Rolling Stone's Best Albums of 2025 So Far

Scores of Puerto Rican artists have used their music to express love and pride in their island, but few do so with the same purposeful vigor as Bad Bunny. The superstar from Vega Baja is responsible for numerous songs that center his homeland, from unofficial national anthems like “Estamos Bien” and “El Apagón” to powerful posse cuts like “ACHO PR” with veteran reggaetón luminaries Arcángel, De La Ghetto, and Ñengo Flow. More recently, he’s been decidedly direct about his passions and concerns, expressed in vivid detail on 2024’s standalone single “Una Velita.” Positioned as his sixth proper studio album, *DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS* centers Puerto Rico in his work more so than before, celebrating various musical styles within its legacy. While 2023’s *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* validated his trapero past with a more modern take on the sound he emerged with in the 2010s, this follow-up largely diverges from hip-hop, demonstrating his apparent aversion to repeating himself from album to album. Instead, house music morphs into plena on “EL CLúB,” the latter genre resurfacing later in splendorous fashion on “CAFé CON RON” with Los Pleneros de la Cresta. Befitting its title, “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR” is set to a sleek reggaetón rhythm for prime-time perreo vibes, as is also the case for “KETU TeCRÉ” and the relatively more rugged “EoO.” A bold salsa statement, “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” pays apparent homage to some seminal Fania releases by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, with traces of the instrumental interplay of “Juanito Alimaña” and an irresistible coda reminiscent to that of “Periódico de Ayer.” Regardless of style, the political and the personal thematically blur throughout the album, a new year’s gloom hanging over “PIToRRO DE COCO” and a metaphorical wound left open after the poignant “TURISTA.” As before, Bad Bunny remains an excellent and inventive collaborator, linking here primarily with other Puerto Ricans as more than a mere symbolic gesture. Sociopolitically minded indie group Chuwi join for the eclectic and vibrant “WELTiTA,” its members providing melodic vocals that both complement and magnify those of their host. Carolina natives Dei V and Omar Courtz form a formidable trio for the thumping dancehall retrofuturism of “VeLDÁ,” while RaiNao proves an exceedingly worthy duet partner on “PERFuMITO NUEVO.”

Bartees Strange’s third album finds the Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter stretching his sonic limbs further than ever before—an achievement, to be sure, since Strange’s first two records (2020’s *Live Forever* and 2022’s critical breakthrough *Farm to Table*) cemented his ability to effortlessly hop between anthemic rock, dusky blues, and rap cadences within just a few minutes. With a slightly darker sound befitting its namesake, *Horror* adds a few impressive guises to Strange’s genre menagerie: There’s the explicitly Fleetwood Mac-esque jangle of “Sober,” the melancholic trip-hop skitter of “Doomsday Buttercup,” and the lucious house thump of “Lovers,” which might count as Strange’s starkest left turn to date. Across these 12 tracks, Strange also fine-tunes his winning formula of countrified balladry and propulsive riffs, both of which are given a big-ticket pop spit-shine courtesy of contributions from studio wizards Yves and Lawrence Rothman as well as the ever-ubiquitous Jack Antonoff. Don’t mistake big names for unnecessary flashiness, though: *Horror* retains the down-to-earth POV that’s made Strange an increasingly powerful presence in indie, even as his ambitions grow.

Lili Trifilio began Beach Bunny as a solo indie-pop project in her bedroom in 2015. A decade later, the Chicago band (now a three-piece with drummer Jon Alvarado and guitarist Anthony Vaccaro) has gone viral on TikTok, rocked huge festival stages, and inspired female-dominated mosh pits with their angsty anthems about broken hearts and bruised egos. Their third album, *Tunnel Vision*, sees the band shifting their focus away from love and towards what some might call a full-blown existential crisis. “The world is changing for the worse,” Trifilio sings bluntly on the deceptively chipper “Mr. Predictable” (whose chorus doesn’t not give “MMMBop,” with all due respect). She’s crying at the DMV on “Clueless,” winkingly extolling the powers of self-delusion on “Big Pink Bubble,” and on “Violence,” she rattles off a list of news items (“Mass extinction, fascists gloating, microplastics in our clothing…”) that are enough to make you want to chuck your phone off of a bridge. The world’s on fire, sure, but Beach Bunny lays it down with enough verve that you may as well mosh anyway.

What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.

After the reception to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, it’s no surprise that Sabrina Teitelbaum’s follow-up, *If You Asked for a Picture*, came together while she was quite literally on the move. “I was touring a lot, so I was in a lot of new places and just writing about what was going on,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I didn’t have the intention of making an album, but when I got home, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to start demoing these songs.’” The resulting 12 tracks may have come together casually, but *If You Asked for a Picture* is a fuller and richer evocation of the Blondshell sound, pairing spiky ’90s alternative rock sounds with acerbic couplets. Along with longtime studio collaborator Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor), Teitelbaum adds subtle sonic flourishes to her winning sound—peep the Ronettes-recalling backbeat of “23’s a Baby” and the dream pop of closer “Model Rockets”—but her cutting and personal songwriting style remains the project’s hallmark. Who else could write an introspective exploration of living with OCD, as Teitelbaum does on the explosive “Toy,” and sneak in a withering line like, “I’ve been running this ship like the Navy/But it’s more like a Wendy’s”? As Teitelbaum’s songwriting continues to mature, Blondshell’s balance of the devastating and the deeply funny continues on as one of indie rock’s most thrilling high-wire acts.

Justin Vernon has never been shy about bearing the weight of his instantly mythical origin story and his fast, unlikely trajectory into global stardom. Four albums and 18 years after *For Emma, Forever Ago*, *SABLE, fABLE* is a document of finding peace—joy, even—and a testament to the work it’s taken to get there. “This record, as much as that first record, if not more, was really just a keystone for healing and growing away from this time period where I felt trapped,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Once COVID wiped out the tour plans for 2019’s *i,i*, Vernon, like pretty much everyone, used the time to take stock, and he came to understand, among other things, that touring might not be the healthiest thing for him. So he made songs. “It really was like, ‘Okay, I’m not well and I won\'t make it if I don\'t do something to change this pretty drastically and stop the whole touring engine,” Vernon says. “There was a sense of relief and an incredible grief to say goodbye to the team that we built. I was like, ‘Let me just get these songs done and just sneak them out there so I can just get them off my chest,’ because that’s what I really needed: to finish them, to learn what was inside them.” The first of these songs, written at the beginning of lockdown, “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is a snapshot of that lonely, uncertain time, but it feels bigger and more hopeful than that to Vernon with five years of hindsight. “In the short term, it makes you feel better, but it’s also a way to lean into your grief and lean into your pain and lean into your guilt,” he says. “I think eventually when I hear that song now, I feel clean from everything that I was dealing with when I had to write it and after I wrote it. But it takes years for things to take shape and for internal things to budge.” From there, the album begins to let more light in with songs like the evidently more hopeful “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (“It’s just all about celebrating this moment right here and just sort of trying to express that heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest feeling”) and “If Only I Could Wait,” featuring vocals from Danielle Haim of HAIM, which Vernon considers nothing less than his favorite American rock band. The album splits the difference between the immediacy of *For Emma* and the often inscrutable maximalism of *22, A Million* and *i,i*. It was during the album’s long gestation that Vernon’s profile was boosted by his work with Taylor Swift, even as his own project remained in the shadows, Vernon exercising a patience and restraint and creating a healthier perspective that was nothing less than career-saving, if not life-saving. “We are insanely beautiful creatures,” he says. “And so I think where I’ve got to with the simplicity of this music, it was just like, I just want to give it to you. I just want to have it be my version of Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’—just boom, here it is. We’re not going to hide, we’re not going to put it behind any drapery. We’re going to just give it to you as much as humanly possible.”

