Rolling Stone's Best Albums of 2021 So Far

A former glam-rock guitarist, Aaron Lee Tasjan is more musically diverse than his 2016 Americana-leaning breakout *Silver Tears* may have suggested. On his fourth album *Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!*, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitarist fully explores his kaleidoscopic vision, fusing Petty-esque heartland rock, Velvet Underground-style art pop, Beatles-styled psychedelia, and modern Americana to craft a truly singular sound. Opening track \"Sunday Women\" is spacey and playful, with Tasjan\'s guitar, at times, mimicking a synthesizer. \"Computer of Love\" pairs incisive lyrics and an acid-laced arrangement to turn a keen eye on social-media-induced narcissism. And on tracks like \"Feminine Walk,\" \"Up All Night,\" and \"Dada Bois,\" Tasjan frankly acknowledges his own gender and sexual fluidity, with vulnerability, heart, and a healthy dose of humor. It\'s appropriate that Tasjan offered this LP as a (cleverly) self-titled project, as it\'s his most fully realized work yet.

\"We spent four months demoing this,\" Stevie Knipe tells Apple Music about Adult Mom\'s latest album. \"There is so much diversity on the record, but I think it was also a product of us having a lot of time to mess around.\" Bouncing from 808s-backed bedroom indie (\"Sober\") to frenetic pop-punk (\"Adam\") to alt-folk flourishes (\"Dancing\"), *Driver* is a detailed adventure into the beginnings and endings of different relationships. It showcases Knipe at their most complete and confident self, as these urgent confessionals mix humor and vulnerability into *Driver*\'s coming-of-age story. \"I always feel very precious about my records,\" explains Knipe. \"But this record feels like the most precious, because it\'s not really part of a content machine followed by a huge tour, but instead it\'s just a record that listeners can let marinate and see if it sticks with them.\" Below, the singer-songwriter takes Apple Music behind *Driver*\'s 10 tracks. **Passenger** \"It\'s a really sad way to start a record. Originally I wrote it as just the first verse, and I wanted it to just be an in-and-out 30-second ambient kind of opening. It\'s a song about when you\'re in a relationship with somebody and you\'re kind of watching the love fall apart, and the partnership kind of die, without really understanding the reasons.\" **Wisconsin** \"This is the first song I wrote that\'s actually not about me. I was watching a friend have a crush, and we were on tour, and there were all these push and pulls between the two of these people, and I was so intrigued by it. And all these small interactions would happen where someone would move their leg in a weird way, and you would talk about it and you\'re like, \'Oh, did that mean that they liked me? What is this thing? What does this text mean?\'\" **Breathing** \"I was dealing with all this medical debt. I was hiding bills, and I was living in my parents\' house. So I was definitely writing a \'note to self\' type of depression hit.\" **Berlin** \"We released this track last year more or less because we just wanted to put something out and we realized that it was going to be a while until we were going to be able to actually release the record. This is \[drummer\] Liv \[Battell\] and I\'s favorite song on the record.\" **Sober** \"Liv had this old demo of the song on her GarageBand. When we were making it, I was like, \'This is a pop song, and it has to be a pop song.\' And now when I listen back, I\'m like, \'Yeah, this is really fucking sad.\' I love doing that parallel all the time. I think it\'s so interesting to me because I always sad-dance to songs.\" **Dancing** \"I got into this horrible car wreck, totaled my car—a semi swiped me on the highway. It was awful, and it was pouring rain. It was the worst night of my life. But I was literally listening to my favorite song, The Replacements\' \'Can\'t Hardly Wait,\' when it happened. And for months, I couldn\'t listen to them. And then one day I was like, \'You can do this. You can move on.\'\" **Adam** \"It\'s so fun and fast. It was birthed from this conversation that we had during a Europe and UK run a couple years ago with our tour manager Adam. We were having one of those long band talks about queerness and being gay, and kind of wishing that when we were kids that we were out and talking about wishing you could have a childhood that wasn\'t closeted. There\'s definitely a lot of sadness in that sentiment, but also a lot of sweetness. I want to tell that kid that everything is chill.\" **Regret It** \"We recorded the guitar and my vocals at the same time, and that\'s what I wanted to do, because I wanted it to be authentic and feel alive a little bit. It has some imperfections, and I like that. I had a really spiritual magical experience playing it.\" **Checking Up** \"This is also another one that I was writing from a different-ish perspective, but I was kind of melding my experience with it, too. I was just watching a friend go through a really hard time with a flaky, inconsistent partner. I was going through almost the same exact thing. I was just thinking about what it\'s like to have all these extremes in a relationship when things are really, really good and then they\'re really, really bad. I think for both of us, that same person kind of lingered in our lives for a long time because there wasn\'t these clear-cut endings.\" **Frost** \"This was inspired by a different car wreck, so there were two. I swear I\'m an okay driver, but whatever. I was just thinking a lot about how chronic pain and things like that can also relate to emotional pain in relationships and partnerships. This whole record was a period of post-relationship and post-dating. And so I just really sat with myself for a couple of years, completely single. The time that I wrote this song, I was like, holy shit, I\'m way too good at now being alone. I\'m really the only one who can shut it off and turn it on, and I definitely control my destiny in some sense.\"

For his 21st studio LP, shock-rock legend Alice Cooper has created a concept album that invokes his Motor City roots. It was back in 1970 that the original Alice Cooper Band rehearsed in a Michigan farmhouse under the watchful eye of producer Bob Ezrin for *Love It to Death*, the album that would include their first big hit in “I’m Eighteen.” Fifty years later, Cooper and Ezrin reunited to record *Detroit Stories*, an album inspired by and created in Detroit by an all-star cast of Detroiters like Wayne Kramer (MC5), Mark Farner (Grand Funk Railroad), Johnny “Bee” Badanjek (The Detroit Wheels), Steve Hunter, and the surviving members of the original Alice Cooper Band—not to mention “honorary Detroiter” and guitar hero Joe Bonamassa. “Hard rock is king in Detroit,” Cooper tells Apple Music. “So we wrote the songs there, recorded them there, and used all Detroit players. You can’t get more Detroit than Wayne Kramer and these guys.” Below, Cooper discusses a few of his favorite original and cover tracks from the album. **Rock ’n’ Roll** “We did this Velvet Underground song because Bob had worked with Lou Reed on two albums—*Rock \'n\' Roll Animal* and *Berlin*. And I knew Lou from the Chelsea Hotel a long time ago, so he was a friend. The way that the Velvet Underground did it, it was sort of New York heroin chic. It was kind of throwaway, but that’s what made the Underground so cool. So I said, ‘Why don\'t we take this song and put a V8 engine in it? Get Joe Bonamassa on it, and this band, and let\'s just tear this song up.’ It’s already a classic, but this breathed new life into it.” **Our Love Will Change the World** “Every time I turn on Little Steven\'s Underground Garage, this Outrageous Cherry song comes on. And I think it\'s just because people can\'t get it out of their head when they hear it. The song is so happy, but the lyrics are subversive—and they’re from Detroit. It’s like the Children of the Damned singing to our generation, saying, ‘Our love is going to change the world—it’s going to be strange for you for a while, but you’ll get to know it.’ I played around with the lyrics a little bit to direct them more into ‘We’re a generation that just doesn’t care.’” **Social Debris** “This has the surviving members of the original Alice Cooper Band on it, and it’s sort of autobiographical. We never felt like we fit in. We were social debris. We didn’t fit in LA, we didn’t fit in San Francisco, we didn’t fit in New York. What we were doing onstage at the time was so violent—there was blood, there was a snake, there were baby dolls chopped up all over, we were wearing girls’ clothing that was all ripped up—and this was 1969, ’70. It scared the hell out of anybody on any drug. So the only place we fit in was Detroit. All the bands from Detroit—The Stooges, the MC5—were hard rock and in your face. We finally found a place where we fit. And of course Detroit itself is social debris—it was always the outcast city.” **$1000 High Heel Shoes** “You can\'t do a Detroit album and represent all the different kinds of music without doing a Motown song. I wrote this as a rock song, but as soon as we got in the studio, it already had the bones of a funk song. So I said, ‘Okay—let\'s go all the way with it, then. Let\'s bring in the horn section and the Motown girls and really turn it into a Motown song.’ And the song itself is about an Uber driver that works 24 hours a day just so he can get his girlfriend $1000 high-heel shoes because she likes to walk around naked in them. And we got Joe Bonamassa and Steve Hunter to play on it.” **Drunk and in Love** “*Romeo and Juliet* is a great love story, but so is a love story about a guy that lives in a box under a bridge with a bunch of other people standing around big oil cans trying to keep warm—and he’s in love with the girl who lives in another box. ‘Come stay in my box. I’ve got some wine, and we’ll keep warm.’ So it’s a very touching little love song. And just the fact that their situation is different than a normal one doesn’t mean their love is any less intense.” **Independence Dave** “Some of the characters on the record are people I either knew or knew were there—people like Independence Dave. He’s a great con man and drug dealer. Everybody likes him. He’s the big bopper. Everything revolves around him, so you’ve got to make the song happy. So I kind of patterned it after ‘Born in Chicago’ by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.” **Shut Up and Rock** “I always kind of liked the idea of a guy that is so out of touch that he’s not just politically incorrect, but he\'s politically incoherent. ‘I don\'t care about your politics; I don\'t care about what you did today; I don\'t care about your yoga class—just shut up and rock.’ When I was singing it, I\'d go, ‘Oh my gosh, this is just so politically incorrect.’ And I thought, well—it should be. That\'s who this guy is. He has no idea. If you said ‘politically incorrect’ to him, he\'d go, ‘What are you talking about? I don\'t even know what that means.’”

