Rough Trade's Albums of the Year 2019

A raw and scintillating state-of-Dublin address.

Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering’s fourth album as Weyes Blood conjures the feeling of a beautiful object on a shelf just out of reach: You want to touch it, but you can’t, and so you do the next best thing—you dream about it, ache for it, and then you ache some more. Grand, melodramatic, but keenly self-aware, the music here pushes Mering’s \'70s-style chamber pop to its cinematic brink, suffusing stories of everything from fumbled romance (the McCartney-esque “Everyday”) to environmental apocalypse (“Wild Time”) with a dreamy, foggy almost-thereness both gorgeous and profoundly unsettling. A self-described “nostalgic futurist,” Mering doesn’t recreate the past so much as demonstrate how the past is more or less a fiction to begin with, a story we love hearing no matter how sad its unreachability makes us. Hence the album’s centerpiece, “Movies,” which wonders—gorgeously, almost religiously—why life feels so messy by comparison. As to the thematic undercurrent of apocalypse, well, if extinction is as close as science says it is, we might as well have something pretty to play us out.

The phantom zone, the parallax, the upside down—there is a rich cultural history of exploring in-between places. Through her latest, Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) has, too, designed her own universe to soulfully navigate life’s mysteries. Maneuvering through a space-time continuum, she intriguingly plays the role of melodic, sometimes melancholic, anthropologist. Tellingly, Mering classifies Titanic Rising as the Kinks meet WWII or Bob Seger meets Enya. The latter captures the album’s willful expansiveness (“You can tell there’s not a guy pulling the strings in Enya’s studio,” she notes, admiringly). The former relays her imperative to connect with listeners. “The clarity of Bob Seger is unmistakable. I’m a big fan of conversational songwriting,” she adds. “I just try to do that in a way that uses abstract imagery as well.” “An album is like a Rubik’s Cube,” she says. “Sometimes you get all the dimensions—the lyrics, the melody, the production—to line up. I try to be futuristic and ancient at once, which is a difficult alchemy. It’s taken a lot of different tries to get it right.” As concept-album as it may sound, it’s also a devoted exercise in realism, albeit occasionally magical. Here, the throwback-cinema grandeur of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” gracefully coexists with the otherworldly title track, an ominous instrumental. Titanic Rising, written and recorded during the first half of 2018, is the culmination of three albums and years of touring: stronger chops and ballsier decisions. It’s an achievement in transcendent vocals and levitating arrangements—one she could reach only by flying under the radar for so many years. “I used to want to belong,” says the L.A. based musician. “I realized I had to forge my own path. Nobody was going to do that for me. That was liberating. I became a Joan of Arc solo musician.” The Weyes Blood frontwoman grew up singing in gospel and madrigal choirs. “Classical and Renaissance music really influenced me,” says Mering, who first picked up a guitar at age 8. (Listen closely to Titanic Rising, and you’ll also hear the jazz of Hoagy Carmichael mingle with the artful mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the monomyth of scholar Joseph Campbell.) “Something to Believe,” a confessional that makes judicious use of the slide guitar, touches on that cosmological upbringing. “Belief is something all humans need. Shared myths are part of our psychology and survival,” she says. “Now we have a weird mishmash of capitalism and movies and science. There have been moments where I felt very existential and lost.” As a kid, she filled that void with Titanic. (Yes, the movie.) “It was engineered for little girls and had its own mythology,” she explains. Mering also noticed that the blockbuster romance actually offered a story about loss born of man’s hubris. “It’s so symbolic that The Titanic would crash into an iceberg, and now that iceberg is melting, sinking civilization.” Today, this hubris also extends to the relentless adoption of technology, at the expense of both happiness and attention spans. The track “Movies” marks another Titanic-related epiphany, “that movies had been brainwashing people and their ideas about romantic love.” To that end, Mering has become an expert at deconstructing intimacy. Sweeping and string-laden, “Andromeda” seems engineered to fibrillate hearts. “It’s about losing your interest in trying to be in love,” she says. “Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity. There is a feeling of needing to be saved, and that’s a lot to ask of people.” Its companion track, “Everyday,” “is about the chaos of modern dating,” she says, “the idea of sailing off onto your ships to nowhere to deal with all your baggage.” But Weyes Blood isn’t one to stew. Her observations play out in an ethereal saunter: far more meditative than cynical. “I experience reality on a slower, more hypnotic level,” she says. “I’m a more contemplative kind of writer.” To Mering, listening and thinking are concurrent experiences. “There are complicated influences mixed in with more relatable nostalgic melodies,” she says. “In my mind my music feels so big, a true production. I’m not a huge, popular artist, but I feel like one when I’m in the studio. But it’s never taking away from the music. I’m just making a bigger space for myself.”

It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned —for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider’s back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date. This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential studio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District. Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick — Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxophone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Klinghoffer on guitars — and were added to the album, “one by one, one on one”. The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon’s previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a relatively drastic change in approach. Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum as well as 2016s Crab Day, Cate Le Bon’s solo work — and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) — has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. The multifaceted nature of Le Bon’s art — its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious — is evident right down to the album’s very name. “People hear the word ‘reward’ and they think that it’s a positive word” says Le Bon, “and to me it’s quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it’s really indicative of the times we’re living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning.” The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: “Always keep your hand behind the chisel.”

Vanishing Twin is songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, synth/guitar player Phil MFU and visual artist/film maker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion; and on this album they have made their first artistic statement for the ages. Some of its great power comes from liberation. The album was produced by Lucas in a number of non-standard, non-studio settings. ‘KRK (At Home In Strange Places)’ summons up the spirit of Sun Ra’s Lanquidity and Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio was simply recorded on an iPhone during a live set which crackled with psychic connectivity on the Croatian island of Krk. The magical Morricone-esque lounge of ‘You Are Not an Island’, the blissed-out Jean-Claude Vannier style arrangement of ‘Invisible World’ and burbling sci fi funk ode to a 1972 cult French animation, ‘Plane te Sauvage’, were all recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury. The only two outsiders to work on the recording were ‘6th member’ and engineer Syd Kemp and trusted friend Malcolm Catto, band leader of the spiritual jazz/future funk outfit The Heliocentrics, who mixed seven of the tracks (with Lucas taking care of the other three). Vanishing Twin formed in 2015 - their first LP, Choose Your Own Adventure, which came out on Soundway in 2016; followed by the darker, more abstract, mostly instrumental Dream By Numbers EP in 2017. The band explored their more experimental tendencies on the Magic And Machines tape released by Blank Editions in 2018, an improvised session recorded in the dead of night, offering a glimpse into their practice of deep listening, near band telepathy, and ritually improvised sound making. These sessions formed the basis of The Age Of Immunology.

The title of this group’s second album may suggest a mystical journey, but what you hear across these nine tracks is a thrilling and direct collaboration that speaks to the mastery of the individual members: London jazz supremo Shabaka Hutchings delivers commanding saxophone parts, keyboardist Dan Leavers supplies immersive electronic textures, and drummer Max Hallett provides a welter of galvanizing rhythms. The trio records under pseudonyms—“King Shabaka,” “Danalogue,” and “Betamax” respectively—and that fantastical edge is also part of their music, which looks to update the cosmic jazz legacy of 1970s outliers such as Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. With the only vocals a spoken-word poem on the grinding “Blood of the Past,” the lead is easily taken by Hutchings’ urgent riffs. Tracks such as “Summon the Fire” have a delirious velocity that builds and peaks repeatedly, while the skittering beat on “Super Zodiac” imports the production techniques of Britain’s grime scene. There’s a science-fiction sheen to slower jams like “Astral Flying,” which makes sense—this is evocative time-travel music, after all. Even as you pick out the reference points, which also include drum \'n\' bass and psychedelic rock, they all interlock to chart a sound for the future.

