it to be country, and I want the beginning to sound like Bon Jovi, and I really also want to then do a garage drop.’ Luckily he agreed! It was a very, very hard song to balance: I think we must have gone back and forth about 20 times on the production, and then another 20 times on the mix. I was trying to make it really big and orchestral, but also a pop song. ‘Hold the Girl’ was the song that really unblocked me and made me excited to write again. It reminded me of how much fun you can have with production.” **“This Hell”** “On first listen, ‘This Hell’ could be a romantic love song, and I love that. It sort of has a double meaning—during lockdown there were certain people that I really held on to and it truly felt like ‘this hell is better with you’—but I’m specifically talking about my friends’ experiences of being shut out of religious communities for being queer. I wanted the music to channel the confidence Shania Twain has and tell the story like a country song, a bit tongue-in-cheek. I worked on it with Vic Jamieson, Lauren Aquilina, and Paul Epworth, who is one of my ultimate production idols. We were in Church Studios, which felt really apt, and I just remember ‘line dancing’ and lighting the whole studio up in red. It was one of the best moments.” **“Catch Me in the Air”** “One of the first in-person sessions I did for this album was with GRACEY in Oscar Scheller’s flat, and we couldn’t come up with anything. I just wasn’t feeling it. Halfway through, GRACEY was like, ‘Oh my god, Gwen Stefani is coming out with new music!’ As a writing exercise, we pretended we were going to be pitching to Gwen, and then the first melody flowed out. The song is about getting to a certain point in my relationship with my mum, and being able to see things from her perspective now I’m around the same age she was when she had me.” **“Forgiveness”** “I had to write this song over Zoom because I had just come into contact with someone who had COVID, so Jonny Lattimer and Rich Cooper were in one room and I was at home. The lyrics are about forgiving people in my past, and things I couldn’t control. It’s quite stripped back, as if I was in a grunge band, but doing pop. I asked Freddy Sheed to play the drums like he was exhausted and hungover, a little bit behind the beat. I wanted this feeling of dragging your feet down this path that you’re walking to get to forgiveness. I remember that I came out with the chorus melody pretty much straight away, but I hate using GarageBand and Logic so I was having to record it to my voice notes, then AirDrop it to myself, then send to Rich to put it in the song. It’s great when you have those moments where it just flows out, but actually getting the idea down on paper was so boring!” **“Holy (Til You Let Me Go)”** “This is where the record starts to get dark. The previous track talks about the idea that forgiveness is a winding road, and now we’re going off the beaten path for the next four or five songs. ‘Holy (Til You Let Me Go)’ is like the counterpart to ‘This Hell.’ I went to a Church of England school and I grew up hearing so much about religion and spirituality, but there was some dark stuff that went on there that was not handled very well, and I’m alluding to it in these songs. I think going to Christian girls’ schools can be very confusing. There’s this idea that girls are holy until a certain point in their life, and then they’re not. So I’m asking: ‘What does youth mean in that situation? What is good and bad?’ You can hear my friends Louis \[a school friend\] and Lauren Aquilina at the end, talking about what happened, and they’re just in shock about how the adults were behaving.” **“Your Age”** “‘Your Age’ started off with a banjo riff, but it’s massively inspired by Nine Inch Nails. The song is about the anger I had towards the adults that were around me when I was younger. Now that I’m an adult myself, I think I can legitimately be quite angry towards the adults of my youth, because I just never would have done things that way. I think when you get older, you look back at certain things you’ve experienced and the way the adults handled it, and you kind of can’t believe it. This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album; I wanted it to have this really dark moment. It’s a pretty direct message.” **“Imagining”** “So much of the confusion around so many mental health issues is that you don’t know if it’s real, and you assume that everyone else is feeling this way, so you minimize what you’re experiencing. It\'s like being in a club and feeling completely lost, which is the energy I wanted to have in the production. It’s very repetitive, the chorus is really shouty, and the lyrics don’t make the most sense. It’s sensory overload.” **“Frankenstein”** “I had two days in the studio with Paul Epworth, and we wrote ‘Frankenstein’ on the first day and ‘This Hell’ on the second. I was writing about realizing that it’s not okay to give one person in your life all this baggage to deal with—whether it\'s a lover or a best friend or someone else close to you—and asking them to put you back together when that’s not their job. I love Paul’s pop production, but for me it’s about the work he did with Bloc Party. It’s actually Matt Tong playing drums on this track, which is insane. I grew up going to gigs around my area in Camden, and it was one of the best, most hedonistic and chaotic times of my life, and I wanted to reference that frantic energy. I might incite a mosh when I perform it live.” **“Hurricanes”** “A little pop-rock moment: It’s about self-sabotage and running into situations that aren’t good for you. I originally wrote this with Clarence Clarity, and the production sounded a bit like The Cardigans, a bit ’60s surf, and it just wasn’t working. I needed it to sound more driving, like being propelled forward throughout the song, like a hurricane. When Stuart Price came on board later on, he was also working with The Killers, and he suggested listening to them as a reference for the drums. Once we rerecorded the drums, it all fell into place. ‘Hurricanes’ is probably my favorite track on the album right now. It ends on that nice major chord, and it’s like this resolve. The end of the chaos. It’s such a fun song to sing.” **“Send My Love to John”** “One of my really good friends has quite actively homophobic parents, and they’ve had a very difficult time because their parents have never been supportive of their queerness. Then one day my friend was on the phone with their mum and at the end of the call she said, ‘OK, I’ll speak to you soon, and send my love to John,’ meaning my friend’s long-term boyfriend. It was a breakthrough. And it’s insane because the mum is never going to say sorry, but this is something they can hold on to. A lot of people need to hear the word ‘sorry’ from their parents and they’re never going to get it, so I wanted to write from the perspective of a parent who regrets not supporting their child to the fullest extent.” **“Phantom”** “I can’t quite remember how this song came about, but I think I had written ‘phantom’ in my notes and I was like, ‘Let’s just try things and see how it sounds.’ We were having quite a free session, just coming up with ideas. It’s a proper rock ballad, almost a love song, about losing yourself and wanting that person back because you don’t like the person that you are now. I wanted it to have a real Aerosmith vibe.” **“To Be Alive”** “The production on ‘To Be Alive’ is inspired by ‘Ray of Light’ by Madonna. It’s got those propulsive breakbeats. I wanted to make an extremely euphoric last song, about the really pure realization that simple things can give us joy if we want them to. The last line of the song, and of the whole album, ‘Flowers are still pretty when they’re dying,’ is actually a lyric Lauren Aquilina suggested. It ends on a hopeful note, but it’s sad at the same time.”

Following on from her critically acclaimed debut “SAWAYAMA”, Rina Sawayama’s highly anticipated new record “Hold The Girl” sees Rina once again juxtapose intimate storytelling with arena-sized songs, creating another ambitious and original album to excite fans and critics alike. Written and recorded over the last ​​year and a half, Rina once again teamed up with longterm collaborators Clarence Clarity and Lauren Aquilina as well as enlisting help from the likes of the legendary Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence & the Machine), Stuart Price (Dua Lipa, The Killers, Madonna) and Marcus Andersson (Demi Lovato, Ashnikko) for their magic touch. The product of Rina and these collective minds coming together is an album which melds influences from across the pop spectrum and is a bold and honest statement of Rina’s personal evolution; coming to terms with her own past and the jubilation of turning to the future.

