Rough Trade UK's Albums of the Year 2022

Discover our favourite albums including vinyl exclusives from Yard Act, Rina Sawayama, Fontaines D.C., Kelly Lee Owens, Jack White, Mitski and more.

Published: November 15, 2022 15:12 Source

51.
Album • Feb 04 / 2022 • 97%
Art Pop Neo-Psychedelia
Popular Highly Rated

When COVID-19 lockdowns prohibited Welsh Dadaist Cate Le Bon to fly back to the United States from Iceland, she found herself returning to her homeland to create a sixth studio album, *Pompeii*, a collection of avant-garde art pop far removed from the 2000s jangly guitar indie she once hung her hat on. In Cardiff, recording in a house “on a street full of seagulls,” as she tells Apple Music, “I instinctively knew where all the light switches were and I knew all these sounds that the house makes when it breathes in the night.” Created with co-producer Samur Khouja, the album obscures linear nostalgia to confront uncertainty and modern reality, with stacked horns, saxophones, and synths. “For a while I was flitting between despair and optimism,” she says. “I realized that those are two things that don\'t really have or prompt action. So I tried to lean into hope and curiosity instead of that. Then I kept thinking about the idea that we are all forever connected to everything. That’s probably the theme that ties together the record.” Below, Cate Le Bon breaks down *Pompeii*, track by track. **“Dirt on the Bed”** “This song is very set in the house. It\'s being haunted by yourself in a way—this idea of time travel and storing things inside of you that maybe don\'t serve you but you still have these memories inside of you that you\'re unconscious of. It was the first song that we started working on when Samur arrived in Wales. It’s pretty linear, but it blossoms in a way that becomes more frantic, which was in tune with the lockdown in a literal and metaphorical sense.” **“Moderation”** “I was reading an essay by an architect called Lina Bo Bardi. She wrote an essay in 1958 called ‘The Moon’ and it\'s about the demise of mankind, this chasm that\'s opened up between technical and scientific progress and the human capacity to think. All these incremental decisions that man has made that have led to climate disaster and people trying to get to the moon, but completely disregarding that we\'ve got a housing crisis, and all these things that don\'t really make sense. We\'ve lost the ability to account for what matters, and it will ultimately be the demise of man. We know all this, and yet we still crave the things that are feeding into this.” **“French Boys”** “This song definitely started on the bass guitar, of wanting this late-night, smoky, neon escapism. It’s a song about lusting after something that turns into a cliché. It’s this idea of trying to search for something to identify yourself \[with\] and becoming encumbered with something. I really love the saxophone on this one in the instrumental. It is a really beautiful moment between the guitars and the saxophones.” **“Pompeii”** “This is about putting your pain somewhere else, finding a vessel for your pain, removing yourself from the horrors of something, and using it more as a vessel for your own purposes. It’s about sending your pain to Pompeii and putting your pain in a stone.” **“Harbour”** “I made a demo with \[Warpaint’s\] Stella Mozgawa, who plays drums on the record. We spent a month together at her place in Joshua Tree, just jamming out some demos I had, and this was one of them that became a lot more realized. The effortless groove that woman puts behind everything, it\'s just insane to me. She was encouraging me to put down a bassline. That playfulness of the bass is probably a direct product of her infectiousness, but the song is really about \'What do you do in your final moment? What is your final gesture? Where do you run when you know there\'s no point running?\'” **“Running Away”** “‘Running Away’ was another song that I worked on with Stella in Joshua Tree. It\'s about disaffection, I suppose, and trying to figure out whether it\'s a product of aging, where you know how to stop yourself from getting hurt by switching something off, and whether that\'s a useful tool or not. It’s an exploration of knowing where the pitfalls of hurt are, because you have a bit more experience. Is it a useful thing to avoid them or not?” **“Cry Me Old Trouble”** “Searching for your touch songs of faith, when you tap into this idea that you\'re forever connected to anything, there\'s a danger—the guilt that is imposed on people through religion, this idea of being born a sinner. Of separating those two things of feeling like you are forever connected to everything without that self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It’s about being connected to old trouble and leaning into that, and this connection to everything that has come before us. We are all just inheriting the trouble from generations before.” **“Remembering Me”** “It’s really about haunting yourself. When the future\'s dark and you don\'t really know what\'s going to happen, people start thinking about their legacy and their identity, and all those things that become very challenged when everything is taken away from you and all the familiar things that make you feel like yourself are completely removed. \[During the pandemic\] a lot of people had the internet to express themselves and forge an identity, to make them feel validated.” **“Wheel”** “In one sense, it is very much about the time trials of loving someone, and how that can feel like the same loop over and over, but I think the language is a little bit different. It\'s a little more direct than the rest of the record. I was struggling to call people over the pandemic. What do you say? So, I would write to people in a diary, not with any idea that I would send it to them, but just to try and keep this sense of contact in my head. A lot of this was pulled from letters that I would write my friend. Instead of \'Dear Diary\' it was \'Dear Bradford,\' just because I missed him, but couldn\'t pick up the phone.”

Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch. Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged. Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever. To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence. The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

52.
Album • Oct 21 / 2022 • 99%
Baroque Pop Chamber Pop
Popular Highly Rated

After recording *The Car*, there was, for “quite a long time, a real edit in process,” Arctic Monkeys leader Alex Turner tells Apple Music. Indeed, his UK rock outfit’s daring seventh LP sounds nothing if not *composed*—a set of subtle and stupendously well-mannered mid-century pop that feels light years away from the youthful turbulence of their historic 2006 debut, *Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not*. If, back then, they were writing songs with the intention of uncorking them onstage, they’re now fully in the business of craft—editing, shaping, teasing out the sort of sumptuous detail that reveals itself over repeated listens. “It’s obviously 10 songs, but, even more than we have done before, it just feels like it’s a whole,” he says. “It’s its own.” The aim was to pay more attention to dynamics, to economy and space. “Everything,” Turner says, “has its chance to come in and out of focus,” whether it’s a brushed snare or a feline guitar line, a feathered vocal melody or devastating turn of phrase. Where an earlier Monkeys song may have detonated outward, a blast of guitars and drums and syllables, these are quiet, controlled, middle-aged explosions: “It doesn\'t feel as if there\'s too many times on this record where everything\'s all going on at once.” On album opener “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” Turner vaults from a bed of enigmatic, opening-credit-like keys and strings (all arranged with longtime collaborator James Ford and composer Bridget Samuels) into scenes of a prolonged farewell. So much of its pain—its romance, its dramatic tension—is in what’s not said. “The feel of that minute-or-so introduction was what feels like the foundation of the whole thing,” he says. “And it really was about finding what could hang out with that or what could be built around the feel of that. The moment when I found a way to bridge it into something that is a pop song by the end was exciting, because I felt like we had somewhere to go.” For years, Turner has maintained a steady diet of side work, experimenting with orchestral, Morricone-like epics in The Last Shadow Puppets as well as lamplit bedroom folk on 2011’s *Submarine* EP, written for the film of the same name. But listen closely to *The Car* (and 2018’s *Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino* before it) and you’ll hear the walls between the band and his interests outside it begin to dissolve—the string arrangements throughout (but especially on “The Car”), the gently fingerpicked guitars (“Mr Schwartz”), the use of negative space (the slightly Reznor-y “Sculptures of Anything Goes”). “I think I was naive,” he says. “I think the first time I stepped out to do anything else was the first Puppets record, and at that moment, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is totally in its own place and it\'s going to have nothing to do with the Monkeys and what that was going to turn into.’ And I realize now that I don\'t know if that\'s really possible, for me anyway. It feels as if everything you do has an effect on the next thing.”

53.
by 
Album • May 13 / 2022 • 90%
Art Pop Neo-Soul
Popular

Ever since an early Obongjayar demo first surfaced on SoundCloud in 2016, it’s been clear that Steven Umoh, the man behind the moniker, possesses a completely unique talent. Known to his friends simply as ‘OB’, the Nigerian-born, London-based musician pens stirring and spiritual lyrics, while commanding a distinctive voice that flits between rap, song and spoken word. With afrobeats, soul and hip-hop influences, he has created a bold, genre-defiant musicality. Despite rich successes over the last few years; OB has never felt ready to release an album, until now, and his debut full-length, Some Nights I Dream of Doors represents a real levelling up for Obongjayar. Across twelve tracks, he deftly moves through diverse sounds and subcultures while navigating a wealth of personal and political topics. OB recently featured on the latest Little Simz album and the most recent Pa Salieu project.

54.
Album • Oct 21 / 2022 • 98%
Post-Punk Indie Rock
Popular Highly Rated

Although Dry Cleaning began work on their second album before the London quartet had even released their 2021 debut, *New Long Leg*, there was little creative overlap between the two. “I definitely think of it as a different chapter,” drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “I think one of the nicest things was just knowing what we were in for a bit more,” adds singer Florence Shaw. “It was less about, ‘What are we doing?’ and more thinking about what we were playing.” Recorded in the same studio (Wales’ famous Rockfield Studios) with the same producer (PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish) as *New Long Leg*, *Stumpwork* sees Shaw, Buxton, bassist Lewis Maynard, and guitarist Tom Dowse hone the wiry post-punk and rhythmical bursts of their debut. The jangly guitar lines are melodically sharper and the grooves more locked in as Shaw’s observational, spoken-word vocals pull at the threads of life’s big topics, even when she’s singing about a missing tortoise. “When we finished *New Long Leg*, I always felt a bit like, ‘Ah, I’d like another chance at that.’ With this one, it definitely felt like, ‘Really happy with that,’” says Buxton. The quartet take us on a tour of *Stumpwork*, track by track. **“Anna Calls From the Arctic”** Nick Buxton: “It was a very late decision to start the album with this. I think it’s quite unusual because it’s very different from a lot of the other songs on the album.” Florence Shaw: “I quite liked that the album opened with a question: ‘Should I propose friendship?’ In the outro, we were thinking about the John Barry song ‘Capsule in Space,’ from *You Only Live Twice*. There’s quite a bit of that in the outro. At least, it was on the mood board.” **“Kwenchy Kups”** NB: “It’s named after those little plastic pots you get when you’re a kid—pots full of some luminous liquid, and you pierce the film on the lid with a straw.” FS: “We were at a studio in Easton in Bristol, and I wrote a lot of the lyrics on walks around the area. It’s a really nice little area, and there’s lots of interesting shops. We wanted to write a few more joyful songs, at least in tone, and the song is so cheerful-sounding. So, some of the lyrics came out of that, too, wanting to write something that was optimistic, the idea of watching animals or insects being just a simple, joyful thing to do.” **“Gary Ashby”** NB: “This is about a real tortoise.” FS: “On a walk in lockdown, I saw a ‘lost’ poster for ‘Gary Ashby.’ The rest of the story came out of imagining the circumstances of him disappearing and the idea that it’s obviously a family tortoise because he’s got this surname. It’s thinking about family and things getting lost in chaos, when things are a bit chaotic in the home and pets escape. We don’t know what happened to him. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, which is a little bit disturbing, but hopefully we’ll find out one day.” **“Driver’s Story”** NB: “We were rehearsing at a little studio in the basement at our record label \[4AD\]. It was just me, Tom, and Lewis, and we weren’t there very long, but quite a few ideas for songs came out of that. The main bit of ‘Driver’s Story’ was one. It felt different to anything we’d done on *New Long Leg*. It’s just got such a nice, oozy feel to it. FS: “There’s a bit in the song about a jelly shoe and the idea of it being buried in your guts. A photographer called Maisie Cousins does photos of lots of bodily stuff and liquids, but with flowers and beautiful things as well. I was looking at a lot of those at the time. The jelly-shoe thing is about that—something pretty, plastic-y, mixed with guts.” Tom Dowse: “It’s got my dog barking on the end of it as well. He’s called Buckley. He is credited on the record.” **“Hot Penny Day”** TD: “I’d been listening to a lot of Rolling Stones, so this is an attempt at that. We were jamming it through, and it started to take on a bit more of a stoner-rock vibe. ‘Driver’s Story’ was also meant to be a bit more stoner-rock until John Parish got his hands in it and took the drugs out of it.” Lewis Maynard: “I found a bass wah pedal in my sister’s garage. I just plugged it in and started playing, and I was like, ‘This is fun.’ I’ve unfortunately not stopped playing bass wah.” NB: “It conjures up quite a lot of imagery. I was listening to some of Jonny Greenwood’s music for the film *Inherent Vice*, and it’s got a washed-out, desert-y feel. This sounds like Dry Cleaning in an alternate, parallel universe somewhere.” **“Stumpwork”** FS: “Quite a lot of the lyrics were gleaned from this archive of newspaper clippings that I went to in Woolwich Arsenal. It’s millions and millions of newspaper clippings on different subjects. There’s a bit \[in ‘Stumpwork’\] about toads crossing roads from this little article I found about a special tunnel being built, so that toads could traverse the street without being run over.” NB: “When we were trying to figure out a name for the record, it felt like the best option. We loved it, and it was really succinct. We liked that the word ‘work’ was in the title.” **“No Decent Shoes for Rain”** TD: “This was two of those jams from the basement of 4AD. We were quite unsure about this song. We took it to show John at the pre-production rehearsals, and he really liked it, and he didn’t really have anything to say about it, which is quite unusual. A lot of people ask, ‘Why did you record with John again?’ And it’s things like that—because he notices things that are good about you that you don’t notice. I was really self-conscious that the end section sounded too trad, classic rock. It sounded like the safest bit of guitar I’ve ever written. But once he said he was into it, I started to look at it from a different way, and it grew from that.” **“Don’t Press Me”** FS: “This has some recorder on it, which I had to play at half-time because it was really fast. I was like, ‘Oh, this would be nice if it had this little bit of a recorder on.’ I tried to play it, and I was completely incapable. I’d thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be able to do this. Kids play the recorder all the time. It’s easy.’ Even at half-time, I had to have loads of goes at it. So, it’s me playing the recorder, sped up, because I have no skills.” **“Conservative Hell”** NB: “I think this song’s really important because through the course of the record there’s two different types of song. There’s these upbeat, jangle, poppy ones and then there’s slightly slower, more groovy ones. This song has two very distinct elements that we’re really happy with. It’s nice as well to be so overtly political, which is not usually our scene.” FS: “The reason it ended up being such an on-the-nose phrase is I was thinking it would be really nice to write a song that was something like ‘Conservative Hell.’ And then, after a while, I was like, ‘That’s pretty good.’ I think it almost sounds like a silly headline, but accurate too.” **“Liberty Log”** FS: “The title comes from thinking about spring rolls. They’re like little logs, aren’t they? Then, later, I was thinking about a stupid monument, something that would be a really dumb statue in a town—just a big log and it’s called the Liberty Log.” LM: “This is one of the ones we took to the studio expecting it to be a shit-ton of editing, structuring, and that John would really fuck with it. We jammed it, and it just stayed the same. This one was first-take vibes, playing it in that way, expecting it to be changed.” **“Icebergs”** NB: “I think this is quite a bleak moment for us. Definitely the most icy-sounding track on the album. It feels like a really good end to the record to suddenly have this explosion of brass come in, and then it just peters out very slowly. I like that the album ends on quite an icy tone, even though that doesn’t necessarily represent us in how we feel about things. It’s a slightly more poignant ending rather than a nice, lovely outro.”