Beck’s 14th full-length album takes its name from a special feature found in the classic 1979 video game Asteroids. “I remember this point where you’re gonna get killed in the game,” he tells Apple Music, “and \[hitting\] this button would make you disappear and reappear somewhere safe. Just in general, I think we could all use that button.” *Hyperspace* finds the pioneering singer-songwriter joining with Pharrell Williams (who co-wrote and co-produced seven of its 11 tracks) for a set of surrealist synth-pop that feels worlds away from anywhere, let alone the directness of 2017’s *Colors*. Where that record felt like it might burst at the seams, Beck luxuriates in negative space and ambiguity here. “Stratosphere”—which features well-hidden backup vocals from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin—sounds like it was recorded at that exact altitude, its synths coming and going like condensation on glass. The equally haunting “Uneventful Days” feels like a message from the in-between. “I couldn’t quite place what it was,” he says of the song. “It’s like those moments in the aftermath of a period of time. Like a new job in a new town. You’re standing in an empty apartment, staring out the window at a palm tree.”

slowthai knew the title of his album long before he wrote a single bar of it. He knew he wanted the record to speak candidly about his upbringing on the council estates of Northampton, and for it to advocate for community in a country increasingly mired in fear and insularity. Three years since the phrase first appeared in his breakout track ‘Jiggle’, Tyron Frampton presents his incendiary debut ‘Nothing Great About Britain’. Harnessing the experiences of his challenging upbringing, slowthai doesn’t dwell in self-pity. From the album’s title track he sets about systematically dismantling the stereotypes of British culture, bating the Royals and lampooning the jingoistic bluster that has ultimately led to Brexit and a surge in nationalism. “Tea, biscuits, the roads: everything we associate with being British isn’t British,” he cries today. “What’s so great about Britain? The fact we were an empire based off of raping and pillaging and killing, and taking other people’s culture and making it our own?” ‘Nothing Great About Britain’ serves up a succession of candid snapshots of modern day British life; drugs, disaffection, depression and the threat of violence all loom in slowthai’s visceral verses, but so too does hope, love and defiance. Standing alongside righteous anger and hard truths, it’s this willingness to appear vulnerable that makes slowthai such a compelling storyteller, and this debut a vital cultural document, testament to the healing power of music. As slowthai himself explains, “Music to me is the biggest connector of people. It don’t matter what social circle you’re from, it bonds people across divides. And that’s why I do music: to bridge the gap and bring people together.”

It’s not as if Iggy Pop has ever really needed to prove anything. If 2016’s *Post Pop Depression*—which he made with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and Dean Fertita, and Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders—showed that he could still cause a ruckus, *Free* shows he’s still more than capable of keeping his audience on its toes. Iggy has always attempted to strike this balance between music for the body and music for the mind: As far back as The Stooges’ first albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a meditative raga like “We Will Fall” would counter the scrappy, visceral force of “No Fun,” or a track like “Fun House” would tack left with Ornette Coleman-inspired saxophone runs. *Free* finds him tapping those exploratory instincts even more deeply. “I wanna be free,” he says with a matter-of-fact inflection as a cinematic trumpet glistens over the moody, beat-less composition that opens the 72-year-old artist\'s 18th solo studio LP. That title track clearly sets the album\'s goalposts—or lack thereof. With the assistance of co-producers and collaborators Leron Thomas and Noveller, Iggy experiments with all kinds of new depths, playing with jazz, rock, electronics, dissonance, poetry, and even a little of the camp he embraced on 2012\'s *Après*, his collection of loungey pop interpretations. “Sonali,” one of *Free*\'s most robust, complex songs, juggles atmospheric synth notes with some inhumanly quick, off-kilter drums while Iggy softly croons lyrics that would almost sound like a stream of consciousness were it not for the fun images that emerge from his linguistic puzzles. (Enjoy untangling “To park the car, we must find parking/Or spend the day on the freeway/Stay in your lane/It\'s what you want/And yes, I approve/\'Cause if I run out of gas/You\'ll be my excuse.\") Though tracks like “Glow in the Dark” and “We Are the People” keep the arrangements to a minimum, there’s an incandescence to Iggy’s performance that’s full of energy—a spark of giddy excitement, as if he’s asking, “What’ll happen if I turn *this* knob? Say it *this* way?” It’s all a lead-up to his fantastic recitation of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” For someone who kicked off punk five decades earlier, and who has hardly let up for a moment in the intervening years, the line “Old age should burn and rave at close of day” basically belongs to him now.

'Mantra Moderne' is a stunning, contemporary masterpiece that fuses Anatolian Psychedelia, Brazilian Tropicalia, 60’s European pop and American jazz. A must for fans of Khruangbin, Portishead, Arthur Verocai, Goat, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, Os Mutantes, Cortex and co. The duo is formed of Kit Martin, who lives between London and France and plays all instruments on the album, and Merve Erdem, vocalist and multi-disciplinary artist from Istanbul, now based in London. This is their debut album. The album explores universal themes such as love, loss, decay, language and ideology, mixing three different languages: English, Turkish and French. Written and recorded by the duo - Kit composed all the songs and Merve wrote the lyrics - in rural France during 2018, each song was completed within a 12-hour window, pawning contemplation for spontaneity. Dubbed by Kit and Merve as ‘lo-fi-hi-fi’ in reference to the high-end tube equipment that helped it find its way to 8-track cassette tape. The style owes its sound to narrow tape width, valve distortion, spring reverb, the mixture of high end gear with lo-fi equipment as well as a disregard to the norms of hi-fi studio techniques. All instruments were analogue and no samples were used. The instruments that are used range from tablas to darbukas, balalaikas to ouds, MS20 synths to Farfisa organs and a lot of cuica. The mixing techniques were done on-the-fly, tracking immediately to tape: compression, EQ, delay and reverb; meaning mixing could not be revisited!

Vinyl or CD in UK/Europe go to decorrecords.com Everywhere else thedelines.com

“We all get lost, but we all come back,” Crumb’s Lila Ramani sings on the title track to *Jinx*, providing a succinct mission statement for one of 2019’s most bewitching indie-rock debuts. The New York-via-Boston quartet douse their songs in luxuriant *Dark Side of the Moon Safari* atmosphere, but a taut, in-the-pocket rhythm section and Ramani’s velveteen voice serve as beacons that guide you through the haze. *Jinx* conjures the sensation of drifting through a dream that’s equally nostalgic and unnerving, with Ramani’s dazed delivery falling somewhere between resigned and restless. On “Ghostride,” she blithely details the ennui-inducing minutiae of a long road trip as a metaphor for being trapped in a dysfunctional relationship, sheepishly admitting, “The radio reminds me I’m alive.” But Crumb isn\'t afraid to disrupt their hypnotic reveries with abrupt shifts in course—\"Part III” begins as a blissfully narcotic Stereolab sway, before coming to a dead stop and free-falling into a psychedelic jazz abyss. “It’s just a feeling,” Ramani repeats just as she’s about to disappear into the void, but *Jinx*’s ambiguous beauty lies in the fact that you’re never exactly sure how you should be feeling.

