Listening to Adrianne Lenker’s music can feel like finding an old love letter in a library book: somehow both painfully direct and totally mysterious at the same time, filled with gaps in logic and narrative that only confirm how intimate the connection between writer and reader is. Made with a small group in what one imagines is a warm and secluded room, *Bright Future* captures the same folksy wonder and open-hearted intensity of Big Thief but with a slightly quieter approach, conjuring visions of creeks and twilights, dead dogs (“Real House”) and doomed relationships (“Vampire Empire”) so vivid you can feel the humidity pouring in through the screen door. She’s vulnerable enough to let her voice warble and crack and confident enough to linger there for as long as it takes to get her often devastating emotional point across. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more,” she sings on “Free Treasure.” Believe her.
Ariana Grande is used to being in the spotlight, but over time, she’s gotten savvy at playing it. The pop star’s seventh studio album *eternal sunshine*—a lightly conceptual riff on the head-spinning 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, of whom Grande has said she’s a lifelong fan—feels like a mind game itself, blurring the lines between real-life references and theatrical bits. It arrives in the middle of a whirlwind tabloid-packed stretch—Grande married, divorced, and scored a starring role in Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation of *Wicked*—and she knows fans have questions. What’s true? What’s real? Ari gives a lot of things on this album, but answers aren’t one of them, a cunning reminder of how little transparency celebrities actually owe us. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Grande leans into the project’s thematic murkiness. “true story,” she says, is “an untrue story based on all untrue events,” and when asked about her own experience with the Saturn return, an astrology milestone referenced in the album’s only interlude, she shrugs. “It was chill. Nothing changed. Pretty uneventful.” She says she finds freedom in art because “you can really pull from anywhere,” and she describes the film as another “lovely costume” to wear. Her answers have flickers of defiance that feel like power. Whoever said albums had to be tidy, or true? “It doesn’t have to be an everlasting love story,” she tells Lowe. “Love is complicated. Showcasing both sides of it is what I tried to \[do\].” If there’s one thing these tracks make clear, it’s that she’s still Ari on the mic—she’s still hitting those high highs (“eternal sunshine”); still finding release on the dance floor (“yes, and?”); still sifting gold out of ’90s R&B (“the boy is mine”), a sequel to the leaked 2023 track “fantasize.” Her favorite? “imperfect for you,” a tribute to the friends who make up her inner circle. “We’re so lucky to have loved ones who are accepting and real with us no matter what,” she says. “We live in a time where everything is boiled down, but that song demands room for nuance, humanness, and complexity.”
Arooj Aftab’s star-making 2021 album *Vulture Prince* was marked by a distinct and undeniable sadness—a chronicle of grief following the death of Aftab’s younger brother Maher, whom the record was dedicated to. Despite its many contributors, *Vulture Prince* felt nearly monastic in sound and focus, conjuring images of someone processing pain alone and amidst the cosmos, and since its release, the Pakistani American singer and composer has opened up her sonic world to increasingly thrilling effect. *Love in Exile*, released in 2023, found Aftab expanding the jazz side of her sound in collaboration with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and now her fourth solo album *Night Reign* reflects her biggest leap yet. It’s the kind of record that makes you realize that Aftab can, when it comes to songwriting and style, do pretty much anything—from smoldering balladry à la the late Jeff Buckley and Sade’s endless-sounding quiet storm to trip-hop’s shadowy iridescence—without losing an ounce of raw emotion. Similar to *Vulture Prince*, *Night Reign* features a bevy of notable musicians pitching in throughout: Moor Mother delivers raw incantations over the foreboding structure of “Bolo Na,” while Iyer’s keystrokes are deeply felt across the patient tapestry of “Saaqi” and guitarist Kaki King lends her considerable talents to the refracted jazz-folk of “Last Night Reprise.” But it’s Aftab’s voice—rich, resonant, malleable, and instantly recognizable—that provides the true gravitational pull at the center of *Night Reign*’s universe, echoing through the sparse rustling of “Raat Ki Rani” and shimmering on the surface of the devastating closer “Zameen.” In the press materials for *Night Reign*, Aftab expresses a desire to “make music with and for everybody,” and this record is undoubtedly the fullest realization of those aims yet, revealing new contours in her songwriting and further cementing her as a singular talent in popular music.
“In my head, I was looking at this album like a TV show,” Nigerian singer Ayra Starr tells Apple Music about her sophomore album *The Year I Turned 21*. “Every song is an episode.” Structured as a series of life’s key moments, the album features the sonic adventures and lyrical savvy that saw Starr’s debut album, 2021’s *19 & Dangerous*, set Afropop streaming records. Brimming with self-confidence and unvarnished introspection, *The Year I Turned 21* covers a range of topics, from the fear of failure, newfound love, growing fame and fortune, and gender positivity to parental loss, intimacy, and mental wellbeing. Starr blends R&B and Afropop with stylistic borrowings from Latin pop, Jamaican dancehall, Nigerian highlife, gospel, and more. “Dem never know I kala,” she sings on “Commas.” The phrase (a mixture of pidgin and Yoruba, which means being underestimated based on looks) shows a keenness for being accessible, a theme explored throughout the album. Combinations of languages and instrumentals abound, buoyed by disparate samples that include ’70s R&B, a field recording, and taped confessions from family members. Production was provided by notable hitmakers that include LONDON, P2J, P-Prime, and Starr’s brother and frequent songwriting collaborator, Milar. The main attraction, however, remains Starr’s singing voice, which has grown along with her stardom. “This album has made me who I am now,” she explains. “It was proper character development.” Here, she talks through the album, track by track. **“Birds Sing of Money”** “My brother, who is a music video director, paid a guy to just sing a Fuji song about me, which is in the beginning of ‘Birds Sing of Money.’ This was a day after I released my first EP, as a gift. And the guy was just hyping me up. That’s a very Yoruba thing.” **“Goodbye (Warm Up)” (with Asake)** “This is one of my favorite tracks I’ve ever recorded. Ever. Before I sent it to Asake, I wasn’t even sure if he was going to like the song. He was like, ‘OK Ayra, give me some time.’ He sent me his verse in two days. I was like, ‘Oh, this is sounding good.’” **“Commas”** “‘Commas’ is about how God has blessed me and I’m really grateful for where I am in life and where I’m about to go. I’m grateful for just even being present in this moment and being alive. I feel like that’s what has brought me here, my gratitude and the continuous hard work I will keep putting into this job. God is good.” **“Woman Commando” (with Anitta & Coco Jones)** “‘Woman Commando’ is such an Afrobeats/amapiano banger in a way, because of the log drums, and I wanted different perspectives. I’ve been watching Coco Jones since I was 12 on Disney’s *Let It Shine*. I sent her a different song, which she loved, but she was like, ‘Ayra, I want to be on your Afrobeats vibe,’ and I was like, ‘Say less.’ Anitta is such an amazing musician and I really just knew that I wanted to go for that Latin element. Her verse is perfect.” **“Control”** “Is relinquishing control the same as submission? It depends on how the listener, the audience wants to take it. The lyric goes: ‘I’m lit tonight/You know my lips lie.’ I want you to take control. I want you to be the man. Do your thing. It’s not really about submission, it’s more like I’m giving you hints—take control.” **“Lagos Love Story”** “‘Lagos Love Story’ is about being in a very happy state of mind. We have that moment where we are so happy, \[that\] it starts to feel wrong. It starts to feel like, ‘I feel guilty for being this happy.’ You kind of feel relieved when something bad happens, because you’re not used to that amount of happiness. That’s what the song is about: being in a very high state of happiness.” **“Rhythm & Blues”** “When I released ‘Rhythm & Blues’ \[in 2023\], I didn’t know if it was the right time. The headspace I was in was a lot of work. I remember recording this song for the first time and how beautiful it was. Also, there is a lyric that goes, ‘My jigga, my muse,’ which I wrote because you don’t expect girl singers to refer to a male love interest as a muse.” **“21”** “The first demo of ’21’ was a 21st birthday gift from a friend. Writing it, I was kind of stuck because I don’t really know how to write about myself. I’m really good at writing about other people and the TV shows I watch and movies I watch, but never myself. So this album was the first time I actually put myself out there and learned how to write by myself.” **“Last Heartbreak Song” (with GIVĒON)** “GIVĒON’s verse made me cry the first time I heard it; I was so happy. I’ve always wanted to see what we would sound like together, because we both have really low range. GIVĒON came with the most perfect perspective, because anybody that has been in an argument with a man, or any man that’s been arguing with a girl, would know \[that\] ‘Last Heartbreak Song’ is literally the dynamic.” **“Bad Vibes” (with Seyi Vibez)** “Translating Yoruba to English is so annoying sometimes because it doesn’t just hit the same in English. In the hook, the lyric in Yoruba means ‘Don’t poke me in my eye or don‘t hit me in my eye. I don’t break. I’m good.’ It’s an idiom, right? For the guest feature, I wanted a perspective from somebody that would understand what I was trying to do with the song. I felt like that with Seyi Vibez, we sound amazing together.” **“Orun”** “‘Orun’ is a highlife song and a juxtaposition of a puzzle of life. Highlife songs are usually known for being joyful and you want to dance to it. But with ‘Orun,’ it’s kind of different because I’m talking about mental health and depression.” **“Jazzy’s Song”** “I’ve been wanting to sample a Don Jazzy production \[Wande Coal’s 2009 single ‘You Bad (feat. D’banj)’\] for so long and I’m glad I did. The title ‘Jazzy’s Song’ shows my respect for him and how much I admire him as a person, as an artist, and as a musician.” **“1942” (with Milar)** “This song is introspective and so vulnerable. I’ve been working for so long, and for the first time in my life, I took a vacation on my birthday. I remember being in the pool with a bottle of 1942 tequila, and I was like, ‘Wow, this moment makes everything all worth it.’ After all the time we’ve put into this job, all the hard work, everything I’ve done, that moment of relaxing in that villa, overlooking the ocean, made everything worth it.” **“The Kids Are Alright”** “Turning 21 is a big \[moment\] and you start to notice things—like certain behavioral patterns are reflections of certain childhood trauma, or things that you’ve gone through in the past. I noticed that I had not really mourned the death and the loss of my father, and it was something I was holding at the back of my head.” **“Santa” (with Rvssian & Rauw Alejandro)** “I’ve been a big fan of Rvssian for so long, and we’ve been wanting to work \[together\] for so long. I recorded the verse and was made to sing in Spanish, literally. It’s so crazy that, once it drops, it becomes this global song, and I’m so happy.”