Will Toledo’s music as Car Seat Headrest has always *felt* like opera whether he called it that or not—at least, few other indie bands have made the droll monotonies of being an outcast sound so grand. A concept album nominally about a med-school student who discovers her secret powers to heal patients by literally absorbing their pain (yep!), *The Scholars* is both Toledo and his band’s most conventionally “big” album (soaring choruses, dramatic turns, multi-part songs) and its most cryptic, tucking all those big, obvious gestures into the folds of a story that feels just out of reach by design. The short songs hit hardest (“The Catastrophe,” “Devereaux”), but the long ones are where they get to make their weird stadium-sized dreams come true. Case in point, the 19-minute centerpiece “Planet Desperation”: Toldeo howls, “When I get to the pearly gates, will I see you on the inside pointing at me/Mouthing ‘There he is, officer—there’s the prick I warned you about.” Then they get to sound like The Who. Then a little bit like Genesis. Then the hand-drum section comes in.

Caylee Hammack’s sophomore album is an ambitious undertaking from the singer-songwriter. In addition to readying 13 new tracks, Hammack co-wrote a romance novel, also titled *Bed of Roses*, with best-selling author Carolyn Brown to accompany the LP, a pairing that plays well off the music’s focus on love, heartbreak, and the growth that often occurs in between. Hammack co-produced *Bed of Roses* with Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Tim McGraw) and John Osborne (Brothers Osborne), and worked with a stacked list of co-writers that includes Tenille Townes, Lucie Silvas, and Luke Dick. *Bed of Roses* opens with its title track, a twangy, old-school jam that wastes no time in reminding listeners of Hammack’s agile, powerful voice, which recalls Lee Ann Womack’s and Dolly Parton’s. “Breaking Dishes” is feisty but vulnerable, as Hammack declares she’s “over it” with a useless partner via a healthy dose of sassy swagger. Other highlights include “The Pot & The Kettle,” a clever and clear-eyed snapshot of life with the right person, and the fiery, sensual “Cleopatra,” which gets some muscle from Huff’s electric guitar. Hammack closes the album with the bruised ballad “Tumbleweed Men,” a melancholy accounting of guys who won’t stick around.

“I kind of prolonged my come-up,” Central Cee tells Apple Music. Off the success of record-breaking global hits “Doja” and “Sprinter,” not to mention the indisputable smash “Band4Band” with Lil Baby, nobody could have faulted the “Wild” West London native from hastily dropping an album to capitalize on any of those singles. But as he’d be happy to remind any of his fans, it was already an uphill battle just being a rapper out of Shepherd’s Bush, which makes his long-anticipated full-length debut, *CAN’T RUSH GREATNESS*, all the more momentous. “The first two projects were mixtapes,” he explains of his prior work. “The energy I put into them is what made it a mixtape, and the energy I premeditated to put into the album and the timing of everything is what the album is.” In line with that intent, Cee’s conflicted state of mind quickly comes to the fore on opener “No Introduction,” acknowledging and accepting the whirlwind of fame while concurrently craving a more tranquil life. Those changes manifest throughout the album, with him straddling diverging worlds on the drill dazzler “5 Star” and struggling with resonant pain on the plaintive “Limitless.” While the instantly gratifying “St. Patrick’s” indulges in familiar flagrant flexes, the album gets decidedly deeper than rap via tracks like “Don’t Know Anymore” and “Walk in Wardrobe,” with the latter’s late beat-switch raising the stakes. “It’s hard for me to rap in such a reflective wake,” he says. “I just want to look ahead at the light at the end of the tunnel and not really think about certain things.” While a substantial amount of the lyrical material skews intimately local, Cee’s worldwide reach reveals itself largely via collaborations with the likes of Lil Durk and Young Miko. Still, as good as it feels to hear him going bar for bar with 21 Savage on trap stunner “GBP,” his link with UK rap icon Skepta on “Ten” and reunion with *Split Decision* mate Dave on “CRG” just hit different, in the best way. “These songs aren’t really for the masses,” he says, “but just to touch the people, remind everyone that I’m human—that *they’re* human.”

The South Texas singer and guitarist spent his youth roaming—learning the drinking songs of the French Quarter firsthand, busking on New York City subway platforms, performing in communes in Northern California. These days, Charley Crockett seems to sublimate his restless wanderlust into endless touring and prolific recording; *Lonesome Drifter*, co-produced by Shooter Jennings, is his 16th record in nine years. Its dreamy outlaw ballads and honky-tonk numbers tell a story about hustling in America (“That old-time feeling just up and walked away/Left me with these interest rates,” he sings on “Game I Can’t Win”), and meanwhile, a story of his years spent on the road. “My age is showing in a motel mirror,” he confesses over organ chords on “Under Neon Lights.” And the wistful “Life of a Country Singer” is a ballad of a liminal existence that unfolds in-between spaces, somewhere between dusk and dawn, and between right and wrong. “There’s a long, long line of country singers, singing songs about livin’ late at night,” he drawls, admitting “I ain’t the first one, or the best—but I’m different.”

The sixth solo album from Craig Finn may venture further from his rowdier work with The Hold Steady, but the communal atmosphere remains a selling point; The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel produced the album, and members of his band play on it, as do Kathleen Edwards and Sam Fender. Never one to shy away from vivid storytelling, Finn crafts a concept album of sorts, telling the tale, in his own words, of a person who becomes “a clergyman despite a lack of faith.” Epics and ballads abound, like on the piano-driven “Crumbs,” where the narrator tells of staying with family, imbued with Finn’s one-of-a-kind eye for detail: the crumbs of toast around her niece’s mouth during breakfast time, the sound of the nearby highway. Moments like these often pass through lives unobserved, but Craig Finn turns the mundane into declarations of humanity.

The musician born Omar Banos emerged in the mid-2010s as a teenage old soul: His first brush with virality was for his slide-guitar cover of Santo & Johnny’s dreamy 1959 hit “Sleepwalk,” recorded in his high-school bedroom. A decade later, the 26-year-old singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has amassed a die-hard fanbase for his vibey, lo-fi pop in which he draws from doo-wop, psych rock, and norteño and often lapses into Spanglish (as on his breakout single, 2017’s “Lo Que Siento”). “When I was first putting out music, I was always just trying to release—I didn’t necessarily have a timeline or an idea of what I wanted to do,” Cuco tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But as everything became a little more established, I feel like taking the time to put together projects that felt cohesive would be worth taking the time.” His third album, *Ridin’*, is a love letter to his hometown of Los Angeles—specifically, its Mexican American car culture. It’s also a callback to the old Chicano soul music he’s loved since he was little. “ICNBYH” feels beamed in from an AM radio broadcast circa the early ’70s, with its easygoing swirl of brass and woodwinds. Far from the Ableton experiments of his teenage bedroom, here he’s joined by a team of first-rate instrumentalists, from The Roots’ trumpeter Dave Guy (who appears on “My Old Friend”) to producer Thomas Brenneck, who’s worked with everyone from Amy Winehouse to Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. “It could be riding with the whips, riding for your people, riding through the motions of life,” Cuco says of the album’s title. Still, it’s built to be played in the car with the windows down.