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

As the dust settled on an impressive list of former endeavors, it was an unlikely series of human connections that sparked the inception of Assertion. After years of self-described music industry PTSD and disenchantment, drummer William Goldsmith (Sunny Day Real Estate, The Fire Theft, Foo Fighters), guitarist/vocalist Justin Tamminga, bassist Bryan Gorder united through a series of serendipitous events. Best described adjectively, the band's debut LP, "Intermission," is real, propulsive, and earnest -- a cathartic experience that proudly does not nestle nicely alongside current bands -- or really many releases at all from the last couple decades. "Intermission" conjures more connections to the heady grit and soaring grind of the 90's. Driving guitars anchored by a frenetic rhythm section. A haunting vocal delivery concealing a heartfelt sentiment. Track-by-track, the record builds into a dark and heavy crescendo but unpredictably retreats into delicate and fragile moments in masterful ways.

When *The Plugs I Met* dropped in June of 2019, Benny the Butcher was a promising if somewhat secondary member of the then-burgeoning Griselda Records empire. Upon the release of *The Plugs I Met 2*, composed with New York production stalwart Harry Fraud, he’s a certified star, so comfortable in his personal trajectory that’s he’s had the time—and resources—to launch BSF Records, a label comprising members of his Black Soprano Family crew. Save for Rick Hyde on “Survivor’s Remorse,” BSF is largely absent from *The Plugs I Met 2*, Benny having reserved the majority of the project’s guest spots for NYC rap legends French Montana, Fat Joe, Jim Jones, and the dearly departed Chinx. But no Griselda project is about the guests, and *The Plugs I Met 2* is no different in that regard, Benny painting vivid pictures of street life as he sees it. “For street n\*\*\*as I’m the new catalyst, but who fathomed it?/My heroes in federal sweatsuits and New Balances,” he raps on “When Tony Met Sosa.” The project on the whole is something akin to getting reps up in an empty gym: impressive, to be sure, but also exactly what we know he’s capable of.

On his debut LP *Sex Over Love*, Nigerian rapper Blaqbonez continues his evolution by diversifying his sound, style, and themes. Wielding slick cadences and melodic turns, he explores hedonistic themes between Caribbean, Afrobeats, and hip-hop soundscapes. “An important thing for me is giving you something different with every body of work,” he tells Apple Music. “I try to create a persona for whatever I do. I was Bad Boy Blaq on my first EP, then Mr. Boombastic, and now I\'m Emeka the Stallion. Emeka is basically a sex machine.” Revealing his alter ego’s ethos over the smooth Amaarae- and Buju-assisted “Bling,” unapologetic tinges of trap on “Heartbreaker” alongside Nasty C, and percussive rhythms of “Fendi,” Blaq draws from both his own experiences and keen observations. “I\'m just talking about my life and what I\'ve seen personally, so there\'s no generalization,” he says. “It\'s an intriguing concept, but I\'m speaking my undiluted truth.” He talks us through each of the album’s tracks below. **“Novacane”** “‘I loved the idea of opening the album with a straight-up rap song that makes you feel like this guy is serious—the first thing you hear is \'N\*\*\*as never happy that I\'m back again.\' I tried to include every part of my artistry on this album, and every kind of Blaqbonez that exists—the battle rap clip was to do just that.” **“Heartbreaker” (feat. Nasty C)** “There\'s this line where I say, \'Saw my old crush and I fucked her like I missed her but that pussy average.\' Just some heartbreaker shit. That\'s basically what the album is about.” **“Bling” (feat. Amaarae & Buju)** “This is the oldest song on the project. The hierarchy for me is money over sex, and sex over love. Out here in Naija, I feel like most people would really pick money over love and rather be financially stable. The way the song sounded, I wanted to hear another perspective and another voice. CKay had just worked with Amaarae on ‘Show My Side’ and I thought she was amazing and I needed to put her on a song. I knew Buju\'s voice would be perfect to complete the song.” **“Never Been in Love”** “The saddest thing is all the girls in relationships keep backup guys. They might not be having sex with them, but they keep one for safety. If you really claim that you\'re in love, why do you have to keep a safety person? When I say ‘sex over love,’ it\'s hard for people to agree with me immediately. The truth is they don’t realize they pick sex over love through their actions and in their everyday lives. I think this album will start a new conversation and people will start asking themselves what they\'re actually choosing.” **“Don\'t Touch”** “Blaise Beats came through and whipped up the beat for this song and Majesty Lyn put a vibe to it. She was just mounting vocals, and that\'s how the melody came about. I created the song around that melody, with Superboy Cheque’s voice on the chorus. When I listened to the track, I knew I had to clear up some things because it sounded like a love song. I needed to speak some truths, and that\'s what the switch to the rap side was for. One of the most annoying things in my life is the fact that people think I\'m supposed to be funny on command because I have a couple of funny videos. I\'m a normal person who has normal conversations.” **“TGF Pussy”** “A lot of people will be like, \'What the hell is this guy on? I thought this guy was about to bless us with some take-us-to-church stuff.\' I had the chorus in my head already, so I just wanted a verse that would take you in a whole different direction.” **“Okwaraji”** “This one is a blend of hip-hop and Afrobeats—the cadence is rap and the beat has Afrobeats elements. The lyrics are very specific; it\'s basically a punchline: Ball to death.” **“Fendi” (feat. Joeboy)** “Type A creates these beats that make me flow effortlessly. He’s the same guy that produced ‘Bling’ and ‘Haba.’ It just seems like he knows how to create these big songs for me, and it sounds like this can become such a smash.” **“BBC” (feat. Tiwa Savage) \[Remix\]** “We sent Tiwa the song with spaces and she delivered a fire verse. I love Tiwa and I\'ve always been a fan, so this was exciting.” **“Faaji” (feat 1da Banton & Bad Boy Timz)** “\'Faaji\' basically means \'enjoy life\' in Yoruba. The song is just vibes and happiness...flex, party, and have a good time. It\'s nostalgic for every Nigerian child because the sound at the beginning was the sound from the most popular Indomie advert. 1da Banton and I were in the studio and created the whole song together. Bad Boy Timz is a street artist and I felt that he would give the song some authenticity and connect it to the streets.” **“Zombie” (feat. PsychoYP & Laycon)** “This is the one for the rap lovers.” **“Best Friend” (feat. Cheque)** “This is the closest thing to an emotional love song. It\'s one of my favorites. I can picture girls making TikToks and showing their besties off to it. I think it will do something special.” **“Cynic Route”** “I just felt like there were some things I needed to say and I had to say it on a song that has a calm feel—that makes you feel like there\'s an ending. It\'s not really like I don\'t like women, I just can\'t give you everything that you\'re looking for. It\'s just my truth.” **“Haba”** “This song is me telling my friend\'s story. Back in university, he went to this party and there was a girl who was dancing too hard on him. He was complaining about it. He\'d tell her, ‘Calm down, calm down,’ but she didn\'t listen. She wants to \[destroy\] you, she doesn\'t care.”

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

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

In early 2020, Celeste was riding high. The LA-born, Brighton-raised singer had just topped the BBC’s Sound of 2020 list, claimed the equally prestigious BRITs Rising Star Award, and announced her debut album. But something didn’t feel right. “Everything was moving quite quickly, and I almost didn’t have time to think about how things made me feel or allow them to settle in,” the singer—full name Celeste Epiphany Waite—tells Apple Music. “The songs people had responded to the most were the ones that I had put the most genuine feeling into. At some stage, bringing out singles and stuff, I think that got lost. I felt weakened.” When the UK was put into its first lockdown back in March 2020, Celeste had a chance to reassess. “Everything slowing down was quite helpful,” she says. “I could take stock of what was really important to me and focus on why I was here in the first place.” All of which led to *Not Your Muse*, a rethought debut on which Celeste explores “conversations and dialogue and bits of stories about the things I’ve experienced.” The songs here are about loss (“Strange”), the thrill of new love (“Tonight Tonight”), political disenfranchisement (“Tell Me Something I Don’t Know”), and finding hope after dark times (the exquisite “Some Goodbyes Come With Hellos”). And across it all, Celeste turns any weakness she might once have felt into strength. She takes her nostalgic yet current blend of soul, pop, and R&B—music that’s prompted breathless Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, and Amy Winehouse comparisons—to even bolder places, with jubilant brass melodies, stomping rhythms, and heart-stopping vocals all decorating a startlingly accomplished debut album. “I felt more and more confident with each leap I took,” she says. “The message I wanted for people to take from this project is the idea of trusting yourself to finally get to where you want to be.” Read on as Celeste walks us through her powerful—and empowered—debut, one track at a time. **Ideal Woman** “\[UK producer\] Josh Crocker played the chords to this song and I loved them straight away. I held the microphone and just started to speak what was on my mind. This song is like a conversation with an old friend. And that’s how I wanted people to feel at the beginning of the record, because the songs on it are conversations and dialogue and bits of stories about things that I\'ve experienced. When I wrote ‘Ideal Woman,’ I was feeling disappointed with some of my romantic experiences with men. With them had come insecurities, which is what the verses are about. But the chorus is me reaching a place that’s like, ‘I’m just myself and it’s okay to be that way.’” **Strange** “To a lot of people, this probably sounds like a breakup song. But for me, it’s encompassing lots of feelings of loss. I wrote it in LA, during the 2018 California wildfires. One day, we passed the hospital where I’d seen my dad for the last time, before he died, and my stomach just dropped—the emotion was as raw as it had been six years earlier. I was also feeling heartbreak about the distance that had come between me and some of the friends I\'d grown up with. And I was scared, too, that I’d lose my voice because of the ash in the sky. All those things came together in the studio. I approached the microphone very gently, because I was worried about my voice. But that also filtered into how I would treat this song, which was respectfully. When we finished it, there was this moment of quiet. I think we all felt proud of what we had done.” **Tonight Tonight** “When I first started hanging out with the man who’s my boyfriend now, we’d both be working during the day, so by the time we got to see each other, it\'d be late. All of this romance would occur in the night. This song was just what I wanted to say at the time. I remember working with \[UK songwriter and producer\] Jamie Hartman and he started to conjure up this imagery of the shadow and the light beneath the door. And in that, I just remembered the moment of laying in my bed and knowing that Sonny \[Hall, Celeste’s partner\] was going to come in. Feeling nervous and feeling excited—all that intrigue about another person.” **Stop This Flame** “This was the first song I wrote with Jamie. I was nervous about working with him, because I really liked the stuff he’d written before. I remember him asking what I liked and, all of a sudden, I couldn’t remember any of it! So the most significant names just came out of my mouth, including Nina Simone. He was immediately like, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this piano thing that\'s a bit like “Sinnerman.”’ I thought it was amazing, but by the time I’d moved on to writing other music, I felt it was too close to the music that’s inspired me. I was quite hesitant for people to hear it. But then, as time went on, I began to evolve in a way, as did the meaning of the song to me. Which is that you don’t let too much dishearten you or get in your way.” **Tell Me Something I Don’t Know** “I wrote this on February 8, 2020. I was in LA, but was thinking about what was going on in England. I was very disappointed that the Conservatives had won the \[December 2019\] election, which came from a place of feeling that, in my opinion, they speak for so few people. I was in the studio and was listening to a lot of Gil Scott-Heron. This song is like, ‘Okay, this is the hand we’ve been dealt. But are we going to get a different answer this time?’ That’s why I wrote the lyric ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ because I wanted to have some different answers—and different outcomes—from these people.” **Not Your Muse** “I\'d had the title of this song for three years. I always knew what I wanted it to be about, but I probably tried to write it five times without knowing how to get there. And then, I just surrendered to it and realized that there was something I hadn\'t experienced yet, which would reveal how I’d write it. I had become intrigued by the relationship between the artist and the muse, and the muse as this vessel. I would come up against different obstacles, \[such as\] people I was working with having a different expectation of me. They became the artist, where they had their idea of what they wanted me to exude and emit, but it didn\'t really align with the ideas I had within myself. And so that became an underlying thing in my periphery, which I think contributed to eventually being able to finish this song.” **Beloved** “This song is very ’50s—like those old crooned, whimsical, mellow kind of love songs. I’d just got back from playing some shows in Germany, and I was missing being around my friends and being in London. I went to the studio because Jamie was only in England for a day and a half. I wanted to write something, but I also wanted to be out seeing my friends. So it was written with this kind of tired, post-flight feeling. And that’s come across in the delivery of the melodies. It’s quite woozy. Here, I’m the secret admirer and it’s my love letter to the person I admire from afar.” **Love Is Back** “I don’t know how many people experience this as often as I have, but I get a fantasy about people before I really know that much about them. When I wrote this song, I’d probably met someone at a party and been like, ‘Oh my god, they’re the love of my life!’ And then it gets to two weeks later, and I’m just like, ‘I got that so wrong.’ This song started as me being like, ‘Oh, here she goes again, she’s in love again!’ But when I came to finish it, I had actually fallen in love and was in a relationship. That changed my approach. I was feeling more bold, and that’s reflected in the bigger arrangements in the song and those louder horns.” **A Kiss** “This song details the knowledge gained from different romantic interactions, which I assimilated to types of kisses and what they turn into. But I also see this song as my older self talking to my younger self. It’s like, ‘I hate to say it like this, but this is how it’s going to go.’ A kiss is so important. All of these things just sprouted from that one quite literal thing.” **The Promise** “When I heard the chords to this song, I felt like they were going round in a circle. Straight away, it made me think of those people you always go back to. And it reminded me of that moment where it’s 7 am at a house party, and you and that other person are both hanging on for dear life because you both want to go back with each other, but neither of you want to make the last move. The outro to this song goes back to the guitar that starts it, which is a metaphor for that idea of going around again and again.” **A Little Love** “In October 2019, \[department store\] John Lewis approached my team and told us that they wanted to do an original piece of music for that year’s Christmas advert, which was a first. There are certain things you feel quite starstruck by, and I got straight to writing it! The song is very simple. It’s about the idea that if you’re giving and loving to people who surround you, it contributes to the world being a better place. I liked how unpretentious that was. I’m proud that I got to do this and be part of something that had never happened before.” **Some Goodbyes Come With Hellos** “I wanted to say to the people who were listening to this album that this isn’t an end. It’s more ‘Goodbye for now.’ But I also wanted to end it with a sense of optimism. Some of this album talks about the harsh realities of life, and this song is saying that I’m always hopeful. This song has the demo vocal on it. I often try to keep the demo vocal on songs because it retains the emotion that’s the closest to the source. To me, it’s important that that emotion isn’t being performed in a superficial way. Hopefully, that shows in the music.”

On her sixth LP, Dawn Richard wanted to celebrate the Black DJs and producers who played an instrumental role in developing the early sounds of electronic music. “Dance music has always been culturally from a Black culture,” Richard tells Apple Music. “It’s Detroit house, Chicago footwork, the New Jersey sound, D.C. go-go, and it goes on.” Dismayed by their lack of representation in festivals and playlists, most notably female artists, the New Orleans artist felt the need to speak louder through her art in order to break the glass ceiling. “I have always been a warrior, this Black woman fighting in a space where I didn\'t think I needed to fight,” she adds. “Conceptually, this album became bigger than just a sonic experience—it became an intention.” Also driven by a desire to bring her hometown to the fore, Richard wanted to tell the story of New Orleans filtered through a post-apocalyptic lens—an idea that started from some sketches she drew while working as a creative consultant for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Centered around an android alter ego she created called King Creole, *Second Line* is a futurist, dance-driven voyage intended to narrate her evolution from girl-group reality star to independent artist. “I had to figure out how to stand on my own in a system that didn\'t look at me as belonging in the genre that I was trying to tackle,” she says. “The android was the mainstream journey. Then the independent hustle comes, and you get to see King Creole as the human.” Read on as Richard guides you on her journey through self-discovery. **“King Creole (Intro)”** “It is a call to arms saying, if you thought you knew what this genre or what this electronic idea was, I\'m going to show you what it really is. And I\'m going to add New Orleans all over it right out the gate. So you know it\'s going to drip with soul and presence, and electronic is not just going to be an algorithm—it\'s going to be a soulful experience.” **“Nostalgia”** “I wanted to make sure that I paid homage to those who created and started a genre that is usually not recognized. Larry Heard was one of those incredible DJs and producers that I actually loved. I wanted to say, ‘Let\'s go back to Black, because this genre was started and developed by a culture that is Black.\' I\'m also introducing the mechanics of King Creole and her build—the first half of the album is the machine version of King Creole. It\'s the android—so that\'s why the beats per minute is fast and why we\'re dealing with a more processed sound.” **“Boomerang”** “Now we\'re playing with the vocals as the instrumentation to bring us through. So out the gate, we\'re hearing the vocoder, the harmonization between the vocals. And again, paying homage to a sound that was curated by Blacks. So again, disco becomes the next one. We\'re still in the future, but we\'re paying homage to the root. And with \'Boomerang,\' there are all these messages saying that the love comes back. If you give love out, it\'ll come back tenfold. So it\'s the idea that within this space, each record pays homage to the things that came before.” **“Bussifame”** “The word itself comes from New Orleans. We talk fast so everything we do is bled together. So really, it generally was ‘bust it for me’—like ‘bust a move’—but in New Orleans that sounds like ‘Bussifame.’ I was paying respects to the accent. I wanted to try to take it to the next level, bring New Orleans to the future. We don\'t hear New Orleans in this kind of sound, and that was the fun part—to create something that doesn\'t exist yet.” **“Pressure”** “To me, ‘Pressure’ was taking a traditional pop record and completely de-structuring it—adding bits of Chicago footwork, adding bits of go-go, adding bits of drum and bass, like really playing with movement within the bass and the sound. The record constantly moves. By the end of it, it goes into hip-hop. I\'m just spitting at that point. Like the cockiness to say that, \'I\'m going to give you a record that has four different transitions, and you will never know what to expect.\'” **“Pilot (A Lude)”** “It\'s a bounce record. It\'s an ode to Freedia, Katey Red, and Messy Mya, and I got to show love to my city. If I\'m going to talk about dance, I got to show love to where I grew up in. And again, calling the record \'Pilot,\' saying that we are the flyers of this. We steer this. Call us the pilots, because we are the connoisseurs of this thing that we do.” **“Jacuzzi”** “I always love juxtapositions, like applying something as catchy and melodic to the raunchiest of records. I\'ve always felt like Black women have been severely disrespected within us owning our sexuality. And on every album, I\'ve always had one song that best speaks to that. I really wanted to connect the relationship of one\'s body when you think about the intertwining of android to human; what that physically looks like sexually to the body, and how machine can make sense to human skin.” **“FiveOhFour (A Lude)”** “504 is an area code in New Orleans. You fight very hard to have that 504. The 504 legitimizes you as you\'re legit New Orleans. I produced it myself, showing that I didn\'t need a collaborator for this. It is purposely gritty, it is purposely pitched low. You\'re starting to see the shift in where I\'m getting out of android and going into human. But more importantly, I\'m showing how culturally important New Orleans is as the narrator of this process.” **“Voodoo (Intermission)”** “This is all *Blade Runner* at this point, the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. So King Creole comes out, and she’s telling everyone that she\'s on a mission to give you more. This is the human in her that wants that acceptance and love. She\'s having the vulnerability to say, \'All I want is your love. If you can just see me, I can give you all of this.\'” **“Mornin Streetlights”** “‘Mornin Streetlights’ starts with my mom speaking about how the only person she\'s ever loved is my father. They met when they were 15 and they\'ve been together ever since. I love music, and the reason why I\'ve been so tenacious at it is because I\'ve only known love like that. I\'ve only been taught to love the way my mom and dad have loved. That\'s what I grew up in, but it also makes sense as to the way I love my art. I love it with a tenacity that I can\'t give up.” **“Le Petit Morte (A Lude)”** “I wanted something that was honest. Even just start with the comment ‘This is the last time I\'m going to write a song about you.\' It\'s like going from talking about how I love this music to then saying, \'But I\'m tired of talking about my relationship with art and music.\' It is my purest and most honest moment and I\'m at my most vulnerable. And I freestyled that entire record. I did that as soon as I walked in. My dad played the piano on it and I just wailed. I didn\'t even know what was coming out.” **“Radio Free”** “You see the album now start to transition into hope, because I never sit in that dark place too long. So with ‘Le Petit Morte,’ it felt a little like death. It\'s acknowledging the death, whereas \'Radio Free\' is acknowledging the loss but understanding that you can play your freedom loud.” **“The Potter”** “‘The Potter’ is seeing the loss of worthiness but exposing it and saying, ‘Okay. But how do I see myself as worthy?’ It came to me when I was in church. What happens when you rust, rot, and you sit on the shelf? Will you be loved then? Who am I now? They let you go, and then how do you go on? How do you go on knowing you are this sculpted thing that once was so beautiful that is now worthless to those? And how do you find your worth within that place?” **“Perfect Storm”** “It’s literally being in a storm—having lost everything and being in Katrina and recognizing that we were homeless. It was beautiful the day before. It was hell the day it happened. And then, the next day, it was beautiful again, as if it didn\'t happen, and everything in its path was gone. My biggest theme and aim was to make the record as close to an actual storm as I possibly could—and that breath of fresh air that you feel when you realize that you\'ve lost everything and that you\'re still alive.” **“Voodoo (Outermission)”** “So now we\'re out of it, and now I\'m bringing you to what will be the next album in the trilogy. Because we\'re on album two after *new breed*. I\'m taking myself and removing it out of the art and the music industry, and now it is me as myself. And so I\'m trying to maneuver you guys out of that journey, and I\'m bringing you into what will be the next phase.” **“SELFish (Outro)”** “When people think of selfish, they think of it negatively, and I totally threw that out the window. I\'ve always loved to mess with interludes and make these hidden gems where people are like, \'Why wasn\'t this song longer?\' With this one, I thought it would be really cool to make an outro eight minutes. Black women, especially, we are punished for wanting more for ourselves. And I just want to encourage artists that it\'s okay to put yourself first in the process.”

In a promo video for Dinosaur Jr.’s 2016 LP *Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not*, singer-songwriter Kurt Vile offered a hearty endorsement as he listened to the album for the very first time: “Riffs, sad lyrics—that’s my Dino,” he said, his daughter seated beside him and his speakers blaring. “That’s the Dino I like.” Five years later, Vile’s formally entered the fray as a co-producer on *Sweep It Into Space*, a follow-up that further reinforces the notion that the legendary indie rock outfit is the rare band to actually improve since reuniting, as they did upon restoring their original lineup in 2005. You can hear touches of Vile’s influence on the off-kilter, piano-driven pop of “Take It Back,” as well as in the bittersweet chimes of first single “I Ran Away,” which sounds like a clear (yet distinctly fuzzy) descendent of Jackson Browne’s 1977 classic “Running on Empty.” But by design, Dino’s 12th full-length delivers and continues to refine exactly what Vile has come to love and anyone who’s paid attention for the last four decades might expect: wave upon strangely comforting wave of J Mascis’ supernatural guitar work (“To Be Waiting”) and natural melancholy (“I Ain’t,” which features loopy backing vocals from Vile), plus a Lou Barlow-penned highlight that ranks among his best (“Garden”).

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

Eric Church’s *Heart & Soul* was the most ambitious work of the country star’s career—a triple album showing off his depth, versatility, and chameleonic nature as an artist. Originally a fan club exclusive, the six songs making up *&* complete the trilogy, rounding out what was already an impressive showing from the Chief. *&* opens with “Through My Ray-Bans,” an emotive, image-rich illustration of how Church sees the world. “Do Side” is a slinky, stuttering jam session, sure to become a staple of Church’s fiery live shows. “Mad Man” is a breakup song as only Church could write one, with lines like “His thumbs-up has been grounded/Now it’s that bird he loves to fly.” Closer “Lone Wolf” caps off the record in grand fashion, complete with a gospel choir and one of Church’s finest vocal performances.

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

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

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

“I guarantee that most musicians have that groove or that vibe somewhere within them,” Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl tells Apple Music of the funk and disco rhythms that course through his band’s 10th LP. “They just may have never found the right time or place to let it out.” Recorded before the global pandemic took hold in early 2020, *Medicine At Midnight* is very much the sound of Grohl letting it out—a round of fleet-footed party rock inspired, in part, by ABBA, Prince, and David Bowie’s *Let’s Dance*, the 1983 Nile Rodgers-produced classic whose drummer, Omar Hakim, contributes percussion on several tracks here. Without breaking entirely from their highly reliable brand of stadium-ready slow burns (“Waiting on a War”) and riffy joyrides (“Love Dies Young”), the Foos make space for cowbell (“Cloudspotter”) and calls from the dance floor (the soulful title cut), handclaps and *na-na-na*s (“Making a Fire”). It’s a change that should probably come as no surprise. “I’m a drummer,” Grohl says. “I explained one time to Pharrell: ‘If you listen to *Nevermind*, those are disco beats, dude.’ If you’ve been in a band for a long time, you get comfortable in that place that people are familiar with. In some sort of attempt at longevity, you just have to be able to reach out and try things you’ve never done before.”

Towards the end of “Serotonin,” the opening track on girl in red’s debut album, some Norwegian dialogue emerges through the bracing alloy of indie rock and hip-hop. “That recording is where I’m talking to the doctor,” the singer-songwriter born Marie Ulven tells Apple Music. “My friend had to carry me out from a lobby in Bergen while I was making the album because I woke up, thought I had a blood clot in my brain, and was like, ‘I’m about to die.’ I’m like, ‘OK, it felt like my heart stopped beating.’” It’s a moment that exemplifies the album’s remarkable openness—manifested by Ulven’s emotional honesty and her anything-goes approach to making music. “Serotonin” details the Norwegian’s experiences with intrusive thoughts, and across the subsequent 10 tracks, she performs an unflinching internal audit, processing her feelings, anxieties, and behaviors and their effects on herself and her loved ones. It’s all cast in a free-spirited brand of alt-pop that dissolves genre boundaries and shreds the “bedroom indie” tag that accompanied her early DIY EPs. The result is something that she hopes will offer help to anyone who listens. “It would be really cool if I was able to say some shit about their lives, not just mine,” she says. “The best thing about music is when you hear a song where someone is explaining what you felt but you’re not able to say because you haven’t dared to try and figure it out, or haven’t had the time.” Let girl in red take you through the album, track by track. **“Serotonin”** “\[Intrusive thoughts\] can be really scary and make you feel really crazy if you don’t know what they are, where they’re coming from, and how to deal with them. It was so liberating, knowing that I’m not crazy and that I don’t want to do these things, and then I just felt like I was over it almost. Then I wrote the song. It was just a weird journey figuring out the rap parts, but they came really quick. It was not a hard time writing those lyrics. They poured out of me.” **“Did You Come?”** “There’s no proper chorus there. The entire thing is just like a vibe. It’s hooky, and that’s all you need. I started out with the lyrics first: ‘You should know better now to fuck it up and fuck around.’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is cheating. Someone is really fucking angry here, and this is a great way to get out this aggression.’ I started making really fast-paced drums and this guitar and this piano thing. It really made me see a lot of stuff in my head.” **“Body and Mind”** “I’ve experienced a lot of self-hatred this past year, which I’ve never really understood. Realizing that you are a person is really fucking weird. I think a lot of people struggle with accepting mortality. People fixing up their bodies, changing themselves because they just want to avoid the inevitable, which is dying and aging. This is me trying to comfort myself: ‘I’ve had my deepest cries for now/My heart’s out, my guard’s down.’ I’m accepting this shit, and I don’t want to beat myself up for being a person. I think aging as a concept is really beautiful because it just means that you’re alive still.” **“hornylovesickmess”** “It’s a fun, self-aware track about how my life led me to be a jerk to someone a little bit and also being really sad that touring had its toll on my relationship with this person. My favorite line is ‘Maybe on a bus for months straight, shit’s fun but I’m going insane/Like it’s been months since I’ve had sex, I’m just a horny little lovesick mess.’ Just this fun image of me being with 10 sweaty guys on the tour bus, and being in a bunk bed thinking about this one person that I just want to call right now.” **“midnight love”** “I had a friend that would always get a guy over late at night. Then he would leave in the morning and they would never hang out during daytime. It was really getting to her. I was like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of someone.’ I was that dude who would just call someone when I felt like ‘I need this and I know that you are able to give it to me, so therefore I will call you.’ I’d never had any bad intentions. But I was able to realize a few things about myself.” **“You Stupid Bitch”** “The story here is that I had to go and comfort someone because of their broken relationships with other people. But really: ‘I’m here, I could be yours right now and you wouldn’t be going through all of this if you just saw how present I am and how much I want to be with you.’ It’s about being so angry but still comforting someone: ‘I love you but you’re fucking stupid.’ It is a really intense song, but it’s going to go hard live.” **“Rue”** “I’m singing to my sister. I had to sleep in her bed for weeks straight because I’ve just been so scared. Every time I was about to fall asleep, I felt like my heart stopped beating, so I’d want to be in her bed in case I died. I’ve just been completely all over the place. This is singing to my family and loved ones that I want to get better. I’m trying to leave it all behind. I don’t want to make it worse for you guys. It’s also about realizing that you have to do the work. If you want to get better mentally, or if you struggle with depression or anxiety, it’s such a heavy realization figuring out that it’s you who has to do it.” **“Apartment 402”** “I live in Apartment 402. I’m imagining myself lying on the floor because I’ve lost every will to do anything. I’m singing about how shitty things have been for so long; I have a sense of hopelessness. But then I’m seeing the sun come in. You know when you see the sunlight hit dust? The room is opening up for me. I’m turning this place that I’ve had so many bad feelings towards into something beautiful and into a safe place and a good place—not just a place I could die in and nobody would know.” **“.”** “There’s something about the vocal performance that’s just like, ‘Oh, Marie, you really, really know what you’re saying right now.’ That song is really sad and I always want to cry thinking about it. It’s about the one that got away, really. A result of touring and being away a bit too long and not giving enough while being away. And how that can seem like you don’t care, but in reality, in my bubble, I was like, ‘I have absolutely no emotional capacity to be in another country and to give you what I think you need from me right now.’ It just ended up disappearing, and there wasn’t really anything more to say than to just have a full stop.” **“I’ll Call You Mine”** “It’s such a catchy, summery, driving song. It’s about letting someone in and hoping for the best, even though you’ve been fucked over a few times. I’ve had a tendency to think that nothing good could ever last. You know how sometimes you have fun but then we’re like, ‘Oh, something bad is going to happen.’ Two or three years ago, I’d have fun with my friends, and I’d be driving and I’d be like, ‘One of us is going to die first.’ That always happens, a real death element coming in, or ‘someone is going to get hurt’ element.” **“it would feel like this”** “\[The title\] *if i could make it go quiet* is all about the mental noise, all the feelings and thoughts that are so big they just take up your entire mental capacity and take over your entire body. This song feels like ‘If I could make it go quiet, it would feel like this.’ This place of quietness, this beautiful place where I’m able to be OK. I’m taking it all in. It feels like the credits to a movie because the album is so full, you could get to like, ‘Holy cow, what did I just listen to?’ There’s no words. You don’t need any. I’ve just poured my heart out in all of these songs.”

During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”

On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”

While 2020\'s solo debut *Petals for Armor* indulged in R&B, funk, and pop, the Paramore singer\'s latest collection deconstructs her loneliest and darkest feelings with a heavy dose of acoustic compositions, melancholy piano melodies, and well-placed electric guitar flourishes. Williams wrote and performed the entirety of *FLOWERS for VASES / descansos* and recorded it in her Nashville home, and it serves as an ode to the suffering that precluded *Petals for Armor*\'s arc of self-discovery. Williams\' voice once again takes center stage, intertwined within the record\'s pensive compositions, varying from barely a whisper (\"First Thing to Go\") to a simmering rage (\"Trigger\"). \"My Limb\" dabbles in the macabre (\"If you gotta amputate/Don\'t give me the tourniquet\"), the delicate \"Asystole\" compares a past relationship to the most fatal form of cardiac arrest, and the folk-tinged \"Good Grief\" focuses on how love slowly dissolves. This 14-track postmortem adds another chapter of honest reflection to Williams\' ever-growing repertoire, laying her past demons to rest.

For athletes of both the professional and amateur ranks, the time between seasons is an opportunity to recuperate and to sharpen their tool set for the next run. Superstar MC J. Cole, whose career has long been informed by both basketball metaphor and actual basketball playing (in May 2021, ESPN reported that Cole had joined the Basketball Africa League\'s Rwanda Patriots BBC), has crafted his *The Off-Season* mixtape in the same mold, affirming that if he’s done anything in the time since 2018’s *KOD* album, it’s get even better at what he does. The 12-track tape is at once a testament to his actual rhyme skill and the reverence he’s earned within hip-hop. He’s sourced production from Boi-1da, Timbaland, Jake One, and T-Minus, among others, and has words—but not verses—from Cam’ron, Damian Lillard, and a man he admits to having once had an actual physical alteration with, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. Though he takes time to shout out both Chief Keef and Dave East—conspicuously opposite forces in the realm of contemporary rap—proper features here come from fellow Fayetteville native Morray and “a lot” collaborator 21 Savage. Over the course of his career, Cole’s been known as something of a lone wolf—J CoLe wEnT pLaTiNuM WiTh nO fEaTuReS. But in the scope of the energy we get from him on *The Off-Season*, it’s less likely that he’s been avoiding other rappers than that he\'s just left them all behind.

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

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.

“It’s always been my mission to spread good vibes through music,” Joeboy tells Apple Music. “Love is the theme of this project—it’s the perfect blend between beauty and magic.” Blending Afropop beats with classic instrumentation, his first studio album takes an earnest journey through various love stories––from gaining confidence to reach out to the girl next door (“Lonely”), to recovering from unrequited love (“Focus”), and even navigating the beauty of boundaries (“Consent”). Yet the mood here remains light-hearted and celebratory as Joeboy showcases his versatility (“OH”), and he grows ever more self-assured (“Count Me Out”).

It\'s no surprise Joy Oladokun cites Tracy Chapman as an influence. Armed with a guitar and an achingly beautiful voice, she\'s cut from the same mold, capable of telling stories with clear-eyed appraisal and unflinching vulnerability. “To see a Black queer woman take the instrument of the standard Americana dude and make it her own and tell her story was maybe the most inspiring thing that could have happened to me,” Oladokun told Apple Music\'s Ebro Darden in Februrary 2021. Now, *in defense of my own happiness*, Oladokun\'s major-label debut, cements her place within a lineage of folk singer-songwriters documenting the complexities of the human experience. The album opens with “someone that i used to be,” a contemplative ode to growth and evolution that she approaches with a level of gentleness often reserved for others but rarely the self. “Having trouble giving grace to every one of my mistakes,” she admits in the opening verse, only to later find at least a bit of it: “Looking at the face inside the mirror with kinder eyes.” It\'s this sentiment that underscores the songs here. She\'s able to muster the strength to be fragile and imperfect, content to not know all the answers—to be a work in progress. Oscillating between facing inward and outward, Oladokun balances confession with observation, though never losing her sense of mercy for herself and others. Single “Bigger Man,” a wrenching duet with Maren Morris, illuminates the grit and patience required to subsist in the face of inequality. “I\'ve turned sticks and stones to an olive branch, I\'ve made a full house from a shitty hand,” she sings on the anthemic hook, “yet here I am, still gotta be bigger than the bigger man.” Oladokun is measured in her singing; she opts, instead, to let her lyrics do much of the emoting. But in moments when she does open up her voice—on songs like “if you got a problem” and “jordan”—the versatility of her artistry is made plain as the vocal traditions of gospel and soul come into dialogue with her Americana and folk. It culminates on the string ballad “breathe again,” as she prays for respite from the world and for the “faith to bend.” As much a monument to her experiences as a declaration of release from them, *in defense of my own happiness* musically reveals Oladokun as both the root and the branch, but it\'s the permission she grants herself to grow freely (and, by extension, her listeners as well) that is ultimately transcendent.

After Joyce Wrice declares, “Let\'s talk about all of the things that women gotta endure just to get some love” on “Chandler,” she spends the next 40 minutes of her debut album making good on her word. *Overgrown* finds the singer dealing in matters of the heart with an eye on both the past and the future. She has a clear grasp on R&B styles of old—and her gorgeous voice, clean and brimming with soul, lends itself well to that—but she isn\'t completely given to nostalgia. There\'s something modern about the way she slides between sounds and genres. And lyrically, she is very much a product of the time. Her confessionals are plagued by the characteristic indecision and on-again, off-again tension of a generation who gave the world terms like “situationship” and “bread-crumbing.” The desire for love and companionship is palpable, as is her desire to not get hurt by someone who doesn\'t know her worth. The features that make up *Overgrown* (which was executive produced by D\'Mile) complement Wrice\'s style while also expanding it. Next to rapper Freddie Gibbs on the hip-hop-inflected “On One” or singer-instrumentalist Masego on the jazzy “Must Be Nice,” she navigates sonic spaces that are more suited to her collaborators but which she no less bends to her will. The “That\'s on You” remix, which features the singer UMI, spotlights her Japanese heritage to become a standout. On solo tracks—namely the simmering stunner “Addicted” and the piano ballad “Overgrown”—she showcases the best of her voice, letting it soar over production that allows her the space to shine. This collection was three years in the making, and it\'s evident Wrice tended to it with love and patience; with a veteran\'s poise and a newcomer\'s inquisitiveness, *Overgrown* serves as an arrival and as notice.

“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”

There’s a track on *Chemtrails Over the Country Club*—Lana Del Rey’s sixth full-length album and the follow-up to 2019’s *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!*—that should have been heard earlier. “Yosemite” was originally written for 2017’s *Lust for Life*, but, in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that year, Del Rey revealed the song was “too happy” to make the cut. Its appearance is a neat summation of where you can expect to find the singer here. Total serenity might not have been achieved just yet, but across these 11 tracks, Del Rey, along with returning producer Jack Antonoff, finds something close to peace of mind, reflected in a softer, more intimate and pared-back sound. “Wild at Heart,” “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” and “Yosemite,” for example, all brim with (self-)acceptance. Returning to ”Yosemite” hints at something else, too: an artist looking back to make her next step forward. *Chemtrails* is scattered with references to its predecessors, from the “Venice Bitch”-reminiscent outro of the title track to “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” which might be seen as a companion piece to 2012 single “Ride.” Then there are the tracks that could easily have appeared on previous albums (“Tulsa Jesus Freak” wouldn’t be out of place on 2014’s dark-edged *Ultraviolence*) and lyrics we’ve heard before (“Dance Till We Die,” for example, references “Off to the Races” from her debut album *Born to Die*, while “Yosemite” calls back to the “candle in the wind” of *NFR!*\'s “Mariners Apartment Complex”). Del Rey’s MO has always been to tweak and refine—rather than reinvent—her sound, bringing her ever closer to where she wants to be. *Chemtrails*, however, is the first time she’s brought so much of her past into that process. As for where this album takes her? Somewhat unexpectedly towards country and folk inspired by the Midwest, rather than Del Rey’s beloved California; on “Tulsa Jesus Freak,” Del Rey pines after Arkansas. *Chemtrails Over the Country Club* makes no reference to the global pandemic in which it was partly created and released. And yet, amid a year of isolation, it was perhaps logical that one of this generation’s best songwriters would look inward. Here, Del Rey’s panoramic examination of America is replaced with something altogether more personal. On opener “White Dress,” she reflects on “a simpler time” when she was “only 19… Listening to White Stripes/When they were white hot/Listening to rock all day long.” It’s a time, more specifically, before she was famous. Nostalgia for it ebbs and flows as Del Rey’s vocals crack and strain, but any regret is short-lived. “I would still go back/If I could do it all again… Because it made me feel/Made me feel like a god.” Fame—and its pitfalls—are things Del Rey is more intimately acquainted with than most, and are a constant source of conflict on *Chemtrails*. But, as on “White Dress,” disillusionment most often turns to defiance. This reaches its peak by the album’s midpoint, “Dark but Just a Game,” an outstanding exploration of just how dangerous fame can be—if you let it. Where Del Rey was once accused of glamorizing the deaths of young artists who came before her, here, she emancipates herself from that melancholic mythology. “We keep changing all the time/The best ones lost their minds/So I’m not gonna change/I’ll stay the same,” she sings in an uplifting major-chord chorus that seems to look ahead to a better future. That sunnier disposition doesn’t dispel Del Rey’s unease with fame altogether, but she’s only too aware of what it’s brought her. For starters, the women she’s met along the way—paid tribute on the album’s final three, country-inspired tracks. “Breaking Up Slowly,” a meditation on the tempestuous relationship between Tammy Wynette and George Jones, was written with country singer-songwriter Nikki Lane (who toured with Del Rey in 2019), and Weyes Blood and Zella Day join Del Rey on the final track to cover Joni Mitchell’s “For Free.” On “Dance Till We Die,” meanwhile, the singer celebrates women in music who have come before her—and acted as guiding lights. “I’m covering Joni and I’m dancing with Joan,” she sings. “Stevie’s calling on the telephone/Court almost burned down my home/But god, it feels good not to be alone.” That same track may see her revisit her woes (“Troubled by my circumstance/Burdened by the weight of fame”), but it also finds her returning to an old coping mechanism. Just as on *Lust for Life*’s “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing” and *NFR!*’s “Happiness is a butterfly,” it’s time to dance those woes away. “I\'ll keep walking on the sunny side/And we won\'t stop dancin\' till we die.”

When she debuted in 1993 with the seminal *Exile in Guyville*, Liz Phair planted her flag as indie rock’s resident acid-tongued queen. The Chicago singer-songwriter, who recorded the project as an alleged track-by-track response to The Rolling Stones’ *Exile on Main St.*, challenged the machismo of the scene with a deadpan frankness that was just as evocative as it was shocking. In the years since, Phair has lived nine lives in the music biz: She released two follow-ups (’94’s *Whip-Smart* and ’98’s *Whitechocolatespacegg*) before unleashing 2003’s self-titled LP—a step into the mainstream that many critics interpreted as an anodyne attempt at radio success and, more importantly, a betrayal of her brusque beginnings. In classic Phair fashion, of course, she had the last laugh—it was her highest-charting album to date—and what followed was a pair of records that pushed the envelope even further. It’s been 10 years since Phair released *Funstyle*, a see-what-sticks sort of adventure in experimentalism that traversed everything from Bollywood to hip-hop. In that time, she focused on raising her son while juggling live performances and scoring TV shows—until quarantine, when she felt inspired to pick up where she left. “I cannot \[emphasize\] how weird it was to work on a record in a pandemic,” she tells Apple Music. “There were so many reasons why that ended up being stranger than anyone could have possibly imagined. And in fact, it’s the same as always.” The resulting album speaks to that sentiment, marking a reunion with *Guyville* producer Brad Wood, who brings a pop sheen to a collection of songs rooted in Phair’s DIY beginnings. It’s a record that examines how relationships work, and how distance can manipulate your perceptions of longing and intimacy. Below, Phair walks us through how each song on *Soberish* conveys her view of the world today. **Spanish Doors** “Anyone who’s a fan of my music knows that I’m fascinated by ordinary moments in conversations that somehow take on greater significance in the larger scope of a person’s life—how simply one piece of information can rock your world. And I really resonated with the idea that \[my friend, whose divorce inspired the song\], was in a public place when she found out that she was no longer going to be living the life that she was accustomed to. And how jumbled your internal landscape can be when you’re dealing with denial—‘I don’t want to face this.’ Bargaining, maybe there’s a way out of this. Devastation, in the sense that everything’s going to change and there’s nothing you can do about it. The stages of grief. How can you put that into a pop song? That’s the tricky challenge.” **The Game** “I think most of my romance these days is amped up. It’s not day-to-day, it’s overly large. And sometimes I think ‘The Game’ is really talking about how much you need ordinariness and day-to-dayness in a love relationship. And as exciting as it is to have a kind of a dramatic affair, it gets old, you get tired. You don’t want to keep resurrecting it—you want it to evolve into something more subtle. I think that surprises me.” **Hey Lou** “\[Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson\] are icons to me. Independent of each other, they were huge influences early on in my life. I just loved both of their music when I was a teenager. Both were making groundbreaking, compelling art. And then, when they got together as a couple, it just seemed impossible: How can these two titans coexist in an ordinary life? And it was really an accidental inspiration that turned into a real sort of love letter to two challenging, difficult artists who, by all accounts, had a very peaceful, loving relationship. So, I’m fascinated.” **In There** “It’s like you’ve been saying no to someone for a while and when they start to lose interest because they’ve been rejected a number of times, you’re like, ‘Goddamn it. I miss them.’ And then, you have to break in with your own inability to commit or your own inability to open yourself up to someone. Because for the longest time you could just say no, and you felt like they’d keep coming. And now you are realizing that you’ve said no, and it might be you that has the problem.” **Good Side** “‘Good Side’ is my mature ‘F\*\*k and Run.’ Instead of being in a pithy funk about my hookup, I can just kind of say to myself, ‘Well, he got a pretty good impression of me. So, no harm, no foul.’” **Sheridan Road** “That inspiration came from a longtime partner that also grew up in the same area \[in Chicago\] that I did. And there’s this particular road in it, Sheridan Road, that is the main artery connecting the suburbs to downtown. And every time you want to go home or any time you want to go out, you travel on this road. So, our being together on this road in the song brings up all the different life experiences that we’ve had. And yet, we’ve walked the same walk all our lives, but his life is totally different from mine. He’s got special places and I’ve got special places. How could we have been growing up in the same place the whole time and not have been aware of each other?” **Ba Ba Ba** “I’m hooking up with someone, it’s a new romance, I’m very excited about it. And in the space of a single song, it starts and is already over before it even began. I think of it as a boomerang song, because where you think it’s going and the person you think I am at the beginning of the song is sort of my ambassador self, the more appealing broadly to mainstream people, like, ‘I’m happy. Yay. Woo.’ And then, by the end of the song, I’m back to my usual self and the relationship is already over.” **Soberish** “I feel like we’re all doing the best we can right now. I feel like we, as a country, have gone through a time period that was very dark and difficult and an existential threat, so to speak. So, a lot of people felt the need to stay connected with reality without actually being entirely sober. How much of reality can I stand to absorb and how much do I need to push away from me and keep myself insulated from? ‘Soberish’ is just a more romantic and innocent way to look at that. I used to be the kind of person that could do this sober, but right now I need a shot.” **Soul Sucker** “You know when, if on a certain night, you have a hookup with someone and you like that person and it was perfectly fine, but it was just, like, that night. And then you keep running into them in your real world, and maybe they weren’t the person that you would be most excited for people to see that you hooked up with. You’re in your more elegant persona, and then here comes your hookup from back in the day. And you’re like, ‘I don’t know who this is. I don’t know.’ Like that.” **Lonely Street** “That is a very modern love song, because it sort of speaks to, yes, we can be connected by a screen, but what I really need is for you to be lying next to me, whispering in my ear. And there’s a sense of sadness in the relationship, but also a sense of isolation that we get by in our modern world with a substitute for what we really need, which is actual intimacy.” **Dosage** “I think of it as a modern-day ‘Polyester Bride’ in that I wrote it with the idea of going back to that bar, where Henry the bartender gave me all that good advice when I was young, and coming back as an older woman and seeing a young woman who is basically in the position I used to be in. So, I’m now looking at myself in the younger person who’s wasted, giving her advice, but also saying, ‘By the way, you’re doing fine. Nobody has it all together. Even now, at my age, none of those decisions were even the impactful ones.’” **Bad Kitty** “‘Bad Kitty’ is just embracing the mess that is my life. It’s an ongoing theme I have that I will always be out of place no matter where I go or who I try to be. And the manifestos that people think that I have, or that I have the answers, I really don’t. At the end, it’s the poem of just no helmet, no brake, no net, no rope, no more cocaine. You don’t really believe that I’m never going to do those things, do you? That’s really a kind of a throwing your hands up: I am a bad kitty. To this world, that’s how I am perceived. That’s how I identify myself as. It’s not such a bad thing, really—I get nine more lives. But at the same time, it doesn’t all make sense. It’s my emotional state and that’s how I make art. And it doesn’t always have to make sense. One thing does not have to be like, ‘Now I will never do this, and now I will do this.’” **Rain Scene** “I was here in my house, and I had bought a 3D microphone thing that I can put on my ears that will record surround sound of whatever space I’m in. And I knew I wanted the approaching storm of ‘Sheridan Road’ to break. I wanted the storm to actually release at the end of the album. So, this unexpected rain happened here in Southern California, and I just practically threw clothes on and threw this thing on. And I was, like, yelling to my son, ‘I’m going out in the rain! I’m going to record the rain!’ And I just stomped up and down the street around my house, recording puddles and me splashing in puddles. And I had Brad edit it in such a way that it took on a flavor of synthesizer of manipulated sounds at the end, and then I wrote a little song about it.”

Madvillain superfans will no doubt recall the Four Tet 2005 remix EP stuffed with inventive versions of cuts from the now-certified classic rap album *Madvillainy*. Coming a decade and a half later, *Sound Ancestors* sees Kieran Hebden link once again with iconic hip-hop producer Madlib, this time for a set of all-new material, the product of a years-long and largely remote collaboration process. With source material arranged, edited, and recontextualized by the UK-born artist, the album represents a truly unique shared vision, exemplified by the reggae-tinged boom-bap of “Theme De Crabtree” and the neo-soul-infused clatter of “Dirtknock.” Such genre blends turn these 16 tracks into an excitingly twisty journey through both men’s seemingly boundless creativity, leading to the lithe jazz-hop of “Road of the Lonely Ones” and the rugged B-boy business of “Riddim Chant.”

When *Papi Juancho* dropped amid the late-summer doldrums of 2020, many saw it as a return to raunchy form for Maluma. Reuniting with the Rude Boyz as his producers, the Colombian superstar seemed to turn his back, at least temporarily, on the luxurious pop and arena balladry of its full-length predecessor *11:11*. Yet if his fans have learned anything from the man behind worldwide smash hits like “Felices los 4” and “Hawái,” it’s to expect the unexpected. Timed with his 28th birthday, the surprise release of *#7DJ* once again presents the artist in a new light—in this case the Caribbean sunshine. Recorded in Jamaica with a mix of local musicians and studio familiars, this seven-track mini-album puts him in touch with reggaetón’s origins while exploring the roots and dancehall vibes prevalent in the island’s fruitful sounds. On “Tónika,” he connects with reggae royalty in Ziggy Marley, yielding a breezy bilingual duet that combines the organic and the electronic in extravagant fashion. No doubt enjoying the freedom of these sessions, Maluma indulges in “Agua De Jamaica” and the delectable R&B thump of “Chocolate.” When he fully commits to the live band experience, as on the exceptional “Desayun-Arte,” he leaves no doubt of the expansive effectiveness of his artistic range.

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

Over the past decade, Toronto’s Mustafa Ahmed has worn many hats: spoken-word poet, community activist, documentarian, member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policy-shaping Youth Advisory Council, and, more recently, a songwriter for pop stars like The Weeknd and Shawn Mendes. All of those accomplishments—not to mention a number of enthusiastic Drake endorsements—have made the long-awaited arrival of Mustafa’s debut release, *When Smoke Rises*, a major event, complete with an A-list guest list that includes James Blake, Sampha, and Jamie xx. But Mustafa has answered those heightened expectations with a set of deeply meditative acoustic-soul hymns that, at times, feel almost too personal and painful to bear. The title and cover shot of *When Smoke Rises* pay tribute to Toronto MC Smoke Dawg, a fellow member of the Halal Gang rap collective who was killed in 2018, and these eight songs reverberate with the trauma of losing loved ones too soon and the crises of faith that result from enduring endless violence. Atop the rumbling rhythms of “The Hearse,” Mustafa preps his slain friend’s body for a traditional Muslim funeral while questioning whether his natural peacemaker instincts can keep his desire for vengeance at bay. “Ali” is even more harrowing, an emotional plea for a friend to leave town to avoid the trouble coming to him, only for the trouble to find him anyway. (“There were no words to stop the bullets,” Mustafa ruefully admits, in a voice that isn’t so much calm as numbed.) But *When Smoke Rises*’ grim subtext is leavened by Mustafa’s natural melodic graces—even when recounting the worst days of his life, his songs summon the strength to carry on. “Just put down that bottle, tell me your sorrows,” he sings on the quiet yet resounding mission statement “Stay Alive,” a reminder that reckoning with the pain is the first step toward healing it.

On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”