55.
by 
Album • Sep 09 / 2022 • 95%
Alt-Pop
Popular Highly Rated

“I\'ve made an album about fear and shame, it’s definitely been uncomfortable,” Oliver Sim tells Apple Music. As one third of British indie electronic group The xx, Sim—alongside bandmates Romy Madley Croft and producer Jamie xx—became adept at writing sparse and haunting love songs. For his solo debut, however, he turned his gaze inward to confront the internalized shame that has colored his life. “Initially, it was like, why would I want to share the things that I think make me feel hideous in some way?” he says. “But concealing that hasn’t really worked for me in the past. If anything, the whole idea of concealing things just feeds into shame.” Here, Sim gets straight into it: The album’s first track, “Hideous”—which features guest vocals from queer pop music royalty Jimmy Somerville—sees Sim share for the first time that he’s been living with HIV since he was 17 years old. “My whole way of navigating my status was just control,” Sim says. “I know exactly who knew and if they told anybody else. But writing that down was a real ‘fuck it’ moment.” For the record, Sim worked almost exclusively with bandmate Jamie xx. “It would have been a very different album if I\'d made it with somebody else,” he says. “Jamie\'s been my friend since I was 11 years old. I don\'t think I would have been as vulnerable with someone else. Also, he\'s a straight man and he got involved in some real queer conversations. He just had no ego. He was making my world come to life.” Part of that involved indulging Sim’s love of horror films—he has created an entire short horror film to accompany the album with director Yann Gonzalez—but also helping Sim to unpack his experiences with homophobia, loneliness, and self-sabotage. “I got worried that this record was going to be perceived as perpetuating the idea of self-loathing gay men, which would just be this downer,” Sim says. “But this whole process, and how I see the record, is not a downer. It’s the opposite of shame. It’s not hiding.” Read on for Oliver Sim’s track-by-track guide to *Hideous Bastard*. **“Hideous”** “Jimmy Somerville became my pen pal quite a few months before I asked him to appear on the song. I\'ve known that voice all my life, but as an adult I’ve come to understand what he represented and everything he’s done. He’s been so visible and vocal about queer issues for such a long time. I think I wanted some of that fearlessness. When I finally asked him to be a part of the song, I expected him to be quite militant and for the cause, but he was very gentle with me. He was like, ‘I hope you\'re doing this for yourself.’ He also said, ‘I’m 60, so don’t be expecting me to hit those high notes.’ But he came in and the moment he started singing, Jamie and I cried. His voice is incredible. It\'s so strong and in person it’s really loud.” **“Romance With a Memory”** “For this album I’ve done a lot of playing around with my voice. I have only ever sung in duet with Romy—if I step out of that, where can my voice go? I love trying to see how high can my voice go or how low can my voice go, even if I\'m pitching it down to a point of it either sounding like a parody of what a masculine voice would sound like to it being totally demonic. I like hearing male voices sing together. There is something very masculine about it, but also something romantic and tender, too. The whole idea of men harmonizing together, I think, is quite queer.” **“Sensitive Child”** “This is something that I’ve definitely been called. It’s definitely a euphemism for a certain type of kid, in particular a little boy. I think hearing it as an adult, and as a gay man, brings up a lot of childhood feelings of not being acknowledged. It’s also probably one of the fullest songs I’ve ever made. Normally, for me songs start as words on a piece of paper, but this started with a Del Shannon song called ‘Break Up’ and then I did all the writing around that. I\'m the kind of person that spends months on a song, but this song happened very quickly. I see this as quite an angry song.” **“Never Here”** “I talk a lot about memory on this album, and this song asks the question of just how reliable my memory can be and how, maybe, technology warps how I remember things. It\'s also, sonically, one of the heaviest songs on the record, which was really fun for me. The music that I really got into as a teenager was either from my sister\'s record collection, which was just mid-’90s American R&B like Aaliyah, TLC, En Vogue, and Ginuwine, or it was heavy music like Placebo and Queens of the Stone Age. It was fun to get into that a bit more with \'Never Here\' and to scream. I think that\'s the few times that I\'ve allowed myself to scream, which is a real release.” **“Unreliable Narrator”** “I\'ve come into this record with just tons and tons of questions, but not necessarily the answers. I wrote this song as, in my head, this album is a movie, and this was a plot point I wanted halfway through the record. It was inspired by this monologue Bret Easton Ellis wrote for Patrick Bateman in *American Psycho*. In the film, it\'s where Christian Bale\'s doing his 14-step morning routine and about how he’s not really there. I’m not a psychopath, but I think that idea of facade and wearing a mask, to any degree, is so relatable. I also thought halfway through this film of my album if I was to admit that anything I could be saying is unreliable would be quite fun.” **“Saccharine”** “I’ve made my whole career on love songs—that is my home. For this record, I’ve tried not to write too many love songs because I think that I could have done a lot of hiding if I did. But to me, this song is still quite revealing about myself. It has much more to do with myself than anyone else; it’s my fear of intimacy. I didn’t want this album to be sweet. It could have a sense of humor, but it had to be savage. This is very much about my inner saboteur and how I react when things become too sweet.” **“Confident Man”** “It’s funny: At school, I felt like an outsider because of my sexuality. I didn’t know I was gay at primary school, but it was always made apparent that I was a bit of a dandy. I was never invited to play football. I didn’t want to play football—I hate football—but it’s not nice to not be included, especially when I’m drawn to these boys for reasons I didn’t quite understand. But then, to experience that as an adult within the gay community, a community of outsiders… I don’t know. There’s that feeling of performative masculinity and of what confidence actually looks like. I think there’s something very insecure about feeling like you have to perform masculinity. What do people actually even consider masculinity? I think there’s something very confident about saying, ‘I don’t feel so confident.’” **“GMT”** “Jamie and I had gone to Australia. This was before COVID and we’d started the record. I had gone there to bypass the English winter because seasonal depression is real. We\'d started in Sydney and we road-tripped down to Byron Bay just listening to lots of music. We were listening to The Beach Boys and I started singing things in the car. When we got to Byron Bay, we ended up sampling The Beach Boys on the song. I was in this beautiful sunshine yet still pining for London a little bit. I think there is an inherent melancholy about London, which has been the driving force for so much amazing creativity. This was a jet-lagged love song about London.” **“Fruit”** “Funny enough, this is the hardest song to explain, because I think it kind of says it all. It\'s the very *Drag Race* moment of ‘What would you say to five-year-old Oliver?’ So it is talking to five-year-old me, but it\'s also very much talking to me today, because there is a part of me that is still five years old. I’m still a sensitive child, but now I’m hearing the things that I would want to hear.” **“Run the Credits”** “When I was talking about ‘Unreliable Narrator’ being a plot point, this was the song I wrote exactly for the end of the album. It was the note that I want to end on and mirrors the scariest thing I find in cinema, which is the open-ended ending. A Disney-style bow to close everything is so tempting, but there is nothing scarier than leaving it open-ended. Your imagination\'s always going to tailor-make the scariest outcome.”

Hideous Bastard, the debut album from Oliver Sim—best known for his work as songwriter, bassist,and vocalist of The xx—is set for release on September 9th via Young. Produced by bandmate Jamie xx, Hideous Bastard is the culmination of two years of writing and recording, inspired by Sim’s love of horror movies and his own life experience, unpacking themes of shame, fear, and masculinity. These themes are front and centre on new single “Hideous”. Enlisting the help of lifelong hero and “guardian angel”Jimmy Somerville on guest vocals, the single sets the scene for the forthcoming album and sees Sim speaking publicly for the first time that he’s been living with HIV since the age of seventeen. It debuts with a video by another personal hero, French director Yann Gonzalez, who has also collaborated with Sim on a forthcoming queer horror short film of the same name that premiered yesterday as part of the Semaine de la Critiqueat the Cannes Film Festival.

56.
Album • Jul 08 / 2022 • 91%
Singer-Songwriter Indie Pop
Popular Highly Rated

Sound of the Morning is released on Heavenly Recordings on Friday 8th July 2022. Written and recorded in late 2021, Katy’s latest effort is co-produced by Ali Chant (Yard Act and the helm of Katy’s debut Return) and Speedy Wunderground head-honcho Dan Carey (Fontaines DC). Katy’s debut album, Return, released in November 2020, saw her go from Bristolian newcomer to a critically-acclaimed breakthrough star, selling out shows up and down the UK. Praised for “the arresting quality of [her] Kate Bush-meets-Dolly Parton vocal delivery” by The Times, labelled as “finding humanity in every moment” by DIY and with lead single ‘Take Back The Radio’ described as “a whoop of pure joy” in the Guardian, amidst the bleak toll of lockdown, something about this curiously optimistic album began to really resonate. It feels fitting then that, having provided an aural balm at just the right moment with her first album, its follow-up should reflect a world brimming with curiosity, back in action and wanting to expand its horizons. If Pearson’s extracurricular activities in recent months have shown that she can dip a toe into a multitude of genres - providing guest vocals on Orlando Weeks’ recent album ‘Hop Up’; popping up with Yard Act for a collaboration at End of the Road festival; singing on trad-folk collective Broadside Hacks’ 2021 project ‘Songs Without Authors’ - then forthcoming second album Sound of the Morning takes that spirit and runs with it. It’s still Katy J Pearson (read: effortlessly charming, full of heart and helmed by that inimitable vocal), but it’s Katy J Pearson pushing herself musically and lyrically into new waters. It’s an album that’s as comfortable revelling in the more laid-back, Real Estate-esque melodies of lead single ‘Talk Over Town’ - a track that attempts to make sense of her recent experiences, of “being Katy from Gloucester, but then being Katy J Pearson who’s this buzzy new artist” - as it is basking in the American indie pop of ‘Float’, penned with longtime pal Oliver Wilde of Pet Shimmers, or experimenting with the buoyant brass of ‘Howl’, in which Orlando repays the favour with a vocal guest spot. It all makes for a record that’s increasingly unafraid to explore life’s darker parts, but that does so with an openness that’s full of light. As an artist who professes to “always strive for the bittersweetness of things”, Sound of the Morning does just that, taking the listener’s hand and guiding them through the good and the bad, like the musical equivalent of an arm around the shoulder. “I want people to feel things with my music, but I don’t want to cause my listener too much trauma,” she notes with a cheeky glint. “Counselling is expensive, so you’ve got to pick your battles…”

57.
Album • Sep 16 / 2022 • 79%
Singer-Songwriter Baroque Pop Soft Rock
Noteable

Metamorphosis seems enchanted to the untrained eye—butterflies magically appearing from the chrysalis, the interiors of which we can’t see. But the reality is messy. One body dies to make space for another. It’s easy to forget the discomfort it takes to transform, seductive to behold only the beauty on the other side. Not so on Marina Allen’s Centrifics, the follow-up to her critically-acclaimed debut Candlepower (2021). Over ten songs, Allen is clear-eyed, wading into the lake of her own sorrow, unsure of what awaits her but unwilling to remain on the comfort of dry land. “I was fed up with hiding myself,” Allen says of the intention behind the songs. “I just kept saying ‘yes’”. There’s joy in permission, but saying “yes” always requires negation of something else. This duality of grief and mirth permeates the record, which sees Allen at her most confident and embodied, flinging her voice into the stratosphere and digging it into the earth. Humor duets with wisdom as her lyrics circle around the biblical, taking on the weight of prophecy without the prophet’s pride. “I can’t bring you where I’m going,” she sings both sure and soft. “New light seeps in, a new world is coming.” Allen’s searing vocal presence is supported by Chris Cohen’s production, which weaves far-flung influences that resonate cinematically throughout. The contrasts are held tenderly, crafting a record that’s both larger than life and intimate in its restraint, each song a portal between an old self and a new. ~Olivia Gerber

