Rough Trade UK's Albums of the Year 2021

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

When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.

On 2018’s *Saturn*, Neo Jessica Joshua further broadened her sound (self-described neatly as “wonky funk”), exploring fame, spirituality, and romantic turbulence through a luminous astrological lens. The problem that beset preparations for studio album three in November 2019, therefore, was fairly ironic. “I just didn’t have any space,” Joshua—better known as Nao—tells Apple Music. “My own studio in East London is really, really small. So I hired a bigger space and invited loads of musicians and friends down just to jam and create and make interesting ideas.” Within 10 days, the nucleus of *And Then Life Was Beautiful* had formed, followed by periods of creative tinkering sparked by the unsettling (a pandemic) and utterly joyous (the birth of her daughter, in spring 2020). Fittingly, the final album honors change in all aspects (including breakups—a subject tapped into majestically on tracks including “Messy Love,” “Glad That You’re Gone,” and “Good Luck”) and triumphantly toasts femininity (see the Lianne La Havas duet “Woman”). It’s an album that bears its creative and personal liberation and wisdom well—bolstered by spoken-word interludes from UK poet Sophia Thakur. “It\'s a really cool way of tying a project together and providing a bit more context,” she says. “I love interludes, and I can remember them being on so many great albums, like Kendrick Lamar’s \[*good kid, m.A.A.d city*\] and old-school albums from Jill Scott \[*Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1*\], where they often play around with poetry or conversations.” Below, Nao talks through her triumphant third album, track by track. **“And Then Life Was Beautiful”** “The first lyrics are ‘Change came like a hurricane, 2020 hit us differently/And even though I didn\'t want it, the slow life got ahold of me.’ It’s about us all going through the pandemic at the same time, but also a reminder that better days are ahead.” **“Messy Love”** “This is a song about creating boundaries. I think everyone has experienced someone in their life that\'s not good for them, whether it’s a girlfriend-boyfriend situation, a family member or friend, and when they\'re around you, they bring negative energy and create situations. It\'s not something everyone’s born with, to be able to put up boundaries or learn how to say goodbye to these people. So this song, and the track after, pays homage to that.” **“Glad That You’re Gone”** “This track is about moving on and finding the people that pour life into you and water you. I\'ve been through enough to know what I can and can’t deal with—and so I’m better at spotting red flags \[in relationships\]. If I see a couple from early, then I’m cutting it, dead.” **“Antidote” (feat. Adekunle Gold)** “My daughter loves Adekunle—when she was born, I would use his songs to stop her crying. And I was excited, like, ‘This is a sign to reach out!’ I did, and discovered he had also just had a baby. So this song came together really quickly and easily. There was something about listening to Adekunle when my daughter was crying and her stopping and how it changes the energy in the room and lifted our spirits. And I wanted to recreate something again like that, so an Afrobeats vibe felt like the right space to finally meet each other.” **“Burn Out”** “I’ve been like diagnosed with a condition called chronic fatigue syndrome, which is quite hard for a lot of people to relate to. But I basically don\'t have very, very much energy at all and I can\'t really get through the day doing ordinary tasks without having to sleep or rest for long periods of time. And so it\'s been this way for three years. In my first year I thought: ‘It’s just burnout?’ I would say burnout is kind of a lesser version of that. A similar feeling, you\'re knackered, but if you take a month off you’ll be back up on your feet. And so it was easier for me to sing ‘Burn Out’ than singing ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.’” **“Wait”** “This song represents lessons that I never knew and if I had known maybe situations would be different. For me, in this relationship situation, I ran away instead of staying and working through it. And learning the lesson that we are human and we all humans make mistakes. The way to deal with them isn\'t to run away. Going through rough times in a relationship sometimes means that it can end up being stronger. But I guess this song is almost like an apology to myself in a way.” **“Good Luck” (feat. Lucky Daye)** “The songs with features came about very organically as we were thrown together in some way. I met with Lucky Daye last year; we were both nominated for Grammy Awards. I met him on the red carpet. We were mutual fans and in that moment agreed to get into the studio. So two days later, we came up with \'Good Luck.’” **“Nothing’s for Sure”** “This track is a reminder to live in the moment. With the pandemic, you don\'t really know what\'s around the corner, so you learn about practicing being present and going with the flow.” **“Woman” (feat. Lianne La Havas)** “This track brings together the idea that there\'s space for more than just one girl. Lianne is someone I\'ve been a fan of for a long time. We kept bumping into each other at festivals, as the two British female and Black sort of alternative soul artists. And we agreed to work together, when the timing was right. Being a female artist can sometimes feel like only one woman can be big at one thing. I remember back in the day: ‘Oh, is it Rihanna or is it Beyoncé?’ ‘Is it Nicki or is it Cardi?’ So we’re playing with that notion, because actually there is space for all of us—to wear our crowns and celebrate women as a whole, just the fucking incredible species that we are.” **“Better Friend”** “I won\'t go into the personal story here, but I guess we all have those friends that we were really close with and somehow we drifted apart from. This song serves the idea of sending that person a message, like, ‘I hope you\'re thriving in life, I hope you\'re smiling, I hope you\'re getting everything that you\'ve dreamed of.’ That’s where my head was at when I was writing this song.” **“Postcards” (feat. serpentwithfeet)** “This song is two love stories happening in parallel to each other. serpentwithfeet is welcoming a man into his life; they\'re in London, and they\'re looking at the gray day, and it\'s all really beautiful to them, and it\'s really exciting. Mine is about letting go of someone. I’m going through old memories and thinking about how I still think the person is an amazing human. It\'s unusual that you\'re going to have a Black man sing about loving another man on music, and having space for that, I think, is really beautiful.” **“Little Giants”** “This track is about finding out someone is not the person you thought they were—and explores the different emotions around that. I think that\'s really prevalent now, in the age of social media, and especially online dating when you\'re planning on meeting a person, you don\'t really know what you\'re getting or who you\'re really speaking to.” **“Amazing Grace”** “I was working with \[UK producer\] Maths Time Joy. He was playing guitar, and the lyric \'Amazing Grace\' kept coming to me—like it\'s sung so beautifully on the chords. But I was like, what does it mean to me? I took that and turned it into this idea of facing one\'s fear of failing—I think that\'s definitely one of my biggest fears. This song\'s just exploring the fear of failure, and what happens if actually you do just go for it.”

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

When UK trio Drug Store Romeos started making music together as teenagers, their sound was indebted to post-punk, heavy and raw. But then Sarah Downie, Charlie Henderson, and Jonny Gilbert started listening to such cosmic trailblazers as Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, and Broadcast, and their approach transformed, their songs taking on a more dreamy and hypnotic form. On the group’s debut album, *The world within our bedrooms*, they craft a series of indie-pop gems out of the haze, balancing sonic exploration with enchanting hooks and intricate dynamism. Their minimalist approach was forced on them by necessity, but it has opened up exciting new avenues. “I started playing keyboards, which meant I couldn’t play the bass,” Downie tells Apple Music. “We had to pick between guitar or bass, because we only have so many hands, and Charlie started playing bass. It meant our songs had to be stripped-back. Charlie started playing the bass in a more melodic way rather than just trying to fill in the foundation.” Their lean, lo-fi grooves are the perfect soundbed for tales of isolation and reflection, trying to make sense of a chaotic world as their teens became their early twenties. “We came from a very small town,” says Downie. “We were cut off a lot from the world, and I think that introspectiveness, with all the time we had to overanalyze ourselves, wrote itself into the music.” It is, explains Downie, an album that captures a coming-of-age, a record that fills you with hope when you come out the other side. Here, the three-piece take us through their journey, track by track. **“Building Song”** Sarah Downie: “It does what it says on the tin. We gave it that name but kept going, ‘We need to find a good name for this. That’s such a cop-out.’ And it just became that. I think it’s quite fitting.” Charlie Henderson: “It’s got a feeling, an atmosphere, that’s quite central to the world that we were trying to create. Naturally, throughout the song, it layers up over time and everything—it feels like a nice way to introduce the whole sound of the album.” **“Secret Plan”** CH: “This was written at 2 in the morning whilst my housemates were having a drum ’n’ bass party downstairs. I made the synth line and the bass part, and then, for the vocals, I was just improvising while this intense drum ’n’ bass was going on downstairs. It was quite chaotic. If ‘Building Song’ is the establishing shot, this is the first scene that’s in this slightly spooky, surreal suburban town. I hope people can dance to it, but also I imagine people listening to this album alone on headphones.” **“Bow Wow”** SD: “This was written when I got a Casio Casiotone CT 1000P, which has shaped a lot of our music. If you have headphones on and you’re listening carefully enough, you can just about hear my heartbeat in this song. Me and our producer, George Murphy, were in the studio at 2 am and we were pretty knackered, doing vocals over and over again. The lyrics—‘My heart rate increases’—were going through my head and I needed to get more energy in my body, so I started running around the studio. Then I put the microphone on my shirt and we recorded my heartbeat. George quantized it so that it’s going along with the kick.” **“Elevator”** CH: “I did a lot of experimenting, a lot of different things went onto that, but it was quite surprising it worked. They’re quite similar—both emotional and intense. The melody feels like it’s coming from a similar place, and they just locked together.” **“Walking Talking Marathon”** SD: “I wanted a song that didn’t fit into some chorus-verse-chorus, strophic structure. I pieced together from magazines, from things I’d been watching at the time, any little bits and bobs, phrases. The goal is to have as little friction between me and my instruments and what’s coming out of my mouth as possible.” **“Frame of Reference”** CH: “I spent about a year struggling with depression, but I’d still gone to festivals that summer. And so, a couple of times, there were hundreds of people dancing around me, and I was dancing, but I felt really crushed and empty, yet dense at the same time—whilst also being on ecstasy. The strangeness of that feeling, that artificial euphoria with this deep human sadness combining, was such a potent and unique emotion to me.” **“Feedback Loop”** CH: “I was really happy with the lyrics in this song. To me, this is, like, an 11 pm song—as you’re walking home, you don’t particularly want to go home and you’re aimlessly wandering around a little bit. I remember me and Sarah were in my garden and I was so obsessed with Molly Nilsson’s song ‘Hey Moon!’ I smoked a joint and listened to it five times and then came in, and then we wrote the chorus of ‘Feedback Loop.’” **“What’s on Your Mind”** SD: “Half of this was improvised in the studio. I think there was some technical difficulty that George was trying to figure out, and we were just mucking around, and he thought it was quite interesting so he pressed *record* and that was one of those lovely studio moments where a song comes out quite a lot differently than when it came in.” **“No Placing”** Jonny Gilbert: “This was written at a marijuana-and-music evening at Charlie’s house. It wasn’t an organized band writing session—more of an impromptu, just-for-enjoyment session. It was an evening of getting down parts that Charlie then spent more time crafting over the next few weeks, and with the help of Sarah, he brought it into a full song. It’s one of the most uptempo ones we’ve got, but to me, it will always feel nighttime because it was written entirely at nighttime.” **“Vibrate”** CH: “It was quite different to what we really wanted to do, and then our managers said it was pretty much their favorite song we’d ever written. We wanted to make songs that were dreamier and playful, but this one is quite dark and a bit serious. I like it now though.” **“Electric Silence”** SD: “This was around the time I was reading the *The Secret Life of Plants*, which is a book that talks a lot about Cleve Backster and his experiments in the 1960s with a polygraph test and plants. It’s a fun little one. I guess it’s just a cute little song. On my Casio, we had this auto-bass that makes these different rhythms and stuff, and we use one which I’m pretty sure is ABBA. We used that a lot.” JG: “It’s very *bop-bop-boop-boop*.” **“Kites”** SD: “‘Kites’ was written when I was in Winchester with my dad in the first part of lockdown. There was this hill that I would go to most days. It was carved out by the surrounding foothills of Winchester, and when you were on the hill, you could see the city in the foreground and this little hill adjacent from my hill. You could see people having picnics and dogs running up, people running up. I guess I was inspired by the open space, and I kind of wanted to spin up out of my body and be one with the clouds.” **“Put Me on the Finish Line”** SD: “This song was hanging around for ages. I created the keyboard line, but I didn’t really know where to go from there. I had this verse, but I could never, ever get a chorus for it. It means that the person that wrote that song all those years ago feels like a completely different person to who I was finishing it. But, thankfully, those two people seem to get along.” **“Cycle of Life”** SD: “This was written in about 20 minutes. Jonny had been watching this documentary on life cycles, nature, sandstorms, and the movement of currents and diatoms.” JG: “I started writing down what they said in the documentary to try and understand it, and it was on the wall when Sarah was making music. She started to fit it into her lyrics, and we realized it could be a thing.” SD: “It’s our most factual song. It’s a little palate cleanser.” **“Adult Glamour”** SD: “This is our oldest song. It feels like family to me. We spent months mixing it in my dad’s study in Fleet, encasing it in as many layers as we could. It was finished after this very intense acid trip that me and Charlie had where we got extremely into the personalities of sounds, thinking about the tones and what they create, just getting very into the tiny intricacies. It’s about the desensitizing nature of technology. After that acid trip, I got rid of my phone for about a year. It was a naive thing to do but was also quite good for me. As most people are, I was very addicted to my phone and I hated that.”