Big Thief had only just finished work on their 3rd album, U.F.O.F. – “the celestial twin” – days before in a cabin studio in the woods of Washington State. Now it was time to birth U.F.O.F.’s sister album – “the earth twin” – Two Hands. 30 miles west of El Paso, surrounded by 3,000 acres of pecan orchards and only a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, Big Thief (a.k.a. Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia) set up their instruments as close together as possible to capture their most important collection of songs yet. Where U.F.O.F.layered mysterious sounds and effects for levitation, Two Hands grounds itself on dried-out, cracked desert dirt. In sharp contrast to the wet environment of the U.F.O.F. session, the southwestern Sonic Ranch studio was chosen for its vast desert location. The 105-degree weather boiled away any clinging memories of the green trees and wet air of the previous session. Two Hands had to be completely different — an album about the Earth and the bones beneath it. The songs were recorded live with almost no overdubs. All but two songs feature entirely live vocal takes, leaving Adrianne’s voice suspended above the mix in dry air, raw and vulnerable as ever. “Two Hands has the songs that I’m the most proud of; I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old,” says Adrianne. “Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this. It’s already bare-bones.” Lyrically this can be felt in the poetic blur of the internal and external. These are political songs without political language. They explore the collective wounds of our Earth. Abstractions of the personal hint at war, environmental destruction, and the traumas that fuel it. Across the album, there are genuine attempts to point the listener towards the very real dangers that face our planet. When Adrianne sings “Please wake up,” she’s talking directly to the audience. Engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who were both behind U.F.O.F., capture the live energy as instinctually and honestly as possible. Sarlo teamed up with James Krivchenia to mix the album, where they sought to emphasize raw power and direct energy inherent in the takes. The journey of a song from the stage to the record is often a difficult one. Big Thief’s advantage is their bond and loving centre as a chosen family. They spend almost 100% of their lives together working towards a sound that they all agree upon. A band with this level of togetherness is increasingly uncommon. If you ask drummer James Krivchenia, bassist Max Oleartchik or guitarist Buck Meek how they write their parts, they will describe — passionately — the experience of hearing Adrianne present a new song, listening intently for hints of parts that already exist in the ether and the undertones to draw out with their respective instruments. With raw power and intimacy, Two Hands folds itself gracefully into Big Thief’s impressive discography. This body of work grows deeper and more inspiring with each new album.

leaving meaning. is the first Swans album to be released since I dissolved the line up of musicians that constituted Swans from 2010 – 2017. Swans is now comprised of a revolving cast of musicians, selected for both their musical and personal character, chosen according to what I intuit best suits the atmosphere in which I’d like to see the songs I’ve written presented. In collaboration with me, the musicians, through their personality, skill and taste, contribute greatly to the arrangement of the material. Michael Gira – Vocals, words, acoustic/electric guitar, production. I started Swans in NYC in 1982 and have been the primary songwriter, singer and producer throughout the years. In the early years I played bass, but later switched to guitar. During the years of Swans hiatus (1999 – 2010), I released several albums by and toured with a group called Angels of Light. Kristof Hahn – Lap steel, various guitars throughout, backing vocals, generous and insightful advice on mixes and arrangements. Kristof first became involved with Swans in 1989, was a principal contributor to Angels of Light, and a core Swans member 2010 – 2017. Kristof’s other musical ventures have included the Rock ‘n’ Roll Noir band Les Hommes Sauvages and Kool Kings (with Alex Chilton). He’s currently working on an instrumental record for Lawrence English’s label, Room 40. He holds a Masters Degree in Political Science, and when Swans doesn’t pay the bills, he translates books for a living. Kristof’s presence, on and off tape, is pivotal to this record. Kristof lives in Berlin, Germany. Larry Mullins - Drums, vibes, orchestral percussion, Mellotron, various keyboards, backing vocals. Larry (AKA Toby Dammit) is a trained symphonic percussionist and all around consummate musician. He played through the 90s with Iggy Pop and later with The Stooges. He played with Swans in the late 90s and was a main contributor to Angels of Light. He is rumored to have been involved with The Residents. His varied and numerous credits also include a stint with Silver Apples as well as recently, Shakespeare’s Sister. His current main job is playing keyboards with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I decided immediately to ask Larry to contribute to Leaving Meaning after watching the German TV series Babylon Berlin, and suddenly, unbeknownst to me, there was Larry as the main focus of various cabaret scenes, drumming behind a huge kick drum in his inimitable style. After laughing in shock for perhaps half an hour, I decided to contact him. We hadn’t been in close touch for a long time and I’m elated I reached out. Larry lives in Berlin, Germany. Yoyo Röhm - Electric bass, double bass, various keyboards, piano, backing vocals. Yoyo came to my attention through his work with Kristof and Larry in Berlin. In addition to his excellent bass playing, Yoyo’s ears were invaluable in helping to sort out many of the arrangements. Yoyo plays with numerous left field musicians around Berlin and also works with Mick Harvey on his Serge Gainsbourg recordings and tours. Yoyo, Larry, Kristof and I rehearsed in Berlin for 3 weeks prior to recording. Yoyo is a true Berliner – gruff and determined on the outside, a marshmallow inside. He was a great musical resource for this record. The Necks – (Chris Abrahams - piano, organ; Tony Buck - drums, percussion; Lloyd Swanton - double bass). I have been an avid Necks fan since I first saw them perform at a Big Ears Festival in 2010. They subsequently played with Swans at a few shows in Australia. Their live performances and recordings are just about any superlative you can think of – mesmerizing, transcendent, sublime. Their music is entirely improvisational – it’s my understanding that they have no idea what they’re going to play before they start. And yet, mostly using rudimentary jazz trio instrumentation, they manage to fashion burgeoning and ever-evolving, immersive clouds of sound that utterly envelop the listener as the music unfolds. I’m beyond honored and humbled that they agreed to perform the basic tracks for 2 of my songs (The Nub, and Leaving Meaning). Their performances were then delicately, and (I hope!) tastefully further orchestrated upon in Berlin. Tony lives in Berlin, and also played drums on the song Some New Things. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff– Choral backing vocals. Anna is blessed with a soaring voice, lyrical acuity and increasing facility with the church organ. I was impressed recently to learn that she often travels around Europe and visits churches unannounced, where she talks her way into being allowed to use the resident organ – some of them rather massive, I imagine – and plays and explores for hours. Her searing records and live shows reflect the courage of her imagination and have garnered her increasing, much deserved recognition. Maria is an accomplished Swedish cinematographer and director of photography. In 2017 I heard Anna and Maria singing together at a sound check for a special song they were doing in Anna’s set, was instantly enthralled, and resolved at that moment to ask them to participate together on a Swans recording. I’m delighted they agreed to come to Berlin and record for me. They were a joy to work with! They live in Scandinavia. Ben Frost - Guitar, synthesizers, sound manipulations. Ben’s adventurous sound-craftings, sometimes harrowing and sometimes delicate and quite musical, and his powerful live shows, have afforded him much recognition of late. I’ve also been highly impressed with his soundtrack work for the HBO series, Dark. He’s an extremely talented arranger and composer. His mission for this record was intentionally ill defined. I basically wanted his ears and sensibility, with no particular part or instrument in mind. I arrived at his studio in Reykjavik, Iceland, put up the songs, and he played what he thought a song needed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover his unique approach to the electric guitar as well as his synth work. Ben also was quite helpful with arrangement and mixing ideas. Ben lives in Iceland. Baby Dee – Lead vocal on The Nub, supported by her friends Fay Christen and Ida Albertje Michels, and Jennifer Gira. Dee has released numerous records (one produced by Bonnie Prince Billie, I think), and if you don’t know them, you should! The first time I saw her she was riding a unicycle in circles outside the now-defunct Avant club, Tonic, in NYC, playing a ukulele (or accordion?) and singing with great mirth. I saw her set that night and was won over. She’s since toured with Swans several times. Her music could loosely be called neo cabaret, but more accurately she’s totally unique and a great performer and songwriter, graced with a powerful voice and high-end ability on the piano, accordion and more. I wrote The Nub specifically for her to sing. I was stymied for words to the main guitar figure to the song, and suddenly she popped into my mind, floating through the universe in diapers, sucking milk from the stars. The song wrote itself. Dee lives in The Netherlands. Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost – Jeremy: Santur, hi-hat, fiddlesticks, accordion, engineering; Heather: Stroh violin, violin, viola, fiddlesticks, engineering. Together, Jeremy and Heather comprise the band A Hawk and a Hacksaw. (Jeremy played at one time with the bands Neutral Milk Hotel and Beirut). Again, if you don’t know their music, you should! They’ve released several records. It’s Balkan/Gypsy influenced, somewhat psychedelicized, with great singing, playing and melodies. They’re each multi-instrumentalists and they intrepidly travel the world, both touring and simply exploring the Balkans, in search of adventure and master musicians of the region, some of whom they simply befriend, others whom they record. They toured with Swans a while ago, and I’ve had it in the back of my mind to ask them to record on a record since. I travelled to their home studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, presented the songs, and did the same thing I did with Ben – I said, “Now what?” You can hear them on several songs on the record, sometimes subtly, at other times more pronounced. In any event, it’s great to have such a pair of wonderful humans on the record. ADDITIONAL MUSICIANS: Dana Schechter – Dana played bass on the song Some New Things. Dana was a core member of Angels of Light. Her current band is Insect Ark. It’s rather heavy and great. Will be working with Dana more soon in the future and very pleased we reconnected recently. Jennifer Gira – Backing vocals throughout and cameo vocal on Sunfucker. Jennifer has sung backing vocals on the past few Swans albums as well as lead vocal on the song When Will I Return? on the last Swans album, The Glowing Man. She’s also of invaluable help on mixing and arrangement decisions. Cassis Staudt – Accordion and harmonium. Cassis was a core member of Angels of Light. She moved to Berlin some time ago and we lost touch. Cassis is a composer of music for films in Berlin. I’m very happy to be working with her again. Norman Westberg – Electric guitar. Norman played on a few key moments on this record. Norman has been in and out of Swans since the beginning (mostly in) and was a core Swans member in 2010 – 2017. We’ll continue to work together into the future, absolutely. Norman releases solo instrumental records through Lawrence English’s Room 40 label. We’re touring (each solo) together in Eastern Europe soon. Christopher Pravdica - Bass guitar, sounds. Chris played at pivotal moments on this record. He was a core Swans member in 2010 – 2017. We’ll continue to work together in the future, absolutely. Chris has recently been enlisted by Jamie Stewart for his band Xiu Xiu. Phil Puleo – Phil played hammer dulcimer on the song Amnesia. This might be considered a severe under utilization of his considerable talents as a drummer, but there’s more to come quite soon. Phil was a core member in Swans 2010 – 2017 and played as a member of Swans in the late 90s, and contributed to Angels of Light. Thor Harris - percussion, trumpet, clarinet, sounds, bells, gizmos, additional vibes. Thor drove up from Austin to record for me at Heather and Jeremy’s place in Albuquerque. Always a highpoint to be in the presence of this committed musician and friend. Thor was a core member of Swans in 2010 – 2016 as well as Angels of Light. Certainly more to come! Thor has his own happening combo, Thor and friends, and they make seductive and beautiful records and tour often. He also has recently been recruited by Jamie for Xiu Xiu. Paul Wallfisch – Paul played piano to great effect here and there on the record. Paul was a touring member of Swans in 2017. He works with the glorious human chanteuse Little Annie. He’s also a musical director for theater productions in Germany, and recently landed a very fancy-pants job as musical director/composer for a theater production at a historical theater in Vienna. Thanks to All!!!! MG