“Five is freedom, unbound by borders/Rising by lifting others/The artist, the father; the man walking two worlds.” These words, written and performed by Nigerian poet Alhanislam, not only form part of the overture to Davido’s fifth studio album, but also offer insight into the mind and methodology of an artist who’s been at the forefront of African music for over a decade. Davido frames 2025’s *5ive* as something of a victory lap, not just for his own pursuits, but for the entire contemporary African soundscape. “This is definitely about celebrating the longevity and how far we’ve come,” he tells Apple Music. “It’s been a long, long journey. Afrobeats is in an amazing place. Everybody’s doing well, all the way from South Africa to Ghana to Nigeria. For us to have risen and taken this culture and the music to such heights—we have our own categories at the Grammys, at the Billboard Awards; we have our own festivals selling out more than the festivals in America. It’s crazy. Because of the nature of the whole genre, everybody’s messing with the culture. So every album is to push Afrobeats further.” Here, he’s as intentional as ever about eliminating gaps between cultures and sounds altogether, employing even more of the sonic fusions that permeated his 2023 album *Timeless*. The distinctive log drum of South Africa’s amapiano again features heavily here, along with fusions incorporating Caribbean and Latin styles—woven together with the red thread of Afrobeats and clever nods to African classics. “I love bringing different worlds to mine,” Davido explains, and he does so here through collaborations with Victoria Monét, Shenseea, Tayc, and Dadju; recurring guest stars Chris Brown, Musa Keys, and producers Shizzi, Marvey Muzique, and DJ Maphorisa; rising Jamaican star 450; and homegrown Nigerian heroes like ODUMODUBLVCK, Omah Lay, and Chike. Here, he talks through key tracks from *5ive*. **“Anything”** “This is a song you play before you run the Olympics. That’s a song you play before you get on a soccer pitch, the finals, Champions League. That’s a song you play before you do a final exam as a lawyer—it’s an inspirational song just to motivate you to action. Apart from inspirational stuff that we’re talking about on the record, it also kind of solidifies my longevity in the game and how long I’ve been here and how long I’ve still been able to do it. I’ve seen artists come and go and I’m still able to be here.” **“Be There Still”** “Shout-out to \[co-producer\] DJ Maphorisa; shout-out to South Africa; shout-out to my boy \[co-producer\] Marvey Muzique. I’ve always had a strong place in my heart for South Africa, because apart from Nigeria, South Africa was one of the countries to accept my music and push me, put money in my pocket, book me. ‘Be There Still’ is definitely about my longevity in the game, how long we’ve been here. Anywhere the money is going to be, anywhere success is going to be, I’m going to be there. Anywhere you see good things, anywhere you’re looking for n\*\*\*as at the top, you’re going to see me.” **“Offa Me” (feat. Victoria Monét)** “If you ask me, it’s going to be one of the biggest records on the album. Victoria Monét—I met her at the 2024 Grammys, and she won three awards that night. She was on fire. And I feel like this record is the perfect matchup of what she does and what I do.” **“R&B” (feat. Shenseea & 450)** “I love the Caribbean, and I’ve done a lot of shows there. ‘R&B’ is produced by my boy Jonn P. I know people know Shenseea, but a lot of people back home might not have heard of 450. But he’s the new guy. He’s the new hot guy going crazy; he’s amazing. I’m excited to show him to Africa and to the world and just mix our worlds together.” **“Awuke” (with YG Marley)** “Shout-out to Jamaica, YG Marley. Like I said, I love bringing the two worlds together. What I loved about that record was the process, the making of the song and the making of the video. YG came to Nigeria for the first time; \[it was his\] first time being in Africa, him and his uncles, and I think his brother. I love when these artists come to my home and I show them, like, ‘Yo, this place is not that bad.’ You know what I’m saying? It’s kind of lit. And every time they come, they end up not even wanting to leave.” **“Holy Water” (feat. Victony & Musa Keys)** “Me and Musa Keys together \[on 2023’s ‘UNAVAILABLE’\]—we probably have the biggest songs of our career. For me, apart from collaborating with these people, they’re actually family. Musa ended up laying some ideas on the beat, and then me and Victony finished up the song. They’re just two strong, hardworking individuals that are going crazy right now. There’s nothing wrong in learning stuff from the newer generation. Look how Drake has done it. Even DJ Maphorisa, he’s still tapping in with the new producers. So I’ve never had a problem, and that’s probably why I’ve lasted so long, because a lot of people have a problem with tapping in. Just because I’ve done stadiums around the world, it doesn’t mean I don’t have a listening ear or don’t mean I still can’t learn. So I’m always open, and I never feel too big, because the music is bigger than all of us. What we’re trying to attain is bigger than all of us.” **“Nuttin Dey”** “This is a typical Nigerian record—it’s like my version of ‘Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright’ \[Bob Marley’s 1977 hit “Three Little Birds”\]. When we say ‘nuttin dey’ in my country, it means ‘no problem.’ It’s like, ‘We’re good; everything is chill, everything is nice.’ So that’s the vibe of that record. And shout-out to Selebobo, an OG music producer from Nigeria that hasn’t been active in a while, and I met up with him in America. And then we got back in the studio and did that.” **“Titanium” (feat. Chris Brown)** “You know what’s crazy? Chris Brown has been on my last four albums. That’s my brother. When you do music with your brothers, with your family that you both care about, nah, it’s always going to work. Just that moment with me and him in South Africa performing to the biggest crowds of our careers \[in 2024\]…it’s crazy. **“Lately”** “You know when you sing depressing songs, but the songs are so good you have to dance? It’s really talking about a lot of things I was going through—a lot of smiling through sadness—and it was really talking about, ‘God, please save me. I have to be strong for everybody.’ And I’ve been in those type of situations where I’m not really strong mentally at that point, but then I have to act like everything is okay, for everybody else to be okay. It’s really a depressing record that bangs heavy.” **“Funds” (feat. ODUMODUBLVCK & Chike)** “I remember when they first played me the sample \[of Brenda Fassie’s 1997 hit ‘Vuli Ndlela’\] and I was like, ‘How we’re going to flip this?’ I’m not really a big fan of sampling music, but sampling Brenda Fassie is legendary. It was just amazing to see how we could just bring two worlds together. I’m Yoruba, and then Chike is Igbo, and then you bring in Brenda Fassie’s \[South African\] spice into that too—nah, I always knew it was going to *go*.” **“With You” (feat. Omah Lay)** “I remember when Kai Cenat came to Nigeria \[in 2024\], he was on a livestream, and then I took him out in my car. And when he was in the car, he was like, ‘Oh, what song is this?’ And it was Omah Lay’s song playing. I think the next day Omah Lay tweeted, ‘Wow, I thought Davido hated me.’ I’m like, ‘Hated you? Why would you think I hate you? I love your music. What you talking about?’ He was like, ‘Oh,’ he didn’t know. So I was like, ‘Yo, we got to get in studio.’ I don’t put no ego before my music. And I know this one is top three for me. So shout-out to Omah Lay. I feel like that’s going to be a big record for us.”

