Rough Trade UK's Albums of the Year 2021

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

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

“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”

“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”

The intense process of making a debut album can have enduring effects on a band. Some are less expected than others. “It made my clothes smell for weeks afterwards,” Squid’s drummer/singer Ollie Judge tells Apple Music. During the British summer heatwave of 2020, the UK five-piece—Judge and multi-instrumentalists Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson—decamped to producer Dan Carey’s London studio for three weeks. There, Carey served them the Swiss melted-cheese dish raclette, hence the stench, and also helped the band expand the punk-funk foundations of their early singles into a capricious, questing set that draws on industrial, jazz, alt-rock, electronic, field recordings, and a Renaissance-era wind instrument called the rackett. The songs regularly reflect on disquieting aspects of modern life—“2010” alone examines greed, gentrification, and the mental-health effects of working in a slaughterhouse—but it’s also an album underpinned by the kindness of others. Before Carey hosted them in a COVID-safe environment at his home studio, the band navigated the restrictions of lockdown with the help of people living near Judge’s parents in Chippenham in south-west England. A next-door neighbor, who happens to be Foals’ guitar tech, lent them equipment, while a local pub owner opened up his barn as a writing and rehearsal space. “It was really nice, so many people helping each other out,“ says Borlase. “There’s maybe elements within the music, on a textural level, of how we wished that feel of human generosity was around a bit more in the long term.” Here, Borlase, Judge, and Pearson guide us through the record, track by track. **“Resolution Square”** Anton Pearson: “It’s a ring of guitar amps facing the ceiling, playing samples. On the ceiling was a microphone on a cord that swung around like a pendulum. So you get that dizzying effect of motion. It’s a bit like a red shift effect, the pitch changing as the microphone moves. We used samples of church bells and sounds from nature. It felt like a really nice thing to start with, kind of waking up.” Ollie Judge: “It sounds like cars whizzing by on the flyover, but it’s all made out of sounds from nature. So it’s playing to that push and pull between rural and urban spaces.” **“G.S.K.”** OJ: “I started writing the lyrics when I was on a Megabus from Bristol to London. I was reading *Concrete Island* by J. G. Ballard, and that is set underneath that same flyover that you go on from Bristol to London \[the Chiswick Flyover\]. I decided to explore the dystopic nature of Britain, I guess. It’s a real tone-setter, quite industrial and a bit unlike the sound world that we’ve explored before. Lots of clanging.” **“Narrator”** OJ: “It’s almost like a medley of everything we’ve done before: It’s got the punk-funk kind of stuff, and then newer industrial kind of sounds, and a foray into electronic sounds.” Louis Borlase: “It’s actually one of the freest ones when it comes to performing it. The big build-up that takes you through to the very end of the song is massively about texture in space, therefore it’s also massively about communication. That takes us back to the early days of playing in the Verdict \[jazz venue\] together, in Brighton, where we used to have very freeform music. It was very much about just establishing a tonality and a harmony and potentially a rhythm, and just kind of riding with it.” **“Boy Racers”** OJ: “It’s a song of two halves. The familiar, almost straightforward pop song, and then it ends in a medieval synth solo.” LB: “We had started working on it quite crudely, ready to start performing it on tour, in March 2020, just before lockdown. In lockdown, we started sending each other files and letting it develop via the internet. Just at the point where everything stops rhythmically and everything gets thrown up into the air—and enter said rackett solo—it’s the perfect depiction of when we were able to start seeing each other again. That whole rhythmic element stopped, and we left the focus to be what it means to have something that’s very free.” **“Paddling”** OJ: “The big, gooey pop centerpiece of the album. There’s a video of us playing it live from quite a few years ago, and it’s changed so much. We added quite a bit of nuance.” AP: “It was a combined effort between the three of us, lyrically. It started off about coming-of-age themes and how that related to readings about *The Wind in the Willows* and Mole—about things feeling scary when they’re new sometimes. That kind of naivety can trip you up. Then also about the whole theme of the book, about greed and consumerism, and learning to enjoy simple things. That book says such a beautiful thing about joy and how to get enjoyment out of life.” **“Documentary Filmmaker”** OJ: “It was quite Steve Reich-inspired, even to the point where when I played my girlfriend the album for the first time she said, ‘Oh, I thought that was Steve Reich. That was really nice.’” LB: “It started in a bedroom jam at Arthur’s family house. We had quite a lazy summer afternoon, no pressure in writing, and that’s preserved its way through to what it is on the album.” AP: “Sometimes we set out with ideas like that and they move into the more full-band setting. We felt was really important to keep this one in that kind of stripped-back nature.” **“2010”** OJ: “I think it’s a real shift towards future Squid music. It’s more like an alternative rock song than a post-punk band. It’s definitely a turning point: Our music has been known to be quite anecdotal and humorous in places, but this is quite mature. It doesn’t have a tongue-in-cheek moment.” LB: “Lyrically, it’s tackling some themes which are quite distressing and expose some of the problematic aspects of society. Trying to make that work, you’re owing a lot to the people involved, people that are affected by these issues, and you don’t want to make something that doesn’t feel truly thought about.” **“The Flyover”** AP: “It moulds really nicely into ‘Peel St.’ after it, which is quite fun—that slow morphing from something quite calm into something quite stressful. Arthur sent some questions out to friends of the band to answer, recorded on their phones. He multi-tracked them so there’s only ever like three people talking at one time. It’s just such a hypnotic and beautiful thing to listen to. Lots of different people talking about their lives and their perspectives.” **“Peel St.”** AP: “That’s the first thing we came up with when we met up in Chippenham, after having been separate for so long. It was this wave of excitement and joy. I don’t know why, when we’re all so happy, something like that comes out. That rhythmic pattern grew from those first few days, because it was really emotional.” LB: “It was joyful, but when we were all in that barn on the first day, I don’t think any of us were quite right. We called it ‘Aggro’ before we named it ‘Peel St.,’ because we would feel pretty unsettled playing it. It was a workout mentally and physically.” **“Global Groove”** OJ: “I got loads of inspiration from a retrospective on Nam June Paik—who’s like the godfather of TV art, or video installations—at the Tate. It’s a lot about growing up with the 24-hour news cycle and how unhealthy it is to be bombarded with mostly bad news—but then sometimes a nice story about an animal \[gets added\] on the end of the news broadcast. Growing up with various atrocities going on around you, and how the 24-hour news cycle must desensitize you to large-scale wars and death.” **“Pamphlets”** LB: “It’s probably the second oldest track on the album. The three of us were staying at Ollie’s parents’ house a couple of summers ago and it was the first time we bought a whiteboard. We now write music using a whiteboard, we draw stuff up, try and keep it visual. It also makes us feel quite efficient. ‘Pamphlets’ became an important part of our set, particularly finishing a set, because it’s quite a long blow-out ending. But when we brought it back to Chippenham last year, it had changed so much, because it had had so much time to have so many audiences responding to it in different ways. It’s very live music.”

'Flock’ is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation. The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but ‘Flock’ is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk. Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is ‘The Revolution Of Super Visions’, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates ‘Flock’ and concludes on ‘Solarised’, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night. The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphosise…

As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”

In August 2019, New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins thought she had the rest of her year fully mapped out, starting with a tour of North America as a guitarist in David Berman’s newly launched project Purple Mountains. But when Berman took his own life that month, everything changed. “All of a sudden, I was just unmoored and in shock,” she tells Apple Music. “I really only spent four days with David. But those four days really knocked me off my feet.” For the next few months, she wrote as she reflected, obsessively collecting ideas and lyrics, as well as recordings of conversations with friends and strangers—cab drivers and art museum security guards among them. The result is her sophomore LP, a set of iridescent folk rock that came together almost entirely over the course of one week, with multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman in his Brooklyn studio. “I was trying to articulate this feeling of getting comfortable with chaos,” she says. “And learning how to be comfortable with the idea that things are going to fall apart and they\'re going to come back together. I had shed a lot of skin very quickly.” Here, Jenkins tells us the story of each song on the album. **Michelangelo** “I think sequencing the record was an interesting challenge because, to me, the songs feel really different from one another. ‘Michelangelo’ is the only one that I came in with that was written—I had a melody that I wanted to use and I thought, ‘Okay, Josh, let’s make this into a little rock song and take the guitar solo in the middle.’ That was the first song we recorded, so it was just our way of getting into the groove of recording, with what sounds like a familiar version of what I\'ve done in the past.” **New Bikini** “I was worried when I was writing it that it sounded too starry-eyed and a little bit naive, saying, ‘The water cures everything.’ I think it was this tension between that advice—from a lot of people with good intentions—and me being like, ‘Well, it\'s not going to bring this person back from the dead and it\'s not going to change my DNA and it\'s not going to make this person better.’” **Hard Drive** “I just love talking to people, to strangers. The heart of the song is people talking about the nature of things, but often, what they\'re doing is actually talking about themselves and expressing something about themselves. I think that every person that I meet has wisdom to give and it\'s just a matter of turning that key with people. Because when you turn it and you open that door, you can be given so much more than you ever expected. Really listening, being more of a journalist in my own just day-to-day life—rather than trying to influence my surroundings, just letting them hit me.” **Crosshairs** “You could look at this as a kind of role-playing song, which isn\'t explicitly sexual, but that\'s definitely one aspect of it. It’s the idea that when you\'re assuming a different role within yourself, it actually can open up chambers within you that are otherwise not seeing the light of day. I was looking at the parts of me that are more masculine, the parts of me that are explicitly feminine, and seeing where everything is in between, while also trying to do the same for someone else in my life.” **Ambiguous Norway** “The song is titled after one of David\'s cartoons, a drawing of a house with a little pinwheel on the top. It\'s about that moment where I was experiencing this grief of David passing away, where I was really saturated in it. I threw myself onto this island in Norway—Lyngør—thinking I could sort of leave that behind to a certain extent, and just realizing that it really didn\'t matter what corner of the planet I found myself on, I was still interacting with the impression of David\'s death and finding that there was all of these coincidences everywhere I went. I felt like I was in this wide-eyed part of the grieving process where it becomes almost psychedelic, like I was seeing meaning in everything and not able at all to just put it into words because it was too big and too expansive.” **Hailey** “It\'s challenging to write a platonic love song—it doesn\'t have all the ingredients of heartbreak or lust or drama that I think a lot of those songs have. It\'s much more simple than that. I just wanted to celebrate her and also celebrate someone who\'s alive now, who\'s making me feel motivated to keep going when things get tough, and to have confidence in myself, because that\'s a really beautiful thing and it\'s rare to behold. I think a lot of the record is mourning, and this was kind of the opposite.” **The Ramble** “I made these binaural recordings as I walked around and birdwatched in the morning, in April \[2020\], when it was pretty much empty. I was a stone\'s throw away from all the hospitals that were cropping up in Central Park, while simultaneously watching nature flourish in this incredible way. I recorded a guitar part and then I sent that to all of my friends around the country and said, ‘Just write something, send it back to me. Don\'t spend a lot of time on it.’ I wanted to capture the feeling that things change, but it’s nature\'s course to find its way through. Just to go out with my binoculars and be in nature and observe birds is my way of really dissolving and letting go of a lot of my fears and anxieties—and I wanted to give that to other people.”

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

Over the course of her first four albums as The Weather Station, Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman has seen her project gradually blossom from a low-key indie-folk oddity into a robust roots-rock outfit powered by motorik rhythms and cinematic strings. But all that feels like mere baby steps compared to the great leap she takes with *Ignorance*, a record where Lindeman soundly promotes herself from singer-songwriter to art-rock auteur (with a dazzling, Bowie-worthy suit made of tiny mirrors to complete the transformation). It’s a move partly inspired by the bigger rooms she found herself playing in support of her 2017 self-titled release, but also by the creative stasis she was feeling after a decade spent in acoustic-strummer mode. “Whenever I picked up the guitar, I just felt like I was repeating myself,” Lindeman tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was making the same decisions and the same chord changes, and it just felt a little stale. I just really wanted to embrace some of this other music that I like.” To that end, Lindeman built *Ignorance* around a dream-team band, pitting pop-schooled players like keyboardist John Spence (of Tegan and Sara’s live band) and drummer Kieran Adams (of indie electro act DIANA) against veterans of Toronto’s improv-jazz scene, like saxophonist Brodie West and flautist Ryan Driver. The results are as rhythmically vigorous as they are texturally scrambled, with Lindeman’s pristine Christine McVie-like melodies mediating between the two. Throughout the record, Lindeman distills the biggest, most urgent issues of the early 2020s—climate change, social injustice, unchecked capitalism—into intimate yet enigmatic vignettes that convey the heavy mental toll of living in a world that seems to be slowly caving in from all sides. “With a lot of the songs on the record, it could be a personal song or it could be an environmental song,” Lindeman explains. “But I don\'t think it matters if it\'s either, because it\'s all the same feelings.” Here, Lindeman provides us with a track-by-track survey of *Ignorance*’s treacherous psychic terrain. **Robber** “It\'s a very strange thing to be the recipient of something that\'s stolen, which is what it means to be a non-Indigenous Canadian. We\'re all trying to grapple with the question of: What does it mean to even be here at all? We\'re the beneficiaries of this long-ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history—so to sing \'I never believed in the robber\' sort of feels like how we all were taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is: ‘People lived here.’ And then the next 265 pages are all about the victors—the takers.” **Atlantic** “I was thinking about the weight of the climate crisis—like, how can you look out the window and love the world when you know that it is so threatened, and how that threat and that grief gets in the way of loving the world and being able to engage with it.” **Tried to Tell You** “Something I thought about a lot when I was making the album was how strange our society is—like, how we’ve built a society on a total lack of regard for biological life, when we are biological. Our value system is so odd—it\'s ahuman in this funny way. We\'re actually very soft, vulnerable creatures—we fall in love easily and our hearts are so big. And yet, so much of the way that we try to be is to turn away from everything that\'s soft and mysterious and instinctual about the way that we actually are. There\'s a distinct lack of humility in the way that we try to be, and it doesn\'t do us any good. So this just started out as a song about a friend who was turning away from someone that they were very clearly deeply in love with, but at the same time, I felt like I was writing about everyone, because everyone is turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.” **Parking Lot** “What\'s beautiful about birds is that they\'re everywhere, and they show up in our big, shitty cities, and they\'re just this constant reminder of the nonhuman perspective—like when you really watch a bird, and you try to imagine how it\'s perceiving the world around it and why it\'s doing what it does. For me, there\'s such a beauty in encountering the nonhuman, but also a sadness, and those two ideas are connected in the song.” **Loss** “This song started with that chord change and that repetition of \'loss is loss is loss is loss.\' So I stitched in a snapshot of a person—I don\'t know who—having this moment where they realize that the pain of trying to avoid the pain is not as bad as the pain itself. The deeper feeling beneath that avoidance is loss and sadness and grief, so when you can actually see it, and acknowledge that loss is loss and that it\'s real, you also acknowledge the importance of things. I took a quote from a friend of mine who was talking about her journey into climate activism, and she said, ‘At some point, you have to live as if the truth is true.’ I just loved that, so I quoted her in the song, and I think about that line a lot.\" **Separated** “With some of these songs, I\'m almost terrified by some of the lyrics that I chose to include—I\'m like, \'What? I said that?\' To be frank, I wrote this song in response to the way that people communicate on social media. There\'s so much commitment: We commit to disagree, we commit to one-upping each other and misunderstanding each other on purpose, and it\'s not dissimilar to a broken relationship. Like, there\'s a genuine choice being made to perpetuate the conflict, and I feel like that\'s not really something we like to talk about.” **Wear** “This one\'s a slightly older song. I think I wrote it when I was still out on the road touring a lot. And it just seemed like the most perfect, deep metaphor: ‘I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.’ I\'m always really happy when I can hit a metaphor that has many layers to it, and many threads that I can pull out over the course of the song—like, the world is this garment that doesn\'t fit and doesn\'t keep you warm and you can\'t move in. And you just want to be naked, and you want to take it off and you want to connect, and yet you have to wear it. I think it speaks to a desire to understand the world and understand other people—like, \'Is everyone else comfortable in this garment, or is it just me that feels uncomfortable?\'” **Trust** “This song was written in a really short time, and that doesn\'t usually happen to me, because I usually am this very neurotic writer and I usually edit a lot and overthink. It\'s a very heavy song. And it\'s about that thing that\'s so hard to wrap your head around when you\'re an empathetic person: You want to understand why some people actively choose conflict, why they choose to destroy. I wasn\'t actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song; I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it\'s not cool.” **Heart** “Along with \'Robber,\' this was one of my favorite recording moments. It had a pretty loose shape, and there\'s this weird thing that I was obsessed with where the one chord is played through the whole song, and everything is constantly tying back to this base. I just loved what the band did and how they took it in so many different directions. This song really freaked me out \[lyrically\]. I was not comfortable with it. But I was talked into keeping it, and all for the better, because obviously, I do believe that the sentiments shared on the song—though they are so, so fucking soft!—are the best things that you can share.” **Subdivisions** “This was one of the first songs written before the record took shape in my mind and before it structurally came together. I think we recorded it in, like, an hour, and everyone\'s performance was just perfect. I like these big, soft, emotional songs, and from a craft perspective, I think it\'s one of my better songs. I\'ve never really written a chorus like that. I don\'t even feel like it\'s my song. I don\'t feel like I wrote it or sang it, but it just feels like falling deeper and deeper into some very soft place—which is, I think, the right way to end the record.”

“I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about people dancing to my own sadness,” David Balfe tells Apple Music. “When I was writing this at first, it was never meant for the public. I pressed 25 copies and gave them to my friends, who this record is about.” *For Those I Love* is about one of the Dublin artist’s friends in particular: his closest friend, collaborator and bandmate, the poet and musician Paul Curran—who died by suicide in February 2018. This extraordinary album is a love letter to that friendship. A self-produced, spoken-word masterpiece set to tenderly curated samples and exhilarating house beats, breaks and synths (“our youth was set to a backdrop of listening to house music in s\*\*t cars, so it made perfect sense to retell those stories with an electronic palette”), it’s also a tribute to working-class communities, art, grief and survival. “Growing up where we did in Dublin, my friends and I learned very young that life is a very fragile and temporary thing,” Balfe says. “We first navigated the world in survival mode, but we soon realized that you have to express love. Because it haunts you as a regret if you don’t. An expression of love could be the difference between somebody’s being here or not being here. For us, that’s where being that vocal about love came from. I hope that’s not rare.” Read on for Balfe’s track-by-track guide to his important, thrilling record. **I Have a Love** “I wrote 75 or 76 songs for this album—this was the 15th, and it was also the first one that actually made it onto the record. It set the tone for how I wanted it all to feel and sound and flow, with the density and the texture that I wanted. The vast majority of samples that made it on had a very weighted significance to myself and my friends—they were very complementary to or important within the singular relationships that I was writing about. Here, the opening piano chords are from Sampha’s \'(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano.\' It’s is a very important song for myself and Paul. It dominated so much of the soundtrack to our intimate moments. I had written the instrumental before Paul had passed away and it was already going to be a track about my relationship with him. I was very lucky that I got to play that instrumental for him before he passed, and I got to share some of the lyrics. They very much had to do with this endless love that we both had. After Paul passed, the weight of the song and the samples themselves took on quite a different life me, and allowed me to reframe how I was writing the lyrics. I revisited \'(No One Knows Me),\' and I revisited \[the song’s other sample\] \'Let Love Flow On\' by Sonya Spence. Despite having this disco heart, I’ve always found that to be a warm safety blanket of a song. A gorgeous reassurance of hope and love against the difficulties of live and tragedy. The main refrain—\'I have a love, and it never fades\' was written long before Paul passed, and I was very lucky to have been able to share with him. I think a lot of people have the impression that it was something I had written in response to his death, but it wasn’t. It was a response to our friendship and 13 years of being inseparable. It’s quite curious and tragic that it held so much more weight in the aftermath. So I rewrote the whole history of that song and the whole history of our life around that refrain afterwards. It’s a strange song for me.” **You Stayed / To Live** “This is a song that’s very much rooted in storytelling. So many of my relationships with my friends involved fields and barren wasteland—hanging out and spending time just being together, discussing and planning our ideas. It was rare to walk into these areas without there being a fire of some kind. I’m still entranced by it—I find even the visual of fire to be very intoxicating. Anyway, most of the record was made in the shed at my ma’s—but this was made up in the box bedroom. It was a Thursday night after training, and I was laying on the bed writing about this time that myself and Paul stole a couch and walked it over the motorway to this field at three in the morning, intending to set it on fire the next day and film it. We woke up the next morning and the couch had already been set on fire. There’s something magic about that field—time does not work in a linear fashion there. As I was writing the song, one of the cars across the road got set on fire—over a debt, I found out. There are so many things about the recording of this album that has made me rethink how I engage with the world in regard to fate, or observations of spirituality. And I get it: everything holds this other significance when you’ve gone through that kind of tragedy, and you read into things as a source of comfort more than anything. And you allow yourself to be enchanted by it. Really, of course, it’s all just chance.” **To Have You** “This is built around ‘Everything I Own’ by Barbara Mason. The start of the track also has this audio clip from when the band I was in with Paul \[Burnt Out\] were filming the video for a track called ‘Dear James,’ and the song continues from there. We wanted to have this atmospheric smoke bellowing out of our bins in the lane behind my house. One of my best mates, Robbie, was like, ‘I can make a smoke bomb out of tin foil and ping pong balls.’ And we did it. For us, it was just this moment of such monumental success. It was like this really traditional, hands-on success of our labor. I wanted to bring a reminder for myself and my friends of the things that we had done together and felt so much collective beauty for. We’re never going to lose that memory now. This is also the only song on the album that includes my harp playing, which has allowed me to not feel guilty about buying a harp in the first place and not following through with learning how to play it. Paul was always like, ‘You’re a f\*\*king lunatic for buying that. But deadly, cool. Go for it.’” **Top Scheme** “The synth patch that I used is something I built years and years ago for a project that I did with one of my best mates, Pamela \[Connolly\], who’s now in a great band called Pillow Queens. We made music together in my ma’s shed for years for a project called Mothers and Fathers, and I wanted to bring a nod to that—it was important to me that I acknowledge so many of the different parts of my shared musical history with my friends for this album. Myself and Paul also had plans to start a separate project called Top Scheme, which was going to involve biting social commentary over some electronic, very aggressive, off-grid punk. We’d started making demos, but kept putting it off to focus on Burnt Out. I wanted to write a spiritual successor to that project and was very conscious where it would fit into the record. The song starts the curve from speaking very much about the love that we all shared together, into capturing about the worlds we grew up in—with this song speaking very specifically about the economic and social inequality that we faced being in a 1990s’ working-class community. It also speaks about the worlds we started to move into—when the geography of your world opens and suddenly you feel that sense of alienation that you once felt as a young child. You might be experiencing an economic disparity or a social divide that you’re unable to bridge. You hear people absolutely dehumanize others and reduce people down to scumbags based on their economic standing or, particularly as this song speaks about, really punishing people verbally for being addicts. Stripping them of their humanity, not caring about the sickness that ails them and seeing them as a plague. Just seeing them as a plague. This song speaks to that anger and disassociation—but there’s also supposed to be a very dark humor across it.” **The Myth / I Don’t** “This is the darkest moment on the record, and it’s the most difficult one to revisit because I am very much walking back into a mental and physical space that I’ve fortunately recovered from. It talks about where I was at before I had access to therapy and medication, then when I did and was trying to justify the exorbitant cost of dealing both those things—trying to value your own health over economic stability. It was very important that the music was sonically intoxicating. It spirals and I tried to make its density change and shift over time—with the shape of each sound morphing slowly and sometimes frantically towards its peak. I wanted it to feel like the same chaos, discomfort, and internal fear I felt during that period, but also capture the same drive toward this one singular end point. It needed to move towards this sonic oblivion at the end, because that’s what I was seeking at that point in my life. It’s also worth noting that for all the darkness that that song does bring, the times where I’ve gotten to perform it have probably been the most giving and actually traditionally cathartic things that I’ve been able to experience.” **The Shape of You** “Some of the samples took months to clear, but the Smokey Robinson one here went through like clockwork, overnight. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask why, I don’t need to know why. It’s a defining moment on the record for me—I listened to ‘The Tracks of My Tears’ when everything was going to s\*\*t and I felt heard in somebody else’s music, and suddenly understood that within my own music I could have somebody speak for me with an elegance that I would never be able to get. The beauty of sampling is being able to be intelligent enough to recognize when the choice to use other people who have walked that ground before is the right one. The lyrics cover me breaking my leg at a Belgian punk festival in 2007 and experiencing this terrifying, very chaotic time—before the relief and beauty and safety I felt when I saw my best friend arrive at the hospital. Everything that could possibly go wrong had gone wrong, but your best mate is there beside you, and you suddenly feel like it’s all going to be OK—and that you might even find some value in the chaos of it all.” **Birthday / The Pain** “One of the important things about this track is the juxtaposition of its make-up. It was quite a methodical choice. I understood that if I was to write about something like a dead body on bricks being found on my street while I was six years old with the sonic palette you would usually anticipate, then it would never have the comfort level for people to engage with that story. It’s a little bit of a cheat in order to allow people to find an entry point into the reality of that kind of world. The song’s built around a sample from ‘She Won’t be Gone Long’ by The Sentiments. It’s a slow dance, that song, and I find it to be quite a comfort to fall into the rhythm of it. The other special part of the song is the inclusion of crowd chanting at the start—from a specific game at Tolka Park, where our \[soccer\] team, Shelbourne FC, play. It was the first match of the season after Paul had passed and we were scattering his ashes that night on the pitch after the game. It was one of those games where you channel everything you have left in your life into those 90 minutes, into that jersey. It was 3-2 Shels in the end, with a 93rd minute penno. It’s all of us and the fans chanting, recorded on my phone. It was important to be able to bring the importance of that audio, that team, those friends and those strangers onto the record.” **You Live / No One Like You** “I think this is the best song, musically. It has all the warmth and texture that I want in a piece of music. I wasn’t trying to write pop anthems here—and that’s nothing against great pop anthems at all—because you can get so much into the weeds, the maths and the make-up of a song that way. But really it’s my favorite because it’s a song where I get to most clearly speak about my greatest love: my friends, and the survival that we’ve had together. It’s the song I get to most directly speak about them by name and channel years and years of friendship into this one moment. It’s therefore the song that gives me the most hope. And it gave me the most hope when I recorded it, too. It’s a lot easier to feel affected by something when you observe it than when you live it, I think, and to see my friends so emotionally invested and elated when they see and hear themselves immortalized, that’s where the value lies for me. It’s also nice to be able to revisit and revel in so many of monoliths of Irish culture—stemming back to people like John B. Keane and Brendan Behan. The song is very much a place of warmth, where I can go to remember what’s good, what’s left and what I value still.” **Leave Me Not Love** “I felt it was important to me to be able to close the book on this record and bring the listener back around to its inception. To really focus on that eternal return to the same, coming back to the original notes and scale that open the album. Where this track moves in quite a different direction to the others is at the end. It’s perhaps the only time where I unapologetically express something without hope. I turn back to the reality that I lived at the time, which was something explicitly void of hope and embedded in pain. I felt it would have been disingenuous of me not to bring the album back to the really graphic darkness that’s still there. I think I’m responsible enough to offer pockets and avenues that I have found to escape it, while stripping away any pretense and present the reality of that grief. What follows is ‘Cryin’ Like a Baby’ by Jackson C. Frank, which is a song that was very important to Paul and I, and speaks very directly, with a finesse I couldn’t have found by myself, to the days directly after Paul’s passing. It was the only way to end the record.”

On their endlessly eclectic sophomore album, Bicep considers a musical inquiry most often circled by jazz and jam bands: What if tracks don’t need to be immutable, permanent records, but should instead transform and evolve? Taking inspiration from their first major tour—a two-year trek between festivals and clubs during which they’d regularly rework their tracks from the road—the Northern Irish duo freed themselves from the idea that songs had to be fixed. “Club music has to draw you out,” Matt McBriar tells Apple Music. “Headphone music has to pull you in. More often than not, we’d wind up with six different versions of each song. Eventually it was like, ‘Why do we have to choose?’” As a result, the album versions on *Isles* are simply jumping-off points—the best headphones-inclined versions the pair could cut (dance-floor edits will inevitably materialize when they bring the tracks into clubbier environments). “There’s no straight house or techno on this album; those versions will come later,” Andy Ferguson says. “We wanted to explore home listening to its fullest extent, and then explore the live show to its fullest extent. Rather than try to do both at once, we decided to serve each.” Taking this approach presented an interesting challenge: In order for the songs to be malleable *and* recognizable, they needed to have a strong foundation. “They couldn’t be reliant on a single composition, they had to work in different forms,” McBriar says. “We had to make sure they had strong DNA.” Below, the pair—self-described geeks and gear-heads eager to get technical—take us inside the creative process behind each track. **Atlas** McBriar: “This was the first track we finished after coming back from the tour. We tried to capture the feelings from the peak of the live show, that optimism and euphoria in the room when we performed. It set the tone for the rest of the album in terms of our process. Although we initially recorded several different melodies, the final form came together a few months later in a single afternoon on our modular. This riff was the strongest.” **Cazenove** Ferguson: “This was another early demo, and was sparked by our obsessive interest in ’90s technology—the old MPC controllers that Timbaland and Dilla used. That old equipment doesn’t produce instantly crisp sounds or perfect beats, but that’s where the beauty is. It’s fuzzy and imprecise. We were experimenting with a lot of ’90s lo-fi samplers and bit crushers, and the idea was to build a rhythm by feeding our MPC through a reverse reverb patch on the Lexicon PCM96. From there we just added layer upon layer. We wanted something fast and playful, but with a lot less emphasis on the dance floor.” **Apricots** McBriar: “This actually began as an ambient piece, and the strings sat on our hard drive for a year before we considered some vocals. One day, we picked up an amazing, recently released record called *Beating Heart - Malawi*. The vocals and polyrhythms of ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ stood out. They were captivating. We pitched snippets of them to our strings before building the rest of the track around them. The second sample is from the 1975 \[Bulgarian folk\] album *Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares*. We connected with the mysterious chanting, and felt like it had parallels to the Celtic folk we grew up hearing.” **Saku (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This began as a footwork-inspired track with a hang drum melody; we’d been looking into polyrhythms and more interesting drum programming. But when we slowed down the tempo from 150 to 130 BPM, it totally flipped the vibe for us. We experimented with several different vocals samples—including ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ before it wound up on ‘Apricots’—but ended up sending a stripped-back version to Clara La San, who brought a strong ’90s UKG/R&B vibe. We added some haunting synths at the end to bring contrast and some opposing dark and light elements. It was great to pull so many of our influences into one track.” **Lido** Ferguson: “This track was born from one of our many experiments with granular synthesis. We cut a single piano note from a catalog of 1970s samples and fed it into one of our granular samplers. As we experimented with recording it live, the synthesizer glitches and jumps added all this character and texture. It was pretty disorderly and hard to control, but we loved the madness it produced. There are a ton of layers to this track despite it sounding so simple. And mixing it was a lot of work, trying to get that balance between soothing and subtle chaos.” **X (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This track was built around our Psycox SY-1M Syncussion. We’d been hunting for a Pearl original for years. It has all these uncompromising, metallic fizzes and bleeps that are so difficult to tame, you really need to start with it as the center of the track. Most tracks on the album began on the piano, but not this one. The frantic synth melody was actually improvised one afternoon on our Andromeda A6; it was a single take on a heavily customized and edited patch that we\'ve never been able to replicate. It was just one of those moments when you hit ‘record’ and get it right.” **Rever (feat. Julia Kent)** Ferguson: “We started this track in Bali in 2016. We were on tour and had access to a studio full of local instruments, and knew right away that we wanted to use them. We recorded long sessions of us playing them live, but never ended up using them in one of our finished tracks. Several years later, we were working with Julia Kent, who had recorded the strings for another demo, but it just wasn’t working. She tried some of the Bali instrumentals instead. It sounded really unique. The chopped-up vocal came last, edited and re-pitched to fit, almost like a melody.” **Sundial** McBriar: “One of the simplest tracks on the album, ‘Sundial’ grew from a faulty Jupiter 6 arp recording. Our trigger wasn’t working properly and the arp was randomly skipping notes. This was a small segment taken from a recording of Andy playing around with the arp while we were trying to figure out what was going wrong. We actually loved what it produced and wrote some chords around it, guided by the feeling of that recording.” **Fir** Ferguson: “We have a real soft spot for choral vox synths, and this track was born from an experiment with those. It\'s actually one of the fastest songs we\'ve ever made, and grew purely out of those days in the studio when we just jammed, trying new things. No direction, no preconceived ideas, we just felt it out.” **Hawk (feat. machina)** Ferguson: “The melody on ‘Hawk’ is actually our voices mapped and re-pitched to a granular sampler. We experimented a lot with re-pitching on this album; it brings this unique quality to vocals and melodies. We have a rare-ish Japanese synth, the Kawai SX-240, which creates all those super weird synth noises. Again, this track was the product of lots of experimentation. Machina\'s vocal\'s were actually for another demo which we were struggling on and it just worked perfectly.”

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

In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”

Here’s what a typical day of lockdown looked like for Courtney Barnett in 2020: “Wake up, watch the sunrise, do some meditating, drink some coffee, do some work and then some songwriting,” she tells Apple Music. “Go for a walk, call a friend, then some more work.” Living alone in a friend’s empty Melbourne apartment, Barnett found herself in a reflective mood, often watching the world and seasons change from her window, a guitar in her lap. “A lot of the time there wasn\'t much else to do,” she says. “But I think it\'s good sometimes to just sit and watch or listen, to take a minute.” Written in the quiet of hotel rooms or that very apartment, Barnett’s intimate third LP is a set of meditative rock that feels uniquely present, the Aussie singer-songwriter playing like she’s got nowhere to go and nowhere else she’d rather be. It’s music that feels akin—spiritually and sonically—to that of one-time collaborator Kurt Vile, a placid coming together of jangly guitars, purring drum machines, and zen turn of phrase. “I feel that quietness is often a reflection of the writing, but also I think that I was just craving a quieter sound,” she says of the album. “I\'ve gotten used to just taking things as they come over the years. Nothing is ever how you think it\'s going to be, so it\'s just trying to live in those moments and make the most of them.” Here, Barnett guides us through a few of the album’s songs. **“Rae Street”** “The chorus \[‘Time is money and money is no man’s friend’\] is something that I remember from my childhood, something my dad would say as a bit of a joke, as a hurry-up if we were late for school or whatever. It\'s just always stuck in my head, and when I reflected on it as an adult, it took on a whole new meaning, especially in the context of last year when the world slowed down or stopped in some places, and people lost jobs.” **“Sunfair Sundown”** “That was inspired by a party with friends—one of those nights you feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for friendship and connection. I started writing it the next day, just because of that overwhelming, beautiful, big feeling—it was that simple. It was just celebrating very special small moments and the fact that small moments can mean so much. Sometimes, to one person, it\'s just another day, but it could totally change or affect someone else\'s life.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “I just remember when I wrote that song, it felt special straight away. The guitar chords and the melody—it all came quite naturally and quickly. It started as a letter and then it turned into a song, and over time it’s morphed, as songs do. It’s constantly evolving. I just think it\'s such a simple, beautiful song—I feel a lot when I play it.” **“Turning Green”** “Starting out, we did this whole version that sounded like a jangly guitar-pop song. But it didn\'t grab me, so we pulled it apart and \[Warpaint drummer\] Stella \[Mozgawa\] reprogrammed some drums. I put the guitar down because it just didn\'t seem like it fit, and we kind of flipped it on its head to see if it would inspire a better feeling. And it did, straight away—just singing along to it made the words come to life in a different way. Sometimes, in the studio, you just want to throw so much stuff onto songs and it just gets crowded and busy, and then you kind of lose track of what\'s happening. The change gave the words space and that space was really important for a lot of this album, but this song especially.” **“Write a List of Things to Look Forward To”** “The song’s title came from someone saying, ‘You should write a list of things that you\'re looking forward to.’ And that just inspired the thought behind it—what that means and what it represents. It’s a song about gratitude, but it is also about connections in life, this idea of life and death and being afraid of it and just being at peace with that progression.”

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

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

K-house, K-pop, hip-hop, electronic: Call it what you want—Hye Jin Park’s debut ignores those boundaries, anyway. The Korea-born, LA-based producer’s debut album, *Before I Die*, is a personal exploration of everything from living overseas and missing her family to sex, the music industry, and childhood nostalgia. It’s sung, rapped, and spoken, in Korean and English, over a sound that takes elements of hip-hop, techno, house, indie, and lo-fi beats, and creates something new, immersive, and totally unique. Below, Park walks us through each track on her self-produced, self-recorded LP. **“Let’s Sing Let’s Dance”** “In my life, when I’m really sad, I just sing and dance. If there are times when others feel sad, too, I want them to just sing and dance and leave everything behind for a while.” **“I Need You”** “Up to this point, I have endured all of this road alone and survived. I just really needed someone who had my back.” **“Before I Die”** “It’s been so long since I left Korea and last saw my family. I couldn’t get in touch with my family properly, because I was moving around the country on my own and dealing with all of these things that were happening to me. Of course, now, the coronavirus and everything that is happening in the US has affected my ability to see them. Words can never, ever, ever express how much I miss my family.” **“Good Morning Good Night”** “At the beginning of the day, I wanted to tell myself to have a good day. At the end of the day, I wanted to tell myself that I had also worked hard today.” **“Me Trust Me”** “I believe in myself and trust myself. But I wanted to protect myself from people who don’t believe in me or in themselves. They try to take me down like they take themselves down.” **“Where Did I Go”** “I’m thinking back to when I was a kid. I used to draw on the walls of my room. I miss that little kid.” **“Never Give Up”** “I left my country when I was 24, because I thought I did everything I could in Korea to pursue my dream. First, I moved to Melbourne, Australia by myself, because I thought easily get a visa for as a Korean. And then I moved from Australia to the UK and then to Los Angeles, California. I’ve gotten fucked over a lot. Twice in a row, I was seriously fucked over in this industry and by its people. They threatened me and were racist towards me. How many crooks I’ve met, country by country. How many times I’ve had to go through creepy guys, country by country. There’s a lot of people who wanted to try and take me down and be disrespectful towards me. I wanted to show them and tell them that I’ll never give up.” **“Can I Get Your Number”** “When you like someone, you ask them, ‘Can I get your number?’” **“Whatchu Doin Later”** “Then, you could text them and say, ‘Whatchu doin later?’” **“Sex With Me (DEFG)”** “And then, you could tell them, ‘Sex with me.’” **“Where Are You Think”** “I was talking to myself, saying, ‘Wake up. You need to make money.’” **“Never Die”** “I’ll never die.” **“Hey, Hey, Hey”** “Try listening to this song when y’all jogging. It’s gonna hit different.” **“Sunday ASAP”** “I wanted Sunday to come as soon as possible. It’s the only time I can let myself be lazy. I usually pressure myself to work harder than anyone else. So, soothing myself is like candy.” **“i jus wanna be happy”** “Originally, this song was called ‘I Hate Myself.’ But then, I deleted all of the ‘I Hate Myself’ parts I recorded. Instead, I rerecorded ‘i jus wanna be happy’ in Korean.”

DJ and producer Leon Vynehall has spent the best part of the last decade producing electronic music that inspires instinctual dancefloor movement as much as it does an emotional response from its listeners. His 2018 debut LP*Nothing Is Still* was the culmination of five years spent researching his family history and writing a novella that, along with its accompanying music, produced an impressionistic account of his grandparents’ emigration from the UK to New York. When it came to his second full-length project, he decided to take a different tack. “I didn’t want to be constrained by a set of rules,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted to reject the whole idea of narrative and story—like abstract painters following where the painting was telling them to go, I would sit down, pick up an instrument and experiment.” That path, however, left Vynehall confounded. “When I listened back, I didn’t even recognize the person that was speaking to me through the monitors—it all seemed so confused,” he says. He decided to put the project to one side, he had his 30th birthday and took a trip to LA. There, he experimented with psychedelics one evening and, as he came out of his trip, he felt his mind clear. “I realized that I wanted to use music as some sort of therapy, that I don’t have any answers, it’s just a reflection of an ongoing process,” he says. The result is *Rare, Forever*—a work that is at turns freeform and yet, in typical Vynehall fashion, deeply personal. Tracks like opener “Ecce! Ego!” and “Farewell! Magnus Gabbro” sweep through a cinematic orchestration of synth strings in an approximation of Vynehall’s own artistic process to find purpose, while the club-oriented “Dumbo”, “Mothra” and “Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been” take charge of an inner sense of freedom and playfulness. All the while, references are made to everyone from Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa to philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Read on for Leon Vynehall’s thoughts on this deeply immersive and intuitive record, track by track. **Ecce! Ego!** ‘‘Ecce ego’ is Latin and it means ‘behold me’. I named the song that because I wanted this to be the introduction to the record and it feels like a continuation from *Nothing Is Still*. It starts off with a similar string arrangement and build-up in textures but then I wanted it to flip, almost like when you spin a mirror around and you see a new image. I feel like this song’s twin is “Envelopes” from the last record and funnily enough “Envelopes” was the first song I wrote for *Nothing Is Still*, while “Ecce Ego” was one of the first things I wrote for this one.” **In>Pin** “This is a representation of the internal conversations that we have with ourselves when we’re trying to make something, the imposter syndrome or all these different voices that speak to you about where you should go and what you should be doing. The vocals on the track are a mix of poems from a Portuguese writer called Fernando Pessoa, and another from the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, as well as my own words. It’s ultimately like the hesitation just before you do something—it is the set-up to the whole thesis of the record.” **Mothra** “‘Mothra’ plays like the kind of left-field club track that I’m more known for, but I wanted it to feel like it was something growing and then as it gets to the middle eight—the big crescendo part and that swelling sense of euphoric epiphany—it all slips away before it’s fully realized, leaving you to drive forward to the next track.” **Alichea Vella Amor** “This is a love song for my partner Alice, who is always there for me. Alichea is the nickname that my partner’s family would give her when she was younger and ‘vella amor’ means ‘old love.’ I wanted to put this track in the record as a reminder that, even though this is an album that is about the self, about the psyche, you can’t have the self without others around you, and especially the people that you love.” **Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been** “I wanted to make this track super clubby but I also wanted to make sure that it wasn’t like anything I’d done before. I’ve always been fascinated by why and how snakes shed their skin. They constantly leave this artefact behind of what they were and I’d like to think about my old records as these memories of where I was at that time of making them. The infinity sign is the snake that eats itself and it’s symbolic of me needing to evolve and move forward, to push through the thoughts that you are a ‘has-been’ before shedding that skin and becoming anew.” **Worm (& Closer & Closer)** “The worm is the idea, the thing that you’re trying to find wriggling around under the surface to give you a sense of purpose. The snippets of singing that are soaring over the top, saying ‘getting higher and higher,’ ‘I feel it,’ ‘I keep it,’ and ‘it’s taking over me,’ are a representation of you beginning to find it. I’m not really a lyricist. I’m more someone that loves words and then tries to make them feel rhythmic. I find phrases and then make uses for them. **An Exhale** “This a release—finally letting out that tense, deep breath out that you’ve been holding in. This song is the one that I attribute most to the psychedelic experience I had in LA. I wanted it to feel like it’s constantly unfurling, building up and being joyful. It’s the highest point within this overarching record—a moment where you feel like you’re getting somewhere.” **Dumbo** “‘Dumbo’ is meant to be really fun and playful—it’s the most tongue-in-cheek song on the record. I take what I do really seriously, I put everything into it, but on a personal level I’m kind of an idiot. This track is more about embracing that inner child and that super free version of yourself because, as much as you need to be considered, you also need to be playful and experimental and just let go.” **Farewell! Magnus Gabbro** “This is probably one of the most honest pieces of music I’ve ever written. I was very stuck when I wrote this—I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere—and I really wanted it to be a snapshot of how I was feeling. I’d been on the Isle of Skye and the mountain ranges there are made of this rock called gabbro and I felt like what was inside me was this big rock that I needed to move. So I got into the studio and I started playing this drone and I made these two organs oscillate at different points so it felt like I was vibrating within the room and meditating within the sounds. Ultimately, this song became a meditative drone track to say goodbye to that big boulder inside me.” **All I See Is You, Velvet Brown** “This is the final gesture of the record, the end of this particular conversation. I wanted to try and personify the feeling of having a guiding force in explorations like these, and the image of velvet kept coming up, which I tried to put into sound. I found the poem that goes with it very reassuring, as it illustrates how we learn important lessons at times of self-discovery and, although we might not use them again, they’ll always be there.”

The second album from Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek asks the big questions in slippery ways, with poetic ripples of mantra-like vocals, or field recordings that take on a mystical significance (a roommate singing, a hand-clapping game). The layered, nonlinear soundscapes on *Fatigue* feel totally uncategorizable yet inexplicably comforting as Cheek—who plays bass, guitar, piano, synth, and percussion here, in addition to her vocals and personal recordings—guides herself down a winding path of discovery. “Make a way out of no way,” she repeats on the kaleidoscopic “Find It”; the wondrous almost-songs that follow use that sentiment as a guiding light.

“I can only work by being really open,” Welsh electronic producer Lewis Roberts, aka Koreless, tells Apple Music. “If I don’t start a piece of music by being inquisitive and playful, I lose interest very quickly.” This inherent curiosity forms the basis of his shape-shifting releases. Coming to prominence with his post-dubstep-influenced debut EP, 2011’s *4D*, and then working with labelmate Sampha before releasing its synth-heavy follow-up, *Yugen*, in 2013, Koreless has spent the past six years without any solo releases. Instead, he collaborated with Sharon Eyal’s groundbreaking dance company L-E-V for 2019’s Bold Tendencies festival, produced for FKA twigs’ acclaimed album *MAGDALENE*, and endlessly refined his long-awaited debut album—the aptly titled *Agor*, which means “open” in Welsh. Throughout its rigorously edited 10 tracks, Koreless toys with notions of tension and release, building expectations through crescendos of intensity before thwarting the cathartic payout with an immediate cut to blissful spaciousness. “You can accelerate a rhythm so much that it stops being heard as rhythm and, instead, becomes a single tone,” he explains. “That’s what I’m doing with these arrangements—pushing you to a threshold point until you burst through the chaos into an entirely new feeling and experience.” Here, he dives deeper into each of *Agor*’s tracks. **“Yonder”** “‘Yonder’ is a prelude to the record, like the lights coming up for a moment before we begin. It feels like an empty stage where nothing is really happening yet; it’s just providing a general feel. It was important to start like this, because the rest of the record can be quite melody-heavy, so I wanted something to welcome the listener in first.” **“Black Rainbow”** “I wanted ‘Black Rainbow’ to be a digital folk song. It builds in intensity as I’m squeezing every drop out of it. But then we reach a threshold that we break through, and it just becomes very blissful. The song is like taking off and accelerating into total bliss rather than into chaos. That’s one of the aims behind the record—to enable these ruptures and then to accelerate into a peaceful state.” **“Primes”** “This track is my homage to someone like Oren Ambarchi, since it’s just made of sine waves, which are the perfect, irreducible sound. You can’t get any simpler than a sine wave; it’s what you’re left with when you strip everything else away. I really like working with sines because they’re very general and there’s something comforting about their generality. I used to work a lot more with them, and this is probably their only place on the record. It plays like shards of sine wave dust.” **“White Picket Fence”** “I like using vocals almost like instruments and capturing the material quality of them, rather than having an artist feature. I like an anonymous, slightly inhuman vocal, which is why these vocals are just played through a keyboard. There’s a comforting safety to a vocal that sounds like it’s been grown in a lab, and on this track, I’m trying to separate them from any personality as much as possible and just keep them as these angelic, general voices.” **“Act(S)”** “This was the same tune as ‘White Picket Fence,’ but I decided to chop it halfway. It felt like ‘White Picket Fence’ needed to finish there and that this ending had a certain sculptural difference to it. I love when albums have extra sections tagged on at the end of a song. They aren’t interludes but rather a moment to breathe.” **“Joy Squad”** “I like when you’re in a club and you hear a song that is a bit of a roller-coaster and that can take you on a wild and unexpected ride without ruining everyone’s night. I was trying to find a version of that with ‘Joy Squad.’ I think of it as being a giant in terms of visualizing the sonic scale, because it’s quite an empty soundworld, so everything fills up much bigger in that space—it doesn’t just feel like microtones.” **“Frozen”** “I was exploring how you can use a vocal to get it to sound like percussion. Both this and ‘Joy Squad’ are using vocals in that way to make very short, percussive sounds. This is about finding that moment of beauty before failure—like having blind faith just before everything falls apart—and that was the structure of the song. I wanted to create a digital, sugary sweetness and I was getting there through very heavy-handed vocal processing.” **“Shellshock”** “The themes of ‘Shellshock’ are similar to ‘Frozen’ in trying to tread this line between something super-sweet and sincere and then some kind of creeping fear underneath. All of this builds to create that same sense of rupture and disassembly we find in ‘Black Rainbow.’” **“Hance”** “This one’s a little machine—it feels like a Heath Robinson device, a bionic music box. This is a short track, but it might have been one of the ones that took the longest to make. With a lot of these shorter ideas, I didn’t want to make them into full songs—they are enough however long they are. It’s a nice palate cleanser before we end.” **“Strangers”** “This was the last track to be written for the record. It felt like a lot of the previous songs had been really labored over and almost strangled tight, whereas ‘Strangers’ came together really quickly. It feels less constrained and like there’s more life to it because of that. It was fun to make and it works really well to tie everything together as the final tune. It is a joyful ending.”

“You can never get to a point where the music is perfect,” London pianist, rapper, and composer Alfa Mist tells Apple Music. “You just have to be in the moment that feels right.” This prioritizing of intuitive feeling over cold perfectionism is a trait that has seen Mist produce a remarkable amount of perceptive and ever-changing work. There have been collaborative projects with singer Emmavie, drummer Richard Spaven, and musician Lester Duval, as well as two self-released albums, three EPs, and features with Jordan Rakei, Yussef Dayes, and Tom Misch. Where 2017’s *Antiphon* interspersed Mist’s jazz-referencing compositions with conversations with his brothers on the meaning of family, and 2019’s *Structuralism* featured dialogue with his sister on the formulation of identity, *Bring Backs* is equally considered and thematic. Built around a sensuous and impressionistic poem written by Hilary Thomas, *Bring Backs* explores the effects immigration has on the understanding of our lives and the world, while referencing a card game Mist would play as a child where a “bring back” could see you pulled into the game again, even if you thought you had already won. It is a metaphor that has continued to resonate. “Growing up, I saw how people’s success could disappear as quickly as it came,” Mist says, “and that means you then live unsure of what you can hold on to—it creates an instability in your place in the world, and that’s where I wrote this album from.” Here he talks through each of *Bring Backs*’ tracks. **“Teki”** “‘Teki’ is a song about being in a battle with yourself. In Japanese, the word means ‘enemy’ or ‘opposition,’ and in the UK when things are difficult or hard to navigate, you might say, ‘This is a bit teki.’ This battle is not about conquering yourself, it’s about leading to a knowing of yourself and having an understanding of who it is you are. The guitar is prevalent since I really like post-rock and bands like Radiohead. The softer harmony meets an energetic, harsh guitar line—and that’s the conflict in the music itself.” **“People” (feat. Kaya Thomas-Dyke)** “‘People’ has no piano on it, as I wanted to make a conscious effort to show my composing side, rather than only being seen as a jazz-piano guy. I first came up with the tune on bass, which is often the case, because I find the simplest things will sound amazing on bass or guitar. The lyrics were written and sung by a frequent collaborator of mine, Kaya Thomas-Dyke. She’s talking about how you have to acknowledge how people become who they are and their own stories, as that’s how we can all build compassion for each other.” **“Mind the Gap” (feat. Lex Amor)** “The opening has a recording of the tube announcement from my usual journey, which is where I listen to a lot of music and do a lot of writing. ‘Mind the gap’ is a phrase you hear on the tube all the time, but the song is more about the times where we grow tired of everything for a moment—we might not have the capacity to take on other people\'s issues then, and we have to be aware of that. I’ve known Lex Amor for a few years. Her voice is soft and it fits perfectly. The guitar and the drumbeat is quite stuttery, which reminded me of the sound of the train tracks too.” **“Run Outs”** “I come from Newham, which is a place where grime was very prevalent, and some of the first beats I made had a grime vibe to them. I wanted to return to that style because I had previously separated playing piano from beat-making, but in the last few years I realized that to truly sound like myself, I’ve got to bridge these two aspects together. ‘Run Outs’ is a perfect example of that marrying of the two styles, and the title comes from another childhood game I’d play, which is like tag but in teams.” **“Last Card (Bumper Cars)”** “This track really focuses on Hilary Thomas’ poem. It’s giving space for her to speak about a character’s journey to get to this country and things that she can remember from her childhood back home—so there are no drums at the beginning, the song just flows around her speech, and then it transitions into another tune called ‘Bumper Cars’ at the end. This one is influenced by the Madlib *Beat Konducta* songs I always used to listen to and how he would flip these found theme songs and samples into something entirely different.” **“Coasting”** “‘Coasting’ is exactly how the song feels, like you’re coasting along. I worked with an amazing strings player and arranger, Peggy Nolan, on the song, and we were thinking in terms of layering, and how to build this tune to just keep it going and floating along. We only play the theme at the start and then we never go back to it—it flows and then it’s done. Essentially, it’s a journey from one place to another through improvisations, never returning to where it\'s been.” **“Attune”** “We recorded all the tracks to tape. We could do two takes in the sessions and then if we wanted to do a third one, we’d have to record over one of the previous takes. I liked that limitation—I’m a perfectionist, but if I stuck to that, then nothing would ever come out. We’re choosing the moment that feels right, rather than repeating something until you feel like it’s perfect, and you can hear that on ‘Attune.’” **“Once a Year”** “I really enjoy writing string arrangements, and this track was written for Peggy, who played the cello like it was a quartet by recording the parts four times. That cello sound is quite dark and somber, and it is perfect for this record because the themes are self-reflective and introspective. The song itself is about how I’d only really see a lot of my relatives on Christmas because of the hustle and bustle of life—it’s remembering that time of family togetherness.” **“Organic Rust”** “I wanted Rocco Palladino and Richard Spaven on this track as I\'ve been playing with them both for years so I knew they\'d be perfect for its hip-hop feel. ‘Organic Rust’ deals with similar themes to ‘Mind the Gap,’ talking about the times where it feels like everyone is performing and nobody’s being themselves and so you begin to question the point of what it is you’re doing. Lyrically, everything in there is a metaphor, since I like to keep things ambiguous. I want to ask the questions and then walk away.”

“This is the antithesis to our last record—where that was about heartbreak, this album is about freedom, picking yourself up and moving forward,” Jungle producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “It’s an album made for bringing people together; upbeat tunes to set people free.” Lloyd-Watson is one half of Jungle, the London-based production duo, with childhood friend Tom McFarland. Coming to prominence with their Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut album in 2014 (and, specifically, its ubiquitous single “Busy Earnin’”), the producers went on to establish themselves as hook-writing maestros, giving the warm mahogany feel of 1960s and ’70s soul a chrome polish with their seven-piece live band performances and intricate arrangements. Their third album, *Loving in Stereo* (succeeding 2018’s *For Ever*), takes their melodies squarely to the dance floor, featuring the thumping drum breakbeats of “Talk About It,” the driving disco-funk of “Keep Moving,” and collaborations from rapper Bas (“Romeo”) and singer Priya Ragu on the jazz-influenced “Goodbye My Love.” Read on for Lloyd-Watson’s thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Dry Your Tears”** “This was originally a middle-eight of a B-side called ‘Don\'t You Cry Now.’ It was one of the last pieces to go on the record, and it’s an overture about not feeling sorry for yourself. The vocals on it are quite airy and dreamlike, as if you\'re waking up from a bad dream, and the strings then ease you into the album but also make you question exactly what it is we\'re about to listen to.” **“Keep Moving”** “Those strings crescendo into ‘Keep Moving,’ which is an archetypal Jungle track. It\'s a song that we\'ve been trying to make ever since ‘Busy Earnin’,’ and it\'s almost like the older sibling to that song. It\'s about moving on and moving through hard times; a mantra to not worry about stuff too much but to be hopeful instead.” **“All of the Time”** “We always envisioned this track as what it would sound like if a band from the 1960s or ’70s had heard future garage rhythms but were playing them on acoustic instruments. It feels like a sample but it\'s not a sample, since we\'ve always been obsessed with things that sound old but are new. It\'s supposed to be a super uplifting track, with this gospel feeling in the chorus, which is just like pure euphoria.” **“Romeo” (feat. Bas)** “We met Bas at a festival on Coney Island a few years ago. He came backstage with such amazing energy and we got talking. We\'re all about features that are personal and that happen because they\'re meant to happen. We were at The Church Studios in Crouch End and he texted that he was in London, so he came through. We make a lot of hip-hop and we\'ve got so many of those sorts of beats, it\'s really great for people to hear that element to us.” **“Lifting You”** “This was a beat that I had made and it wasn\'t really supposed to be on the album. I remember sending it out to a load of artists and they really liked it but nothing happened with it. I sat down one day and wrote a vocal and we sang on it, and it just had a really carefree feeling to it. It\'s inspired by bits of KAYTRANADA, with this Moog One bassline that gives it a slightly clubbier feel. There’s also psychedelic influences and an uplifting vocal chorus, which takes it to a different dimension.” **“Bonnie Hill”** “‘Bonnie Hill’ is the oldest track on the record; it was one that was written during the second album at Bonnie Hill, a place in the hills in Los Angeles. We just had this beat for a while and it came together with this other melody we had lying around. At The Church Studios we had this 12-piece strings and brass section, and we added jazz flute, as well as a saxophone—that set the track alight. We don\'t have many solos in Jungle songs, so this was really exciting.” **“Fire”** “This was one of the first tracks to signify the direction of the album. It\'s this free-flowing piece that was very quick to make, in only around an hour. It\'s more of a sonic experimentation, where we\'d just gotten this new profiling amplifier and started putting loads of synthesizers through it, blurring that line between electronics and a band sound. We like to set our music to things, and this feels like it could soundtrack a car chase or heist in a film. It\'s a bit chaotic, and that\'s what we love about it.” **“Talk About It”** “The producer Inflo was in town when we were recording in LA and we just started jamming and came up with this. The drums have a sense of \[The Jam’s\] \'Town Called Malice\' or The Stone Roses to them. It\'s another one of those songs that feels like it\'s taken something from different eras and then pieced them all together. We wanted to hold on to the drum breakbeat that started it off and we just wouldn\'t let go of it until it was finished, not tweaking it or changing it but allowing it to sit in its original form.” **“No Rules”** “It\'s something that came about that wasn\'t supposed to be on the album, just again a track that got made for the fun of making music. It\'s like a synth odyssey, but it\'s also got this power. It\'s a rebellion against government control and surveillance and the ever-evolving world of *1984* that we\'re living in.” **“Truth”** “This is the most leftfield thing from what Jungle is. We were following the train of thought that you accept whatever happens in the studio, and it came very quickly. We used to listen to a lot of the indie rock that was dominating the charts in the mid-2000s, things like The Thrills and The Strokes and Kings of Leon, and there\'s an element of that to it, which is really nostalgic to us. It\'s a song about realizing that you love somebody and getting over those trust issues in the beginning of a relationship to ultimately realize that you only want to be with them.” **“What D\'You Know About Me?”** “This is ESG-inspired and it\'s the fastest track we\'ve ever done. It embodies the anger and passion that this record has—it’s got a darkness to it that ‘No Rules’ also has, again being about surveillance and people knowing too much about you. We\'re playfully asking, ‘What do you know about me?’ It\'s got this stark swagger to it.” **“Just Fly, Don\'t Worry”** “The previous two tracks are quite intense, so we wanted this to segue you down into the end of the album. This was originally a lot longer, but it plays now like a palate cleanser, just giving you the bits that you need. It\'s got a mixture between dub and funk in the groove and feel. We\'re making this music for the fun of it, and what we liked and what we connected with went on the record, rather than songs that we thought other people would know.” **“Goodbye My Love” (feat. Priya Ragu)** “We had been writing all day on this other song at Guy Chambers\' studio in London, where he has some amazing equipment like a vintage harpsichord and vibraphone. Our time was coming up and we challenged ourselves to see if we could get these sounds down for something new. Priya\'s got such a fantastic voice with such a pure tone, and we wanted to get her melody down in a free flow of consciousness. It wasn\'t intended to be a Jungle track, it was just made for us, but then we felt like it was supposed to be on the record.” **“Can\'t Stop the Stars”** “We try to close with something quite cinematic on our records. I remember hearing these strings back in the studio and they are so overwhelming—even to this day, that last 16 or 32 bars of music is so emotional and it takes us back to this feeling of wanting to be young and free. It\'s about someone in your life telling you you don\'t need to worry about everything, because you can\'t stop the stars from moving, so you can\'t control everything in this life. The more you let go, the more free you\'ll actually be.”

The view from the living room of Damon Albarn’s home near Reykjavik is striking. Beyond the black-sand beaches and North Atlantic water, Esja, a volcanic mountain range, cuts across the skyline. Around it, the Icelandic weather regularly puts on a show. “It’s always extreme there,” Albarn tells Apple Music. “It doesn’t exist in a meteorological platitude.” Toward the end of 2019, Albarn gathered an orchestral ensemble to sit at his window and chart the landscape, wildlife, and climate in music. Three sessions were recorded before the pandemic stalled the project. Relocating to his UK home in Devon, Albarn found he just couldn’t let those musical improvisations lie dormant until lockdown loosened. “They were such a strong thing,” he says. “It’s like a potion—I kept taking the cork top off to sip for a minute, maybe just smell it. At one point, I was like, ‘I’m just going to drink this now and use it to do something.’ So, I did like Asterix, and I made *The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows*.” Assisted by longtime collaborators Mike Smith and Simon Tong, Albarn transformed the music into his second solo album—11 unhurried reflections on loss and fragility. “The fragility is the humans’ place within nature,” he says. “And the loss is the transferal of everything. Nothing’s lost. The thing changes, it doesn’t actually disappear—it just has a different state or form.” With its vivid sense of place and transformation, the record recalls two of Albarn’s recent projects: Gorillaz’s *Meanwhile* EP and The Good, the Bad & the Queen’s *Merrie Land*. “The older you get, depending on your circumstance, the more acutely you feel these things,” he says. “I’m making music for young people at a rather advanced age for someone making music for young people. People of my own age, it’s kind of, ‘Yeah, well, that’s how I feel as well.’ Whereas for younger people, it’s like, ‘Well, that’s a strong flavor,’ but it’s not a bad thing.” Here, he takes us through the album, track by track. **“The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows”** “I’d had that phrase for a while and thought that was a good working title for the Icelandic project. It was only in Devon at the end of \[2020\] that I realized where it had come from fully—I’d obviously read the poem \[John Clare’s ‘Love and Memory,’ adapted here\] at some point. And that poem just felt like it worked weirdly with the nature. John Clare was a very natural poet, working-class. \[What I was getting from the poem\] was ‘the dark journey,’ and you can’t just wipe out the memory of somebody. It’s a very emotional negotiation you go on when someone’s left your life: You’ve lost something, but you retain what you choose to retain, and that can be a beautiful thing as well.” **“The Cormorant”** “For years, I was scared of swimming out into the bay \[in Devon\]. I sort of conquered that fear at the beginning of lockdown and started to do it as a daily meditation. Sometimes I got myself in quite a lot of trouble because it was too rough. I did have one point where I thought, ‘I’m going to drown.’ But I love doing it, because although the fear of being devoured by a shark or whatever has diminished, it’s still there a little bit, so it’s quite an edgy thing to do every day. That’s just the first two lines of that song. It’s a deep song, a whole novel in itself really. I was sitting on the beach, and I had my phone. I recorded the whole of the vocal line, music and words, without really anything in my head. It was more of a sung conversation with myself and the cormorant and the water and everything that’s taken place on that beach over 25 years. I love that about the beaches—I’m there on my own, I can just bring everyone who’s ever been there with me and all the thoughts I’ve got. It\'s important for all of us to have somewhere where you can somehow gather your thoughts.” **“Royal Morning Blue”** “\[When rain turns to snow\], suddenly everything goes in slow motion and beautiful geometric patterns start to appear and the world feels reborn in a way. Even the most desolate of landscapes after a big snowfall are perfect. It’s such an ephemeral thing though. It’s the same water but transformed for a moment.” **“Combustion”** “This is part of a much bigger thing. I think it’ll be developed more when I do it with the orchestra in February \[2022\] and I’m reunited with my musicians from Iceland. The record will transform again, the space in between the singing will be much greater, to return it more to its meditation on this perspective that musicians and myself were allowed by being there and playing in real time.” **“Daft Wader”** “\[It’s inspired by\] Zoroastrian sky burials. And the public mourning of martyrs. It’s a very big part of Shia religion, martyrdom. Problematic. And same with Sunni. It’s problematic, but it just struck me how it was very beautiful seeing communities all sitting together, drinking fruit juice and coffee, and being really peaceful publicly. Because it’s always kind of invested with such drama and violence, their religious festivals—we’re taught to fear them, and not understand it and not be sympathetic. I’m very lucky: I’ve been to Iran, and it has its issues, but it’s a very civilized place.” **“Darkness to Light”** “Dawn is so much later in the winter \[in Iceland\]. It’s like half-10, maybe even 11 o’clock. Dawn is in the working day. So, it’s a lot of time making this record in that state, which is something I grew to understand more about when I was doing *Dr Dee* \[a 2011 opera about Elizabethan polymath John Dee\] because the time between dusk and night, and night and dawn, was the favored time of the day to commit to magical practice. That’s where all the good spells are cast.” **“Esja”** “This is the outline of the mountain, and it moves with the contours around a certain harmonic destination. You’ve got to give \[the musicians\] some sort of harmonic destination. Once you start saying, ‘Play in a certain way,’ you’re missing the point. It’s how they feel once they start to tune in to just staring, and not thinking about what you’re playing. So, listening, being sensitive to each other. It’s like everyone’s got a paintbrush—and how do we keep moving but somehow inhabit our points of view? When I was writing over the top, it made it easier having this harmonic reasoning behind all of this abstract stuff.” **“The Tower of Montevideo”** “I’ve made it. I’ve swum past the buoy to the uncharted cruise ship \[first mentioned in ‘The Cormorant’\], and I’ve met fellow musicians, or stowaways or refugees, emotional refugees, and we’ve formed a band and we’re playing these songs to nobody. I’ve had a bit of an obsession about music in empty clubs for a long time. To make music for an audience is a true joy, but be careful, because modern consumption of music is killing us musicians slowly. It’s a long, protracted death, but it’s happening.” **“Giraffe Trumpet Sea”** “This is a song about flying back to London and looking down—there were a few clouds, a night city—and feeling like I was at the bottom of some ocean, that it was gold treasure. Giraffe trumpets are the cranes. When they’re resting, they look like they’re sort of giraffes. Half-giraffe, half-trumpet, sending out beautiful sounds to the universe. But I left out all the words. I think it was too distracting at that point in the record to go off on another tangent and another story, but I liked the music and I liked the title.” **“Polaris”** “‘Polaris’ reminds me of that anxiety I felt in the ’80s around Greenham Common \[RAF air base housing cruise missiles under Britain’s Polaris nuclear weapons program\]. That understanding that we had as kids of that age, that nuclear war was a very real thing, and we were quite scared. ‘Polaris/Watching the embers fall.’ That’s after a nuclear attack. And then the next bit—‘Joining the saline to start the inspection’—is me zoning in on the oystercatchers in Devon when the tide goes out. Seeing them in an *Animal Farm* kind of way: They’ve become the rulers. They’re black and white, and their red eyes—kind of this uniform. And waiting for the saline to clear so they can eat. And the other birds have to wait in their line before they’re allowed to go and do anything. So, ‘Polaris’ is an ominous word. But it’s the Polar Star as well, which is something that’s been used by anyone who’s gone to sea. It’s saved many people.” **“Particles”** “\[A rabbi Albarn met on a flight\] was fleeing certain particles. But she said the particles are looking for you in the universe. They are attracted to you. You cannot stop anything. We moved on to the conversation of Trump, and she said he’s a perfect example of a particle in that you can’t escape it, but it’s benign in a sense because it’s just going to come and cause great disruption and then disappear, and other things will come out of it. And that is true of the universe. Firstly, nothing disappears; it just changes. And secondly, there is no sadness because everything is evolving. And it’s only us who want to find some meaning to it. And that’s why we become sad—because when we can\'t find meaning to things, we’re sad. And that’s just being a good old-fashioned Homo sapien.”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums are typically accompanied by a collective ideological statement of intent from the Montreal instrumental ensemble. And coming in the midst of a pandemic that has greatly magnified the societal inequalities they’ve always railed against, the missive/press release that accompanies *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* practically reads like a ransom note, with calls to “take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise” and “tax the rich until they\'re impoverished,” among others. But where they were once the doomsday prophets of pre-millennium post-rock, the band\'s response to the intensifying turmoil of 21st-century life is to radiate an ever-greater degree of positivity through their music. Godspeed\'s seventh album adheres to a similar structure as their post-reunion releases (with two mammoth, multi-sectional movements each flanked by a shorter piece) while tapping into a similar spirit of hard-fought perseverance. However, *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* is distinguished by its heightened sense of clarity and levity. In contrast to the sustained, swelling drones of 2017’s *Luciferian Towers* and the defiant doom-metal behemoths of 2015’s *Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress*, this set’s opening four-track suite gradually blossoms from a minimalist, militaristic march into a delirious orchestral swirl, before entering an extended comedown jam that suggests ’70s Floyd jamming with Crazy Horse. The equally expansive companion piece (spread over tracks 6 and 7) likewise travels from desolate valleys to staggering peaks and back again, but rallies for a triumphant victory-lap gallop that could very well count as the most elating piece of music this band has ever produced. Even the brief meditative ambient symphony that closes the record is embedded with inspirational energy—it’s called “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN,” so consider *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* a sonic premonition of the better, more humane world that awaits us on the other side.

As Amyl and the Sniffers came off the road in late 2019, they moved into a house together in Melbourne. “It had lime green walls and mice,” frontwoman Amy Taylor tells Apple Music. “Three bedrooms and a shed out back that we took turns sleeping in. We knew we were going to come back for a long period of time to write. We just didn’t know how long.” Months later, as the bushfires gave way to a global pandemic, the Aussie punk outfit found themselves well-prepared for lockdown. “We’ve always kind of just been in each other’s pocket, forever and always,” Taylor says. “We’ve toured everywhere, been housemates, been in a van, and shared hotel rooms. We’re one person.” With all rehearsal studios closed, they rented a nearby storage unit where they could workshop the follow-up to their ARIA-winning, self-titled debut. The acoustics were so harsh and the PA so loud that guitarist Dec Martens says, “I never really heard any of Amy’s lyrics until they were recorded later on. She could’ve been singing about whatever, and I would have gone along with it, really.” And though *Comfort to Me* shows a more serious and personal side—as well as a range of influences that spans hardcore, power pop, and ’70s folk—that’s not necessarily a byproduct of living through a series of catastrophes. “I was pretty depressed,” Taylor says. “It’s hard to know what was the pandemic and what was just my brain. Even though you can’t travel and you can’t see people, life still just happens. I could look through last year and, really, it’s like the same amount of good and bad stuff happened, but in a different way. You’re just always feeling stuff.” Here, Taylor and Martens take us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Guided by Angels”** Amy Taylor: “I feel like, as a band, everyone thinks we’re just funny all the time. And we are funny and I love to laugh, but we also are full-spectrum humans who think about serious stuff as well, and I like that one because it’s kind of cryptic and poetic and a bit more dense. It’s not just, like, ‘Yee-haw, let’s punch a wall,’ which there’s plenty of and I also really love. We’re showing our range a little bit.” **“Freaks to the Front”** AT: “We must’ve written that before COVID. That’s absolutely a live-experience song and we’re such a live band—that’s our whole setup. We probably have more skills playing live than we do making music. It’s the energy that is contagious, and that one’s just kind of encouraging all kind of freaks, all kind of people: If you’re rich or poor or smart or fat or ugly or nice or mean, everyone just represent yourself and have a good time.” **“Choices”** Dec Martens: “\[Bassist\] Gus \[Romer\] is really into hardcore at the moment, and he wanted a really animalistic, straight-up hardcore song.” AT: “Growing up, I went to a fair handful of hardcore shows, and I personally liked the aggression of a hardcore show. In the audience, people kind of grabbing each other and chucking each other down, but then also pulling each other up and helping each other. I also just really like music that makes me feel angry. I constantly am getting unsolicited advice—or women, in general, are constantly getting told how to live and what to do. Everybody around the world is, and sometimes it’s really helpful—and I don’t discount that—but other times it’s just like, ‘Let me just fucking figure it out myself, and don’t tell me what kind of choices I can and can’t make, because it’s my flesh sack and I’ll do what I want with it.’” **“Hertz”** AT: “I think I started writing it at the start of 2020, pre-lockdown. But it’s funny now, because currently, being in lockdown again, I’m literally dying. I just want to get to the country and fucking not be in the city. So, the lyrics have really just come to fruition. I was thinking about somebody that I wasn’t really with at the time. It’s that feeling of feeling suffocated—you just want to look at the sky, just be in nature, and just be alive.” **“No More Tears”** DM: “I was really inspired by this ’70s album called *No Other* by Gene Clark, which isn’t very punk or rock. But I just played this at a faster tempo.” AT: “And also inspired heaps by the Sunnyboys, an Australian power pop band. Last year was really tough for me, and that song’s about how much I was struggling with heaps of different shit and trying to, I guess, try and make relationships work. I was just feeling not very lovable, because I’m all fucked in the head, but I’m also trying to make it work. It’s a pretty personal song.” **“Knifey”** AT: “It’s about my experience—and I’m sure lots of other people’s experience—of feeling safe to walk home at night. The world’s different for people like me and chicks and stuff: You can carry a weapon and if somebody does something awful and you react, it comes back to you. I remember when I was a kid, being like, ‘Dad, I want to get a knife,’ and he was like, ‘You can’t get a knife because you’ll kill someone and go to jail.’ But so be it. If somebody wants to have a go, I’m very happy to react negatively. At the start, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do these lyrics. I don’t know if I’d want to play that song live.’ It’s probably the only song that I’ve ever really felt like that about. It hit up the boys in the band in an emotional way. They were like, ‘Fuck, this is powerful. Makes me cry and shit,’ and I was like, ‘That’s pretty dope.’” **“Don’t Need a C\*\*t (Like You to Love Me)”** AT: “It’s a fuck-you song. When I’m saying, ‘Don’t need a c\*\*t like you to love me,’ it’s pretty much just any c\*\*t that I don’t like in general. There could be some fucking piss-weak review of us or if I worked at a job and there was a crap fucking customer—it’s all of that. I wasn’t thinking about a particular bloke, although there’s many that I feel like that about.” **“Snakes”** “A bit of autobiography, an ode to my childhood. I grew up in a small town near the coast—kind of bogan, kind of hippy. I grew up on three acres, and I grew up in a shed with my sister, mom, and dad until I was about nine or 10, and we all shared a bedroom and would use the bath water to wash our clothes and then that same water to water the plants. Dad used to bring us toys home from the tip and we’d go swimming in the storms and there was snakes everywhere. There was snakes, literally, in the bedroom and the chick pens, and there’d be snakes killing the cats and snakes at school—and this song’s about that.”

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

The origins of Clairo (born Claire Cottrill) hold their own modern mythos: 2017’s lo-fi bedroom pop track “Pretty Girl” went viral, and a major-label record deal with Fader/Republic followed. Then came her debut LP, *Immunity*, and its sardonic indie pop punctuated by jazzy instrumentation, soft-rock harmonies, and diaristic revelations. On her sophomore album, *Sling*, produced by Jack Antonoff in a remote and rural part of upstate New York, Clairo has mined deeper into her well of self-possessed folk. The outdoors seems to have grounded her; even moments of ornate orchestration are stripped down to their emotional core, like in the fluttery horns and xylophone of “Wade,” the herd of violins on “Just for Today” and “Management,” or their psychic opposite—the heartbreaking piano ballad intro on “Harbor,” and the campfire stopper “Reaper.” Standout first single “Blouse” features backing vocals from Lorde, and borrows a familiarly devastating chord progression (think Big Star’s “Thirteen”). Everywhere you turn on *Sling*, there are careful, restrained, and wise observations on the human condition.

Written after the birth of her first child (and just before the arrival of her second), *Colourgrade* finds London’s Tirzah Mastin taking a more experimental approach, wrapping moments of unadorned beauty in sheets of distortion, noise, woozy synthesizers, and listing guitars. It’s decidedly lo-fi—not the sort of album that actively invites you in. And yet, like its predecessor—her acclaimed 2018 debut LP, *Devotion*—this is naturally intimate music, alt-R&B that offers brief meditations on the coming together of both bodies (“Tectonic”) and collaborators (“Hive Mind,” which, in addition to seal-like background effects, features vocals from touring bandmate and South London artist Coby Sey). Working again alongside longtime friend and collaborator Mica Levi, Mastin sounds free here, at ease even as she obfuscates. On “Beating,” as she sings to her partner over a skittering drum machine and a layer of gaseous hiss, she stops for a moment to clear her throat, as if in quiet conversation late at night. “You got me/I got you,” she sings. “We made life/It’s beating.”

Saint Etienne’s 10th studio album wasn’t supposed to sound like this. By early 2020, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell had almost completed a different set of songs. But as lockdown took hold, there was no way to mix them and work paused. While they waited, the trio picked up an idea that was easier to explore from their own homes, one first investigated on 2018’s Christmas giveaway *Surrey North EP*. A few years earlier, Stanley had become drawn to vaporwave, a sound he’d found on YouTube. Bedroom producers were warping and tranquilizing ’80s R&B and setting it to images of abandoned buildings. The hazy sense of nostalgia intrigued Stanley. “The music that gets sampled and images that get used are American or Japanese,” he tells Apple Music. “So, we thought, ‘What if we use British imagery and samples to try to evoke a period in recent British history?’” They settled on 1997 to 2001, a period beginning with the installation of the Labour government and ending with 9/11. It felt like the last time Britain had been buoyed by widespread optimism and was an age that people were increasingly looking back on with yearning. “A lot of the problems we have at the moment, like social media, barely existed,” says Stanley. “The internet barely existed. The climate catastrophe—everyone knew it was possibly going to happen, but no one realized it would accelerate as fast as it has.” Exchanging files and thoughts across email and video calls, the trio foraged samples from the era’s R&B and pop, stretching and reshaping them into eight hypnotic pieces full of summery warmth and reflection. Melodies take hold slowly but doggedly, melancholy occasionally draws in like evening shade, and a gauzy sense of reverie acknowledges how nostalgia can blur details. “The whole point is memory is a very unreliable narrator,” says Stanley. “Every period has its grimness but, with the ’90s, it’s easy to see how people are focusing on the positivity. When we were teenagers, we really looked back at the ’60s and thought what an amazing period that was. But what we were looking at was The Monkees rather than people being lynched in the South.” Here, Stanley guides us along a journey through a half-remembered past, track by track. **“Music Again”** “It’s basically Pete’s work. We just found the samples together and he extended that and made it into a hypnotic, repetitive pattern, and Sarah wrote her lyric over the top. I like the fact that when I’ve mentioned that there’s a Honeyz sample \[‘Love of a Lifetime’\], people are like ‘obscure R&B band’ or whatever. But they obviously weren’t. At the time, they were all over Radio 2; I think they had a couple of Top 10 hits. We really wanted it to be something you might remember hearing, so it might actually jog a genuine memory from the time. So, the samples \[on the album\] were all from mainstream acts, just not the most obvious songs.” **“Pond House”** “\[The sampled track, Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Beauty on the Fire’\] got in the Top 30. With a lot of the samples, we were listening to albums from that period and just hearing if there was a snippet of something that we could use and expand. It’s almost like trying out a new instrument, trying out a guitar pedal, just seeing if there was something we could do with it. We were looking for good productions from the time, relatively smooth. I have playlists of all the ones that we never ended up using. There’s a song called ‘Sky’ by Sonique, a couple of Jamelia things—‘Antidote,’ ‘Life.’ Maybe we’ll use them in the future. Mel B’s solo stuff, Martine McCutcheon, Lutricia McNeal.” **“Fonteyn”** “\[The sample is\] a Lighthouse Family song, but it’s not the biggest hit, ‘Lifted’; it’s a relatively minor single \[‘Raincloud’\]. I remember hearing them on Radio 2 at the time, and I always really liked the bottom end of the piano working as a bassline, so that’s what we used.” **“Little K”** “We were just going back and forth, but basically Pete was sending us things that were essentially finished. It was like, ‘Well, this is terrific.’ Then Sarah would write lyrics and come up with the topline, then he’d fit them in and cut it up a bit like he did here on ‘Little K.’” **“Blue Kite”** “Pete did this in his studio at home. It was using bits of our own songs, from the early ’90s I think. That kind of abstraction reminds me of My Bloody Valentine, even though there’s no obvious guitars on it. I think it’s sad they never made another album 18 months after *Loveless*. Because I remember Colm, the drummer, was getting really into jungle, and I think they probably recorded stuff. I was thinking, ‘Wow, where’s this going to go?’ Then they just don’t make a record for 20-odd years instead. There were so many directions you could go in the early ’90s and so much music being made where you could take inspiration from it, from contemporary stuff. I think that really gave us a palette that we could use, as well as stuff from the past that we already liked—psychedelia, Northern Soul, or whatever.” **“I Remember It Well”** “I worked with a guy called Gus Bousfield, who does a lot of TV and film work. He’s an engineer, producer, and a multi-instrumentalist. That’s the kind of person I need to work with because I can barely play ‘Chopsticks.’ It’s great to have someone who can do everything you want. Gus recorded \[the sampled conversations here\] in an indoor market in Bradford. They’re heavily distorted and it sounds like human language, but you really can’t work out a single word. He plays guitar on this, which has a slight *Twin Peaks* feel.” **“Penlop”** “I think this probably had the most time spent on it. Pete did a version that was about eight minutes long. It got more distorted towards the end. I just love the way it has a part where it drops down, then comes crashing in. And then it goes up another level after that.” **“Broad River”** “The piano part is the intro to a Tasmin Archer song \[‘Ripped Inside’\]. That’s all we took from that, I think, a bar of piano or whatever, two bars. It’s funny because a lot of people have said, ‘Oh, this is the first time you did sampling since \[1993 album\] *So Tough*.’ And it isn’t. I suppose we’ve just not used it as obviously. There’s plenty of things we’ve recorded over the years which have samples on them, but you can take a bit of an existing song and make something completely new, with a completely new atmosphere. I think this is one of the cases, because I love the way it sounds on ‘Broad River’ and the Tasmin Archer song is obviously a fair bit darker.”

“I didn’t know if we were going to be able to recreate the magic,” Tunng’s Mike Lindsay tells Apple Music of returning to LUMP, his collaboration with Laura Marling, following 2018’s acclaimed, eponymous debut. “I was petrified.” It’s not too hard to see why. *LUMP*—on which Marling layered, as she puts it, “essentially free-form nonsense poetry” atop atmospheric electronic folk soundscapes crafted by Lindsay—presented a strangely wonderful meeting of musical minds that few could have predicted. Fortunately, *Animal* proves that it was no one-off. Here, bolstered by their experience of touring together, LUMP takes their sound to bigger, bolder, and more hedonistic places, as the duo explores—like they did on their debut—a space somewhere between sweetness and menace, darkness and light. “That’s what makes it work for me,” says Lindsay. “There’s this creepiness versus cuteness. It needs to grate up against each other to keep it surprising.” And there are plenty of surprises, from gloriously danceable moments (“Animal”) to off-kilter indie pop (“Climb Every Wall,” “We Cannot Resist”) and one thrilling, truly unexpected guitar solo (“Paradise”). Marling—who drew from her study of psychoanalysis and her own dreams for this album’s lyrics—says *Animal* is about “desire and the under-conscious things that are driving us,” as well as our attention deficit, validation, fame (including her own), and cultural shifts. (If any of that sounds impenetrable, it somehow isn’t once you press play.) There is, too, a sense of freedom and playfulness throughout. And for Marling in particular—who worked on *Animal* alongside 2020’s *Song for Our Daughter*—that has always been the beauty of LUMP. “When I was working on *Song for Our Daughter*, I was having problems with my throat. I was struggling to sustain my voice or catch my breath. But in the studio with Mike, I wasn’t experiencing those problems. I think that obviously says a lot about what LUMP was to me at that time, which is just a huge relief. Laura Marling is this very private, stressful experience, whereas LUMP is an energetic force to draw on. There are no bad ideas.” Read on as Marling and Lindsay guide us through their second musical adventure, one track at a time. **“Bloom at Night”** Mike Lindsay: “With the ambient beginning, I feel this song has an element of similarity to the opening track on *LUMP*. But when those beats click in, it’s a shock. It just felt the perfect way to draw you in and then make you wonder, ‘What\'s going to happen on this record? ’Cause I don\'t really know what this is anymore.’” Laura Marling: “The first lyric that I came up with was ‘It took one God seven days to go insane.’ I guess I was trying to describe the feeling of what people have been reduced to in the attention age. The indecency of being reduced, at times, to get your piece of attention in the world, which none of us is above—particularly artists and musicians.” **“Gamma Ray”** ML: “We had the chorus first, but it took a long time to figure out the verse part. Laura went to the kitchen and came back with this amazing set of lyrics—really menacing, covered in attitude. They slotted in perfectly around the stupid timing this song is in (it’s in 7/4). When we layered up that verse at the end of the last chorus, it was like black magic or something. When you hear the words ‘Excuse me, I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ for me that’s the voice of Lump \[the duo’s yeti-like mascot, who appeared on the cover of their debut\].” **“Animal”** LM: “This was the easiest to decipher from the music Mike had made. And again, lyrically following the theme of desire, and sort of the gross accoutrements of desire.” ML: “We had that riff, and it felt like a kind of ’90s, slowed-down rave riff or something. The first lyrics Laura started singing—‘Dance, dance, this is your last chance’—were a joke, with that overly British voice, just for fun. But for me, it was kind of a eureka moment. And in the breakdown, she started doing this kind of gospel or party animal moment and it blew my mind. What Laura is singing in the middle collapse of the song is the word ‘animal.’ And that\'s why it became the title of the album. I think it\'s such a strong, very simple word that meant a lot to the LUMP project.” **“Climb Every Wall”** ML: “For me, this song is all about the bassline. There was a kind of melancholy and drunkenness at the same time. It felt like a brilliant piece of pop music, which I hadn’t really done in LUMP before. But Laura totally twisted it into something I wasn’t really expecting. It’s dark, foreboding, with almost a Nico-esque voice.” **“Red Snakes”** LM: “This song is similar to stuff I’ve done before, but with LUMP’s slightly wonky imagery. I have a recurring dream of my mother being in a pool of water at night, like a pond, and not being able reach her. In one of the dreams I reached into the water to see what was in there and a huge red snake came and bit my arm and I couldn\'t get it off. That’s obviously a very stark image and a very strong feeling, so it came together quickly. The intimacy of the piano also dictated that.” **“Paradise”** ML: “I wasn’t sure about this track. Partly because it’s in a slightly different key to the other tracks, so I was like, ‘It’s going to ruin my journey, man!’ But I was wrong. It’s one of those tunes that is very creepy mixed with this pure joy. I worried it was just too far beyond what we’ve done before, but I think that was why Laura wanted it on the record. And for me, all that really matters about this song is the badass guitar solo.” LM: “The ‘paradise’ in the context of the song is either that moment near death or the moment near waking when you have a sort of ecstatic experience. The whole fool\'s journey is that we\'re getting back to that state, total bliss, just unachievable. It\'s a fantasy. And then, that was intertwined with me having a dream in which my therapist approached me on the top deck of a London bus, offered me a cucumber sandwich, then asked me out on a date. And that was a disturbing image, as I\'m sure you\'d agree.” **“Hair on the Pillow”** ML: “This whole album is supposed to be one kind of journey. And I think after we’ve had the massive moment of ‘Paradise,’ we needed some time to reflect. What is this world you’ve been put in sonically? It’s also a chance to reflect on some of Laura’s imagery. The words ‘hair on your pillow’ is sampled form ‘Animal’ through a heavily pitched-down vocoder. It’s another example of the voice of Lump the character.” **“We Cannot Resist”** LM: “This song is a pretty well-trodden story: kids on the run, first love, biggest heartbreak, and so on. Then there’s all this quite strange libidinal language about profanity. Desire is quite often something that\'s either really tightly strung or has gone slack. I was just messing around with that and it ended up making it a not straightforward pop song.” ML: “There’s a magic moment at the end of this song when it just dissipates into whispers, which then continues into the flutes of the next song, ‘Oberon,’ which are actually the same flutes from ‘Bloom at Night.’ The whole record has these kinds of in-between tracks, which give a different flavor to the song you just heard. This song is kind of a broken pop song that doesn’t quite know what it’s supposed to be.” **“Oberon”** LM: “Mike had this piece of music and we didn’t have very long to work on it—he was in Margate and I was going home at the end of the day, so we needed to come up with something quickly. I have a continuous run of notebooks—the front is for Laura Marling and the back, flipped around, is for LUMP. I flipped it to the Laura Marling side and found something I had never used. ‘Oberon’ must have been in the mix for *Song for Our Daughter*. We did three takes and I read excerpts of notes that I’d written way back. Then Mike just cut them up and put them in random places, so that their meaning was completely different and obscure. It turned out to be an odd, pleasing listen.” **“Phantom Limb”** LM: “I make a daily habit of underlining things in newspapers and quote some stuff, phrases that I like. This song is just a repository for the funny phrasing I’ve heard in the last few years. Lots of the lyrics are about things that are uncomfortable to think about—slightly disturbing images.” ML: “This song has a rolling time signature that never ends. I could listen to it forever. ‘We have some work to do’ is such a brilliant line to end the whole project on. It can be very open to interpretation as a comment on society. This ending makes me want to go back to the start and retrace my steps, to work out what journey I’ve just listened to.”

Twelve years after Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” upended dubstep and forever changed the course of bass music, the UK DJ/producer, born Peter O’Grady, has yet to put out his debut album. In fact, “I’ve never wanted to write an album,” he tells Apple Music. So, *Still Slipping Vol. 1*, the most substantial offering he’s released yet, might present something of a conceptual hurdle: Its 14 tracks and 46-minute runtime would seem to have all the outward trappings of a bona fide full-length. O’Grady, however, insists that it is not. Instead, he claims, it’s a mixtape. “I listen to a lot of rap mixtapes,” he says. “There’s something quite playful and a little bit more personal about them. Dance albums always feel very put on a pedestal. But with hip-hop tapes, there’s so much energy and excitement. It feels really fresh and unpretentious.” A similar energy runs through *Still Slipping Vol. 1*: Though its muted production constitutes some of the most experimental material in Joy Orbison’s catalog, it’s propelled by lithe garage and drum ’n’ bass rhythms, and it’s stitched together with Voice Notes from O’Grady’s family members. Reminiscing about his grandfather, laughing about a weekend of daiquiris, or even, in the case of one charming recording of his mother, simply praising the young musician’s production chops, these spoken bits lend an intimate air; you feel like you’re eavesdropping on his private life. O’Grady made the record during the 2020 COVID lockdown; cooped up at home, he saw no one for months, communicating with his family only via FaceTime. That sense of isolation bleeds through into some of the record’s darker tracks, like the gothic trap of “Bernard?” or the bit-crushed textures and paranoid jitter of “Glorious Amateurs.” But the spirit of collaboration also courses through the music. Working with an array of rappers, singers, and fellow producers—at first socially distanced and eventually in person—O’Grady took the opportunity to try out new sounds and styles, folding in the grit of post-punk on “’Rraine” and the reflective tenor of dub poetry on “Swag W/ Kav,” a flickering UK garage floor-filler. Here, he explains the backstories behind selected songs from the mixtape. **“W/ Dad & Frankie”** “My dad’s not a massive talker. You’ve got to get stuff out of him. He didn’t know he was being recorded; he was just in a good mood with his brother. My dad was a bit of a mod in the suedehead era, and they’re talking about clothing. I liked it because it’s a nice moment between my dad and his brother, but it’s also painting a picture of something that I find quite interesting. I’m quite influenced by post-punk, and kicking off the record, I was thinking about that; there’s a guitar sample in there.” **“Sparko” (feat. Herron)** “Sam Herron and I did all of this just sending loops and ideas back and forth. I’m really into vocals and vocal melodies, but also the industrial side of things—I’m always trying to bring the soul out of something that’s quite abstract or a bit tougher. This track is him pushing it one way and me pushing it the other way and, hopefully, getting this interesting balance. It came together really quickly; it’s probably one of the last things I did on the record. I like it because it has this really good energy. It’s quite danceable. I play a lot of stuff around that BPM range when I DJ longer sets. We all come from a broken-beat background at 140 BPM, which maybe seems less interesting to us now. At slower tempos, you have more space.” **“Swag W/ Kav” (feat. James Massiah & Bathe)** “I was listening to a lot of 2-step and garage again. It’s something that I’m really influenced by, but I’m so sensitive about doing it, because I hold it in such high regard. Now there’s a throwback aspect, and the trend is really popular. But I think it’s hard for people now to imagine how sophisticated it seemed. I wanted to carry that sophistication on; I wanted to carry that energy into the track. I wanted to write a garage track that you could play like a minimal house track—something you could slip in at the right party and it wouldn’t be a throwback.” **“Better” (feat. Léa Sen)** “When I made this, I was thinking about people like Photek. I’m a massive Photek fan, and the way he approached house music and soulful vocal stuff always sat well with me. It’s uplifting but also melancholic. Drum ’n’ bass was always like that for me. But the nice thing about Léa is she’s 21 and she doesn’t necessarily know a lot of the things I was thinking about. I feel like her vocal is more like her doing a Frank Ocean vocal, which I love.” **“Bernard?”** “This is one I didn’t make during COVID, actually. It was originally called ‘Amtrak’ because I made it on an Amtrak train going from New York to Washington. The reason it’s called ‘Bernard?’ is because of Bernard Sumner. I’m a big New Order fan, and when I made it, I was thinking, ‘What if New Order made a hip-hop beat?’” **“Runnersz”** “This was one of the first Voice Notes I got sent where I was like, ‘Yeah, I have got to use this.’ Mia is my cousin; she’s also Ray Keith’s daughter—my uncle, who does the drum ’n’ bass stuff. I remember her being born, and now she’s 21 or something. She and her sister seemed to grow up quickly in lockdown, and it made me think about them now coming to clubs and falling in love and stuff like that.” **“’Rraine” (feat. Edna)** “Lorraine is my mom’s name, but my dad never says Lorraine—he just says ’Rraine. This is a song that me and Edna wrote, and then it morphed into what it is now. I do a lot of sessions with rappers and singers, and this was one of the beats I was giving to rappers. I got a few different vocals on it, but then I did a session with Edna. She’s in a band called Goat Girl—more post-punk type stuff. Weirdly, she really took to that track. It became this sort of—I don’t even know how I’d describe it. I’m a big Cocteau Twins fan, and I guess I was thinking about that kind of thing, but it isn’t really that, is it? It’s definitely leaning into my emo stuff.” **“Glorious Amateurs”** “I can’t even remember how this one came about. Someone once said to me that I write music like it’s coming out of a tube of toothpaste or something. This is one of the few that I would say I agree with that assessment. My manager didn’t really want to put it on the record, and I pushed. I said, ‘No, this one has to go on there.’” **“Froth Sipping”** “This was quite an old one, actually. When we were putting the tape together, we were going through a lot of my demos and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s actually quite good.’ I don’t really remember how I did a lot of it. I feel like it was quite modular-based. I think it’s even got some of the same ideas as ‘81B.’ I used to do a lot of that—build tracks out of other tracks. Things would just morph into other things.” **“Layer 6”** “I was with my mum and dad at Christmas, and my mum was talking about my radio show. She was like, ‘You should listen to Pete’s radio show. I think you’d like it.’ And my dad turns to me and goes, ‘It’s not for me though, is it? I’m nearly 70. Your mum can sit there and say it’s great, but it’s not really for her either.’ My parents have got really good musical taste, but they’re not musical people as such—they don’t play instruments. So, it’s kind of a sweet moment where my mum is trying to make sense of what I do and say something positive.” **“Playground” (feat. Goya Gumbani)** “This one, again, is thinking about stuff like Cocteau Twins. There was that really interesting point in post-punk—if you listen to the first Bauhaus record, that’s pretty much like a dub record. That fascinates me. I was thinking about that a bit when I made that beat. Goya, who’s the rapper, just has a really good ear. He came round and I was playing things and he was like, ‘Oh, that one.’ He could hear what he calls his ‘pocket,’ where the vocals would sit. It changed quite a bit once he jumped on it. I had been working on it with this vocalist who I was thinking could be the new Elizabeth Fraser. I was envisioning myself in this goth band. And then I played it for Goya, because the track wasn’t working out. It was two worlds colliding.” **“Born Slipping” (feat. TYSON)** “I like the idea of going out on a bit of a bang. It’s pretty straight up. It’s not trying to be anything particularly different, really. It’s quite an honest thing. It’s a bit garage-y, I love that. I’ve always loved a good vocal chop and a nice dubby synth. It’s the kind of thing that if I played it to my mates that I grew up with, they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, why don’t you do this more?’”

A few years removed from his Oscar-nominated work on 2017’s *Call Me by Your Name*, Sufjan Stevens turns to film for inspiration on this collaborative concept LP with LA singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine. Working together in upstate New York, the two would watch a movie in the evening, then write a song in response the next morning, employing the sort of quiet arrangements and pristine melodies that mark their work as solo artists. It’s an ode to maintaining an open mind (or *shoshin*, the Zen Buddhist term whose English translation is the album’s title), Stevens and De Augustine as eager to engage with horror films and commercial blockbusters as they would artier fare—from *All About Eve* to *Hellraiser III*, *Bring It On Again* to *Point Break* and *Wings of Desire*. But whether they’re giving voice to *The Silence of the Lambs*’ Buffalo Bill (“Cimmerian Shade,” sung from the perspective of said serial killer) or exploring the power dynamics of Spike Lee’s *She’s Gotta Have It* (“It’s Your Own Body and Mind”), every song here sparkles and stands on its own. You don’t need to have seen any of the source material to fully appreciate it.

Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.

For the follow-up to her harrowing 2019 album *Caligula*, Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) explores the physical and religious ruins of rural Pennsylvania as a metaphor for personal turmoil. “I think overall the record is about betrayal and consequences and facing the repercussions for your actions,” she tells Apple Music. “Looking at myself and the people close to me, it\'s about my most recent very turbulent relationship, and trying to love someone who cannot love you, and the resulting loneliness and isolation.” Because she was living in rural Pennsylvania to be in that relationship, she chose to detail the strange history of the area on *Sinner Get Ready*. “One of the major focuses of the record was to create darkness and intensity, and a very emotional soundscape,” she says, “but to do it without the trappings of extreme music and metal and noise, and to use a totally different palette to create the same vibe.” Below, she comments on each track. **“The Order of Spiritual Virgins”** “This track is a bridge between the last album, *Caligula*, and the rest of the record. The Order of Spiritual Virgins relates to the Cloisters at Ephrata, which was a small monastic society in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. They were hardcore ascetics, and I think a lot of it was based around totally repressing sexuality. I wanted to introduce a lot of the vocals that appear throughout the record—they’re congregational and not particularly refined, but they have real conviction. This song also has the only blatant synth aspect on the record, which is in the Morton Subotnick style.” **“I Who Bend the Tall Grasses”** “This song is inspired by a poem by my friend Blake Butler\'s late wife, who passed away around the time I was writing this record. She\'s a poet named Molly Brodak, and the poem is called ‘Jesus.’ I found it so striking and moving, and so the language of this track is very much indebted to that poem. It’s probably the most violent song on the record, and it also transitions out of the screaming stuff I’ve been doing for the last two years now. It’s like the last gasp of that for this record, and I believe we did it in one take.” **“Many Hands”** “With this one, I really wanted to focus on the repetition of the lyrics because I think they are fairly graphic. I also wanted to bring in part of the world that I\'ve been building previously and to reference ‘All Bitches Die’ by actually pulling the piano progression from that song and then repeating the lyrics and pulling that from the song as well. So that’s actually the first thing you hear, and then it transitions into this other song that is laid over it. They kind of talk to each other throughout the song. I think it has an Angels of Light vibe.” **“Pennsylvania Furnace”** “This is an actual place, a defunct community that’s about 20 minutes away from where I was living this past year. And now it\'s just a big ruin with a concrete slab and some crap laying around. ‘Pennsylvania Furnace’ was another contender for the record title, but I wanted to give it to the song. Musically, I wanted to create a very lonely feeling. We wanted to create something that sounded grand and huge but also extremely close to you. So there’s a very dry, close vocal. It’s a very sad song.” **“Repent Now Confess Now”** “The title for this is from a sign on I-70, which is an interstate that runs the length of Pennsylvania horizontally. About 45 minutes outside of Philly, there’s a barn by the side of the road on what looks like an Amish farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the phrase ‘Repent now, confess your sins and God will abundantly pardon.’ But the song is directly about the surgery I had to get this year. I had a massive disc herniation in my lower back that became an emergency situation that threatened total loss of my lower body.” **“The Sacred Linament of Judgment”** “A lot of the lyrics on this record are intended to emulate or are directly appropriated from Amish and Mennonite texts from the 1800s and 1700s. And this one comes from a book called *The Heart of Man: Either a Temple to God or the Habitation of Satan: Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, Calculated to Awaken and Promote a Christian Disposition*. Also appearing on this song is the confession of Jimmy Swaggart, an evangelist who was brought to accountability by one of the prostitutes he had been frequenting.” **Perpetual Flame of Centralia** “Centralia is an abandoned mining town 30 minutes outside Philly where there was a coal mining accident in 1962, and there’s been a fire burning underground ever since. This song was the first song I did in the studio, and I really wanted to focus on creating an intimate space. Vocally, the phrases are very long and there is a lot of breath taken. I wanted to focus on the quality of the voice as it\'s losing its ability to project or sustain itself. The song is about consequences and judgment.” **“Man Is Like a Spring Flower”** “This song was a wild ride. The title is from a piece of Mennonite fraktur, which is the illuminated manuscript that they would paint in their copious spare time. Again, it starts off with this polyphony, which is just me, but it\'s so grating and abrasive that every time I listen to the song, I start laughing because I think it sounds so gross. We brought in this really, really good banjo player and had him do this compositional technique called phasing, which affects the rhythm of the song. And then I did the most miserable vocal I could muster.” **“The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata”** “I wanted the emotional trajectory of the record to be a bit of an unraveling. It starts out with strength and confidence and virulence and ends in total despair, acceptance, and perhaps a wish for absolution. I kept trying to add all this crazy stuff to this one, but we kept taking it out until I was left with a very simple congruent harmony. It seems like a nice, traditional song, but the only curveball is the lyrical ugliness at the end. It really is about the acceptance of loneliness, I think.”