Marika Hackman’s second album, 2017’s *I’m Not Your Man*, gave the English singer-songwriter a lot to reflect on. “Being so open about my sexuality and having a response from young women saying it helped them to realize who they are and come out—that isn’t something that just washes over you,” she tells Apple Music. “I hold that in my heart and it’s very much a driving force.” That momentum can be felt throughout Hackman’s third album as she explores sex between two women (“all night”), inhabiting the mind of her ex to confront a breakup (“send my love”), and masturbation (“hand solo”) with bracing candor and propulsive synths. “Coming to this record I thought, ‘All right. I’ll do it, I\'ll be more open.’” Let Hackman guide you through her darkly comic journey of what it means to be human, track by track. **“wanderlust”** “I wrote this song in a matter of hours, and this is the first recording ever of it. It’s just me at the kitchen table with the mic on a pair of Apple headphones, the old ones. It’s been sitting in my bank for a while; I didn’t want it on the last album because it felt too similar to my first and I wanted to pull away from that. When I wrote ‘the one’ \[the following track\], it felt like this would be the perfect opener to lull the listener into a false sense of security about where I’d gone with my music this time around, like, ‘Oh, it’s the old Marika that I know and love.’” **“the one”** “This is the first song I wrote specifically for this album. It really set the tone and surprised me. I deal with a lot through humor; I think it’s a good way of connecting with people. It invites them in. The track was born out of feeling frustrated: I’ve been doing this for a long time and sometimes I wish I was bigger. It was taking that as a concept and exaggerating the fuck out of it to make this big joke. I don’t like this part of myself—I don’t like being frustrated or jealous—so I wanted to push that feeling as far as I could. I turned it into something external that I can sit back and laugh at.” **“all night”** “The intention with this song was to openly explore sex between two women in a celebratory, honest way. Because that’s my experience of sex, so that’s the only way I can talk about it. The whole ‘kissing, eating, fucking, moaning’ part, that was saved in the notes on my phone for a really long time. I get a lot of ideas when I’m on buses if I’ve been on a night out. I had this idea about describing your mouth as being something just for eating and moaning. Then you flip that and the eating becomes the fucking and kissing and moaning. I like wordplay and to pretend it’s going somewhere then take you somewhere else.” **“blow”** “I wanted every instrument to have a purpose in the part that it was playing, not just be a wash of color or for some atmosphere. On this track there’s funky basslines interlocking with wild drum parts and then a space where the jagged, gnarly guitar lines stick out. I’ve never written like that before, and I think that’s because my confidence in playing guitar has really jumped up in the last couple of years from touring.” **“i’m not where you are”** “One of the fans summed this up perfectly: ‘It’s the anthem for the emotionally detached that we never had before.’ That was exactly what I was aiming to do, but I hadn’t put it in those words. There’s an aloofness that people often attribute to being unavailable that’s kinda sexy and cool. And it’s not at all. It’s horrible to feel like you can’t just let go and throw yourself into something because of fear. You often hear songs about people who are so hard to get; I wanted to write it from the other perspective of someone who’s like, ‘I don’t know how to connect. I don’t feel on the same level as most people I meet.’ That’s very lonely.” **“send my love”** “This is about the end of a relationship with my ex, Amber \[of The Japanese House\], and it’s me inhabiting her. I was using her character as the mouthpiece for me to say how I was feeling about myself when we were breaking up. I can only share my experience by saying, ‘This must be how you feel about me right now because this is how I feel about myself.’ And then she listens to it and thinks the lyrics are really sad, because she was like, ‘That’s not how I view you or ever viewed you.’ The lyrics are pretty brutal. There’re all of those elements of nostalgia and regret—that’s what happens when things come to an end. When I listen to the song, I can feel that streak of self-loathing, self-hatred, and sadness, but it’s just a moment in time. That was how I was feeling then, and things change. We’re like best friends now.” **“hand solo”** “One lyric that will get overlooked because I don’t think many people are gonna understand the reference, but the first half of the song is looking at old wives’ tales about masturbation. One of them I read is that you get hairy hands if you masturbate too much. There’s a line in there that says, ‘Oh, monkey glove’—it’s talking about having hairy hands. It’s quite abstract but it sounds sexual as well. It sounds like something you might call your vagina. And it’s quite gross, that song. ‘Dark meat, skin pleat’—it’s all quite visceral. My favorite lyric is obviously ‘Under patriarchal law, I’m gonna die a virgin.’ That is insane, that is crazy! I feel like people don’t take my sexual experiences as real. The song is also a massive fuck-you, because it’s very funny and empowered with a bit of sass.” **“conventional ride”** “This song is about that classic thing where you feel like a straight girl might think she’s into it, but she’s fulfilling some sort of fantasy. Which is fine—that’s something that should be explored—but it’s about being open and honest about that with whoever you’re sleeping with. This is about me being like, ‘Maybe you just need a conventional ride. You’re not really into this. You started off thinking you were, but you’re pulling me along.’ The song has that feeling of momentum, being pulled along by something when it’s not quite right.” **“come undone”** “I was listening to a lot of Crumb and I thought, ‘They’ve got some funky basslines. I wanna write a funky bassline!’ That’s often how a lot of my creative process starts: ‘I wanna do that too.’ Like a petulant child! I wrote the bassline and I thought there’s not enough room for anything to go over the top of this, but I kept with it and wrote a nice drum beat that locked in with this. It’s pretty simple, letting that bassline sing with a flourish of guitar pulling your attention left and right.” **“hold on”** “This song was written on a little MIDI keyboard. I’d never written a song like that before. I went for something a bit like Massive Attack or Radiohead, and it swept off into this big beast that I didn’t really anticipate. It’s a sad song; I was going through a really severe bout of depression that I hadn’t felt intensely before. Maybe that’s why the lyrics don’t make that much sense. It’s like a big exhale. I think I might explore that style of writing a bit more—that was my first foray, and it would be exciting to see if I can do a bit more electronic.” **“any human friend”** “I knew immediately this was going to be the last song on the record because it has this optimism to it. It’s a moment to just breathe and let it wash over you. There’s a very conscious decision right at the end when the acoustic guitar comes in repeating the riff ’til it floats away to bring it back to how ‘wanderlust’ starts and lands it again back into the real world. On this album there’s quite a lot of psychedelic segues between the songs and there’s not much room to breathe; it’s quite intense. Then it spits you out and there’s this tiny little anchor at the end, pulling you back into the room.”