Álvaro Díaz’s artistic evolution has been nothing short of remarkable. The Puerto Rican rapper heard on 2020’s hip-hop-centered *Diaz Antes* sounded little like the 2.0 version on his innovative and inventive 2021 follow-up *Felicilandia*. His now-established penchant for pop-wise productions and futuristic forms carries on with *SAYONARA*, an album that finds him on the cutting edge of reggaetón, among other styles. At a time when the pervasive dembow thump in Latin music can feel a bit too formulaic, he brings a freshness to the format on cuts like “KAWA” and the Quevedo team-up “QUIZÁS SI QUIZÁS NO.” He has obvious reverence for his pioneering predecessors, evident on the homage-heavy Feid collab “GATITAS SANDUNGUERAS VOL.1,” but he’s not beholden to genre norms: The beat switches on “EN PR NO HACE FRÍO” and “SIN PODERES” feel surprisingly natural, a testament to his ability to navigate shifting sonic environs. Further departures such as “QUIÉN TE QUIERE COMO EL NENE” and the balladic “YOKO” only add to his growing mystique.
“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.
Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”
“This album is actually an album of questioning. There\'s a lot of introspection, and within that, I\'m answering questions that I\'ve never had the space or capacity to ask,” Brittany Howard tells Apple Music about *What Now*, the Alabama Shakes singer-guitarist’s second solo album. “I was always so busy, I was always running around, I was on tour, I was preparing this, preparing that. This time I told myself when I would go in there and make songs in my little demo room, ‘No one\'s ever going to hear this,’ and it was very freeing.” Of course, people would end up hearing those songs, but that mindset helped Howard write from a brave new perspective. She dives into her personal history and guiding philosophy in a vulnerable way, like she did on 2019’s *Jaime*, but this time, the instrumental choices are bolder and more unexpected than ever before. “Power to Undo” is a folk-rock tune that showcases the album’s central theme. “You have the power to undo everything that I want/But I won\'t let you,” she sings. Once that’s revealed, the song descends into an acid-funk freakout, built around scratchy guitars and ramshackle drums. “‘Power to Undo’ is actually about freedoms,” she says. “A lot of people can experience this feeling of ‘I know I shouldn\'t do that. I know I need to keep moving in this direction.’ It\'s just about this thing chasing you down, and you\'re like, ‘No, you\'re not going to get me, I\'m not going to change directions.’” Elsewhere, on “Prove It to You,” Howard cues up gauzy synths and a dance-floor drum groove that’s made for an after-hours. It’s the furthest from the rootsy rock Howard rose to fame with, but the creative risks of *What Now* suggest an artist more interested in following a muse than replicating past successes. “I am always expanding and evolving and trying new things,” Howard says. “That\'s the most fun about being a creative person—trying things that challenge you and you don\'t know anything about.”
Brittney Spencer first came to prominence in 2020, releasing an EP, *Compassion*, that caught the ears and hearts of country fans and fellow artists, supergroup The Highwomen among them. It was both her powerful and versatile voice and nuanced, warmhearted songwriting that drew listeners to Spencer, who grew up performing and honing her craft in Baltimore before moving to Nashville in 2013. Given the acclaim she’s netted since releasing *Compassion*, Spencer could have rattled off a debut album in short order. Instead, she took her time crafting her first full-length project, an endeavor that clearly pays off on first listen. Opening track “New to This Town” is gentle and melodic, with fingerpicked acoustic guitar and understated but emotive vocals from Spencer. “I Got Time” gets feisty and playful, recalling the sass and swagger of early Miranda Lambert. Other highlights include “Bigger Than the Song,” a soulful tribute to the country genre, and the LP’s title track, a vulnerable account of Spencer’s commitment to her dreams. Guests on the album, produced by Grammy winner Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Tenille Townes), include Maren Morris, Grace Potter, Abbey Cone, and Sarah Buxton on backing vocals, as well as Jason Isbell on guitar.
Charley Crockett is a rare talent. His voice is one of country music’s finest, a rich baritone with a natural ache and emotion-wringing agility. That he pairs such a voice with an equally powerful flair for storytelling lands him among the ranks of the genre’s new saviors, like Tyler Childers or Sturgill Simpson, but with a style and sound all his own. That sound owes a lot to Crockett’s home state of Texas, which often serves as a character in his narrative-driven songs. On *$10 Cowboy*, Crockett found inspiration on the road, writing much of the album while touring in support of its predecessor, 2022’s concept record *The Man From Waco*. That journeyman’s perspective brings us stories of hitting rock bottom (“Gettin’ Tired Again”), chasing Lady Luck (“Ain’t Done Losing Yet”), and hanging on to love while “empire…rule\[s\] the world” (“Diamond in the Rough”). A can’t-miss tune on the record is “America,” a plainspoken, heart-wrenching lament of a fearsome, unforgiving country. Crockett cut *$10 Cowboy* live to tape at Austin’s Arlyn Studios with his longtime band and a string of ringers, with Billy Horton co-producing.
It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”
It’s not easy being ahead of your time: You have to wait years for the world to catch up. Such was the case when an 18-year-old Chief Keef followed up his anthemic major-label debut (2012’s *Finally Rich*) with a pair of self-released 2013 mixtapes (August’s *Bang, Pt. 2* and October’s *Almighty So*) that sounded obscure in comparison, prompting many a claim that he’d fallen off as quickly as he’d gotten on. These days, you can hear echoes of both projects everywhere, in particular *Almighty So*, the better of the two. You might argue that the slurry, intuitive style which has dominated the past decade of rap began here. Eleven long years later, the project’s sequel arrives after a half decade of teasing. (Keef previewed *Almighty So 2*’s initial cover art way back in 2019.) Hip-hop’s reinvented itself a dozen times over in that time span, perhaps the only constant being Keef’s enduring influence. On *Almighty So 2*, the 28-year-old veteran sounds as if he’s well aware of just how tall his legacy looms. “I done been through so much smoke to where I couldn’t even see myself,” he raps in his oft-copied swing on “Treat Myself” before busting out a classic Sosa-ism: “Diamonds shining off my charm, I think I Christmas tree’d myself!” He spits fire and brimstone over sinister church choirs on “Jesus,” puffs out his chest on the soulful “Runner,” and offers up the most demented Scarface impression since Future circa 2011 on “Tony Montana Flow.” And on “Believe,” the former teenage phenom is now a man who’s done some soul-searching in his time off from shaping the sound of modern rap.
Faye Webster’s fifth album marks the point of full immersion when it comes to the Atlanta songwriting prodigy’s sly, shifting aesthetic. The tones are richer and deeper; the arrangements expand and breathe like massive lungs; her voice layers over itself and ripples, decadent and deeply felt. Webster’s genre-blending approach may have been slightly overstated in the past—a result of her early association with Atlanta’s rascally, defunct hip-hop crew Awful Records—but her sonic playfulness has never been more fully realized than it is on on *Underdressed at the Symphony*. Slinky, flute-dotted R&B is situated up against sumptuous country pop and grungy flips on ’50s sock-hop rock music; longtime friend and rap chameleon Lil Yachty pops up on “Lego Ring” as the pair switch off from a Weezer-esque chug to spacey, astral psych-rock. Lyrically, *Underdressed at the Symphony*—which was written and recorded coming off of a breakup—carries Webster’s now-trademarked mixture of emotional intimacy and straightforward humor. She finds potency in simple sentiments (“Thinking About You,” “He Loves Me Yeah!”), and on the sparse hyperpop “Feeling Good Today,” she details the small pleasures that come with moving through one’s daily existence. “I used to be self-conscious/Well, really, I still am/I’m just better at figuring out why,” Webster ruminates over the lush guitars of “Wanna Quit All the Time,” one of several songs that feature Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. This is music that’s as mesmerizing as it is disarmingly personal, and *Underdressed at the Symphony* represents an artist who, similar to cosmic kin Cass McCombs, seems increasingly intent on proving she really can do anything.
One of 2020s hip-hop’s most remarkable talents, Flo Milli put the rap game on notice with “Beef FloMix” and “In the Party.” The Mobile, Alabama, artist’s savagely confident takedowns of haters and wannabes made her debut project *Ho, why is you here ?* an instantly adored standout in a crowded and expanding pool of new entrants. Her 2022 follow-up *You Still Here, Ho ?* kept up that momentum with songs like “Bed Time” and “Conceited,” signaling her pop chops to those who dared to count her out. Whether a continuation of or conclusion to the more-than-implied titular saga, *Fine Ho, Stay* serves to solidify her position as the worthy successor to a proud tradition of brash women in rap. If the explicit opener “Understand” and its bar-by-bar punchlines somehow don’t make it clear enough, Flo Milli operates on a different level than the competition. It certainly doesn’t hurt that she broke big on the charts with “Never Lose Me,” included here as a remix with SZA and Cardi B features as well as in its original solo take. The supreme energy of that big hit resonates with the similarly sleek “Can’t Stay Mad” and “Life Hack.” Working with seasoned producers like Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E. and Lex Luger, she drops post-trap anthems “New Me” and the Monaleo-backed “Neva” opposite winking Southern rap throwbacks like “Got the Juice.” The sole male guest she deigns to allow on the record, Gunna, rightfully treats her like a lady on his gentlemanly “Edible” verse.
When alt-pop singer-songwriter girl in red completed her second album, *I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!*, and looked back over what she’d made, she saw a record of polar opposites. “The themes are being on top of the world and feeling in love and feeling amazing and living peak moments from life,” Marie Ulven, the Norwegian artist behind the project tells Apple Music, “and then other moments are reflecting on not being so good.” The follow-up to 2021’s breakthrough *if i could make it go quiet* is a striking leap forward for Ulven, building on the propulsive anthems that wowed crowds when she bagged a support slot on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour in 2023. It’s a euphoric record that swaggers from exuberant indie pop to soaring balladry, taking in gliding synth-y sing-alongs and frantic rock anthems along the way. “I wanted to make something that was a very delicate production with cool energy and great lyrics,” says Ulven. “I wanted to elevate what I’ve done before.” It was a process, she states, that involved trusting her instincts. “Something I was really thinking of while making the album was not thinking too much and going with your intuition,” she says. It has resulted in a dazzling second record. Read on as girl in red guides us through it, track by track. **“I’m Back”** “Even before I had a bunch of the other songs, I was like, ‘“I’m Back” could be the first track.’ It goes through different levels of being hopeful and then feeling like you’re better, but then tapping into that ‘I have been sad.’ The journey for this song is the journey for the whole album, in a way. Also, I’m referencing \[*if i could make it go quiet*’s opener\] ‘Serotonin’ in there—it’s the opposite of ‘Serotonin’ and the perfect opening for an album that’s about doing it again.” **“DOING IT AGAIN BABY”** “This is a similar song to ‘I’m Back,’ where it’s like, ‘I’m happy, I’m positive, I’m energetic, I’m feeling good about myself,’ but it’s on the other side of the scale. Instead of being, ‘Oh, I think I’m doing better,’ it’s like, ‘Fuck yeah, I’m the coolest person in the world!’ It’s capturing the extreme of being back, and that’s why I think it’s a fun song to have right after ‘I’m Back.’ It takes it to a whole new level and it really wakes you up a little bit. It’s got everything in there—banjo, fireworks, weird vocal stuff going on. It’s a fun song. It’s definitely one of the coolest songs I’ve ever made.” **“Too Much”** “I think ‘Too Much’ is fun to have right after ‘DOING IT AGAIN BABY’ because that song is about being a lot and then ‘Too Much’ is about being confronted with the world again, or people around you who think you’re a lot. On the emotional journey of the album, this is where there’s a little bit of a dip because there’s a bit of sadness in here as well as ‘No, I’m going to be exactly how much I need to be.’ I feel like it’s an empowering song \[about\] not letting anyone dampen you or tone you down—a really hooky pop song and with fun stuff in there but also a sad song. It was really important to have different energies and different feelings on the album.” **“Phantom Pain”** “Generally on this record, we’re operating with a lot of craziness. And similarly to ‘DOING IT AGAIN BABY,’ this is the crazy version of feeling good, the crazy version of being into someone and being smitten. This is about when I met my girlfriend three years ago, but before we called each other girlfriends, we were dating, just not officially. It turned out she wasn’t really free to date, so she cut me off the day after we had met and we were making out. The song is about the heartbreak I had that week, because I was so heartbroken and I didn’t even know her. It’s hilarious because it’s impossible to have heartbreak for someone that you don’t love yet—you don’t know them. So I thought it was fun to play with phantom pains—it’s like you have pains from somewhere in your body that doesn’t exist anymore but it’s heartache phantom pain.” **“You Need Me Now?” (with Sabrina Carpenter)** “It’s not linked to my girlfriend and I actually ending up together, but it’s a song about a person taking you for granted for a very long time and then dumping you, and then basically coming back when they realized, ‘Holy shit, wait, actually maybe this wasn’t that bad.’ A lot of people tend to think the grass is greener on the other side, but I saw this Facebook post from some old lady saying, ‘No, the grass is greener where you water it.’ I think there’s some truth in that. This song is also about standing up for myself and saying, ‘No, I won’t have your bullshit anymore and I’m not going to let you come back and walk in like nothing ever happened because you ruined me.’ It’s got an empowering vibe to it. \[It’s\] even more fun with Sabrina because, even though she’s singing from the me perspective, she’s also the friend that really agrees with you, like, ‘No, they’re bad for you. Don’t take them back.’” **“A Night to Remember”** “This is about the night I met my girlfriend. It’s basically a track that goes through the whole night. It starts with being smitten by just seeing her, being into her, then going through the different parties we went to. People were doing drugs, people were drinking, it was insane, it was like a night in the movies. The song builds up into this big indie electronic moment and it sounds like a lot of love is in the air. The music sounds like love. It’s attraction and sexual chemistry—all those things are going on—and then it goes into this really fun dance sing-along.” **“Pick Me”** “This is about jealousy and insecurity because my girlfriend is bisexual and there was a time—I have my reasons—where I was very jealous of this one guy. I was also very jealous of guys in general. I realized that I was really insecure in my relationship because I was constantly scared that she was going to leave me. I was confronted with a lot of my insecurities and I had to put them somewhere. I put them into this song. Even though my girlfriend has reassured me so many times, it still somehow just goes into my left ear and out of my right ear. It’s been impossible to even make me feel safe but I know it’s all in my head and it’s not on my girlfriend. I know it’s my problems. By the way, to anyone reading, we’re doing so much better now! I’ve learned to communicate, which is the most important thing because no one’s a mind reader, especially not when it comes to stuff like this.” **“Ugly Side”** “‘Ugly Side’ is reflecting after exposing myself when I feel \[the way\] I do in ‘Pick Me.’ It’s talking about those negative qualities, acknowledging that I’m not perfect and that I have ugly sides. It’s a funny play on ‘Oh, no, don’t take my picture on this side, my ugly side.’ This song is talking about ‘Why do I get so angry sometimes? Why do I lose my shit? Why am I so imperfect?’ It’s consciously debating why I have these shifting sides. It’s just a little self-reflection song.” **“New Love”** “This is about heartbreak and struggling to see someone that you’ve really loved moving on. It’s about wanting and longing for that person and knowing that they’re never going to want you again—and that a lot of heartbreak comes with that. I definitely was struggling with some heartbreak for a very long time, and then this song is, ‘I think it’s the end of that era, I hope. I think this might be the last song I write about this thing.’ It felt like closure to some old stuff.” **“★★★★★”** “I call this song ‘The Factory,’ people can reference it as ‘The Factory’ or just ‘Five Stars.’ It’s basically the overarching themes that I was going through making the album. I had so much doubt but then I was able to come out of it and be like, ‘No, this album is fucking amazing. This is the best shit I’ve ever done.’ This is just a fun little weird song about making songs at the factory. And are they hits? Are they five-star songs? Are they the top-notch songs that I really believe they are or am I being delusional? Because you have to be delusional. This song is about artistic doubt. That’s the best way I can put it. Also, I’m using the percussion from what I think will be the opener on album three, so I was like, ‘It’s a fun little nugget for people to hear this beat now.’ When album three comes out, they’ll be like, ‘Whoa, that’s the same beat!’”
IDLES’ fifth album is a collection of love songs. For singer Joe Talbot, it couldn’t be anything else. “At the time of writing this album, I was quite lost,” he tells Apple Music. “Not musically, it was a beautiful time for music. But emotionally, my nervous system needed organizing, and I needed to sort my shit out. So I did. That came from me realizing that I needed love in my life, and that I had sometimes lost my narrative in the art, which is that love is all I’ve ever sung about.” From a band wearied by other people’s attempts to pin narrow labels like “punk” or “political” to their expansive, thoughtful music, that’s as concise a summary as you’ll get. It’s also an accurate one. The Bristol five-piece’s music has always viewed the world with an empathetic eye, processing the human effects and impulses around subjects as varied as grief, immigration, kindness, toxic masculinity, and anxiety. And on their fourth album, 2021’s *CRAWLER*, the aggression and sinew of earlier songs gave way to more space and restraint as Talbot turned inward to reckon with his experiences with addiction. For *TANGK*, that experimentation continued while the band’s initial ideas were developed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in London during late 2022, before the record was completed with *CRAWLER* co-producer Kenny Beats joining the team to record in the south of France. They’ve emerged with an album where an Afrobeat rhythm played out on an obscure drum machine (“Grace”) or a gentle piano melody recorded on an iPhone (“A Gospel”) hit with as much impact as a gale-force guitar riff (“Gift Horse”). Exploring the thrills and the scars of love in multiple forms, Talbot leans ever more into singing over firebrand fury. “I’ve got a kid now, and part of my learning is to have empathy when I parent,” he says. “And with that comes delicacy. To use empathy is a delicate and graceful act. And that’s coming out in my art, because I’m also being delicate and graceful with myself, forgiving myself, and giving myself time to learn. I don’t want to lie.” Discover more with Talbot’s track-by-track guide to *TANGK*. **“IDEA 01”** “It was the first thing \[guitarist and co-producer Mark\] Bowen worked on, and Bowen, being the egotistical maniac that he is, called it ‘IDEA 01’ because he forgot that it was actually idea seven. But, bless him, he does like attention. But, yes, it was the first song that was written in Nigel’s studio. Bowen sat at the piano and started playing, and it was beautiful. ‘IDEA 01’ is different vignettes around old friends that I haven’t seen since Devon \[where Talbot grew up\], and the relationships I had with them and their families, and how crazy certain people’s families are. Bowen’s beautiful piano part reminded me of this song we wrote on the last album, ‘Kelechi.’ Kelechi was a good friend of mine who sadly passed away, and I hadn’t seen him since I waved him off to move to Manchester with his family. I just had this feeling I was never going to see him again. Maybe I’m writing that in my head now, but he was a beautiful, beautiful man. I loved him. I think maybe if we were still friends, part of me could have helped him, but that’s, again, fantasy I think.” **“Gift Horse”** “I was trying to get this disco thing going, so I gave Jon \[Beavis, drummer\] a bunch of disco beats to work on. And Dev \[bassist Adam Devonshire\] is bang into The Rapture and !!! and LCD Soundsystem, and he turned out that bassline real quick. I wrote a song around it, and it felt great. It was what my intentions of the album were: to make people dance and not think, because love is a very complex thing that doesn’t need to be thought. It can just be acted, and worked on, and danced with. I just wanted to make people move, and get that physicality of the live experience in people’s bones. I had this concept of a gift horse as a theme of a song, and it sang to me. I like that grotesque phrase, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ It’s about my daughter, and I’m very grateful for her, and our relationship, and I wanted to write a beast of a tune around her.” **“POP POP POP”** “I read \[‘freudenfreude’\] online somewhere. It was like, words that don’t exist that should exist. Schadenfreude is such a dark thing, to enjoy other people’s misery, so the idea of someone enjoying someone else’s joy is great. Being a parent, you suddenly are entwined with someone else’s joys and lows. I love seeing her dance, and have a good time, and grow as a person, and learn, so I wanted to write a song about it.” **“Roy”** “It’s an allegorical story that sums up a lot of my behavior towards my partners over a 15-year period where I was in a cycle of absolute worship and then fear, jealousy and assholery. I wanted to dedicate it to my girlfriend, who I call Roy. She’s not called Roy. I wanted it to be about the idea of a man who is in love and then his fears take over, and he starts acting like a prick to push that person away. Then he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover, realizing what he’s done, and he apologizes. He is then forgiven in the chorus, and rejoicing ensues.” **“A Gospel”** “It’s a reflection on breakups, which I think are a learning curve. I think all my exes deserve a medal, and they’ve taught me a lot. It’s really a tender moment of a dream I used to have, then \[it\] dances between different tiny memories, tiny vignettes of what happened before, and me just giving a nod to those moments and saying goodbye, which is beautiful. No heartbreak, really. I’ve been through the heartbreak now. It’s just me smiling and being like, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you very much.’” **“Dancer” (with LCD Soundsystem)** “The best form of dance is to express yourself freely within a group who are also expressing themselves freely, the true embodiment of communion. The last time I had this sense of euphoria from that was an Oh Sees gig at the \[Sala\] Apolo in Barcelona. I closed my eyes and let the mosh push me from one side of the room to the other and back. I didn’t open my eyes once, I just smiled and was carried by this organism of beautiful rage. Dancing’s a really big part of my personality. I love it. My mum always danced. Even in her most ill days \[Talbot’s mother passed away during the recording of 2017 debut *Brutalism*\], she would always get up and dance, and enjoy herself. I dance with my daughter every day that I have her. I think it’s magic and important.” **“Grace”** “It all came out of nowhere. I had this beat in mind for a while—I was thinking of an aggro Afrobeat kind of track. But it didn’t come out like that. It came out like what happens when Nigel Godrich gets his hands on your Afrobeat stuff. I asked Nigel to make the beat, and he chose the LinnDrum \[’80s drum machine\]. The LinnDrum changes the sound of a beat, the tone of a drum, the cadence of a beat, it changed the beat completely. It’s a very, very delicate thing, a beat. It sounded like a different song to me. It sounded amazing. And that’s where the bassline came from. And then that’s where the vocals came from. It felt a bit uneasy for a long time because it came out of nowhere. Me and Bowen were like, ‘Is this right? Is this complete?’ I think it just has to feel like you, like it is part of you and what you mean at the moment, that’s all. An album’s an episode of where you’re at in the world in that point in time.” **“Hall & Oates”** “I wanted to write a glam-rock pounder about falling in love with your boys. My ex and I used to joke about this thing where you make love to someone for the first time, and then the next day, you’re walking on air, and it feels like Hall & Oates is playing. The birds are singing, you’re bouncing around and everything’s great. I wanted to use that analogy for when you make friends with someone for the first time, and they make you feel good, lighter, stronger, excited to see them again. And that’s what happened in lockdown: I made friends with \[Bristol-based singer-songwriter\] Willie J Healey and my mate Ben, and we went on bike rides whenever we could, getting out and feeling good post-lockdown. It gave me a sense of purpose again. It felt like I was falling in love.” **“Jungle”** “I was trying to write a jungle tune for ages. The guitar line was a jungle bassline that I had but it just never fit what we were writing. And then Bowen started playing the chords on the guitar and it transformed it into something completely different. It completely revitalized what I’d been dragging through the mud for five years. Bowen made it IDLES, made it real, made it believable, made it beautiful. And then it reminded me of getting nicked, so I wrote a song about different times that I’ve been in trouble.” **“Gratitude”** “This was a real struggle. Bowen was really obsessed about doing interesting counts with the beats. I just wanted to make people dance and create infectious beats. We were coming from very different angles, but we loved this song that Bowen had made. I was like, ‘I get it, Bowen. This is insane. I love it, but I can’t get it.’ We hung on to it for ages, and then Nigel really helped us out, he created spaces and bits here and there by turning things down and moving everything slightly. Then Kenny helped me out, and got rid of the stupid counts, I think, and helped me write it on a 4/4 beat. And then they changed it back. I just come in in weird places. Everyone chipped in, because everyone believed in the song.” **“Monolith”** “I was fascinated by films where four or five notes are repeated throughout and create this monolithic motif. There’s a sense of continuity but the mood changes depending on certain things like tone and instruments. I wanted to do that over a song, and we got our friend Colin \[Webster\] from \[London noise rock unit\] Sex Swing to do the sax, we did it on different instruments that Nigel had. Nigel went away and basically put it all through the hollow-body bass. It reminded me of a documentary from a series called *The Blues* that Martin Scorsese curated. *The Soul of a Man* \[directed by Wim Wenders\] is about a song \[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’\] getting sent into space. If any aliens get this capsule, they’ll hear this song being played from a blues artist. It created a really beautiful and deep picture in my mind. It felt like this monolith drifting in the ether. I started singing a blues riff behind it, a Skip James kind of thing. I think it’s a beautiful way to finish the album—us drifting in the ether.”
Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.
Whether singing in Spanish or in English, Kali Uchis continually proves herself to be a versatile performer. Following 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios)* and its hit single “telepatía,” the Colombian American singer eventually boasted that she had two more albums, one in each language, more or less at the ready, the first being 2023’s soulful *Red Moon in Venus* and the next being *ORQUÍDEAS*. With lyrics primarily (though not exclusively) in Spanish, she delivers an exquisite pop-wise R&B set here, one replete with clubby highs and balladic depth. The dance floor is well served with cuts like “Me Pongo Loca” and “Pensamientos Intrusivos,” her ethereal vocals elevating them further. The collaborations reflect her journey as well as her status, as she links with superstar KAROL G on the polished perreo throwback “Labios Mordidos” and música mexicana sensation Peso Pluma for the romantic duet “Igual Que Un Ángel.” On “Muñekita,” she bridges her two worlds with the aid of Dominican dynamo El Alfa and City Girls rapper JT, who combine to produce an irresistible dembow moment.
When KAYTRANADA left the 2021 Grammys with two awards (Best Dance/Electronic Album for 2019’s *BUBBA* and Best Dance Recording for “10%”), he made history as the first Black and first openly gay artist to win the former category. The industry recognition was long overdue for the producer, who had been building a devout following for nearly a decade. “In my mind I was finally a true artist,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. After relocating to Los Angeles, he channeled that confidence into making his third solo album, *TIMELESS*: “It felt more serious—more legit. I was still having fun making *TIMELESS*, but making *BUBBA* was another type of fun where I didn’t really take it seriously.” Like its predecessor, *TIMELESS* is a collection of club grooves for catching a vibe. It’s packed with guests who effortlessly acclimate to KAYTRANADA’s singular sound while imprinting their own touch. PinkPantheress’ saccharine voice is richer on the squiggly house beat of “Snap My Finger,” Ravyn Lenae offers breathy seductions on the hard-edged R&B of “Video,” and Thundercat delivers comical disses in soothing falsetto on the jazzy hip-hop of “Wasted Words.” Back-to-back tracks “Do 2 Me” (featuring Anderson .Paak and SiR) and “Witchy” (featuring Childish Gambino) hit an energy peak, their tales of late-night infatuation framed by sultry, body-enveloping production. If *BUBBA* was about finding KAYTRANADA’s sound, *TIMELESS* expands it. The producer is in what he calls his “experimental bag,” and Channel Tres joins him in it on the incendiary “Drip Sweat.” Channel’s trademark baritone drifts in and out of disembodied Auto-Tune, dropping bars over punchy drums and breaks sampled from Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” “We were just making the funkiest thing, like how it would sound if we did new jack swing today,” KAYTRANADA says. “What is that Bobby Brown energy? We were trying to give it that.” He tries out AI sampling on the breezy instrumental “Seemingly.” He also sings on a track for the first time on the Weeknd-inspired “Stepped On,” creating his version of ’80s New Wave with strobing synths and a dark disposition. With a new skill unlocked, *TIMELESS* makes room for another KAYTRANADA evolution.
“There\'s something about this record that feels like I\'m coming home,” Maggie Rogers tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe about her third full-length *Don\'t Forget Me*, which is the Maryland-born singer-songwriter\'s first project since completing her master\'s degree in religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School. Being away from the music business, she says, allowed her time to think about her life as an artist while also diversifying her mind. “I was trying to put so much in music,” she says. “Now my life is a lot more balanced and a lot more full—and I\'m not saying by any means I have it figured out.” *Don\'t Forget Me* finds Rogers still on a path toward “figuring it out,” marrying the kineticism that made her breakthrough single “Alaska” such a sensation eight years prior with bigger sonic structures and wiser lyrics. Opener “It Was Coming All Along” thrums with plush synths and strings, as well as a sampled phone call that brings Rogers\' lyrics about “trying to be brave these days” to life. “The Kill” possesses a grandness that recalls a sunny drive on an open road, which makes its story of a doomed relationship hit even harder. That energy, together with a wiser perspective, enabled her to her explore stories from beyond her personal realm. Take “So Sick of Dreaming,” a sauntering, Nashville-tinged cut about the travails of twentysomething life punctuated by a frustrated monologue about being stood up for Knicks tickets. (“And by the way, the Knicks lost,” she dryly notes.) It\'s based on “a story that a friend had told to me the night before about another friend of hers that was going through this thing,” she says. “I never would\'ve thought it was material; I had only written songs about things that were so personal to me.” Broadening her songwriting is another way Rogers lets loose on *Don\'t Forget Me*—and it\'s apparent across the album\'s 10 songs, which are confident even when they\'re grappling with regret and frustration. “I\'m so focused and clear about the things that I want, and I\'ve had different goals for every record or things that I really want to accomplish,” Rogers says. “The goal on this album cycle is, I\'m trying to have fun. And if I don\'t think it\'s going to be fun, you probably won\'t find me there.”
As important as it is to foreground the Tuareg/Nigerien heritage of Mdou Moctar’s scorching psychedelic rock, it’s just as important to note its connection to the American underground. After all, *Funeral for Justice* isn’t “folk music” in any touristic or anthropological sense, and it’s probably as (if not more) likely to appeal to fans of strictly American weirdos like Ty Segall or Thee Oh Sees as anything out of West Africa. Still, anyone unfamiliar with the stutter-step rhythm of Tuareg music should visit “Imajighen” and the lullaby-like hush of “Modern Slaves” immediately, and it pleases the heart to imagine a borderless future in which moody teenage guitarists might study stuff like “Sousoume Tamacheq” the way Moctar himself studied Eddie Van Halen. As with 2021’s breakthrough *Afrique Victime*, the intensity is astonishing, the sustain hypnotic, and the combination of the two an experience most listeners probably haven’t had before.
“I have to write about how I feel,” Rachel Chinouriri tells Apple Music. “If I don’t feel it or can’t relate to it, I can’t write about it.” Since breaking out in 2022 with viral track “So My Darling,” the South London singer-songwriter has done just that, penning bittersweet indie bops and devastating ballads that have been fueled, most often, by stories of heartache. You’ll find plenty of that on this debut album, but Chinouriri also goes deeper, with songs about self-contempt, loss, grief, and feeling like you don’t belong right when you’re supposed to be killing it (see “The Hills,” her cathartic exhale about a five-week songwriting trip to LA, which left her feeling lonely, under pressure, and creatively stumped). For Chinouriri, *What a Devastating Turn of Events* was shaped by “the journey of being in your early twenties. You finally leave home and then you are kind of becoming an adult, but you don’t really feel like an adult,” she says. “You’re still looking at the grown-ups to give you advice, but you are the grown-up. It is a weird journey of trying to discover yourself. Being able to feel and then turn it into song—it’s a privilege to have that as a gift.” But *What a Devastating Turn of Events* also feels rooted in much more than just a bumpy life transition, and Chinouriri’s lyricism is laced with far more wisdom than most people can apply to those chaotic early-twenties years. Either way, the singer-songwriter wanted her debut to capture what it’s like to be shattered by a sudden event. And so, the record opens with sharp-witted, mostly upbeat indie-pop moments (plus some “wonky” bits, as Chinouriri puts it), before the crushing title track—written after the singer-songwriter’s cousin tragically took her own life—shifts this album, and its creator, on its axis. What follows are some of Chinouriri’s most raw, arresting songs yet. “When death happens, it does turn your entire world upside down,” she says. “It might not even be death, it might just be something that happens. And sometimes you don’t realize how much you have until something major happens. Then you realize, ‘Damn, I’ve wasted so much time bothering about stuff that doesn’t matter.’ Turning points can either make or break people.” This album ends on Chinouriri’s own turning point: “Pocket,” a sweet song about new, better love that Chinouriri promised she’d give to the person who finally allowed her to feel it, followed by her acoustic version of “So My Darling,” the song that started this wild ride in the first place. Here, Chinouriri takes us through her debut, track by track. **“Garden of Eden”** “I wrote this after my big LA trip feeling like, ‘This \[the UK\] is home for me.’ I’m just adamant I want a house in the countryside. Where I grew up in Croydon isn’t that, but it was quiet, and I would always hear birds and see fields and grass. We were in a room \[in a studio in the UK countryside, where Chinouriri went after LA\] and would always have the recording on, and the birds were that loud. I was like, ‘Let’s just maybe make it a soundscape where you’re just falling into this situation.’ It’s setting the scene.” **“The Hills”** “We’ve left the Garden of Eden now and I’m like, ‘Right, I don’t belong here.’ The music video shows \[me\], a Black woman, walking across some flags, and people have said, ‘Oh, she’s talking about how she doesn’t belong in the UK,’ but I’m actually talking about how much I *do* belong. It’s almost seeing those street parties where they’ve got all the flags and being like, ‘I’m as English as you guys, so I belong here and I’ll be staying here whether you like it or not.’ The song is definitely a headbanging, screaming moment—it has a bit of an American-boy-band-in-a-basement, kids-in-a-garage vibe. It felt like a relief to have something after a trip where we didn’t have much, especially after five weeks.” **“Never Need Me”** “After I wrote this, I didn’t even send it to the label. A few days later, I was at a festival and my manager came to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you send us this song? Oli \[Bayston, one of the song’s co-writers\] sent it to us.’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, I think it’s a terrible song.’ I think it was because of its meaning. And in the session, I was just so angry and annoyed and in such an agitated mood. I felt uninspired. But later, I said, ‘If I can do it however I want, I’ll finish the song.’ So I went to \[songwriter\] Glen Roberts and changed all the production—I was thinking Kings of Leon and heavy guitars.” **“My Everything”** “This song is about giving your all to everyone. My project before this album, *Four° in Winter*, was very experimental and wonky. I knew I was hitting some pop territories with this album, but I think there are still wonky elements to me. I really love Ladysmith Black Mambazo and how they use their voice almost as the instruments. I just liked being in the studio and coming up with weird sounds with my voice. I don’t even want to know how many vocal tracks are on that—but it was a lot! I don’t know if people will like it, but I wanted to show all the different parts of who I am.” **“All I Ever Asked”** “Again, I didn’t want it on the album. But now I realize this song is important and a way people discovered me \[it was a single in 2022\]. I think I’m actually quite a dark person because I’m a Scorpio. Whether you believe in star signs or not, I’ve always gravitated towards dark lyrics to a point where I don’t think sad lyrics really hit me anymore. But there’s also a degree of making light of situations. Because as much as \[what inspired this song\] is sad, it’s also like, ‘You’ll live. He was an asshole. There are plenty more people you can meet in this world.’ There’s light that can come to those situations.” **“It Is What It Is”** “When I was doing \[the speak-singing here\], I was like, ‘Maybe I’m going to sound a bit like a loser.’ I’m not really rapping, I’m talking, and then obviously I have this English accent. I don’t want to say I have a boring voice, but when I’m speaking, I think I sound quite monotone. But what I’m saying is, ‘You are a fucking arsehole.’ This one’s for my girls and boys who have definitely felt this multiple times. Mae Muller is on this track. She is that person who will be like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I’ll go out and look at someone slightly questionable and be like, ‘I fancy him.’ She’ll go to the bathroom and be like, ‘Rachel, love you so much. No, no, you’re not doing that.’ And I’ll be like, ‘OK.’” **“Dumb Bitch Juice”** “This was very much Amy Winehouse-inspired—I know it’s not Amy Winehouse at all, but she had this ability to sing in quite a free and melodic way, but you can hear every single thing she says. When I wrote this, I was like, ‘I’m here to insult today.’ Not just insulting someone else—insulting myself too. Because sometimes men are terrible, but there’s also a degree of ‘You have allowed someone to treat you like that.’ Of course I’ve been heartbroken by an absolute idiot because I’m drinking dumb bitch juice!” **“What a Devastating Turn of Events”** “All my siblings were born in Africa, I’m the only one who was born in the UK. There’s a set of relatives who know I exist, but I’ve not met most of them—I have no clue who they are, but my siblings grew up with them. And when she \[Chinouriri’s cousin, the subject of this song\] died, my siblings were devastated. I was sad about someone I didn’t know. I constantly thought about it and wondered how it had happened. I had gone through something similar; being able to write about it has been kind of helpful for me to understand my own situation and stuff that I’ve gone through. Sonically, I never thought we needed a big chorus. It’s a different verse and different chorus every single time. Then there’s just this kind of chanting thing—I think that’s maybe where my African influence is coming, the marching and the pace of the drum and everyone singing as a group. We all sat in the studio with a mic and just screamed, ‘What a devastating turn of events.’ I think there’s a degree of sorrow that comes along, kind of trudging through this very sad story. This is a very important one.” **“My Blood”** “I wanted a song where there’s not necessarily continuation, but which speaks about things which people might do as a cry for help. You should always watch when things like that happen to people. I went through a phase where I was pulling out my own hair—it was a stress thing. It started making me think about when I was younger and there was self-harm things. It was visualizing looking in a mirror and being like, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ But it’s also these invisible wounds. The strings here add so much to the song—the cinematic-ness of it is definitely influenced by Daughter. I wanted to get people to feel. It sounds very sad from top to bottom, but I hope people listen to it and think, ‘Wow.’” **“Robbed”** “There was a baby in our family who passed away, and I felt like I was robbed of them. I was a bit more poetic in this song, but it’s almost considering people I’d not met that had such a massive effect on me. You can be robbed of time sometimes, with people or family. When stuff like that happens, the people around you are always like, ‘It’ll be OK. I’m sorry that happened.’ And actually, sometimes it’s OK to just be like, ‘That was fucking shit. That was horrible and this is unfair.’ That was the kind of emotion I wanted to translate in these songs.” **“Cold Call”** “I was really inspired by Coldplay’s ‘Politik.’ It’s just mind-blowing. I’m quite obsessed with Coldplay and I asked my team to show them the song. I know that they liked it—it meant a lot. They are my inspiration for a lot of things. I think it feels like a universal song. It’s kind of like, ‘I’ve had enough of this now, I’m not doing that anymore.’” **“I Hate Myself”** “I like how this ends with me reflecting on the positive. I’ve felt some very negative things, which I’ve been lucky enough to stop in their tracks. I mean, ‘a victim of your mind’ is one of the lyrics here. I wrote this with \[producer and songwriter\] Jonah Summerfield and he was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty deep.’ But sometimes when you put your thoughts on paper, you can read it back and think, ‘That was ridiculous.’ I looked back at this and thought, ‘That was a really stupid thing for me to even put myself through.’ You have to learn to love yourself—and hope that as a society we can really unlearn the treatment of people for being different sizes. Being able to write music has been a combination of me unlearning and learning so much about myself. And I think I can see how my self-esteem really skyrocketed the song in many ways.” **“Pocket”** “When I wrote this, I’d gone through all my phases of being like, ‘Men are trash, men are toxic.’ Then I was kind of like, ‘Well that’s just BS. I was just choosing terrible men. And there are actually nice ones if you allow yourself to be loved. So I’m going to write a song about how I would like to be loved.’ I thought, ‘When I find someone, I’m going to give them this song.’ And when I started dating my boyfriend, I said, ‘There’s this song I have.’” **“So My Darling (Acoustic)”** “The song is like six years old, so it’s a nostalgic way to end the album. You’ve gone through this journey of \[mostly\] new songs, and then you get thrown back into one that everyone knows. I wanted the whole album to sound and feel nostalgic for being a Black Brit, so to end on something nostalgic for the fans was really important. I think the whole album is very nostalgic of maybe my home life, but for the fans, it’s nostalgic for them.”
Puerto Rican singer RaiNao earned some deserved attention from her memorable features on Mora’s 2023 album *ESTRELLA*. Six months after those collaborative songs went public, she returns with a solo set of her own, the transfixing *CAPICÚ*. Judging by these 16 shape-shifting tracks, beginning with the junglism of “navel point” and through the ambient trap-pop of “f\*ck$,” any previously held notions about her style warrants swift reevaluation. Her seeming unwillingness to be boxed into any one sound presents listeners with a diverse yet oddly cohesive experience benefitting from her breathy voice. Such artistic restlessness sometimes becomes evident over the course of a single song, as when “readysita” slips out of airy R&B and into shimmering yet jagged house music shards. At other points, the fusion of genres is more pronounced, particularly on the tropical hybrid “Gualero REFF12.31.” Reggaetón, as expected, does play a role here, via the alt-perreo vibes of “logout” and the Tainy-aided “roadhead.”
As the leader of Korean superstar group BTS, rapper-producer RM (aka Kim Nam-joon) is not always free to follow his musical curiosities or to explore deeply personal experiences. When he writes, records, and performs within BTS, he is doing it as part of a larger group, and the sacrifices that come with that are made in favor of something more collective. But RM has much to say as an artist outside of his BTS persona, and in the first 11 years of the group’s career, he has found the space to say it, releasing his own solo material in the form of two mixtapes (2015’s *RM* and 2018’s *mono.*), a 2022 solo album debut (*Indigo*), and now *Right Place, Wrong Person*. While *Indigo* was a vulnerable reflection back on RM’s twenties, *Right Place, Wrong Person* is somehow even more raw in its sounds and sentiments. The 11-track album is a diary-like study of healing wounds (“I just hope you remember me/The best grave in your cemetery”) and hard-won liberations (“I like my broken self/Bitch, that\'s the shit”) delivered in eddies of spoken-word verse, husky vocals, and RM’s signature lyrical rap. Pre-release track “Come back to me” acted as a disclaimer of what was to come. A slow-burn exhale of a song, the six-minute track about RM’s desire to understand his suffering (“You are my pain, divine, divine”) is an antithesis to the two-and-a-half-minute, hook-focused tracks that dominate so much of modern music. RM is similarly experimental in the hypnotic mood-setter “Right People, Wrong Place” and “ㅠㅠ,” a 74-second musing seemingly about the fans who come to his shows: “Do you stay inside or go off to life?/I\'m so grateful for everyone\'s time/Hope you all had such wonderful night.” As with *Indigo*, RM finds room to collaborate on *Right Place, Wrong Person*. French American jazz duo DOMi & JD BECK produce the percussive-driven “?,” while American singer-songwriter Moses Sumney features heavily on the groovy “Around the world in a day.” British rapper Little Simz contributes two verses to the jazzy “Domodachi,” which bounces between English, Korean, and Japanese to ask listener-friends to let loose: “Just ignite this bonfire/Friends gather around me one by one.” The uptempo “Groin” sees the leader of BTS breaking out of some of the boxes fame has put him in, working to accept the moments he has “fucked it up”: “I only represent myself/Let’s say what we have to say before we get sick and die.” “LOST!” is similarly energetic and blithe in its celebration of life’s confusions, positioning RM’s disorientation not as something to be feared but embraced: “I\'m goddamn lost/I never been to club before/I hit the club/I never felt so free before.” Here and elsewhere on the album, the eponymous “wrong person” doesn’t seem to be another individual, but rather a description of self. But with this music-making, the hope of something “right” seems to be on the horizon—if not here yet, then coming: “Time flies, he’s 14 and he’s already 30/And I look up in the sky, I see silver cloud/Yo, hurry.”
A Top Dawg Entertainment fixture since the early 2010s, ScHoolboy Q played no small role in elevating the label to hip-hop’s upper echelon. With his Black Hippy cohorts Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock, the tremendously talented Los Angeles native made a compelling case for continuing the West Coast’s rap legacy well beyond the G-funk era or the days of Death Row dominance. Even still, his relative absence from the game after *CrasH Talk* dropped in 2019 has been hard to ignore, particularly as the most prominent member of his group departed TDE while SZA became the roster’s most undeniable hitmaker. Indeed, it’s been nearly five years since he gave us more than a loosie, which makes the arrival of his sixth full-length *BLUE LIPS* all the more auspicious. His concerns as a lyricist draw upon the micro as well as the macro level, as a parent decrying mass school shootings on “Cooties” or as a rap star operating on his own terms on “Nunu.” Elevating the drama, the *Saw* soundtrack cue nods of “THank god 4 me” accent his emboldened bars targeting snitches, haters, and fakes. Q’s guest selection reflects a more curatorial ear at work than the gratifying star-power flexes found on *CrasH Talk*. Rico Nasty righteously snarls through her portion of the menacing “Pop,” while Freddie Gibbs glides across the slow funk groove of “oHio” with scene-stealing punchlines. A producer behind TDE records by Isaiah Rashad and REASON, Devin Malik steps out from behind the boards to touch the mic on a handful of cuts, namely “Love Birds” and the booming paean “Back n Love.”
If runaway smashes like “Pound Town,” “SkeeYee,” and “Get It Sexyy” told us anything about St. Louis MC Sexyy Red, it’s that the *Hood Hottest Princess* trades in anthems. Nearly exclusively. Her *In Sexyy We Trust* mixtape hardly deviates from the plan, delivering even more anthems extolling the allure of the Sexyy Red lifestyle. Across the tape, we hear Red rap about upholding a particular standard of courtship (“Boss Me Up”), the joys of puppy love (“U My Everything”), how hard she goes in the streets (“Ova Bad”), and also the very precise sexual maneuvers she enjoys (“Lick Me,” “Awesome Jawsome”). The bulk of it is delivered over charging Tay Keith production, which will make fans excited to shout back lyrics at her during an unknowable number of Rolling Loud sets. Red’s work here is enough to make guest appearances from Drake and Lil Baby seem like an afterthought, but they, too, very obviously recognize an aspiring hitmaker when they hear one.
Shaboozey has long been inspired by the romantic notion of the outlaw: “The guy who’s standing against a whole bunch of folks and it’s like, ‘We’re going to take them down.’ Yeah, you can try!” the musician tells Apple Music’s Kelleigh Bannen. The obsession is less quaint than it sounds. Having pored through old western films, dime-store pulp novels, and gunslinger ballads à la Marty Robbins, the Virginia native noticed that old-school cowboy culture and hip-hop share a preoccupation with all things American renegade. The conversation around country music’s Black roots will sound familiar to anyone who tuned in to Beyoncé’s *COWBOY CARTER*, which featured Shaboozey on two tracks. (“Beyoncé’s been such a big part of being Black in America,” he said, still in awe of the opportunity. “At every point in our lives, she has had some sort of cultural impact.”) But the 29-year-old singer/rapper has been staking his territory in the space between hip-hop and country for a decade, redefining what it means to be a modern country star. His third album, *Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going*, plays out like a classic American road movie, opening with steel guitar, the gallop of horse hooves, and Shaboozey with his foot on the gas, fresh out of smokes and headed nowhere in particular. On tracks like “Let It Burn,” his rich baritone is equal parts Willie, Waylon, and woozy blues rap à la Future. Elsewhere, he channels Imagine Dragons’ arena-ready roots rock, where breakup banger “Annabelle” hits the sweet spot between Fleetwood Mac and Post Malone. But the star-making moment is “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” the breakaway hit of 2024’s Stagecoach Festival: a Southern-fried riff on a 20-year-old J-Kwon club classic with TGIF vibes.
“Pain makes you more humane,” Shakira tells Apple Music. “Being able to take that pain and transform it into something else, that is an opportunity and a luxury that us artists have.” Assuredly, the Latin-pop superstar’s romantic and professional woes in recent years have been significant, often converted into cruel tabloid fodder that, no doubt, amplified the issues and surrounding emotions. Yet with *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran*, her first new album in nearly seven years, she transforms the numbingly dull lead of personal hardship into a glorious musical gold. “In a way, it’s kind of good not to have a husband,” Shakira says of the impact her breakup had on her creativity. “Now I feel like working. It’s a compulsive need of mine that I didn’t feel before.” Even before the album emerged, that compulsion came through clearly and eventfully with the release of singles like the award-winning “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” showing the world that she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind during trying times. “No one should tell any woman how she’s supposed to heal and lick her wounds.” *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran* exemplifies that sentiment. As expected, given her prior hits, she retains a mastery of the dance floor with the benefit of autobiographical lyricism. Here, she provides such expertly executed versions as the Bizarrap-assisted “La Fuerte” and the emotionally potent “Tiempo Sin Verte.” One of many successors to Shakira’s bilingual pop lineage, Cardi B joins for the opener “Puntería,” a sweat-inducing track dripping with erotically charged metaphors. More than willing to branch out beyond what her legacy already holds, she also demonstrates just how integral she’s become to the modern reggaetón landscape, lending her cosign to Manuel Turizo on “Copa Vacía” and finding a kindred spirit in KAROL G on “TQG.” Far more surprising are her successful forays into other genres represented throughout the album, namely the música mexicana team-ups “(Entre Paréntesis)” with Grupo Frontera and “El Jefe” with Fuerza Regida, as well as the brisk bachata cut “Monotonía” with Ozuna. Still, Shakira hasn’t forgotten her long-standing rock listenership, bringing energy and grace to the cathartic “Cómo Dónde y Cuándo.” Similarly, her balladry remains exemplary, the revelatory messages of “Acróstico (Milan y Sasha)” and “Última” obviously driven by her experiences and in response to these challenges. Ultimately, against all odds, she emerges from this album with a sense of hope and optimism. “Love is the most amazing experience a human can live, and no one should take away that opinion from you,” she says. “It doesn’t matter the shitty experiences you go through in life; there’s always a lot more to look forward to.”
In the video for Sleater-Kinney’s “Untidy Creature,” freediver Amber Bourke spends two and a half minutes on her back, eyes closed, holding her breath under the water of a full bathtub. That peaceful-seeming setup, juxtaposed with Bourke\'s re-oxygenating gasps, is an apt metaphor for the tension, anxiety, vulnerability, and catharsis that characterize the Portland, Oregon, band’s 11th LP (and second as a duo following the departure of longtime drummer Janet Weiss), *Little Rope*. “The album is playing with ideas and feelings and sentiments that could be either or both,” guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein, one half of the duo alongside vocalist/guitarist Corin Tucker, tells Apple Music. “So a little rope could signify the darkest moment for someone, a desire to end it all, but it could also conversely be the thing that someone throws to you to rescue you, to pull you from the muck and the mud.” Over the last couple of years, Sleater-Kinney has experienced a lot more than just muck and mud. In late 2022, just as the band had started writing the album, Brownstein\'s mother and stepfather died in a car accident while traveling overseas. “There was a sense of fragility and also disorientation,” Brownstein says of that time. “So the act of playing guitar, I understood that ritual. I knew what to do with my hands. So Corin brought me songs instead of baking cakes or bringing me food. Part of it was just tending to this world that we have spent nearly three decades building—and songs were something that were still very much alive. And because the stakes felt higher, I just wanted every song to be perfect.” Here Brownstein and Tucker explain how they made that happen. **“Hell”** Corin Tucker: “This song really came about organically when I was in a record store listening to music in LA. It was one of those moments where the lyrics just started coming to me and the emotion of feeling like I was having this revelation about what we normalize in our society, the way that we normalize violence, the way that we have accommodated it. It\'s supposed to be a moment of shock of waking up to that and realizing it in that moment.” **“Needlessly Wild”** Carrie Brownstein: “I\'ve always been a scrappy, irascible person, and I think this song reckons with outsize emotions that no longer feel sanctioned and that feeling of continual clumsiness, or confusion, or almost being feral. I kept wanting to change the lyrics from the demo version, which said \'needlessly wild\' over and over again. But Corin and John Congleton, our producer, liked it better when it was more lyrically austere. And I finally realized that the repetition was the song—that the whole point was that there wasn\'t an escape route, and that we\'re not going to find a different end to this repetitive line, just like we can\'t write alternative endings for things that we don\'t want or like the outcomes to.” **“Say It Like You Mean It”** CT: “This song is about when you realize that your time with the people you care about the most, it will come to an end, and you may not know exactly when that\'s going to be or how it\'s going to take shape, but you definitely will be saying goodbye. And it\'s about the wide range of emotions that come with that: acceptance, the tender feelings, and also a feeling of frustration and even anger in the imperfection of the intimacy that we have together during the time that we have.” **“Hunt You Down”** CB: “I was listening to a podcast that featured an interview with a poet, an undertaker named Thomas Lynch. And he was talking about a meeting he had with a father as they were planning the burial of this man\'s child, and the father said to Thomas Lynch, \'The thing you fear the most will hunt you down.\' It was such a striking and devastating line, and it had such an axiomatic quality to it. It is just the truth. This sounds very depressing, but the music of the song—the rhythm, the vocal melody—it\'s catchy. The more you sing something—even if there\'s pain or sadness in the lyrics—when you put that over something that actually buoys you, it can change the meaning of what that is until there\'s freedom in letting go of that great fear.” **“Small Finds”** CT: “When we started playing this song, it was just kind of like a jam on guitar. It’s a weird song. It definitely comes from our love of discordant guitar—bands like Television and Sonic Youth—and music that has some real grit to it. And then the fun of it is making a puzzle that works as a song. With the lyrics and the vocals, I wanted to do something that gave it a bit of swing into a catchier song, so that it had a story to it that wasn\'t just bits and pieces. So the character in it is a dog, and it\'s about taking away all of that cerebral angst that we live with every day, and we worry about things and getting into our bodies and thinking about, ‘Well, what is meaningful in the everyday life? What is some joy I can seek out?’” **“Don\'t Feel Right”** CB: “This is that duality between dark and light. To me, when I was writing it, we needed a fast song. I like songs that feel like songs you drive around to. It\'s such a classic way of listening to music. And I wanted a song that you could sit inside and go on a journey with, musically. It has that repeating riff and this just constant drive to it. When we sing the chorus, it really conjures Tom Petty to me, who I think is very good at taking heartbreak and heartache and turning it into something melodious.” **“Six Mistakes”** CT: “I think it was something that we were messing around with sonically to have it be like a New Wave or Devo song. But as we got into the studio with the rest of the songs and the emotion and the rawness of everything, it took it to this very heightened level, where it\'s a song about feeling outside of being loved, and outside of being seen. So it\'s almost a character of a woman who can\'t understand why people can\'t see her. That\'s something that I think comes up on this record a lot: aging and feeling like a woman—your identity really changes over time, and taking back your power with that and playing with it.” **“Crusader”** CB: “There\'s a handful of methodologies with which we work, and one is just Corin and I still sitting in a room together playing guitar, and you can hear that on this song or \'Small Finds,\' just that very fundamental, central Sleater-Kinney quality of intertwining, angular guitar lines. Thematically this song zooms out a little bit, surveys the landscape, grappling with this harsh reality that\'s sometimes unimaginable and that\'s grown dire. And just the idea that someone\'s very existence is a threat to someone else, and the trespasses on bodily autonomy. I think the song imagines that instead of shrinking, you grow to possess something grander and brighter. It\'s a little bit of a hype song in the middle of a broader narrative—of this album that is about resistance and grappling with smallness and self-effacement.” **“Dress Yourself”** CB: “This song speaks to the modern-day predicament of somehow getting out of bed and getting ourselves prepared for the day, despite all of the existential threats. It\'s almost shocking what great pretenders we all are, and the normalcy and steadiness that we can project out into the world. It\'s a rallying cry for those of us who can\'t believe we\'re upright every day.” **“Untidy Creature”** CT: “This one’s meant to be a very personal story about feeling trapped in a relationship, but it\'s also meant to look out as a window on what women are going through in this country in the past couple of years, losing our bodily autonomy, losing our sense of being able to control our own destiny. And so it\'s meant to mirror the personal and the broader world at the same time.”
Few artists have done more for carrying the banner of guitar rock proudly into the 21st century than St. Vincent. A notorious shredder, she cut her teeth as a member of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band before releasing her debut album *Marry Me* in 2007. Since then, her reputation as a six-string samurai has been cemented in the wake of a run of critically acclaimed albums and collaborations (she co-wrote Taylor Swift’s No 1. single “Cruel Summer”). A shape-shifter of the highest order, St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, has always put visual language on equal footing with her sonic output. Most recently, she released 2021’s *Daddy’s Home*, a conceptual period piece that pulled inspiration from ’70s soul and glam set in New York City. That project marked the end of an era visually—gone are the bleach-blonde wigs and oversized Times Square-ready trench coats—as well as creatively. With *All Born Screaming*, she bids adieu to frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff, who produced *Daddy’s Home*, and instead steps behind the boards for the first time to produce the project herself. “For me, this record was spending a lot of time alone in my studio, trying to find a new language for myself,” Clark tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “I co-produced all my other records, but this one was very much my fingerprints on every single thing. And a lot of the impetus of the record was like, ‘Okay: I\'m in the studio and everything has to start with chaos.’” For Clark, harnessing that chaos began by distilling the elemental components of what makes her sound like, well, her. Guitar players, in many respects, are some of the last musicians defined by the analog. Pedal boards, guitar strings, and pass-throughs are all manipulated to create a specific tone. It’s tactile, specialized, and at times, yes, chaotic. “What I mean by chaos,” Clark says, “is electricity actually moving through circuitry. Whether it\'s modular synths or drum machines, just playing with sound in a way that was harnessing chaos. I\'ve got six seconds of this three-hour jam, but that six seconds is lightning in a bottle and so exciting, and truly something that could only have happened once and only happened in a very tactile way. And then I wrote entire songs around that.” Those songs cover the spectrum from sludgy, teeth-vibrating offerings like “Flea” all the way to the lush album cut (and ode to late electronic producer SOPHIE) “Sweetest Fruit.” Clark relished in balancing these light and dark sounds and sentiments—and she didn’t do so alone. “I got to explore and play and paint,” she says. “And I also luckily had just great friends who came in to play on the record and brought their amazing energy to it.” *All Born Screaming* features appearances from Dave Grohl, Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, and Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, among others. Le Bon pulled double duty on the album by performing on the title track as well as offering clarity for some of the murkier production moments. “I was finding myself a little bit in the weeds, as everyone who self-produces does,” Clark says. “And so I just called Cate and was like, ‘I need you to just come hold my hand for a second.’ She came in and was a very stabilizing force, I think, at a time in the making of the record when I needed someone to sort of hold my hand and pat my head and give me a beer, like, ‘It\'s going to be okay.’” With *All Born Screaming*, Clark manages to capture the bloody nature of the human experience—including the uncertainty and every lightning-in-a-bottle moment—but still manages to make it hum along like a Saturday morning cartoon. “The album, to me, is a bit of a season in hell,” she says. “You are a little bit walking on your knees through some broken glass—but in a fun way, kids. We end with this sort of, ‘Yes, life is difficult, but it\'s so worth living and we\'ve got to live it. Can\'t go over it, can\'t go under it, might as well go through it.’ It\'s black and white and the colors of a fire. That, to me, is sonically what the record is.”