In following up their 2021 album, *Infinite Granite*, Deafheaven have chased a seismic shift with a melding of strengths. Whereas *Infinite Granite* almost completely abandoned the band’s black-metal roots for clean vocals and a lush shoegaze sound, *Lonely People with Power* combines elements of both. “To me, this is the ultimate Deafheaven album,” vocalist George Clarke tells Apple Music. “I think it harnesses all these disparate ideas that we’ve had over our entire career in the best way that they’ve ever been done. While it does include sonic touchstones from our earlier albums, it also includes some from our more recent material—just done in a way that, I think, is smarter. If we were to stop at this point, I think this is the record that would best explain what it is we do.” Lyrically, *Lonely People with Power* explores exactly what the title implies. “Initially, there was this broad scope that recognized that people who tend to want to amass power, people who tend to seek influence, are also people who tend to lack intimate connections,” Clarke says. “They’re people who are what I keep describing as spiritually vacant. I think there’s a void there that is often wanting to be filled with this sort of ephemeral influence. “As we kept writing and the subject matter got more personal, I was thinking about the idea of what is passed on to us,” he adds. “Life lessons, things that you learn from your parents, things that you learn from your teachers, and how their handicaps and their perspectives shape your own worldview. And how, in a sense, everyone wields a certain amount of power. Everyone, in a sense, is a lonely person with power.” Below, Clarke comments on each track. **“Incidental I”** “The melody in ‘Incidental I’ appears again in ‘Doberman.’ A lot of the incidentals and the way that they function within the album were created by \[guitarist\] Kerry \[McCoy\], who very much likes to conceptualize records by using melodic reprisals. This one of the three is the shortest, but certainly one of the most mood-setting tracks of the record. I really love the way that it came out. It’s quite simple, but effective.” **“Doberman”** “This was the last song we wrote for the album. To me, it was the big single, which we ended up not going with. But in my estimation, it has a lot of our strengths. What I really enjoy about it is that we leaned a little further into Emperor-like qualities in the chorus and used these types of synth textures to enhance the chorus parts. And the bridge is very Aphex Twin-influenced. To me, this is our Emperor/Aphex Twin record, which is fun.” **“Magnolia”** “We decided on this as the first single because we wanted to come out with a haymaker. It’s one of the most to-the-point songs we’ve ever written. I think it’s very interesting and catchy, but in a condensed way that we’ve not yet explored in previous albums. The beginning riff is something that we had been sitting on since 2023; it was our soundcheck riff. Kerry came up with it, and it would often get stuck in our heads. Some of our writing happens on tour in those moments because everyone’s onstage, and we developed it from there.” **“The Garden Route”** “A lot of these songs really benefited from what we had learned on *Infinite Granite* in terms of songwriting and how to structure a song that’s lean and transitions well but still has an emotional punch to it. I think this song is one of those examples. It really couldn’t have been written without having done *Infinite Granite*. And I like that we sometimes do this harsh vocal over a clean guitar, which we first experimented with in 2014 or ’15. At the time, it was almost uncomfortably jarring but has since really become part of our sound.” **“Heathen”** “Again, a song that really could not have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The thing that was interesting with this song is that we had originally thought there would be no clean vocals on this record. But Kerry had this vocal idea for the beginning, and it really stuck with me. It was immediately catchy, and it really fit with the lyrics. After a quick conversation, we decided that the most Deafheaven thing to do is to do what’s natural to us and what we think sounds best. Setting a precedent for ‘no this’ or ‘no that’ was really contradictory to our whole ethos. And I’m glad we did because I think it’s a welcome element once you’ve gotten this far into the record, to hear this variety. It’s one of my favorites lyrically, too.” **“Amethyst”** “As we were writing this, we felt it was going to be the centerpiece of the album. I think it’s the favorite song on the record for a lot of us within the band. It might be my favorite. To me, it’s a fresh take on a very classic Deafheaven sound and structure. It has all the things that I like. And then, lyrically, it’s a centerpiece as well. The album artwork and the photography within the record are based on the lyrics to this song. I think both sonically and thematically, this is maybe the strongest representation of the album.” **“Incidental II” (feat. Jae Matthews)** “This was a lot of fun to put together. We have Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher on the track. We’re big Boy Harsher fans, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I was talking to one of them about what we were working on, and he suggested that we get in touch with Jae. We got on the phone, and I explained the themes of the album, and I sent her a very early version of the song to see if she was interested. She was excited, which I was really happy about. We flew her out to LA and spent a day in the studio. She wrote the lyrics for it after we discussed it. Much like ‘Incidental I,’ it’s such an important mood piece to the album, especially going into ‘Revelator.’ I think the two connect in a really wonderful way.” **“Revelator”** “This song is the bruiser. It’s just a lot of fun, and the credit goes mostly to Kerry. This is where his head was at a lot of the time when we were making this record, just wanting to go fast and write something that was pissed but sort of unhinged. There’s this clean break, and then it goes into this chaos of blast beats, and we layered a thousand guitars. It’s a very high-energy song, and one that I think is really built for our live show as well. A lot of these songs were written with the live show in mind, and I think this one most of all.” **“Body Behavior”** “I love this song. It is, even within our repertoire, a pretty strange one. It was the first song we wrote for the album. The guys were listening to a lot of krautrock, and so the verses come from there. It’s bass- and drum-driven and very cool. Again, that thing happens where this record couldn’t have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The entire bridge section is this *Infinite Granite* by way of \[Radiohead’s\] *In Rainbows* type of beautiful interacting guitars. Overall, I think this song was a little bit of us figuring out what we were going to do next. The first song you write for something new is always a little bit of that.” **“Incidental III” (feat. Paul Banks)** “This was purposely written to go into the next song, ‘Winona.’ They share the same kind of chord and lead structure. We discussed doing a monologue here, and then we agreed that it would be interesting to have someone other than me voice it. Having Jae on ‘Incidental II’ and Paul \[Banks\] from Interpol on this lets our audience more into the broader world of Deafheaven and what we like. To me, it’s obvious that we like Boy Harsher and Interpol, but I don’t think everyone else maybe sees it that way. This gives us an opportunity to show how well-rounded the project is—and to work with people that we really admire.” **“Winona”** “Winona is a 5,000-person town in Mississippi. It’s a town where my grandparents lived. A lot of my family is buried there and is from there. Along with ‘Amethyst,’ this is the other big epic on the record. The coolest thing about this song, for me, is that there’s a choir on it, which repeats throughout the track, and the choir is just a bunch of our friends. It was six men and six women, and Kerry and I conducted them, which we’d never done before. Much of the choir group were producers and musicians with real orchestral experience, so we’d be side-eyeing them, like, ‘Are we doing OK here?’ It was a lot of fun to make.” **“The Marvelous Orange Tree”** “The song is named after a magic trick from the 1830s, and it always felt like the closer. Again, with the clean vocal thing, while we were writing the song, we were just like, ‘This makes sense here. We should embrace this skill set.’ To me, it’s our big Mogwai track or something. It’s a really cool midtempo song that’s focused on density more than anything else. Because of that, it really sets itself apart from the rest of the record. It’s pure heft and no speed. It’s just a nice flavor to round out a record that dabbles in a lot of different things throughout.”

The creation—and especially the success—of his 2024 viral hit “End of Beginning” prepared Djo, the musical alter ego of *Stranger Things* star Joe Keery, for the recording of his third album. “It was a boost of confidence and a good shot in the arm,” he tells Apple Music. “Doing a song from beginning to end in a studio and getting bit by that was like, ‘Oh man, this is how I want to do this. I don’t think I really want to try to do this in my bedroom.’” Famed New York City studio Electric Lady provided Keery and his frequent producer Adam Thein with the environment they needed. “We were using all the toys,” Keery notes. “This piece of gear was laying around, so let’s mess with it. And it ends up, it informs the whole track. There’s a lot of that going on on this record.” And so, *The Crux* was born. Unlike his past endeavors, this time he chose to focus on collaboration. “I came up musically in a time where it was Kevin Parker and Mac DeMarco and these guys who did it all by themselves. So I think for a while that was what I thought I wanted to be,” he says. “But doing this project, it made me come back to working more collaboratively, still producing stuff, but with other people. It was a real joy to have friends and family and outside musicians coming in and bringing this thing to life.” One surprising guest? Charlie Heaton, Keery’s *Stranger* love-triangle competitor, appears on the jaunty “Charlie’s Garden.” *The Crux* is filled with psychedelic beats, electronica tones, and groovy guitar licks and floats through Keery’s particular brand of twee indie pop with a blend of bright sounds and hazy nostalgia. There’s the uplifting (“Lonesome is a State of Mind”), carefree (“Basic Being Basic”), regretful (“Delete Ya”), somber (“Egg”), and bittersweet (“Crux”). And classic-rock influences abound, particularly on “Potion.” (“Love Fleetwood Mac. You can definitely hear that on that track,” he says.) Keery takes special pride in his output. “It’s my outlet for talking about my own life and my little diary,” he says. “I’m sure a lot of musicians, that’s the way that they do it. So to use it as a way to cope with what’s going on, and then especially one of my favorite parts is just, like, album order and the structure of the record as a whole. That’s one part of that journey.”

“I try to focus on the present,” Ela Minus tells Apple Music as she explores the songs of *DÍA*. “I’m never thinking about the past or the future. I try not to compare past experiences with anything that followed them. I simply spend my days making new music.” On her previous releases, the singer and multi-instrumentalist born in Bogotá and based in Brooklyn attempted to manifest a safe and comfortable space where people could listen to her songs. Her 2020 breakout debut, *acts of rebellion*, felt like someone communicating electronic pop to you in secret, with warm analog synth squiggles and a delightfully brittle feel, not unlike coldwave’s minimalist steeliness or the punkish, romantic sound of ’80s synth-pop. On *DÍA*, Minus cranks up her stylistic tics to max volume: The synths crash and her voice soars above the music instead of lying in wait in the shadows. The saucer-eyed wobbles of opener “ABRIR MONTE” immediately recall the lush rave waves of Jamie xx’s “Gosh,” while “ONWARDS” conjures peak-era electroclash, right down to Minus’ excellently disaffected and cool-to-the-touch vocal take. “I’m not a simple person,” she admits. “I decided to be honest on this album and paint a more accurate picture of myself. This is why the opening track is titled ‘ABRIR MONTE’ \[‘TO CROSS THE HILL’\]. Recording it felt like opening up a new pathway into my inner world.” Here, she walks us through the album, track by track. **“ABRIR MONTE”** “It’s the first track that I recorded for the album. The first chord progression that seemed interesting enough to define the sound of *DÍA*. It’s like a mantra that envelops you. I’d like it to sound like I’m jumping off the speakers and embracing you, literally. I’m inviting you to step in and follow the road that’s outlined on the rest of the record.” **“BROKEN”** “This song is like a complement to ‘ABRIR MONTE,’ and it appeared in the same order. It’s an anthem that celebrates every person’s current emotional state, because we should accept that every single moment is valid.” **“IDOLS”** “This is my favorite song on the album. The definition of what I’m feeling like these days, and how I would characterize the music industry. I’d love for artists from all disciplines to listen and internalize the lyrics. I hope it inspires people to do whatever they please instead of chasing blindly after the pop idols of the moment.” **“IDK”** “Perhaps I should have left this one out. It’s a little too honest, and it makes me uncomfortable. I attempted to drop it in every possible manner, but the album never felt complete without it. If there’s a song that defines my emotional state at the time—and how thoroughly lost I felt—it’s this one. It’s the heart of the entire record. Something that I cherish in music is the relationship between tension and resolution. ‘IDK’ is the crux of all the tension that percolates in this project.” **“QQQQ”** “A moment of euphoria. I had developed bits of this song for the longest time: pieces of lyrics, beats, and melodies. But I couldn’t quite bring it all together into a cohesive song. I envisioned it as a bonus track, but just as I was wrapping up the album, I felt that it was missing a moment of pure euphoria for the concerts, the clubs, or wherever you experience this project in a live setting. The night before mixing, I revisited this one from scratch. I told myself, ‘I have to make the most joyful song of my career, so that it becomes a symbol of complete liberation.’ That’s what this is, or at least I hope it is.” **“I WANT TO BE BETTER”** “This may well be the only love song I’ve ever written. The lyrics are very literal. I feel relationships force you to question who you really are, and how you interact with the world. I had never examined that, until I fell in love. This song speaks of love as surrender—that moment, like a mirror, when there’s someone else in your life. You can almost see yourself through their eyes, and evidently you strive to become a better person.” **“ONWARDS”** “I don’t know what else to add here—the lyrics say it all. I wrote it when I felt frustrated with my life. The perception that we’re always meant to be wanting more, pursuing our ambitions. As time goes by, the pressure is on to prove your worth, and that feeling makes me desperate. This song is a response to those questions, so that I can get rid of my fears and insecurities. I want to follow my own path, calm and focused. I just need to continue being myself.” **“AND”** “It’s the track that connects ‘ONWARDS’ with ‘UPWARDS,’ but also a very intimate moment on the album. One of my parents had passed away, I was experiencing a massive amount of pain, and I recorded a voice memo where you can hear things falling around the house—a negative ambiance. I thought that brief moment of pain was meant to become something else, and I developed this piece.” **“UPWARDS”** “It marks the resolution of ‘AND.’ It’s the one piece of advice that I’m always expecting from my friends, no matter what the situation. Life has taught me that even though we wish we could change things for other people, the truth of the matter is that we can only be responsible for our own lives, our own wellbeing and goals. I’d like this song to become an anthem about this uncomfortable truth.” **“COMBAT”** “This is a very moving song for me, because it’s the first time that I recorded with instruments other than synths. I wrote an arrangement for a wind quartet, and ‘COMBAT’ signals the resolution of the entire album. It feels like we’re standing on terrain that has burned to the ground, and now the rebuilding begins. It has the spirit of a new life—an invitation to be born again.”

Though its tracklist is compact in comparison, Eric Church’s follow-up to his ambitious 2021 triple album *Heart & Soul* is no less potent than its predecessor. *Evangeline vs. The Machine*, produced by longtime collaborator Jay Joyce, finds country music’s favorite Chief fearlessly commenting on current events and sharing vulnerable moments, doing so with all the style and swagger that fans have come to love and expect. Church tells Apple Music he believes *Evangeline vs. The Machine* is “the most creative album” he’s ever made, thanks in part to his decision to bring an orchestra into the recording studio. The resulting sound is rich and often surprising, with an expansive nature that mimics the big, complex themes Church explores in his lyrics. “There’s a tension that strings and vocals provide that you can’t get from a guitar, you can’t get from a keyboard, just because of the mechanism of the way they’re moving their arms,” he says. “There’s a tension. They can create drama. And a lot of this record has drama. I think that it almost sounds like a soundtrack. It sounds like a movie soundtrack.” Opening track “Hands of Time,” an ode to the healing power of music and a rebuke of outgrowing youthful abandon, takes that cinematic feel and infuses it with the kind of crunchy heartland sound that made songs like “Drink in My Hand” and “Springsteen” smash hits. “Johnny” refers not to Cash but to the hell-fighting hero of Charlie Daniels’ classic “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” with Church pleading for the fictional fiddler to grab his bow and “send him to hell again.” Church wrote the emotional ballad, which makes the most of Church’s orchestra, after the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which claimed the lives of three children and three adults. “Darkest Hour” also finds Church responding to recent events, as he released the poignant song ahead of the album to raise funds for victims of Hurricane Helene in 2024. And “Evangeline” is Church’s personification of the creative muse, who is ever at odds with the machine of capitalism. Below, Church shares insight into several key tracks. **“Bleed on Paper”** “‘Bleed on paper,’ that is selling your soul. You’re never going to get that back. A lot of young artists, they don’t know that. They don’t have a choice. And I think that that’s what gets hard. Staying true to \[yourself\] is the biggest challenge, I think for not just country music, but for music as we go forward in this river that is just so flooded with crap. How do you swim in that? And I think that that’s the hardest thing. If I was a young artist right now, that would be a challenge.” **“Johnny”** “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life as a parent was dropping my kids off the day after the shooting. They went to school and everybody thought it was good to go back to school and get the kids. And I understood that, but that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I sat in the parking lot a while. I was about to drive back home, and ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ came on. There’s that line, ‘Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard/Hell’s broke loose in Georgia and the devil deals the cards/And if you win, you get a shiny fiddle made of gold/If you lose, the devil gets your soul.’ And I remember that line hit and I was like, ‘God, we need Johnny, because the devil’s not in Georgia, he’s here. He’s everywhere and he’s winning.’” **“Darkest Hour”** “In ‘Darkest Hour,’ first time we went through it, in the back half of that song, there’s a flute. And it’s a flute that sounds like a baby elephant is throwing his trunk from the right to the left. The track was going really well, and all of a sudden that came in and I lost it. I stopped the entire orchestra. I said, ‘Was that a flute?’ And then there’s a girl that was playing and I said, ‘No, that’s great.’ I said, ‘I didn’t see that coming.’ And so it’s just one of those things where you have these moments that I would never have conceived, I would never have thought about, but you’re actually going to these people who are really talented people and you’re playing the song and you’re going, ‘Okay, now you paint on this picture.’” **“Evangeline”** “Evangeline, to me, in this record represents creativity, and the machine is the things we deal with now that push against or round off that creativity. Evangeline is the muse for creativity in this album. And everything in our world right now is going to push against that. And it does, even for people who are pretty creative: ‘It can’t be this long, this is the only snippet that you can put on YouTube.’ So everything that you have commercially with what the machine is, it pushes against that. And that’s a fight. And this record’s a fight in that way. I’m trying to let this record, which is the most creative I’ve ever done, be a beacon for that creativity.”

One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting *The Crow* reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). *EUSEXUA*, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, *Caprisongs*), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style. The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from *EUSEXUA*’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.