“hand solo,” “blow,” “conventional ride”—these are just a few of the cheeky offerings off Any Human Friend, the new album from rock provocateur Marika Hackman. “This whole record is me diving into myself and peeling back the skin further and further, exposing myself in quite a big way. It can be quite sexual,” Hackman says. “It’s blunt, but not offensive. It’s mischievous.” There’s also depth to her carnal knowledge: Any Human Friend is ultimately about how, as she puts it, “We all have this lightness and darkness in us.” Hackman lifted the album’s title from a documentary about four-year-olds interacting with dementia patients in senior homes. At one point, two little girls confer about their experience there, with one musing on how it’s great to make “any human friend,” whether old or young. “When she said that it really touched a nerve in me,” says the London-based musician. “It’s that childlike view where we really accept people, are comfortable with their differences.” Such introspection has earned Hackman her name. Her folkie 2015 debut, We Slept at Last, was heralded for being nuanced and atmospheric. She really found her footing with her last release, I’m Not Your Man—which earned raves from The Guardian, Stereogum, and Pitchfork—and its sybaritic, swaggering hit “Boyfriend,” which boasts of seducing away a straight guy’s girlfriend. “Her tactile lyrics keep the songs melodically strong and full of surprises,” remarked Pitchfork. We’ll say! “I’m a hopeless romantic,” she explains. “I search for love and sexual experience, but also I’m terrified by it.” Hackman is a Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey for the inclusive generation: unbounded by musical genre, a preternatural lyricist and tunesmith who isn’t afraid to go there. (Even her cover art, which finds Hackman nearly nude while cradling a baby pig, is a nod to Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s unfiltered photos of mothers just after they gave birth.) To that end, “hand solo” extorts the virtues of masturbation and features Hackman’s favorite line, “Under patriarchal law, I’m going to die a virgin.” The song “blow” paints a picture of social excess. And “conventional ride” thumbs its nose at heterosexual sex through “the trope a lot of gay women experience: sleeping with someone, then it becomes apparent you’re kind of an experiment.” With Any Human Friend, boundaries are no longer an issue for her. “I sent ‘all night’ to my parents and they were quite shocked,” she says of the paean to the flesh, dressed as a sweetly harmonic track. “Why does it sound shocking coming out of my mouth? Women have sex with each other, and it seems to me we aren’t as freely allowed to discuss that as men are. But at no point am I disrespecting the women I’m having sex with. It can be fucking sexy without banging people over the head with a frying pan. It’s sexy sex.” Sharing intimacies with her parents sorta makes sense when you consider she wrote “the one”—a portrait of the artist amid identity crisis—and several other songs in her bedroom at their house, where she crashed after a painful break-up with a longtime girlfriend. “‘send my love’ is a proper breakup song,” she says of the levitating, string-laden track. “I actually wrote that in a moment of grief. It’s a strange take on it because I’m imagining myself as my ex-girlfriend.” She penned its companion track, “i’m not where you are,” a melodic earworm about emotional detachment from relationships, roughly six months later. “I think because my life was flipped upside down, it was taking me longer to write,” she says. “This was definitely the hardest process I’ve gone through to make a record.” She wrote the album over a year, recording a few songs at a time with co-producer David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx). “I stopped being able to sleep properly,” she says. “I was waking up in the middle of the night to write songs.” But the longer recording process also meant that Hackman had the time to experiment in the studio, especially with electronic songs. She was inspired by Wrench’s vast synth collection, many of which she used throughout Any Human Friend (“the synths give the album a nice shine”), notably on “hold on,” a deep dive into ennui expressed as ethereal R&B. She also switched up drum rhythms and wrote songs on the bass, such as the upbeat, idiosyncratic “come undone” (working name: “Funky Little Thang”). Hackman bookends Any Human Friend with some of her most unexpected musical turns. The first song she wrote, “the one” (technically its second track), is “probably the poppiest song I’ve ever written,” she says. “It’s about that weird feeling of starting the process again from scratch.” To that end, it features a riot grrrl Greek chorus hurling such insults at her as, “You’re such an attention whore!” The title track closes out the album and explores how, “when we’re interacting with people, it’s like holding a mirror up to yourself.” It’s a weightless coda that’s jazz-like in its layering of rhythmic sounds as if you’re leisurely sorting through Hackman’s headspace. “The drive to do all this is all just about trying to work out what the fuck is in my brain,” she says, laughing. The dragon she’s chasing is a rarified peace that materializes after properly tortured herself. “I really did have a good time working on this album,” she says, reassuringly. “It’s just emotionally draining to write music and constantly tap into your psyche. No musician is writing music for themselves to listen to. It’s a dialogue, a conversation, a connection. I’m creating something for people to react to.”

\"Kids in the Dark\" ushers in Bat for Lashes\' fifth album on a wave of cinematic synths that sounds like sunset and open road. It\'s the perfect introduction to a conceptual cycle that finds London-bred singer-songwriter Natasha Khan inhaling a throwback version of her new LA home base. Khan is no stranger to inhabiting complex characters (the widow of 2016\'s *The Bride*) and motifs (the fairy-tale fantasies of her debut, *Fur and Gold*), and likewise, *Lost Girls* hinges on Nikki Pink, whom Khan has described as \"a more Technicolor version\" of herself. In addition to its clear nods to the 1987 film *The Lost Boys*, the record takes cues from the original screenplay Khan was working on upon her relocation, inspired by \'80s kid flicks and vampire films, and blows them out in neon songs, tinged with drama and romance. The saxophone-laden instrumental \"Vampires\" calls to mind retro climactic scenes where imminent peril is blocked out by hope, while the disarmingly bright \"So Good\" embodies the kind of glamorous and carefree existence we often ascribe to the past. \"Why does it hurt so good?\" she begs on the hook, projecting all of the delight and none of the suffering. Khan is a master of conjuring thematic atmosphere, but here, she inhabits her era with particular gusto. In a pop culture landscape that remains obsessed with nostalgia, on *Lost Girls*, Khan transforms the familiar tropes of the past into something that feels fresh and revelatory—we are able to see old things anew, through the eyes of a person she\'s never been in a time and place she\'s never lived.