A dedicated period of introspection influenced Jordan Rakei’s fourth album. “Therapy is a really logical way to help yourself improve in life,” the New Zealand-born, Australia-raised, and London-based singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “It\'s not just about getting out of an extremely depressive state, or getting over a divorce or a really bad breakup. It\'s like, how can therapy be a tool to get me to see life slightly differently, and make me slightly happier?” *What We Call Life* finds Rakei at his most confident, his approach to composition and production shifting as a result of his journey, with each song representing something he learned via therapy. “I feel like it\'s really who I am right now,” he says. “I had my own sound, but I was letting my influences shine through a little bit more. But with this one, I feel like it\'s the first time I’ve had my own voice throughout a whole album.” Across his previous work, Rakei hasn’t found issues with genre-blending—fusing soul, jazz, R&B, and alternative influences with rare finesse. But *What We Call Life* is his most experimental, ambient, and existential set yet. “Introspection is hard for some people; they don\'t like thinking about their own life, or their past, or anything,” he says. “So doing a bit more of that would be really good for us all.” Here, Jordan guides us through each track. **“Family”** “I was thinking about my parents’ divorce, when I was about 14. When I was a young teenager, I thought the divorce didn\'t affect me. But now, double the age, I’m reflecting and thinking about the impact it must have had on my parents, navigating now being single parents. Also, thinking about me, sympathizing with the young teenager that I was, not really understanding its impact. I had this idea that my parents were ‘super soldiers.’ As I became an adult, I\'m like, ‘Oh, wow, that\'s just a normal person trying to go about their life.’” **“Send My Love”** “I think of this track as three mini-songs in one. There\'s the verse, which is really atmospheric and spacious, but with a bit of a groove. When the chorus comes in, it becomes a pumping dance track. I actually produced it all first, I laid all the instrumental down, we did all the synthesizers and we did all the drum programming. Then as soon as I saw it all sitting, I was like, ‘How can my voice slot in this without getting in the way of the production?’ But the choruses, I\'ve gone through five to six different choruses of trying to not get my vocals in the way, and decided to just keep it really simple.” **“Illusion”** “I just really wanted this to be a fun one, not overthinking the process. I was born into a particular family with particular morals, in a country that had a certain privileges. Living in Australia, in a rich neighborhood, I had these advantages from birth. It\'s basically like a subtle argument of nature versus nurture, and whether you can control your own narrative in life.” **“Unguarded”** “I wanted to have a track that breathed, production-wise. The focus wasn’t lyrics or the instrumentation, it was the energy and mood, and the way it all moves. It was more about the emotion rather than the message or the instrumental choices, about the movement and arc of the music.” **“Clouds”** “I wanted the whole song to be built around this vocal loop idea, similar to James Blake’s ‘Retrograde’, or a Bon Iver song. I actually made that in lockdown, in my bedroom. I started making the instrumental in May 2020 when Black Lives Matter started surfacing around the world. My dad\'s from the Pacific Islands, and he\'s brown. But I always forget that I\'m mixed-race, because I\'m white-passing. I was raised in Australia, I had white friends. And when I first came out in my career, people would comment and say, ‘Jordan Rakei, the next white D’Angelo.’ So, I was attacking that, and the guilt I feel behind it, and acknowledging my heritage a bit more. Even now I\'m trying to pronounce my last name how it should be pronounced. My whole life I just used to say ‘Rack-eye.’ But it\'s actually ‘Rah-kye’ or ‘Rah-kaye,’ depending on if you\'re in New Zealand or not. I still have to remind myself I\'m Cook Islander.” **“What We Call Life”** “When I was younger, there was a crazy party at my house. There were always parties at my house, because my parents were really sociable. I was a shy child, and quite anxious. I was angry at my parents for always having these parties when I was just a quiet, shy child. I was like, ‘Why do I constantly have to be put through this?’ I remember thinking to myself at that time, ‘Is this the life I expect? Is this what I’m going to be like for the rest of my life?’ I\'m trying to talk to my inner child, and trying to give him some sort of reassurance, like, ‘Life\'s going to be all right, you\'re going to get through this.’ I used to be really stressed about it.” **“Runaway”** “I\'ve managed to really nail what I love about all types of music in one song. I feel like it\'s slightly complex; at the same time it\'s really simple. It\'s ethereal, but it\'s got a groove to it. All the harmony choices are exactly like what I\'m into at the moment. And lyrically, it\'s about embracing a new path in life, and not running away from the past.” **“Wings”** “I\'m drawing from a different palette sonically. It\'s probably the heaviest, darkest tune on the album. So I was trying to channel my inner distorted guitar. Lyrically, it’s about breaking out of your mold, embracing your wings and flying to a new life, or plane of being. I wrote these verses way back in 2014 when I first moved to London. I just didn\'t feel like I ever had the right song emotionally to go with it. Until we were in the studio and we made this song, and I was just like, ‘Hey, I\'m going to try and sing these lyrics over the top.’ And it\'s still relevant to where I\'m at right now.” **“Brace”** “I started the album quite bright, and I feel like this is quite expansive, it\'s a different sound from earlier songs in the album. But I really wanted that contrast. ‘Brace’ is a really relaxing, slow-moving cinematic experience.” **“The Flood”** “I always knew when I made this track it was going to be the last track on the album, because it\'s got a long intro, it\'s got a long middle section, and then it\'s got a long outro. I wanted it to be a seamless story, like you’re embracing a new future. The last four minutes is all instrumental; I just wanted to ride out on it and let it fizzle away. It\'s talking about the flood of emotions in the body, and how responsive the body is to trauma. It\'s a narrative on emotion.”

The trio meld poetic indie pop with ethereal electronic beats.

“I wanted to get a better sense of how African traditional cosmologies can inform my life in a modern-day context,” Sons of Kemet frontman Shabaka Hutchings tells Apple Music about the concept behind the British jazz group’s fourth LP. “Then, try to get some sense of those forms of knowledge and put it into the art that’s being produced.” Since their 2013 debut LP *Burn*, the Barbados-raised saxophonist/clarinetist and his bandmates (tuba player Theon Cross and drummers Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick) have been at the forefront of the new London jazz scene—deconstructing its conventions by weaving a rich sonic tapestry that fuses together elements of modal and free jazz, grime, dub, ’60s and ’70s Ethiopian jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music. On *Black to the Future*, the Mercury Prize-nominated quartet is at their most direct and confrontational with their sociopolitical message—welcoming to the fold a wide array of guest collaborators (most notably poet Joshua Idehen, who also collaborated with the group on 2018’s *Your Queen Is a Reptile*) to further contextualize the album’s themes of Black oppression and colonialism, heritage and ancestry, and the power of memory. If you look closely at the song titles, you’ll discover that each of them makes up a singular poem—a clever way for Hutchings to clue in listeners before they begin their musical journey. “It’s a sonic poem, in that the words and the music are the same thing,” Hutchings says. “Poetry isn\'t meant to be descriptive on the surface level, it\'s descriptive on a deep level. So if you read the line of poetry, and then you listen to the music, a picture should emerge that\'s more than what you\'d have if you considered the music or the line separately.” Here, Hutchings gives insight into each of the tracks. **“Field Negus” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “This track was written in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests in London, and it was a time that was charged with an energy of searching for meaning. People were actually starting to talk about Black experience and Black history as it related to the present, in a way that hadn\'t really been done in Britain before. The point of artists is to be able to document these moments in history and time, and be able to actually find a way of contextualizing them in a way that\'s poetic. The aim of this track is to keep that conversation going and keep the reflections happening. I\'ve been working with Joshua for 15 years and I really appreciate his perspective on the political realm. He\'s got a way of describing reality in a manner which makes you think deeply. He never loses humor and he never loses his sense of sharpness.” **“Pick Up Your Burning Cross” (feat. Moor Mother & Angel Bat Dawid)** “It started off with me writing the bassline, which I thought was going to be a grime bassline. But then in the pandemic lockdown, I added layers of horns and woodwinds. It took it completely out of the grime space and put it more in that Antillean-Caribbean atmosphere. It really showed me that there\'s a lot of intersecting links between these musics that sometimes you\'re not even aware of until you start really diving into their potential and start adding and taking away things. It was really great to actually discover that the tune had more to offer than I envisioned in the beginning. Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother are both on this one, and the only thing I asked them to do was to listen to the track and just give their honest interpretation of what the music brings out of them.” **“Think of Home”** “If you\'re thinking poetically, you\'ve got that frantic energy of \'Burning Cross,\' which signifies dealing with those issues of oppression. Then at the end of that process of dealing with them, you\'ve got to still remember the place that you come from. You\'ve got to think about the utopia, think about that serene tranquil place so that you\'re not consumed in the battle. It\'s not really trying to be a Caribbean track per se, but I was trying to get that feeling of when I think back to my days growing up in Barbados. This is the feeling I had when I remember the music that was made at that time.” **“Hustle” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “The title of the track links back to the title of our second album, *Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do*. The answer to that question is to hustle. Our grandparents came and migrated to Britain, not to just be British per se, but so that they could then create a better life for themselves and their families and have the future be one with dignity and pride. I gave these words to Kojey and he said that he finds it difficult to depict these types of struggles considering that he\'s not in the present moment within the same struggle that he grew up in. He felt it was disingenuous for him to talk about the struggle. I told him that he\'s a storyteller, and storytelling isn\'t always autobiographical. His gift is to be able to tell stories for his community, and to remember that he\'s also an orator of their history regardless of where his personal journey has led him.” **“For the Culture” (feat. D Double E)** “Originally, we\'d intended D Double E to be on \'Pick Up Your Burning Cross.\' But he came into the studio and it really wasn\'t the vibe that he was in. We played him the demo of this track and his face lit up. He was like, \'Let\'s go into the studio. I know what to do.\' It was one take and that was it. I think this might be one of my favorite tunes on the album. The reason I called it \'For the Culture\' is that it puts me back into what it felt like to be a teenager in Barbados in the \'90s, going into the dance halls and really learning what it is to dance. It\'s not just all about it being hard and struggling and striving; there is that fun element of celebrating what it is to be sensual and to be alive and love music and partying and just joyfulness.” **“To Never Forget the Source”** “I gave this really short melody to the band, maybe like four bars for the melody and a very repeated bassline. We played it for about half an hour, where the drums and bass entered slowly and I played the melody again and again. The idea of this, when we recorded in the studio, is that it needs to be the vibe and spirit of how we are playing together. So it wasn\'t about stopping and starting and being anxious. We need to play it until the feeling is right. The clarinets and the flutes on this one is maybe the one I\'m most proud of in terms of adding a counterpoint line, which really offsets and emphasizes the original saxophone and tuba line.” **“In Remembrance of Those Fallen”** “The idea of \'In Remembrance of Those Fallen\' is to give homage to those people that have been fighting for liberation and freedom within all those anti-colonial movements, and remember the ongoing struggle for dignity within especially the Black world in Africa. It\'s trying to get that feeling of \'We can do this. We can go forward, regardless of what hurdles have been done and of what hurdles we\'ve encountered.\' But, musically, there\'s so many layers to this. I was excited with how, on one side, the drums are doing what you\'d describe as Afro-jazz, and on the other one, it\'s doing a really primal sound—but mixing it in a way where you feel the impact of those two contrasting drum patterns. This is at the heart of what I like about the drums in Kemet. Regardless of what they\'re doing, the end result becomes one pulsating, forward-moving machine.” **“Let the Circle Be Unbroken”** “I was listening to a lot of \[Brazilian composer\] Hermeto Pascoal while making the album, and my mind was going onto those beautiful melodies that Hermeto sometimes makes. Songs that feel like you remember them, but they\'ve got a level of harmonic intricacy, which means that there\'s something disorienting too. It\'s like you\'re hearing a nursery rhyme in a dream, hearing the basic contour of the melody, but there\'s just something below the surface that disorientates you and throws you off what you know of it. It\'s one of the only times I\'ve ever heard that midtempo soca descend into brutal free jazz.” **“Envision Yourself Levitating”** “This one also features one of my heroes on the saxophone, Kebbi Williams, who does the first saxophone solo on the track. His music has got that real New Orleans communal vibe to it. For me, this is the height of music making—when you can make music that\'s easy enough to play its constituent parts, but when it all pieces together, it becomes a complex tapestry. It\'s the first point in the album where I do an actual solo with backing parts. This is, in essence, what a lot of calypso bands do in Barbados. So when you\'ve got traditional calypso music, you\'ll get a performer who is singing their melody and then you\'ve got these horn section parts that intersect and interact with the melody that the calypsonian is singing. It\'s that idea of an interchange between the band backing the chief melodic line.” **“Throughout the Madness, Stay Strong”** “It\'s about optimism, but not an optimism where you have a smile on your face. An optimism where you\'re resigned to the place of defeat within the big spectrum of things. It\'s having to actually resign yourself to what has happened in the continued dismantling of Black civilization, and how Black people are regarded as a whole in the world within a certain light; but then understanding that it\'s part of a broader process of rising to something else, rising to a new era. Also, on the more technical side of the recording of this tune, this was the first tune that we recorded for the whole session. It\'s the first take of the first tune on the first day.” **“Black” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “There was a point where we all got into the studio and I asked that we go into these breathing exercises where we essentially just breathe in really deeply about 30 times, and at the end of 30, we breathe out and hold it for as long as you can with nothing inside. We did one of these exercises while lying on the floor with our eyes shut in pitch blackness. I asked everyone to scream as hard as we can, really just let it out. No one could have anything in their ears apart from the track, so no one was aware of how anyone else sounded. It was complete no-self-awareness, no shyness. It\'s like a cathartic ritual to really just let it out, however you want.”

*Build a Problem*, dodie tells Apple Music, is about “the problems I build in my life and other people’s lives.” But the title of her debut album also encapsulates something else. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the way people are built and shaped, and I feel like that is the main theme of everything I write,” the Essex-born singer-songwriter explains. “I am the problem that was built.” Released a decade after she first achieved YouTube fame, *Build a Problem* finds dodie candidly contemplating her mental health, her sexuality, and the pains of early adulthood. You’ll find the intimate, organic sounds that the singer—whose real name is Dorothy Clark—has always embraced, decorated with soaring strings (“When,” “Sorry”), pop melodies (“Hate Myself”), and gorgeous harmonies (“Four Tequilas Down,” a track so honest she considered not releasing it at all). All of which, she hopes, will offer a final word for anyone who sees her as “just a young YouTube girl.” “With this album, I wanted to make beautiful music. But I also wanted to prove myself. It feels good to do that.” Read on as dodie walks us through her powerful first album, and for her thoughts on eight demos she recorded during the UK’s 2020 lockdown, which feature as bonus tracks. **Air So Sweet** “I wrote this after I had a rare moment of feeling elated and in love with life. I just wanted it to burst through the door and be like, ‘All of life, hit me.’ It’s a great way of introing the album.” **Hate Myself** “This was written on a guitalele, and it was definitely inspired by HAIM and \[2020 track\] ‘Now I’m in It.’ I just thought the lyric ‘When you go quiet, I hate myself’ was so funny. It was certainly something I was feeling but didn’t know how to deal with, so I just laughed it off in that line.” **I Kissed Someone (It Wasn’t You)** “The idea of this song is that the narrator is drunk and in a pretty unstable place. They’re sitting in the back of a taxi after kissing someone who wasn’t the person they wanted to be kissing. And they’re going through the motions like, ‘It’s fine,’ but then dipping into this depressive feeling of, ‘I f\*\*ked up. Get me home. I just want to turn off.’ It’s a short song about a very simple idea.” **Cool Girl** “I wrote this during lockdown. It’s more upbeat and poppy and talks about the suppression of one’s needs in order to be lovable. The title references *Gone Girl*, which is one of my favorite films. I knew I wanted some kind of growth, but I still wanted it to be very gentle. And the best way to do that is to add strings. They were recorded over Zoom and added more depth.” **Special Girl** “I didn’t realize I’d written two songs called ‘Cool Girl’ and ‘Special Girl’ until I was listening to them together. This leads into the more abstract, less poppy side of the album. You can think, ‘I’m broken. I\'m unlovable.’ But ‘Special Girl’ is about saying, ‘This is who I am.’ The ending of it sounds like a hot mess—and that’s exactly what I am in the song.” **Rainbow** “I wrote this two or three years ago. I’d come out as bi, and I still wasn’t feeling entirely sure about myself. I still don’t. It was tough because the world was telling me that it was absolutely fine, and yet I still felt such an internal struggle with it. It’s a very sweet song, but there’s a sadness to it.” **?** “The flipside of ‘Rainbow.’ It’s the anti-feeling—a kind of rumble. I wanted to be quite vague with it. People will take whatever meaning they need.” **Four Tequilas Down** “I wondered if I really wanted to put this song out there. I wanted desperately to alleviate some of the guilt I felt to my audience, who might see me as this perfect angel. I’m not. But also, part of me is like, ‘I don’t care.’ I wrote this in my bedroom, but I wanted it to be swirling, like your mind is going to all sorts of places. My songs never really sit in a place for too long.” **.** “A moment where you really let it all sit and you look at your problems and your choices. I wanted it to be a very quiet moment of understanding.” **Sorry** “This was just an apology and a moment of self-reflection after the realization in ‘.’ that your choices amount to something, that you hurt other people as well as yourself. This section is about finally looking at something that you’ve been pushing away for so long, and what that means in terms of processing. In therapy, I’ve cried so much I’ve wanted to vomit, and I wanted to express how that feels. This track has all this swirling, then it naturally settles. It truly is my favorite moment. It’s like something’s cleared. You’re ready to start again.” **When** “I wrote this when I was 19. It’s quite abstract because I didn’t really know what I was saying. I hadn’t gone through therapy and I wasn’t really sure of myself. And in a way, it kind of makes it more poetic and free. It amounts to this feeling of not being satisfied in your life and waiting for some things to be different. When I was writing the song, I was just starting to feel quite spacey and out of it, and that was the beginning of a mental health condition I now know the name of. But at the time, I thought this feeling was just here to stay. I kept imagining myself on my deathbed being like, ‘Oh God, it all happened, and I didn’t even feel any of that.’” **Before the Line** “This track is me really letting it all go and looking at my brain the way I do when I’m at my worst. I think it’s the angriest song I’ve written. But it’s me being like, ‘I’m f\*\*king alive.’ This song has snippets of every song on the album in it.” **Guiltless (Bonus Track)** “‘Guiltless’ is about a difficult topic that I could never talk about publicly. There are those complex relationships in life where there’s so much love, but so much anger, disbelief, guilt, expectation, and resentment. This is a song exploring that, from a safe, vague-ish distance.” **Boys Like You (Bonus Track)** “I wrote this in two parts. I wrote the verses and chorus when I was enjoying exploring the power play of a potentially unhealthy dynamic. The lyrics in those, I feel, are more understanding and light, but as I came to write the bridge, I wanted to bring forward some of the heaviness and question why so many people fall into these addictive roles.” **Bonus Tracks** “Everyone needed a project in lockdown, and it was good for my brain to have something to do every day. These songs gave me so much. There wasn’t much pressure on them, and they came out easily. They’re a little lighter. I just love the idea of having something very pristine and polished as the main album, and then releasing all this pressure and having this B-side. It’s just me in my room, making mistakes.”

“I would definitely say that 2020 pushed me over the edge, to the point that I needed to express myself more than I ever had,” Greentea Peng tells Apple Music. Recordings for *MAN MADE*—her debut album—first took shape in the early months of 2020, coinciding with a pandemic-induced lockdown and shortly after some sad family news. It led her to use the work as both a means of rumination on the pains of modern life and an ode to his memory. Creating a makeshift studio out of a friend’s house (nicknamed “the woods” from its location in the greenery of Surrey), she spent time alongside longtime friends and collaborators including her band, The Seng Seng Family, and executive producer Earbuds, diving into eclectic genres—ska, soul, trip-hop, dub—to “deliberate my inner workings, and inner conflicts,” she says. But there’s also an underlying effort to weather that conflict through messages of oneness and healing. The bulk of the project is deliberately mixed in 432 Hz (a frequency below industry standard) by legendary engineer Gordon \"Commissioner Gordon\" Williams, inspired by Wells’ research into the power of vibrations to provide comfort and restoration. “We\'re living in a very conflicting time,” she says. “Amidst the huge paradigm shift globally, physically, and spiritually, things are intense. I always want to help uplift and bring people into the spirit, ignite a little self-belief and sovereignty inside.” Explore *MAN MADE* with her track-by-track guide. **“Make Noise”** “This is a manifesto for the album. The song started from a beat that SAMO and Josh \[Kiko, UK music producers\] brought to the woods. We were listening to it, the band started jamming it. It ended up turning out really different to the original. I was in a very free state of expression, channeling like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. It\'s not meant to be an easily digested piece of work; it\'s meant to be somewhat niche and provoking.” **“This Sound”** “My band and I were in a perfect environment—very comfortable, there was a heat wave—and we got very trippy. We were making an untold amount of music and things would just happen, the boys started playing, and again, it just came. When we were making it, I wasn\'t thinking of any influences, but when I listen back, I think Fatboy Slim, or Quentin Tarantino movies. But that\'s just it—no song on the album really sounds like the song before, but in a way they all do.” **“Free My People” (feat. Simmy and Kid Cruise)** “Simmy \[UK musician\] and Cam \[Toman, UK musician known as Kid Cruise\] are my bredrins, they\'ve been my bredrins for years. Before the lockdown I\'d always ask them to open up my shows; we\'re almost in a similar kind of vibe the way we mix up the genres. I invited them through to the woods and we actually wrote that song together on the spot.” **“Be Careful”** “Swindle \[UK musician and music producer\] came with the beat and then we recreated it with the musicians. ‘Be Careful’ was cool because it\'s probably the most different tune on the album; it\'s quite modern-sounding, almost trappy type. And in terms of the lyrics, I feel like it\'s one of the simpler songs—it\'s straight to the point.” **“Nah It Ain’t the Same”** “When I say ‘being a man today,’ I\'m talking about how being human today is just not the same; when you read scriptures, the word ‘man’ is what human is referred to, like, ‘We are all man at the end of the day.’ I guess I was playing devil\'s advocate a little bit because I knew people were gonna be like, ‘What about women?’ But I\'m going beyond that, beyond all of these ideas of man and woman. For me, I think everyone should be actively seeking to try and balance both their masculine and feminine energy; it doesn\'t matter what people identify with.” **“Earnest”** “The words just came to me—I think I just was waiting for the opportunity to be able to purge and release all of this shit. I\'m kind of channeling Barrington Levy and other kinds of reggae, but also just exploring my journey with faith and my connection with God, exploring that in there. It’s very honest.” **“Suffer”** “I originally started writing this about my man—he lost his dad basically the year I started going out with him. Initially I started writing about seeing him upset all the time and feeling his pain. I\'m very sensitive, and very much an empath. When I then also experienced loss, it gave ‘Suffer’ a new lease of life. I touch on the topic of inherited trauma as well; it\'s such a massive thing that people just don\'t realize or know about.” **“Mataji Freestyle”** “That was one of the ones we made at like five in the morning—we jammed that song for about two hours straight. Me and the boys were in altered states of consciousness a lot of the time. Obviously we\'re making music in 432 Hz as well, so that definitely added to the energy of the house. It was very meditative and intense, like I was crying whilst recording that song. It\'s also quite a complex song if you break it down in terms of technicals; everyone is on a different time.” **“Kali V2”** “It’s controversial; I knew certain heads were not gonna like it. But at the end of the day, the album isn\'t for everyone. I guess it was kind of like a battle tune, a kind of rebel tune—the whole album is, to be honest.” **“Satta”** “I got the term ‘satta vibrations’ from \[UK singer-songwriter\] Finley Quaye. I wrote it one morning outside Highbury & Islington tube station on my way back from a party, still kind of buzzing. Just sat on a bench watching my surroundings—seeing a woman cry, bare feds everywhere, pigeons. ‘Satta’ was also produced by Commissioner Gordon, too.” **“Party Hard Interlude”** “I referenced \[UK musician\] Donae’o on this. It was essential to have on there, like a nice little break. I knew I wanted the album to have interludes, skits, to go in and out, I wanted it to be a journey. We were all on copious amounts of mushrooms when we made this, so I felt it would be rude not to have a little ode to mycelium on there.” **“Dingaling”** “We all went to Anish’s \[Bhatt, UK producer known as Earbuds\] studio after being back from the woods; we met up and were going through the album. Anish showed us that tune and we all ended up just getting a bit waved and being there all night with our instruments out. Before we knew it we’d recreated \[his beat\]. Again, it’s a re-lick of Blak Twang \[2002 single ‘So Rotton’\] and 2Face’s \[Idibia, now known as 2Baba\] ‘African Queen,’ with my own little bit in the middle.” **“Maya”** “‘Maya’ for me is a mad one, because I\'ve never sung like that before, especially at the end where I\'m proper wailing. This was a time where I really just expressed myself freely. I don\'t do that often and am not able to do that often yet.” **“Man Made”** “This is probably the most overtly political tune, but to me it’s more spiritual. You can take the song literally, but also metaphorically: how these man-made seeds are being planted in society and in the collective. Materialism, consumerism, individualism—it\'s only once you’re able to shed these accessories that you actually start remembering what it is to be human.” **“Meditation”** “This song literally was a meditation. This track could have been like 15 minutes long; initially we recorded for over an hour. It’s meant to take you inside yourself. And with the 432 Hz as well, it\'s tranquil, to say the least. When you can actually submit to the sound and the frequency, and you\'re not distracted by anything else, you can actually just listen to it.” **“Poor Man Skit”** “I’m questioning the idea of what it is to be rich, to be successful in the modern world, and what it is we should be striving for. Concepts of happiness have kind of gotten distorted. This is really just delving into that—like what does ‘poor’ even mean? Is it the person with no money, or the person with no empathy, compassion, or connection?” **“Sinner”** “This one came from a slightly darker place. I played the bass on this one, which was sick; I came up with the bassline first and just built the tune around that. I was feeling quite sinful at the time, I guess—just questioning myself, my intentions, faith, morals—questioning everything, really.” **“Jimtastic Blues”** “This is a sentimental one. It\'s funny because it probably has the saddest lyrics, meaning, and sentiment on the album, but is maybe the most upbeat tune. It\'s one with Swindle; we’d made it in the woods, then Swindle took it away and added the brass elements at the end, which kind of took it up a notch. It seemed like the perfect way to end the album.\"

After the release of 2018’s *Wide Awake!*, Parquet Courts guitarist Austin Brown was feeling the effects of nearly a decade of touring and recording. “To be frank, I was a bit disillusioned with music in general,” he tells Apple Music. “There was this exhaustion. Maybe I was just a little bit bored with the state of rock music or indie music—it was a hard world to relate to, and I’m not sure we ever did. But I wanted to figure out a way to reject ideas of whatever was being pushed as culture, and I wanted to do it in a productive way by offering up something better.” That something is *Sympathy for Life*, his Brooklyn outfit’s seventh full-length. In an effort to branch out both musically and socially, Brown became a member of The Loft, New York’s longest-running (and most influential) underground dance party, ground zero for disco in the 1970s. While there is still plenty of rock to be found here (see: the hypnotic crunch of “Homo Sapien”), it’s often braided together with elements of dance music, in the spirit of Talking Heads, Happy Mondays, and Primal Scream. The emphasis was on rhythm, the goal to write songs a DJ could easily unfurl at a party. And to get there, they largely switched up their lyrics-first approach to writing, recording and editing together long stretches of improvisation. “We’ve been together for 10 years now,” Brown says. “One of the biggest influences on the sound of the record is us utilizing that. Our biggest asset and our best instrument is just us, playing together as a band.” Here, Brown guides us through songs from the album. **“Walking at a Downtown Pace”** “Every day in the mix session, we would spend a few hours just on this song, listening to the drums and moving stuff around, finding that sweet spot—what makes you move and what doesn\'t. We really wanted a song that a DJ can play at a party, and that\'s why we really needed to get the kick drum to hit, the snare drum to really be on that right beat. It was important for us to have that crossover feel, between rock and dance. But in trying to find what that would mean for us, it felt like a really important song for the band and for the record.” **“Black Widow Spider”** “A lot of the songs were cultivated from improvisations, and this is one of them. That guitar sound is super unique, and it\'s integral to this sound on this record. We fed Andrew\'s \[Savage\] rhythm guitar—and I think maybe the lead guitar as well—through the MS-20 synthesizer. I had this space station dub set up, where I had a 16-channel mixer, five synthesizers, but then also effects like tape echo and the harmonizer—the one that you would hear on David Bowie\'s *Low*. It\'s this vintage 8-bit digital pitch-shifting thing that I just am obsessed with.” **“Marathon of Anger”** “It\'s about living in quarantine during Black Lives Matter and just all of the things that were happening around that time, but also looking forward to what happens next. It\'s about getting to work to make the change that we need to see collectively in our personal lives and in our community. And right now, this is the marathon of anger, but what happens next? You can\'t just be angry, there has to be something that comes after this.” **“Just Shadows”** “Within the band there\'s been an ongoing conversation about recycling. And I guess this song is sort of summed up by that conversation for me: It just gets really frustrating when you\'re in your kitchen being like, ‘I\'m not really sure if this is recyclable, but I feel like if I don\'t do this right I\'m a bad person.’ And the rules about recycling are honestly so confusing, and they\'re put onto us as individuals, rather than the corporations which are literally making the products. The song lists the ways that we have these false choices about doing the right thing, how we find the things that are good for us, how do we know what\'s good for us or good for the world, and have these choices put in front of us that don\'t always make sense.” **“Plant Life”** “The word that \[producer\] Roddy \[McDonald\] used to describe it was ‘Balearic.’ It hit all these notes, and I had them build this up to be this Mediterranean island vibe, a Grace Jones ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ kind of groove—more of a feeling or a mood. It’s like a sunset or a sunrise, a song that you could play on the beach during that time, but at night or in the morning. That late-’80s rock-meets-dance in England vibe: It was never about hard acid house. It was just about this mellow groove. It helped these guys that were in rock bands understand that transition between what can we do to integrate ourselves into this new rave world, this dance world. ‘Plant Life’ is probably the most pure expression of that on this record.” **“Application/Apparatus”** “The lyrics are sort of about this conflict between a person versus the robot algorithm takeover. I feel like the music really matches that in quality—it’s very electronic, robotic, a really direct expression of the lyrics. That song is sort of this total package, a complete circle of aesthetic and lyrical content and deeper meaning.” **“Homo Sapien”** “This is a song that Andrew brought fully realized. At first, it was the kind of track I was trying to avoid on this record—just more of a rock song. But the more that we worked on it, the more I thought, ‘This is actually cool and it fits in aesthetically.’ It feels like one of our more accomplished high-energy tracks. It\'s not beating you over the head with speed or anything—it’s got a groove to it. But the sound of all the guitars and everything just feels like it actually expresses the energy in an intuitive way that we haven\'t always had. It growls and snarls and just feels very primitive and caveman. But in a way that\'s got swagger to it, which I can really appreciate, because I\'m just getting a little old for that finger-wagging kind of punk.” **“Sympathy for Life”** “I was really obsessed with the intersection between Afrobeat and dub when I was thinking about songs for this record—really into polyrhythm and really wanting to incorporate that. I worked really hard, ended up in some pretty funky zones that were really, really hard to recreate live in the studio.” **“Zoom Out”** “It was really inspired by being at some of these parties that I\'ve been going to—dance parties and disco parties, the experience at The Loft. That song is more about the joy that you can experience through community, what you have when you take materialism out of your relationships.” **“Trullo”** “I think this is maybe my favorite song on the record. It’s another one that was cut up from a long improvisation. It’s a very sample-heavy track. I put in a guitar solo that came off of the song \'Bodies Made Of,’ off \[2014’s\] *Sunbathing Animal*. And there\'s some other hidden samples in there as well that I can\'t even remember. It’s about living inside of a house in the shape of a head, kind of like living in a skull.” **“Pulcinella”** “Pulcinella is this creepy Italian clown, or a masked figure sometimes appearing as a clown. It’s playful, it\'s kind of scary, it\'s sort of like a visual or a metaphorical antagonist for themes that pop up throughout the album. The lyrics I always come back to are where it talks about carrying a chain, because I think that carrying around a relationship\'s worth of experiences or a life\'s worth of experiences can get quite heavy and burdensome when you\'re trying to connect with people. The thing that I love about this song is how naked it feels, especially considering the production on a lot of the other songs. It felt like a sensitive way to close out the album.”

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

Take the irony Steely Dan applied to Boomer narcissists in the ’70s and map it onto the introverts of Gen Z and you get some idea of where Atlanta singer-songwriter Faye Webster is coming from. Like Steely Dan, the sound is light—in Webster’s case, a gorgeous mix of indie rock, country, and soul—but the material is often sad. And even when she gets into it, she does so with the practiced detachment of someone who glazes over everything with a joke. Her boyfriend dumps her by saying he has more of the world to see, then starts dating a girl who looks just like her (“Sometimes”). She might just take the day off to cry in bed (“A Stranger”). And when all that thinking doesn’t make her feel better, she suggests having some sake and arguing about the stuff you always argue about (“I Know I’m Funny haha”). On the advice of the great Oscar the Grouch, Faye Webster doesn’t turn her frown upside down—she lets it be her umbrella.

“We really needed to find ourselves in different ways,” The Goon Sax drummer Riley Jones tells Apple Music about changing their songwriting approach following their second album, 2018’s *We’re Not Talking*. “We did need to find a way to breathe new life into something that we\'d been doing for years at that point. Otherwise, we would\'ve kept repeating ourselves.” The Brisbane-based indie-pop trio of Riley, Louis Forster, and James Harrison—all singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists—went through many changes, both personal and musical, in the three years it took to complete the album. Forster temporarily relocated to Berlin, Germany, and started getting more into electronic music, while Riley and Harrison formed a post-punk band called Soot. Once they\'d come up with a good amount of ideas, the band decided to live in a shared house, where they were able to practice together three times a week and give each other all their attention without ever having to leave that creative space. The final result is some of the band\'s most collaborative and explorative work yet, in which they combine their distinct musical personalities and distill a new crop of influences—whether it\'s noise, psychedelia, experimental rock, or mainstream pop—into their usually bright, whip-smart pop songs. “We got back into a lot of our earlier influences, but at the same time, we were trying to push our sound as far as we felt we could go,” Forster says. “It was a really slow writing process in which we scrapped a whole bunch of songs multiple times, but I felt like we were honing in on this conceptual world.” Here, Jones, Forster, and Harrison give insight into the songs they each contributed to the album. **“In the Stone”** Louis Forster: “‘In the Stone’ was the last song I wrote on this record. That song is really about shifting perspectives. It\'s about losing your sense of self when you feel like you\'ve been connecting to it so strongly. When you feel like you\'ve had this really limitless idea of yourself, which is based around another person who\'s accepting you in any way. As tacky as it is to talk about, it was also about addiction. It was about using drugs to connect to an essence of yourself and feel closer to that, but then going too far and feeling so far away from yourself. And even using drugs to connect to sex, and then taking so many drugs that you couldn\'t have sex, and feeling really lost. It\'s about excess and avoidance—trying to avoid talking about things by just taking something that will make you happy.” **“Psychic”** LF: “The whole of that song was really about whether there is an inherent truth, whether multiple truths can be valid, and whether truth can be a more flexible concept. I feel like it\'s going between these two realities all the time—a more normal reality and a psychic supernatural reality. Like when there\'s two people who have this connection, and it feels like you can\'t entirely choose to live in one because there\'s always forces from the other that prove themselves to be more real than you can pretend they\'re not. You can live in this psychic reality, but the real world—whether it\'s plans, aging, and time—still can catch up with you, and you can\'t escape those things.” **“Tag”** Riley Jones: “I think my biggest influence for that song is probably Psychic TV and their song ‘Godstar,’ just for the atmosphere, as well as Jeffrey Lee Pierce from The Gun Club. But sonically, it doesn\'t actually sound very much like that at all. It\'s speak-sung and a bit country-ish, which I think comes from his influence. I wrote it on bass in about five minutes, but it took a lot of different forms before we got to the final version. It used to be a lot slower, and then we ended up just playing with the tempo until it felt right. The thing that took the longest was probably James’ guitar part. We had a lot of noise influences on this album, but James had never played noisy guitar before, so that\'s probably the thing that we did the most takes of in the end. It took a few months of the song evolving until it reached this point.” **“Temples”** James Harrison: “I\'d actually played the ascending melody a couple of times while I was jamming over COVID, and the chord progression has an elating feel to it anytime I play it. I wrote it for someone.” **“The Chance”** LF: “I wanted to write a song that starts off with one idea, to then try to incorporate something else that fundamentally contradicts it. I was really influenced by Tim Hardin and ’60s folk songs. And then I got really obsessed with this idea of putting a ’90s kind of Hole chorus, which was insanely fun to me. It\'s about the power of imagination and a psychic connection where you\'re no longer with someone, but you\'re dreaming about them and imagining them, and you know that some part of you is with them and some part of them is with you.” **“Bathwater”** LF: “Riley and Jim really changed that song when we started to play it together. I\'d written that song and it was really The Raincoats-inspired. It was the first song that I wrote for the record, the very first thing, and then I remember showing it to them when we got back to Brisbane. Riley started playing a disco beat under it, and Jim was playing this prancing guitar line. It reminded me of Kiss or something. I really liked it and it completely changed the meaning of the song. I think the verses are inspired by The Blue Nile. I got really, really obsessed with that band and the way they slowly hold tension and have this feeling of nighttime in their music.” **“Desire”** RJ: “These are the two songs on the album where I play guitar, and so they\'re a lot noisier but poppy in terms of the structure. I wanted to be somewhere between an Elvis song and a Keiji Haino song, but then I was also very inspired by classic pop like Kylie Minogue. It\'s a strange cocktail of all of these things. It\'s definitely rooted in what we\'ve done in the past, and I think the method hasn\'t changed so much. We still work together in the same way, but sonically, it is pretty different.” **“Carpetry”** JH: “That song came the quickest to me. I wrote the chorus at a different point, and Riley brought in a specific drumbeat which felt like it tied the whole song together. I thought it was a really simple song for a while, but then it started clicking in the band, which was good. I think the lyrics are a bit weird—they’re meant to be metaphorical.” **“Til Dawn”** LF: “As much as it\'s a cliché, it\'s like the Townes Van Zandt lyric about waiting around to die. I think it was about feeling very, very mortal. I was pretty depressed and I felt like I was just waiting to be obsolete, waiting till it was okay to die. But at the same time, just wishing that I hadn\'t. It was being angry at the world that I existed at all, because I felt like my time of obsolescence was still quite a way off. But then, I think it\'s about finding some kind of peace in that as well. I made that song sound more depressing than it was at first. It\'s about accepting that you have an amount of time here and having a strange relationship with being alive, which, maybe at one point, was and is now not at all that way. I think I\'ve moved a long way from that. I\'ve accepted my place in this world.” **“Caterpillars”** JH: “The way I originally played it on guitar, it just went everywhere. I listened to a bunch of Nick Drake songs and tried to streamline it out a bit so that it was a bit more listenable and sounded more simple. It does have the piano, which I think gives it good groove, too. But I also really like the lyrics. That\'s probably some of my favorite lyrics that I wrote—it definitely has a whimsical feeling to it.”

*“Pressure brings out good shit in me.” Read BERWYN breaking down his debut mixtape, track by track.* On New Year’s Eve 2019, BERWYN and two friends made a bet: Anyone who gets a Drake feature, appears on a Jorja Smith track, or tours America before 2020’s end has to get a tattoo. “We laughed ridiculously,” the Trinidad-born singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. Nine months later, as he prepared to drop this debut mixtape, none of those ideas seemed so ridiculous. BERWYN had since signed to Sony and received enthusiastic shout-outs from both Smith and Drizzy, alongside taking a starring role on *FRIDAY FOREVER*, the second album from Richard Russell’s Everything Is Recorded project. *DEMOTAPE/VEGA* underlines why he landed on so many radars. In songs that fuse rap, soul, and R&B, his emotional honesty and poetic lyrics expose the humanity within the everyday grind. The tape was originally made during an intense two-week stretch in 2017, with BERWYN working in isolation in a bedsit, equipped with an old laptop and broken headphones. “I enjoy living my music,” he says. “That whole truth and honesty—you really have to be in the headspace of writing songs. You’re not conscious of anything else.” Making *DEMOTAPE/VEGA* was his “last-ditch” attempt to use music to forge a path beyond the struggles he’d experienced growing up on an East London housing estate. “Pressure brings out good shit in me,” he says. Here, he takes us through those results, track by track. **MOURNING PREYERS** “I felt this was like a natural way to begin a journey—and during that phase of my life, it was probably how I would start my day, before I go out, doing what I’m doing. I would do a little bit of singing, just randomly, walking around the house. It’s a form of my prayers. I pray a word in the night, but song in the morning. It’s strange, I’ve only noticed that now, actually. If *VEGA* is like a micro experience of a day of mine, then that was a good way to kick it off.” **ASHTRAY** “After starting the day, ‘ASHTRAY’ is about painting the scene. You know in a movie or a TV show, when it starts, they do a slow pan around the room to show details of the room? ‘ASHTRAY’ has the ‘broken, broken telescope,’ ‘mirror, mirror,’ or ‘the scales are on my dresser’—physically bringing the geography of the space into it. ‘Ninety-nine problems in my ashtray’ is like, I’m here grafting, I’m running away, I’ve got issues, I’m stressed, I’m trying to smoke them away. Welcome to the tip of the iceberg. And also, I really just wanted a bad-boy intro.” **SKIT01 (OF GODS AND MEN)** “‘SKIT01’ was a random blur I got into at the end of my bed. It doesn’t really sound like a *song* song, it just sounds like a mental blur. The idea behind it initially was that trap, hip-hop, and popular music was growing in a phase where it was using the semitone form a lot. We’d gone less major into these minor pentatonic scales that sound like horror films. So I wanted to see if I could implement that into a ballad. The lyrics came from inside, off the top of my head. You can hear me trying to write another line at the end, ‘The way I like it.’ I couldn’t think of anything to go with ‘The way I like it,’ so I thought, ‘Fuck it.’” **TRAP PHONE** “It’s about the day I went to go see my boy, we’re sitting in his garden, and he told me that one of my other boys had been stabbed maybe a few days prior. When I first made ‘TRAP PHONE,’ actually, I had a meeting with \[record label\] Young Turks, and on the train back, I saw my friend’s mum, and he was in court on this day now. And his mum just looked so upset. Whenever I used to go see my mum in prison, she used to work in the front office, so we’d chat and all of that. I told her, ‘Auntie, none of this is your fault. Please fix your face and smile. You\'ve done what you needed to do. A lot of people haven\'t, but you’ve done what you needed to do.’ So ‘TRAP PHONE’ just brought all this out of me. Recording a song while you’re singing requires a lot of takes. Because I was staying in that bedsit, I couldn’t really. So when I was singing, I’m more or less whispering on the mic. Such a soft tone. ‘TRAP PHONE,’ I’m literally talking while I’m singing.” **GLORY** “‘Glory’ was inspired by Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack. \[sings\] ‘You just call out my name… And I’ll be there.’ I was singing and playing that \[‘You’ve Got a Friend’\] a lot. I don’t know if anyone’s caught on to that. But it was just a mental blur and just a rant, really.” **MISSING U** “We had a few versions, actually. The last one that came out was a slightly more polished version. It was just a bit more of a song-y song, rather than a rappy song. It\'s just a banger that came out of a banging season.” HEARTACHE & CHEST PAINS “It’s about past stuff. The story kind of speaks for itself. I’ll let the mystery do its job. ‘Lipstick still stains the whiskey glasses’: That’s just painting the image. I’m never going to stop the storytelling. I became serious \[about music\] when we got an emergency teacher in year 11. She just exploded a bomb inside of me for music. I used to spend a lot of time there, working on the computer. The computer was the thing. Like the fish that grabs onto the hook, that was probably the hook that took me. She used to take me to a folk club as well, to just keep me out of trouble. It was just loads and loads of old people, the wealthiest old people ever. But those people treated me really, really well. It was a whole universe I had no idea existed. Folk is literally rap but with really cool melodies and cool accents.” **CRUSHED VELVET** “It’s a smiley, nostalgic song. When you’re in your feelings, but you’re not upset. It was actually part of a poem I’d written as well. I didn’t know about putting the poem on, I wasn’t sure about the energy, so I used the verses on that instead.” **017 FREESTYLE** “The rantiest of the rants. \[Final line ‘My whole life they try to tell me big boys don’t cry/How about we give them oceans and tides?’\], that’s a Frank Ocean bar. *Boys Don’t Cry* is Frank Ocean’s magazine. Oceans and tides. Yeah, it’s all about that masculinity factor. Just, fuck it, I’ll just give you emotions, you know? You do have to have your strength \[when visiting emotional places as a songwriter\]. Especially when you do it all yourself. I wouldn’t say it’s hard, but I definitely wouldn’t say it’s easy either. And at some point, you get paid well enough for the shit.” **FAREWELL** “‘FAREWELL’ was my last track, so, like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just smash it up!’ I’m using that register in my voice I use in brief moments in the shower, or walking around the house. I think I’d noticed the quality of music would probably do something. So it was just ending it on that note: that if this does happen, maybe say my piece now. It’s written in the exact same melody as ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ One of the most beautiful melodies to hit the soul. It was only once I got to ‘FAREWELL’ I thought, ‘This is the coolest story ever.’ I called the tape *VEGA* the whole time I was making it because I’d written a book called *VEGA*, and it was a love story. So I wanted the album to be very rap/street, but to have the implementation of romance, so that once the book comes out, they could work like like a universe. The book reading that’s at the end of ‘FAREWELL,’ I ended up stumbling upon that on the very last day of recording. I listened to this reading about children born from this planet, Vega, and I’d never heard anything describe myself—at least what I would like to think of myself—so, so clearly, and so to a tee. That was a trip moment, to know that there was a mad feeling behind it the whole time.”

w&p by Skee Mask Mastered by Tangible Air Artwork photos by Lara Köcke

“I’ve had a lot of controversies in my short period being an artist,” slowthai tells Apple Music. “But I always try making a statement.” In 2019, there was the Northampton rapper’s establishment-rattling appearance at the Mercury Prize ceremony, hoisting of an effigy of Boris Johnson’s severed head. A few months later, sexualized comments he made to comedian Katherine Ryan at the 2020 NME Awards caused a fierce Twitter backlash and prompted the Record Store Day 2020 campaign to withdraw an invitation for slowthai to be its UK ambassador. Ryan labeled their exchange “pantomime” but it led to a confrontation with an audience member and slowthai’s apology for his “shameful actions.” Since releasing his 2019 debut *Nothing Great About Britain*, then, the artist born Tyron Frampton has known the unforgiving heat of public judgment. It’s helped forge *TYRON*, a follow-up demarcated into two seven-track sides. The first is brash, incendiary, and energized, continuing to draw a through line between punk and UK rap. The second is vulnerable and introspective, its beats more contemplative and searching. The overarching message is that there are two sides to every story, and even more to every human being. “We all have the side that we don’t show, and the side we show,” he says. “Living up to expectations—and then not giving a fuck and just being honest with yourself.” Featuring guests including Skepta, A$AP Rocky, James Blake, and Denzel Curry, these songs, he hopes, will offer help to others feeling penned in by judgment, stereotypes, or a lack of self-confidence. “I just want them to realize they’re not alone and can be themselves,” he says. “I know that when shit gets dark, you need a little bit of light.” Explore all of slowthai’s sides with his track-by-track guide. **45 SMOKE** “‘Rise and shine, let’s get it/Bumbaclart dickhead/Bumbaclart dickhead.’ It’s like the wake-up call for myself. It’s how you feel when you’re making constant mistakes, or you’re in a rut and you wake up like, ‘I really don’t want to wake up, I’d rather just sleep all day.’ It’s explaining where I’m from, and the same routine of doing this bullshit life that I don’t want to do—but I’m doing it just for the sake of doing it or because this is what’s expected of me.” **CANCELLED** “This song’s a fuck-you to the cancel culture, to people trying to tear you down and make it like you’re a bad person—because all I’ve done my whole life is try and escape that stereotype, and try and better myself. You can call me what you want, you can say what you think happened, but most of all I know myself. Through doing this, I’ve figured it out on a deeper level. When we made this, I was in a dark place because of everything going on. And Skep \[Skepta, co-MC on this track\] was guiding me out. He was saying, ‘Yo, man, this isn’t your defining moment. If anything, it pushes you to prove your point even more.’” **MAZZA** “Mazza is ‘mazzalean,’ which is my own word... It\'s just a mad thing. It’s for the people that have mad ADHD \[slowthai lives with the disorder\], ADD, and can’t focus on something—like how everything comes and it’s so quick, and it’s a rush. It’s where my head was at—be it that I was drinking a lot, or traveling a lot, and seeing a lot of things and doing a lot of dumb shit. Mad time. As soon as I made it, I FaceTimed \[A$AP\] Rocky because I was that gassed. We’d been working here and there, doing little bits. He was like, ‘This is hard. Come link up.’ He was in London and I went down there and \[we\] just patterned it out.” **VEX** “It’s just about being angry at social media, at the fakeness, how everyone’s trying to be someone they’re not and showing the good parts of their lives. You just end up feeling shit, because even if your life’s the best it could be, it just puts in your head that, ‘Ah, it could always be better.’ Most of these people aren’t even happy—that’s why they\'re looking for validation on the internet.” **WOT** “I met Pop Smoke, and that night I recorded this song. It was the night he passed. The next morning, I woke up at 6 am to go to the Disclosure video shoot \[for ‘My High’\] and saw the news. I was just mad overwhelmed. Initially, I’d linked up with Rocky, making another tune, but he didn’t finish his bit. \[slowthai’s part\] felt like it summed it up the energies—it was like \[Pop Smoke’s\] energy, just good vibes. I felt like I wouldn\'t make it any longer because it’s straight to the point. As soon as it starts, you know that it’s on.” **DEAD** “We say ‘That’s dead’ as in it’s not good, it’s shit. So I was like, ‘Yo, every one of these things is dead to me.’ There’s a line, ‘People change for money/What’s money with no time?’ That’s aimed at people saying I changed because I gained success. It’s not that I’ve changed, but I’ve grown or grown out of certain things. It’s not the money that changed me, it’s understanding that doing certain things is not making me any better. If I’m spending all my time working on bettering myself and trying to better my craft, the money’s irrelevant. I don’t even have the time to spend it. So it’s just like saying everything’s dead. I’m focusing on living forever through my music and my art.” **PLAY WITH FIRE** “Even though we want to move far away from situations and circumstances, we keep toying with the idea \[of them\]. It plays on your mind that you want to be in that position. ‘PLAY WITH FIRE’ is the letting go as well as trying to hold on to these things. When it goes into \[next track\] ‘i tried,’ it’s like, ‘I tried to do all these things, live up to these expectations and be this person, but it wasn’t working for me.’ And on the other foot, I *tried* all these things. I can’t die saying I didn’t. You have to love everything for how it is to understand it, and try and move on. You’ve got to understand something for the negative before you can really understand the positive.” **i tried** “‘Long road/Tumble down this black hole/Stuck in Sunday league/But I’m on levels with Ronaldo.’ It’s saying it’s been a struggle to get here. And even still, I feel like I’m traveling into a void. You feel like you’re sinking into yourself—be it through taking too many drugs or drinking too much and burying yourself in a hole, just being on autopilot. It’s coming to that understanding, and dealing with those problems. It’s \[about\] boosting my confidence and my true self: ‘Yo, man, you’re the best. If this was football, you’d be the Ballon d’Or winner.’ We always look at what we think we should be like. We never actually look at who we are, and what our qualities are. ‘I’ve got a sickness/And I’m dealing with it.’ I’m trying. I\'m trying every avenue, and with a bit of hope and a bit of luck, I can become who I want to be.” **focus** “From the beginning, even though I’m in this pocket of people and this way of life, I’ve always known to go against that grain. I didn’t ever want to end up in jail. You either get a trade or you end doing shit and potentially you end in jail. A lot of people around me, they’re still in that cycle. And this is me saying, ‘Focus on some other shit.’ I come from the shit, and I pushed and I got there. And it was through maintaining that focus.” **terms** “It’s the terms and conditions that come with popularity and...fame. I don’t like that word. I hate words like ‘fad’ and ‘fame.’ They make me cringe so much. Maybe I’ve got something against words that begin with F. But it’s just dealing with what comes with it and how it’s not what you expected it to be. The headache of being judged for being a human being. Once you get any recognition for your art, you’re no longer a human—you’re a product. Dominic \[Fike, guest vocalist\] sums it up beautifully in the hook.” **push** “‘Push’ is an acronym for ‘praying until something happens.’ When you’re in a corner, you’ve got to keep pushing. Even when you’re at your lowest. That’s all life is, right? It’s a push. Being pulled is the easy route, but when you’re pushing for something, the hard work conditions your mind, strengthens you physically and spiritually, and you come out on top. I used to be religious—when my brother passed, when I was young. I asked for a Bible for my birthday, which was some weird shit. Through this project…it’s not faith in God, but my faith in people, it’s been kind of restored, my faith in myself. Everyone I work with on this, they’re my friends, and they’re all people that have helped me through something. And Deb \[Never, guest vocalist\]—we call each other twins. She’s my sister that I’ve known my whole life but I haven’t known my whole life.” **nhs** “It’s all about appreciation. The NHS—something that’s been doing work for generations, to save people—it’s been so taken for granted. It’s a place where everyone’s equal and everyone’s treated the same. It takes this \[pandemic\] for us to applaud people who have been giving their lives to help others. They should have constant applause at the end of every shift. We’re out here complaining and always wanting more. I don’t know if it’s a human defect or just consumerism, but you get one thing and then you always want the next best thing. I do it a lot. And there’s never a best one, because there’s always another one. Just be happy with what you’ve got. You\'ll end up having an aneurysm.” **feel away** “Dom \[Maker, co-producer and one half of Mount Kimbie\] works with James \[Blake\] a lot. They record a bunch of stuff, chop it up and create loops. I was going through all these loops, and I was like, ‘This one’s the one.’ As soon as we played it, I had lyrics and recorded my bit. I’ve loved James from when I was a kid at school and was like, ‘We should get James.’ We sent it to him, and in my head, I was like, ‘Ah, he’s not going to record on it.’ But the next day, we had the tune. I was just so gassed. I dedicated it to my brother passing. But it’s about putting yourself in your partner’s shoes, because through experiences, be it from my mum or friends, I’ve learnt that in a lot of relationships, when a woman’s pregnant, the man tends to leave the woman. The woman usually is all alone to deal with all these problems. I wanted it to be the other way around—the woman leaves the man. He’s got to go through all that pain to get to the better side, the beauty of it.” **adhd** “When I was really young, my mum and people around me didn’t really believe in \[ADHD\]—like, ‘It’s a hyperactive kid, they just want attention.’ They didn’t ever see it as a disorder. And I think this is my way of summarizing the whole album: This is something that I’ve dealt with, and people around me have dealt with. It’s hard for people to understand because they don’t get why it’s the impulses, or how it might just be a reaction to something that you can’t control. You try to, but it’s embedded in you. It’s just my conclusion—like at the end of the book, when you get to the bit where everything starts making sense. I feel like this is the most connected I’ve been to a song. It’s the clearest depiction of what my voice naturally sounds like, without me pushing it out, or projecting it in any way, or being aggressive. It’s just softly spoken, and then it gets to that anger at the end. And then a kiss—just to sweeten it all up.”

For a spell, Kojaque’s debut album had a working title of *Down and Out in Dublin City*, a riff on George Orwell’s classic novel *Down and Out in Paris and London* and its examination of prosperity and poverty. In the end, the Dublin rapper born Kevin Smith settled on *Town’s Dead*, considering it a punchier way of saying the same thing. Tracing the narrative of a catastrophe that unfolds one New Year’s Eve, *Town’s Dead* showcases Kojaque’s skill for intricate production, urgent bars, and hooky choruses. “I wanted to make something like if Kendrick Lamar lived in Dublin,” he tells Apple Music. “What would *good kid, m.A.A.d city* sound like then? That album, to me, is perfect. I was trying to aim high in terms of a concept record.” *Town’s Dead* pulls from hip-hop, R&B, and indie, while lyrically much of it was birthed from the frustration of being a young person in Dublin. “It’s not unusual to be into your thirties or forties and still living with your parents, because of the way the housing and rental market is structured,” he says. “There’s a lot of frustrations and that came through in the music.” He sees himself as part of a new wave of creativity coming out of Ireland—as evidenced by the samples of fellow Dubliners Girl Band on the title track and experimental Connemara artist Maria Somerville on the hazy beats of “Black Sheep, Pt. I.” “Pain can be a really good spur when it comes to music,” he says. *Town’s Dead* is a vivid account of turbulent times—let Kojaque take you through it, track by track. **Heartbreak** “I saw \[producer Peter\] Brién make this live track on Instagram, and I was like, ‘Holy s\*\*t, what is this sound?’ He sent it on to me and just the energy switches in this song, it feels like mood swings, and I think it feels like anger breaking through that numbness, which is kind of a common feeling. I think when you live in Dublin, there’s a sense of slight numbness, like there’s issues going on that you can’t really articulate.” **New Year, Who’s This? (Interlude)** “I wanted something that set the story as well as being funny, because that’s a big thing about the Irish: We’re funny people, man. So, it was a roundabout way of telling this story. It sets it up. It’s New Year’s Eve, I’m somewhere, my buddies are trying to look for me, and I think a lot of those themes repeat themselves throughout the record. I wrote the script to that, and I sat out in a car with an iPhone, just recording with my buddy.” **Town’s Dead** “This sums up a lot of the narrative. In terms of the story, the first half is meant to be after I’ve got my head kicked trying to buy a bit of smoke. And then the second half is more just a reflection of what I’ve seen growing up around Cabra, where I live, and the developments going on with the gentrification and the shortsightedness that I would see in terms of our current government. It was trying to be like an anthemic song, a call to action, because it feels often like people are just a bit worn down because you’re trying to focus on your own issues, let alone fix s\*\*t that’s out there, so it feels a bit too big. If you can concisely articulate that s\*\*t in a song, it feels a bit more doable.” **Wickid Tongues** “I guess the song is about falling in love a bit too deeply or too quickly, and the kind of paranoia that can set in when the feelings are so overwhelming. It was produced with me and Brién, and I got Biig Piig to sing backing vocals. We recorded her vocal take the first time I came to London, which was, like, 2018. And we were out drinking, and I was like, ‘Oh, I love your voice. I’ve got this part on this song that I’d just love you to sing over it.’” **Shmelly** “I got the beat off Kwes Darko when we were on tour with slowthai, and the minute I came home, I started writing to it and added some extra production and saxophone over the top. I guess it’s about frustration, wanting more out of life, and wanting to be f\*\*king ambitious. I thought it was a switch in energy from my old stuff and maybe a good taster in terms of the direction I wanted to go in.” **That Deep** “When I wrote it, I thought it was really funny, and I thought it moved the story along nicely and gave a new arc to the whole story—that idea of texting someone’s girlfriend and their fella picking the phone up.” **Black Sheep, Pt. I** “I wrote this, I think, after listening to ‘Sherane a.k.a Master Splinter’s Daughter’ off *good kid, m.A.A.d city*, just being like, ‘Whoa, this is such a cool story!’—so interesting, and to leave it on that cliffhanger. It took me a while to get a beat that fit the song and something that matched the mood and developed in the same way that the story did.” **Rover** “Initially, this was a beat switch for a different song that I had that never came out. I think I wrote the lyrics when my girlfriend at the time was going away to America for, like, four months. I liked the energy of the track, and I loved the switch-up, because I matched it with ‘Black Sheep, Pt. I.’ You ever listen to ‘Nights’ by Frank Ocean? The beat switch in that, it’s something that I’ve always tried to do—get a beat switch that sounds as good as that.” **Jinty Boy Blues** “I guess this song is about a feeling of betrayal, when you’re really deeply in love with someone and it doesn’t work out the way you think it will. Because if you’re really in love with someone, they can really hurt you. It’s quite an angry song, or a hurt song. I think it’s important to express those feelings, even if it’s difficult, because they’re true feelings.” **No Hands** “I wrote this on my 21st birthday. I was listening to a lot of Loyle Carner and Vince Staples at the time. The beat was a big inspiration for the lyrics. I just got to the end of the song, and I was like, ‘S\*\*t!’ It just kind of flowed out of me. I sat back and I was like, ‘Oh, whoa, that’s like a whole song there.’ The tune revealed itself to me as it was written.” **Part II** “‘Part II’ came from the beat. Me and \[Dublin-based singer-songwriter\] Kean Kavanagh were producing the song and it just had this f\*\*king mad Dr. Dre energy. This character came into my head, and I was going to write from the point of view of this drug dealer character. And as I got to the end of the first verse, I was going like, ‘S\*\*t, this feels like the drug dealer’s perspective from “Black Sheep, Pt. I.”’ It’s the same story but told from a different perspective. I did the second half of the song with that in mind in order to bring the story on—you get his betrayal from his perspective.” **Sex n’ Drugs (feat. Célia Tiab)** “I had this hook in my head, and I was doing some production in Belfast with Brién. We were out on a run—we go on runs in the morning and then produce stuff in the afternoon. And I had these lines written on my phone, and the hook, and I just sang it to him. We got back into the house, and he started playing these chords, and I was singing over it. And then he produced it and I put the drums on it. And then we bounced the track out and bounced the instrumental. And funnily enough, Brién lost the project and so we couldn’t really mix it or anything. Luckily enough, he’s just a good enough producer that his bounce sounded great.” **Fallin for It** “I think I produced this after listening to *iridescence* by BROCKHAMPTON and just how hard the sonics were on that. Brién put all the piano on the second half. I like the juxtaposition of how hard the first half is and then how tender the second becomes, because I think that’s oftentimes the case, especially with male expression: Frustration and anger tends to be hiding feelings that are more intimate or more tender that don’t tend to be as accepted.” **Coming Up (feat. Célia Tiab)** “I think I was trying to make something that sounded like ‘In My Room’ by Frank Ocean. It took me ages to do the strings—probably, like, three weeks—because I don’t have any real music theory. Then, I got in touch with my buddy who plays viola for orchestras, and he scored it out for me, and we recorded all the strings in my shed. And all my vocals for the whole record are recorded in my wardrobe. It’s very much a DIY record.” **Casio (feat. Maverick Sabre)** “This came about when I was out drinking with my friend one night, and he confessed to me that he’d been suicidal. It took me so off guard, because he very much didn’t express feelings in that way and there were no telltale signs. I think I kind of went home and just wrote the whole tune almost as a plea. I sent the song over to Maverick Sabre once I’d recorded my vocals and asked him if he would do some choral stuff for the beginning and sing the chorus with me, and the stuff he sent back was unbelievable.” **Curtains** “I’ve been playing ‘Curtains’ for probably the past five years. When I had the idea for a concept album or a record that had a narrative, I remember being out in the park one day and I had a notebook with me and the story started coming to me. A lot of the record deals with depression and dark thoughts and loneliness or even heartbreak, and this song is like someone shaking and snapping you out of it, trying to get you over that hump.”

In August 2020, acclaimed Americana singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle died at the age of 38. The son of iconic songwriter artist Steve Earle, Justin was known both for carrying the hardscrabble alt-country torch passed by his father and for charting his own musical path, one guided by deftly narrative songwriting and genre agnosticism—and marked by struggles with substance abuse and addiction. In the wake of his son\'s passing, the elder Earle gathered his longtime band The Dukes to record 10 of his favorite JTE songs and one original, the closing track \"Last Words.\" Earle\'s raw emotions are right at the surface of his vocal performances on *J.T.*, with songs like Justin\'s 2008 *The Good Life* cut \"Turn Out My Lights\" taking on striking new resonance. On \"They Killed John Henry,\" off Justin\'s 2009 LP *Midnight at the Movies*, one can hear the similarities between the father and son\'s singing voices, which weren\'t always readily apparent in their respective work. Fan favorites like \"Champagne Corolla\" and \"Harlem River Blues\" get faithful, if stripped-down, treatment from The Dukes, who shape the songs to the elder Earle\'s vision without changing what made them so special in their original forms. Closer \"Last Words\" is a fitting capstone for the record, with Earle painfully contrasting the moment of Justin\'s birth with the last phone conversation the two had on the night Justin died. *J.T.* is a fitting tribute to a true talent lost far too soon, but more than that it\'s an intimate portrait of love and grief, one final transmission between a father and his son.

“There were three potential titles for this album,” Rostam Batmanglij tells Apple Music. “One of them referenced gender, another was referencing America and nationality. As I’m saying this, I’m realizing that’s what I like about this title—that it can apply to gender or politics, and yet you might hear this record and not think about either of those things.” Listen to *Changephobia*, the former Vampire Weekend talisman’s second solo record, and plenty of things hit you. To name a few: Americana; unexpected time structures; guitar solos; gorgeous melodies; a lot of sax. “Stylistically, I was seeking to make a clean break from a lot of the music that I’ve made over the last 10 years,” he says. “I wanted to be a bit more abstract. I was thinking about minimalist art, and that was kicking around in the back of my mind in very simple shapes.” Accordingly, there’s a joyful union between a desire to keep things, as he says, to “one or two colors” and Batmanglij’s natural musical curiosity and invention. Let him talk you through the story of his second album, one track at a time. **“These Kids We Knew”** “I was just working on music to get out of my bedroom during lockdown, and then these lyrics started coming out of me. I really didn\'t think it was for the album. But then, as more time passed, I started to realize that it was not only for the album, but eventually that it was track one. I think as a queer musician I identify a little bit more with the younger generation because I relate to their attitudes towards sexuality and gender—it\'s a little bit distinct from people that grew up in the \'90s and early 2000s. That made me think about the generation above mine, and just how each generation has different things that we have to contend with, whether it\'s climate or gender or equality. I kept thinking, ‘Who are these kids?’—and maybe in some ways it’s also me coming to terms with the fact that I\'m not a kid anymore. I\'m fully in my mid-thirties.” **“From the Back of a Cab”** “It started with this drum part without many chords, and it just kicked around on my iPhone but I knew there was something exciting there. One day I started playing this Americana piano along to these drums, and it felt very disconnected from the drum part, because the drum part is in 12/8, which is something that you hear in African music and Iranian music. I\'ve become more interested in trying to use lyrics as the driving force, as opposed to just writing vocal melodies and figuring out what lyrics should go along with.” **“Unfold You”** “This features a sample from Nick Hakim \[2015’s ‘Papas Fritas’\] and features Henry Solomon’s sax playing which I later brought into HAIM’s \'Summer Girl.\' Even though \'Summer Girl\' came out within a few months of us starting to record it, \'Unfold You\' took years. In some ways it had to—because the recording of the song tracks an evolution and a personal change.” **“4Runner”** “I was in a store in Japan when I heard this song, and to this day I haven\'t been able to find it. But I remembered how it sounded in my brain—it had 12-string acoustic guitar and had brush drums, and I just filed that away knowing it was a palette I should try one day. Years later, I was in the studio wanting to realize this idea. I started building it up with 12-string acoustic, drums, and Moog Voyager bass. I made a track that felt fresh and then spent a lot of time just driving around and sitting in my room listening to it, piecing it together what it should be about.” **“Changephobia”** “A few years ago I was sitting at a park bench in Massachusetts and someone told me change is good, and it just stuck with me. No one had ever said to me that change is good. This idea informed the whole album. I’ve also had a fascination with sax that dates back maybe a decade. I knew where I wanted to go musically, and wanted to push myself away from the same chord progressions I’ve used in so many songs. This was a new kind of chord progression for me, inspired by jazz. I asked Henry to play a solo over those chords, and he did about 36 takes. The second take had the magic, so that’s what you hear.” **“Kinney”** “The first day that I worked with Henry, I sang this melody to him—and he played it back on the saxophone. I didn’t think I was able to play it myself on any instruments, but Henry played it back to me, we put the melody on top, and the next thing I knew I had a song written—a sort of crazy 182 BPM drum ’n’ bass song. I was very doubtful on the outro, because it’s fully grunge. I worried there are some places you should never go. Ultimately, though, I’m glad I went here.” **“Bio18”** “I was on tour in Houston years ago and recorded these drums on my iPhone. I’d honestly been hearing the rhythm in my head since I was a kid in D.C. played on buckets on sidewalks. I was curious about where stuff like Charlie Mingus and Charlie Parker, that how that stuff kind of intersects with, like, the French classical composers like Debussy and Ravel. I was curious about the way those things overlap.” **“\[interlude\]”** “I have a rule that I need every song to be at least two minutes, even if it doesn\'t have lyrics. This was supposed to be a song on the album, but I could just never figure out what to sing. I had Henry play sax on it, and originally the sax was supposed to be a solo, and there would be a song on either side of the solo. Eventually I said to myself, ‘I don\'t know exactly what I want to say, but maybe the music is saying what I want to say.’ And so I kept it on. The original version of this album also had two other interludes, and I cut those but I kept this one. I don\'t know why.” **“To Communicate”** “Therapy and psychology are probably a huge part of what was on my mind as I was writing the lyrics of this album. But I think that shouldn\'t be something that\'s too obvious if I did it right. I like the idea that someone might hear the song and feel, ‘This is clearly about psychology.’ And another person might hear it and think, ‘This is clearly about someone that betrayed Rostam or Rostam feeling that he betrayed himself.’ Dave Fridmann mixed this song, and the one thing I told him was I wanted it to sound like The Zombies. His response was, ‘Then maybe you should speed it up about 10 BPM.’ And I think he\'s right. I did experiment with that. But it was too late in the game to speed it up that much. And maybe it\'s good that it doesn\'t sound *too* much like The Zombies. But hopefully it sounds a little bit like The Zombies.” **“Next Thing”** “It wasn\'t supposed to be on this album. I\'d given up on it for a couple years. And then as I was finishing the album, I thought to myself, ‘You\'re going need to have a special bonus track for Japan, or it\'ll be good to have one extra thing.’ But once it was done, I liked it too much. The drums and the piano were recorded live at the same time, they were not recorded with a click track, which, for people who make music, you know that almost everything we hear is steady. And this song is not steady. If you dropped it into one of your DAWs \[digital audio workstations\] like Ableton, Logic, or Pro Tools and tried to line it up, it will constantly infuriate you. But that\'s exactly what I wanted from the song.” **“Starlight”** “Even before I had written the rest of the album, I knew that this was going to be the last song. It started on a bullet train in Japan, so it was originally called ‘Shinkansen.’ I was at a friend\'s wedding and he sang Chet Baker to his wife, which made me think there hasn\'t been a futuristic update of Chet Baker. This is my attempt.”

The revelation on the London band’s second album isn’t how exquisitely they channel the shout-along camaraderie of classic British punk and oi (“It’s Me Who’ll Pay,” “Beat That Drum”), or even how they downshift into their ballads (“Take Me Home to London,” “Life’s Lemons”). It’s how their balance of melody and muscle captures a history of working-class music from pub rock to Northern soul, The Jam to Thin Lizzy (“Coming Up Tough,” “Life on the Bayou”). And if hardcore purists find them inauthentic or too poppy, it’s only because they’re more interested in entertaining a wider audience than nurturing their subcultural roots—a transition The Clash made 40 years earlier. Like its title, the music on *The Mutt’s Nuts* is clever, down-to-earth, rude, and a little salty. Bottoms up.

Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.