Latto (Alyssa Michelle Stephens) started rapping at 10, won Jermaine Dupri’s *The Rap Game* at 17, and released her debut album, *Queen of Da Souf*, at 21. Now 23, with a new rap moniker (dropping the controversial Mu- at the front of her title), she’s back with her sophomore LP, recorded across two years in Miami, LA, and Atlanta. “I’m reintroducing myself to the world on a clean slate,” she tells Apple Music. “I was adamant about its versatility, standing out as an artist—not just a female, but an artist in general.” And she’s accomplished that, with A-list collaborators (Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino on “Sunshine,” the Pharrell Williams-produced “Real One”), hard-as-hell empowerment bangers (“It’s Givin,” “Trust No Bitch”), and surprising sonic detours (Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” sample on her biggest track to date, “Big Energy”). “I hope people hear the passion,” she says of *777*, which she named as a reference to God and the lottery —“hitting the jackpot” in two different ways. “I’m serious about what I do. My heart is really in the music.” Below, she walks Apple Music through the album, track-by-track. **“777 Pt. 1” and “777 Pt. 2”** “I wanted to set the tone of the album. I knew the intro was going to be something very unique, heavy punch lines, very aggressive—real rapper aesthetic. I actually recorded ‘Pt. 2’ first, and as soon as I did that one, I knew that was the intro. Then, months after, I ended up doing a special \[song\] with Sonny Digital, what is now ‘777 Pt. 1.’ It gave me intro vibes, but I didn’t want to scrap the other intro that I already had.” **“Wheelie” (feat. 21 Savage)** “\[21 Savage and I\] already had a relationship because of my previous album. We had a song called ‘Pull Up.’ When I heard ‘Wheelie,’ after I did the first verse, I’m like, ‘I don’t even want to do the second verse,’ so I’m thinking of people that would be perfect for that sound. It reminded me of ‘Pull Up,’ as far as that sticky, choppy, catchy flow. He put the second verse on there, sent it right back. That’s Atlanta culture, strip-club culture—that’s the ratchet song, the turn-up song on the album.“ **“Big Energy”** “I did this one in LA. When I walked in the session, my A&R were talking about this beat that they wanted to play for me. It felt nostalgic, it felt big and super mainstream, commercial for me. I wanted to really just challenge myself. I was trying to catch the flow and figure out my tone on the beat for a week straight until I got it. And by the time I got it, I was like, ‘I think this is special.’” **“Sunshine” (feat. Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino)** “I still can’t even believe that I got them both on the song. I had originally recorded it as a solo song, but I felt like it was bigger than me. I wanted a feature on it. So, I’m thinking out loud. I’m thinking of very ‘artistic’ artists. I want somebody who has a universal sound and someone who can go more in-depth and play on the word ‘sunshine.’ Who is the clever rapper? I’m thinking of these names and I’m shooting for the stars. And to my surprise, both of them did the song request, which is like huge, huge, huge. I’m still a new artist. I’m from Atlanta, so Childish is extra special, and I just grew up on Wayne.” **“Like a Thug” (feat. Lil Durk)** “‘Like a Thug’ was one of the ones that I had been sleeping on it. I have had it in the vault since 2020. I just never gave up on the song. That’s a different sound for me, but I knew it had some special components to it, too. Come around to this year, and I rerecord it, fix it up, change a bar here and there. It’s so pretty, super radio, and I wanted it to still have edginess—that raw, uncut feel. Lil Durk, in my opinion, kills all the slow songs; he features on these slow R&B songs, girl songs. He eats them up. To my surprise, he did it, no questions asked.\" **“It’s Givin”** “In my opinion, it’s the sassy, girl-power song on the album. It’s so fun. That’s a girl anthem. When you making your videos on Instagram, walking in your heels, and you ready to go to the club—makeup done, hair done, nails done—this is the song. This is the song you going to be playing, adding behind your videos and stuff. It’s just boss bitch, bad bitch energy.” **“Stepper” (feat. Nardo Wick)** “‘Stepper’ was another one of those that I had originally in mind as a solo song. I actually freestyled this song—I was in the booth, just going part to part, punching in; it was just getting more aggressive. I was like, ‘You know what? I feel like I need a male to offset my energy. I feel like I hear Nardo Wick on this.’ I’m a fan of his music. Then I found out we was labelmates, so I’m like, ‘Oh, y’all got to make this happen.’ Nardo jumped on there and when I heard his verse, I fell in love. This song, from jump, I never second-guessed it.” **“Trust No Bitch”** “‘Trust No Bitch’ is my personal favorite. Sitting in the studio one day, it’s close to album wrap-up time. I’m just seeing what else I have left in me. It’s just me and the engineer. I’m going through beats and I’m not finding anything that’s jumping out at me. Soon as I played this beat, I sent it to the engineer, like, ‘Pull it up right now. I’m going in the booth.’ The aggression literally was just flowing out of my mouth. And it’s a buildup of all my experiences—I’m growing up as a woman and an artist at the same time. So, I think it’s just a buildup of all the relationships and friendships that I’ve been through that make people skate on thin ice around me. Everybody can’t be trusted.“ **“Bussdown” (feat. Kodak Black)** “I recorded that song in Miami. One of my A&Rs, they had a relationship with \[Kodak’s\] engineer. I wasn’t mad at the idea at all. So, I gave them the green light to send it over to him, and he sent the verse back the next day. He was super excited to do it. I fell in love with the verse.\" **“Soufside”** “‘Soufside’ came about because I never wanted to go too mainstream or commercial with my music. I never wanted to get away from my roots and the sound that made me who I am. So, after I dropped ‘Big Energy,’ I was very adamant about dropping another song that offset it a little bit, just so people know that I’m not forgetting where I came from. ‘Soufside’ is like, ‘OK, I got all these new eyes on me. “Big Energy” is bubbling and it’s reeling in a new fanbase, so let me tell these people who I am, where I’m from, and how I get down.’” **“Sleep Sleep”** “On the verse, I did a flow that I had never done before. For that one, I just set the lights in the studio to a moody light. There wasn’t any yellow or white lights in the studio or the booth. I’m literally just feeling things about what goes down in the bedroom.” **“Real One”** “Pharrell produced ‘Real One.’ I could not believe that he even wanted to work with me. I pulled up on him for a week straight and we cut five, six songs. This was my favorite out of the songs that we did. I definitely couldn’t *not* put a Pharrell-produced song on my album. I think it’s just one of those songs that girls can relate to. Men make mistakes, and sometimes they don’t really realize what they lost or realize what they had.”

On August 5th, Lee Bains + The Glory Fires will release Old-Time Folks, their fourth full-length studio album, via Don Giovanni Records. Since releasing their first album There Is a Bomb in Gilead in 2012, the road-worn Birmingham, Alabama band – singer and guitarist Lee Bains, bassist Adam Williamson, and drummer Blake Williamson – has built a reputation as being what NPR calls “punks revved up by the hot-damn hallelujah of Southern rock” who carry on “the Friday-night custom of burning down the house,” a raw live sound that they captured with Texas punk producer Tim Kerr on studio albums Dereconstructed (2014) and Youth Detention (2017) before recording a full-on live album at their favorite hometown dive, Live at the Nick (2019). Their work has come to be known, too, for Bains’s lyrics and their literate, incisive social commentary on the band’s beloved homeplace, leading him to publish poetry in the New Yorker and speak at universities from Mississippi to Sweden. Bains and the Williamson brothers can also be found collaborating with artists like Lonnie Holley and Swamp Dogg, lending their bombast to truck-bed protests of Donald Trump and Roy Moore, playing benefit shows for striking Alabama coal miners and Southern Black LGBTQ liberation organizations, and presenting gospel-music live streams for Birmingham and Atlanta food banks. While the Glory Fires have spent a decade propagating what the New York Times calls “pandemonium with a conscience,” in recent years, as the band drove their 400,000+-mile van between shows, they found themselves listening to records that were more produced, arranged, and textured than their own past work, to records that struck them as timeless and immense, ones that invited you in, to get lost in the details. On many bleary-eyed interstate drives, they talked about wanting to make a classic record–not a transparent document of their playing live with the occasional embellishment–but a record. They talked about working with a producer who had made such albums. About taking Bains’s songs and deconstructing them, stripping them down to their most minimal elements, reimagining them, and building them back up again. They talked about closely considering arrangements. Digging into their varied influences. Swapping instruments. Getting high-fidelity sounds. Inviting guest musicians. Incorporating percussion and synthesizers and horns and strings. Maybe even doing a song or two without a blaring electric guitar, or even–gasp–without a guitar at all. So, that’s what they did. They contacted Athens, Georgia’s David Barbe, whose work with the Drive-By Truckers, Sugar, Son Volt, Vic Chesnutt and countless other artists has earned him a legendary reputation amongst Southern independent rockers, and they agreed to set about bringing this vision to fruition. After months of recording demos with John Paul Foster in Montevallo, Alabama and going over arrangements with Texas punk stalwart Tim Kerr, who the band calls their “coach,” the band decamped to Athens to record with Barbe at Chase Park Transduction in December of 2019. Soon after laying down the initial tracks, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and the usually hard-touring trio soon found themselves at home with yet more time to consider, flesh out, and arrange this new batch of songs. The result is an album whose levels of dynamics, nuance, range, and intimacy are new for the band. Enriching those explorations are kindred musical spirits like pianist Thayer Sarrano, organist Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), singer Kym Register (Loamlands), horn players William Washington and Theresa May (Mourning A BLKstar), and string arranger Annie Leeth, whose idiosyncratic contributions to the album deepen that sense of collectivism that the lyrics invoke. The album was nearly named A People’s History, and its thirteen songs are focused on that mission–to investigate the band’s stomping grounds of Alabama and West Georgia, and to summon stories of that land’s peoples, rising up collectively to defend and liberate themselves from systems of power and exploitation. Just as the album’s music meanders between jagged rock’n’roll and churchy swells, feedback-drenched dirges and orchestral rave-ups, the lyrics lead us through those rich varied lands and time itself: black-masked protestors face SWAT tanks in smoggy cities; Muscogee warriors encircle a colonial fort along a muddy river; incarcerated workers noisily strike in a maximum-security prison surrounded by cottonfields; coal miners barricade the entrance of a mine; kids talk politics in the alley out back of a punk show; families gather outside a country church to prepare a dinner on the grounds. As we encounter these people and places, we sink deeper into what Bains calls “old-time,” that which connects us to those who have gone before, to the land, to each other, and to something deeper and older still. While tackling such lofty political, historical and philosophical concepts, the album is also the band’s most intimate, vulnerable and spiritual to date. The perspective is both outward- and inward-facing, Bains never taking on the persona or experience of others, but rather writing about the way his own limited experience and perspective of the band’s place can lift the veils of false narratives, and uncover “piles of winding stories” through time. Throughout the record, great forces–whether exploitative or liberatory, reconciliatory or confrontational, grand or humble, condemning or merciful–show up in the smallest, most personal moments of our lives and relationships, both public and private. Little by little, we are drawn into a long arc of freedom, justice, and beloved community, and into a celebration of and thanksgiving for those who do its work. Bains uses words like a chef, fusing them together like the chips from a multitude of trees are pressed together into particle board. These are songs that are not just songs, but stories and poetry, as well, and Bains’s sense of melody makes the stories into anthems. In an age characterized by individualism, and at a time when the past seems to be the sole domain of the status quo, Old-Time Folks illustrates the deep, thick, tangled roots of liberation, collectivism, mutuality and solidarity in the Deep South, and where they are flowering and bringing forth fruit today.

“The whole concept of the album is me having a conversation with my mom, and we’re just catching up,” GIVĒON tells Apple Music of his debut album. Hers is the first voice we hear, as she tells the singer how proud she is of him. Then comes the nocturnal breakup jam “Let Me Go.” “Decide if I am worth the time I cause you/Let me know or let me go,” he declares on the hook, before Mom closes it out with a reminder: “People make mistakes/People don’t always agree with each other/Keep that in mind.” *Give or Take* unfolds like the pages of a journal, detailing the romantic escapades of a twentysomething who loves love but isn’t always prepared to have it. Between wandering eyes, bad timing, and a desire to heal always at odds with the weakness of the flesh, there’s a bit of everything here conceptually. The songs are experiences he recounts to his mom, in search of advice or perhaps absolution. “That’s why the stories kind of feel like a roller coaster and not just one smooth story—because it was more sporadic,” he explains. “I really wanted to give people a look behind the curtains of a 26-year-old man growing up today.” GIVĒON’s gorgeous voice has the kind of grit and soul that imbues every lyric with emotional resonance; the production throughout further adds to the mood while also allowing his instrument to take center stage. As a result, these songs sound—and feel—like some of his most mature to date, even as he searches for romantic maturity within himself. “I just wanted to make sure I was being honest and vulnerable, and making sure everything was elevated,” he says, adding that there was little different about his approach this time around. “I made my other stuff in 2019-2020, so naturally, with the course of time, I knew I was evolving as an artist, so I wasn’t really worried about it.” By the end of it all, Mom is brought to tears—the happy sort though. Below, GIVĒON shares the ideas and inspiration behind each of the songs. **“Let Me Go”** “I always think it’s really important to start with just a hook—something heavy, drums, just rhythmic. Pretty much the story of this one is either we’re going to be something or nothing at all, and then it ended up being nothing at all. So, that’s really just the end of everything before. That song was really just the closure.” **“Scarred”** “‘Scarred’ really is just running into someone fresh off of a heartbreak way too quick and really just telling them, ‘I’m a fan of what this is, but it’s not going to work because the breakup is so fresh and because I still have lingering issues that need to be resolved. But selfishly, we could still do everything we’re doing.’ Because it’s just, I don’t know, sometimes it feels easier to be in something while you try to heal versus just healing, staring at a wall.” **“dec 11th”** “I’m pretty much just setting the scene for the next song, ‘This Will Do.’ It’s really just a message or a Bat-Signal for just a connection that I made while on stage. And then, the next song really talks about how fleeting those connections are because it’s stage and it’s not real, essentially. So, December 11th, I did a sold-out show in Houston and, yeah, that’s the date of that show.” **“This Will Do”** “Sometimes, production will have their structures, but I feel like, sometimes, artists—we know what feels better because we know what to sing over. We know when to let it breathe. And I love to go into that space where it kind of just makes it flow more. So, for ‘This Will Do,’ this is the beginning of the story of me saying that I’m single for the first project ever, really. And one of the problems I run into being single and being me is not being quite sure what’s real and what’s fake, but this song is me acknowledging that possibility and then just going with it—saying it could be fake, yeah, but it’ll do.” **“Get to You”** “‘Get to You’ was meant to feel exhausting. You have all these options and then, now, it feels empty. It’s just the bachelor—single life is old, but it’s also a message to someone saying, ‘Sorry that I’m doing this on my time, but I kind of had to.’” **“Tryna Be”** “‘Tryna Be’ is just as simple as, ‘Listen, I’m trying to be everything that I should be and even that I want to be, but...’ It really speaks on distance as well and trying to be the best you can be when you know no one is looking. It also speaks to the mindset of telling someone and just being honest and no one caring, which is a very real thing. You’ll tell someone, ‘Listen, I have this, this, this,’ and they’ll be like, ‘You know what? I really don’t care.’ It just speaks on how toxic today is. Not that it’s a new concept, but it’s just—I don’t know, it’s wild out there.” **“Make You Mine”** “This is all still a part of a journey, so these are just checkpoints that I was going through. Once I get to ‘Make You Mine,’ I start to fall back into the romance of it all. It’s a rare moment of me being more sensual and just light and dreamy. I only have a few songs in this space—‘WORLD WE CREATED’ and ‘Garden Kisses’—and ‘Make You Mine’ is where we just see that side.” **“July 16th”** “So, pretty much, it’s just a timeline. At the end of ‘Make You Mine,’ there’s a transition, there’s a conversation being had. It’s me saying. ‘I know I’m moving too fast. I just can’t help it. It’s just how I am.’ And ‘July 16th’ is really just the message of, ‘I’m moving too fast again and trying not to but doing it anyway.’” **“For Tonight”** “I kind of tried to have this song where it feels contradictory in a way. The sonics are so—they feel romantic, and it feels like it’s a love song. But if you scratch the surface and actually look and listen and read the lyrics, you could kind of see the truth peek out and the taboo-ness of what I’m talking about. Because that’s really sometimes what relationships are and what life is: It looks and feels right on the outside, but then, once you put a magnifying glass on it, you could kind of start to see all the cracks.” **“Lost Me”** “So, ‘Lost Me’ is—I’m always in something. I’m always romantically involved, but for this time, I’m going to actually try to just take time for myself and not be bummed out about it, not be melancholy about it. It was just more of a shoulder-shrug, like honestly, let me just, for lack of a better word, do me and not make it feel like there’s anything wrong with it. That’s why the sonics are so—there’s so much rhythm to it. There’s so much bounce to it. It has the drums; it has the light and airy acoustic guitar that you hear throughout the whole song. It was me just chillin’.” **“Lie Again”** “‘Lie Again’ is really, it’s kind of almost self-explanatory. It’s just seeking information, getting that information, and then wishing you never had it.” **“Another Heartbreak”** “\[Piano ballads are\] one of my favorite forms and structures of songs, to where I like it so much, I tried to limit it to just one on this album. I can make piano ballads all day. But for ‘Another Heartbreak,’ I just wanted something stripped back but that also feels cinematic. So, throughout the song, there’s key changes and chord changes, and it still has a building element to it—there’s choir vocals, there’s strings. And the song is as simple as saying, ‘I got one more heartbreak left in me, so this has to work, or I’m done off all of it.’ It’s really just me saying I can’t take another one.” **“At Least We Tried”** “I just wanted to make sure I had real good moments as well. It’s easy to tell these stories of heartbreak and melancholy, but to be able to balance it with ‘At Least We Tried’ and stuff like that is, I think, what really makes it an album. Because it could just continue to go on that roller coaster.” **“Remind Me”** “That’s one of my favorite songs that was written on the album because it’s just such an introspective one. It’s like you’re looking at someone and they’re reminding you of the old you, when you weren’t as thoughtful and when you weren’t as caring and empathetic. And now, you pretty much just ran into you. It’s just karma.” **“Unholy Matrimony”** “‘Unholy Matrimony’ is just so—it’s heart-wrenching, but also it is what it is. That’s how it goes. And the story is just so visual. You could see the white dress, and you could see the tux, you could see it all happening throughout the song. And these conversations with my mom throughout the album are real, organic conversations that we had, and it all just came together perfectly.”

I'm excited and proud to announce that my 5th solo record A Legacy Of Rentals will be released on May 20, 2022 via Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers. A Legacy of Rentals was largely written during 2020, in the shadow of the pandemic and the George Floyd murder that occurred in my hometown of Minneapolis. It was recorded in 2021 with producer Josh Kaufman, engineer D. James Goodwin, and a number of other friends and collaborators. These songs deal a lot with memory: how we remember people that are gone, places that have changed, major events that are part of our past. It's about how memories become the stories that we tell others and ourselves. It’s about the distortion that happens to our own histories when stretched by time and distance. It’s about finding joy in the mundane and engaging in hope in our everyday. You can watch a video trailer for the record here: youtu.be/3YqMngcaZSg I really appreciate you being a part of this. This record is very special to me, and I think a bit different than anything I’ve done before. I’m honored to be here to share A Legacy Of Rentals with you. This is what it looks like. cf Pre-order physical formats of A Legacy of Rentals: orcd.co/alegacyofrentals

In the near-decade since LA-based best-friend duo Girlpool, Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad, infiltrated the indie pop-rock scene with their gorgeous harmonies and punky melodies as teenagers, a lot has changed: They instituted additional instrumentalists, they started veering away from their charmingly minimal and diaristic songwriting, and Avery began transitioning before their third LP, *What Chaos Is Imaginary*. *Forgiveness*, the pair’s fourth full-length, is the product of that growth. Their ear for sparse composition has evolved; instead of speaking world-weary truths in the space between spiky guitar riffs, they’ve grounded their sincerity in ethereal production, spacey synth, and songs that interrogate gender, relationships, and everything in between. Once celebrated for their youthful exuberance, Girlpool has never lost their heart, they’ve simply gained wisdom.

“*Kid Krow* was my introduction to the world—there’s a lot of teen angst,” Conan Gray tells Apple Music, contrasting his sophomore album to his 2020 debut LP. “*Superache* is a bit more self-aware. I’ve had time to think about life; it’s my early twenties.” Written largely in isolation, on his bed, on the floor of his living room, and with Olivia Rodrigo producer Dan Nigro, the YouTuber-turned-pop star’s second LP is a maturation full of nuanced explorations of desire (“People Watching”) and romantic platonic friendships (“Best Friend”). “The overarching theme of this album is lingering pain—this mourning period that almost feels good. You wallow in it, and you cry, and you write all these songs; you’re being really annoying about it all,” Gray laughs. “That’s what a *Superache* is—I wanted it to have a bit of humor as well.” Educated in Taylor Swift’s songwriting school of lyrical specificity, *Superache* is an album of cut-close-to-the-heart narratives (“Astronomy”), explosive pop rock (“Jigsaw”), Harry Styles-esque solo balladry (“Yours”), and ascending vocal melody (“Memories”). Ambitious and melodramatic, sure, but always rewarding. “I hope this album makes people feel less alone in their experiences. That’s why I started writing music: I was a lonely kid and didn’t feel like I could understand other people,” he says. “Being alive is a confounding thing and you’re allowed to have insane, mixed emotions all the time.” Below, Conan Gray walks Apple Music through his sophomore LP, track by track. **“Movies”** “I think the reason why I chose ‘Movies’ as the opener is because it’s a song about being in denial. For a lot of my early teens and a lot of my life, I spent so long, trying so hard, to fall in love in a way that was normal. I wanted the Hallmark movie. I wanted that stupid, fake, perfect love because that’s what I grew up seeing. I think, in the past few years, I’ve realized that’s not what I want anymore. I wanted to show people the process of discovering that over this album.” **“People Watching”** “‘People Watching’ was a really pivotal point in making *Superache*. The truth is, I wrote this album at a time where I just wasn’t in love. I had very few romantic interests. And I feel like my whole life, I’ve been an observer of life but not a participator. I’ve watched people. What does it feel like to fall in love? I write all these songs because I’m trying to understand.” **“Disaster”** “‘Disaster’ sounds a little different from the rest of the album. I wanted the song to sound like overthinking, where you’re racing through all these moments in your life with someone and trying to decipher whether or not they like you, and whether you should tell them that you have feelings for them. So, I wanted the song to be really fast and to have hard synths and drums and this really quick dialogue.” **“Best Friend”** “The song is about a bunch of different friends in my life. Since I’ve never been in a relationship romantically, I really see my friends as the most important aspect of my entire life. It felt like something that I had to say on the album or else it would’ve been an inaccurate depiction of what my life has been like the past few years.” **“Astronomy”** “The reason why I put ‘Astronomy’ after ‘Best Friend’ is because ‘Astronomy’ is about my best friend. My deepest fear in life is losing my best friends—my childhood best friend in particular. It’s irrational because I know her better than anyone else on earth and she knows me better than anyone else. In the bridge, I say, ‘Stop trying to keep us alive/You’re pointing at stars in the sky/That already died.’ When you look up at the night sky, you see all these stars, and most of them actually aren’t even there anymore. That’s that moment when you’re losing a friendship or a relationship, and you realize that the only things you have to say to them are things that you’ve done in the past. There’s nothing new and there’s nothing more.” **“Yours”** “Dan \[Nigro\] and I were sitting at the piano, and he started playing the melody. It got stuck in my head. I started singing, ‘Somebody you call when you are alone...’ At that point in my life, I was dealing with that annoying, lingering love for someone that I very much felt was the most important person in my life. They didn’t have the same feelings towards me. I wanted the chorus to be really simple and repeat itself, like, ‘Well, I’m not yours, and I want more, but that stuff’s not going to happen.’ I wanted it to be very kind of plain.” **”Jigsaw”** “‘Jigsaw’ was the one part of the album where I really needed to express how angry it makes me that when you love somebody, it doesn’t matter who they are, it’s so hard to please them sometimes. You feel pressure to please them or become what they want you to be. I ended up getting in this argument with someone and I remember being so mad—the kind of mad where you start crying and you feel really stupid because you’re angry, but you’re crying. It was originally just a sad little acoustic song. I played it for Dan \[Nigro\] and I was like, ‘I want to make this song so loud.’” **“Family Line”** “It’s about watching generations of hurt people pass their pain onto their kids, and then their kids pass them onto their kids. In my childhood, I felt like I was told that I was going to end up living this very specific life and that I wasn’t going to have a bright future because of my past. ‘Family Line’ is me saying, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter. I can be whatever I want to be.’ I was so scared to put it out; that was the reason why I needed to put it out.” **“Summer Child”** “My generation is the type of generation that loves to just act like everything is perfectly fine. When we talk about pain, we are very sarcastic about it. We don’t really get into depth about it, and we laugh it off. We create these facades about who we are in order to make things a bit easier. ‘Summer Child’ is me acknowledging the fact that we all have a tendency to create versions of ourselves that we think are easier for people to digest. But oftentimes, it’s just something that we’ve made up in our heads and everyone is perfectly lovable the way that they are.\" **“Footnote”** “‘Footnote,’ selfishly, is my favorite song in the entire album. It scratches this itch that I’ve never heard scratched before, if that makes any sense. It’s not a song about the big dramatic heartbreak and the screaming and the slamming doors and crying. It’s not about that. It’s about the aftermath. When your ex ends up writing the story of their life, you’re just going to be a tiny little footnote at the bottom of a page. So much of love, of music is about the big and the loud. This song is about the quiet realization that you’re just going to have to take a step back and let them go.” **“Memories”** “‘Memories’ was the very last song that I wrote for *Superache*. I wanted to take this phrase that I’ve heard so many times in rom-coms, sitting on the curb like, ‘Oh, I hope that you’ll stay in my memories forever. I love you. Never leave me.’ I wanted to take that phrase and completely deconstruct it, like, ‘You know what? I actually do wish you would stay in my memories and not exist in my present. I don’t want you right now. Go.’” **“The Exit”** “I wanted to end the album with ‘The Exit’ because it sums up the album. It’s about realizing that everyone around you is moving on, but you’re still standing at the exit, wondering how everyone is doing it so easily and how they’re able to continue on with their lives after being heartbroken. It’s always been something that’s dumbfounded me. I’m a lingerer. I just stick around, write songs, and think.”