Rebirth takes place when everything falls apart. DIIV—Zachary Cole Smith [lead vocals, guitar], Andrew Bailey [guitar], Colin Caulfield [vocals, bass], and Ben Newman [drums]—craft the soundtrack to personal resurrection under the heavy weight of metallic catharsis upheld by robust guitars and vocal tension that almost snaps, but never quite… The same could be said of the journey these four musicians underwent to get to their third full-length album, Deceiver. Out of lies, fractured friendships, and broken promises, clarity would be found. “I’ve known everyone in the band for ten years plus separately and together as DIIV for at least the past five years,” says Cole. “On Deceiver, I’m talking about working for the relationships in my life, repairing them, and accepting responsibility for the places I’ve failed them. I had to re-approach the band. It wasn’t restarting from a clean slate, but it was a new beginning. It took time—as it did with everybody else in my life—but we all grew together and learned how to communicate and collaborate.” A whirlwind brought DIIV there. Amidst turmoil, the group delivered the critical and fan favorite Is the Is Are in 2016 following 2012’s Oshin. Praise came from The Guardian, Spin, and more. NME ranked it in the Top 10 among the “Albums of the Year.” Pitchfork’s audience voted Is the Is Are one of the “Top 50 Albums of 2016” as the outlet dubbed it, “gorgeous.” In the aftermath of Cole’s personal struggles, he “finally accepted what it means to go through treatment and committed,” emerging with a renewed focus and perspective. Getting back together with the band in Los Angeles would result in a series of firsts. This would be the first time DIIV conceived a record as a band with Colin bringing in demos, writing alongside Cole, and the entire band arranging every tune. “Cole and I approached writing vocal melodies the same way the band approached the instrumentals,” says Colin. “We threw ideas at the wall for months on end, slowly making sense of everything. It was a constant conversation about the parts we liked best versus which of them served the album best.” Another first, DIIV lived with the songs on the road. During a 2018 tour with Deafheaven, they performed eight untitled brand-new compositions as the bulk of the set. The tunes also progressed as the players did. “We went from playing these songs in the rehearsal space to performing them live at shows, figuring them out in real-time in front of hundreds of people, and approaching them from a broader range of reference points,” he goes on. “We’d never done that before. We got to internalize how everything worked on stage. We did all of the trimming before we went to the studio. It was an exercise in simplifying what makes a song. We really learned how to listen, write, and work as a band.” The vibe got heavier under influences ranging from Unwound and Elliot Smith to True Widow and Neurosis. They also enlisted producer Sonny Diperri [My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, Protomartyr]. his presence dramatically expanded the sonic palette, making it richer and fuller than ever before. It marks a major step forward for DIIV. “He brought a lot of common sense and discipline to our process,” adds Cole. “We’d been touring these songs and playing them for a while, so he was able to encourage us to make decisions and own them.” The first single “Skin Game” charges forward with frenetic drums, layered vocals and clean, driven guitars that ricochet off each other. “I’d say it’s an imaginary dialogue between two characters, which could either be myself or people I know,” he says. “I spent six months in several different rehab facilities at the beginning of 2017. I was living with other addicts. Being a recovering addict myself, there are a lot of questions like, ‘Who are we? What is this disease?’ Our last record was about recovery in general, but I truthfully didn’t buy in. I decided to live in my disease instead. ‘Skin Game’ looks at where the pain comes from. I’m looking at the personal, physical, emotional, and broader political experiences feeding into the cycle of addiction for millions of us.” A trudging groove and wailing guitar punctuate a lulling apology on the magnetically melancholic “Taker.” According to Cole, it’s “about taking responsibility for your lies, their consequences, and the entire experience.” Meanwhile, the ominous bass line and crawling beat of “Blankenship” devolve into schizophrenic string bends as the vitriolic lyrics. Offering a dynamic denouement, the seven-minute “Acheron” flows through a hulking beat guided under gusts of lyrical fretwork and a distorted heavy apotheosis. Even after the final strains of distortion ring out on Deceiver, these four musicians will continue to evolve. “We’re still going,” Cole leaves off. “Hopefully we’ll be doing this for a long time.” Ultimately, DIIV’s rebirth is a hard-earned and well-deserved new beginning.

Nérija is Nubya Garcia (tenor saxophone), Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpet), Cassie Kinoshi (alto saxophone), Rosie Turton (trombone), Shirley Tetteh (guitar), Lizy Exell (drums) and Rio Kai (bass). Blume is a truly breath-taking collection of compositions that perfectly encapsulates everything Nérija. Vibrant, engaging, infectious and truly current, Blume takes you on a sprawling wonderful journey, arriving at what is a majestic body of work of their personal and collective experiences and inspirations over the last half decade or so.

When David Berman disbanded Silver Jews in 2009, the world stood to lose one of the best writers in indie rock, a guy who catalogued the magic and misery of everyday life with wit, heart, and the ragged glory of the occupationally down-and-out. After a 10-year break professedly spent reading books and arguing with people on Reddit, Berman enlisted members of the Brooklyn band Woods to back him on *Purple Mountains*. Berman’s pain had never been laid quite so bare, nor had it ever sounded quite so urgent. “I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion,” he sings on the swaggering “That’s Just the Way I Feel.” “Day to day, I’m neck and neck with giving in.” And “Margaritas at the Mall” turns an ordinary happy hour into a jeremiad about the cold comforts of capitalism in a godless world. That the music—country-tinged indie rock—was as polished and competent as it was only highlighted Berman’s intensity: less a rock singer than a street preacher, someone who needed to avail himself of his visions stat. But even at his most desperate, he remained achingly funny, turning statements of existential loneliness into the kind of bumper sticker Zen that made him seem like an ordinary guy no matter how highfalutin he could get. “Well, if no one’s fond of fuckin’ me, maybe no one’s fuckin’ fond of me,” he sings on the album-closing “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” sounding not all that far off from the George Strait one-twos he reportedly loved. Above all, though, his writing is beautiful, attuned to detail in ways that make ordinary scenarios shimmer with quiet magic. Just listen to “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” which turns a quiet night in a big city into an allegory of finding solace in the weather of what comes to us. Shortly after the release of *Purple Mountains*, Berman died, at the age of 52, a tragic end to what felt like a triumphant return. “The dead know what they\'re doing when they leave this world behind,” he sings on “Nights That Won’t Happen.” “When the here and the hereafter momentarily align.”

David Berman comes in from the cold after ten long years. His new musical expression is a meltdown unparalleled in modern memory. He warns us that his findings might be candid, but as long as his punishment comes in such bite-sized delights of all-American jukebox fare, we'll hike the Purple Mountains with pleasure forever.

Durand Jones & The Indications’ 2016 self-titled debut started out as the work of a few friends in a Bloomington, Indiana, basement with a four-track recorder, an *American Idol* karaoke microphone, and a budget somewhere in the neighborhood of $450, beer included. That the album—gritty, but beautiful and laidback—caught on is a testament to both the endurance of classic soul and the appetites of modern audiences for something that doesn’t need to work so hard to reach out and grab you by the throat. Recorded in a proper studio with the subtle aid of strings and horns, *American Love Call* only strengthens the band’s case, channeling the sturdy, mellow sound of ’70s vocal groups like The Chi-Lites and The Delfonics (“Don’t You Know,” “Court of Love”) and weaving in subtle references to modern life both lyrical (“Morning in America”) and sonic (the synthesizer flourishes on “Circles”). And while the album is retro at heart, it fits surprisingly well in a contemporary landscape, questing for chill while still offering plenty of detail to sink into.