58.
by 
Album • May 27 / 2022 • 84%
Singer-Songwriter Psychedelic Folk
Noteable
59.
Album • Oct 07 / 2022 • 92%
Americana
Popular
60.
by 
Album • Apr 29 / 2022 • 80%
EBM Industrial Rock
Noteable
61.
by 
Album • Sep 23 / 2022 • 93%
Art Pop Singer-Songwriter
Popular Highly Rated

“Through the writing of these songs and the making of this music, I found my way back to the world around me – a way to reach nature and the people I love and care about. This record is a sensory exploration that allowed for a connection to a consciousness that I was searching for. Through the resonance of sound and a beaten up old piano I bought in Camden Market while living in a city I had no intention of staying in, I found acceptance and a way of healing.” - Beth Orton Many musicians turn inward when the world around them seems chaotic and unreliable. Reframing one’s perception of self can often reveal new personal truths both uncomfortable and profound, and for Beth Orton, music re-emerged in the past several years as a tethering force even when her own life felt more tumultuous than ever. Indeed, the foundations of the songs on Orton’s stunning new album, Weather Alive, are nothing more than her voice and a “cheap, crappy” upright piano installed in a shed in her garden, conjuring a deeply meditative atmosphere that remains long after the final note has evaporated. “I am known as a collaborator and I’m very good at it. I’m very open to it. Sometimes, I’ve been obscured by it,” says Orton, who rose to prominence through ‘90s-era collaborations with William Orbit, Red Snapper and The Chemical Brothers before striking out on her own with a series of acclaimed, award-winning solo releases. “I think what’s happened with this record is that through being cornered by life, I got to reveal myself to myself and to collaborate with myself, actually.” Weather Alive - Beth Orton's first album in six years - is out 23rd September on Partisan Records"

62.
by 
Album • Apr 01 / 2022 • 82%
Glam Rock Art Pop Synthpop
Noteable Highly Rated
63.
Album • Sep 09 / 2022 • 77%
Synthpop Minimal Synth
Noteable
64.
by 
Album • May 27 / 2022 • 89%
Indie Pop Indie Rock Indie Surf
Noteable Highly Rated
65.
Album • Nov 04 / 2022 • 88%
Jazz Fusion Jazz-Funk
Noteable Highly Rated

“The main objective was to be as honest as humanly possible,” drummer Femi Koleoso tells Apple Music. “The result is that this is the most Ezra-sounding record we’ve ever made.” Since they emerged at the vanguard of London’s jazz circuit in 2016, Koleoso’s quintet Ezra Collective have crafted their sound into a blend of jazz improvisation, Afrobeat fanfares, hip-hop swagger, and soulful melodies. It’s a potent mix, one that has seen them turn festival audiences into bouncing masses, rather than the chin-stroking group often associated with jazz, and it has also earned them a legion of famous fans. For their second album, following 2019’s *You Can’t Steal My Joy*, they have enlisted some of these chart-topping pals, including singers Nao and Emeli Sandé, rappers Kojey Radical and Sampa the Great, and words from artists such as Steve McQueen and the late Tony Allen. The resulting 14 tracks live up to Koleoso’s promise, embodying Ezra Collective’s vibrancy with the thundering rhythms of “Victory Dance,” the neo-soul warmth of “Smile,” and dubby dilations of “Ego Killah.” “It’s music to move you and make you feel moved,” Koleoso says. Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Life Goes On” (feat. Sampa the Great)** “We end each of our albums with a cover, and we start the next one with a cover too. It’s all about making the albums chapters of the same book of our lives. This record, therefore, samples the Fela Kuti tune ‘Shakara,’ which is the last track on our last album, *Steal My Joy*. I got really into amapiano in the lockdown, and that’s where the shaker and saxophone sounds come from. When it came to finding a feature, I knew Sampa would encapsulate Fela Kuti and UK jazz—she was perfect.” **“Victory Dance”** “I was training for a marathon during the lockdown, and it ended up being something of a spiritual journey to go on. I kept thinking about the pain that you endure for that single moment of victory and the involuntary dance you do when you get there. This track is meant to make people shake and dance like that, so the horn part was written like a fanfare, and then it drops into an Afro Cuban salsa where you can’t help but move.” **“No Confusion” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “Tony Allen was a great mentor of mine, and I wanted to pay tribute to all that he’s taught me on this track. The title is an allusion to the Fela Kuti number ‘Confusion,’ which is one of the few recordings of a Tony Allen drum solo, and it also refers to not being confused about who you are or what you’re capable of. The track opens with a recording of a conversation I had with Uncle Tony on Worldwide FM, and he’s telling me the greatest lesson of all: ‘no one can be you-er than you.’” **“Welcome to My World”** “Fela Kuti is one of the main influences for Ezra Collective, but this is the first record where we made a tune that really evoked his sound, which was composed by our trumpet player, Ife Ogunjobi. We couldn’t agree on the drumbeat because it defines the direction of the song, but once we landed on what you hear, it became one of my favorites. We’ve been playing this live ever since it was written, and it always goes off.” **“Togetherness”** “We’ve spent the record traveling through the music of Southern Africa so far, and this track takes us to another of Ezra Collective’s cultural touchstones: the Caribbean. Sound system culture is a massive part of my life, and I go to Channel One every Sunday when I’m in London. If you live in the city, you’d be hard-pressed to not hear the influences of Caribbean music everywhere, and this tune taps into the reggae and dub sounds that are all over town.” **“Ego Killah”** “Jorja Smith is like an extended member of the group and one of our best friends, so it was only right that she sings the opening to this track. ‘Ego Killah’ stays on the Caribbean influences and goes deeper into the bass vibrations of dub. I always feel that the core of jazz music is paying homage to what’s come before and changing what will come after, so that’s why I wanted to incorporate all these different sounds into our improvisations.” **“Smile”** “When we started Ezra, all we played were jazz standards, and we always tried to make them original. We’ve been playing ‘Smile’ for 10 years now, and our version is inspired by D’Angelo’s ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love,’ since it’s a neo-soul take on a standard. I like to alter the expectations of what we might be capable of playing in our shows or on our records, and this is just such a beautiful song that makes audiences cry every time.” **“Live Strong”** “I always try to get every person who is involved with Ezra Collective on the album as it’s a nice thank-you to have their names written on the vinyl forever. The clapping that you hear on ‘Live Strong’ is all the engineers and crew, as well as our manager, Amy, who was heavily pregnant at the time. Now the record’s out, I’ve credited her new daughter, Ivy, too. The track itself is influenced by the group Sault, especially their track ‘Son Shine,’ which has such a beautiful feel that takes its own time. This is one that will get the audiences two-stepping when we play it.” **“Siesta” (feat. Emeli Sandé)** “This track was written by our bass player, TJ \[Koleoso\], and has the same amapiano influences of ‘Life Goes On.’ It’s meant to be the moment of rest during the journey that allows you to keep going. I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs on the album, since it’s heavily influenced by Kokoroko and their laidback and pretty melodies, as well as the work of Khruangbin. I met Emeli at Steve McQueen’s birthday party a few years ago, and this was just the perfect marriage for her.” **“Words by Steve”** “Before lockdown, Steve McQueen reached out and asked to meet me for breakfast. Before I even sat down at his table, he went on the most incredible monologue I’ve ever heard, describing the effects that Black people have had on culture in the UK, and he ended it by saying that we belong in any building in London, since we have helped to make this city. This was the birth of the album concept, *Where I’m Meant to Be*. We became great friends, and I wanted to give him credit for all of his wisdom, so I featured this phone call between us.” **“Belonging”** “In 2020, we did a tour with Hiatus Kaiyote and as we got to see them play so much, we grew a whole new appreciation and love for their ability to weave time signatures and feels. This track is inspired by their work, but it plays like the most UK jazz number on the record, since it’s aggressive, complicated, and still has deep emotion. It is the song on the album that was hardest to make as it had the most arrangements, but it’s honest. It’s going to be a hard one to play live!” **“Never the Same Again”** “Dark and depressing songs don’t come naturally for us as a group—we’re all about spreading joy and positivity through our music. Our keyboard player, Joe Armon-Jones, wrote this track and it really encapsulates that feeling of optimism, using the same Sault-inspired sound that drove forward the feeling of ‘Live Strong.’” **“Words by TJ”** “We love giving context to our music with words, which is why we keep the mics on in between recording tracks, so we can always collect sound bites and stories from different band members. This interlude is one instance of TJ talking about playing Ronnie Scott’s and giving a testament to the power of the music. We only ever write songs to make people feel how he describes on the track.” **“Love in Outer Space” (feat. Nao)** “We always end with a tribute to someone who’s come before us. We’ve covered Sun Ra before, and this is one of my all-time favorite melodies of his on ‘Love in Outer Space.’ We have been playing the instrumental version of the track live for years, but I missed the vocals that Sun Ra sings on the original, so I knew Nao would be perfect for our recorded version. It’s a song that I’m so proud of and the best way to end the journey—it gives the listener permission to go anywhere.”

Ezra Collective’s new era, a venture in discovered maturity and raised stakes, will be defined by the anticipated second album. 'Where I’m Meant To Be' is a thumping celebration of life, an affirming elevation in the Ezra Collective’s winding hybrid sound and refined collective character. The songs marry cool confidence with bright energy. Full of call-and-response conversations between their ensemble parts, a natural product of years improvising together on-stage, the album - which also features Sampa The Great, Kojey Radical, Emile Sandé, Steve McQueen, and Nao - will light up sweaty dance floors and soundtrack dinner parties in equal measure.

66.
by 
Album • Feb 18 / 2022 • 95%
Indie Pop
Popular

On *Small World*, Joseph Mount shrinks his scope. Whereas its predecessor, 2019’s *Metronomy Forever*, was a sprawling 17 tracks, *Small World* consists of just nine. “Often, I want to do the opposite of what I’ve just done,” Mount tells Apple Music. “I wanted to be really musically focused and concise.” This album’s title is, too, a reflection of the shrunken world in which it was made. Written in summer 2020—and recorded between November of that year and early 2021—these songs were crafted in the thick of the pandemic and explore loneliness (the Elliott Smith-meets-Red Hot Chili Peppers “Loneliness on the run”), the optimism we clung to (“Things will be fine”), and the incomprehensible weight of it all (“Life and Death”). This isn’t, however, a record to transport us back to the worst moments of lockdown. “The way I made music during the pandemic was to escape from feeling like I was in a pandemic,” says Mount. “This album is designed to be listened to when you’re free.” The soothing and organic sound of *Small World* might surprise listeners who’ve been with Metronomy since day one—not least because of Mount’s voice, which has dropped a few octaves, sounding at times like Benjamin Biolay’s or Serge Gainsbourg’s. “When I first started writing songs, I imagined I was a producer and that, one day, I would get a female singer to sing them,” says Mount who has, of course, since produced for artists including Robyn and Jessie Ware. “I would always sing in a falsetto voice and really high up. Even though it was never necessarily comfortable, it’s just what I did. This was me trying to be a bit more mature. I want to grow up with Metronomy. You’ve got to develop it and turn it into what you want it to be.” Read on as Mount guides us through his seventh album, one song at a time. **“Life and Death”** “This was the last thing I wrote for the record. I felt like I’d mined the experiences of being locked down for nice songs. And I hadn’t really done anything that acknowledged the actual gravity of the situation, and just how horrible it is and how many people died. This is my song, which is supposed to be a bit despairing about everything. But like all the songs on the record, the music isn’t supposed to make you feel bad or upset. It’s meant to be supportive.” **“Things will be fine”** “The first thing I wrote for the record. It encapsulated everything I wanted it to be, in terms of the sound and the lyrics. I’ve got two children and I was having to say to them, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ But I had no knowledge that backed that up. It’s also about when you’re young, and for the first time you realize that the world is quite a horrible place. And then you realize you’ve been protected by your parents, which is what they’re there to do.” **“It’s good to be back”** “I was imagining this character, a musician who’s in their late thirties, trying to write a record that connects with young people. I was imagining a fictitious conversation with a record label: ‘Oh, you want to reach the kids? You need to use drum machines and synthesizers.’ And then doing that but putting in an acoustic guitar. Which, to me, is this really fun juxtaposition of ideas. The song was about being back at home, and about when our tours were canceled or postponed. When you come back from being away, it always takes a week or two to lock back into the same routines with one another.” **“Loneliness on the run”** “‘Loneliness on the run’ is a song about being far away from people that you love. And wanting them to try and manage their bad feelings. I wrote something about visualizing your loneliness, or your anger, and then throwing it out the window or chasing it away. So, that was the idea. At the end of this song, I guess the album does shift a gear and it becomes a little less introspective and starts forgetting the bad stuff.” **“Love Factory”** “I liked the idea of industrializing love, making it this thing which is churned out. This factory is operating at astonishing capacity. We are doing incredibly well at creating love here. It’s supposed to be a relentless song to reflect that.” **“I lost my mind”** “It’s about feeling like you are doubting your own sanity. It’s not something that I’ve felt, but during the pandemic, it was something that I was very aware of—how friends of ours in quite different situations were just in apartments, on their own, feeling very isolated and out of touch. I wanted it to feel like it was following that in the music as well. It does wig out, and I decided to put a whistling sound in, which helped push it over the edge.” **“Right on time”** “The other thing about imagining where I want to be in a few years is also this awareness that you can’t keep writing songs about falling for people because it’s happened. It happened a long time ago. Having said that, the next two songs on the album are exactly that. But I think they’re going to be the last songs I write like it. It’s just another mindlessly optimistic song about enjoying the sunshine. I remember the summer of 2020. It was super hot. Everyone suddenly had this realization that, yes, you can be unable to see your family and be suffering with all kinds of stuff, but it’s unbelievably sunny and nice outside. Just finding somewhere where you can have the sun hitting your face makes you feel better.” **“Hold me tonight” (feat. Porridge Radio)** “The first demo I have of the song is just my voice and a guitar. It was a Velvet Underground-style thing I was thinking of: very sparse. Relatively near the end of recording the album, I was listening to this song, and I was like, ‘We should just restart and have someone else singing it.’ I thought it should be a girl’s voice and they should be singing about their side of this story, which is, of course, going to be that you love each other and everything’s great. I sent Dana \[Margolin, of Porridge Radio\] the track and what she sent back was this totally ruined situation where she turned the whole thing on its head. She turned it into something absolutely genuine for her, and it rescued the song for me in a way.” **“I have seen enough”** “I thought I’d try and write a song in French, and the idea for it was about the horror of life—but how you can’t look away. It’s too beautiful at the same time. And in the end, the French wasn’t really good enough, so it’s English! To nutshell it, it’s about just enjoying and appreciating what you have around you. And I guess the way that it would relate to the pandemic is just all of the horrors that were going on and still being able to find pleasurable things. Finding happiness within it all.”