Listening to Atlanta MC JID’s third studio album *The Forever Story*, it’s hard to imagine the Dreamville signee pursuing a career in anything other than rap, but according to the man born Destin Choice Route, establishing himself as one of his generation’s most clever wordsmiths was plan B. “I ain\'t always want to be a rapper, artist, or nothing like this,” he told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden ahead of the album’s release. “This wasn\'t my dream. This was just like, ‘I’m really fire at this. I\'m really gifted at this.’ I always wanted to be a football player, you feel me? That was my whole shit.” Though he’s long ago moved on from any delusions of playing the sport professionally, the voicemail tacked on to the end of album intro “Galaxy” reveals a closeness to the sport, and more specifically those who helped him learn it. “That\'s my old football coach,” JID says of the voice we hear chewing him out for not answering the phone. “He was just giving me shit. That was his whole demeanor, but it was always for the better. He was my father away from home. He was just a big part of the whole story.” *The Forever Story*, to be specific, is a deep dive into the MC’s family lore and an exploration of what growing up the youngest of seven meant for his outlook. If JID’s last proper album, *The Never Story*, was an introduction to his lyrical prowess and a declaration that he had a story to tell, *The Forever Story* is an expansion of that universe. “*Never* came from a very humble mindset,” he says. “It was coming from, I *never* had shit. *The Forever Story*\'s just the evolved origin story, really just giving you more of who I am—more family stories, where I\'m from, why I am kind of how I am.” He tells these stories in grave detail on songs like “Raydar,” “Can’t Punk Me,” “Kody Blu 31,” and “Can’t Make U Change” and then includes collaborations with heroes-turned-peers (“Stars” featuring Yasiin Bey, “Just in Time” with Lil Wayne) that acknowledge a reverence for his craft. He raps about his siblings on songs like “Bruddanem” and “Sistanem,” but it’s “Crack Sandwich,” a song where the MC details an encounter in which his family fought together, that seems the most like a story JID will enjoy telling forever. “We were all together like Avengers and shit,” he says. “Back-to-back brawling in New Orleans. It was crazy.”

The second album from Raveena Aurora is a conceptual epic whose protagonist, the titular Asha, is an ancient Punjabi princess living on an alien planet, where she is bestowed with advanced spiritual intelligence (as one does). However complicated that sounds, the Indian American artist unfurls the narrative with grace and subtlety, her feather-light falsetto floating over South Asian-inspired percussion and dreamy R&B and disco. Vince Staples drops by for a verse on the slinky, Timbaland-esque “Secret,” but the album’s most swoon-worthy moment is “Asha’s Kiss,” a collaboration with Asha Puthli—the Mumbai-born jazz-fusion singer whose “Space Talk” you’ve probably heard sampled in any number of hip-hop classics—that feels like an afternoon daydream. If that doesn’t get you in the mood for reverie, the 13-minute guided meditation (“Let Your Breath Become a Flower”) that closes the album should do the trick.

It wasn’t long after his debut mixtape, 2020’s *No Love Lost*, that Blxst was being heralded as the preeminent voice of Los Angeles R&B. His style—a seamless mix of croaky harmonizing and nimble flows—made him the perfect counterpart for collaborators both local (Mozzy, Drakeo the Ruler, 1Take Jay, Bino Rideaux) and global (Nas, Rick Ross, Fireboy DML). *Before You Go* picks up right where *No Love Lost* left off, striking a balance between pledges of unending allegiance to his life partner (“Never Was Wrong,” “Pick Your Poison,” “Sometimes”) and professions of gratitude for every moment of his journey (“Couldn’t Wait for It,” “Still Omw,” “Talk to Me Nicely”). The tape contains a handful of songs that seem like direct continuations of ideas he debuted on *No Love Lost*—“About You” refurbishes a vintage R&B melody in the vein of “Be Alone,” “Every Good Girl” has a strong “Wrong or Right” energy, and “Be Forreal” features cadences that recall “Gang Slide”—all of which serve as reminders of how great his debut was and affirmations of how committed the singer is to establishing the Blxst sound.

At this point, Lizzo needs no introduction. The endlessly witty, playfully braggadocious, and proudly plus-size powerhouse has been pocketing Grammys and flying private for a minute now, and in many ways, her celebratory fourth album *Special* is a snapshot from her view at the top. “I felt a lot of pressure to follow up *Cuz I Love You* with more bangers,” she tells Apple Music. “Or to capture this post-‘Truth Hurts’-single-girl-era Lizzo. But concepts have never really been my bag. It feels like I’m lying. Instead, I just wrote honestly about where I’ve been for the last few years, and who I’ve become.” Given these tumultuous times, the tone of the album shifted a bit. In its early phases, *Special* was a political project of angry, protest-oriented rock songs—a way to “address the injustices I see in the world,” she says. But her songwriting led her into brighter, more positive territory. “I started writing from a place of gratitude rather than fear, and that’s always where I wanted to be,” she says. “Whether I have everything in the world or it’s all taken away from me, I always want my base level to be gratitude. These songs are a celebration of who I am right now.” Laced with campy one-liners (“It’s bad bitch o’clock/Yeah, it’s thick thirty”), hard-to-get clearances (Beastie Boys, Coldplay, Lauryn Hill), and chunky disco-funk beats designed to make you move, these spirited, charismatic anthems are her most adventurous yet. They also detail Lizzo’s keys to happiness: counting your blessings and loving yourself first. **“The Sign”** “This was originally track two. The first track I had was a sad song about love and loss, because I wanted to catch people by surprise. Like a traditional Lizzo album starts with a big fanfare, it\'s very in-your-face. As this album evolved and I made peace with not putting a lot of those darker notes on here, it became clear to me that the right way to start this was by being my honest self. That meant: ‘Hi, motherfucker!’ That in-your-face fanfare. I think it works great as a tone-setter, too, because honestly, where else would this song go? It can\'t go at the end. It can\'t be in the middle. It\'s definitely not track three. It’s a kick-off. It’s saying, ‘We\'re about to have fun. This is about to be a musical journey.’” **“About Damn Time”** “I have been making feel-good music for a long fucking time now—as early as ‘Good as Hell’ for people who\'ve known about me. So when I made a song like ‘Juice’ that had this funky disco feel to it, I didn\'t really realize what I was doing. I was just letting the song happen. It was the complete opposite with ‘About Damn Time.’ For this record, I was like, ‘We are making a disco record.’ I wanted a song that would be emblematic and reflective of the times. And I associate disco with resilience; it helped so many people stomp out of a dark era in this country. So I hoped that a contemporary disco song would have a similar effect. Now, I don\'t know what we\'re walking into. Things have gotten crazy. But I do know that we\'re always moving. I wanted this song to be a marching song \[that would help\] us move forward.” **“Grrrls”** “benny blanco and I had never worked together before this album. We’d eaten together, but we\'d never worked together. Then one day I heard he wanted to get in the studio and I was like, ‘Oh shit, okay, let\'s make it happen.’ He came with one track and it was this. So I sat with it for a while. Eventually I was like, ‘Listen, this is either going to be the greatest song ever or the biggest waste of our time.’ Because Beastie Boys were one of the greatest copyrights of all time. No one, and I mean no one, has done this. Until now. Dude, Beastie Boys cleared ‘Girls’ for yours truly. It’s an honor.” **“2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)”** “This is the first record I made with Max Martin, and it’s a dream record. As someone who\'s been writing songs since I was 9, who studied music since I was 12, and who dreamed of being a performer, Max Martin is the dream collaborator. Recording it was like watching a legend in action. He’s an extremely collaborative, open, creative soul. The song is a callback to when pop records had key changes—that golden era of late-’80s and early-’90s pop when singers had massive records that were vocally impressive but also danceable, and the production quality was very intentional. I think it\'s a work of art. It’s a masterpiece.” **“I Love You Bitch”** “‘I Love You Bitch’ came from a tweet, and it\'s not the same as ‘Truth Hurts,’ so don\'t come at me for royalties, Twitter. Shortly after ‘Rumors’ with Cardi B dropped, Cardi tweeted that she wanted to hear a love song from me next. And I was like, ‘Okay, if Lizzo did a love song, what would it be? I love you, bitch?’ It was one of those rare times where I had the title before the song. I got in the studio with Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin and told them about my idea. Omer started playing the guitar, and I started freestyling to it. I\'m from Houston, and there\'s this Houston rapper named Z-Ro who has a song called ‘I Hate U Bitch.’ Suddenly I was like, hold up, what if I sang the ‘I Hate U Bitch’ melody but said ‘I Love You Bitch’ instead? It just came out, and it might be the greatest thing we’ve ever done. As I was writing the lyrics, I realized that I wanted to write a universal love song—one you could sing to the person you\'re fucking and your best friend, to your family or to someone you just met at a bar.” **“Special”** “After ‘Rumors,’ I received a lot of backlash. I think it was because people hadn\'t heard from me since *Cuz I Love You* and this was their opportunity to attack me because I was visible, you know? But I turn my pain into music. I turn my pain into profit. I make it work for me. So I went into the studio to write a song for myself that would remind me how special I am. In the second verse, I say, ‘Could you imagine a world where everybody\'s the same? And you could cancel a girl ’cause she just wanted to change? How could you throw fucking stones if you ain\'t been through her pain? That\'s why we feel so alone, that\'s why we feel so much shame.’ I was trying to flip the mirror on people, that same mirror that I check myself with. It’s me saying, ‘You attack people like they\'re the monster, but you\'ve become the monster.’ No one\'s giving anyone the space to be themselves, to show their specialness, and to grow.” **“Break Up Twice”** “This is my second dream collab: Mark Ronson. And let me tell you, this is quintessential Mark. His style and swag is inescapable. Working with him made me feel like a kid again, because you just jam. And I used to be in a rock band, so that’s my bread and butter. When I first heard the guitar part, I was like, ‘This is classic shit right here.’ And when I heard those Lauryn Hill ‘Doo Wop’ chords, I was like, ‘Do we run from this or lean into it?’ You’ve got to lean into it. She cleared it in a day and I was beside myself. The story behind it is like, I’d had a barbecue and one of my friends threatened the guy I invited. She was like, ‘If you fuck with her, I\'m gonna slash your tires.’ I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’ I took it into the studio and Mark thought it was brilliant. The idea is: I don\'t break up twice. We\'re only going to do this once, and we\'re going to do it right.” **“Everybody\'s Gay”** “I wanted to write a fantasy song, like one of those Hollywood songs where you\'re taken away to a picture that I\'m painting, a dream sequence kind of thing. It\'s very cinematic. I wanted to write about this wild costume party where everybody gets together and has a good time. And no, when I sing ‘Take your mask off,’ I didn\'t mean your N95. I meant like the mask of the person that you have to uphold when you\'re out in the world, the mask that protects your true self. Take that off, because we accept you for who you are in this space. This high-key is the centerpiece of the album, musically, for me. It\'s a cornucopia of sound.” **“Naked”** “Goddammit, where do I even start? Pop Wansel made this beautiful track, and I was like, ‘If I don\'t use this track, I\'m going to think about this for the rest of my life. If I don\'t use this beat, I\'m going to think about this beat for the rest of my life.’ Initially, I wanted to write a song about how comfortable I\'ve become with myself, but then I evolved as a person. And as I’ve evolved, ‘Naked’ has undergone a lot of rewriting. It has evolved with me. So now it’s like, ‘How accepting are you of me?’ It’s very intimate. I saw Solange perform a couple years ago now at the Lovebox Festival in London, and I was in awe of her set because she had so much nuance. Meanwhile, I\'m all bravado. I\'m in-your-face, loud-loud-loud, full-throttle. I was like, ‘Man, on my next album, I want nuance.’ Because there\'s nothing like the control that she has, the power she has in the quiet. So on ‘Naked,’ I\'m in a half-falsetto for most of the song. I’m ad-libbing here and there. I’m having a little chat. It’s under your breath. Also, I had a sinus infection when I sang this, and frankly I give the best vocals with a sinus infection.” **“Birthday Girl”** “I did this with \[production duo\] Monsters & Strangerz, and it all came from a freestyle. I was like, ‘Is it your birthday, girl? ’Cause you lookin\' like a present.’ I literally think I freestyled that. And they were like, ‘Whoa.’ Mind you, the song wasn\'t about birthdays. I thought it was going to be like the first line of the first verse but then I’d go on to talk about how fine my friends are and whatever. And they were like, ‘No, no, this is the song.’ I felt tied to the song’s initial concept, which was to celebrate my friends and how much I love and appreciate them, but then I realized that birthdays symbolize that. Birthdays are a big deal for me. Every friend that I have, I try to make their birthday the biggest blowout every year. Helicopters, Omarion. Lizards. Three-tiered cakes. Like I say in the song, ‘When you\'ve been through the most/You got to do the most.’ That\'s an Instagram caption for life.” **“If You Love Me”** “This was the first song I wrote for the album, and it was something I needed to get off my chest. It’s about all of the times I go onstage and talk to the crowd and am like, ‘You guys show me so much love, so much support, and I want to thank you for supporting a woman who looks like me—a big Black woman from Houston, Texas. If you could show this same energy to people who look like me but who aren’t Lizzo, who aren’t dancing onstage and entertaining you... If you could show it to a woman on the street, show her some love and respect...’ Because historically, that hasn\'t been the case. It’s asking: How do we take the time to be kind to ourselves and kind to the person next to us, no matter what they look like or where they come from? How can we take this respect that we give to entertainers and apply it to people in the real world? This is a record that fans who\'ve been following me for a long time will get it as soon as they hear it.” **“Coldplay”** “This song was literally created from a 45-minute freestyle to a piano loop. Ricky Reed had me sit in the booth and just talk, so I started romanticizing about this trip I’d just taken to Tulum, about the experiences I’d had and how I was singing Coldplay and crying. A few weeks later, he was like, ‘Hey, you remember that freestyle you said in the booth? I wrote a song using your words.’ He played me a track that sampled Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy.’ Ricky was like, ‘We should call this “My Love Is You.”’ And I was like, ‘Nah, we should call it “Coldplay.”’ Because I\'m going to tell you: Black people call people the name of their band. We call Adam Levine ‘Maroon 5.’ ‘Oh, there goes Maroon 5.’ I thought there was something funny and real about calling a song that samples Coldplay ‘Coldplay.’ Their songwriting is so simple and poetic. So I was like, ‘Let\'s honor them. Let\'s not run from it.’ On this album, I didn\'t run from anything. If there’s a thesis to this album, it’s that. Embracing myself.”

Following a Grammy-nominated debut album may sound like a daunting task, but Ingrid Andress makes it seem like a breeze on her sophomore outing. The LP finds Andress taking what stood out about her 2020 debut *Lady Like*—infectious melodies, conversational and often vulnerable lyrics, a playful take on the country sound—and expanding upon it with a more adventurous approach to production (Andress co-produced the LP) and confident, story-based songwriting. Unable to tour in support of *Lady Like* due to the pandemic, Andress wrote much of *Good Person* during quarantine, using the time for reflection on herself as a person and an artist. Songs like the poppy “How Honest Do You Want Me to Be?” and the old-school “Pain” bristle with raw self-assuredness, fruits of that period of forced introspection. “Blue” is a tender, souful dispatch from the colorful vistas of newfound love, with one of Andress’ finest vocal performances accented by gentle pedal steel. And the title track, one of several which seamlessly incorporate a vocoder, gets at a core human struggle: how to be good.

Formed in the heart of London’s DIY punk scene, Big Joanie (featuring guitarist Stephanie Phillips, bassist Estella Adeyeri, and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone) are a Black feminist punk band whose passionate live shows and moreish blend of nineties riot grrrl and synth-heavy post punk, have seen them steadily rise to become one of the most championed bands of the current era. Big Joanie are back with their sophomore record Back Home. Recorded at Hermitage Works Studios in North London, the album was produced and mixed by Margo Broom (Goat Girl, Fat White Family). Back Home is a dramatic leap forward for the band; the band build on their tightly knit, lo-fi punk formula to bring forth a collage of blazing guitars, down tempo dance punk, and melancholic strings that evoke the full depth of the band’s expansive art punk vision. The album title references a search for a place to call home, whether real or metaphysical. “We were really ruminating on the idea of a home and what it means,” explains Stephanie. “It’s about the different ideas of home, whether that’s here in the UK, back in Africa or the Caribbean, or a place that doesn’t really exist; it’s neither here nor there." The album’s strength lies in the band’s bold and varied new sound. Album opener ‘Cactus Tree’ is an eerie, gothic folk tale that tells the story of a woman waiting for her lover while a wall of euphoric harmonies and screaming feedback roll in the background. Lead single ‘Happier Still’ is a driving, Nirvana-influenced track that grapples with the idea of wanting to push through a depressive episode. Inspired equally by the melodic rock of Hüsker Dü and the mystical sensibilities of Stevie Nicks, closer ‘Sainted’ brings the club-ready sentiment of the 2018 single ‘Fall Asleep’ to its natural conclusion. Despite Big Joanie’s many accomplishments, there is so much more the band want to achieve and Back Home looks set to be the breeding ground for a new era of Big Joanie. With their boundary-breaking approach to punk, radical politics, and an appreciation for earworm melodies, Big Joanie are set to become important voices for a new generation of punks.

The four-piece band exude all the chintzy glamor of a hyper-stylized ’70s B-movie: its members hail from across the globe (Uruguay, Australia, Sweden, London), style themselves like mid-century French chanteuses, and are mainly here to vibe-out, man. But their debut album is seriously captivating: a breezy, all-instrumental tour through retro global psychedelia, from cumbia to Turkish psych to scuzzy surf-rock, furnished by vintage synths and produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos. These are adventurous, evocative jams, calling to mind spaghetti western standoffs and oversized margaritas; there’s also an homage to Lindsay Lohan’s VIP beach resort, naturally (“Lindsay Goes to Mykonos”).

Jake Lenderman lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He plays guitar in the indie band Wednesday, sometimes fishes on the Pigeon River, and creates his own music as MJ Lenderman. His latest solo release with Dear Life Records is titled Boat Songs. Lenderman describes the album as his most “polished” sound to date, built around songs that “chase fulfillment and happiness”—whether that means buying a boat, drinking too much, or watching seeds fall from the bird feeder. Boat Songs is the followup to Lenderman’s 2021 label debut, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, and subsequent release, Knockin’, with Dear Life Records, both of which were critically acclaimed for their off-the-cuff alternative country sound. But with Boat Songs, Lenderman emerges confident as ever, an innovative yet unassuming artist, straightforward and true. Recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun with Alex Farrar and Colin Miller, Boat Songs is the first album Lenderman made in a professional studio. WWE matches and basketball games were silently projected on the studio walls during recording sessions. And you can hear their power in these ten unapologetically lo-fi tracks, each brimming with pent-up energy and the element of surprise. A clavichord honks throughout ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat’ with the playfulness of a live Dylan/Band set. ‘SUV’ screams with My Bloody Valentine distortion. When Xandy Chelmis beautifully bends his steel guitar on ‘TLC Cage Match’ you can't help but think of Gram Parsons. And ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’ howls with the intensity of Crazy Horse era Neil Young. Boat Songs is fearless and it’s exciting. It challenges the perception of what modern day country music is supposed to be and where it can go. But no matter where Boat Songs goes sonically, the album is deeply rooted in Lenderman’s natural gifts as a storyteller. Someone once asked Hank Williams what made country music successful and he said, “One word: sincerity.” Filled with everyday observations ripped straight from his journal, Lenderman’s lyrics are sincere in their absurdities, with the vulnerability and honesty of Jason Molina and Daniel Johnston. There are moments of humor (‘Jackass is funny like the Earth is round’), admission (‘I know why we get so fucked up’), and recognition of beauty others might not stop to see (‘Your laundry looks so pretty...relaxing in the wind’). Read alone on the page, ‘Hangover Game,’ ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat,’ and ‘Dan Marino,’ stand out as perfect little poems, unpretentious and real. Simply said, these songs are unforgettable. Or you could also say it like this: listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch. The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again. But it don’t matter how many times you’ve heard them, because they're from the heart—and in the end they always make you feel alive again. --Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

WILLOW made her return to music in 2021 with her infectious pop-punk- and indie-rock-style fourth album, *lately I feel EVERYTHING*, a departure from the neo-soul and alt-R&B of her previous albums. For her fifth album (co-produced by singer-songwriter and guitarist Chris Greatti), the emo-punk star deals with heartbreak the best way she knows how: through catchy hooks rife with angst against crashing cymbals and sharp bass riffs, leaning into a grittier sound than its predecessor. The album opener “maybe it’s my fault” chronicles the rise and fall of a relationship, with WILLOW coming to terms with the possibility that her actions may have caused its downfall. The song begins with WILLOW reminiscing on the whirlwind early days over angelic background vocals, steadily intensifying to when the first fight happens. “I don’t know/How I can forgive you/It’s all in my mind, it’s all in my mind/I try to rewind and all of the while, I’m hurtin’ inside/It’s your fault/Maybe it’s my fault,” she sings. The album serves as a cathartic purging of emotions across each of its 11 tracks. Whether it’s about feeling the physical and mental isolation of moving through the world (“curious/furious,” “WHY?”) or reflecting on a fractured relationship (“Split,” “Coping Mechanism”), WILLOW showcases her vulnerability with ease.