Durand Jones & the Indications aren’t looking backwards. Helmed by foil vocalists in Durand Jones and drummer Aaron Frazer, the Indications conjure the dynamism of Jackie Wilson, Curtis Mayfield, AND the Impressions. Even with an aesthetic steeped in the golden, strings-infused dreaminess of early ‘70s soul, the Indications’ sophomore LP, American Love Call, is planted firmly in the present, with the urgency of this moment in time. The Indications’ 2016 self-titled debut was the product of friends who met as students at Indiana University in Bloomington, In., recorded for $452.11, including a case of beer. American Love Call, the band’s sophomore LP is instead the record the Indications dreamed of making, fleshed out with strings, backing vocals, and a newfound confidence in songwriting. Blending a slew of influences from years spent crate-digging, guitarist Blake Rhein says the Indications approach songs in the same way hip-hop producers do, as likely to pull inspiration from ‘70s folk-rock or classic R&B as they are Nas’ Illmatic. “Did I expect to do this shit once I got out of college? Hell no,” Jones relays, laughing. “Totally not. But this is what God is telling me to do – move and groove. So I’m gonna stay in my lane.”

The cover art for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 17th album couldn’t feel more removed from the man once known as a snarling, terrifying prince of poetic darkness. This heavenly forest with its vibrant flowers, rays of sun, and woodland creatures feels comically opposed to anything Cave has ever represented—but perhaps that’s the point. This pastel fairy tale sets the scene for *Ghosteen*, his most minimalist, supernatural work to date, in which he slips between realms of fantasy and reality as a means to accept life and death, his past and future. In his very first post on The Red Hand Files—the website Cave uses to receive and respond to fan letters—he spoke of rebuilding his relationship with songwriting, which had been damaged while enduring the grief that followed his son Arthur’s death in 2015. He wrote, “I found with some practise the imagination could propel itself beyond the personal into a state of wonder. In doing so the colour came back to things with a renewed intensity and the world seemed clear and bright and new.” It is within that state of wonder that *Ghosteen* exists. “The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents,” Cave has explained. Those eight “children” are misty, ambient stories of flaming mares, enchanted forests, flying ships, and the eponymous, beloved Ghosteen, described as a “migrating spirit.” The second album features two longer pieces, connected by the spoken-word “Fireflies.” He tells fantasy stories that allude to love and loss and letting go, and occasionally brings us back to reality with detailed memories of car rides to the beach and hotel rooms on rainy days. These themes aren’t especially new, but the feeling of this album is. There are no wild murder ballads or raucous, bluesy love songs. Though often melancholy, it doesn’t possess the absolute devastation and loneliness of 2016’s *Skeleton Tree*. Rather, these vignettes and symbolic myths are tranquil and gentle, much like the instrumentation behind them. With little more than synths and piano behind Cave’s vocals, *Ghosteen* might feel uneventful at times, but the calmness seems to help his imagination run free. On “Bright Horses,” he sings of “Horses broken free from the fields/They are horses of love, their manes full of fire.” But then he pulls back the curtain and admits, “We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are/Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire/The fields are just fields, and there ain’t no lord… This world is plain to see, it don’t mean we can’t believe in something.” Through these dreamlike, surreal stories, Cave is finding his path to peace. And he’s learned that he isn’t alone on his journey. On “Galleon Ship,” he begins, “If I could sail a galleon ship, a long, lonely ride across the sky,” before realizing: “We are not alone, it seems, so many riders in the sky/The winds of longing in their sails, searching for the other side.”

Greg Gonzalez often thinks in cinematic terms. “It should have a rougher feel, like a documentary would,” the Cigarettes After Sex frontman tells Apple Music of the recording process for *Cry*, his ambient pop outfit’s sophomore LP. “In film, it\'s like, \'Do you shoot on location or do you shoot on set?\' We weren\'t in some office recording studio where there were standards of how you do things and gear set up. Our overall philosophy is to avoid studios. We should just record where it feels nice.” For *Cry*, that meant returning to a cathedral they’d once played in Germany and setting up in the courtyard of a Mallorcan villa. “It definitely made everyone play in a very relaxed way, which was exactly what I was looking for,” Gonzalez says. “In the end, I liked the energy in the gentle landscape of Mallorca, the wind in the trees under the stars. And that\'s how the feeling of the record was, too.” Here are the stories behind every song on the album. **Don’t Let Me Go** “On our first tour of Europe, we played a show in this beautiful cathedral in Bochum, Germany, and we liked it so much we thought we should come back to record. The atmosphere inside led me to write ‘Don\'t Let Me Go’ in about five minutes—the melody and everything. It’s based on a relationship I had in my hometown before I moved to New York, a person that I lost contact with. Just to say, ‘Even though we don’t talk, this was special. This led me to where I am now. Don\'t let the memory of it go.’ It was strange to be in Germany, so far away from home and so far away from my past. You think of where you are and then you think of the person you were just years ago. There\'s something very emotional about that. There was no rehearsal—it just appeared out of thin air.” **Kiss It Off Me** “One of the strangest songs on the record. Growing up in El Paso, there was a lot of Tejano music in the atmosphere. I was listening to metal and John Zorn records in high school, but by the time I got to New York, I had really gotten into Tejana and this one song by Selena called ‘Como la Flor.’ And I just kind of thought, ‘What would happen if I took that and made it a Cigarettes song somehow? Not in some goofy way, but out of a genuine love for Selena and a real emotional connection to that song. Cigarettes stuff is very influenced by Françoise Hardy and Cocteau Twins and Julee Cruise and Leonard Cohen, so it’s like I was throwing neon green into a black-and-white painting.” **Heavenly** “We played this summer festival in Latvia in 2016 and we had his really great show, our first show where the crowd was just going crazy in a new way. It was bizarre to get that kind of reaction—where it feels like we’re Metallica or something—because the music is so relaxed. After we played, we were all on this nice, natural high, and we walked over to a beach that was part of the festival. At that time of year in Latvia, the sun goes down really late at night. We sat down and looked at this gorgeous sunset just going on for hours and hours. It was one of the most beautiful things I\'ve ever seen. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is where I should be right now. This is the place I\'m kind of meant to be.’ It was this moment of clarity, and I put it in the chorus of ‘Heavenly.’ I turned that feeling into something more romantic, but it came from the beauty of witnessing that sunset forever.” **You\'re the Only Good Thing in My Life** “The hardest thing to get across in writing erotic pop is deciding where you put that line: What is romance and what is pornography? With the things I\'m doing, I\'m trying to say that all the sexual elements in the music grow out of romance. The romance is part of the sex. The romance is there first, and all the sexual things kind of come out of that, but the romance has to be first. The references to *Playboy* and *Penthouse* are images that I relate to the lover in this song, almost like bedroom talk. If you\'re intimate with someone and you\'re in this very intimate space, the things you say are very intense. They can be very raw, but they can be very passionate and sweet too.” **Touch** “You can really hear the sound of the cathedral on ‘Touch,’ the vastness of it. It’s one of the darker songs, a romance that\'s going bad, one that\'s kind of breaking up and people aren\'t seeing eye to eye. There are songs I\'ve written where the same character repeats, because it\'s from a relationship I had and I\'m telling different stories from that. We did the song ‘K.,’ and we had the song ‘Sweet,’ and we had ‘Affection.’ ‘Touch’ is the finale to that story, the last song associated with that person.” **Hentai** “This is the story of my current relationship. Writing the lyrics, I thought, ‘This is actually pretty over the top. Is it worth saying?’ When we first met, my girlfriend and I had this weird, short conversation about a *hentai* scene: We were both intrigued by it. But it was very open. You need those people in your life. You need to be able to say things out loud and see what they say and see how you react. But we just understood each other, immediately. We could talk about absolutely anything when we first met, and obviously that\'s why we\'re still together. That’s the way I saw it.” **Cry** “I think we all, or many of us, want to be in relationships. I\'ve always been looking for a relationship, one that would be spiritual, one that could be forever, with someone that you just fall in love with and you can\'t help it. We had just started to really tour, and all I was trying to do was to play music for a living—to be a writer, and for that to be my identity. I had met a few people that I probably could have had deep relationships with, but I found that since we were touring, I just wasn\'t ready for it, I wasn\'t in the right place for it. This song was a reaction to all of that. I just couldn\'t commit.” **Falling in Love** “So there’s ‘Hentai,’ and there’s ‘Falling in Love,’ which is about the more traditionally romantic side of my relationship with my girlfriend. Like the image of that moment with her and talking about how it would be sweet to have a house by the ocean someday. I love those plans you can make and have with the people you date. If I\'m traveling, then most of the relationship becomes long-distance, so when we couldn\'t see each other, we would see the same movie at the same time in different cities and make a little date of it. She was in LA and I was in New York, and I\'d be like, ‘All right, here\'s a time that we can both go to that kind of lines up.’ And so we would go and pretend that we were next to each other, watching the movie.” **Pure** “There are the songs that start to lean a bit more erotica on this record, just because the imagery of that was interesting to me. These are details taken from a relationship, but I put them together in the song to kind of tell that story. You could argue it\'s a little more like fantasy the way it’s arranged. There\'s explicit sexual elements to a lot of music. But how do you balance that? It\'s positive sensuality, positive sexuality.”

Michael Kiwanuka never seemed the type to self-title an album. He certainly wasn’t expected to double down on such apparent self-assurance by commissioning a kingly portrait of himself as the cover art. After all, this is the singer-songwriter who was invited to join Kanye West’s *Yeezus* sessions but eventually snuck wordlessly out, suffering impostor syndrome. That sense of self-doubt shadowed him even before his 2012 debut *Home Again* collected a Mercury Prize nomination. “It’s an irrational thought, but I’ve always had it,” he tells Apple Music. “It keeps you on your toes, but it was also frustrating me. I was like, ‘I just want to be able to do this without worrying so much and just be confident in who I am as an artist.’” Notions of identity also got him thinking about how performers create personas—onstage or on social media—that obscure their true selves, inspiring him to call his third album *KIWANUKA* in an act of what he calls “anti-alter-ego.” “It’s almost a statement to myself,” he says. “I want to be able to say, ‘This is me, rain or shine.’ People might like it, people might not, it’s OK. At least people know who I am.” Kiwanuka was already known as a gifted singer and songwriter, but *KIWANUKA* reveals new standards of invention and ambition. With Danger Mouse and UK producer Inflo behind the boards—as they were on *Love & Hate* in 2016—these songs push his barrel-aged blend of soul and folk further into psychedelia, fuzz rock, and chamber pop. Here, he takes us through that journey song by song. **You Ain’t the Problem** “‘You Ain’t the Problem’ is a celebration, me loving humans. We forget how amazing we are. Social media’s part of this—all these filters hiding things that we think people won\'t like, things we think don\'t quite fit in. You start thinking this stuff about you is wrong and that you’ve got a problem being whatever you are and who you were born to be. I wanted to write a song saying, ‘You’re not the problem. You just have to continue being *you* more, go deeper within yourself.’ That’s where the magic comes—as opposed to cutting things away and trying to erode what really makes you.” **Rolling** “‘Rolling with the times, don’t be late.’ Everything’s about being an artist for me, I guess. I was trying to find my place still, but you can do things to make sure that you fit in or are keeping up with everything that’s happening—whether it’s posting stuff online or keeping up with the coolest records, knowing the right things. Or it could just be you’re in your mid-thirties, you haven’t got married or had kids yet, and people are like, ‘What?’ ‘Rolling with the times’ is like, go at your own pace. In my head, there was early Stooges records and French records like Serge Gainsbourg with the fuzz sounds. I wanted to make a song that sounded kind of crazy like that.” **I’ve Been Dazed** “Eddie Hazel from Funkadelic is my favorite guitar player. This has anthemic chords because he would always have really beautiful anthemic chords in the songs that he wrote. It just came out almost hymn-like. Lyrically, because it has this melancholy feel to it, I was singing about waking up from the nightmare of following someone else’s path or putting yourself down, low self-esteem—the things ‘You Ain\'t the Problem’ is defying. The feeling is, ‘Man, I\'ve been in this kind of nightmare, I just want to get out of it, I’m ready to go.’” **Piano Joint (This Kind of Love) \[Intro\]** “As a teenager, I’d just escape \[into some albums\], like I could teleport away from life and into that person’s world. I really wanted to have that feel with this record. It would be so vivid, there was no chance to get out of it, no gap in the songs—make it feel like one long piece. Some songs just flow into each other, but some needed interludes as passageways. This intro came when I was playing some bass and \[Inflo\] was playing some piano and I started singing my idea of a Marvin Gaye soul tune—a deep, dark, melancholic cut from one of his ’70s records. Then Danger Mouse had the idea, ‘Why don’t you pitch some of it down so it sounds different?’” **Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)** “I used to always love melancholy songs; the sadder it is, the happier I’d be afterwards. This was my moment to really exercise that part of me. Originally, it was going to be a piano ballad, and then I was like, ‘Why don’t we try playing some drums?’ Inflo’s a really good drummer, so I went in and played bass with him, and it sounded really good. I was thinking of that ’70s Gil Scott-Heron East Coast soul. Then we worked with this amazing string arranger, Rosie Danvers, who did almost all the strings on the last album. I said to her, ‘It’s my favorite song, just do something super beautiful.’ She just killed it.” **Another Human Being** “We were doing all the interludes and Danger Mouse had found loads of samples. This was a news report \[about the ’60s US civil rights sit-in protests\]. I remember thinking, ‘This sounds amazing, it goes into “Living in Denial” perfectly—it just changes that song.’ And, yeah, again, I’m ’70s-obsessed, but the ’60s and ’70s were so pivotal for young American black men and women, and it just gave a gravitas to the record. It goes to identity and something that resonates with me and my name and who I am. It gives me loads of confidence to continue to be myself.” **Living in Denial** “This is how me, Inflo, and Danger Mouse sound when we’re completely ourselves and properly linked together. No arguments, just let it happen, don’t think about it. I was trying to be a soul group—thinking of The Delfonics, The Isley Brothers, The Temptations, The Chambers Brothers. Again, the lyrics are that thing of seeking acceptance: You don’t need to seek it, just accept yourself and then whoever wants to hang with you will.” **Hero (Intro)** “‘Hero’ was the last song we completed. Once it started to sound good, I was sitting there with my acoustic, playing. We’d done the ‘Piano Joint’ intro and I was like, ‘Oh, we should pitch down this number as well and make it something that we really wouldn’t do with a straight rock ’n’ roll song.’” **Hero** “‘Hero’ was the hardest to come up with lyrics for. We had the music and melody for, like, two years. Any time I tried to touch it, I hated it—I couldn’t come up with anything. Then I was reading about Fred Hampton from the Black Panthers and I started thinking about all these people that get killed—or, like Hendrix, die an accidental death—who have so much to give or do so much in such a small time. I also love the thing where all these legends, Bowie and Bob Dylan, were creating larger-than-life personas that we were obsessed with. You didn’t really know who they were. That really made me sad, because I don’t disagree with it, but I know that’s not me. So, ‘Am I a hero?’ was also asking, ‘If I do that stuff, will I become this big artist that everyone respects?’—that ‘I’m not enough’ thing.” **Hard to Say Goodbye** “This is my love of Isaac Hayes and big orchestrations, lush strings, people like David Axelrod. Flo actually brought in this sample from a Nat King Cole song, just one chord, and we pitched it around, and then we replayed it with a 20-piece string orchestra packed into the studio. We had a double-bass cello, the whole works, and this really good piano player Kadeem \[Clarke\] who plays with Little Simz, and our friend Nathan \[Allen\] playing drums. That was pretty fun.” **Final Days** “At first, I didn’t know where this would fit on the record, like, ‘Man, this is cool, I just don’t *love*it.’ I wrote some lyrics and thought, ