Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums of 2023

**100 Best Albums** In 2017, *Ctrl*—a 14-track project rife with songs about love, sex, self-doubt, and heartbreak—became one of the most influential albums in R&B. *Ctrl* was the soundtrack for many people in their twenties, highlighting the growing pains of young adulthood. SZA’s vulnerability and raw honesty, coupled with ultra-relatable lyrics full of diary-like ruminations and conversations from friend group chats, are what made her debut so impactful. Where *Ctrl* reflected SZA’s journey towards finding self-love and acceptance, her long-awaited sophomore LP *SOS* finds the St. Louis-born singer-songwriter dealing with some of the same topics of love and relationships from a more self-assured place. She ditches the uncertainties of her romantic entanglements to save herself—most of the time. On the soulful and gritty album opener “SOS,” SZA reintroduces herself and says precisely what’s on her mind after a night of crying over a lost relationship: “I talk bullshit a lot/No more fuck shit, I’m done,” she swaggers. This isn’t the only song that shows her weariness towards relationships that no longer serve her; see also “Smoking on My Ex Pack” and “Far.” She finds the confidence to know that she doesn’t need to depend on a man to find happiness on “Conceited” and “Forgiveless.” However, not every song on the project is about moving on and leaving her past relationships behind her; SZA still has a penchant for making wrong decisions that may not end well for her (“Too Late,” “F2F”) and questions her worth in some instances (“Special”). The album sketches the ebbs and flows of emotions, with strength in one moment but deep regret and sadness the next. There’s growth between her debut and sophomore album, not just lyrically but sonically as well, blending a mix of her beloved lo-fi beats and sharing space with grunge- and punk-inspired songs without any of it sounding out of place. On the Phoebe Bridgers collaboration “Ghost in the Machine,” the duo take a deeper look at the realities of stardom, looking for a bit of humanity within their day-to-day interactions. The track is not only progressive in its use of strings and acoustic guitars but haunting in its vocal performance. Throughout the journey of *SOS*, there are moments of clarity and tenderness where SZA goes through the discomfort of healing while trying to find the deeper meaning within the trials and tribulations she endures. She embraces this new level of confidence in her life, where she isn’t looking for anyone to save her from the depth of her emotions but instead is at peace with where she’s at in life.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

Tainy is long overdue for his own album. Having come up under the legendary Luny Tunes during reggaetón’s mainstream rise in the 2000s, the Puerto Rican producer advanced from being a staple of the genre to one of its most important practitioners in the 2010s and 2020s. His extensive work with Bad Bunny in particular—not to mention nearly every contemporary Latin star—catapulted him into a spotlight that beatmakers rarely experience. Yet even as he dipped his toes into repositioning himself as an artist and not just a studio maestro with hits like “Callaita” and “I Can’t Get Enough,” he didn’t feel entirely ready for this next phase of his career. “I felt, as a producer, even though I had success and had relationships with artists, I could still grow even more to find myself,” Tainy tells Apple Music. A futuristic vision fueled by influences like anime and science fiction, this 19-track effort was well worth the patience and labor, featuring vocalists from across his two-decade catalog and musical collaborators he’d never worked with before. “Having the artists that I started my career with, but also the new generation, a combination of both, it was just the right time,” he says. Read more about *DATA* below, straight from Tainy himself. **“LA BABY” (feat. Daddy Yankee, Feid, and Sech)** “To be able to have those two generations combined together and create something different to me was ideally something that I wanted to have in the project. The idea started as me working with Feid. I really wanted Daddy Yankee to be a part of that. He loved it and he was down to work on it. He did his magic easily. I was working with Sech on some of the songs and showed it to him and he was super down. People get a bit happier when they listen to the track and have fun.” **“11 Y ONCE” (feat. Sech and E.Vax)** “The first time I heard *Man on the Moon*, Kid Cudi\'s album, it was mind-blowing. It was so different. I was already producing, so I\'m really into all the details in the music. There were a couple tracks where I just felt like these guitars sounded crazy. And some of them have the same thing in common, which was Ratatat. Fast-forward to everything happening during the years and we get to a moment where it doesn\'t seem so far-fetched to at least approach \[E.Vax\]. I started working with live drums, live bass, and these live instruments, so it could seem a little bit easier for him to jump in and do their thing. I always felt that Sech as an artist has so much to give because of his vocals and his tone and his delivery. I\'m so happy that we were able to combine all those ideas.” **“VOLVER” (feat. Four Tet, Rauw Alejandro & Skrillex)** “I like going into the car and driving back home. I put my Apple Music on and put a song, but then it recommends me similar things—and that\'s how I find new bands, new ideas, new genres. This track popped up called \'Lush\' from Four Tet. It just sounded great. As soon as I got home, I started to sample and work on it. And as soon as I got back to Miami, Sonny—Skrillex—tells me he wants to go in for a couple days. So I show him this track and he\'s like, \'Is this Four Tet?\' He tells me Four Tet is a legend, he\'s amazing, one of his good friends. I didn\'t know that those two worlds were connected. It was really cool to see all of those things come together with people that really know each other but not directly everybody.” **“FANTASMA AVC” (feat. Jhayco)** “I’ve known Jhayco since he was just a writer. But I always felt the talent that he had, what he could bring to the table, and he started by getting songs out to different artists. I wouldn\'t say it\'s easy, but it\'s one of the coolest things to be with him in the studio because everything just comes naturally. I think we\'re really connected creatively and the sounds that we like, the ideas that we aim for, just on trying new stuff. It takes you on different vibes and you see his versatility, the first half and the second half.”

The first song on Lil Yachty’s *Let’s Start Here.* is nearly seven minutes long and features breathy singing from Yachty, a freewheeling guitar solo, and a mostly instrumental second half that calls to mind TV depictions of astral projecting. “the BLACK seminole.” is an extremely fulfilling listen, but is this the same guy who just a few months earlier delivered the beautifully off-kilter and instantly viral “Poland”? Better yet, is this the guy who not long before that embedded himself with Detroit hip-hop culture to the point of a soft rebrand as *Michigan Boy Boat*? Sure is. It’s just that, as he puts it on “the BLACK seminole.,” he’s got “No time to joke around/The kid is now a man/And the silence is filled with remarkable sounds.” We could call the silence he’s referring to the years since his last studio album, 2020’s *Lil Boat 3*, but he’s only been slightly less visible than we’re used to, having released the aforementioned *Michigan Boy Boat* mixtape while also lending his discerning production ear to Drake and 21 Savage’s ground-shaking album *Her Loss*. Collaboration, though, is the name of the game across *Let’s Start Here.*, an album deeply indebted to some as yet undisclosed psych-rock influences, with repeated production contributions from onetime blog-rock darlings Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and Patrick Wimberly, as well as multiple appearances from Diana Gordon, a Queens, New York-hailing singer who made a noise during the earliest parts of her career as Wynter Gordon. Also present are R&B singer Fousheé and Beaumont, Texas, rap weirdo Teezo Touchdown, though rapping is infrequent. In fact, none of what Yachty presents here—which includes dalliances with Parliament-indebted acid funk (“running out of time”), ’80s synthwave (“sAy sOMETHINg,” “paint THE sky”), disco (“drive ME crazy!”), symphonic prog rock (“REACH THE SUNSHINE.”), and a heady monologue called “:(failure(:”—is in any way reflective of any of Yachty’s previous output. Which begs the question, where did all of this come from? You needn’t worry about that, says Yachty on the “the ride-,” singing sternly: “Don’t ask no questions on the ride.”

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

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

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

Victoria Monét is known throughout the industry for her songwriting skills, the brains behind hits for Ariana Grande, BLACKPINK, Chloe x Halle, and many more. “I moved to LA to pursue artistry and just all of the things that I dreamed for myself, and life takes you in different turns, so I ended up songwriting a lot more than recording my own music,” she tells Apple Music. Although the Sacramento native spent most of her career writing, she still released music independently with her 2014 and 2018 EP series *Nightmares & Lullabies* and *Life After Love*, but it wasn’t until 2020’s *JAGUAR* that Monét came into her own as an artist of the same stature as the ones she’d worked for. Named after the fierce jungle cat—known for lurking undetected until they’re ready to pounce—the project introduced a motif that Monét created to show her transition from illustrious songwriter to full-fledged R&B star. “*JAGUAR I* and *II* are relatives, but you see, *JAGUAR II* is an older, more developed, voluptuous older sister,” she says. “I just really wanted to make it in my eyes better than *JAGUAR I*, which I feel like I’ve done.” Co-produced by longtime collaborator D’Mile, *JAGUAR II* is a seamless continuation enlisting live musicians and delving further into the psychedelic sounds of the 1970s—an era that influenced and inspired both albums. Still, Monét takes it further by guiding listeners through different soundscapes of funk, pop, R&B, and reggae while capturing the different moods she wanted to create. Instead of songs about her experiences as a new mom and being in love, Monét decided to showcase the full spectrum of emotions that women feel, whether she’s singing about her affinity for cannabis on the Lucky Daye-assisted “Smoke,” being outside on the flirty party anthem “Party Girls,” or women’s empowerment on “Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem).” “I\'m trying to listen to it from a fan\'s perspective, and I would think that people would be like, oh, she\'s going to talk about just being completely in love and wanting to get married and having kids, this white-picket-fence life,” she says. “And it\'s not that I feel like even making the album with my relationship, I had the freedom to discuss things that I may not feel currently, but they came up in the making of this album, even though I\'m not necessarily in that mindset right now.” On the swaggering “On My Mama,” Monét adds some Southern twang, interpolating Texas rapper Chalie Boy\'s 2009 track “I Look Good” for an infectious hook that makes it a soundtrack to positive affirmations about not just looking good but feeling good as well, while the follow-up “I\'m the One” continues that cocky persona over a pop-leaning track. Monét reflects on her stardom on the retro track “Hollywood,” which features legendary funk group Earth, Wind & Fire and her daughter Hazel. “Philip Bailey came in and did his vocals, but then Verdine came in on a different day to play the bass,” she explains. “Just knowing that I\'m inspired by them so much from the inception of *JAGUAR* to have them on it as an exclamation point for *JAGUAR II*, it just means so much.\"

Zach Bryan has very quickly achieved Ubiquitous Pop-Mythology Origin Story status. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter’s trajectory, from Navy cadet with a preternatural talent for storytelling and a YouTube following to honorable dischargee with a massive grassroots following to, now, major-label superstar selling out 100 or so arenas a year, was both dizzyingly fast and seemingly preordained. His self-titled follow-up to 2022’s triple-LP Warners debut *American Heartbreak* doesn’t necessarily advance Bryan’s story or status so much as cement it, moving past the introduction phase into something more permanent and more meaningful. One way or another, Zach Bryan—and *Zach Bryan*—is going to be with us for a while. The album—a lean 16 tracks compared to *Heartbreak*’s 34—begins with a double-barrel mission statement. The first is the spoken-word opening track, “Fear and Friday’s (Poem),” which distills Bryan’s everyman charm and philosophy into a benediction (“I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common/They are overdone and glorified and always leave you wanting”). This is followed immediately by a Hendrixesque “Star-Spangled Banner” guitar lick and the shout-along bravado of “Overtime,” complete with horn section and empowered nods to his aforementioned mythology: “They said I\'s a wannabe cowboy from a cutthroat town/With tattooed skin and nobody around/Your songs sound the same, you\'ll never make a name for yourself.” Bryan’s three-year whirlwind of making a name for himself has only sharpened his eye for detail—the songs only sound the same in that they all share this quality. A slick turn of phrase like “If you need a tourniquet or if you want to turn and quit/Know that I\'ll be by your side” is delivered like someone who knows what he\'s doing. The songs comfortably inhabit traditional country, Americana, and, on relative barn burners like the veteran’s tale “East Side of Sorrow” and “Jake’s Piano - Long Island,” at least one boot in Springsteen-anthem story-song terrain. And at a moment when country music, possibly more than any other genre, is roiled by reactionary entrenchment in the face of long-overdue advancement, Bryan has managed to stake himself to the center without alienating anyone or, chiefly, himself. He preaches love and tolerance and sings about hard drinking and ’88 Fords, and they don’t sound like opposing energies, because why should they? He goes toe-to-toe with Nashville-outsider kindred spirit Kacey Musgraves on “I Remember Everything,” and even the most intimate songs, like the solo acoustic closer “Oklahoman Son,” sound built for the back row, which gets further away each tour leg. The sum of these parts is nothing less than a confident, headstrong star turn from someone who seems a little ambivalent about stardom, at least on any terms other than his own.

Chappell Roan is not afraid to tell you—or, really, sing at you—about how she\'s feeling, in vivid detail. On her debut album, the Missouri-born upstart, who has been making waves since the 2017 release of her intense debut single “Good Hurt,” collects tales of debauchery and despair as it chronicles her realization of being queer and coming into her own. *The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess* opens with Roan singing mournfully about a dastardly ex-boyfriend over trembling pianos and starlit choirs; an insistent beat rises up gradually at first, then overtakes the song as she realizes she needs to be part of a “Femininomenon” that demands pleasure and respect from anyone lucky enough to be in her orbit. Left turns like that abound over the next 13 songs. Take the synth-pop “Casual,” which dissects a friends-with-benefits relationship in brutally specific detail, or the euphoric club cut “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” an insouciant dismissal of “hyper mega bummer boys” that opens with a sardonic mini-monologue and closes with a triumphant sing-along. Roan still traffics in ballads, too: “California” grapples with homesickness and frustration, Roan dipping down into her voice\'s low reaches, while the plush “Coffee” examines the idea of fully closing the loop with an ex, with the reality of its impossibility closing in as the music swells. There\'s a hunger that drives Roan\'s music, even in its more introspective moments. It isn\'t just sexual, although songs like the smirking poison-pen letter “My Kink Is Karma” and the flirty electro-psych come-on “Red Wine Supernova” show off how Roan\'s erotic awakening has helped her whole outlook on life come into sharp relief. Her willingness to take pop in unexpected directions, combined with her frankness about the tangled feelings that arise even when good things seem to be happening, make her debut compulsively listenable.

“I spent a lot of moments in my life trying to represent that I was a *bichota*—a boss girl—but I wasn’t feeling that way completely,” KAROL G tells Apple Music. “It’s good and normal sometimes, feeling not that good and not in that mood—but that tomorrow is going to be beautiful.” That sentiment resonates from the first few moments of *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO*, on the lively opener “MIENTRAS ME CURO DEL CORA.” After dramatically impacting the very landscape of global Latin music with 2021’s career-defining *KG0516*, the Colombian superstar is now focused on what the future holds. If KAROL G’s phenomenal 2022 run of hit singles, from “PROVENZA” to “GATÚBELA” to “CAIRO,” whet her fans’ appetites, the bold and confessional *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* provides them with a downright decadent musical feast. Boasting an eclectic series of collaborations with the likes of Carla Morrison, Sean Paul, and Sech, to name a few, her latest album intrepidly explores sounds both familiar and previously unexplored as she further refines and even redefines her artistry. From the FINNEAS-produced alt-pop of “TUS GAFITAS” to the música mexicana stylings of “GUCCI LOS PAÑOS,” *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* sets a high bar across genres. All the while, she delivers powerhouse vocal performances with deeply personal lyrics bound to resonate with listeners. “I was scared to just show that vulnerability,” she says. “But this is the way my album came out, and now I just feel proud.” Among its numerous highlights, the undeniable centerpiece of *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* is the momentous Shakira team-up “TQG,” an intergenerational and empowering single that unites these Colombian superstars at long last. “I was just seeing what was happening with Shakira in her personal life, and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me contact her,’” she says of the track, one that had been shelved prior to recording this historic feature. “It was worth it for me to launch it again, for girls to represent that moment of the life.” Read more about some of KAROL G’s favorite *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* songs below. **“X SI VOLVEMOS”** “I believe that this duet with Romeo was, in fact, destined. The story of choosing Romeo began when I had originally finished the song. For a long period, I found myself unsatisfied with the end result, as if it was a recipe missing its final ingredient. After replaying the song, the thought of duetting with Romeo felt like the perfect idea. I felt that his voice, charisma, and undeniable sensuality would give life to this passionate track. Days after, I decided to post the track on social media, and coincidentally \[in\] what felt like destiny, Romeo reached out to say he loved the song and that he wanted to join. He was the secret ingredient, and this song wouldn’t be complete without his ‘so nasty’ spice.” **“TQG”** “My collaboration with Shakira is a dream come true. She has always been a reference for me, besides being Colombian. She is the kind of artist that you follow throughout their career and dream about how, one day, you want to represent your country in the incredible way that she has done. Working with her has been an enriching experience, and I have learned a lot from her. My admiration is profound. After Shakira sang about her own breakup, I shared the lyrics of ‘TQG’ with her, a song about that stage when you are ready to rip the bandages off and get back on your feet. She loved the lyrics and felt they represented her; in the end, we finished the song together.” **“TUS GAFITAS”** “‘TUS GAFITAS’ represents something special for me; I got to work with FINNEAS on this track, which also happened to be the first love song I wrote for *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO*. I was heading to Cairo to shoot a video clip when I wrote the lyrics, which I think was symbolic of where I was on my healing journey. It was a fulfilling experience at many levels, personally and creatively, as I was also involved in the production process.” **“OJOS FERRARI”** “I love blending different genres together, and introducing dembow as an eccentric, upbeat track was essential to deliver my idea of a diverse album. My favorite part about the creative process is being able to collaborate with talent that have fresh ideas. Angel Dior and \[Justin\] Quiles brought that energy to the song. It’s a reminder that art doesn’t always have to be sad or profound but can also be a source of joy and excitement.” **“DAÑAMOS LA AMISTAD”** “I always have a great time working with Sech; he is incredibly talented. In “DAÑAMOS LA AMISTAD,” our styles fuse together perfectly to create a unique sound with its own flow and energy. We are thrilled with the final product and hope our fans will be too.” **“MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO”** “The album’s name is a phrase I repeated to myself when I saw or felt that things were wrong. I felt like I was going through a grand moment in my career, but I was very disconnected from myself and my surroundings. Sometimes, despite so many blessings that life had given me, I didn’t feel happy. So, every day I would say to myself, ‘No matter what, tomorrow it will be nice, tomorrow it will be nice.’ And that’s the message I want to convey to you, that even though life sometimes puts us in situations that no matter how bad they hurt us or how cloudy it gets, the next day, the sun will come out, and everything will be beautiful.”

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

“Sometimes what you envision for yourself as an artist isn\'t necessarily what is fitting right in that moment in the industry,” Becky G tells Apple Music about the road to *ESQUINAS*. “But in order to get a result you\'ve never had, you’ve got to be willing to do something you\'ve never done.” Some three years in the making, this self-described passion project marks the third and most personal full-length from the bilingual singer. A deliberate and meaningful departure from popwise predecessors *MALA SANTA* and *ESQUEMAS*, it offers more than a dozen originals and curated covers under the broad and thriving música mexicana genre umbrella. “The cover songs were chosen with so much intention,” she says of selections like “CRUZ DE OLVIDO” and “POR UN AMOR,” which were formative to her musical upbringing. Working closely with hitmaking songwriter and executive producer Edgar Barrera, she honors her standing as a 200 percenter (100% Mexican, 100% American) both solo and with vocal collaborators including Gabito Ballesteros, Peso Pluma, and the iconic Chiquis. “This album was very healing for my inner child, and very healing for the me today that is still eager to learn and eager to keep dreaming, feeling proud of where I come from.” Read more about *ESQUINAS* below—in her own words. **“2NDO CHANCE” (feat.. Ivan Cornejo)** “You can ask Ivan about this—he almost canceled the session. He texted me personally and he goes, ‘It\'s such a big opportunity that I don\'t know if I\'m ready for it.’ I thought it was so amazing and so courageous of him to be so open and honest and super vulnerable about where his head was at. Regardless, beyond any transaction that can happen between us from a business standpoint, I was—and am—an Ivan Cornejo fan. We started playing each other music that we had been working on, and then we ordered In-N-Out and just stuffed our faces. I feel like in that moment he realized it doesn\'t have to be this transactional thing, we can actually just be homies. So ‘2NDO CHANCE’ was, to me, an example of the genuine admiration and love that we had for one another, overflowing into such a dope, beautiful song.” **“CRIES IN SPANISH” (feat. DannyLux)** “I met Danny backstage at Coachella and it was the sweetest interaction ever. Literally our families were just hanging out backstage and I was telling him how proud I am of him and just how dope it is that we\'re all out here doing it together, Chicanos representing. When I tell you I don\'t care how successful I’ve become, sharing music with my peers, it\'s such a vulnerable and such a bonding experience for me. When I share music, I get so excited and so nervous. I sent him this song and he right away had such a beautiful reaction to it and was like, \'If you don\'t mind, I\'d love to add my guitars.\' One thing led to another and I sent him an emoji of the telenovela girl, crying in Spanish.” **“LOS ASTROS”** “Los Panchos was something that my great-grandmother on my mom\'s side would always be playing at her house when I was a kid. There\'s just this nostalgia to \'Piel Canela\' and all of their other iconic songs like \'Besame Mucho.\' It\'s a sound that is so romantic, and I thought it\'d be so cool to add a style of production that felt very nostalgic and familiar, but with a very new-school lyric. And Edgar does what Edgar does best, which is literally nail it right on the head every single time. I\'m supposed to have favorites; every song is genuinely so special to me, but I think \'LOS ASTROS\' sonically is such a gem on the album.” **“POR UN AMOR”** “This song is so special to me because it is one of the very first songs that I learned how to sing with mariachi. Obviously Vicente Fernández’s ‘Por un Amor’ is iconic. Linda Ronstadt also did it, and I love that because she was a 200 percenter in every way—sang in Spanish, spoke in English—which I found pretty fascinating and really cool. Jenni Rivera, who also inspired me so much, had a version. If you listen to everyone\'s, there\'s a different flavor to it, and that\'s why it was important to me to kind of bring my own little zhuzhing to it, which was the play on the electric guitar and it being Low Rider-inspired.” **“POR EL CONTRARIO” (feat. Ángela Aguilar and Leonardo Aguilar)** “They\'ve been putting in their reps since they were kids. At the same time, they\'re still leaving so much room for their own personal development and evolution and style. I listened to Leonardo sing and he has such a beautiful voice. I mean, I was so excited to get him on this song, and obviously with Ángela as well. As women in music, for us to be able to come together and support one another and be on records together, especially in genres that are very male-dominated still to this day, is super important. We’re able to show that, the same way I did in reggaetón with KAROL \[G\] or with Natti \[Natasha\]. We’re so much more when we come together.” **“CUIDADITO” (feat. Chiquis)** “Janney \[Chiquis Rivera\] was dating my cousin Emilio—now they\'re engaged. I was totally Cupid in that situation. We were hanging out and I played her the song and she loved it. We didn\'t get to record it together, but we were sending each other voice notes back and forth. I told her I would love if we can have an iconic Jenni Rivera \'don\'t get it twisted, foo!\' moment. That\'s why at the end of the song you hear her say it.”

ANOHNI’s music revolves around the strength found in vulnerability, whether it’s the naked trembling of her voice or the way her lyrics—“It’s my fault”; “Why am I alive?”; “You are an addict/Go ahead, hate yourself”—cut deeper the simpler they get. Her first album of new material with her band the Johnsons since 2010’s *Swanlights* sets aside the more experimental/electronic quality of 2016’s *HOPELESSNESS* for the tender avant-soul most listeners came to know her by. She mourns her friends (“Sliver of Ice”), mourns herself (“It’s My Fault”), and catalogs the seemingly limitless cruelty of humankind (“It Must Change”) with the quiet resolve of someone who knows that anger is fine but the true warriors are the ones who kneel down and open their hearts.

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

“No, I\'m not the same/I think I done changed,” Janelle Monáe raps with a swagger on “Float,” the opener for her fourth LP, *The Age of Pleasure*. Over powerful brass—courtesy of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80—and heavy-lidded 808s, the singer-songwriter introduces listeners to another side of herself where she embraces the present. “Those lyrics for \'Float,\' I was like, I have to put this out now,” she tells Apple Music. “This is exactly, how do I honor how I\'m feeling and who I am now. I\'m not thinking about the future, but right now, because this is all we have right now.” Where Monáe\'s previous records were character-driven—set in a complex futuristic world filled with androids—and explored themes about power, race, and humanity, *The Age of Pleasure* highlights a new era of liberation that sheds her Afrofuturist persona in favor of an unmasked exploration of her own sensuality and deservedness to feel good above all else. Monáe creates a safe space within the album\'s 14 tracks where people can relax into themselves and express their queer identities, sexuality, and unapologetic Blackness. “We had an Everyday People Wondaland party, and I was like, *Oh, this is who I want to make music for*,” she says. “This moment right here, I want to make the soundtrack to this lifestyle. They get it. This is what we fight to protect. All of my work that centers around protecting my communities that I\'m a part of, from the LGBTQIA+ communities to being Black to all of that.” *The Age of Pleasure* is a love letter to the Pan-African diaspora. Monáe trades in her previous albums\' New Wave indie-electronic beats for an effortless fusion of jazz, dancehall, reggae, trap, and Afrobeats. The first half features tightly produced jazz- and funk-inspired tempos and rhythms over which she flexes her accomplishments (“Champagne Shit”) and proudly celebrates herself (“Float,” “Phenomenal,” “Haute”). The album\'s second half switches gears with midtempo, reggae-influenced sounds and Monáe indulging her carnal desires. “I like lipstick on my neck/Hands around my waist so you know what\'s coming next/I wanna feel your lips on mine/I just wanna feel/A little tongue, we don\'t have a long time,” she sings on “Lipstick Lover,” a seductive, summery groove that is a joyous celebration of queer Black sexual liberation. She uses water metaphors to underscore her euphoric pleasure-seeking on “The Rush” and “Water Slide,” while “Only Have Eyes 42” is an ode to polyamory, with more than one lover at the center of Monáe\'s affections. Ultimately, on *The Age of Pleasure*, Monáe taps into her “free-ass motherfucking spirit,” as she calls it, and delivers an album that honors the space that she\'s currently in—unabashed and proud of who she is. “My friends have gotten an opportunity to see a different side of me that nobody gets to see, and this album, this moment that I\'m having, I\'m allowing myself to show that version of Janelle that friends get to see all the time,” she says. “I want to own all of me and be all of me.”

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

Convenient though it may be, sometimes you have to give in and accept the metaphor. *Gumbo*, the engrossing fourth album from Atlanta’s Young Nudy, is what it says on its packaging: a collection of painstakingly crafted component parts (“Okra,” “Duck Meat,” “Shrimp,” “Portabella”) simmered together to become more than their mere sum, an alchemic blend of flavors and textures. And as with the titular dish, a mere recitation of ingredients would give an imitator little insight into how the real thing is made—the secret ingredients, of course, are proprietary. To shift to another culinary metaphor, there’s a use-every-part-of-the-animal ethos at play on *Gumbo*. Even the most mundane parts of the recording process become opportunities for innovation: Where many rappers use punch-ins to lay verses that are difficult to land in a single take, Nudy uses this technique to achieve a hallucinatory effect. See the opener “Brussel Sprout,” which comes to sound more like a lullaby than the opening salvo to a rap record with such punishing low ends. Rather than feeling stitched together, the takes overlap like blankets falling onto one another; the listener has to track whether Nudy in each subsequent layer is underlining what was said before, or subverting it. Produced in large part by Coupe (with an assist from Nudy’s longtime collaborator Pi’erre Bourne on the Key Glock-featuring “Pot Roast”), *Gumbo* is a heavy, percussive album, its punishing bass and yawning negative space giving the rapper ample room to deploy the most fluid flows of his career to this point. Nudy is a chameleonic rapper, able to dance through complicated patterns or communicate via monosyllables through sheer charisma. On *Gumbo*, those and other approaches are used in precise measures—as the recipe demands.

“We have to be friends”—the first song written for *PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE*—had a profound impact on its author. “I was like, ‘What the hell is going to be this record? This is going to be my awakening,” Chris tells Apple Music’s Proud Radio. “The song was all-knowing of something and admonishing me finally to stop being blind or something. So I started to take music even more seriously and more spiritually.” Even before that track, the French alt-pop talent had begun to embrace spirituality and prayer following the death of his mother in 2019—a loss that also colored much of 2022’s *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*. But letting it into his music took him to deeper places than ever before. “This journey of music has been very extreme because I wanted to devote myself and I went to extreme places that changed me forever,” adds Chris. “An awakening is just the beginning of a spiritual journey, so I wouldn\'t say I\'m there, it would be arrogant. But it\'s definitely the opening of a clear path of spirituality through music.” After the high-concept, operatic *Redcar*, this album—a three-part epic lasting almost two hours that’s rooted in (and whose name nods to) Tony Kushner’s 1991 play *Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes*, an exploration of AIDS in 1980s America—confirms our arrival into the most ambitious Christine and the Queens era yet. The songs here will demand more of you than the smart pop that made Christine and the Queens famous—but they will also richly reward your attention, with sprawling, synth-led outpourings that reveal something new with every listen. Here, Chris (who collaborated with talent including superproducer MIKE DEAN and 070 Shake) reaches for trip-hop (the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears can be so soft”), classical music (the sublime “Full of life,” which layers Chris’ reverbed vocals over the instantly recognizable Pachelbel’s Canon), ’80s-style drums (“We have to be friends”), and the kind of haunting, atmospheric ballads this artist excels at (“To be honest”). Oh, and the album’s narrator? Madonna. “I was like, ‘If Madonna was just like a stage character, it would be brilliant,’” says Chris. “I pitch it like fast, quite intensely: ‘I need you to be the voice of everything. You need to be this voice of, maybe it\'s my mom, maybe it\'s the Queen Mary, maybe it\'s a computer, maybe it\'s everything.’ And she was like, ‘You\'re crazy, I\'ll do it.’” Chris gave the narrator a name: Big Eye. “The whole thing was insane, which is the best thing,” he says. “The record itself solidified itself in maybe less than a month. I was writing a new song every day. It was quite consistent and a wild journey. And as I was singing the song, the character was surfacing in the words. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a character.’ Big Eye was the name I gave the character because it\'s this very all-encompassing, slightly worrying angel voice, could be dystopian.” For Chris, this album was a teacher and a healer—even a “shaman.” “I discovered so much more of myself and rediscovered why I loved music so hard,” he says. “And it\'s this great light journey of healing I adore.” It also cracked open his heart. “This record for me is a message of love,” he adds. “It comes from me, but it comes from the invisible as well. Honestly, I felt a bit cradled by extra strength. Even the collaboration I had, this whole journey was about friendship, finding meaning in pain too. It opened my heart.”

Three years before *Gag Order*, Kesha released 2020’s *High Road*, a cheery-sounding LP that attempted to return to her early party-pop days, despite the clear-eyed courage of its predecessor, 2017’s soulful *Rainbow*. After the “TiK ToK,” Jack Daniel’s-swilling early days of Kesha’s career came very public litigation with her former producer and label head Dr. Luke, whom she accused of sexual assault. It’s not something she can legally address on record, but the title of her fifth studio album is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to her ongoing battle. Produced by Rick Rubin, the album is her most innovative to date. There’s the minor-key, Auto-Tuned ode to hallucinogenic transcendence “Eat the Acid” and the indie-folk neuroticism of “Living in My Head.” The minimal synth turned explosive experimentalism of “The Drama” was co-written with Kurt Vile and includes an inspired interpolation of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” If early fans celebrated Kesha for her bravado, now they’ll find her fearlessness expressed in both new sonic textures and a new emotional vocal performance: laid bare, raw, undeniable.

In an interview just after the release of 2020’s *Reunions*, Jason Isbell said the difference between a good songwriter and a great one was whether or not you could write about a subject beyond yourself without making it feel vague. Ten years out from the confessional rawness of *Southeastern*, not only are Isbell’s lyrics ever closer to his ideal, but he’s got a sense of musical nuance to match. *Reunions* and 2017’s *The Nashville Sound* all blend anecdotes and memories from Isbell’s past with fiction, but *Weathervanes* tells a broader story with these vignettes, one with a message that became painfully clear to him throughout the pandemic: You can’t fully appreciate and acknowledge the good in your life without experiencing, and holding space for, the bad. “When I went into writing these songs, it started sort of at the tail end of the lockdown period and continued through our reentry into society; it kind of feels like a new world, for better or worse,” Isbell tells Apple Music. “A lot of these stories came from that, because when you start adding up the things that you\'re grateful for as somebody who tells stories, then automatically I think your mind goes to the counterpoint of that or the inverse of that. And you start thinking, \'Well, where could I be if I hadn\'t made the choices that led me to here?\'” This led to a fundamental shift in his approach to songwriting. “The more specific and the more intense something is, the more likely I am to come at that through a character,” he tells Apple Music. “If I\'m writing about love or death or having kids, I will go from the first person and it\'ll be me. But if I\'m writing about something like a school shooting, it feels like I have to say, \'Okay, this is how this affects me, and this is how this makes me feel.\' The only way I can be honest with that stuff is come at it from a character\'s perspective when it\'s a very specific topic like that.” Sometimes, that means creating these characters—or even reflecting on a younger version of himself in a difficult situation, as he does in “White Beretta”—and trusting them to lead the song down the path it needs. “So many times I didn\'t know what I was talking about until I got to halfway through the song, and I like it best when it happens that way,” he says. “I\'ll just get started and I\'ll say to myself, \'If I make a real person here and actually watch them with an honest eye, then after a couple of verses, they\'ll tell me what I\'m writing about.\'” Below, Isbell tells the stories behind the songs of *Weathervanes*. **“Death Wish”** “This is the kind of song that I have wanted to write for a long time. It\'s expansive from the production, but also you can tell from Jack White doing the acoustic cover that he did, it still feels like a broad, expansive sort of thing. That\'s a modern type of songwriting that I\'m really drawn to, but it\'s also antithetical to the roots-music ideal. And after \'Death Wish\' is over, I feel like, you\'ve hung in there with me through this sort of experimental thing. Now I can give you something that is a little bit more comfortable for your palate, something you\'re a little more used to from me.” **“King of Oklahoma”** “I was out there filming in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. There was a project that I had been asked to be a part of with Darius Rucker, Sheryl Crow, and I think Mike Mills, and a couple of other people. For a minute there, I was like, ‘Well, if I can get home in time to record with you all, that sounds like a really fun time. So I will do that.’ But I was never home in time because they kept changing my filming schedule, so I just missed it. But I wrote that song thinking, ‘Well, maybe I need some songs for this; I don\'t know if this is going to work for them or not.’ Eventually I thought this should be just a song of my own.” **“Strawberry Woman”** “This one\'s probably the closest I come to nostalgia on this record, I think, because there are a lot of moments here that are things that Amanda \[Shires, Isbell\'s wife and frequent collaborator\] and I shared together early on in the relationship. There\'s an undercurrent of the beginning of a relationship when you really need each other in ways that, if everybody\'s progressing like they\'re supposed to, you might not wind up needing each other in the same way 10 years down the road. And there\'s loss in that. It\'s a beautiful thing to grow as a human being, and both of us have, I think a lot, but then all of a sudden, at the end of that, you start trying to figure out what you still have in common. Even though you might not have the codependent nature that the relationship had early on, it\'s still something worth doing and worth working on, worth fighting for. You have to adjust your expectations from each other.” **“Middle of the Morning”** “After the experience of *Reunions*, Amanda and I took a little bit of a break from doing that stuff together. For the most part, I just sat and worked on my own until I got all these done. ‘Middle of the Morning,’ I don\'t know if she likes that song or not, maybe she does. That one\'s very personal as far as the perspective goes. That was a tough one to write and a tough one to sing, because I know there\'s some assumptions in there, and there\'s this sort of feeling of living in under the same roof through the pandemic and feeling so disconnected from each other.” **“Save the World”** “It was right after the Uvalde school shooting, but I didn\'t know that that\'s what I was writing about when I started. When I started, I was writing about leaving my wallet behind, and then I was writing about a phone conversation, and then all of a sudden I was writing about a school shooting. Once I realized that\'s what I was writing about, I thought, \'Oh, shit. Now I\'ve got to do this and handle it correctly.\' It took a lot of work. I finished that song and played it for Amanda, and she was like, \'I think you should write this again. You\'re not saying what you want to say. And at this point, it doesn\'t have enough meat, doesn\'t have enough detail.\' And I was like, \'Yeah, but that\'s going to be really fucking hard. How do you write about this without it seeming exploitative?\' And so it took more than one stab.” **“If You Insist”** “This song is from the perspective of a woman, and I wrote it for a movie—I don\'t remember the name of the movie, and I wound up not using it for the movie. They had given me my own song \[\'Chaos and Clothes\' off *The Nashville Sound*\] as a reference, and so I wrote something very similar to that in feel. I just really liked the song, and whoever we were negotiating with for the situation with the movie, they didn\'t want us to own the master, but I said, \'Well, I\'ll just keep it.\' And so we just kept it and I put it on the record.” **“Cast Iron Skillet”** “I think for a lot of songwriters that are writing whatever ‘Southern song’ or outlaw country they feel like they\'re writing is to go into this idea of, \'This is all the stuff that my granddad told me, and it\'s this down-home wisdom.\' What I wanted to say was, \'There is an evil undercurrent to all these things that our granddads told us, and there is darkness in those woods.\' I don\'t mean to sound like I\'m better at it than anybody else. Sometimes people are aiming for a different target, but I get bored with songs that do the same thing over and over. I wanted to turn that on its head and say, \'Let\'s frame this with this nostalgic idea of our romanticized Southern childhoods—and then let\'s talk about a couple of things that really happened.\'” **“When We Were Close”** “This is about a friendship between two musicians, and a lot of people ask me who it\'s about, but that\'s not the point. It\'s about me and a whole fucking bunch of people, but it\'s fairly specific. I had a friend who I made a lot of music with and spent a lot of time with, and we had a falling-out, and it never got right. It was so severe, and then he was gone, and that was the end of that. There was no closure. I remember when John Prine died, I was very sad, but I was also very grateful that the grief that I felt for John was not complicated. You don\'t have to be angry and you don\'t have to feel like there are things left unsaid or unresolved. This story was really the inverse of that, because it was like, yes, I am grateful for a lot of the things that we did together and that person showed me and a lot of the kindnesses, but at the same time, it was complicated. I have to be able to hold those two things in my head at the same time. You could call that the theme of this whole album, honestly.” **“Volunteer”** “The connection that I have to my home is complicated, because I am critical of the place where I grew up, and also, I\'m very, very fortunate that I grew up there. But my heart breaks for small towns in Alabama, and those small Alabama towns are scattered all over America and all over the world. I go play music in a lot of them, and I feel welcome, but not entirely. I also feel like an interloper. This story is a narrative based on a character that is fictional, but it came from that idea of like the Steve Earle song, \'nothing brings you down like your hometown,\' that same thing. It\'s like, why can\'t I really feel like I have a strong emotional connection to this place where I grew up? And also, why can\'t they get it together? The older I get, the more I think I feel comfortable discussing that and discussing the place.” **“Vestavia Hills”** “It started as me writing about somebody else, but the joke was on me. I got about halfway through the song and I was like, ‘I see what I\'m doing. You asshole.’ Then I thought about, man, what would it be like to be an artist\'s crew member? Let\'s make our character the crew guy, the sound guy who has been doing this for a long time and really believes in the work and really cares about the artist, but he has had enough. Basically, this is him turning in his two-week notice and saying, \'I\'m going to do one last tour with you, and then I\'m going home, because my wife makes a lot of money. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and I don\'t have to put up with this shit anymore.\'” **“White Beretta”** “At this song’s heart there\'s this regret, and it\'s not shame, because I love the concept of extracting helpful emotions from shame. I feel like shame is kind of to protect you from really looking at what actually happened. I can look back and say, \'Well, yeah, it wasn\'t all my fault, because I was raised a certain way to believe a certain set of things.\' I didn\'t say, \'Don\'t do this.\' I didn\'t say, \'I don\'t want you to terminate this pregnancy.\' I was just kind of on the fence. But I was a teenager; I didn\'t know what to do, and I had been raised in a very conservative place, and there was a lot of conflicting emotions going on. A song like that is hard because you have to make an admission about yourself. You have to say, \'I haven\'t always been cool in this way.\' I don\'t think you can give an example to people of growing if you don\'t give an example of what you\'re growing from.” **“This Ain’t It”** “This is sort of post-Southern-rock, because it sounds very Southern rock, but the dad in this song is somebody who would completely, unironically love the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The perspective is he\'s basically trying to sneak back into his daughter\'s life at a very inopportune time. It\'s another one of those where the advice might not be very good, but he certainly believes it, and it\'s coming from his heart. I\'ve proven what I need to prove about my tastes and about serving the song, and sometimes the song just needs to have a bunch of guitar on it and rock, and maybe even some fucking congas.” **“Miles”** “I kept trying to shape it into something that was more like a four-minute Jason Isbell song, and then at one point I thought, ‘No. I think we could just play the way that I\'ve written it here.’ I would have a verse on one page and then that refrain written out on a different page, and I had to go back through the notebook and figure out what belonged to that song. The approach was kind of like if Neil Young was fronting Wings. It was like a McCartney song where it\'s got all these different segments and then it comes back around on itself at the end, but also sort of with Neil\'s guitar and backbeat. It felt like I had a little bit of a breakthrough in what I would allow myself to do, because I\'ve always loved songs like this, and I\'ve always sort of thought, \'Well, you need to stop.\' When Lennon was out of the picture, McCartney was making \'Band on the Run\' and all this stuff. It\'s just one big crazy song all tied together with little threads.”

Conforming to the expected has never been Amaarae’s strong suit. And it should come as no surprise that the Ghanaian American artist would create a sonic otherworld where the trappings of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, punk, and alternative rock mesh with globe-trotting instrumentation and exist harmoniously without question on her album *Fountain Baby*. The result? A culmination of what a transnational pop star is in 2023—boundless. *Fountain Baby* lends its credence to Amaarae’s continued quest for growth and mastery, but not in a contrived way. There are pockets of carefully crafted yet carefree melodies like the dreamy “Angels in Tibet” and sultry “Reckless & Sweet.” On “Counterfeit,” the singer-songwriter swiftly glides with confidence on production by KZ Didit that’s reminiscent of an early-2000s movie soundtrack. “Wasted Eyes” opens with a quick koto solo and progresses as Amaarae soliloquizes about a wounded romance. The 14-track solo project pushes the ante of its 2020 predecessor, *The Angel You Don’t Know*, towards newer heights.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

Brimming with astrological fervor and unbridled emotionality, *Red Moon in Venus* finds the Colombian American sensation zeroing in on love. From the proud promises behind “Endlessly” to the sweet little profundities of “Love Between...,” the album plays with genre without losing cohesion or connection. On the guest front, Don Toliver matches her R&B potency amid the polyrhythmic blur of “Fantasy,” while Omar Apollo brings his own certain charm to the sumptuous duet “Worth the Wait.” Yet most of the album keeps the spotlight rightfully on her, leading to breathtaking moments like “I Wish You Roses” and the Sade-esque “Blue.” And while *Red Moon in Venus* returns the artist to a primarily English-language mode, she hasn’t dispatched entirely with the approach taken on 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞*. She brings bilingual lyricism alongside orchestral accents for “Como Te Quiero Yo” and retro grooves for “Hasta Cuando.”

Who, exactly, *is* Miley Cyrus? Is she the country music progeny turned former child star turned pop provocateur, twerking on awards shows and throwing middle fingers to critics? Is she the hopeful young balladeer, lending her naturally emotive voice to Top 40 anthems like 2009’s “The Climb”? Or is she the rock star in hiding, getting trippy with The Flaming Lips on their collaboration *Dead Petz* and channeling her inner Joan Jett on 2020’s *Plastic Hearts*? While her shifting identities can distract from her formidable musicianship, it is exactly this restless, chameleonic nature that makes Cyrus one of our more engaging and enduring pop stars. On eighth LP *Endless Summer Vacation*, Cyrus finally finds a way to bring these seemingly disparate parts together. She tapped four producers to help helm the album, each with an ear toward one of Cyrus’ primary lanes. Greg Kurstin (Adele, Maren Morris) brings his trademark gravitas to the cutting but compassionate breakup ballad “Jaded.” Kid Harpoon, who recently took home a Grammy for Harry Styles’ *Harry’s House*, has fingerprints all over the LP, as on powerhouse opener “Flowers,” Cyrus’ biggest single since 2013’s “Wrecking Ball.” Tyler Johnson, a fellow Nashvillian with credits ranging from Taylor Swift to Toni Braxton, pairs well with Cyrus, his own catholic tastes dovetailing nicely with hers. Mike WiLL Made-It, a longtime Cyrus collaborator, jumps in on tracks like the Brandi Carlile feature “Thousand Miles,” which feels country-adjacent but ultimately transcends genre, and the dark, industrial Sia collab “Muddy Feet,” which boasts one of the LP’s most biting lyrics: “You smell like perfume that I didn’t purchase.” Lines like that may provoke curiosity into Cyrus’ personal life—she’s made no effort to conceal that much of the material was inspired by her divorce from Liam Hemsworth—but the music itself is sturdy enough to transcend tabloid fodder. There are also other notable—and at times unexpected—co-writers on the LP. Cult-favorite indie filmmaker Harmony Korine (*Spring Breakers*, *Kids*) is credited on the woozy, gauzy “Handstand,” which lyrically references one of his paintings, “Big Twitchy.” Acclaimed R&B/electronic artist James Blake joins on album highlight “Violet Chemistry,” which feels like a spiritual and sonic cousin of Taylor Swift’s *Midnights* cut “Lavender Haze.” Country artist and songwriter Caitlyn Smith, who co-wrote the *Plastic Hearts* standout “High,” contributes to “Island,” a groovy, low-key banger about the double-edged sword of independence. Cyrus closes *Endless Summer Vacation* with a demo version of “Flowers,” the kind of bonus track that can, more often than not, function as little more than filler. In this case, though, the contrast between the song in its infancy and its buoyant, assertive final form is striking and emotional. The hard-won strength of the studio version is there, but it\'s drenched in a raw, gritty sadness that sounds painfully real. In its studio incarnation, you can hear that Cyrus buys what she’s selling, that she’s not only content to be her own companion but actually prefers her own company. In this demo, though, her words seem to function more as a compass than a proclamation, a hopeful road map out of the woods of heartbreak. For an artist whose musical talent is often overshadowed by her offstage antics, this glimpse into Cyrus’ creative process is a welcome one, and a fitting way to end her most fully realized album yet.

Dogsbody, the debut album by Brooklyn-based Model/Actriz (vocalist Cole Haden, guitarist Jack Wetmore, drummer Ruben Radlauer, and bassist Aaron Shapiro), is a coming-of-age album set between the hours of dusk and dawn. It is as much an exploration of love and loss as it is a sharp, piercing, and violent ode to the explosive joy of being alive - the overwhelming brightness of staring at the sun.

One of the first things Bad Bunny fans will notice about *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* is its conspicuous lack of reggaetón. Following the vibey highs of the preceding *Un Verano Sin Ti*, which included some of the biggest songs he’s ever done within the genre, some might have anticipated more in the vein of “Me Porto Bonito” or “Moscow Mule.” Yet limiting his reggaetón exposure to a mere two tracks here, “PERRO NEGRO” and the closing “UN PREVIEW,” marks one of many deliberate decisions made by the Puerto Rican superstar on his fifth proper album. If fans haven’t quite figured it out just yet, El Conejo Malo does whatever he wants. (This is, after all, the same artist who named his 2020 album *Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana*.) He speaks rather directly to his unwillingness to compromise or change for anyone else on “NO ME QUIERO CASAR,” which compounds its throwback nods so adroitly that one might miss the subtle Yandel sample near the end. More often than not, *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* finds him getting things off his chest, beginning with the unapologetically direct opener “NADIE SABE.” Those who’ve been with Bad Bunny since the days of “Soy Peor” and “Chambea” will welcome this overt return to his bold trapero roots, something that echoes through “MONACO,” “VOU 787,” and the especially cutting “GRACIAS POR NADA.” Yet there’s more to *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* than some rapper rebound. Far from the beach-based pop that peppered *Un Verano Sin Ti*, here he embraces more nocturnal styles on the thumping tech-house cut “HIBIKI” and the frenetic Jersey club variant “WHERE SHE GOES.” He even ventures into the Latin drill fray for “THUNDER Y LIGHTNING,” with lyrics that demand a rewind, before indulging in some Voltio y Notch nostalgia with the triumphant “ACHO PR.” Both of those songs, and several others, include some rather stellar vocal guests, but Bad Bunny would rather his listeners experience those features in real time. To borrow a sentiment from the album’s title, nobody knows what tomorrow brings, so we might as well live—and listen—in the moment.

In 2022, NewJeans dropped into the saturated K-pop industry with zero pre-promotion. The music video for “Attention” combined breezy R&B-inspired pop, immaculate Y2K-nostalgic visuals, and the teen-girl cool of Minji, Haerin, Hanni, Danielle, and Hyein. Now they’re back with their second EP, a mini-album featuring six short tracks that reasserts NewJeans’ dominance in the fourth-generation K-pop scene. Sonically, *Get Up* doubles down on NewJeans’ commitment to noughts-era R&B paired with electronic dance elements. Pre-release singles “Super Shy”—which member Hanni says reminds her of flying through space on a rocket ship—and *Powerpuff Girls* collab “New Jeans” are peppy, synth-driven bops that fans of “Ditto” will love. But the girls have never been as solemn as they are on “Cool With You,” a UK garage track, and “Get Up,” two songs that could be teasing an evolution of their vibe. Tying the sophomore project together are the versatile, finely tuned vocals of the young members, which continue to elevate NewJeans’ music from forgettable pop to something more textured—and serve as a tribute to the teen-girl interiority that is at the center of NewJeans’ music and story.

“I don\'t really want to tell people stories,” Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. “I want to show them. I want them to feel.” At 28, the Australian artist has more than a few stories to pick from. In the years between 2018’s *Bloom* and this, his third full-length, he’s appeared in several films and series; collaborated with artists like Charli XCX, Lauv, Jónsi, and Tate McRae; and launched a luxury lifestyle brand. But beneath those headline-makers, he simply lived his life and experienced the experiences that laid the foundations for *Something to Give Each Other*. “There’s 10 stories, 10 moments,” he says of the album, which took around two and a half years to complete. Between COVID and filming the TV series *The Idol*, he was granted a “luxury of time” he’d never had before. “It ended up serving the album really well because it gave me time to see which songs stuck around.” “I\'ve felt very hopeful and joyous and connected, but there’s a lot of vulnerability as well,” Sivan says. There’s love, sex, and heartbreak, the thrill of reemerging feelings, fleeting yet vital moments of intimacy and communication. There’s a sweaty club moment (“Rush”), balmy dance pop (“Got Me Started”—which samples Bag Raiders’ definitive 2008 hit “Shooting Stars”), gentle confessionals (“Can’t Go Back, Baby”) and sensual house (“Silly”). And it’s all told through the lens of welcome self-discovery and unapologetic, undiluted queerness. Here, he talks through the stories of each song on *Something to Give Each Other*. **“Rush”** “In the moments between Melbourne lockdowns when we were able to go out, I had these nights that were so fun, they were almost emotional. There was this overwhelming joy and euphoria. I was sober and sweating and just so grateful to be with people. And grateful for music, for life, for youth and sex and connection. So I wanted to write that moment.” **“What\'s the Time Where You Are?”** “I felt pretty emotionally dead for a while after my last relationship, and my feelings didn\'t all come back in one go. There were these little sparks I started to feel, and I was so excited when I did. I was talking to this one guy and I had a little crush for the first time in ages. At one point he messaged me saying, ‘What\'s the time where you are?’ Maybe I over-romanticized, but it was so sweet. Because he could definitely google that. But I saw it for what it was, I think: It was an effort at connection and keeping the conversation going. It sparked this idea of two people separated by a great distance, both out there living their lives, having a great time, but looking for each other in music or nights out or little texts like that.” **“One of Your Girls”** “I think this is my favorite song I\'ve ever worked on. This thing kept happening where I was being approached by guys who’d previously or historically identified as straight. They were flirting with me, saying there was something in me that they were interested in. I just felt all these different things. Firstly, I was placing them on such a pedestal. I was like, why is this so hot? And also questioning myself because I’d always end up heartbroken. I think I knew I wasn’t treating myself with the respect I deserved by being the secret or the experiment. We wrote three different choruses and ended up coming to this sad robot thing, inspired by a movie I’d seen. Even that spoke to the way I’d felt: like I was expected to be there when they wanted me, then disappear when they freaked out, then be there again when they wanted. Like this emotionless object. And yet there I was time and time again. You don\'t want to rush them through the process of figuring shit out. This isn’t me making any sort of statement—I have patience for that experience. I’m just musing to myself about it.” **“In My Room” (feat. Guitarricadelafuente)** “I met Guitarricadelafuente \[Álvaro Lafuente Calvo\] and his boyfriend in Paris at a dinner, and they were so sweet. When I got back to the hotel, I started listening to his music and I was just really, really inspired. So I messaged him that we should write sometime. We wrote the song in one day. It\'s the only collaboration on the album, and I love that it\'s with a queer artist. In my head, I\'m lying on my bed, kicking my legs, daydreaming about someone like I’m a teenager. It was a really nice way to write rather than trying to make narrative: We were both just communicating our feelings.” **“Still Got It”** “It’s about a moment where I bumped into my ex-boyfriend and realized he still had all the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place. One of my favorite lyrics on the album is ‘Said hello like an old colleague.’ It was just that weird thing where you\'re like, wow, I lived with this person, I shared so much of my life with this person, and here we are greeting each other like old colleagues. It was a moment of reflection. I love collaboration and writing with people, but sometimes it\'s really nice to just do it by yourself, say exactly what you feel and worry less about the stuff I normally love worrying about, like, ‘How many syllables is it? Does it work from a pop point of view?’” **“Can’t Go Back, Baby”** “I was pretty angry, and I\'ve never really written from an angry place. I was hurt and felt betrayed. It’s a real journey throughout the song and by the end it\'s like, ‘In the morning, I wake up with the sun across my face/In the evening, there I lay with so much love to take your place.’ That\'s not love from other people, it\'s love I have for myself, being able to show up for yourself. But sonically there’s a softness, because I still have so much care for that person, that relationship. I knew I wanted this on the album, but I was dreading writing it. When I eventually did, I was like, ‘Let\'s just record this today and then I don\'t want to look at it.’” **“Got Me Started”** “It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It was one of those moments of a spark, where someone unlocks that side of you again and you\'re like, ‘Oh, I can feel.’ I love the lyric ‘Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body/Fuck it up just like this party did tonight.’ To me, it\'s just this house party: You\'ve met someone and for whatever reason you just can’t keep your hands off each other—and how exciting it is when that happens.” **“Silly”** “We had sexiness on the album in a few different ways, but one thing we didn\'t have was *icy, cool* sexy—something that just really simmers. I was surprised by the lyrics that came. It ended up being about how someone can get you back into your feelings for them in two seconds. It almost touches on the story of ‘Still Got It.’ I\'ve sung in falsetto as a layer a lot throughout my music, but never as a lead vocal. Here, we started off with that falsetto as a layer, and I was going to track under it, but we left it alone up there. So I essentially got to duet with myself, which was so cool.” **“Honey”** “‘Honey’ started in Melbourne with \[producer\] Styalz Fuego and the Serenity Prayer. My dad taught it to me when I was a kid. One of the lines is something like ‘Give me the courage to accept things I cannot change.’ I love the idea of having these really strong feelings for someone and not knowing how to express them, and almost saying a prayer—even though I\'m very irreligious. ‘Give me the courage to say all these things I feel about you.’ It just felt very joyous, like the confetti moment at the show.” **“How to Stay With You”** “It’s really cruisy and mellow, it’s got saxophone on it. It’s about someone I met who ended up leaving, and I was a bit lost on how to stay with them, because I wanted to, but it didn’t seem possible. There was something interesting to me about putting it at the end. Throughout all the experiences and people on the album, I still have this longing and desire to find a long-term relationship. When it fades out in the outro, the last lyrics on the album are these little background vocals: ‘Starting again when I got all I wanted/Starting to feel a little bit despondent.’ I still haven\'t found the thing I\'m looking for. It doesn\'t negate these prior experiences and how beautiful they are, but I\'m still looking. I thought it was a very real way to end it. I\'m on this journey, I’m really happy and I\'m enjoying every second of it, I\'m so grateful for all the connections, and I\'m curious to see what happens next. But I don’t know what that is yet.”

*Just because I been on a run doesn\'t mean I don\'t know how to walk away I\'ll let you get your bars off over text but don\'t forget you\'re talking to Drake Personality Morality Immeasurable salary 100 dollar bills that I\'m counting like a calorie Shells for the peanut gallery Probably better off with Mallory or Valerie You tearing up and sniffling while reacting like some allergies Saying what I mean isn\'t mean if you\'re really listening - it\'s reality* — Drake In the dog days of summer 2023, Drake did a very Drake thing: Just before embarking on tour, he revealed that he’d written a poetry book called *Titles Ruin Everything*. To spread the news, he took out ads in several major newspapers. On them was a QR code which led to another announcement: “I made an album to go with the book. They say they miss the old Drake girl don’t tempt me. FOR ALL THE DOGS.” The “old Drake” line, as real heads know, is a reference to “Headlines,” a song from the early days of Champagne Papi’s rise from Canadian curiosity to global superstar. The old Drake was an underdog, a former child actor and Lil Wayne protégé who blended hip-hop and R&B in a way that would indelibly change both. And the new Drake? He’s a 36-year-old father of one who’s responsible for a not-small percentage of Toronto’s annual tourist economy and who, with the release of “Slime You Out,” is one No. 1 single away from tying Michael Jackson on the all-time list. If there’s anything Old Drake and New Drake can agree on, it’s hour-and-a-half-long blockbuster albums that master the fine art of score-settling. (Speaking of fine art, that’s a drawing from his five-year-old son Adonis on the cover.) Drizzy’s gone through plenty of phases in his 15 years in the running as one of hip-hop’s GOATs: albums full of wintry grime and drill, or breezy dance albums for the baddies to turn up to on girls’ night. *For All the Dogs*, his eighth studio album, has more in common with 2011’s *Take Care*, the star-making opus loaded with luxuriant beats and big-name features. But instead of drunk-dialing his exes, Drake’s…well, he’s still doing that every now and again. Mostly, though, he’s with his dogs. The album’s loose framework is a late-night local radio program: BARK Radio, live from Chapel Hill, whose hosts include Teezo Touchdown, Drake’s crush/idol Sade, and the occasional chorus of hounds. This particular broadcast is a sumptuous banquet of classically Drake techniques, starting with the smirking fake-out that is intro track “Virginia Beach.” (If you know, you know.) There’s the requisite Houston worship on “Screw the World,” the new jack swing peacocking of “Amen,” and the swanky-sounding “Bahamas Promises,” which opens with a couplet only Drizzy could pull off: “Broken pinkie promises/You fucked up our Bahamas trip.” He’s scoffing at rap’s NPCs with J. Cole on “First Person Shooter” and taking relationship advice from Future on “What Would Pluto Do.” On “BBL Love,” he drops an all-timer for the “that’s so Drake” archives, musing, “They say love’s like a BBL, you won’t know if it’s real until you feel one,” as if anyone has ever said such a thing whose name isn’t Aubrey Drake Graham. But it isn’t officially a Drake album till you get to the song with the city name and timestamp in the title. On “8am in Charlotte,” over a boom-bap beat from Conductor Williams, Drake presides over his dogs like a coach before the big game, initiates breakups at five-star restaurants, and unleashes a barrage of knee-slappers you can imagine him deploying 20 years from now at his eventual Vegas residency. In the video, the most successful rapper of his generation wears a hoodie emblazoned with “HATE SURVIVOR.” Never change, Drake, never change.

By the time December 2022 swung around, there was very little doubt that YBNL newcomer Asake had been the most propulsive voice in Afropop in a year that had seen the genre turn decisively on its head. Asake’s run from earlier in the year, after the breakout of his Olamide-assisted “Omo Ope” led to the release of his enchanting debut album *Mr. Money With the Vibe*, established crowded vocals, futuristic percussive elements, and iridescent amapiano-Fuji fusions as the new framework of Afropop while minting hits like “Sungba,” Terminator,” “Peace Be Unto You,” and “Organise.” Keen to keep his momentum going and further the narrative of his blistering come-up, Asake’s sophomore album, *Work of Art*, coming less than a year after his debut, presents an artist operating at a nearly peerless level. With production still majorly helmed by Magicsticks, the template remains largely the same, but the scale of ambition is stratospheric as Asake aims to present his music as high art. Switching between effervescent live arrangements, jaunty hip-hop-adjacent beats, and classic African samples, the air on *Work of Art* is celebratory and zestful, with the singer’s compelling blend of Yoruba panegyrics and urban slang adding color to songs like “Sunshine” and “Basquiat.” In a throwback to his *Ololade Asake* EP, label boss Olamide makes the only guest appearance here, contributing a standout verse on “Amapiano.” Still, mostly alone, Asake continues to take inspiration from his journey, spreading himself far and wide to channel bleary-eyed optimism on “Lonely at the Top” and hope on “I Believe.” Across these 14 songs, Asake invites us into his new reality and tells his story in vivid Technicolor.

Hip-hop free spirits Aminé and KAYTRANADA broke through around the same time, their respective mid-2010s album debuts having dropped within roughly a year of one another. As such, few should be all that surprised to see their amalgamated KAYTRAMINÉ come to fruition. The sweet soul sensations and razor-sharpened verbiage of initial singles “Rebuke” and the Pharrell-assisted “4EVA” accurately previewed their full-length’s scenic purview, a POV of a righteous escapade through the post-Neptunes/post-Timbaland lineage. Hyper sexual exploits, luxury smackdowns, and much more await listeners on “letstalkaboutit” and “Ugh Ugh,” as well as the aggressively funky cuts “STFU3” and “Who He Iz.” Formidable rapper guests Big Sean and Freddie Gibbs raise the pressure considerably, while Snoop Dogg himself brings his experience in similar sonic spaces to the sparse and synthy “Eye.”

Part of the appeal of Meg Remy’s music is that you can think and feel with it in almost equal measure. Inspired by her experience as a new mother (she delivered twin boys in 2021), *Bless This Mess* draws from a similar ’80s-pop Petri dish as 2020’s *Heavy Light* and 2018’s *In a Poem Unlimited*, and with the same mix of gut passion and high-concept remove. Do you need to know, for example, that the after-school-special balladry of “Bless This Mess” was inspired by the punishment of the Danaïdes in Greek mythology? Or that the hypnotic funk of “Pump” came from Remy’s reflections on how motherhood turns the female body into a kind of machine? Not to derive pleasure from them, clinically speaking, but there’s no doubt she wants you to be aware of the conditions she’s working with when it comes to gender, history, and economy, and to recognize pop as a viable way to get there. And if the ideas start to feel heavy, you can always dance them off.

The highly anticipated eighth album by U.S. Girls, the nom de plume of North American multi-disciplinary and experimental pop artist Meg Remy, will be released on 24 February entitled Bless This Mess. A dynamic suite of dexterous melodies and a nuanced artistic response to the complexities of motherhood, Bless This Mess was crafted in tandem with the conception and birth of Remy’s twin boys. It expands the sonic and thematic palette of U.S. Girls, fusing the muses of funk, mythology, and the radical disorientation of joy into an electric tapestry of anthems, aches, and awakenings. To celebrate the announcement, today U.S. Girls releases the slow jam gem, ‘Futures Bet’ alongside a music video directed by Alex Kingsmill that explores the visual wonder and resiliency of trash. A combination of traditional 3D animation & composited live action footage was fed into various Stable Diffusion deep learning models. Some images in the video have up to 6 passes of the artificial intelligence reinterpretations at various strengths to create the effect. It co-stars Remy and Carlyn Bezic, who also sings on the track and will open for U.S. Girls’ 2023 tour dates under her moniker Jane Inc. As Remy’s body changed so did her voice; her diaphragm lost breathing room, adjusting to the growing lives inside. Many takes on Bless This Mess were tracked with the babies in utero, or in her arms. (She even samples her breast pump on the album’s poetic closing cut, “Pump”). The resulting performances are suffused by the physicality of this journey: more blood, more feelings, the interwoven wonders, and wounds of procreation. The ten songs on Bless This Mess were pieced together stem by stem with a vast cast of collaborators (Alex Frankel of Holy Ghost!, Marker Starling, Ryland Blackinton of Cobra Starship, Basia Bulat, Roger Manning Jr. of Jellyfish and Beck,) and audio engineers (Neal H Pogue, Ken Sluiter, Steve Chahley, Maximilian Turnbull). Long-time collaborator, husband, and co-parent Turnbull played a key role facilitating these fluid muses. The production throughout is exquisite, warm, and wood-panelled, framing the voice, keys, bass, and rhythms in heightened textural harmony. ***Pre-orders will include a pin-badge***

Megan Moroney’s debut album opens with a wry smirk of a song. At first listen, opening track “I’m Not Pretty” sounds like another variation of the common enough country trope of reminding listeners that they’re beautiful, haters be damned. But Moroney, a swiftly rising star in the genre with a firebrand personality, takes it a step further when addressing an “ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend”: “Keep on telling yourself I’m not pretty.” Such bold assertions populate the rest of the LP, which the Savannah, Georgia-born singer-songwriter recorded alongside producer Kristian Bush, also known as one half of Sugarland. Following Moroney’s wildly popular 2022 breakout EP *Pistol Made of Roses*, *Lucky* takes the best of that EP—Moroney’s sass and swagger, in particular, but also the vulnerability of tracks like “Fix You Too”—and offers a fuller portrait of her specific vision of country music, which is reminiscent of early Miranda Lambert or Kelsea Ballerini. “Girl in the Mirror” is a painful look at sacrificing one’s own selfhood for a wayward lover. “Another on the Way” pairs a dark, swampy arrangement with a tale of a wise barkeep called Miss Daisy, who sagely advises the heartbroken narrator, “Men, they’re like trains/If you miss one, there’s another on the way.” Closer “Sad Songs for Sad People” has Moroney declaring, “I want every word to hurt like blue eyes crying in the rain,” as a gently soulful rhythm section accentuates her natural twang. And “Tennessee Orange,” which was an early viral hit for Moroney, cleverly plays on Southern football rivalries to tease out the complexities of a relationship.

“It’s seemingly about relationships with other people, but I think it’s more about a relationship with the higher power,” Jenny Lewis tells Apple Music about her fifth solo full-length. “And I’m not even talking about God—it’s the *details*.” By that, Lewis means the sort of simple, quotidian texture we might normally have overlooked before the pandemic took hold, when the world stood still long enough for us to truly appreciate them. At the time, the LA singer-songwriter had already written a number of songs that would end up on *Joy’All*. But like anything else, they evolved, Lewis continuing to edit and write on her own, at home alone in Laurel Canyon (or as part of a virtual songwriting workshop hosted by Beck) with the windows and doors open. “It was like, suddenly, there were no airplanes overhead, no cars on the street, no hikers even. The animals emerged from the canyon, and the house next to me was empty, so I could make a lot of noise.” Once lockdowns had loosened, she took to Nashville, where she recorded with acclaimed producer (and Apple Music Radio host) Dave Cobb, a perfect fit for Lewis’ work if there ever was one. “The songs pre-pandemic are a little more persons, places, and things, and then the songs post- are a little more existential musing,” she says. “Certainly, one element of *Joy’All* is gratitude and a sort of witnessing of the moment, because the moment was so traumatic for so many of us. It’s having a little breath and reflecting on the whole thing with gratitude. I personally had a profound shift. I can’t say if it’s a positive one, but it’s definitely a shift.” Here, Lewis zooms in on the details of a few songs. **“Psychos”** “‘Psychos’ has been around for a minute—it’s had a couple incarnations. It started out as a bossa nova, on a keyboard I have in Nashville, a CP-70 Yamaha. Then I recorded a version with my friend in the Midwest, kind of a remix version. And then I demoed it on GarageBand, on my iPhone, and took it to Dave. So, it had all these lives so far. If it’s a solid song, it can sort of exist in all the worlds. Some songs don’t translate from the album to a live setting or vice versa, but some are very fluid.” **“Joy’All”** “This one started out with a Purdie shuffle. Bernard Purdie is this famous session drummer, and he would do this thing with his fingers on the snare drum, and that’s fingers on the snare—so that set the tone. And I was so free on top of that rhythm. There’s a little bit of a blue note in there, too, but that’s intentional.” **“Puppy and a Truck”** “I was prompted in the Beck songwriting workshop, and this had been something I really had been living, because I actually do have a puppy and a truck, so it was pretty easy to write. But having the deadline in the workshop was crucial—I’d been thinking about it for a month, but I actually wrote it in 24 hours, and it was done. I wrote every line with my puppy by my side. And I played it every night opening for Harry Styles, and every night my production manager would bring Bobby \[Rhubarb\] out, with little doggy headphones on, and she knew—she knew it was me up there.” **“Apples and Oranges”** “It’s about a skateboarder. It was a waltz, and it had been around for a minute, and I was going to cut it for *On the Line*, but I didn’t for some reason. And I put it aside, and then I revisited my voice notes—which is my most valuable thing, all the stuff in my voice notes, thousands of bits of things—and I went back to it, and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me change the time signature and the key, and then rework the bridge and demo it on my phone.’ And it was just a totally new song.” **“Giddy Up”** “It has a De La Soul reference: ‘The stakes is high, the whistle blows,’ which is kind of a #MeToo nod as well. There’s a lot going on in that song as far as it’s a plea for intimacy, but not without peril or potential peril. It’s like the risk of putting yourself out there. It’s really about cognitive dissonance, that song. Like, get on your pony and ride—you know this isn’t the thing.” **“Chain of Tears”** “It ends with the line, ‘If it ain’t right, it’s wrong.’ So, back on that cognitive-dissonance tip and the same plea in ‘Giddy Up,’ to get on the pony and get out there. I think it’s like, we have the facts, and we’re voting no.”

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what sets *Tension* apart from other Kylie Minogue albums. Everything we’ve come to expect from Minogue in the 35 years she’s been an integral force in pop culture—immaculate pop melodies infused with rapturous *joie de vivre* and a flirty attitude—is present. And yet, there *is* an intangible quality permeating *Tension*, making the familiar sound fresh and new. “I think it’s a natural confidence and acceptance of where I am,” Minogue tells Apple Music. “I’ve got more to say and I feel at ease to say much of it.” After 2018’s country-inspired *Golden* and 2020’s lockdown-blues-busting *Disco*, the Australian pop icon started work on what would become her 16th studio album, with “no vision,” just the guiding principle: “As long as it’s not boring.” Richard “Biff” Stannard, the Spice Girls producer who has worked with Minogue since her triumphant return to pop music on 2000’s *Light Years*, was her first port of call. “Biff knows pop, he knows indie, he knows cool, he knows me, and we love flitting around different sounds and genres, so it’s such a great place for me to start,” says Minogue. “Tentatively, no pressure. We try to just make it play, in the beginning.” That playful energy is at the core of *Tension*, perhaps best captured in the erotically charged title track, as well as “Things We Do for Love”—a high-octane blast of effervescent dance-pop—and “Hands,” on which Minogue raps (yes, really). This deluxe edition also features three extra tracks, including “Somebody to Love,” a tender, synth-led midtempo that emerged from the project’s earliest sessions. “We unearthed it for the bonus tracks and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we love this song!’ It’s like a hug,” Minogue says. Then there’s “Padam Padam,” the pulsing floor-filler that sent the world into a viral state of pop emergency, affectionately dubbed “the Padam-ic,” when it was released in May 2023. “Who knew it would kick off in this manner? That’s just been the icing on top of the cake,” says Minogue of “Padam Padam.” But it should come as no surprise to anyone loosely familiar with Minogue’s tendency to shatter expectations—something she admits is no accident. “It’s determination and belief and inspiration from real-life human stories that my music has played a part in,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, there are days where I just don’t know how I’m going to do it. The balance of that is the struggle. But I am determined and I love it.” Read on to find out more about each song on *Tension*, in her own words. **“Padam Padam”** “I heard the demo and loved it. I thought, ‘This is amazing.’ And then once I’d self-recorded my vocals and put them in, I thought, ‘What’s more, this is amazing for me.’ I really felt like I was almost fused to this song, and we became greater than the sum of our parts.” **“Hold on to Now”** “I deeply, deeply love this song. The ‘na-na-na’ melody is from a voice note I sent to Biff \[Stannard\] in 2021, and a few months later, we built it up from there. Sonically, I think it’s beautiful. I heard it on some amazing speakers recently and I was fully transported—it felt connected and ‘other’ to me. I just really allowed myself to swim in it. I love that I feel like I’m asking the existential and immediate questions in one. But it’s about searching—when you’re so busy searching for answers, you forget being in the present. That’s why that speaks to me. I’m really very fond of it.” **“Things We Do for Love”** “The word this song brings to mind is ‘cardio.’ It’s got a bit of a *Footloose* feel. There’s no respite, it just keeps going and going, and the energy builds. ‘Things We Do for Love’ was written on the same day as ‘Tension,’ when \[UK songwriters and producers\] Kamille and Anya \[Jones\] came in. It took quite a bit of time at the back end in finishing the song, working out how to shape it so that the drive keeps going. It’s a weird structure, but I think it worked out really well.” **“Tension”** “The initial version was really out of place, and I wasn’t sure it would make the album. The lyrics were pretty edgy, the robo-voice was much more exaggerated—it just sounded very deep club. As it evolved, it was softened and finessed. Again, it was the shaping of the song that really stood out to me—it’s like a roller coaster ride, there are little diffusers that balance the song. You get on in the intro, with the piano stabs, it takes you up and up, closer and closer to the climax, it gets so edgy…then it drops. The bass comes in and you fly down that first big dipper. Then the second time it’s about to happen, you know what to expect, and your excitement level is even higher, because you know how thrilling it was.” **“One More Time”** “This started as another song. We parked it, but I really liked the track and I didn’t want to waste it. The week we were in Surrey \[for a writing camp with Minogue’s ‘bezzies’ Duck Blackwell (Halsey) and Jon Green (Paloma Faith)\], I had another idea—the ‘Slow down/Work it on out’ part—which was opposite to what we had already written. Jon came in with ‘I know your star sign/What’s on your bedside’ and there was a real cute attitude with it. It’s light and fun. The lyrics are revisiting, if not a relationship, at least a dalliance—it may or may not be romantic. There’s nothing deep in there, but it’s got a freedom to it.” **“You Still Get Me High”** “This started with Biff and Jon, and it was slower, more indulgent. I wanted to see if there was any potential with it, so I mentioned it to Duck one day and said, ‘I’d love you to be part of it and get your take on it.’ I think the combination of Biff, Duck, Jon, and myself—we just enhance each other. A lot of the euphoria comes from Jon, who is ‘the feels’; Biff’s got his pop brain permanently on. Then Duck brought it into line with what the album was becoming. It’s a bit of a split-personality song—I particularly love the end, with all the ad-libs.” **“Hands”** “My A&R manager Jamie Nelson prefaced sending me the demo of ‘Hands’ with, ‘I know you’re not a rapper, but I’ve got this idea…’ And of course, I’m way too curious and willing to give it a try, but I had to work a lot on trying to morph it to be ‘me.’ I wish I’d known earlier that the vocal \[on the demo\] was a male voice pitched to be in a ‘woman’s’ register, because that made me feel a bit better about how I couldn’t quite access the start of it. So the very beginning of the first verse is not me—we just left \[the demo vocal\] on the track—but the rest is, and I think I got my syncopation down fine. It’s the kind of fun, sunny-day song where, if anyone starts singing one segment, you have to keep going. You really can’t stop. I first listened to the demo in the car with my friend—windows down, sun shining—and it made perfect sense.” **“Green Light”** “‘Green Light’ is quite surprising to me. I think it might be a cousin to ‘Spinning Around’—it’s not as overt, it’s quite breezy and chill. But I did a listening party in a club in New York and before we played this song I said, ‘There aren’t that many relaxed, chill moments on the album, but this might be one of them.’ I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sometimes you don’t know. ‘Green Light’ slapped, as I believe they say. It definitely sits in the groove.” **“Vegas High”** “I knew I was doing the Vegas residency, so I went with Biff and Duck to meet \[artist and writer\] Gerard O’Connell for the first time, and the four of us squashed into this tiny little studio to do a song related to Vegas. That was the mission for the day. We were talking about a romanticized, cinematic version of Vegas—driving to Vegas, when the roads get a bit more dusty and there’s a glimmering, almost like an oasis, or if you’re flying in at night and it’s much of nothing, and then there’s that little wonderland of Vegas—and the story unfolded really quickly. ‘Capture the magic and hold it in your hand.’ I recorded it there and then.” **“10 Out of 10” (Oliver Heldens feat. Kylie Minogue)** “This was originally just going to be for \[Dutch DJ\] Oliver. His team randomly reached out to my team and I thought, ‘This is fun, I can see people strutting along to this track.’ It’s another one that was quite difficult for me to get access to. The girl who did the demo has a wild voice—very different to mine—and a natural attitude. I never want to sound like a bad carbon copy, but because I can self-record now, I often will. I’m free to be a bad carbon copy and take on the best of what they’ve done, then wean myself off and find out where I fit. It wasn’t intended for my album, but we embraced it and I think it’s a nice addition.” **“Story”** “It meant so much to me to write this song. I don’t get into what the difficulty was, but I had to overcome some things and get through a difficult period, and I’m acknowledging that for my sake. There’s something about the dichotomy of the aloneness you feel and the help you get from people who will support you through any difficulty that I can’t put in words as well as I put it in the lyrics. Once you get through it, you appreciate that the people who were helping you will never know how much they are part of your story and how much they have helped you, in ways that you can never repay them. I was so delighted by the number of people who came up to me at the listening parties to say that they love ‘Story.’ I felt so moved, and vindicated really, that it’s not just speaking to me and the people I love, but to others as well. And they’ll take from it what they will.”

To call *Fuse* Everything But the Girl’s first album in 24 years is to downplay everything the husband-and-wife duo of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have been busy with since—the partial sum of which includes seven solo albums, three children, five memoirs, and three record labels. “We were very much on our separate tracks until the pandemic,” Watt tells Apple Music. “When things started getting back to normal, we both realized we had been changed a lot by the whole experience, and wondered if a change and a new direction could be a good idea.” But for as much of a contextual shift as the project might’ve been for Watt and Thorn personally, their music has always been both of its time and slightly out of it in ways that make *Fuse* feel as singular and natural as anything they’ve done before. Certain tracks bear obvious markers of the 2020s, whether it’s the 2-step beat of “Nothing Left to Lose” or Thorn’s duet with her eerily Auto-Tuned self on “When You Mess Up.” But others—like the quiet desperation of “Run a Red Light” or the after-hours bliss of “No One Knows We’re Dancing”—tap into the same small, oblique sophistications that have driven their music since before they discovered drum machines. “We had more time on our hands and more with each other,” Watt says of making their first record together since 1999’s *Temperamental*. “Tracey just said, ‘Maybe now is the time; if not now, then when?’ When we began—after the first tentative steps—we realized we still had so much in common. A common language. A love of economy, direct emotion, space.” Here Watt and Thorn talk through the album, track by track. **“Nothing Left to Lose”** Tracey Thorn: “This was the last track we wrote and recorded. I think we could only do it once we had got our confidence levels up. We were buzzing off the tracks we had already done, and thought we just needed one more to really nail it. When Ben put the backing track together, with that beat and the heavy tremolo bass and loads of space for my vocal, it felt like a nod to our past but fresh. It was so atmospheric and it inspired this really raw, heartfelt lyric.” **“Run a Red Light”** Ben Watt: “We were a few songs into recording when one evening I played Tracey some songs I’d demoed a few years back. This was one of them, and Tracey picked it out immediately, saying, ‘That is a killer song, you must let me sing it.’ The ‘run a red light’ lines only appeared once, as a coda at the end, but we turned it into the chorus instead and sang the lines together, with my vocal heavily Auto-Tuned so that it has a bit of what Mark Ronson calls that ‘sad robot’ quality. The lyric is a portrait of the kind of guy I often met at the end of the night during my DJ days, the guy who thinks he just needs one break and he could turn everything around.” **“Caution to the Wind”** TT: “It’s quite an unusual track for us in that it’s house tempo but almost euphoric. Usually we inject sadness into this musical mood, but this one has a proper celebratory lyric: the stars, the sky like a cathedral, the idea of a person coming home, and throwing caution to the wind, demanding to get close to someone. The ‘caution to the wind’ lines made me think of Stevie Nicks while I was singing them. It’s got a slight ravey Fleetwood Mac vibe to it—big tom fills and floaty scarves.” **“When You Mess Up”** BW: “This was the first song we wrote together since 1999. I had recorded a series of piano improvisations on my iPhone—just playing, without imagining I was writing a song, trying to free myself from any pressures and expectations. And using slightly unusual chord voicings, 4ths and 6ths, etc. Tracey wrote this lyric about how that transitional stage between middle age and the future reminds you of all the tension and uncertainty of being young. But she’s trying to be forgiving of herself, saying, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, we all mess up, life is difficult.’ We messed around a bit with Tracey’s vocal on some of the lines, pitching it higher, bending its tone, so it sounds like a little devil on her shoulder, or some internal voice digging at her.” **“Time and Time Again”** TT: “This is the kind of song where you can’t quite tell which is the verse and which is the chorus, it’s more circular than linear. The lyrics are about someone looking at a friend who can’t get out of a relationship, imagining that at some point they’re gonna have to come and save them. Ben and I are singing together on the verses, really nice downbeat kind of vocals. And then my voice is sped up again and used as a kind of effect in the middle section. The feel reminds us a bit of our earliest forays into electronic music in the ’80s, where some tracks on *Idlewild* were inspired by Jam & Lewis productions, that pop/R&B vibe of the time.” **\"No One Knows We’re Dancing”** BW: “The lyric is a kind of homage to Lazy Dog, the club night I ran in Notting Hill with Jay Hannan for several years from the late ’90s onwards. It took place on Sundays, starting in the afternoon and ending at midnight, and the song captures—with a bit of added color—some of the regulars who turned up or people who worked there. It’s about that secret, self-enclosed world of the club, magnified by this sense that you’re down in the dark basement dancing at 5 pm, while outside in the street normal life is just going on, and the sun is blazing. Ewan Pearson added some extra synth and drum programming, and it turned into a real dubby Italo-disco vibe.” **“Lost”** TT: “This was an early piece of music that Ben had created, recording it at home during lockdown. A hypnotic, arpeggiated repetitive cycle of a song. He had typed the words ‘I lost…’ into Google and followed all the suggestions which came up to create the lyric: I lost my mind, I lost my bags, I lost my perfect job. It seems quite random and almost detached, but then you are hit by the line ‘I lost my mother’ and you realize that it is about loss of all kinds, and how it hits you. I then improvised singing another set of lyrics as a kind of counterpoint in the background, and they are exhortations not to give up in the face of loss, to keep going, and not to call yourself a loser.” **“Forever”** BW: “This was the first track on this project where I added a four-on-the-floor beat, and I remember Tracey running into the room going, ‘I like this!’ But it isn’t really a dance track, and we quite like that. It’s got quite a dark, pulsing arpeggiator going through it, and a kind of intense mood. The lyrics are about trying to work out what’s important—letting go of game playing and time wasting, trying to work out who’d be there for you in a crisis…as the lyric says, ‘When everything burns down.’” **“Interior Space”** TT: “This started as another one of Ben’s piano improvisations, and is layered up with a sonic landscape of drones and swooshes and a field recording our engineer Bruno had made of a beach in Wales while on holiday with his family. It also features some of the only guitar on the album from Ben. My vocal is heavily treated so it sounds like the inside of my head, woozy and psychedelic, a little bit out of it. The lyric is about not understanding yourself, feeling unknowable, and the arrangement tries to dramatize that feeling, make it vivid and real.” **“Karaoke”** BW: “A slow empty groove to end the album—distorted organ, CS-80, West Coast Moog. The verse lyrics are about a trip I made to a karaoke bar in San Francisco some years ago. The early evening was fairly humdrum, then the regulars arrived and a woman sang Jennifer Hudson’s ‘Spotlight’ and brought the house down. It inspired Tracey to add the chorus lyrics, which introduce another idea into the song, asking, ‘What is singing for? Do you sing to heal the brokenhearted or get the party started?’ Both, is the obvious answer.”

Eighteen months before *a Gift & a Curse*, Gunna was in a very different position. The Georgia native ushered in 2022 with the chart-topping success of *DRIP SEASON 4EVER* and its lexicon-altering hit “pushin P” with Young Thug. In May of that year, both he and his YSL label boss found themselves under indictment in a sweeping RICO case. By December, he was free, only to be faced with wild speculation over the terms of his release. Caught up in the fallout, he clapped back over the rumors and narratives that formed about and around him with the single “bread & butter.” Scarred and singed by some of the most damaging accusations one could face in the rap game or the streets, he unloads his lyrical clip in spectacular fashion on his first album since his arrest. Throughout *a Gift & a Curse*, Gunna makes it a point to address his predicament head-on, offering a perspective as unique as the circumstances. A defiant superstar, he reintroduces himself to his fans and haters alike on the simmering “back at it,” following it swiftly with the confident and confrontational “back to the moon.” He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders over what’s changed with “idk nomore” while returning to the lavish normalcy of his pre-arrest lifestyle via “rodeo dr” and “p angels.” For the grand finale, “alright,” he sees the path forward clearer than ever, shouting out YSL amid a hopeful chorus.

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

Since self-releasing the track “3 Nights” in the late 2010s, Dominic Fike has become a multi-platform star. Not only have his closely felt songs made him a bona fide pop phenomenon worthy of a Paul McCartney co-sign, he’s also appeared in the HBO series *Euphoria*, which allowed him to flex his skills as an actor without breaking his momentum with his music. “I have been recording songs every day, or writing them,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every time I make a song, I feel like it\'s my best song. It\'s hard not to want to put it out as soon as you make it. I think a lot of artists will feel me when I say that.” That drive to constantly be creating is why his third album is a bit of a flashback for him. Songs like the reggae-tinged “Dancing in the Courthouse” throw to his youth in Naples, Florida, and his scrapes with the law there, while the groove-forward, surrealistic “Ant Pile” has its roots in the music he made three years ago—when he was in a very different place in his life. “I made it when I was in active addiction and I was in no place to make music,” said Fike. “I had to spend a couple years in rehabs and things like that. When I came back, I was able to finish it—and it was exhausting. I had to take a look inside myself. There were so many emotional talks with producers, with people that were mentors or people I work with. It was just a heavy load on my shoulders that I\'m grateful to be done with.”