Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums of 2023

Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U),” the Bronx-born MC’s biggest hit to date and the song that has soundtracked an unknowable number of after-school hangs, almost wasn’t. “The song was really a throwaway for me,” Spice told Apple Music’s Ebro. “I made it, and I was like, ‘All right, let me put that away.’ And the people I was playing it for—I played it for a bunch of people, and \[they\] was just like, ‘Oh. OK, cool.’” But the song was not to be denied. By the time “Munch (Feelin’ U)” hit streaming platforms in August 2022, Ice had accumulated a legion of local fans eagerly awaiting its release, having heard a snippet she’d uploaded to socials earlier that summer. Once the phrase “You thought I was feelin’ you?” made it to TikTok, the rest was history. Or as Spice herself puts it on January’s *Like..?* EP, “In the hood, I’m like Princess Diana.” Twenty-three-year-old Ice Spice was born Isis Gaston and got an early start at rapping. “I had little raps and shit since I was a kid,” she says. “I never made full songs, though.” She began recording properly in 2021, with things really revving up after meeting producer and frequent collaborator RIOTUSA while in college at SUNY Purchase. Though her popularity rose fast, her first and likely most important fan was her father, an MC in his own right who, Spice says, used to run with DJ Doo Wop in the early 2000s. “In the crib or on the way to school and everything, he would be on some, ‘Let me hear something’ and always trying to film me, pushing me to do something,” she says. “Or if I would tell him about girls that I didn’t really fuck with in school, he would be like, ‘Write a rap about them.’” He likely couldn’t be prouder of his little star upon the release of *Like..?*, a six-track EP that was, at its arrival, already 50 percent hits. “Munch (Feelin’ U)” is, of course, here, as are the instantly viral “Bikini Bottom” and “In Ha Mood.” Add to those the NYC drill-expressive “Princess Diana,” the P. Diddy “I Need a Girl, Pt. 2”-sampling “Gangsta Boo,” and the Jersey club-indebted “Actin a Smoochie,” and you’ve got a picture of a young talent who is just getting warmed up. “Those are six songs that I already made,” Spice says of *Like..?*. “Fans going to eat that up. And then there’s always time to evolve and grow as an artist. So, I’m not rushing to jump into another sound or rushing to do some different shit. If it happens, it happens. I just want everything to be natural.”

Like…? is Bronx, New York newcomer Ice Spice’s debut EP. Following up the success of “Munch (Feelin' U)” and “Bikini Bottom,” on November 16, 2022, during an interview with RapCaviar, Ice Spice announced that she was working on an EP, stating: I’m excited for this new music. I’m about to put out an EP. It’s about to be like six songs. ‘Bikini Bottom’ is on there, and then there’s some that people haven’t heard. It’s about to be a vibe. Visuals coming with it, too. Yeah, a bunch of content around it. It’s lit. On December 25, 2022, Ice Spice released the EP’s third single, “In Ha Mood.” Although no other information about the EP was announced, the day before it’s release, Ice Spice took to social media revealing the cover art and tracklist. Lil Tjay serves as the sole feature.

One of the toughest things to do as an artist is a feat of transfiguration whereby a songwriter changes the individual into the universal. It’s a rare accomplishment, and even rarer for an artist as young as Reneé Rapp to do it. “I write a lot from specificity,” she tells Apple Music. “So many of these songs have to come from real things that are happening in my life. Friendships end, relationships end. Sometimes you just have to sit with your feelings.” The 23-year old actor and musician blazed through Charlotte, North Carolina’s thriving theater scene before taking on the roles of Regina George in the *Mean Girls* musical, both on Broadway and in the upcoming movie adaptation, and Leighton on the HBO Max series *The Sex Lives of College Girls*. Through all that success, Rapp also somehow found the time to develop into a preternaturally talented songwriter. On her full-length debut *Snow Angel*, she fuses the raw catharsis of Olivia Rodrigo with the scenic storytelling of Maggie Rogers, bouncing back and forth between stadium-ready hooks (“Talk Too Much,” “The Wedding Song”) and intimate, slinky crooning (“I Wish,” “Willow”). Rapp enlisted her longtime collaborator, the Grammy-nominated producer Alexander 23, to work on *Snow Angel*, and you can sense his guiding hand throughout the record, helping Rapp channel and focus her emotions—heartbreak, anxiety, venom, and hope in equal measures—into personal stories that also feel like they’re for everyone. Below, she tells the stories behind those stories on *Snow Angel*. **“Talk Too Much”** “I have a lot of stress dreams, and one night I had a dream that I killed my girlfriend. I was so stressed out and I was so confused. The relationship was very new, and I got really overwhelmed. I ended up confessing and asked her how she felt. They were like, ‘What is wrong with you?!’ Then I just decided to write ‘Talk Too Much’ because I don\'t think I should have told them that, but also I did tell you this. It’s about the spiraling of being in a new relationship and wondering if it\'s good or bad.” **“I Hate Boston”** “This song comes from two different places. It started because I was in a session with some of my friends and I was talking about this show I played in Boston. The fans were just so awesome and it was a great gig by all accounts, but I was sick and I felt like shit. I also wore these faux leather pants and big boots and a fuzzy sweater, and the venue was so hot and I was suffocating. It was awful. The other side was that I wanted to use Boston as an alias because the word sings beautifully. The lyrics are about a city that an ex tainted for me, and I wanted to make sure that it felt really close to the hyper-specific situations that I went through in this relationship. Boston was sort of a cover-up.” **“Poison Poison”** “This is probably the most sarcastic, cynical song that I have on this record. I had a friendship with another girl that ended really horribly. I think as a woman and as women, it sucks when we get in a fight with another woman. We don\'t want to be a girl that takes down another girl. I wanted to write a song about it because I cared about this person so much and we were such good friends and I felt really betrayed. I wanted to deal with my feelings in a way that was comedic and sarcastic and kind of coped with it in a different way than how I actually felt about it, which was extremely hurt and betrayed and really confused and very sad.” **“Gemini Moon”** “This song is so fucking funny because actually I\'m a Pisces moon. But I wrote \'Gemini Moon\' because I had a really tough breakup a couple years ago which started as us taking a break—this in-between thing where you\'re feeling two states at once. I walked outside after this happened and I looked up and, of course, it\'s a full fucking moon. That shit always happens to me on a full moon. I always have full moons on my birthdays, and it sucked. Then I wondered if the moon is in Gemini right now. And through tears, I looked it up, and sure enough, it was Gemini moon. Then I was in the studio one day and fresh into a new relationship and I was experiencing being in love with someone again after having that fallout. I hadn\'t felt that intensely for someone in a long time, and I was really scared. I was criticizing every little thing I did. So I was like, wow, I wonder if it\'s a Gemini moon right now. I looked it up and it was a Gemini moon, and I was like, are you fucking kidding? It was almost exactly two years apart.” **“Snow Angel”** “I went through a really shitty experience in early 2022. I was extremely sad, and I was involved with the wrong people. I had recounted the situation so many times to friends over and over again. It was something that I think I had just stored in a place that I was never really going to process it the way that other people did. Then one day I was sitting with Alexander and he was like, ‘We really should write that snow song.’ And everybody else on my team was like, ‘We\'re so happy. Oh my god, this is the code for this album, we\'ve cracked it.’ In my brain I\'m like, ‘Well, this was one of the worst experiences in my life, so glad that it could turn into something like this.’” **“So What Now”** “I was seeing this person and we had a really quick in-and-out kind of thing. It was just so intense and I was so mad. So after the situation had subsided, I was like, ‘Are you going to ever speak to me again? Am I supposed to speak to you?’ ‘So What Now’ is just the culmination of this overarching thought of ‘you\'re treating me like shit’ but also ‘I\'m not mad at you, but what are we supposed to do?’” **“The Wedding Song”** “I was living in New Jersey for work for a few months when I wrote this. I was in a relationship at one point with someone who I thought I was going to marry, and that was the first time that had ever happened to me. And I thought that it would be so just gut-wrenching to be like, ‘I wrote you a wedding song because I thought I was going to be with you forever and I never played it for you, and now you\'re never going to hear it because we don\'t speak anymore.’ It\'s meant to be this really soul-sucking kind of song that\'s so happy and beautiful in the chorus, then it\'s just so sad in the verses because it\'s like, ‘Well, this is what I would\'ve said had you stuck around, but you decided to not and that\'s just now something that I have to deal with.’” **“Pretty Girls”** “I think ‘Pretty Girls’ is the universal gay-girl experience, in my opinion. Ever since I became more publicly out, so many straight girls are like, ‘I couldn\'t be with a girl, but wow, if I did...’ So it\'s just the gay-girl experience of all these straight girls being like, ‘I am either a closeted gay in a way that I don\'t understand or I\'m just kind of using you as a little prop.’ And that sucks any way you slice it. But in a really sick and twisted way, it’s kind of flattering. I love to be hit on. I\'m so sorry, but I do.” **“Tummy Hurts”** “This was the last song we wrote that ended up making the album. It started because I wrote down in my notes one day the sentence ‘My tummy hurts, he\'s in love with her.’ It wasn\'t really about any specific situation, which is usually where I write from. I love this almost childlike way of saying I have a stomach ache and then this really adult feeling of someone is in love with somebody else. I liked how it felt and I liked how it was worded. And it all came from there.” **“I Wish”** “I wrote this when I was living in New Jersey. I was writing with some of my friends and they had come up with a different kind of concept for the chorus and some of the lyrics. They said, ‘Oh, this is like writing a song to your childhood self.’ But for me, it\'s reading in a different way. It was more about how I remember my first taste of mortality when I realized my parents were going to die when I was 10. I remember not being able to sleep for such a long time because I was like, holy shit, my parents are not invincible. I was just so shocked by it and I was so confused. I was young and it was really jarring and I struggled with it for a long time. I think I still do. And so I just wanted to make \'I Wish\' this sort of love letter to the idea that I wish I didn\'t know about the concept of death.” **“Willow”** “‘Willow’ is two things. Frank Ocean is my favorite songwriter of all time. I didn\'t feel like I had any songs on my project that took any lyrical inspiration from him and his projects, and I really wanted there to be. I also loved willow trees as a kid. As I got older, I also thought there was something so interesting about it being called a weeping willow. I felt like I kind of had a lot of similar qualities to this tree, which sounds crazy, but I just always felt that way. I ended up framing it as my little self sitting under a willow tree talking to my current self. It was me personifying the tree as my younger self, which sounds kind of crazy, but it\'s one of my favorite songs on the whole album.” **“23”** “I think it’s the first song that Alexander and I did together. I was having full birthday panic the day before I turned 23. I was like, ‘Wow, it\'s my birthday, but I feel like all my friends hate me and I feel extremely alone.’ I thought that these feelings would be gone by now, but here I am, a young adult about to be in my Jordan year, and I still feel like shit. It’s a birthday blues kind of song. Then the outro is this hopeful message that I don\'t feel that same way when I\'m 24 next year. So the kind of annual terror that comes around your birthday, it\'s like wishing that away.”

On Melanie Martinez’s third LP, her Cry Baby trilogy comes to an end. If 2015’s *Cry Baby* debut introduced the titular character (and reintroduced Martinez as a fearlessly creative avant-pop creator outside of her covers on *The Voice*) and 2019’s *K-12* “used school as an analogy for life and the systems of power our society continues to live under,” as she tells Apple Music, *PORTALS* is about death and what lies beyond. “I wanted to challenge my listeners’ perspective by essentially saying: Just like us, after Cry Baby’s vessel on earth has died, she lives on as a spirit in the cosmos. It was important for me to show the immortality of being a human with this record—to give people hope that there’s life after death.” Across 13 tracks largely written in her home’s “portal room”—a space she describes as “an entry point for benevolent spirits to come and rest on their journey”—*PORTALS* is a synthy vaudeville, from the sped-up heartbeat production and spoken-word intro “DEATH” to the uptempo alt-pop of closer “WOMB.” The lines between life and the afterlife are blurred. “I hope grief becomes easier for people while listening to this record,” she adds. “That they can enjoy this life to the fullest knowing we’re all just here to grow, create, feel, and have shared experiences with one another to help each other evolve.” Below, Martinez walks through her new album in a track-by-track guide she wrote exclusively for Apple Music. **“DEATH”** “One day, I sat in the portal room alone and started singing melodies. I heard a spirit with a completely different tone than mine repeat a melody I had sung out loud in the silence and it sent a chill down my body. I was really scared at first, then continued on, using that moment as confirmation from the other side. I laid down the chords; I added a simple drum loop in the chorus. That was later replaced by production from my favorite collaborator CJ Baran, as well as live drums from Ilan Rubin of Nine Inch Nails, who also put drums down for a couple of other songs.” **“VOID”** “This is the first song I fully produced on my own, also in the portal room. The first thing I put down was that bass guitar top line—it was an exact melody from a voice memo I had recorded a few days prior. The chorus melody and lyric came all at once just from looping the bassline. I put down a simple programmed drum loop that was later replaced and mixed in with live drums by Rhys Hastings.“ **“TUNNEL VISION”** “I wrote this song while in Hawaii in February 2021 with Kinetics & One Love. We were surrounded by coqui frogs singing to us, the sound of rain hitting the roof, and pure connection.” **“FAERIE SOIRÉE”** “There were many days I sat in the portal room wanting to create outside of my own perspective. I asked Jeff Levin (my A&R) to send me as many folders as possible of instrumental tracks created by different producers. After searching through the folders for a while, there was one track labeled ‘Respect Vol 1’ by this producer named Hoskins that struck me. It was an infectious drum groove over a guitar top line. I wrote the song very quickly.” **“LIGHT SHOWER”** “There is a place in the afterlife people under hypnosis describe as a soul cleansing, a place where gem-colored rays of light shine through every inch of your soul, cleansing your spirit of the trauma it had experienced during your last lifetime. I remember reading about this sitting on the roof of my garage. A few weeks later I sat in my bathtub with my guitar and stayed up all night writing a love song about this light. It was also the very first song I ever wrote for this album.” **“SPIDER WEB”** “‘SPIDER WEB’ is written about social media’s chokehold on society. I wrote this one on my guitar in the portal room, recorded a voice memo of it, and sent it to CJ. He created an incredible instrumental track for it that same day and even created the perfect drop using his own mouth sounds that gave it that extra spidery feel.” **“LEECHES”** “The next few songs are about conflict on earth. Living in the most vapid and isolating city of Los Angeles, I decided to write ‘LEECHES’ about people who live here for the wrong reasons, and how they act around people in the spotlight.” **“BATTLE OF THE LARYNX”** “This was the last song that was written and added to the album. I wrote this one to be about two different conflict styles: one person who yells a bunch of nothing really loudly to try and intimidate, and the other who can calmly and concisely use their words and wit to prove their point.” **“THE CONTORTIONIST”** “This conflict song is about bending over backwards for someone who doesn’t accept you as you are.” **“MOON CYCLE”** “I wrote this song in the portal room alone over a guitar loop by Pearl Lion. On each of my albums, I like to include at least one ‘taboo’ song about something many people deal with, but no one talks about in music: I wanted to write a fun, lighthearted song about being a person who experiences menstruation, how blood represents vitality and life. I wanted the chorus to be pretty and to use analogies for bleeding that were sweet. The rumbling sounds that lead into the song are my actual period cramps, recorded on my phone. With the conflict of patriarchal society brainwashing straight cis men to believe they should have any kind of say over other people’s bodies, I wanted to make the song extra uncomfy for them by going on to describe a man who lives for period sex.” **“NYMPHOLOGY”** “The ending interlude of this song is actually called ‘Amulet.’ My partner Verde was cleaning out his computer and an instrumental randomly started playing and my ears perked up. It was a track he had produced years ago that was just sitting there collecting digital dust. I immediately wrote over it, but writing a full song for it was difficult. I loved it so much and had no idea what to do with it. One day in the studio I randomly was like, ‘Hmm, maybe “Amulet” can be an interlude after a song,’ and as fate had it, the very last note of ‘NYMPHOLOGY’ is the very first note of ‘Amulet.’ A perfect puzzle piece.” **“EVIL”** “My favorite of the conflict songs. It flowed. It was a mental turning point, where I was finally able to articulate perfectly what I had dealt with in my last relationship. I wanted the lyrics to be the most savage—every time I wrote something, I was like, ‘No, it’s not mean enough.’ It’s about dealing with a narcissist who ironically calls you evil because you’re able to see through them. I spent the entire day blowing out my vocals recording it.” **“WOMB”** “I knew I wanted the album to end on the title ‘WOMB.’ This was one of the earliest songs, written in 2020. I had a session one day with Omer Fedi, and he started playing these guitar chords that were so beautiful, I asked him to play it on loop while I stared at the corner of the room, quickly writing lyrics. CJ and I had Rhys come in and record live drums around two years later to complete it. This song is written from the perspective of entering a new lifetime—the nerves and excitement that arises when you’re about to let your human experience on earth move your progression forward.”

“The origin of all this goes back years,” Peso Pluma tells Apple Music. “My musicians, my team and I started this dream called Peso Pluma.” For Hassan Kabande Laija, 2023 has been sweet:. He has become one of the brightest stars and flag bearers for música mexicana’s incredible rise. In short order, he’s gone from local to global, with songs so popular that they’ve transcended into the collective subconscious. Peso Pluma became internationally known for hits like “Ella Baila Sola,” “La Bebé (Remix),” “PRC,” and “El Azul.” But *GÉNESIS*, his third studio album, clearly portrays the artist as someone more concerned with the longevity and legacy of his craft than with the momentary thrills that come from viral successes. “The title of the album represents the beginning of a new era,” says the Zapopan-born artist, referring to its release as a deliberate turning point both in his life and in his career. After such an impressive run, often in collaboration with other Latin hitmakers, *GÉNESIS* feels undeniably like a fresh albeit raw statement befitting his arrival on a new level. The album presents 14 corrido tracks across música mexicana’s spectrum, from the most romantic to the most *bélicos* and back again. On the instantly memorable “LUNA” with Junior H, he delivers a love letter in ballad form dedicated to the one who got away. “I made this song for a very special person, so that the moon could communicate the things that I cannot say to that person,” he says. The rest of the album’s stacked guest list includes his cousin Tito Double P, corridos tumbados master Natanael Cano, and previous collaborator Gabito Ballesteros, as well as artists as seemingly disparate as Luis R Conriquez and Eladio Carrión. “We are very happy to globalize Mexican music and the music we grew up with,” he says. “That has always been the goal and the same objective: to expand what we like to do and the type of music we listen to and globalize it to every corner of the world.” Having opened the ears of the world to música mexicana, he wanted to emphasize the idea that his work is not regional, but rather universal. The requinto and the bajoloche are now part of the world’s sonic tapestry, thanks in no small part to his efforts. “I\'m 23 and I\'m already out and about,” he says on “NUEVA VIDA,” a song that gives greater meaning to the album’s concept. Overall, *GÉNESIS* is a work that explores the artistic and conceptual capacities of the corrido in 2023, at the exact moment in which Peso Pluma has all eyes on him. “We are very happy with everything that is happening to us,” he says. “There are many blessings that are raining down on us, and I think that little by little, we have learned how to take the bull by the horns.”

The question of whether you want an MC like Earl Sweatshirt and a producer like The Alchemist to test each other’s limits is on some level an existential one: Like, isn’t the fact that the dreamlike flights of *VOIR DIRE* feel like comfort food a testament to how much they’ve already stretched our conception of hip-hop? Ten years out from his first “real” album (2013’s *Doris*), Earl sounds grateful, fulfilled, and yet no less enigmatic than when he was a kid, holding space for a history of Black diasporic art from Martinican poet Aimé Césaire to the Swazi-Xhosa South African pop legend Miriam Makeba without sacrificing the hermetic quality that made him so appealing in the first place. In Vince Staples, he continues to find the straight-talking foil he needs (“The Caliphate,” “Mancala”), and in Al a producer who can nudge him just a little closer to the hallelujahs he’s either too cool or evasive to embrace (“Mancala”). And at 26 minutes, the whole thing easily asks to be played again.

From the stark gospel soul of his 2013 breakthrough “Take Me to Church,” to the T.S. Eliot-inspired visions of 2019’s *Wasteland, Baby!*, Andrew Hozier-Byrne traverses literature, religion, and classical imagery to chart his own musical course. For the third Hozier album, *Unreal Unearth*, he’s followed that impulse further than ever before. During the pandemic Hozier found himself catching up on literature that had long been on his to-read pile, including Dante Alighieri’s *Inferno*. Not the lightest of reading, but a line from Dante stuck a chord. “There’s a passage in Dante’s *Inferno*, when he’s describing what’s above the door to Hell. The third line is: ‘Through me, you enter into the population of loss,’” the Irishman tells Apple Music. “That line just resonated with me. It felt like the world we were in. The news reports were just numbers of deaths, numbers of cases. It was a surreal moment.” It struck him that the format and themes of Dante’s 14th-century epic, in which the poet descends through the nine circles of Hell, could be the perfect prism through which to write about both the unreal experience of the pandemic and the upheavals in his personal life. “There’s such a rich tapestry there. I didn’t study classics and I’m not an academic, but for me, all those myths are happening around us all the time,” he says. “You can play with them a lot and reinterpret them and then subvert them as well.” The result is Hozier’s most ambitious and emotionally powerful album to date. It’s a remarkable journey, taking in pastoral folk, soaring epics, and tracks addressing the devastation caused by colonialism. Here, Hozier guides us through, one track at a time. **“De Selby (Part 1)”** “I didn’t know the song was going to reference de Selby until it started taking shape. He’s a character in a book by Flann O’Brien called *The Third Policeman* \[written in 1939 but not published until after O’Brien’s death in 1967\]. The book is like *Alice in Wonderland*, and it’s a classic piece of surreal Irish storytelling. De Selby is this lunatic philosopher who—and I don’t want to spoil the ending—doesn’t know he’s dead and in the afterlife. It felt like an appropriate reference for the opening track, to reflect on this darkness that he’s entering into, this infinite space.” **“De Selby (Part 2)”** “Part two comes out in a totally different place. It was always in this funk, rock place, even in the early demos. Part one ends in the Irish language, it’s basically saying: ‘You arrive to me like nightfall. Although you’re a being of great lightness, I experience you like nighttime.’ It’s that idea of ‘I don’t know where you begin and I end,’ and the song explores that a bit lyrically.” **“First Time”** “It felt like a nice place to come out of the heaviness of the previous track. It represents limbo. This cycle of birth and death, of being lifted by an experience and then that experience ending and it feeling like your world collapsing in on you, and then going again. Alex Ryan, my buddy who is also my bass player, sent me this bassline one day and it was really colorful and light and playful to work with. I really enjoyed writing the lyrics, they’re not too structured. It’s almost like talk-singing and I hadn’t really explored that much before this album, so I wanted to try it out.” **“Francesca”** “I had written a song that was very specific to Francesca \[from the Second Circle (Lust) in Dante’s *Inferno*\], that was written from her perspective. I was even trying to write it in terza rima, which is the interlocking triplets that Dante wrote in. But that’s where I was a like, ‘OK, I have to step back a little bit from this.’ When this song came around, it started from personal experience and then I allowed those themes and some of the imagery from that character in and then let the two mix. It’s an example of letting the song have a life above ground and resonate with a life below ground in regard to that character.” **“I, Carrion (Icarian)”** “It’s trying to capture that feeling when you’re lifting off. That sometimes when you’re falling in love with somebody, you’re met with this new lightness that you haven’t experienced ever before, but it’s also terrifying. To fully experience the best of that, you have to take into account that it could all collapse inwards and that you’re OK with that. It’s trying to hold those two realities in both hands and just playing with the imagery of it. It felt appropriate to come out of the hurricane of ‘Francesca,’ where two characters are trapped in a hurricane forever, into someone who is just on the wind.” **“Eat Your Young”** “I don’t know how intentional the reference to Jonathan Swift was in this. That essay \[Swift’s 1729 satirical essay *A Modest Proposal* in which he suggests the Irish poor sell their children as food\] is such a cultural landmark that it’s just hanging in the air. I was more reflecting on what I felt now in this spirit of the times of perpetual short-term gain and a long-term blindness. The increasing levels of precarious living, poverty, job insecurity, rental crisis, property crisis, climate crisis, and a generation that’s inheriting all of that and one generation that’s enjoyed the spoils of it. The lyrics are direct, but the voice is playful. There’s this unreliable narrator who relishes in this thing which was fun to write.” **“Damage Gets Done” (feat. Brandi Carlile)** “I’ve known Brandi Carlile for years, she’s an incredible artist and I’m lucky to call her a friend. As that song was taking shape, I wanted it to be a duet. It’s kind of like a runaway song. It’s not as easy to access that joy, that sense of wonder when you’re young that captures your enjoyment for a moment and then it’s gone. Brandi has one of those voices that is powerful enough to really achieve that feeling of a classic, almost power ballad. There’s very few artists that I know that have voices like that, who can just swing at notes the way Brandi swings at notes and hit them so perfectly with this immaculate energy and optimism.” **“Who We Are”** “This song was like a sneeze. Once we had the structure down, we jammed it and I just started wailing melodies that felt right at the time, and then took that away and came back with a song very quickly. Something I wanted to get into the album was this idea of being born at night, of starting in complete darkness. It’s a song that starts in childhood in this cold and dark hour, being lost and then just scraping and carving your way through the dark. It’s an idea that I wanted to put into a song for years, but never did.” **“Son of Nyx”** “A real collaboration between my bass player Alex Ryan, \[producer\] Daniel Tannenbaum \[aka Bekon\], and myself. Alex sent me a piano piece he recorded when he was at home in County Kerry. What you hear at the beginning is the phone memo, you can hear the clock ticking in his family’s living room. Alex’s dad is called Nick, so the song’s name is a play on words. In Greek fable, Nyx is the goddess of night and one of her sons is said to be Charon, the boatman who brings people to the underworld. All those voices that you hear are the choruses or the hooks from the other songs on the album distorted or de-tuned, so you’re hearing the other songs spinning around in that space.” **“All Things End”** “‘All Things End’ started from a personal place. There was a number of songs that could have taken the place of Heresy \[the Sixth Circle\]. In the medieval or the classic sense of heresy, ‘All Things End’ took that place. In those moments as a relationship is crumbling and it’s slipping away from you, it was something that you truly believed in and you had all your faith in and you had all of your belief in. In approaching that concept of that not happening it feels like something heretical. It’s a song about accepting, about giving up your faith in something.” **“To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”** “The previous song reflects upon a parting of ways. I suppose in that context, this reflects upon the great loss of this experience and making sense of love after the fact, which is very often the case. If you’ve grown up in a cold climate like Ireland, you learn to warm up the bed quickly so you’re not shivering for too long. It’s a song I wrote for somebody who is from a warm climate who had never experienced that before. \[It’s about\] the significance of something so mundane but so remarkable—to experience a bed that has been warmed by somebody else in a space that you now share now with somebody new. It’s a love song.” **“Butchered Tongue”** “This reflects upon what is lost when languages are lost off the face of the earth. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world for the last 10 years, going into places that had either Native American or Australian place names—some of the places I mention in the song—and asking people what the place name means and being surprised that no one is able to tell you. The song nods to some of the actions, some of the processes that are behind the loss of culture, the loss of language. There is a legacy of terrible violence, but we have to acknowledge not just that, but also bear witness to this generosity and welcomeness that I experience in those places.” **“Anything But”** “This one falls into the circle of Fraud. It was fun working with American producers on this. They thought it was a very sweet, caring love song. The lyrics in the verses are like, ‘If I was a rip tide/I wouldn’t take you out...If I was a stampede/You wouldn’t get a kick,’ The song is saying on paper that these are kindnesses, but the actual meaning is a joke—what you’re saying is I want nothing to do with you. The third verse says, ‘If I had death’s job, you would live forever.’ So that’s where it fits into the circle of Fraud. I was having fun with that.” **“Abstract (Psychopomp)”** “As a kid I saw somebody running into traffic to try and pick up an animal that had just been hit by a car. This song looks at that memory in an abstract way and sees all of this tenderness and somebody going to great risk to try and offer some futile gesture of care towards a suffering thing. But it’s also about acceptance and letting go. The alternate title is ‘Psychopomp,’ which is a Greek term for a spirit guide—somebody who moves somebody from one part of life into the next. Charon the boatman would be a psychopomp, so it seemed appropriate for a memory of seeing somebody pick up a dead animal off a road and then place it on the sidewalk where it dies.” **“Unknown/Nth”** “This is pretty much just me and a guitar which is what I enjoy about this. It’s very similar to the approach of my first record. I really enjoyed the space that’s in that song and then letting that space be something that had a lot of stillness and a lot of coldness in it.” **“First Light”** “It seemed like an appropriate ending song—of coming out and seeing the sunlight for the first time. Dante talks a lot about how he misses the sky, how he hasn’t seen the stars for so long. He hasn’t seen clouds, he hasn’t seen the sun. I wanted to put that feeling of being in this very oppressive space for a long time and then to see the sky, as if for the first time. I was writing this song with that feeling in mind, of this great opening, a great sense of furtherance and great open space. The record needed something like that. It needed this conclusive deep breath out, this renewing of the wind in the sails and then going on from there.”

When Olivia Rodrigo shocked the pop music landscape with her ballad “drivers license,” she drew influence from an unexpected place: Gracie Abrams, an introspective bedroom-pop newcomer with an incredible knack for writing her interior world into a whispered hook—and who had yet to release a debut LP. *Good Riddance*, Abrams’ first full-length, is a triumph, from coming-of-age rockers (“Difficult”), mournful ruminations on past relationships (“I Know it won’t work”), and guitar ballads (“Full machine”) to the lyrical wisdom that only comes with distance (“You were there all the time/You’re the worst of my crimes/You fell hard/I thought good riddance” in the opener “Best”). Straight from the frank, lushly detailed Taylor Swift school of songwriting, Abrams has clearly learned a thing or two from her tourmate; for good measure, *Good Riddance* was co-written with one of Swift’s collaborators, Aaron Dessner of The National.

The highly anticipated solo album from international star Mr. Eazi brings a fresh and dynamic reintroduction of the Nigerian-born artist. In contrast to his usually jovial sound, *The Evil Genius* takes us on an intimate journey through the artist’s life over the past few years, expressed across a variety of reggae, gospel, highlife, and Afropop sounds. Mr. Eazi’s musical growth allows him to touch on themes of grief, depression, politics, and love while offering glimpses toward his signature playful style. Each song is accompanied by individual visual-art pieces from artists across Africa, commissioned by Mr. Eazi to represent the essence of each track, making *The Evil Genius* not just an album, but also an exhibition of Eazi’s life. “This album is not just a music album—it’s art,” Mr. Eazi tells Apple Music. “It’s meant to be displayed in museums and galleries.” As the artist delves into personal relationships with family and fans, while exploring topics ranging from politics to prayer, it’s easy to understand why he describes the project as a therapeutic endeavor. With unique collaborations from the likes of Angelique Kidjo, Soweto Gospel Choir, and a variety of producers, *The Evil Genius* is a showcase of Mr. Eazi’s duality and his creative appreciation for the transformative nature of music and art.

PinkPantheress’ debut album, *Heaven knows*, opens with the sound of a scaling church organ and heavy rainfall. It’s a grand entrance that’s as fitting for this album’s title as it is perhaps surprising for the artist behind it. But if PinkPantheress broke out thanks to the propulsive, UKG- and D’n’B-shaped pop she’d crafted in her bedroom (and her songs’ wild social-media success), the beginnings of *Heaven knows* feel like an acknowledgment—or a declaration—that she’s outgrown its four walls. Sometimes, that feels literal: “True romance” finds her amid the screaming crowds and clicking cameras of a show as she heralds her love for someone much more famous than her. It’s either a sign of the company she keeps these days (“Every song is about you/And everybody’s shouting out your name”) or a play on the darker side of fan obsession (“I know you’re older/But I really know I’m sure/Held my ticket since they landed at my door/I’ve been a fan of you since 2004/You know you got me”). But this album is also a broadening of her musical world, the songs here—made with collaborators including Greg Kurstin (Adele, Gorillaz, Foo Fighters), Mura Masa, Cash Cobain, Danny L Harle (Caroline Polachek) and Oscar Scheller (Ashnikko, Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama)—are noticeably more expansive than those on 2021’s star-confirming mixtape *To hell with it*. You can expect all the nostalgic sounds and breakbeats that defined that release and made the Kent-raised singer-songwriter/producer famous. But also disco (on the excellent “The aisle”), ’90s R&B (“Mosquito” and “Feel complete,” which sounds like it could have been written for a girl group), rock wig-outs (“Capable of love”), and flourishes of strings, church bells and even birdsong en route. (There are also songs that pass the three-minute mark.) Plus, plenty of collaborations, as Pink recruits a crop of culture-shaping artists to appear alongside her: Rema, Kelela, Central Cee, and, of course, Ice Spice, with whom she reached global domination in summer 2023 with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2.” All of which is united by the story of a troubled relationship, the album’s emo-shaped lyricism frequently blurring the lines between heartbreak and death and love and obsession (“You’re not quite stuck with me, but one day you’ll be,” she sings on “The aisle”). It could feel sinister, if her voice—and increasingly boundless, future-facing hyperpop—weren’t quite so sweet. By the time *Heaven knows* closes out with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2,” it’s a reminder of the astronomical heights PinkPantheress reached before even announcing her debut. But right in the middle of it, she hints that—despite her social-media beginnings—she can be anything she wants to be. “I am not your internet baby,” she repeats insistently on “Internet baby (interlude).” “I am not your internet baby.”

Near the end of The Rolling Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years, Keith Richards takes the microphone to ask a series of emotional questions, pleading for honesty about what might lie ahead for him: “Is the future all in the past? Just tell me straight,” he asks. The answer is, remarkably, no: *Hackney Diamonds* is the band’s most energetic, effortless, and tightest record since 1981’s *Tattoo You*. Just play “Bite My Head Off,” a rowdy kiss-off where Mick Jagger tells off a bitter lover, complete with a fuzz-bass breakdown by...Paul McCartney. “At the end of it, I just said, ‘Well, that\'s just like the old days,’” Richards tells Apple Music of that recording session. *Hackney Diamonds* was indeed made like the old days—live, with no click tracks or glossy production tricks—yet still manages to sound fresh. After years of stalled sessions, and the death of their legendary drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, Jagger and Richards decided on a fresh start, traveling to Jamaica (the same place they wrote “Angie” in 1973) for a series of writing sessions. Based on a recommendation from McCartney, Jagger hired producer Andrew Watt, who’d also worked with Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ozzy Osbourne, Post Malone, and more, to help them finish the tracks. “He kicked us up the ass,” Jagger tells Apple Music. With Steve Jordan on drums, Watt kept it simple, bringing in vintage microphones and highlighting the interwoven guitars of Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The whole point is the band being very close, eyeball to eyeball, and looking at each other and feeding off of each other,” says Richards. In the spirit of 1978’s genre-spanning *Some Girls*, the album comprises sweeping riff-heavy anthems (“Angry,” “Driving Me Too Hard”), tortured relationship ballads (“Depending on You”), country-tinged stompers (“Dreamy Skies”), and even dance-floor grooves (“Mess it Up,” featuring a classic Jagger falsetto). The capstone of the album is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a stirring seven-minute gospel epic featuring Lady Gaga. Halfway through, the song goes quiet, Gaga laughs, and Stevie Wonder starts playing the Rhodes keyboard, and then Gaga and Jagger start improvising vocals together; it’s a spontaneous moment that’s perfectly imperfect, reminiscent of the loose *Exile on Main St.* sessions. “Playing with Stevie is always mind-blowing, and I thought that Lady Gaga did an incredible job, man,” says Richards. “She snaked her way in there and took it over and gave as good as she got with Mick, and it was great fun.” Richards didn’t expect to make an album this good as he approaches his 80th birthday. But he’s using it as a moment to take stock of his career with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. “The fact that our music has managed to become part of the fabric of life everywhere, I feel pretty proud about that, more than any one particular thing or one particular song,” he says. “It is nice to be accepted into this legendary piece of bullshit.”