67.
by 
Black Lips
Album • Oct 14 / 2022 • 77%
Garage Rock Indie Rock
Noteable

The Black Lips return with their 10th studio effort ‘Apocalypse Love’, scorched with their trademark menace, it cryogenically mutates all recognised musical bases; it spins yarns about vintage Soviet synths, Benzedrine stupors, coup de’ tats, stolen valor and certified destruction, all set against a black setting sun. Since the turn of the decade the band have transformed from austere country pioneers, into a set of Lynchian surrealists, hellbent on recalibrating the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Singer and saxophonist Zumi Rosow muses, “It’s a weird dance record, one that reflects the moment that the world’s in right now…” ‘Apocalypse Love’ is an album that emanates from a dive bar jukebox in the back of your mind; with a playlist that bends between tub thumping doom-glam, Plastic Ono singalongs, cocktail-shaken space age pop, Morricone reverberations and lo-fi outsider acoustic-punk, with mariachi horns, theremins, drum machines and harmonies filtering through the infectious melodies. “A wonderful new chapter… The world may be on fire, but at least we have Black Lips.” The Line Of Best Fit Stand-out number ‘Among The Dunes’ is an amorphous platform-heeled anthem, a signature sax-fuelled stomper filled with trippy swagger. While opener ‘No Rave’ proffers a hypnotic locked groove, with Cole Alexander’s trademark snarl delivered over a sulphurous wall of distorted hedonism, a dystopian anthem for an apocalyptic manifesto. Meanwhile, the twisted exotica of ‘Whips Of Holly’ with its silver screen façade is like the soundtrack to a classic Theda Bara vamp-fest. As the band venture into their third decade, ‘Apocalypse Love’ is proof that The Black Lips show no sign of slowing down…

68.
by 
Album • Oct 28 / 2022 • 80%
Power Pop Indie Rock
Noteable Highly Rated

THE DARKEST TIMELINE DISCO TOUR 2022 18/11 - Nottingham, Metronome 19/11 - London, EartH - Main Hall 20/11 - Manchester, Rebellion 26/11 - Bristol, Exchange 27/11 - Leeds, Brudenell 02/12 - Sunderland, Pop Recs 03/12 - Glasgow, Mono TICKETS: martha-punx.com

69.
Album • Oct 14 / 2022 • 75%
Jazz-Funk Funk
Noteable

Rendered with uncluttered clarity, Surprise Chef’s savvy instrumentals prompt the listen to pay closer attention. That’s especially true of the Melbourne jazz/soul ensemble’s third album, which showcases their sample-ready breaks and soundtrack-esque vibe studies in digestible three- or four-minute portions. “Conversation Piece” pairs snappy drums with rippling piano, stuttered xylophone, and a concise guitar line to allow for plenty of open space before some choice woodwinds come into play. Despite having no vocals, these self-produced tracks are total earworms: Observe the squiggly synth hook urging on lead single “Velodrome,” or the dusty groove that emerges halfway through “Iconoclasts.” Surprise Chef has clearly done their homework, poring over the back-catalog nooks and crannies of funk-minded labels like Stones Throw and Daptone. That makes *Education & Recreation* aptly titled indeed: You can hear the players drawing on decades’ worth of crate-digging wisdom and simply having a lot of fun with it.

Surprise Chef’s music is based on evoking mood; their vivid arrangements utilize time and space to build soundscapes that invite the listener into their world. The quintet’s distinct sound pulls from 70s film scores, the funkier side of jazz, and the samples that form the foundation of hip hop. They push the boundaries of instrumental soul and funk with their own approach honed by countless hours in the studio, studying the masters, and perhaps most importantly, the “tyranny of distance” that dictates a unique perspective to their music. Hailing from just outside of Melbourne, Australia their first two albums, All News Is Good News and Daylight Savings amassed a die-hard fanbase and brought their sound from their home studio to every corner of the globe. The band is now signed to Big Crown Records, joining a lineage of contemporary and classic sounds that have influenced Surprise Chef’s music since their formation in 2017. Surprise Chef is Lachlan Stuckey on guitar, Jethro Curtin on keys, Carl Lindeberg on bass, Andrew Congues on drums, and Hudson Whitlock—the latest member who does it all from percussion to composing to producing. Their self proclaimed "moody shades of instrumental jazz-funk" have a bit of everything: punchy drums, infectious keys, rhythm guitar you might hear on a Studio One record, and flute lines that could be from a Blue Note session. But when you step back and take in the entirety of their sound and approach, you'll hear and see a group greater than the sum of its parts. In many ways Surprise Chef embodies the idiom "the benefits of limits." They were limited in that there weren't many people making or talking about instrumental jazz/soul/funk in Southeast Australia, let alone putting out records. This left them to develop their sound and approach in a kind of creative isolation where a small circle of friends and like-minded musicians fed off each other. "Being in Australia, being so far away, we only get glimpses and glances of this music’s origins," Stuckey says. "But hearing a label like Big Crown was one of the first times we realized you could make fresh, new soul music that wasn't super retro or just nostalgic." This approach is on full display throughout their new album Education & Recreation. Tracks like “Velodrome” pair chunky drums with an earworm synth line that has all the making of something you would find on an Ultimate Breaks & Beats compilation while numbers like “Iconoclasts” show their knack for tasteful use of space. From the crushing intro of “Suburban Breeze” to the floaty mellow bop of “Spring’s Theme” Surprise Chef has weaved together an album that takes you through peaks and valleys of emotion and provides a vivid soundtrack that will pull you deeper into your imagination. There is a beauty in the vast space for interpretation of instrumental music and they are adding a modern classic to the canon with this new album. Turn on the record and enjoy the ride, wherever it may take you.

70.
by 
Album • Sep 23 / 2022 • 80%
Alt-Country Contemporary Country
Noteable

From the first bass note within the driving drum beat you can tell something is different about the new record from Nikki Lane. The backbeat feels like a gutsy strut while the lead guitar feels like a revved up engine shifting gears. Denim & Diamonds comes out firing, spit shining the cowboy boots and tossing on a jean jacket. Produced by Joshua Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Denim & Diamonds has the Highway Queen embracing a more rock-oriented sound while still maintaining the heartfelt outlaw country sound she has developed across her previous three releases. Denim & Diamonds still has the fuck-off flare of which Nikki has come to be known. Her stylized, story-telling lyrics are all there as well as her catchy country hooks. The outlaw country sound is now balanced out with a gritty guitar and a machine gun snare that echoes the sound of 70’s rock. Nikki Lane has made a record that sounds new and old. Familiar and surprising. She embraces where she has come from, (“First High”, “Born Tough”) the lessons learned along the way, (“Good Enough”, “Try Harder”) all while doing things her way, (“Denim & Diamonds”, “Black Widow”).

71.
by 
Album • Jul 15 / 2022 • 98%
Post-Punk Revival
Popular

Once, New York City’s Interpol was thought of as the progenitor of the early-2000s post-punk revival, known for their ability to distill vintage sounds and morph them into nostalgic innovations. But a couple decades, endless world tours, and international success can change a few things. *The Other Side of Make-Believe* is singer/bassist Paul Banks, guitarist Daniel Kessler, and drummer Sam Fogarino’s seventh studio album (recorded with their longtime collaborator Alan Moulder, and their first time working with producer Flood), their first written remotely. It is also an evolution for the band, who made room to experiment with piano-forward songwriting (“Toni,” “Something Changed”); huge, layered drums (“Renegade Hearts”); mathy time signatures (“Into the Night”); and experimental bass (“Passenger”). It’s Interpol like you’ve never heard them before. Thematically, the album—and its title—reflects the unstable status quo of modernity, its optimistic qualities and its detrimental ones. “I\'m very fascinated with musing on the human imagination and our proclivity to come up with stories to make sense of reality,” Banks tells Apple Music. “On the one hand, that\'s beautiful, distinguishes us from other species, and allows all of fiction and film and art, this abstract thinking as a way to wrestle chaos into sense. But I feel like there’s something of a downside to it—self-delusion and self-deception that takes over with reality is too cold and frightening. The world we live in right now, there’s a lot of tension between what is true and what is false.” Below, Banks walks Apple Music through Interpol’s seventh studio album, track by track. **“Toni”** “‘Toni’ is one of two songs that Daniel wrote with a piano as the core. It was actually one of the songs that we wrote remotely, then we got together for in-person sessions: 10-day, two-week stretches of just jamming all day. ‘Toni’ was a song that really took shape in one of those live sessions. We got Daniel mic’d up on a piano and had to make a decision: Are we going to make this a rock song? Is this going to have electric bass and electric guitar? Or is it just going to use sound effects? We decided we were going to use traditional instrumentation, and what it turned out to be is fun. It felt like a natural beginning to a record.“ **“Fables”** “This one has a very fun drumbeat. What Sam does on the drums is probably one of my favorite elements of the record. And I love that it\'s not in a hurry. The world was so messed up while we were writing this record, with the pandemic. Some of these songs feel hopeful, and those themes of resilience and strength and human ingenuity felt more appropriate for me to write about. \'Fables\' is one of those songs that has a message of construction rather than destruction, which I think would often characterize my lyrics.” **“Into the Night”** “It was a real challenge to work with Daniel\'s strange time signature with this. It’s a 13-beat bar and sometimes it\'s a 15-beat or a 13-beat loop. Trying to write a bassline and a vocal to what Daniel had done was really cerebral. Daniel’s part had this great Zeppelin swag to it. Or, like, The Mars Volta, this real hot-blooded thing. It came about in a nice organic way, all around and lyrically. It\'s one of my favorites and it has an emotional payoff that I\'ve hoped to achieve. I don\'t know if we always do, but this song does.” **“Mr. Credit”** “It’s a fever dream about relationships and power dynamics. That one is odd. The first-person character is not to be trusted in that song.“ **“Something Changed”** “\[‘Something Changed’ and ‘Toni’\] weren’t written as partners, but they were the two songs based around piano. I think it got some people talking like, \'Is this going to be a piano record? What\'s going on? Is this the new Interpol sound?\' And no, it\'s part of the new Interpol sound, but it\'s not all of it. I just feel like that was a good idea. I also think both those songs sound mature and very self-fulfilled.“ **“Renegade Hearts”** “This is one song that Flood had not been 100% sold on what we were trying to do. He felt like the song could do something else, and that focused on drums. He wanted to explore different rhythmic expressions to underpin the chord progression. So he and Sam worked closely and came up with what you hear. It was no easy or simple task. Flood put in work on that song. It\'s still one of my favorites, I just wouldn\'t have anticipated it was going to go where it went.” **“Passenger”** “As the song ends, you hear Daniel’s guitar switch from a verse to a chorus again as it fades, and I think that change is one of the most beautiful things that he\'s written. It’s a very effective guitar line. I love how the vocal and Daniel’s guitar diverge from the verse to the chorus. I hear it like a flower blossoming. I hear this weird Sabbath-y hip-hop influence, a sort of scary drum loop. If you start that drum loop two beats later, it becomes a bit more of a conventional rock thing. And it was just one of these times where it was like, \'Guys, turn it off and listen to it from this downbeat.\'” **“Greenwich”** “That\'s another one of those times where Daniel\'s guitar riff is very intellectual and strange. I wanted to find some swaggy way to do a bassline over it, which I think really worked out, actually. It\'s one of my favorite songs on the record. I love the chorus. It is very sunny. The post-chorus was difficult: Right now, you hear a male and a female voice in the outro and they\'re doing something that\'s quite low-key, satisfied, and content.” **“Gran Hotel”** “We had a chorus going into rehearsals and we had the intro and we had most of the music, but that was it. When we had Daniel\'s guitar and we had the drums and it was time for me to deliver the bass, the engineer Richie Kennedy, I think he said it literally as blunt as \'Do you have anything else?\' It sparked something in me. We rolled another take, and I wrote the bassline on the fly. The entire outro happened in 45 minutes after everyone had gone home one day; it’s just a new bassline and two new guitar parts. It was a pretty cool moment.” **“Big Shot City”** “It’s one of Daniel\'s coolest riffs on the record; it evokes the choreographed waving of a matador\'s red flag that they use to tease a bull. It evokes this velvety substance to me, blowing in the wind. We had a lot of discussion about how the song should be laid down. Daniel was very committed to the idea of the bassline staying in one lane until the outro, and I think that makes the payoff even more special.” **“Go Easy (Palermo)”** “Daniel’s working title was ‘Palermo.’ I wanted the bass to sound like The Cure, where the bassline unto itself is something you might want to hum. I don’t know if I accomplished that, but it was what I was aspiring to. I used to envision an audience singing along, and it was really a profound thing. I regret indulging in that. It felt like a premonition, singing that song and having an audience singing it back. It would always give me literal chills. The lyric was very resonant for me, this idea of going easy, meaning to be kind to yourself on your journey.”

If fate didn’t quite ordain the circumstances for Interpol’s seventh album, it was at least fortunate that the band had happily concluded their Marauder cycle on stage in front of 30 thousand-odd Peruvian fans. Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting new music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood. Coming from a group whose early work was characterised by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional tar pit — doubly so, given the presence of towering producer-engineer duo Flood and Moulder on the boards. But Banks felt the call to push in a “counterbalancing” direction, with paeans to mental resilience and the quiet power of going easy. “The nobility of the human spirit is to recover and rebound,” he says. “Yeah, I could focus on how fucked everything is, but I feel now is the time when being hopeful is necessary, and a still-believable emotion within what makes Interpol Interpol.”

72.
by 
Album • Aug 19 / 2022 • 94%
Garage Punk
Popular

Subtlety is not The Chats’ strong point. Exhibit A is the blunt-as-it-comes title of the Queensland trio’s second album, a 13-song record in which only two of its tracks surpass the three-minute mark. Add the fact that bassist-vocalist Eamon Sandwith sings like a chainsaw, snarling and raging over a series of tightly coiled riffs that rarely dip under hyper-speed, and you have the sonic equivalent of a swift boot to the face. Recorded in six days, the album finds Sandwith’s everyman lyrical focus taking in subjects such as the cost of cigarettes (“The Price of Smokes”), hoon driving culture (“6L GTR”), and being busted for buying an under-14s train ticket (“Ticket Inspector”), all with a turn of phrase that’s unquestionably Australian. (“Starin’ at the ATM/It says insufficient funds/That’s just not good enough/’Cause right now I wanna get drunk,” he growls in “Paid Late”.) More sober themes occasionally pop their heads over the bar (“Emperor of the Beach” lambastes surfers who view the beach as their own), but even they’re delivered as delicately as a headbutt. And if you don’t like it? Well…you know what you can do.

73.
by 
Album • Oct 08 / 2021 • 90%
Indie Rock
Popular
74.
by 
Album • Aug 05 / 2022 • 86%
Breakbeat House
Noteable

After a steady stream of singles and EPs since 2015, Australian-born, London-based producer Jordan Alexander flexes his ever-evolving sound on this debut album. Balancing melody-rich emotional depth with concussive club prompts, he has described *What I Breathe* as a lingering look back across his half-decade working under the Mall Grab moniker, as well as absorbing the myriad sounds of his adopted city. The former theme comes through in the nostalgia-warmed instrumental “I Can Remember It So Vividly,” while that vivid London influence can be heard on the breakbeat-riddled “Time Change”—featuring grime MCs Novelist and D Double E—and Nia Archives’ neo-soul vocal turn on “Patience.” Following Alexander’s 2020 remix EP for Turnstile, that band’s Brendan Yates contrasts alternately restrained and screamed vocals with mellow, almost ambient washes on “Understand.” Alexander himself even sings in a self-reflective murmur on “Without the Sun” and the closer, “Lost in Harajuku.”

75.
Album • Jun 10 / 2022 • 86%
Dance-Punk Post-Punk
Noteable
76.
by 
Album • Mar 25 / 2022 • 96%
Alternative Rock
Popular Highly Rated

Even as they become elder statesmen of alt-rock, there remains a youthful ebullience to Placebo’s songs. Perhaps that’s because singer and guitarist Brian Molko and bassist Stefan Olsdal make music rooted in the heady rush of the here and now, where the emotions are raw, the spirit unfiltered. That’s how it goes on this gripping eighth album, which tackles themes of climate change, mortality, and technology while journeying through a broad soundscape that takes in expansive goth rock, orchestral pop, and synth-tinged grooves. Their defiant anthems seem melancholic and hopeful at the same time, the sound of a band savoring life in the present.

77.
Album • Sep 30 / 2022 • 91%
Indie Rock Heartland Rock
Popular
78.
by 
Album • May 06 / 2022 • 95%
Dream Pop Neo-Psychedelia
Popular Highly Rated

The vibey, moody LA rock quartet (guitarist/vocalists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, drummer/vocalist Stella Mozgawa, and bassist/vocalist Jenny Lee Lindberg) formed in 2004, albeit with a slightly altered lineup—which is to say, its members, now into their forties, have been playing together for nearly half their lives. Throughout that time, Warpaint’s hallmark was their electric live chemistry, its members known to shut their eyes, zone out, and jam with cosmic synchronicity. Their fourth full-length arrives after a six-year hiatus, during which its members pursed their respective solo projects and otherwise settled into their adult lives. But their inexorable bond brought them back together, although this time, songwriting and recording transpired mostly over remote Zoom sessions in makeshift home studios. Elements of the thousand-yard-stare desert rock and wallowy post-punk of their early records remain (the downcast “Trouble,” the lurching “Proof”), but there’s a newfound warmth to *Radiate Like This* inspired by motherhood, stability, and friendships that have stood the test of time and touring. Think chilled-out grooves for road trips to Joshua Tree, laidback love songs about sun and rain and eternity (and the occasional request to send nudes).

79.
Album • Mar 04 / 2022 • 83%
Conscious Hip Hop Neo-Soul UK Hip Hop
Noteable Highly Rated
80.
by 
Album • May 06 / 2022 • 77%
Indie Pop
Noteable
81.
Album • Sep 23 / 2022 • 73%
Smooth Soul Pop Soul
82.
Album • May 20 / 2022 • 95%
Indie Rock
Popular Highly Rated

Porridge Radio are one of the most vital new voices in alternative music, having gone from being darlings of the DIY underground to one of the UK’s most thrilling bands in the space of less than a year. Their barbed wit, lacerating intensity and potent blend of art-rock, indie-pop and post-punk sounds like little else around, and led their 2020 album Every Bad to make the nominees list for the coveted Mercury Music Prize. For frontperson Dana Margolin, drummer Sam Yardley, keyboardist Georgie Stott and bassist Maddie Ryall – who met in the seaside town of Brighton and formed Porridge Radio in 2014 – global recognition has been a long time coming, after years of self-releasing and music booking their own tours. In those eight years, Dana has gained a reputation as one of the most magnetic band leaders around with an ability to “devastate you with an emotional hurricane, then blindside you with a moment of bittersweet humour” (NME). But if Every Bad established Dana’s lemon-sharp, heart-on-sleeve honesty, Porridge Radio’s third album takes that to anthemic new heights. Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is the sound of someone in their late twenties facing down the disappointment of love, and life, and figuring out how to exist in the world, without claiming any answers. It’s also catchy as hell. The title – which was partly inspired by a collage by the British surrealist Eileen Agar – speaks to the “joy, fear and endlessness” of the past few years. Dana’s songwriting and delivery is more confident, with the emotional incisiveness of artists like Mitski, Sharon Van Etten and Big Thief. Though it’s softer and more playful in places than Every Bad’s blowtorch ferocity, there are moments of powerful catharsis, ones that occur when you allow the full intensity of an experience to take hold. In places, that no-holds-barred rawness is on a par with bands like Deftones (their panoramic metal is a key touchstone of Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky) or American emo, elevated by Yardley’s ambitious instrumentals. “I kept saying that I wanted everything to be 'stadium-epic' - like Coldplay,” says Dana. With Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, Porridge Radio have distilled their myriad influences down like they’re flipping through their own singular dial: dreamy yet intense, gentle but razor-edged, widescreen and yet totally intimate. People tell Dana that Every Bad got them through their cancer diagnosis, their break-up, their isolated lockdown. But with their new album, the band are taking a step up and spring-boarding into a bright, exciting unknown.

83.
Album • Sep 23 / 2022 • 95%
Jazz Fusion
Popular Highly Rated

Long before he made his name at jazz’s vanguard, editing together off-the-cuff live sessions like a hip-hop beatmaker, drummer, and producer, Makaya McCraven set out to create a comprehensive record of his collaborative process—a testament to the intuition of improvisation. Its sessions recorded over the course of seven years, between multiple projects and releases, *In These Times* is McCraven’s sixth album as a bandleader, and it showcases the virtuosic instrumentalists he has spent his career building an almost telepathic bond with—bassist Junius Paul and guitarist Jeff Parker among them. It’s also the warmest and most enveloping album he’s produced to date. Frenetic beat-splicing might underpin the polyrhythms of tracks such as “Seventh String” and “This Place That Place,” but the soft melodies played by Parker and harpist Brandee Younger always permeate—a reminder of the clarity of the moment of creation, rather than its post-production manipulation. Indeed, *In These Times* is a reflection of the past decade of McCraven’s instrumental expertise, but it’s also a powerful reminder of the freedom inherent in this time, in the here and now of making music together, when the artist lets go and surrounds us with the ineffable beauty of collective creation.

In These Times is the new album by Chicago-based percussionist, composer, producer, and pillar of our label family, Makaya McCraven. Although this album is “new," the truth it’s something that's been in process for a very long time, since shortly after he released his International Anthem debut In The Moment in 2015. Dedicated followers may note he’s had 6 other releases in the meantime (including 2018’s widely-popular Universal Beings and 2020’s We’re New Again, his rework of Gil Scott-Heron’s final album for XL Recordings); but none of which have been as definitive an expression of his artistic ethos as In These Times. This is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records. And his patience, ambition, and persistence have yielded an appropriately career-defining body of work. As epic and expansive as it is impressively potent and concise, the 11 song suite was created over 7+ years, as McCraven strived to design a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter original compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” that he’s honed over a growing body of production-craft. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in 5 different studios and 4 live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work from home. The pure fact that he was able to so eloquently condense and articulate the immense human scale of the work into 41 fleeting minutes of emotive and engaging sound is a monumental achievement. It’s an evolution and a milestone for McCraven, the producer; but moreover it’s the strongest and clearest statement we’ve yet to hear from McCraven, the composer. In These Times is an almost unfathomable new peak for an already-soaring innovator who has been called "one of the best arguments for jazz's vitality" by The New York Times, as well as recently, and perhaps more aptly, a "cultural synthesizer." While challenging and pushing himself into uncharted territories, McCraven quintessentially expresses his unique gifts for collapsing space and transcending borders – blending past, present, and future into elegant, poly-textural arrangements of jazz-rooted, post-genre 21st century folk music.

84.
by 
Album • Jul 08 / 2022 • 91%
Experimental Hip Hop Post-Punk
Popular Highly Rated
85.
by 
Album • May 27 / 2022 • 82%
Conscious Hip Hop UK Hip Hop
Noteable Highly Rated
86.
Album • May 06 / 2022 • 93%
Indie Pop Alternative Rock
Popular
87.
Album • Aug 26 / 2022 • 97%
Singer-Songwriter Indie Rock
Popular Highly Rated

Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, Melbourne’s Julia Jacklin has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her debut announced those intentions, and the startling 2019 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip. Stirring piano-led opener ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’ channels the underage confusion of being told religion is profound, despite only feeling it during the spectacle of its pageantry. The gentle pulse of ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ and dreamy strings of ‘Ignore Tenderness’ betray an interrogation of consent and emotional injury. The stark ‘Less Of A Stranger’ picks at the generational thread of a mother/daughter relationship, while the hymnal ‘Too In Love To Die’ and loose jam of ‘Be Careful With Yourself’ equate true love with the fear of losing it. Recorded in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), PRE PLEASURE finds Jacklin teamed with her Canada-based touring band, bassist Ben Whiteley and guitarist Will Kidman, both of Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station. It also introduces drummer Laurie Torres, saxophonist Adam Kinner and string arrangements by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire) recorded by a full orchestra in Prague. PRE PLEASURE presents Jacklin as her most authentic self; an uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs.

88.
Album • Oct 22 / 2021 • 50%
Shoegaze
89.
Album • Jun 24 / 2022 • 80%
Lovers Rock Pop Reggae
Noteable
90.
Album • Feb 25 / 2022 • 94%
Avant-Garde Jazz Post-Bop
Popular Highly Rated
91.
by 
Album • Mar 18 / 2022 • 99%
Dance-Pop
Popular Highly Rated

“Right now, I’m still very much restless,” Charli XCX tells Apple Music. “Because I know that I would be an excellent humongous pop star. But I also unfortunately know that there’s a vision of who I am in the mainstream’s mind. It’s a constant headfuck, to be honest. While I’m a very defiant person, I’m also a human, and sometimes I do just want to be accepted, and I don’t understand why I’m not totally—even though sometimes I relish in the fact that I’m not.” Charlotte Aitchison is one of pop music’s more self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-examining artists. *CRASH* is her fifth studio album, and the final one to be released as part of a longtime record deal. It’s partly, as Charli says, an experiment. An opportunity to utilize a major label’s resources and dress up her left-leaning pop in something ultra luxe. A bold and refreshingly transparent attempt to move up a few rungs, it’s a considered move also designed to clear up some of Charli’s nagging what-ifs. “I’ve always questioned myself,” she says. “And it’s why I’ve made this entire album, really. I ask myself, am I a likable artist? Am I too opinionated? Do I look too weird? Am I too annoying? If I shut up and put out certain songs and do the right features, will I become more accepted, more liked, more commercial?” Of course, Charli’s notoriously engaged fanbase—with whom she exchanged ideas, including song lyrics, directly online for 2020’s quarantine album *how i’m feeling now*—would argue she doesn’t need any such validation. “It’s a blessing and a curse, to be extremely honest,” she says of her “Angels.” “I’m very lucky to have the fanbase that I have, who are extremely invested in literally every breath I take. They are very vocal and very smart, which draws me to them, because they’ve got great taste and amazing ideas—as I found out when doing *how i’m feeling now*. But you can’t please everyone. I’ve done so many different things that people are always going to gravitate to certain eras. Plus, I think that there’s an element where they like to root for an underdog, or an on-the-fringes personality like mine. Because we feel like we’ve been in it together for a really long time, the online discourse can be so vigorous. So I can’t lie, sometimes it’s a bit of a headfuck, because whilst I absolutely adore them, I don’t make music for them specifically when I’m sat in the studio—I’m making it for me. And I don’t think they would admire me as the artist I am if I just kept giving them what they expected.” It’s time to listen for yourself. Explore Charli’s premium pop with her own track-by-track guide. **“Crash”** “Until maybe a week before I made this song, the album was going to be called *Sorry If I Hurt You*. But one day, I was driving in my car and *CRASH* just came to me, and I called A. G. Cook. Even though he wasn\'t a *huge* part of this record, he\'s still very much my creative confidant. He agreed it made sense with the constant car references in my work—and I like the onomatopoeia, I like how it references \[2014 single\] ‘Boom Clap,’ and I like how it feels much more punchy and in-your-face than *how i’m feeling now*. I felt that the title needed a song, so A. G. and I got in the studio pretty quickly and knew we needed to make it sound extremely ’80s—if you could bottle the album into one song, this is it. We—plus the song’s co-producer George Daniel—had been sending a lot of new jack swing beats back and forth, and I knew I wanted this guitar solo, and to add these crazy Janet-esque stabs.” **“New Shapes” (feat. Caroline Polachek & Christine and the Queens)** “Caroline, Christine, and I had worked together many times in different forms, and it was time for the three of us to come together. And actually, this song was recorded a long time ago—pre-pandemic. I like how it\'s an antihero song. We’re saying to the love figure, ‘I haven\'t got what you need from me, because I am not typical. I don\'t operate in the way that you want me to. I want multiple partners. I want somebody else. I want no convention within sex and love.’ And I like that as a statement right after the sound of a car crash in the previous song. To do that song with them—two artists who I really feel have such a unique, defiant, and topsy-turvy vision of what pop music is—felt really classic and right for us. There’s a true connection between us now, in music and in our personal lives.” **“Good Ones”** “I think this song deserved to be bigger, but I will always think that of my work. But I do think it established the Cliffs Notes version of what the record is—it\'s got a darkness to it, and it\'s very pop. I like how drastic the jump was between coming out of *how i’m feeling now* into this, both sonically and in how they were made. *how i’m feeling now* was obviously my quarantine album made in my living room over five weeks by me and two trusted collaborators. This song is produced by Oscar Holter—an extremely active part of the Max Martin camp—and not really written hugely by myself but by two amazing topliners, Caroline Ailin and Noonie Bao. So it’s the absolute polar opposite.” **“Constant Repeat”** “This song features an imaginary scenario I created in my head, where I fell for somebody but imagined that they didn\'t want me—which turned out to not be the case. But it was this fear that I had, and my prediction of the situation. I think it\'s interesting that you can convince yourself of that. When you are falling for someone, unfortunately, I think human nature just crushes in on you and tells you you\'re not good enough, and fills you with doubt and dread and fear and all of those things. This song really poured out of me quite late in the album process, and it just felt so real and natural.” **“Beg for You” (feat. Rina Sawayama)** “Rina wanted to do something uptempo together, and give our fans a bit more of a moment. So when this song idea bubbled up, I called her immediately. She rewrote the second verse, and sounded incredible on it. It’s a very perfect-storm moment, because we’re two artists operating within the pop sphere, but always challenging it and doing something a little bit more left. She also has that hardcore, diehard fanbase—there’s a lot of crossover. Whilst maybe some of them were expecting something a little bit more experimental from us, I think, in a way, you can\'t deny that this actually is the perfect song for us in that we are paying a homage to a gay anthem \[‘Cry for You’ by September\]. She\'s queer, I\'m a queer ally, we\'re coming together to really just live our best lives and sing an iconic pop song.” **“Move Me”** “This song came from a writing camp that I was invited to by \[US producer and songwriter\] Ian Kirkpatrick. I hadn’t done a very classic camp for a while. Not because I\'m anti them—I actually think I thrive quite well in them and enjoy them. I ended up writing this with \[US songwriter and producer\] Amy Allen. We’re actually polar opposites in terms of our styles, which is why this song ended up being so beautiful—the aggressive parts of the song where I was basically yelling into a mic are very me, then you have the balance of Amy’s gorgeous verses. As we were doing it, everyone kept talking about how it’d be a great song for Halsey. I was like, ‘No, I love Halsey, but this is a great song for me and I’m fucking keeping it.’ People talk about writing-camp songs being fake and constructed in a test tube or whatever. But it’s very real. We write from our reality. That’s why we’re good songwriters.” **“Baby”** “This was one of the first tracks I made for this album, probably pre-pandemic, and with Justin Raisen—who was a very crucial part of my first album, *True Romance* \[2013\]. So it felt really good to be going back and working with him in the same house where we made part of the first album. This was a song that I always felt was so passionate and fiery and sexy. And I think the making of this song helped me feel powerful, and want to explore the sexier side of pop music and my artistry. It’s the song that helped me decide that I wanted to dance for this campaign, because I just couldn\'t stop wanting to move to it whilst we were making it.” **“Lightning”** “It began as one of those half demos that I took away and lived with. I then called up Ariel Rechtshaid, who was also a huge part of the first album, alongside Justin Raisen, and said, ‘OK, I have this song. I want to do *True Romance in 2022* with it.” And while I know he’s not really on that hype currently, I told him he was the king of the ’80s and if he felt it needed to go down that road, I trusted him because he has the most impeccable taste. So he sent it back to me, and there was a question mark over the Spanish guitar moment, which goes into a chorus. I sent it to A. G. to ask his opinion. He was like, ‘It\'s insane. I laughed out loud.’ And I was like, ‘OK, great. We\'re keeping it.’” **“Every Rule”** “It\'s the true story of me meeting my previous partner, and both of us being in relationships but knowing that we were meant to be together. I think that that\'s a story that a lot of my friends have also experienced—and obviously there\'s a lot of controversy that comes with that circumstance. People are afraid to talk about it. People feel shame. But it\'s also, it\'s really real. I think you have to be really brave to admit to yourself that you\'re not in love with maybe the person that you\'re with, and that you are in love with someone else. It\'s cruel on both sides, and I think you can really hear that. It was a song that I really only felt comfortable enough to make with A. G. He would never judge me for saying these things. It’s another pre-pandemic song, and A. G. was living in a place with a studio in his garage. There was a tree outside that was always covered in crickets. You can hear the crickets in the recording, which I think is really sweet and charming. Once we’d lived with the song for about a year, A. G. had the idea of asking Oneohtrix Point Never to add some things to the song, which I loved.” **“Yuck”** “I like the drastic gear change here. I like that it makes you laugh. I like those jarring moments on albums and in live shows where you\'re going from the most intimate, quiet song to the most hilarious or poptastic. That was the reasoning behind putting ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Yuck’ back to back. I really struggle with that feeling of being smothered. It\'s probably an only-child thing, or something. When you\'re like, ‘Get away from me, give me some fucking space’—that is seriously how I feel 50% of the time. It also reminds me of that gang vocal element of ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘Boys.’ Not sonically, but more in terms of the way that I\'m singing. I\'m definitely not the most technical singer ever—if you put me next to Ariana Grande and made us both sing the same song, I would sound absolutely insane, and she would sound absolutely gorgeous—but when it comes to singing like this, I feel pretty confident. That’s really nice for me, just in a technical way. It\'s really fun to be like, ‘Yeah. You know what? I can sing this song.’ Which I know sounds stupid because I am a professional ‘singer.’” **“Used to Know Me”** “I was trying to emulate myself on ‘Fancy’—or get back into that headspace. I really remember searching for the chorus melody to ‘Fancy’ in a way that I hadn\'t really searched for a melody before. Normally I\'m very instinctual and spontaneous when it comes to melodies, but with ‘Fancy,’ I had to really maneuver my brain around different corners to figure it out—to understand the formation of the notes. I wrote this on my own at Stargate’s studios, which probably made me feel like I had to write a really big pop song, and then when I was listening to it on repeat in my car, I just started singing the synth line to ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. So I called a few people and was like, ‘Is this possible?’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, but do you care about publishing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess not.’ It feels to me like a big song—it’s about reshaping who you are after a breakup.” **“Twice”** “I had reservations about making this the last song because it\'s such an obvious choice with the key change and outro. And generally speaking, I\'m anti the obvious choice. But then George Daniel, who is very good with tracklisting, simply said, ‘You\'re an idiot if you don\'t put this song last.’ It’s actually interesting lyrically, because it\'s about the end of the world and that you shouldn\'t think twice about intimate moments, or these off-the-cuff moments. Essentially, YOLO, and enjoy delving into these once-in-a-lifetime situations that everybody ends up in. I was picturing the scene from \[Lars von Trier’s 2011 film\] *Melancholia* where Kirsten Dunst’s character is sat on a hill waiting for the end of the world. It’s a perfect closer, and I also think it’s a very beautiful song.”

92.
by 
Album • Mar 25 / 2022 • 98%
Art Rock New Wave
Popular

For all the different forms his music has assumed over the years—glam, chamber-folk, yacht rock, dream-pop—you can readily identify any Destroyer song the instant that Dan Bejar opens his mouth to dispense his cryptic yet deliciously dramatic narratives. And no record in his long, winding career puts that theory to the test as gleefully as *LABYRINTHITIS*, an album that’s essentially the musical manifestation of his famously frizzy, mad-scientist hairdo: It’s bursting with wild sonic ideas that shoot off in every direction, yet it’s always unmistakably him. After luring us in with the warm, shoegazey synth drones and subaquatic bass throb of “It’s in Your Heart Now,” *LABYRINTHITIS* traps us in its maniacal maze and dares us to find a way out: “June” deviously blurs the line between polyrhythmic post-punk and ’80s adult-contemporary pop before free-falling into a bizarre, voice-modulated spoken-word breakdown; “Tintoretto, It’s for You” is part louche cabaret strut, part festival-EDM meltdown. But *LABYRINTHITIS*’s boldness of vision also yields rousing moments of release (“Suffer,” “It Takes a Thief”) that infuse the pop elegance of 2011’s *Kaputt* with a little extra *kapow*. The instrumental title track provides a welcome mid-album reprieve in which the band crafts a Boards of Canada-worthy pastorale, complete with the comforting sounds of chattering children.

93.
by 
Album • Apr 29 / 2022 • 93%
Singer-Songwriter Indie Folk
Popular Highly Rated

Tomberlin, the moniker of indie folk artist Sarah Beth Tomberlin, might’ve titled her second full-length LP *i don’t know who needs to hear this…*, but she knows who did: “I did,” she tells Apple Music. “On this record, there’s a lot of searching for space for myself,” she says. “A lot of my songs are me holding up a point-and-shoot camera that has the focus ability, zooming in and zooming out on these small moments.” Before this album, the Baptist pastor’s daughter wrote songs about faith and self-doubt from the distance of her own loneliness; her first full-length, 2018’s *At Weddings*, was acclaimed for its spareness, the way she could write a sacred moment in a fingerpicked guitar riff. Now she’s developed a new language for relationships, and blows it up to enormous size with orchestral instrumentation: horns and Una Corda (“easy”), pedal steel (“born again runner”) and tenor saxophone (“collect caller”). The record is her exploring “just how to be in the world,” she says. “I just turned 27 and *At Weddings* was when I was 21. This is a different chapter of life, with new circumstances and things to investigate.” Below, Tomberlin walks through her album, track by track. **“easy”** “I wrote this song on acoustic guitar, and it was very simplistic. I wanted it to have a little bit more of a being-at-sea feeling, of rocking out in the ocean, rudderless. I remember telling Philip \[Weinrobe\], who co-produced with me, that I didn\'t want it to be a guitar song. We had already been using the Una Corda, this certain kind of piano, on the record. I loved how it sounded—eerie, but really beautiful as well. We combined those two elements and we kind of built it out from there. We turned all the lights off and had candles lit. It was very witchy. We were all in a circle, in this room, with the mics in front of us—really listening, not being too loud so the instruments didn\'t bleed into each other.” **“born again runner”** “The title is attributed to an Emmylou Harris song, \'Born to Run,\' which my dad always says reminds him of me. It\'s a song for him. It\'s a song about loving my dad and wanting to have a relationship with him, even though we\'re very different people.” **“tap”** “I moved to New York in September 2020. I assimilated by going on really long walks through the city, across the Williamsburg Bridge and into Brooklyn, on the West Side Highway, by the water. I was missing being in the country and the woods. I was trying to find ways to connect myself. The first line I had for the song was ‘I\'m not a tree/I\'m in a forest of buildings.\' It\'s about things that disconnect us. I was thinking of how narrative singers can struggle with wanting to put ourselves in a good light. No one is a perfect person. We also pulled a bunch of twigs and grass and flowers from the garden and were hitting the drums with them, so it has this extra brushy, freaky, witchy thing going on.” **“memory”** “I actually did a session with Danny Harle—he co-produced Caroline Polachek\'s record \[*Pang*\]. He wanted to meet when I lived in LA, so we rented a studio space and he was like, \'It\'s no pressure. Let\'s just hang out and see if something happens.\' We spent maybe three hours working on music, and it was just us meeting really for the first time. I really liked the lyrics that I came up with, and that\'s how I wrote that song, which was wild to me. I was really stressed out about writing something with someone in the room. It\'s like writing a paper when the deadline is the next day and somehow you write something good.” **“unsaid”** “It was February \[2020\], before everything went to shit. I wrote it about LA and trying to figure out how to be planted there, because it\'s not really a city. In my opinion, it\'s just this sprawl. It was really hard for me to know how to feel grounded there. It\'s beautiful and fake. Making that song was like trying to comfort myself.” **“sunstruck”** “This one is definitely about examining a relationship with a person that was sputtering on again, off again. A lot of time had passed, we were still friends, and I got some recent news about some changes in their life, and a desire to work on themselves. It was a magic thing to hear, and that song fell out afterwards. I felt released from that relationship. And often, growth comes from being uncomfortable, some drought and some storms. It is a bit mournful of examination, but it ends in a hopeful way.“ **“collect caller”** “Stuart \[Bogie\], who is in fact a legend of New York, plays saxophone on this song, and wow. He came in for a couple songs. I kept saying, \'I’ve collected all the deep-feeling musicians for this record,\' because some people can play an instrument well, but some people, they\'re so mathematical about playing. We somehow collected the people that just deeply feel the music, and Stuart is one of those people. I love him.” **“stoned”** “‘Stoned’ I wrote when I was feeling a bit exasperated—anger but trying to have compassion. I think the anger that I was feeling was just and right, but I didn’t want to become hardened by it. I wasn\'t a big partier growing up; no one\'s asking the pastor\'s kid to go rage. But I was a young adult at this time, and living in Louisville, and someone invited me to a party. It was like, oh, this is in my John Hughes movie, everyone is jumping in the pool, taking their clothes off. I was walking away from it barefoot, drenched wet, holding my shoes, the sun was coming up, it was probably 5 am. When I started writing this song, I was thinking about that moment a lot, of experiencing this fun thing, but actually being in my head. Walking away from it alone and feeling very alone.” **“happy accident”** “\[Cass McCombs\] invited me to come jam one day. I played him some new stuff and he actually hit up Saddle Creek being like, \'Hey, does Tomberlin need someone to produce? I\'m interested in working with her,\' which blew my mind. He\'s a legend to me. I knew that I wanted to recruit Cass for this song, and he played on \'stoned\' as well. On \'stoned,\' I\'m playing the lead rhythm guitar and he\'s doing all the solo-y stuff.” **“possessed”** “I think it\'s cool to have a really short song. I need to get better at that. It\'s really a private song, almost trying to motivate myself. Writer’s block vibes. I thought it would be a fun intro to the record for a while. It\'s really cinematic to draw it back a bit. Each song is its own world, and I love that about different records, and I wanted it to be this way. But there is a sonic thread that sews it together throughout.” **“idkwnthat”** “I was walking around in Brooklyn and going through my voice memos and clicked ‘new recording 430’ or whatever. I don\'t label them. I\'m sitting by the window playing guitar; I sound really tired. I\'m singing that song to myself. Even though I\'m saying, \'I don\'t know who needs to hear this,\' obviously I did. That was the first song that we recorded in the process of the record. Everyone says it\'s a weird time. I feel like it\'s always a fucking weird time to be alive as a person in the world, but especially right now, I guess. This record does go through a flurry of different feelings and emotions. It\'s good to feel all of them. So it felt like a perfect way to end the record.”

94.
by 
Album • Jan 28 / 2022 • 87%
Tishoumaren
Noteable Highly Rated
95.
Album • Nov 11 / 2022 • 80%
Post-Punk
Noteable Highly Rated

With Sod’s Toastie, Tom Greenhouse and his intrepid band of sonic explorers are more assured and confident than ever throughout this sublime sophomore album. While frontman Tom Greenhouse’s off-kilter observations and bizarro anecdotes remain front and centre, this time round the band up their game with a more vigorous sound that keeps pace with Greenhouse’s wholly distinctive lyrical style. Greenhouse continues to revel in telling increasingly surreal short stories, rejoicing in the power of the deadpan one-liner and bedecking his songs with far-flung cultural references. But now the band employ a variety of techniques with improved pro-duction, from the impulsively bashed keyboards and jubilantly repetitive guitar stabs that have be-come their trademark, to flirtations with–heaven forbid!–melody, chord progressions and arrange-ments which elevate their tried-and-tested blueprint into a more exciting and cohesive whole. Opener Musicians is the perfect embodiment of this conscious development. Here, Greenhouse re-counts a sarcastic tale of half-truths that see him galavanting around town trying to put a band to-gether. Sonically, it begins with a caustic callback to the group’s first EP Crap Cardboard Pet and its über-minimalist aesthetic. But by the end of the song a joyous festival of afrobeat-inspired in-struments including samba whistles, bongos and saxophones are added to the mix as the front-man, ironically, fails in his mission to recruit more players. With Get Unjaded, the band have somehow conjured something close to pop, without abandoning the repetition and wit that’s relished by their early fans. I Lost My Head also adopts a jangle-pop sheen with a luscious synth melody, as the frontman ditches the spoken-word for a surly croon (his first known attempt at actual singing!) that provides a welcome breather from the onslaught of dense recantations that are the band’s bread-and-butter. While the lyrics here are still often humorous and political, Greenhouse has also notably expanded his interests on this album to include a new host of topics. The influence of extraterrestrials, for ex-ample, infiltrates the subject matter frequently. On The UFOs, the mysterious protagonist Blinkus Booth’s isolationist lifestyle is apparently interrupted by the spectres of otherworldly visitors, while closer The Neoprene Ravine feels like an extract from a deep space rock opera. Here, jaunty and angular instruments pile-on as we are fed images of an interstellar Spinal Tap, the titular fictional band “The Neoprene Ravine” who are “the alien equivalent of the Velvet Underground” and include an alien Lou Reed yelping “too busy sucking on my little green ding dong!”. Meanwhile, Hard Rock Potato is propelled by a vortex of keys and synths, a real noise-pop gem comprised of real guitar chords (!) and rock-orientated riffs. Here the stream-of-consciousness lyrics take shots at the sinister financial industry, and include one of the many top-tier one-liners on the album: “It’s not gambling if you’re wearing a tie (even if you’ve got no trousers on)”. On Sod’s Toastie, The Cool Greenhouse have pushed their distinctive flavour of post-punk to the point of perfection – their incongruous riffs, alchemical instrumental chemistry, and irreverent spo-ken-word vocals are a delight throughout. Sod’s Toastie is hilarious at times, and at others just hi-lariously good – a not-so-difficult second album.

96.
Album • Feb 25 / 2022 • 98%
Space Rock Revival
Popular Highly Rated

“I like that rock ’n’ roll is simple, that it’s 12 bars—the ineptitude of it,” Jason Pierce tells Apple Music. It’s a funny statement to hear from an artist notorious for spending years meticulously fine-tuning his records and hiring enough guest instrumentalists to fill a 747. But as the Spiritualized leader has proven time and time again in his three decades of space-rock exploration, minimalism provides the clearest path to maximalism. “I like the American bands that wanted desperately to sound like The Rolling Stones, but by pure accident, it all came out wrong, and it became their own thing. They were just seeing where it goes. And I still follow that. With records, they say the devil’s in the details, and there’s thousands of details on the record. I’m trying to find a way of crushing all these things together to make something that doesn’t sound like anything else.” On Spiritualized’s ninth album, two of those details jump out at you: a woman’s voice announcing the title of the record, followed by a lunar-shuttle transmission beep—the very same effects that introduced their 1997 psychedelic-gospel masterwork, *Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space*. And much like that album’s opening track, *Everything Was Beautiful*’s first song, “Always Together With You,” builds a simple repeated melody and romantic lyric into an orchestral surge that’s a little overwhelming. It’s the first of many audio Easter eggs on an album that takes a number of sonic and lyrical cues from Spiritualized’s trailblazing ’90s-era explorations in interstellar rock, to the point that *Everything Was Beautiful* often feels like a greatest-hits retrospective made of new songs. But as much as he’s cultivated a reputation as an all-seeing auteur, Pierce insists such callbacks aren’t part of some grand design. For instance, the seeds for “Always Together With You” were actually first planted back in 2014, when an embryonic version of the song appeared on a Record Store Day compilation called *Space Project*, which featured songs incorporating recordings captured by NASA. Pierce knew he always wanted to take another pass on that hastily recorded demo, but even after embellishing it into the rapturous curtain-raiser we hear on *Everything Was Beautiful*, he still felt it was missing something—until work on the 2021 reissue of *Ladies and Gentlemen* inspired a late-game revision. “I felt like it was a big ask to have people listen to six minutes of three-note chords at the top of an album, and I couldn’t resolve that,” Pierce says. “I couldn’t find a way that I wanted to listen to it and present it. So, I did two very simple steals—the transmission beep from the Apollo landing, which is at the top of *Ladies and Gentlemen*, and the announcement of the album. Suddenly, the whole thing felt like a strange transmission—like somebody outside of the planet looking down. It adds some kind of drama to it that wasn’t there.” Such spur-of-the-moment decisions defined the creation of *Everything Was Beautiful*, which is effectively the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s *And Nothing Hurt*. (The titles form a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse-Five*.) Pierce is grateful his record company talked him out of approaching the two albums as a single piece. “My focus was too wide,” he says. “If I had tried to do the whole thing together, I think I’d still be working on it now.” By splitting the project into two separate releases, Pierce gave himself the time and space to exhale and let the songs evolve according to his gut instincts rather than some master plan. To wit, the epic centerpiece track “The Mainline Song” began life as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of longtime live favorite “Electric Mainline” (“It was almost like giving the audience an intermission,” Pierce says) only to suddenly receive lyrics late in the process and get reborn as the album’s most exultant anthem. Even the seemingly simple country ballad “Crazy” had, in Pierce’s words, “its own perverse end.” Due to budgetary constraints, Pierce’s original vision of an orchestral serenade modeled after Lee Hazlewood and Jimmy Holliday gave way to a Mellotron-backed recording, and when he couldn’t decide between two different mixes of the song, he opted to use both in separate channels. But as a result, “Crazy” transcends the realm of pure country pastiche and takes on the undefinable, otherworldly quality that’s allowed Spiritualized to maintain their own lofty orbit for more than 30 years. “Most people edit down—they have 15, 16 tracks that they edit down to eight or nine for an album,” Pierce says. “I feel like I edit up: I haven’t got enough songs to ever edit something out of the equation, so I drag everything up to be the best it could be. And as some songs get better, the bar gets raised for the others.”

97.
Album • May 13 / 2022 • 99%
Conscious Hip Hop West Coast Hip Hop
Popular Highly Rated

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

98.
by 
Album • May 06 / 2022 • 87%
Alternative R&B Art Pop
Noteable

When the world shut down, the Diaz twins of Ibeyi were unsure when or if they’d be able to record again. With Lisa in London and Naomi in Paris, the future looked like a question mark. *Spell 31* became their answer. “We were coming out of two years of so much pain and violence that it felt like the most important thing was to heal,” Lisa tells Apple Music of the inspiration for their third LP. “It became so clear to us that we make albums for ourselves first. We made the songs we need.” Borders opened back up, the album started to materialize, and Naomi began to shuffle back and forth between her home and her sister’s as the pair worked with their longtime producer (and label head) Richard Russell. “I had to go to London a lot and quarantine every time. I was going there and doing a lot of PCRs and shit like that,” she recalls. Listening to *Spell 31*, though, it’s hard to tell that it came together under duress. The vocals are bewitching and the arrangements sublime, accentuating the spiritual elements that underscore Ibeyi’s music. There’s a shift in perspective here as well. Slowing down allowed them to take stock of their journey, both personal and professional. They sound more confident than ever and with a vision that is equally refined. “We felt that the new album and the new phase of our life had to be aligned with how we felt now,” Lisa says. “And so, we took time to write songs that healed us and also write songs to celebrate those last 10 years and the things that are important for us because we had never taken the time to do that either.” Below, Ibeyi explains how each track came together. **“Sangoma”** Lisa: “It felt like it was the perfect bridge between our last album and this new one. It also is telling you exactly what is going to happen through the album, because it’s a patchwork of moments that felt like healing to us. In the song, I said, ‘A church in open air,’ but I also say, ‘Yuri’s cards and the stars.’ And basically, Yuri is a friend of mine that read tarot to me a few days before we started the recording, and I asked her, ‘What are we supposed to be making?’ And she said, ‘A church in open air.’ She said it’s a church made of nothing—four pieces of wood, but it’s in open air and everybody meets there, and everybody heals, you included. The funny thing is, I said to Naomi, ‘Yuri just told me that we’re supposed to be making a church in open air.’ And she said, ‘Girl, a church in open air? OK, but where we can twerk?’ So, this is exactly what we are making—this is us in a nutshell.” **“O Inle”** Lisa: “‘O Inle’ is a song for Inle, who is the god of health and of healing. The idea was with ‘Sangoma,’ where we say, ‘*Somo milagrosas/curándoles el alma*,’ which means we’re made of miracles, and we cured their souls—*sangomas* are healers from South Africa. And so, we would pick you up and take you to the top of a mountain, and then with ‘O Inle,’ we’d be showering you with light and healing and asking Inle to heal all of us. And then, we are ready for ‘Made of Gold’ and for everything that comes after, which is Ibeyi 2.0.” **“Made of Gold”** Naomi: “We started doing it in Dorset because we were recording the album in London and in Dorset in two different houses. ‘Made of Gold’ was the first song we made all together. At one point, we were doing other songs and it was a week or two weeks later. And then, Richard \[Russell\] went to grab a coffee, and he bumped into Pa \[Salieu\]’s manager, and two days later he was there. It was really magical—he’s a special human being.” Lisa: “And this is the song that gave the name of the album also. Spell 31 is the name of the spell that is at the end of ‘Made of Gold.’” **“Sister 2 Sister”** Lisa: “‘Sister 2 Sister’ came out of a want to celebrate our sisterhood and our twinhood, which is crazy because we had made two albums prior and never really talked about being twins, which is the reason why we’re making music together. It became our little anthem. Also, it was a way to reference our past work because we referenced ‘River’ in this song, and we also say, ‘Here’s how you say Ibeyi.’ It felt like a way for us to say, ‘There’s been 10 years of us making this—you should know our name now.’ It was a way to flex and be proud of what we had done.” **“Creature (Perfect)”** Lisa: “‘Creature (Perfect)’ came from the pandemic and realizing that I had been trying to be perfect for so many people for so long and failing miserably at it, and that I was not happy. By trying to be perfect and morphing myself into what I thought every person in front of me wanted, I hadn’t discovered who I was fully. And so, it was my song to stop that and to embrace that I’m just a creature and embrace that. I can’t pursue this perfection because it was making me incredibly unhappy.” Naomi: “And also because \[perfection\] doesn’t exist.” **“Tears Are Our Medicine”** Naomi: “‘Tears Are Our Medicine’ is a way of saying find your way to release what you want to do. For some people, it’s tears—but just find your way to release everything that is happening to your body. During COVID, I think a lot of people finally did it, but I think if they had done it earlier, it would have been less painful. And so, it’s a way of saying let it go. It’s not a weakness, it’s a strength.” **“Foreign Country”** Naomi: “It was meant to be a song, and then we made this interlude, which I love. It\'s really genuine, and Pa is doing all the ad-libs. It was just having fun.” Lisa: “And there’s samples. There’s our mom talking about what it means to be twins, and there’s also a personal message from her. And there’s Naomi saying this sentence that we heard.” Naomi: “We didn’t see it. Richard, he was looking at something with his daughter, and it was saying the sister thing, the twin thing is like a foreign country. I said it \[on the interlude\], but we don’t recall the TV show.” **“Lavender & Red Roses”** Naomi: “Jorja \[Smith\], she’s a really good friend. It’s a relationship outside even of music. And she just came to see us, just to hear what we had done. We were not talking about making something together at all, and it happened. That’s what is beautiful. And in this song, nobody has a verse, but I feel like our voices go really well together, and it shows the intimacy of our relationship outside of music.” Lisa: “Also, ‘Lavender & Red Roses’ was one of the only songs \[Richard and I\] wrote while we were in the studio, so it was a really collaborative song that we all wrote together, which was a beautiful thing. Also, it’s funny because when I hear ‘Lavender & Red Roses,’ I realize how much we’ve grown as women. On our first album, we wrote a song called ‘Stranger/Lover,’ and at the end of this song, we say, ‘Come heal in my arms.’” Naomi: “And you’re not coming to heal in my arms anymore. Hell, no, you’re going to heal by yourself.” **“Rise Above” Lisa: “That’s a cover of a group called Black Flag, a punk group. And funnily enough, at the time, we didn’t know Black Flag. And Richard had probably listened to the song before going to the studio and thought, ‘Damn, the lyrics are really good.’ And he brought the lyrics out and gave them to us. We created the melody right there and then. Naomi was doing some of the beats on bass. The funny part is we still haven’t heard the original, which is crazy. We have heard a lot of Black Flag songs but not the original because it feels like we’re still trying to protect our version a little bit.” Naomi: “BERWYN is on this track. He listened to it, and he did his verse really fast. For him, listening to this song made him think of George Floyd, and it’s beautiful. I think the thing is, with this song, you can think about everything. It could be for women. It could be for minorities. It’s a song for the oppressed. It could be something small or something really big, but I think this song is just empowering.” **“Los Muertos”** Naomi: “We’re saying the names of our family members that are gone, friends of the family that are gone, some artists in it that have changed or that have impacted us in some way. We could have put way more artists, but we were not going to do a 20-minute song. It’s a cover of a song that our dad \[Angá Diaz\] made called ‘Rezos,’ but he was saying his own names, the names of the artists that he loved, musicians that he loved. In between each name, there’s a voice saying ‘ibae,’ and that’s his voice. We knew for a long time that we wanted to do our own version of it. And I think it’s beautiful because it’s just thinking about people we love and—” Lisa: “Allowing them to be a part of this incredible adventure. It’s like celebrating them through our music.”**

99.
Album • Mar 25 / 2022 • 99%
Conscious Hip Hop Southern Hip Hop
Popular Highly Rated

From his formative days associating with Raider Klan through his revealing solo projects *TA13OO* and *ZUU*, Denzel Curry has never been shy about speaking his mind. For *Melt My Eyez See Your Future*, the Florida native tackles some of the toughest topics of his MC career, sharing his existential notes on being Black and male in these volatile times. The album opens on a bold note with “Melt Session #1,” a vulnerable and emotional cut given further weight by jazz giant Robert Glasper’s plaintive piano. That hefty tone leads into a series of deeply personal and mindfully radical songs that explore modern crises and mental health with both thematic gravity and lyrical dexterity, including “Worst Comes to Worst” and the trap subversion “X-Wing.” Systemic violence leaves him reeling and righteous on “John Wayne,” while “The Smell of Death” skillfully mixes metaphors over a phenomenally fat funk groove. He draws overt and subtle parallels to jazz’s sociopolitical history, imagining himself in Freddie Hubbard’s hard-bop era on “Mental” and tapping into boom bap’s affinity for the genre on “The Ills.” Guests like T-Pain, Rico Nasty, and 6LACK help to fill out his vision, yielding some of the album’s highest highs.

Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date. Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap. To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.

100.
by 
Album • Jun 24 / 2022 • 94%
Art Pop Darkwave
Popular

There is a way a voice can cut through the fascia of reality, cleaving through habit into the raw nerve of experience. Nika Roza Danilova, the singer, songwriter, and producer who since 2009 has released music as Zola Jesus, wields a voice that does that. When you hear it, it is like you are being summoned -- not to somewhere new, but to a place that's already wrapped inside you, somewhere previously obscured from conscious experience. This place has been buried because it tends to hold pain, but it's also a gift, because once it's opened, once you're inside of it, it can show you the truth. Zola Jesus's new album, Arkhon, finds new ways of losing that submerged, stalled pain. Not long after she had started writing the songs that would comprise the record, Danilova found herself stuck in a creative barrens, a spell of writer's block more stifling than any she'd experienced before. "It got to the point where I couldn't even listen to music. Everything sounded the same," she says. On previous albums, Danilova had largely played the role of auteur, meticulously crafting every aspect of Zola Jesus's sound and look. This time, she realized that her habitual need for control was sealing her out of her art. When the frustration of being unable to create became intolerable, she took a leap of faith and reached out for help, something she had never done this early in an album’s lifetime. "At some point, I had to work with other people. I needed new blood. I needed somebody else." Danilova sent her demos to producer Randall Dunn, known for his work with Sunn O))) and on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for the film Mandy. She also began collaborating with drummer and percussionist Matt Chamberlain, whose prior work appears on albums by Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. His daring, askance patterning would come to help define the sound of the record. Relinquishing a degree of control over her music and hearing others contribute to it began to thaw the creative block that had kept her from working. "I felt that I was able to finally hear my music in a context that was broader than what I could do on my own," Danilova says. "I'm letting people interpret my musical ideas and my songs in a way that is supporting everything, but also expanding it into a sound that I never would have been able to think of on my own. That was so rewarding to hear." Arkhon runs the spectrum from songs whose weight lies in their bare simplicity, like "Desire," an elegiac piano composition about the end of a relationship that was recorded acoustically in a single take, to songs that pulse with dense, evolving structures, like "Sewn," a knotty and glittering electroacoustic composition written in total collaboration with Dunn and Chamberlain. Between those poles, "Dead & Gone" boasts a lush string arrangement by Danilova's friend and touring violist Louise Woodward; the overtones of her composition carve abundant, fertile space for optimism and healing to bloom in the midst of overwhelming grief. The towering, groove-oriented track "The Fall" routes Danilova's demo vocals through a lacerating vocoder effect as it seeks out the delights of shaking loose stagnant pain. Throughout “Lost,” tight, interlocking percussion and samples of a Slovenian folk choir propel narratives of collective despair and mutual comfort in kind. Through these turns, Arkhon reveals itself as an album whose power derives from abandon. Both its turmoils and its pleasures take root in the body, letting individual consciousness dissolve into the thick of the beat. "When I look back at my work, I see there's a theme where I fixate on my fear of the unknown," says Danilova. "That really came into fruition for this record, because I had to let go of so much control. I had to surrender to whatever the outcome would be. That used to be really hard for me, and now I had no other choice." In her creative process, Danilova instead began forging a relationship with the unknown. Rather than try to hold Arkhon in its entirety at every moment of its creation, she began focusing on the direct experience of making work with others, allowing for spontaneous moments of unselfconscious play. After over a decade of classical voice training, she found that this shift enabled her to ease into her singing voice in new ways, leading her to greater flexibility and agility. "I had gone through a deeply transformational process of inner growth. That annihilated a lot of tension in my voice, because my whole attachment to things changed," she says. That process bears out across the record in the way the voice takes off from itself, splits from its core, tendrils out into currents of partial language and electronically mediated noise. In the rush, Arkhon unearths buried tools for bearing grief, loss, and disappointment. The album's title means "power" or "ruler" in ancient Greek, but it also has a specific valence within Gnosticism. "Arkons are a Gnostic idea of power wielded through a flawed god," says Danilova. "They taint and tarnish humanity, keeping them corrupted instead of letting them find their harmonious selves. I do feel like we are living in an arkhonic time; these negative influences are weighing extremely heavy on all of us. We're in a time of arkhons. There's power in naming that." Despite the darkness curled inside reality, there is power, too, in surrendering to what can't be pinned down, to the wild unfurling of the world in all its unforeseeable motion. That letting go is the crux of Arkhon, which marks a new way of moving and making for Zola Jesus. "There is a moment where you stop fighting with yourself. That's when things can really happen," Danilova says. "I was disarmed in a way where I just let the process make the record. I could enjoy being in the moment, putting that into the music and letting it unravel or evolve in its own way. To let it have its own story that I only had a part in telling."