According to Alex Kapranos, longtime lead vocalist of Franz Ferdinand, fear may be the largest untapped source of renewable energy on the planet. The millennial-era stalwarts are hoping that by charging headlong into that which frightens us most, maybe, just maybe, we’re all capable of tapping into the secret drive hidden on the other side. “I think we all have fears within us and fears that we confront in our life at different times,” Kapranos tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “And how we react to those fears is how we learn who we are really. And fear is not necessarily a bad thing either. Fear is associated with some of the greatest things you do in your life. Think about asking somebody out on a date: There\'s quite a lot of fear that you have to overcome to do that. Yeah, no. I think it\'s a fascinating insight into who we are.” Kapranos and Franz Ferdinand are no strangers to self-reflection. *The Human Fear* arrives at the peak of millennial-era revivalism thanks to the cresting wave of indie-sleaze nostalgia. But the band’s workmanlike approach to touring hasn’t seen them slow down much in the two decades since their self-titled art-rock debut catapulted them to fame. A lineup change also inspired the band to get back into the studio, where they captured a bit of that anthemic energy on the album’s lead single “Audacious,” a glam-rock bruiser they say serves as a bit of a mission statement for the entire album. “I think the spirit of the song encapsulates what I think being in a band should be, which is quite an audacious thing,” bassist Bob Hardy reveals. “There’s no point being onstage or getting on a stage unless you’re going to do it in an audacious way. If you’re not going to do it the whole way, then what the fuck are you doing?” Much of that “what the fuck are you doing” energy emerged organically when the band reassembled in the studio. Not that a sense of zeal has ever been absent across the band’s discography, but the Scottish quintet wanted to make sure they were hitting the record button with their guitars already firmly tuned. “We made sure that the songs were bangers first and foremost,” Hardy says. “And then we got the band together and learned them. And a lot of the album’s recorded live, so it’s the live sound of the band really tearing into it, and I think it gives the whole record a really exciting feel. It sounds like we’re having fun, and we were having fun making it.” “I hear stories about bands that will go into the studio and say that, ‘Well, the studio\'s jammed a bit.’ And then the record just came, and you can hear it sometimes,” Kapranos adds. “I like the idea of going to the studio when you’ve got some great songs and you know how to play them. I think that makes for a good record.”

Though Becca Harvey rose to alt-pop fame with her 2022 debut album, *When I’m Alone*, she felt as if she were working in the shadow of her collaborators, writing along to their melodies. For its follow-up, the Atlanta singer-songwriter rethought her creative approach, trusting her own lyrical and melodic instincts. The resulting songs are bittersweet and raw (despite the album’s deceptively sweet title), telling the story of a four-year relationship and its aftermath in bleary vignettes. On “I Just Do!” she draws the blackout curtains and sleeps through a flight in the arms of a new crush; next thing you know, she’s looking at old photo-booth strips, wondering how it all went wrong. The 26-year-old’s lyrics are wide-open and bemused, countering her grief with a shrug or a wink; on “Windows,” she slips in a knowing reference to Fleetwood Mac’s iconic breakup banger: “You are my silver spring/No matter what you do/You will always hear me sing.”

Great Grandpa’s third album almost didn’t happen. While working on the follow-up to 2019’s *Four of Arrows*, the five-piece drifted apart, with non-band life taking over and the members scattering from their onetime home base of Seattle to further-flung corners of the globe. But fate intervened, and in 2023 the group threw out what they’d been working on and began creating what would become *Patience, Moonbeam*. The album’s ambitious nature becomes immediately apparent with the opening interlude “Sleep,” a brief yet potent string piece that condenses the story arc of a night’s slumber into less than 40 seconds. But *Patience, Moonbeam* packages its aspirations in a collection that has the surface vibe of slacker-pop, with easygoing rhythms, instantly hummable hooks, and fuzzed-out guitars, making its sudden left turns and emotional peaks hit even harder. Take “Ladybug,” which at its outset meshes Great Grandpa’s chilled-out acoustic guitars with the ultra-processed vocals and buzzy synths that define hyperpop. That segues into a more traditional indie-rock shuffle. Lead vocalist Al Menne’s winsome wail free-associates pop-culture images—Donald Glover on the cover of *GQ*, a line snatched from “All You Need Is Love”—before the digitally refracted voice rises up again: “I wish I could feel that good,” it laments, over and over, the mechanized voice conveying genuine longing for a world that should exist somewhere. It’s a wild combination, but Great Grandpa’s ability to bring together those disparate elements and inject them with full-band emotionalism makes everything come together. *Patience, Moonbeam* is full of moments where Great Grandpa explodes in glorious, and at times heartbreaking, fashion. “Task” shapeshifts from hiccuping chaos into a longing hymn; “Kid” reflects on guitarist Pat Goodwin and bassist Carrie Goodwin losing their first pregnancy, all the while knowing that mourning is something not to be rushed. It’s a record defined by wonder and possibility, and it was made by a band that came back together just in the nick of time.

Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”

The indie-pop band fronted by Michelle Zauner released their third album, 2021’s *Jubilee*, to massive critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. After spending five years writing *Crying in H Mart*, her best-selling memoir about grief, Zauner devoted the record to joy and catharsis, all triumphant horns and swooning synths. But for its follow-up, the ambitious polymath found herself drawn to darker, knottier themes—loneliness, desire, contemporary masculinity. She also gravitated to the indie-rock sounds of her past, recruiting producer and guitarist Blake Mills, known for his work with artists like Fiona Apple, Feist, and Weyes Blood. “\[For *Jubilee*\] we wanted to have bombastic, big instrumentation with lots of strings and horns; I wanted this to come back to a more guitar-oriented record,” Zauner tells Apple Music. “I think I’m going back to my roots a little bit more.” When she began to write the band’s fourth record in 2022, Zauner found inspiration in an unlikely literary juxtaposition: Greek mythology, gothic romance classics, and works that she wryly deemed as part of the “incel canon” à la Bret Easton Ellis’ *American Psycho*. From such seemingly disparate sources emerged the gorgeously bleak songs of *For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)*, whose title is presented with an implied wink, acknowledging the many women songwriters whose work is reduced to “sad girl music.” Indeed, the atmosphere on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is less straightforwardly sad, and more…well, it’s complicated. On “Leda,” the story of a strained relationship unfolds by way of Greek myths in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. “Little Girl,” a deceptively sweet-sounding ballad about a father estranged from his daughter, opens with a spectacularly abject image: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite.” And on the fascinatingly eerie “Mega Circuit,” on which legendary drummer Jim Keltner lays down a mean shuffle, Zauner paints a twisted tableau of modern manhood—muddy ATVs, back-alley blowjobs, “incel eunuchs”—somehow managing to make it all sound achingly poetic with lines like, “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded/Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths.” The universe Zauner conveys on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is sordid and strange, though not without beauty in the form of sublime guitar sounds or striking turns of phrase. (“I never knew I’d find my way into the arms/Of men in bars,” she sings on the wistful “Men in Bars,” which includes the album’s only feature from…Jeff Bridges?!) As for the title’s bone-dry humor—sardonically zesty castanet and tambourine add extra irony to “Winter in LA,” on which Zauner imagines herself as a happier woman, writing sweet love songs instead of…these.

Jennie Kim debuted as a K-pop performer in BLACKPINK in 2016 and released her first solo song, the finger-snapping “Solo,” two years later. But it wasn’t until her debut solo album, 2025’s *Ruby*, that she got a more profound chance to self-reflect through her music. “The greatest part of this solo project for me was that I had time with myself,” JENNIE tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I really got to dig deep inside of who I am and what I am.” The 15-track, primarily English-language album was JENNIE’s first music release since leaving YG Entertainment as a soloist to launch her own label, Odd Atelier, and it’s a declaration of her musical identity as a solo singer and rapper. The album’s name, *Ruby*, is a reference to the alter ego (Jennie Ruby Jane) that the musician created for herself when she moved to New Zealand by herself as a child to learn English. “When I was like 11,” she says, “I knew that I wanted to create this identity for myself, like ‘Jennie’ wasn\'t doing justice for me, and I was like, ‘I want a longer name.’” The persona has carried over into adulthood and her creative expression on *Ruby*. From the hip-hop-driven swagger of tracks like “like JENNIE,” “ExtraL,” and “Damn Right” to confessional-style songs like “F.T.S.,” “twin,” and “start a war,” JENNIE opens up about fame, protecting the ones she loves, and staying true to herself. She taps an eclectic cadre of established and rising Western musicians for help, including Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis (“Damn Right”), Doechii (“ExtraL”), Dominic Fike (“Love Hangover”), FKJ (“JANE”), and Dua Lipa (“Handlebars”). “Now, I\'m not afraid to challenge myself,” JENNIE says of what she learned in the album-creation process. “Understanding my value was the biggest lesson.”

California singer-songwriter Jensen McRae’s cut an impressive figure over the last few years, from her striking breakout single “Wolves” and her debut LP *Are You Happy Now?* to a profile-raising stint opening for Noah Kahan on 2024’s Stick Season tour. Her sophomore bow *I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!* finds the 27-year-old taking her confessional folk-rock style—equally influenced by Tracy Chapman’s raw lyrical expressionism and Taylor Swift’s melodic grandeur—and blowing it up on the widest screen possible. Over bell-clear production courtesy of studio wiz Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee), McRae’s songwriting breathes like never before, from the countrified and Phoebe Bridgers-esque “Savannah” to the closely-mic’d piano ballad “Tuesday,” which features McRae leaning into her sturdy lower vocal register and spinning the type of quietly devastating lyrical gestures she’s become renowned for: “If you spent a day in my shoes/You’d know how it feels to be used.”

“That is who Lady Gaga is to me,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of creating *MAYHEM*. “Maybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.” In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album—which she calls her “favorite record in a long time”—its own thing. “*ARTPOP* was a vibe. *Joanne* was a sound. *Chromatica* had a sound. All different. *The Fame Monster* was more chaotic. *The Fame* was theatrical pop. *Born This Way*, to me, had more of a metal/electro New York vibe to it,” she says. “I actually made the effort making *MAYHEM* to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.” Indeed, *MAYHEM* traverses—and oftentimes melds—the various flavors of Mother Monster’s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited “Garden of Eden” follows the trend of what she calls “2000 throwbacks.” With its sparkly synths, “LoveDrug” might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut “LoveGame.” She even specifically admits the “electro-grunge influence” seeps its way in—especially apparent in “Perfect Celebrity,” “Vanish into You,” and “The Beast.” The latter even shows shades of *Joanne*, but “Blade of Grass” and her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile” really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display. It’s also all incredibly personal to her. “The album is a series of gothic dreams,” she says. “I say it’s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.” Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks, in her own words. **“Abracadabra”** “I think I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think ‘Abracadabra’ is very much my sound—something that I honed in \[on\] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me. And it’s the thing that I’m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.” **“Perfect Celebrity”** “It’s super angry: ‘I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.’ It’s almost comical, this idea that any time I’m in the room with anyone, there’s me—Stefani—and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It’s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn’t feel honest to me on *MAYHEM* to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I’m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I’m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.” **“Shadow of a Man”** “That song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.” **“The Beast”** “In that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who’s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about \[my fiancé\] Michael \[Polansky\] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, ‘You can’t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart’s racing, you’re growling, and we both know why.’ It’s like somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.’” **“Blade of Grass”** “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn’t have as much life around me to inspire me.”

The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”

“For a while I thought, ‘I want to write some new stuff for him,’ but I was not in that headspace,” Mark Pritchard tells Apple Music about collaborating with Thom Yorke. “I thought, ‘I’ll just send him a load of different things in different states \[of completion\]. That would be more interesting for him, he might want to pull some apart, add some things.’ Keep it open and organic and not be like, ‘We’re doing an album here.’” In 2020, Yorke was in COVID-enforced lockdown in the UK when he reached out to Pritchard. The Radiohead vocalist and the veteran electronic producer had worked together on the song “Beautiful People” from Pritchard’s 2016 album *Under the Sun*, while the British-born, Sydney-based Pritchard had remixed Radiohead track “Bloom” in 2011. The purpose of Yorke’s email was simple: If Pritchard had any ideas floating about that would make for a good collaboration, he would love to hear them. What followed was a three-year process of swapping files over email and regular video calls. The duo also teamed up with visual collaborator Jonathan Zawada, who created a feature film comprised of videos for each song. With Pritchard composing and recording his ideas on a collection of vintage synths, *Tall Tales* is a dystopian collection of songs and soundscapes that takes in ’70s synth, dub, krautrock, synth-prog, minimalist techno, and haunting synth-pop. At times claustrophobic (“Ice Shelf”) and relentlessly dark (“The White Cliffs”), the album bristles with the sense of paranoia and global upheaval that enveloped the world around 2020 (even though the music was written prior). “There’s tense moments, it’s heavy, everything’s feeling a bit off, the way I programmed stuff,” says Pritchard. Here, the producer takes Apple Music through *Tall Tales*, track by track. **“A Fake in a Faker’s World”** “It was one Thom got into early on, he had fun going in on that. It might have been one that made him think, ‘I want to do all of this.’ It’s quite a heavy song melodically. I feel it does what a couple of songs do in one song, so while it is long it goes through these different phases.” **“Ice Shelf”** “It was going to be an ambient song, it works without vocals. But I’m glad I sent it through and Thom turned it into a song. That one’s dystopian—it’s sad, and slightly dark. The tension in it pushes it heavy.” **“Bugging Out Again”** “I thought, ‘I want to try some stuff with Thom’s voice. I want to try his vocal through a Leslie speaker,’ which is \[in\] a Hammond organ—they have speakers built in that have rotary horns inside that spin around, which give you this kind of modulation effect. It really transformed the sound of the vocal. It just opened it up and gave it this space.” **“Back in the Game”** “The original instrumental had no drums; it was just the synth. It felt like a John-Carpenter-type horror film vibe. Then Thom said, ‘You should put some drums on it.’ I ended up using this Lowrey ’60s organ that has like a drum pad: kick drum, snare, open and closed hi hat, maybe a cymbal. It’s coming out of an organ speaker, it’s close mic-ed and room mic-ed, which means I can mix the ambience around the sound. The other layer of drums is from this Mattel Synsonics drum machine. It’s like a cheap toy drum sound.” **“The White Cliffs”** “\[I’m using\] a Suzuki Omnichord, which is a Japanese-built electronic accordion. The night I got it I wrote that song. I knew ‘The White Cliffs’ was heavy and the subject matter’s heavy—a few people were like, ‘I really like that one but I can’t listen to it that much.’ There’s a desperation in the lyrics.” **“The Spirit”** “It’s in the most obvious major key, and I thought Thom would go sad over it, but he didn’t. I was a bit taken aback. I wasn’t convinced and I added a load of weirdness to it to push it away from it, and he just said, ‘Nah, you need to get rid of all that.’ He sent me a reggae song by Janet Kay, ‘Silly Games,’ and he said, ‘It’s a totally different song, it’s not comparable in most ways, but there’s a feeling that this has and people don’t do it that often and we need to keep it.’ I was like, ‘OK, I get it.’” **“Gangsters”** “It’s a weird song. When Thom first sent me the vocals I wasn’t sure if he needed to do more. Then it was like, ‘No, this works.’ It’s not really a traditional song, it’s not really a verse, chorus. Once he sent me the vocals I was like, ‘I need to not try and make this into a song.’ What’s good about it is it’s a bit random and comes and goes and it’s unexpected and it just ends a bit abruptly.” **“This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice”** “To me this one felt like a Stereolab-type vibe but with slightly more aggressive drums. It’s an old drum machine but there’s a lot of top-end energy off the hi hats. I was going to put guitars in it. There’s something about early indie music there and that’s cool, ’cause I like that stuff. It had a different bassline in it originally that Thom wanted me to get rid of and leave it open. He then put the bass in the final track.” **“Tall Tales”** “We wanted to have a chaotic buildup that’s tense, there’s a lot of chatter. Thom was going to do a spoken-word piece over it, but then he manipulated his voice \[as\] a backdrop and used computer voices to do the various voices. I spent a lot of time trying to make them sound tense but not harsh.” **“Happy Days”** “A lot of the drum machines that ended up on this record are like preset drum machines, so they’d be like bossa nova, polka, march, waltz, pop, rock, different styles. That march pattern’s not an easy pattern to use. But that’s appealing to me—can I get this to work? I was really surprised what \[Thom\] did on it. Some spoken-word female voice, posh BBC announcer in the first part, and then he’s singing all different types of hooks. It definitely has a darker, older feel to it. I was trying to get a bit of ’40s, ’50s jazz in there.” **“The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads”** “I always wanted to do a song with harmonium. There’s an artist called Ivor Cutler, who I’m a huge fan of, and he used a harmonium. I was trying to do an Ivor Cutler folkie thing, and then I distorted it a little bit and it went a little psychedelic, and then I pushed it back a little bit more towards folk with the percussion and layering in the oboe.” **“Wandering Genie”** “This is one of the ones where the arrangement was finished. It’s this loop that’s falling over itself that doesn’t change key, so Thom put some piano chords in to shift things. Then he decided, ‘I’m just going to do it with my voice, I’m going to layer up a five-part harmony.’ I think there’s five vocal layers and they all have their own effect channel to them.”

By sheer force of will, MIKE has become a leading voice in New York’s underground rap renaissance. He drops one or two albums a year, each expanding his lyrical scope, laidback delivery, and excellent ear for beats. His crew runs deep, and 2024’s *Pinball* with producer Tony Seltzer featured many of his closest collaborators, like Earl Sweatshirt and Tony Shhnow. His 2025 effort, *Showbiz!*, is similar in the sense that it’s a deeply immersive effort, but the guest list is limited. MIKE’s world is nevertheless unmistakable, filled with weed smoke, knotty lyrics, and beats that continue to help forge a new golden age in New York. “Then we could be free” takes an old soul sample and highlights the bassline, giving MIKE’s unrelenting delivery a funky underbelly. “Lucky” features drums that explode like fireworks and synths that dance around MIKE’s voice, approximating his slippery flow without ever tying it down to a consistent rhythm. It’s loose but never sloppy.

When Miley Cyrus won her first Grammys in 2024 (Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance for “Flowers” from 2023’s *Endless Summer Vacation*), something shifted. “I think somewhere inside of me, I needed to hold a trophy and just feel for a moment that I have something that I can hold in my hands that feels like a true achievement,” the 32-year-old child star turned pop icon tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “After every album, I’ve been able to say, ‘Well, I made the album I set out to make, and that’s enough.’ Somewhere, I was avoiding the fact that it did matter to me.” Having finally achieved the validation she’d been longing to feel since childhood, Cyrus says she “felt free to make the album that I’ve really been craving my whole adult career to create.” The name of the resulting album, her ninth, emerged out of the ether while riffing in the studio with producer Max Taylor-Sheppard and Cyrus’ boyfriend/collaborator, Liily drummer Maxx Morando. “As soon as \[Taylor-Sheppard\] played the first chord, I just said, ‘Tell me something beautiful tonight.’ It was so easy, but I have no idea where it came from. The chord he played was so beautiful that what needed to be said had to be beautiful.” In the title track, a Sunday morning soul jam erupts with a “flash, bang, spark” into post-apocalyptic prog-rock distortion. That clash of sensuality and chaos extends through *Something Beautiful*, whose ’80s-inspired melodrama swings for the fences in sound and theme. The deceptively sparkly-sounding “End of the World” celebrates one last blowout bash before the sky falls. “This, to me, is pop music in its fullest form,” Cyrus says. “Pop gets given a bad name by manufactured label creations, and that’s just not what it is.” She’s thinking of legendary pop innovators who evolved with the times: David Bowie, Madonna, Elton John. The ultra-funky “Easy Lover” was intended for another such icon: Cyrus originally wrote it circa 2020’s *Plastic Hearts*, then refurbished it for placement on Beyoncé’s *COWBOY CARTER*. When Bey went with “II MOST WANTED” instead, Cyrus kept the slinky number for herself, recruiting Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard to play electric guitar—though the “Tell ’em, B!” ad-lib stays. Cyrus’ inimitable voice has never sounded more soulful, though that has not come without a price. She tells Apple Music she has Reinke’s edema, a rare condition which causes fluid to build up in the outer layer of the vocal folds—hence her trademark rasp. “So I have this very large polyp on my vocal cord, which has given me a lot of the tone and the texture that has made me who I am,” she says. “But it’s extremely difficult to perform with, because it’s like running a marathon with ankle weights on.” It could be removed surgically, but for Cyrus, the benefit isn’t worth the risk, “because the chance of waking up from surgery and not sounding like myself is a probability.” Throughout a career that’s spanned two-thirds of her life, Cyrus has felt lost in the static. “White noise is essentially everything happening all at the same time, and I feel like that was what the last 20 years of my career felt like,” she says. But while recording *Something Beautiful*, she found herself coming to terms with everything that’s come before. Over the heavy disco groove of “Reborn,” she delivers a mission statement: “If heaven exists/I’ve been there before/Kill my ego/Let’s be reborn.”

The buzzing New York band (lead vocalist Cole Haden, drummer Ruben Radlauer, guitarist Jack Wetmore, and bassist Aaron Shapiro) formed in 2016, but broke through with their 2023 full-length debut, *Dogsbody*—a blast of haunted, hedonistic noise-rock that embellished the cool chaos of early aughts dance-punk with musical-theater melodrama. On its follow-up, *Pirouette*, Model/Actriz lean all the way in on those rococo tendencies and embrace their inner prima donnas without losing their grit. “Living in America, while trapped in the body of an operatic diva,” Haden laments in a campy stage whisper on “Diva” between tales of one-night stands in far-flung European locales. The pendulum swings wildly between abandon and control, but there’s a gonzo sensuality that ties it all together. Hence, an eerie acoustic ballad about being jealous of hummingbirds (“Acid Rain”) followed by a throbbing dance-punk jam (“Departures”) that relishes in the beauty of three-syllable words—parasol, silhouette, matinee, vagabond.

Momma’s follow-up to their 2022 breakthrough album, *Household Name*, opens with the pair skewering a freshly abandoned ex with the line “I love you to death/But I’m outside the door.” No emotion is off-limits for Brooklyn-based songwriting duo Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten (now expanded to a quartet including guitarist, composer, and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks), who’ve created a breakup album full of spiky lyrics and sing-along hooks. “It’s written from the perspective of two people we hurt, so it’s kinda looking at ourselves in a critical lens, which was a really interesting exercise,” Friedman tells Apple Music. “I think it captures the turmoil of us moving on, and these people feeling left behind. The inner struggle of, ‘These people are important to us. I love them, but our lives are growing apart, and I’m changing, so I have to move on.’” *Welcome to My Blue Sky* gave Momma a new spark and a deeper songwriting chemistry that naturally evolved from being such close friends. “I definitely think we wanted to not make a *Household Name* round two, so we were trying to push ourselves to find new things that would excite us,” says Friedman. “With Allegra and I writing these songs with just the two of us on acoustic, it actually allowed more room to play.” Weingarten agrees that their close friendship takes away any hint of self-consciousness that could hamper their creativity. “We’re so connected as songwriters and also friends, there’s a lot less time wasted trying to figure something out on the spot,” she says. “It all came together super fast because when it’s just Etta and I, we can try anything. We learned to trust our intuition and followed that.” From the ’90s slacker sing-along of “I Want You (Fever)” to a nostalgic trip to the grungy dance floor on “Last Kiss,” it’s the sound of a band maturing and moving on up.

*A note from the artists:* \$$$4U 74 PERSONAL MINUTES BY PARTYNEXTDOOR & DRAKE FOR THE CITY OF TORONTO FOR CANADA AND FOR THE WORLD THAT HAS TUNED IN TO THIS SOUND OF OURS FROM TIME OVO OMO FERINA “Maybe it was karma that caused a reversal in my luck and family fortunes” — You most likely in the near future

The remarkable thing about Mike Hadreas’ music is how he manages to fit such big feelings into such small, confined spaces. Like 2020’s *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately*, 2025’s *Glory* (also produced by the ever-subtle but ever-engaging Blake Mills) channels the kind of gothic Americana that might soundtrack a David Lynch diner or the atmospheric opening credits of a show about hot werewolves: a little campy, a little dark, a lot of passions deeply felt. The bold moments here are easy to grasp (“It’s a Mirror,” “Me & Angel”), but it’s the quieter ones that make you sit up and listen (“Capezio,” “In a Row”). Once he found beauty in letting go, now he finds it in restraint.