“I could tell you it feels crazy, but we don’t really take in the full experience,” Grupo Frontera percussionist Julian Peña Jr. tells Apple Music about his band’s extraordinary early successes. “We’re always moving around, which to us feels like a good thing because we don’t want to get too in over our heads. But we love seeing everything that’s changing. It’s something incredible.” Given the cross-border and wider international fame of música mexicana in the early 2020s, it should come as no surprise that a Texas-based band would eventually become one of its most discussed acts. And while Grupo Frontera’s rapid rise remains impressive, what’s perhaps more profound is just how many other artists swiftly joined their circle. Their momentum truly began with recording a version of Colombian pop act Morat’s “No Se Va,” and their shrewd if initially reluctant decision to upload it for all to hear. “That song is everything,” says vocalist and bajo quinto player Adelaido “Payo” Solís III. “It’s the beginning, in the middle, and the future for us.” After the cumbia-accented cover became a viral hit in 2022, the group went on to release a number of collaborative smashes with the likes of Fuerza Regida, Peso Pluma, and, most notably, Bad Bunny. “We knew that \[‘un x100to’\] was going to be one of the hit songs on the album,” Payo says. “For him to hop on it and for us to be able to put his name on our album, that’s something that just launched it way farther than we could have imagined.” In making their full-length debut, *El Comienzo*, Grupo Frontera worked closely with hitmaking songwriter/producer Edgar Barrera. “The way Edgar has explained to me that he writes his songs is he gets into the mind of the artist while he’s writing,” says Payo. “He puts himself in the shoes of that artist—what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking about. It’s an out-of-body experience.” In that way, tracks like the lovelorn “LE VA DOLER” speak strongly to the singer’s own romantic woes. “It was way too perfect on the dot of what was going on,” adds Peña. “We were like, what the hell? How?” Throughout *El Comienzo*, they continue their collaborative streak. Previously released singles “QUE VUELVAS” with Carin León and “OJITOS ROJOS” with Ke Personajes join fresher cuts like “EN ALTAVOZ” with Junior H and “LAS FLORES” with Yahritza Y Su Esencia. Among those highlights is “EL AMOR DE SU VIDA,” a potent lovelorn song recorded with Grupo Firme. By teaming up with personal idols and contemporaneously rising stars, Grupo Frontera makes *El Comienzo* one extraordinary start to what promises to be a long career.

*Barbie The Album* was *almost* as anticipated as *Barbie* the movie—and for good reason. Executive-produced by Mark Ronson and featuring a global all-star lineup, the soundtrack is full of bangers and clever pop-cultural winks meant to capture the zeitgeist the same way the movie and its marketing machine have. It starts appropriately loud with “Pink,” a roséwave bop by Lizzo that makes you feel like Malibu Barbie driving her beach cruiser down the Pacific Coast Highway and features one of the album’s best sound bites—a cheer-style call-and-response spelling out “P, pretty! I, intelligent! N, never sad! K, cool!” Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” comes next, kicking off a stretch of songs that belongs on any summer going-out playlist: “Barbie World (With Aqua)” by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice is a true Barbie multiverse moment, interpolating the Danish group’s 1997 global hit “Barbie Girl.” Charli XCX’s “Speed Drive” is basically “Vroom Vroom” but Barbie-fied, followed by KAROL G’s bouncing reggaetón track “WATATI” and “Man I Am,” a rousing himbo anthem by Sam Smith. But it’s not just banger after banger: Tame Impala’s trippy intergalactic disco jam “Journey to the Real World” shifts the tone, while “I’m Just Ken,” an ’80s-style power ballad sung by Ryan Gosling himself, threatens to steal the whole show here. With “Home,” HAIM provides Tauruses everywhere with their very own theme song, while Billie Eilish’s spare and surprisingly existential “What Was I Made For?” contributes a healthy measure of emotional depth. But it’s Ava Max’s empowerment anthem “Choose Your Fighter” that may best sum up the hectic but high-minded spirit of the entire project: It’s a celebration of self-expression and freedom from rigid, outdated standards of beauty and femininity. Her point is that anyone can be Barbie, and by the time the Korean girl group FIFTY FIFTY is singing about that “pretty state of mind” in the album’s finale, we are all living our own P-I-N-K Barbie dream.

No one could accuse Sonny Moore of being unmotivated in the years following 2014’s *Recess*—the electronic maverick better known as Skrillex kept up a seemingly endless stream of singles, remixes, high-profile collabs (Justin Bieber, Travis Scott), and co-signs of rising artists—but the lack of a follow-up album was nevertheless conspicuous. Nine years later, with *Quest for Fire*, he more than makes up for lost time. At once sprawling and punchy, the 15-track LP offers the fullest picture yet of the visionary producer’s range. Skrillex’s fondness for bass is well-represented: Virtually every track is flooded with voluminous low-end frequencies, typically in the form of stonking FM patches that glisten like oil slicks. The opening “Leave Me Like This” rides a wriggly riff straight out of the UK style known simply as bassline; “Tears,” a collaboration with UK producer Joker and Sleepnet, an artist from Noisia’s orbit, pays tribute to old-school South London bass music. Yet dubstep, for all its importance to Skrillex’s origins, is little more than a footnote on *Quest for Fire*. Stylistically, the album covers lush, melodic garage (“Butterflies,” with Starrah and Four Tet), Middle Eastern club (“XENA,” with Palestinian singer/composer Nai Barghouti), futuristic dancehall (the gargantuan “Rumble,” with Fred again.. and Flowdan), and more. What it all has in common, beyond the seismic undertow, are Skrillex’s filigreed vocal chops and intricate drum programming, which continue to unlock new levels of hyperkinetic energy. Skrillex has always tended to pack the studio with pals, and *Quest for Fire* is his most collaborative effort yet, stuffed with names both big and small. Missy Elliott drops new verses (and a clever interpolation of “Work It”) on the hip-house anthem “RATATA.” Rave dreamweaver Porter Robinson and hitmaker Bibi Bourelly add emotional uplift to “Still Here (with the ones that I came with),” a teary-eyed garage banger. The most surprising cameo might come from Eli Keszler, an experimental percussionist better known for working with avant-garde figures like Laurel Halo. Sometimes, the collaborators help lead Skrillex to some unexpected places: Who knows what kind of alchemy resulted in “TOO BIZARRE (juked),” in which rapper Swae Lee, post-everything producer Siiickbrain, and bass musician Posij come together in an unprecedented fusion of R&B, juke, pop punk, and screamo. Yet no matter who ends up in the booth with Moore, there’s no mistaking who’s behind the boards. Simply put, nobody else sounds like Skrillex, and no matter how far he roams, his sound is always unequivocally his.

SUGA, the prolific songwriter, MC and producer who cut his teeth in the Korean rap underground before joining BTS, brings his hip-hop acumen to a debut solo album under the moniker Agust D. Following up on mixtapes *Agust D* (2016) and *D-2* (2020), *D-DAY* concludes a self-reflective trilogy with a potent statement of liberation from societal pressures, past regrets and future fears. With commanding yet intimate songcraft, he reimagines tradition (“Haegeum”) and pairs boom-bap with honeyed R&B and a killer hook from IU (“People Pt.2”)—among other highlights including a collab with the late, lauded polymath Ryuichi Sakamoto (“Snooze”).

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

From the very beginning of his career, Burna Boy has always moved with the disposition of a misunderstood and underappreciated virtuoso. There was the statement-making 2013 debut *L.I.F.E - Leaving an Impact for Eternity*, controversy-addressing releases like 2015’s *On a Spaceship* and 2016’s *Redemption*, and the self-assured groove of 2018’s *Outside* that recentered his journey and set the stage for further success on 2019’s era-defining, self-mythologizing *African Giant*. By the time he won a Grammy for 2020’s *Twice as Tall*, Burna Boy was already at the forefront of popular African music, regularly being referenced as one of global pop’s most incisive acts. A left turn on 2022’s emotionally charged and personally reflective *Love, Damini* has done nothing to diminish Burna’s powers, while the resounding success of his Toni Braxton-sampling 2022 hit “Last Last” has only further propped up his international profile. All of these triumphs have left Burna Boy walking in rarified air and appreciative of sticking to his convictions. In keeping with his penchant for not holding back on his most cogent thoughts, it’s no surprise that the first words uttered on his new album *I Told Them…* is a cheeky reminder to longtime detractors and onlookers. “It\'s fun to tell people something is true, and they doubt—and then they end up seeing it. There\'s no greater feeling,” Burna Boy tells Apple Music. “You can go back to my old tweets and stuff. I basically predicted everything that\'s happening now. So this is basically that.” Where *Love, Damini* was primarily a revelatory, genre-bending immersion into Burna Boy’s world, *I Told Them…* is hip-hop inspired, cocksure, and blunt, offering a glimpse at Burna’s future with backstory from his past. Whether warning haters not to be surprised by his successes on “On Form” or reeling off said successes on glitzy cuts like “Big 7” and “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” Burna is keen to make it clear that he’s in a new place, and he taps J. Cole for a withering dress-down of his critics on “Thanks.” Still adept at pulling musical influences from all over into a fully realized musical vision, Burna Boy recruits newcomer Seyi Vibez for a cinematic reimagining of street pop on “Giza.” He barely breaks a sweat swapping verses with Byron Messia on “Talibans II,” but the emotional core of *I Told Them…* comes on “If I’m Lying,” a wispy ballad where he admits to losing control at times over an alluring instrumental by Steel Banglez.

Rooms feature everywhere on Holly Humberstone’s debut album—including in its title, *Paint My Bedroom Black*. That wasn’t a conscious move, says the British singer-songwriter, but it’s reflective of when the record was made, on tour in 2022. “I’d say I spent 90 percent of the year on the road, which I loved,” she tells Apple Music. “My favorite times were last year. But it’s also such an emotional roller coaster: traveling, being in different cities. I started to feel like I was living this weird double life and was struggling to connect with the people back home. I lost sense of who I was a little bit.” *Paint My Bedroom Black*—written in “grounding” sessions between tour dates—captures Humberstone’s yearning for those people back home and her guilt at not being around enough (see the self-castigating “Antichrist”), but also tentative new love (album standout “Kissing in Swimming Pools”), the simple joy of reuniting with someone you’ve missed (“Room Service,” which recalls José González’s “Heartbeats”), and realizing you see the same sky as the people you’re miles away from (the d4vd-featuring “Superbloodmoon”). And here, Humberstone embraces the brooding alt-pop that earmarked her as one of the UK’s most promising young singer-songwriters, but expands it too, with touches of country and Americana (she credits her love of Kacey Musgraves and Springsteen for this), skittering electro-pop (“Flatlining”), plenty of vocoder, and even ’90s breakbeats (“Lauren”). All of which, to Humberstone, feels like “chaos.” “There’s so much going on, every track is a different story and something new that I’m trying to figure out,” she says. But when the album was finished, she realized it also captured two distinct parts of herself. “I didn’t do it on purpose, but to me, the album is split in two. There’s one side that’s my extrovert self, reclaiming my love for everybody back home and reaching out,” she says. “And then the other side, which is just wanting to shut everything out.” Read on as Humberstone lets us in on her debut record—and both of those sides—one track at a time. **“Paint My Bedroom Black”** “This was such a release to write. I had a couple of days off and my producer Rob \[Milton\] flew over to join me in New York. We got a little studio and it was the biggest relief after such a long time. To me this feels like a really intimate track—like I’m wanting to shut everything out. I didn’t write it about anybody. It just came from things that I was feeling about myself and about the world that I was finding myself in. It was just reclaiming myself a little bit. But there’s something positive about it, it feels like the start of something.” **“Into Your Room”** “I didn’t realize until I finished the record, but rooms come up in nearly every song. This time we were in LA and Rob flew over again and we went in with Ethan Gruska \[boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers, Ryan Beatty\]. A theme of this album is feeling like I was neglecting people at home and not being there for the people I wanted to be there for—and I wanted to turn those things into something that felt positive. It’s a love song about wanting to be close to someone. We were trying to get across an embrace of somebody after not having seen them for such a long time—\[I was\] proclaiming my love for people back home. The production is really upbeat and sparkly and shiny.” **“Cocoon”** “I got off tour and was trying to navigate picking things up at home after being away for so long. It’s really hard getting back home and being jet-lagged, and then that rolling into not wanting to get out of bed \[or\] face the fact that I’ve returned to normal life. Mental health and feeling depressed isn’t an easy thing to write about but it felt really important to do that. An angsty, guitar-heavy song was fun and really healing to write.” **“Kissing in Swimming Pools”** “We wrote and recorded it in a day and didn’t change much. It’s about the start of a relationship. I’d gotten home and been able to see this person a little bit more, and it was just a really positive thing that was going on in my life alongside the stresses of trying to write an album, being on tour, and being away. I just wanted to write a love song for this person, that was all there was to it. Everything felt live and washy and reverbing, because that’s how those feelings are.” **“Ghost Me”** “One of my strengths and downfalls is that I form really strong attachments to people and then become dependent on them—I cling onto people a lot. When everything else is changing, I find it really comforting to know that the people back home are still there and that they’re kind of a constant. I think that this song especially is me wanting to literally clutch on for dear life to these people. The voice note at the end is my friend Lauren. She had sent it to me earlier that day and I just thought it was hilarious. We put it in, thinking that it was a joke and that we were probably going to take it out at a later date. But it just never ended up coming out.” **“Superbloodmoon” (feat. d4vd)** “I’d been a fan of d4vd’s for a while and knew he was in London, so reached out. I’d had the title ‘Superbloodmoon’ in my notes and something like ‘The Superbloodmoon, can you see it from where you are?’ He was able to relate to me quite a lot with the touring and being away from home and wanting that one thing that would connect you back to the people you were longing to see. I’m so grateful to d4vd for being so down to be part of it.” **“Antichrist”** “This is about the end of my first proper relationship where I just couldn’t be enough for them. And just feeling like a bit of a letdown, I guess. Obviously I’m over-exaggerating \[in the song\]—I’m not actually a terrible person! I feel like you hear a lot of breakup songs and being brokenhearted and somebody hurting you, but I’d never really heard many songs about being on the other side of it and how that can also break your heart a little bit, about who you thought you were. It’s kind of an apology song.” **“Lauren”** “This was another with Rob and Ethan. We’d been in a new space in London for a good few days and I’d not been able to make any progress with writing. The studio had this old-fashioned drum machine and it was about building something that felt cool from that to try and spark some sort of inspiration. Ethan built this weird drum loop and then I jumped on the Wurlitzer and started playing some kind of darker chords underneath. And that’s where the song came from.” **“Baby Blues”** “There’s the voice note from Lauren and there’s the song ‘Lauren’ about her obviously. I wrote quite a lot of songs about her. I wrote this about her coming to visit—she’d come to visit me and then she’d left. I wanted to write about seeing her getting off the train and being across the zebra crossing from me and just getting to see somebody that I loved again. It was so simple. I got addicted to the demo—I thought it was perfect, this little snippet. A little breath.” **“Flatlining”** “The person I wrote ‘Antichrist’ about moved literally down the road from me, with a friend. When you have the same friends, your lives are kind of intwined and at some point you’re going to run into each other. It’s that fear of being ambushed by old feelings that I really just want to bury and not think about. But it ended up being totally fine and, after I wrote this, I felt like we were friends again, which is weird because the chorus is, ‘We just can’t be friends anymore.’ But I think I have a tendency to blow things out of proportion! We introduced the little heart monitor sounds and I think you can hear the anxiety in the percussion—the feeling of not knowing where your head is at or how things are going to play out. It’s an anxiety-inducing song, for sure.” **“Elvis Impersonators”** “I wanted to write about my sister being away—she lives in Tokyo and she must have such a different life that I have nothing to do with, which is really hard to grasp. I really don’t know the person that she is over there. We’d been to visit her before the pandemic and we had this really hilarious night out where there were all of these Michael Jackson and Elvis impersonators. It was just really bizarre but funny, and I wanted to put it into a song. But this is really about missing a sister.” **“Girl”** “It’s yearning for a deeper connection. I think when you’re away, you meet so many people and so many things that seem superficial and surface level. I think the yearning in my voice in this song represents what it’s about.” **“Room Service”** “I’m sure a lot of people are a lot busier than me and have a lot more on their plate than me and have to travel a lot more than I do. But for me, I’m still learning to navigate this side of my life and being away from home more than I’m used to. This song was about wanting to go somewhere really cool and then just shut ourselves in our room, order room service, and catch up: This is the only place that I want to be, the only thing that really matters. Which is how I feel about my friends and everybody I wrote this album about. It felt like the closing track because it sums everything up to me in a really nice way. It feels like the closing of the chapter.”

It takes less than a second for Wilco’s 13th album to make its intentions known. Opening track “Infinite Surprise” begins in medias res, with an abrupt wash of dissonance and a metronome that sounds purposefully not on purpose. On the heels of 2022’s what-it-says-on-the-tin throwback to the band’s y’alternative roots, *Cruel Country*—and, really, most of the band’s work for the prior decade or so—this jarring introduction announces a welcome sense of mischief. *Cruel Country* arrived as Wilco was celebrating the 20th anniversary of their defining opus, *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot*, complete with valedictory mini-tour and lush box set recounting and relitigating the album’s famously tense personal/personnel drama. If there’s anything that defines Wilco’s career since, it’s Jeff Tweedy’s reluctance to replicate those conditions; no amount of creative energy and friction could be worth the psychic cost. Wilco has had the same lineup since 2005, they write and record in a cozy Chicago home base, they are a fully thriving and self-sufficient entity like few bands would dare to dream of. So the moment of noise and unease feels like a recentering, even if no one will mistake *Cousin* for *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* or the winding krautrock freakouts of 2004’s *A Ghost Is Born*. Produced by Cate Le Bon—the first time the band has worked with an outside producer since Jim Scott co-produced 2009’s *Wilco (The Album)*—the album is the sound of a band wriggling out of that comfort zone in small but meaningful ways. “Sunlight Ends” is an atmospheric twinkle of a song driven by a hushed digital (or consciously digital-seeming) drum track that feels uniquely Wilco, yet not quite like anything the band has made in a long time. The title track has a similar skitter to it that lends just the right amount of wooziness. But the goal, beyond that opening second, is not to disorient or misdirect. While the album title can’t help but suggest *The Bear*, which leans heavily on Wilco syncs to shore up its Chicago bona fides, “cousin” as a concept also feels familial and familiar and sometimes maybe just a little bit weird.

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

On his Mercury Prize-winning debut album, 2017’s *Process*, Sampha Sisay often cut an isolated figure. As the Londoner’s songs contended with loss—particularly the passing of his parents—and anxieties about his health and relationships, a sense of insularity and detachment haunted his poignant, experimental electro-soul. Arriving six years later, this follow-up presents a man reestablishing and strengthening connections. Lifted by warm synths and strings, songs are energized by the busy rhythms of jungle, broken beat, and West African Wassoulou music. Images of flight dominate as Sampha zooms out from everyday preoccupations to take a bird’s-eye view of the world and his place in it as a father, a friend, a brother, a son. “I feel sometimes making an album is like a manifesto for how I should be living, or that all the answers are in what I’m saying,” he tells Apple Music. “I don’t necessarily *live* by what I’m saying but there’s times where I recognize that I need to reconnect to family and friends—times where I can really lose connection by being too busy with my own things.” So where *Process* ended with Sampha ruefully noting, “I should visit my brother/But I haven’t been there in months/I’ve lost connection, signal/To how we were” on “What Shouldn’t I Be?” *Lahai* concludes in the fireside glow of “Rose Tint,” a song celebrating the salve of good company: “I’m needy, don’t you know?/But the fam beside me/Is what I needed most.” Before then, *Lahai* examines Sampha’s sense of self and his relationships through his interests in science, time, therapy, spirituality, and philosophy. “I became more confident with being OK with what I’m interested in, and not feeling like I have to be an expert,” he says. “So even if it comes off as pretentious at times, I was more comfortable with putting things out there. That’s an important process: Even in the political sphere, a lot of people don’t speak about things because they’re worried about how people will react or that they’re not expert enough to talk on certain things. I’m into my science, my sci-fi, my philosophy. Even if I’m not an expert, I could still share my feelings and thoughts and let that become a source of dialogue that will hopefully improve my understanding of those things.” Started in 2019 and gradually brought together as Sampha negotiated the restrictions of the pandemic and the demands and joys of fatherhood, the songs, he says, present “a photograph of my mental, spiritual, physical state.” Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“Stereo Colour Cloud (Shaman’s Dream)”** “I wanted to make something that felt like animation and so the instrumentation is quite colorful. What started it off was me experimenting with new kinds of production. I was using a mechanical, MIDI-controlled acoustic piano and playing over it. Same thing with the drums—I built a robotic acoustic drummer to build these jungle breaks. So, it’s all these acoustic instruments that I programmed via MIDI, and also playing over them with humans, with myself.” **“Spirit 2.0”** “It’s a song I started in my bedroom, a song I wrote walking through parks in solitude, a song I wrote at a time I felt I needed to hear for myself. It took probably a year from start to finish for that song to come together. I had the chords and the modular synths going for a while and then eventually I wrote a melody. Then I had an idea for the drums and I recorded the drums. It was also influenced by West African folk music, Wassoulou music. I guess that isn’t maybe quite obvious to everyone, but I’ve made quite a thing of talking about it—it’s influenced the way I write rhythmically.” **“Dancing Circles”** “This also came from this kind of acoustic/MIDI jamming. I wrote this pulsing, slightly clash-y metronomic piano and wrote over and jammed over it. I put the song together with a producer called Pablo Díaz-Reixa \[Spanish artist/producer El Guincho\], who helped arrange the song. I sort of freestyled some lyrics and came up with the dancing refrain, and then had this idea of someone having a conversation with someone they hadn’t seen in a long time, and just remembering how good it is, how good it felt to dance with them.” **“Suspended”** “I feel like a lot of what I’ve written goes between this dreamlike state and me drawing on real-life scenarios. This is a song about someone who’s reminiscing again, but also feeling like they’re kind of going in and out of different time periods. I guess it was inspired by thinking about all the people, and all the women especially, in my life that I’ve been lifted up by, even though I frame it as if I’m speaking about one person. The feeling behind it is me recognizing how supported I’ve been by people, even if it’s not been always an easy or straightforward journey.” **“Satellite Business”** “This feels like the midpoint of the record. I guess in this record I was interrogating spirituality and recognizing I hadn’t really codified, or been able to put my finger on, any sort of metaphysical experience, per se—me somewhat trying to connect to life via a different view. The song is about me recognizing my own finitude and thinking about the people I’ve lost and recognizing, through becoming a father myself, that not all is done and I’m part of a journey and I can see my parents or even my brothers, my daughter. \[It’s\] about connection—to the past and to the future and to the present. Any existential crisis I was having about myself has now been offloaded to me thinking about how long I’m going to be around to see and protect and help guide someone else.” **“Jonathan L. Seagull”** “I speak a lot about flying \[on the album\] and I actually mention \[Richard Bach’s novella\] *Jonathan Livingston Seagull* in ‘Spirit 2.0.’ For me, the question was sometimes thinking about limits, the search for perfection. I don’t agree with everything in *Jonathan Livingston Seagull* as a book, it was more a bit of a memory to me \[Sampha’s brother read the story to him when he was a child\], the feeling of memory as opposed to the actual details of the book. I guess throughout the record, I talk about relationships in my own slightly zoomed-out way. I had this question in my mind, ‘Oh, how high can you actually go?’ Just thinking about limits and thinking sometimes that can be comforting and sometimes it can be scary.” **“Inclination Compass (Tenderness)”** “Birds, like butterflies, use the Earth’s magnetic field to migrate, to be able to navigate themselves to where they need to get to \[this internal compass is known as an inclination compass\]. I feel that there’s times where love can be simpler than I let it be. As you grow up, sometimes you might get into an argument with someone and you’re really stubborn, you might just need to hug it out and then everything is fine—say something nice or let something go. Anger’s a complicated emotion, and there’s lots of different thoughts and theories about how you should deal with it. For me personally, this is leaning into the fact that sometimes it’s OK to switch to a bit more of an understanding or empathetic stance—and I can sometimes tend to not do that.” **“Only”** “It’s probably the song that sticks out the most in the record in terms of the sonic aesthetic. It’s probably less impressionistic than the rest of the record. I think because of that it felt like it was something to share \[as the second single\]. Thematically as well, it just felt relevant to me in terms of trying to follow the beat of my own drum or finding a place where you’re confident in yourself—recognizing that other people are important but that I can also help myself. It’s a bit of a juxtaposition because there’s times where it feels like it’s only you who can really change yourself, but at the same time, you’re not alone.” **“Time Piece”** “Time is just an interesting concept because there’s so many different theories. And does it even exist? \[The lyrics translate as ‘Time does not exist/A time machine.’\] But we’re really tied to it, it’s such an important facet of our lives, how we measure things. It was just an interesting tie into the next song.” **“Can’t Go Back”** “I feel like there’s a lot of times I just step over my clothes instead of pick them up. I’m so preoccupied with thinking about something else or thinking about the future, there’s times where I could have actually just been a bit more present at certain moments or just, ‘It’s OK to just do simple things, doing the dishes.’ The amount \[of\] my life \[in\] which I’m just so preoccupied in my mind…Not to say that there isn’t space for that, there’s space for all of it, but this is just a reminder that there’s times where I could just take a moment out, five to 10 minutes to do something. And it can feel so difficult to spend such short periods of time without a device or without thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow. This is just a reminder of that kind of practice.” **“Evidence”** “I think there’s times where it just feels like I have ‘sliding door’ moments or glimpses or feelings. This is hinting \[at\] that. Again, the feeling of maybe not having that metaphysical connection, but then feeling some sort of connection to the physical world, whatever that might be.” **“Wave Therapy”** “I recorded a bit of extra strings for ‘Spirit 2.0,’ which I wanted to use as an interlude after that, but then I ended up reversing the strings that \[Canadian composer and violinist\] Owen Pallett helped arrange. I called it ‘Wave Therapy’ because, for some of the record, I went out to Miami for a week to work with El Guincho and before each session, I’d go to the beach and listen to what we had done the day before and that was therapeutic.” **“What if You Hypnotise Me?” (feat. Léa Sen)** “I was having a conversation with someone about therapy and then they were like, ‘Oh, I don’t even do talking therapy, I just get hypnotized, I haven’t got time for that.’ I thought that was an interesting perspective, so I wrote a song about hypnotizing, just to get over some of these things that I’m preoccupied with. I guess it’s about being in that place, recognizing I need something. Therapy can be part of that. As I say, nothing has a 100 percent success rate. You need a bit of everything.” **“Rose Tint”** “Sometimes I get preoccupied with my own hurt, my own emotions, and sometimes connecting to love is so complicated, yet so simple. It’s easy to call someone up really and truly, but there’s all these psychological barriers that you put up and this kind of headspace you feel like you don’t have. Family and friends or just people—I feel like there’s just connection to people. You can be more supported than you think at times, because there’s times where it feels like a problem shared can feel like a problem doubled, so you can kind of keep things in. But I do think it can be the other way round.”

Bebe Rexha has always been the kind of dextrous, shape-shifting pop singer who can hold her own in a room with music’s biggest talents. Her catalog is littered with A-list collaborations (Nicki Minaj, Florida Georgia Line, Travis Barker, Doja Cat, Rick Ross, and many others), and yet Rexha, with an immensely powerful voice that perfectly cracks and effortlessly soars, can’t help but steal the spotlight. It’s a wonder, then, that she isn’t yet a bigger star. Can’t people see that she’s doing the heavy lifting? On her third studio album *Bebe*, she ups the ante, teaming up with David Guetta, Snoop Dogg, and Dolly Parton; Rexha steps right up and meets them at eye level. Sliding between groovy stoner anthems, twangy folk songs, and glossy synth-pop, she somehow manages to turn them all into supporting characters. (Well, *most* of them: The Dolly duet “Seasons,” inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 song “Landslide,” feels like a genuinely even pairing, which should tell you something about just how strong a singer Rexha really is.) The rest of the album is a one-woman show in which she skillfully maneuvers between pummeling club pop and strummy pop-rock balladry. “Born Again,” a clear highlight, is proof enough that she’s among the best—and most underrated—vocalists of her generation.

“It was very easy to do,” Joanna Sternberg tells Apple Music of making their second full-length. “I was having fun and as comfortable as could be. It felt like the right thing.” Recorded over five days in the cartoonist/singer-songwriter’s native New York—with indie guitar hero Matt Sweeney producing—*I’ve Got Me* certainly sounds like it came easy. But Sternberg—a virtuoso musician who studied jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music—has a way of making difficult things sound simple and obvious, whether it’s self-acceptance (the huglike title track), resilience (“Mountains High”), or playing every instrument here. Yet, somehow, every line feels like it might weigh a ton, too. “It’s hard for me to get up the courage to show people one of my songs,” Sternberg says. “I have to really, really, really, really consider if I show people. I haven’t shown people a lot of them, but I have, like, 200.” **“I’ve Got Me”** “It’s kind of just about what it says it’s about—being very isolated and not having any friends. I think it’s kind of the theme of the whole album, because writing songs and stuff is what got me to have people wanting to be my friend. I mean, the song is about not feeling lonely—like I stopped being upset about being alone.” **“I Will Be With You”** “I just wrote the song while I was waiting for an orchestra rehearsal to start. I was at the piano, just having fun. I was trying to write an Irish love ballad. I wrote it in, like, three minutes; it was fine.” **“Mountains High”** “I was listening to lots of Cajun music with accordion in it, where they’re repeating accordion patterns. In my building, there’s a practice room in the basement because it’s artist housing. And after 11, you could go in as long as you want, so I would just go in and try to write songs. And I wrote this song in one of the rooms—just came up with the melody, and it kind of just wrote itself very fast.” **“I’ll Make You Mine”** “My mom wanted me to put that on the record, so I did. But that was one of the first songs I wrote, because I just kind of made it up on the piano. I don’t really like the song very much because it’s cheesy, but she said I had to put it on the record.” **“Stockholm Syndrome”** “I thought it kind of sounded like something that reminds me of middle school and the music everyone liked in middle school, and I didn’t like it. So, I didn’t think it was even good. But then all my friends were loving it. So, then I just forced myself to get used to it, and now I like it. I’m very lucky to play my songs, and I love to do it, but that song took a while to write because I thought it was really, really annoying and embarrassing. Then I just kind of accepted it.” **“The Love I Give”** “Sometimes, when I’m walking around, I come up with melodies. My producer Matt Sweeney really encourages me to take walks, so I can come up with melodies. So, that’s really, really helpful that he does that, because I forget to do it. I wrote that song while I was just walking to the train, and I just wrote it really fast. It was just about being around people who are hurtful to you, but you don’t want to change who you are.” **“She Dreams”** “I wrote that song when I was asleep. I wrote it in a dream, and I woke up, and it was all written. It was the only time that’s ever happened. And I think it was the first song I ever wrote. It’s pretty.” **“The Song”** “I kind of wrote it based on the first melody in Dvořák’s *New World Symphony*, of the English horn solo. It was a really nice melody, and then I just went off of that. That was all I needed to just write the whole thing.”

A decade into their career, London duo Jungle is determined to make up for lost time. Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland felt that they’d taken too long to follow up 2014’s self-titled Mercury-nominated debut, with second album *For Ever* arriving four years later. It injected their third album *Loving in Stereo*, released in 2021, with a creative restlessness, and that thrilling urgency continues on *Volcano*. “We’d just come off the road and went straight back into the studio,” Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “We got the record done between November and December 2022 and wrapped it up in January, which is one of the quickest turnarounds we’ve done. You can feel that in the music.” It’s a record that both sharpens the pair’s melodic hooks and hones their nu-disco, soulful pop swagger—pushing them further away from being a band and deeper into how they’ve always imagined themselves. “It’s going back to what is essentially a production duo,” says Lloyd-Watson. “It’s a collective—we wouldn’t be where we are without the dancers, without the incredible vocalists, without all the people that come together to make the full thing. But ultimately, it feels like bits of it are heading much more towards something like Justice or Daft Punk, more dance-y.” Exploring themes of love found, loss, heartbreak, and rediscovery, *Volcano* is also a record that insists you move to its rhythm. This is Jungle at their most vibrant and infectious. Lloyd-Watson talks us through it, track by track. **“Us Against the World”** “This starts in almost chaotic fashion. I think we like that because it bamboozles you a little bit and you can’t really work out what’s going on. It’s frantic and a bit crazy and then it settles in and takes a while to find some solid harmony that Jungle would be known for. We’re embedded deep in harmony. It’s like a breakbeat track, a little bit on edge. I suppose the track can be taken as, ‘We’re about to climb this mountain together, this volcano.’ It’s a setting-off track. It’s us against the world.” **“Holding On”** “This is one that wasn’t necessarily made for Jungle, we made it with \[Dublin DJ/producer\] Krystal Klear and \[Essex singer-songwriter/producer\] Lydia Kitto. It has a much more clubby touch to it, it’s got heavier kicks and it’s got 909 hats, which we’ve never really used. It continues that more aggy side of what we wanted to do, we wanted to have a bit more of the disco-punk element to it, à la \[the South Bronx’s early-’80s punk-funk pioneers\] ESG, something that was anti the soft, midtempo Jungle that we know and love. It’s a bit strobe-y and then eventually it releases to this refrain, which sounds like some old soul sample that we made. I suppose it’s the first time you’re like, ‘OK, this is a Jungle record. I know what’s going on here.’” **“Candle Flame” (feat. Erick the Architect)** “Track three has always been the big one for us—\[2014 breakthrough hit\] ‘Busy Earnin’’ was track three \[on their debut album\]. We had this hook for a long time. It had been sitting at 104 BPM and we eventually got a bit bored of it down at that tempo and ramped it up so you get those sped-up, soul-pitched vocals. We wanted to have something that was really fun and carefree and had this atmosphere of a party. I think ‘Candle Flame’ is about the fire and the passion in early love, essentially. Erick the Architect, of Flatbush Zombies fame, jumped on it and did a verse which reminded me of a young Snoop Dogg. It had that fiery energy and just set the thing on fire really…like a candle flame!” **“Dominoes”** “‘Dominoes’ is another song that had this old soul vibe—it was a lot slower originally, it was down at 85 BPM. ‘Dominoes’ is a metaphor for falling in love and the cataclysmic events that happen as you adapt to being deeper and deeper in love and you change your whole life. It has a sample of the \[US R&B singer\] Gloria Ann Taylor song ‘Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,’ which we took and then mixed with the vocals of our song, like this mashup thing. It’s got this cruising, The Avalanches vibe, a real summer jam. I suppose it’s the first time in the album when you get a little bit of respite and it’s not so explosive.” **“I’ve Been in Love” (feat. Channel Tres)** “This features Channel Tres and is from a session that we did a while back—basically before Channel Tres was even established as an artist. We wrote this over another song which was called ‘I’m Dying to Be in Your Arms,’ which you can hear in the middle of ‘I’ve Been in Love.’ We resampled the original track that he was on, which forms the middle eight. It tells the story of love past and the idea of coming out of that love.” **“Back on 74”** “The feeling of ‘Back on 74’ is a nostalgic one, it’s that feeling of having this place of your life where you grew up, where you had these really fond memories. 74 is a fictitious thing, but for us it’s like 74th Avenue or 74th Street or something, where, in your imagination or as a kid, you were playing out on the street. You’ve gone back to this place and it’s giving you this really nostalgic feeling but everything’s not quite the same. You’ve come out of something on ‘I’ve Been in Love’ and through ‘Back on 74,’ you have this desire to go home, back to a place that felt safe.” **“You Ain’t No Celebrity” (feat. Roots Manuva)** “This is probably the most raw and honest track on the record, a warning to people in your life that think they’re a bit of a princess or a bit of a diva—when they become demanding or a little bit self-righteous or a little bit expectant of certain things to fall their way. Roots Manuva was maybe relating to that feeling. He had these lyrics which were originally on another track, something we did with him way back in 2016 or something. He had these almost like nursery-rhyme, Mr Motivator-style hooks that weren’t even a verse, almost like this mantra. It explains the compromise that you have to have in a relationship with somebody, the push and pull, over easy and easy over, a constant back and forth.” **“Coming Back”** “This is a continuation of ‘You Ain’t No Celebrity’ but it’s a little bit more of a celebration. It takes the resentment and the anger and turns it into this more cheeky, throwaway, carnival vibe. It starts off with these shouted vocals, like, ‘I don’t miss you,’ these realizations about yourself, and the chorus goes on to say you keep coming back for more—once you’ve let go of somebody, somebody keeps wanting more from you. It explores the idea of expectation in relationships, but we end up with this almost carnival ending where everybody’s joining in, getting through it through fun.” **“Don’t Play” (feat. Mood Talk)** “‘Don’t Play’ is a sample from ‘Faith Is the Key,’ a really rare record by Enlightment, a Washington soul and gospel outfit. They put this record out in ’84 but then the record plant basically went under and their distributor went under, which made this record quite valuable, a holy grail for collectors. It surfaced again in 2000 and now copies are going for about £800. It had this amazing little hook in it and my cousin, who is Mood Talk, put this beat together and sampled it. We featured him on the record and we sang over the sample. ‘Don’t Play’ is, ‘Stop playing these games, I’m not bothered.’ That message can be applied at the beginning and it can be applied at the end of a relationship. There are always games on the in and the out…” **“Every Night”** “This is fun and guitar-based. We really wanted to make a song without a snare drum. It’s a fun song, a positive message about love, and it’s got gospel influences to some extent. It’s a bit of a party.” **“PROBLEMZ”** “This came out originally in 2022 and I suppose in some way, with \[its double A-side\] ‘GOOD TIMES,’ was the blueprint for the sound of the record. We left ‘GOOD TIMES’ off the record because it didn’t feel like it was right, it didn’t really feel like the production or the vibe was quite where this record was. But ‘PROBLEMZ’ is one of our favorite bits of music we’ve ever made and we didn’t want to leave it as some B-side. It’s got Latin American vibes and feels to it, especially in the flutes and the swing of the music, a classic disco feel. At the end, it goes to this place that’s almost like musical theater with the strings.” **“Good at Breaking Hearts”** “This is the first traditional ballad of the record. It’s like, ‘I’m only good at making mistakes—a bit of a juxtaposition in that you are only good at breaking hearts.’ It features \[London singer-songwriter\] JNR Williams and 33.3—which is mine and Lydia’s new project. JNR has an amazing voice and I’ve been working with him for two or three years, writing loads of songs with him. This is a song that we made for his album but he was like, ‘I don’t want it,’ and then as soon as it was done, he was like, ‘Oh, I wish I’d taken this!’ I said, ‘You should have trusted me, man!’ It’s a beautiful song. His voice has got touches of Nina Simone and Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder to him. He’s got an amazing voice.” **“Palm Trees”** “We made this out in LA originally. It was about this idea that you could escape to this place, like holiday-themed, ‘Here we come, palm trees!’ That feeling of ‘I’m just going to escape this and I want to go somewhere hot and I want to go somewhere where my troubles don’t affect me and I can leave all this stuff behind.’ It’s told through this story of a girl going to a club and taking a drug that sends her on this wild space disco trip.” **“Pretty Little Thing” (feat. Bas)** “This was something that got made in the same chunk of time in which ‘PROBLEMZ’ and ‘GOOD TIMES’ were made, and fans would know that it’s actually on the end of the video for ‘GOOD TIMES/PROBLEMZ’—on the credits we ran a little snippet of ‘Pretty Little Thing.’ It’s a ballad, a chance to reflect on moments and reflect on the old experience. \[Queens-via-Paris rapper\] Bas jumped on this and told his own story, which weirdly made sense of the whole thing anyway. It was serendipity.”

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

For his fifth studio album *Tequila Ever After*, singer Adekunle Gold arrived at a formula for recording sessions: “It is about where I am mentally,” he tells Apple Music. “What is my soul saying? What is my life at that point? What am I feeling? What vibe am I on? What sounds am I enjoying?” The title is a reference to Gold’s new-found love for tequila, the Mexican staple which he discovered during trips to Los Angeles, where the majority of this album was recorded. “I was a rum guy, I was a whiskey guy before but, nah, tequila’s taken over,” he explains. “That’s why I call myself ‘Tio Tequila.’” The pleasures of drinking aside, for the Nigerian singer tequila become an elixir, which he uses to ease himself into moments of creative contemplation. “It starts with a conversation,” says Gold. “You book a 12-hour session, and then you talk for five or six hours. Then we start making beats. And then once I hear the sound I like, I get into spirit, my melodies.” On *Tequila Ever After*, Gold’s new affair with tequila and therapy-inspired sessions are coupled with stellar collaborations with producers and artists who draw from Malian guitar blues, South African soul, Jamaican dancehall, and American pop and hip-hop. He jokingly describes the combination as “Afrobeat Pro Max,” a bigger and better version of his previous albums. “I hope people enjoy life more. I know it’s crazy to say that in a world where people are dealing with a lot of things,” says Gold, “but I’ve learned that it’s not the event, it’s how you react to it. And I’ve chosen to react to life as ‘Tequila Ever After’ and I hope that you do as well.” Here, he breaks down key tracks from the album. **“Chasing Peace of Mind” (with Habib Koité & Ami Faku)** “The only thing that matters to me is just keeping the peace of my mind and making sure anything that’s not worth it shouldn’t bother me at all. Sometimes what you need to do is just take one shot of tequila and then you’ll be fine. Just calm down, relax. And that’s it. I reached out to Ami Faku from South Africa because, no matter the tempo of any song, she puts soul in it—she has a beautiful soul. And I went out to Mali to find my childhood hero Habib Koité—the one person that I listened to a lot growing up. If I’m not mistaken, I think he discovered tequila in LA as well. So it made the story better. I’m like, yeah, this is destiny. I wanted his guitar. Malian music is incredible; beautiful. The way the world plays guitar is different from how they play it. And Habib’s voice is crazy.” **“Party No Dey Stop” (with Zinoleesky)** “The song was already elevated, but Zino took it all the way up. When I wrote this, I was in LA with my friends and I was feeling celebratory. I was thinking about my accomplishments, and I just felt like I needed to talk about how I’m not moved by what I see. I know who I am now. I just want my peace. Again, it comes back to peace and to have my own money. I’ll have everything else that I need in my own time.” **“Ogaranya”** “‘Ogaranya’ in Igbo means wealthy person. Big man, big name. It’s an update—I wanted a song that described where I am right now. Making money feels so good. I bought a house for my mom. I bought a car for my baby. I’m happy that I’m able to do these things. Thank God for running things smoothly. Thank God for money flowing in the accounts. Let me talk my shit.” **“Wrong Person” (with ODUMODUBLVCK)** “When I was writing this song, I think I was talking about people who play with me because my face is gentle. People talk shit about me sometimes. And I see some things on social media that come to me. ‘Know your level, bro’ is what I’m saying on this song.” **“Sisi Ganja”** “I don’t necessarily have to finish a song in one sitting, which was the case with this song. I don’t rush it. I learned from my very good friend, singer Jacob Banks. He said he is never the artist that goes to the studio to record. He is comfortable just recording anywhere, but he likes going to the studio just for the idea of hoping. ‘You know what, I’m coming to this studio today to hope for maybe this one song. Maybe this one session that can just change everything.’” **“Make It Easy” (with Coco Jones)** “Coco Jones is amazing—she sings beautifully. This was the last song to be submitted on the album. She came through just after I asked that, and then she sent the verse and I’m like, ‘My God, this is nuts.’ And you can hear that she did justice to the song. Beautiful!” **“Not My Problem”** “I feel like this is the perfect summer song. It’s a song where you realize that you’ve done everything you can do for this relationship, and then, *omo*, you just let it go, man. ‘Not my problem, man. Do I blame you? It’s my fault. If I didn’t put this much effort into it, you wouldn’t be doing this to me, so it’s my fault.’ I feel like everybody can relate to that.” **“Look What You Made Me Do” (with DJ Simi)** “I think Simi \[singer-songwriter and Gold’s wife\] and I make music based on our relationship. I said to her, ‘I want a perfect duet. If it means writing 10 songs, let’s do it.’ We wrote five; this was the fifth one. We work well together, so it’s the easiest thing to do. There’s no pressure for us. We will do what we do and that’s it.” **“Omo Eko”** “My full name is Adekunle Kosoko. So first of all, I’m a prince of Lagos. I’m proud of being a Lagos boy who is just doing things gently and smoothly. I’m saying, ‘Party never start till I enter the place.’ It’s swag. When I come, I announce my presence, and that’s what I’m saying in this song.” **“Come Back to Me” (with Khalid)** “I listen to a lot of musicians, and I just know who can take this up, who can activate, who will blend with me very well. Then it will just be beautiful music all around. For other people it\'s different things, it’s optics and all. For me, it’s just, ‘Let’s serve the music.’ And I just knew I wanted Khalid.” **“Falling Up” (with Pharrell Williams & Nile Rodgers)** “These two legends I manifested on this album. The song is about struggles \[and\] many things I’ve seen in life, but even if I lose, I’ll always fall up. Pharrell called me a ‘unicorn’ and said I ‘cut the best melodies.’ It was fulfilling, man. It was a great feeling. Then seeing Nile Rodgers listening to my music that day—it was beautiful. The chorus on the song was all Pharrell. He’s been very supportive all the way. I’ve been calling this my World Cup song, my Olympic song, my Champions League song. This song is a song that’s going to change my life.” **“To My Own”** “I’ve always loved Labrinth \[who co-wrote ‘To My Own’\]. I think he is a great writer, an amazing producer, and an all-round artist. If I like an artist and I want us to work, I don’t even wait for the team to do their thing. I just send DMs myself. We got in the studio, it was supposed to be like a five-hour session. We spoke for the most part, like four hours. The first question he asked me was, ‘What’s your soul saying?’ And then we talked about a center. What’s my center? I talked about how my family is my center. And that’s the same for him as well.”

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.

The title of Chicago artist Jamila Woods’ third album, *Water Made Us*, is a subtle reference to a quote from Toni Morrison: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” It’s this ethos that runs through Woods’ first album since 2019’s *LEGACY! LEGACY!*, consumed with memory and place, the power of returning, and the way things change even as they stay the same—and stay the same as they change. She recruited LA-based producer McClenney to help build the album from scratch, hammering the songs to fit these themes one by one. *Water Made Us* boasts features from Saba, Peter CottonTale, and duendita, who assists with herR&B-soul concoctions on “Tiny Garden.” The album’s second song, “Garden” features a soul-inspired groove, delicate keyboard chords, and Woods’ upper-register voice floating above. “It’s not gonna be a big production, it’s not butterflies and fireworks/Said it’s gonna be a tiny garden, but I’ll feed it every day,” she sings. It leads the song into a chorus filled with harmonies and technicolor guitar flourishes. The moment is a snapshot of small ideas coalescing into something large, a tiny garden with the scars of history.

From the moment “Jugaste Y Sufrí” with Eslabon Armado went undeniably viral in 2020, DannyLux was bound for stardom. Still just a teenager, the sierreño singer-songwriter gradually amassed a series of singles and short projects that surpassed his one-to-watch status and made him one of the most sought-after artists in música mexicana. His most substantial outing to date, *DLUX* demonstrates where this period of growth and development has led him. Collaborations make up roughly half of the tracks, with Gabito Ballesteros on the pleading “DIME QUE HAY QUE HACER,” Cuco on the wistful “DECIR ADIOS ‘OYE NARRADOR,’” and Pablo Hurtado on the heartfelt “ZAFIRO.” Naturally, he reunites with Eslabon Armado once again for “ME CAMBIASTE,” which is sure to become a fan favorite. Of course, even without the high-profile features, he dazzles solo with songs like the lushly arranged “¿CÓMO TE LO EXPLICO?” and “ATRAPADO.”

Two of hip-hop’s most prolific contemporary artists, laidback rapper Larry June and production vet The Alchemist, seem to have plotted *The Great Escape* for some time. If prior co-credited appearances on projects by mutuals Curren$y and Jay Worthy signaled their clear studio chemistry, 2022’s *Spaceships on the Blade* standout “Breakfast in Monaco” left little to no doubt that the two absolutely needed to drop a proper album together. Following the anticipatory loosie teases of “60 Days” and “89 Earthquake,” this 15-track effort exceeds expectations by formally bringing June’s entrepreneurial ethos of health and wealth into ALC’s unparalleled sonic world-building. Visions of luxury cars, presidential suites, and, of course, fresh-squeezed orange juice run through June lyrics over the grind dates “Porsches in Spanish” and “Turkish Cotton.” The pair’s no-expense-spared journey takes them to Detroit, where Boldy James spits confidently through a perpetual snarl on “Art Talk” and Big Sean speaks on the long game with unapologetic frankness on “Palisades, CA.” Elsewhere, East Coast renaissance man Action Bronson drops a dizzyingly reference-heavy verse on the jazz-infused “Solid Plan,” while Wiz Khalifa elucidates his core values on the psychedelic soul-powered “What Happened to the World?”

Five years after her critically acclaimed studio debut *Lost & Found*, Jorja Smith returns more self-assured than ever. On *falling or flying*, the UK singer-songwriter stays true to her roots, her lush tone draping over jazzy, futuristic production, while cuts like “GO GO GO” give listeners access to Smith’s more lighthearted side as she dips into indie rock territory. While *Lost & Found* exuded the energy of an exploratory coming-of-age for the then-19-year-old, *falling or flying* is a brutally honest expression of all the artist has learned. In her return to the musical spotlight, Smith also found her way back to her hometown of Walsall after spending a handful of years in London, during which time she worked on her sophomore album. *falling or flying* represents the singer’s blossoming sense of self amidst relentless public opinion, once again proving her intricate capabilities as a storyteller through both lyricism and vocal prowess.

In early 2023, Kelsea Ballerini released her *Rolling Up the Welcome Mat* EP, a frank collection of songs she wrote and recorded with collaborator Alysa Vanderheym in the wake of her high-profile divorce. The songs span a number of the complicated feelings wrought by a difficult breakup, like the angry skepticism of “Blindsided” and the knowing regret of “Mountain With a View,” on which Ballerini reflects frankly upon the moment things really fell apart in her marriage. *Rolling Up the Welcome Mat (For Good)* expands upon its predecessor, offering new music as well as revisions of original tracks, like the live “Healed Version” of the heart-wrenching ballad “Penthouse.” The EP’s “Interlude” gets a “Full Length” treatment, while the already cutting “Blindsided” adds the sarcastic parenthetical “(Yeah, Sure, Okay)” to its title, as well as additional lyrics which Ballerini debuted during a performance on *Saturday Night Live*. Closing track “How Do I Do This” is brand new, serving as a cautiously optimistic capstone that especially emphasizes the “For Good” in the updated EP’s title.

With over 50 hit singles and more than 100 million records sold, English synth-pop masters Depeche Mode could still play sold-out stadiums if they had stopped releasing music in the mid-’90s. “We could easily, if we wanted to, just go out and play the hits,” vocalist Dave Gahan tells Apple Music. “But that’s not what we’re about.” Depeche Mode’s 15th studio album is their first without co-founder and keyboardist Andy Fletcher, who passed away in 2022. This sad and hugely significant event in the band’s history is reflected in the album’s title. “*Memento Mori*—‘remember that you must die,’” Gahan says, translating the Latin phrase. “The music really will outlive all of us.” Main songwriter Martin Gore started working on the record early in the pandemic—well before Fletcher’s death—but recalls the moment when he played his demos for Gahan. “It’s always a tough moment when you have to present your songs for the first time to Dave,” he tells Apple Music. “I would’ve been presenting them to Andy as well, obviously. He passed away just days before I was about to send him the songs. And that’s one of the very sad parts about it, because he used to love getting the songs.” *Memento Mori* is notable for another big reason: It marks the first time Gore has worked with a songwriter outside of Depeche Mode. He teamed up with Psychedelic Furs vocalist Richard Butler on several tracks, including “Don’t Say You Love Me,” “Caroline’s Monkey,” and the pulsing lead single “Ghosts Again.” Surprisingly, the band tracked more than just the 12 songs that appear on the album. “We actually recorded 16 songs for this album, and it was very difficult to choose the 12 that made it,” Gore says. “That’s very unlike us, but we have four in the vault. It’s a very, very small vault. It’s like a thumb drive.” Despite the melancholy inherent in some of the songs, *Memento Mori* is ultimately life-affirming—and a testament to Depeche Mode’s commitment to the creative process. “It’s music, and it’s art, and it’s something that is incredibly informing,” Gahan says. “Without it, I don’t know where I would be.” Below, he and Gore comment on a few of the key tracks. **“My Cosmos Is Mine”** Dave Gahan: “It’s actually one of my favorites on the album. When Martin first sent me the demo, it didn\'t strike me. But quite often those are the ones that creep up on me later—that I most identify with for some reason—and that song was one of those. I remember going to Martin\'s house and singing it, and I knew we were capturing something. I feel like I found a meaning in the song that I identified with, and I don\'t often. When I found my place with that song, I knew it was going to be a great introduction to *Memento Mori*.” **“Ghosts Again”** Gahan: “When I first heard that song, I was like, ‘Okay. I\'m in.’ The demo made me feel instant joy. I remember dancing around my living room, and my daughter came in and she was looking at me weird, like, ‘What\'s going on?’ I was like, ‘Don\'t you love this?’ She kind of started bopping along with me and she was like, ‘I get it. It\'s a really good song.’” **“Don’t Say You Love Me”** Gahan: “It’s very Scott Walker. To me, it’s this beautiful torch, but I love those kinds of songs. I mean, it’s like a movie or something. Martin wrote that one with Richard Butler.” Martin Gore: “Which is something I’ve never done before, worked with somebody outside the band. He reached out to me around April 2020. The pandemic had hit, and he just texted and said, ‘We should write some songs together.’ And he actually said that once before, like 10 years ago or something, but nothing ever came of it. But because it was the pandemic, I thought, ‘If I’m going to do something different, now is a good time to experiment.’ So we did, and we ended up writing six songs that I really like.” **“Speak to Me”** Gahan: “Well, it\'s sort of metaphors. The loneliness, the emptiness, the void, the wanting to be with people and life—and at the same time, not wanting to be. The initial idea came to me, but the song was incredibly elevated by Martin and our producers, James \[Ford\] and Marta \[Salogni\], into a different place, another world. And that\'s exactly where I wanted the song to go as well. But it’s beyond what I could have put together myself. It’s a very simple song, but honest and real. For me, it was the key that opened the door for me to make another Depeche Mode record with Martin. It was an answer to that question for me.”

“Almost everyone that I love has been abused, and I am included,” declares Arlo Parks with arresting honesty in the first lines of her second album *My Soft Machine*. Then, almost in the same breath, she adds, “The person I love is patient with me/She’s feeding me cheese and I’m happy.” It’s an apt introduction to an album that both basks in the light—as Parks celebrates the affirming joy of falling deeply in love—and delves into darkness. “The core concept of the project is that this is reality and memory through my eyes, experienced within this body,” Parks tells Apple Music. “From the loss of innocence to the reliving of trauma to the endless nights bursting through Koreatown to first kisses in dimly lit dive bars, this is about my life.” It’s all told, of course, with the poetic, diary-entry lyricism that made *Collapsed in Sunbeams* so special—and which catapulted Parks to voice-of-a-generation status. Here, Parks also allows her indie-pop sound to unfurl, with embraces of synths, scuzzy guitars (see “Devotion,” the album’s most electrifying and unexpected moment), jazz, gorgeous harmonies (on the sweet, Phoebe Bridgers-guested “Pegasus”), electronic music, and more. That came, she says, in part from the team she assembled for the album, who allowed her to be more “fluid” (*My Soft Machine* was worked on with names including BROCKHAMPTON producer Romil Hemnani, the prolific US songwriter/producer Ariel Rechtshaid, and Frank Ocean collaborator Baird). “The community that organically formed around the album is one of my favorite things about it,” says Parks. “I think there is a confidence to the work. There is a looseness and an energy. There was a sense of sculpting that went beyond the more instinctive and immediate process of making album one. I am very proud of this.” Read on for the singer-songwriter’s track-by-track guide to *My Soft Machine*. **“Bruiseless”** “This song is about childhood abandon and the growing pains. It was inspired by a conversation I had with \[American poet\] Ocean Vuong where he said he was constantly trying to capture the unadulterated joy of cycling up to a friend’s house and abandoning the bike on the grass, wheels spinning, whilst you race up to their door—the softness and purity of that moment.” **“Impurities”** “I wrote this song the first time I met my dear friend Romil from BROCKHAMPTON. My friends and I were party-hopping and every time we called an Uber it was a Cadillac Escalade, which we thought was hilarious at the time. This is a song that is simply about being happy and feeling truly accepted.” **“Devotion”** “Romil, Baird and I were driving to a coffee shop called Maru in the Arts District of LA in Baird’s Suzuki Vitara that I nicknamed the ‘Red Rocket.’ We were blasting ‘17 Days’ by Prince. The three of us decided two things during that 15-minute round trip: that we had to fully commit to drama and that we were a rock band for the day.” **“Blades”** “The reference to the aquarium scene in Baz Luhrmann’s *Romeo + Juliet* refers to the idea of looking at a person you once knew so intimately and something indescribable has changed—as if you’re looking at each other through ocean water or obscure glass.” **“Purple Phase”** “The guitars you hear on this song are Paul \[Epworth, the British producer who also worked on *Collapsed in Sunbeams*\] and I just improvising. It was the last day of a long working week, we were feeling free and connected and our heads were cleared by exhaustion—we didn’t even have the capacity to overthink. This song has one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written: ‘I just want to see you iridescent charming cats down from trees/Mugler aviators hiding eyes that laugh when concealed.’” **“Weightless”** “Making ‘Weightless’ was a defining moment in the album process. I felt completely unchained from *Collapsed in Sunbeams*. Anything was possible, Paul \[Epworth\] and I were just chaos-dancing around the room and giggling. This one is very special to me and gave me so much creative confidence.” **“Pegasus (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)”** “Of course ‘Pegasus’ features lovely Phoebe \[Bridgers\]. The inspirations for the sparseness melting into the light, dancy beat were ‘White Ferrari’ by Frank Ocean, ‘Talk Down’ by Dijon, and ‘Grieve Not the Spirit’ by AIR. This is the first song I’ve written being so candid about how tricky it can be to accept someone being unbelievably kind.” **“Dog Rose”** “The original demo for this song was recorded in a hotel room in Toronto. I had the idea for the riff in the chorus and I was lying wide awake at 3 am just letting it drive me insane. Then I got up and ran about 15 blocks, through parks and across bridges, to get my guitar from the bus and get the idea down. It was very dramatic.” **“Puppy”** “I had always wanted to capture that half-spoken, half-melodic cadence—kind of like Frank Ocean in ‘In My Room’—and I was so pleased when I achieved it. The fuzzed-out guitar-sounding instrument is actually this little synth that \[producer\] Buddy \[Ross\] has. We were trying to recreate the energy of \[my bloody valentine’s\] *Loveless*.” **“I’m Sorry”** “Garrett Ray from Vampire Weekend’s touring band is on drums and David Longstreth \[the lead singer and guitarist\] from Dirty Projectors is on guitar for this one. Sculpting the right sonic treatment for this song took what felt like years, but it’s definitely my favorite song on the record from a textural and feel point of view.” **“Room (Red Wings)”** “‘Red Wings’ is a reference to the book *Autobiography of Red* by Anne Carson. The main character has distinctive red wings; his home life is tumultuous and he finds comfort in photography and falls deeply in love with a man called Herakles. The fragility and heart-rending nature of this book mirrors the broken quality of the song.” **“Ghost”** “This is the oldest song on the record. I demoed it in the winter of 2020 in my childhood bedroom. At the core of the song is a sense of embracing help, embracing human touch, learning not to suffer in solitude, learning to let people in.”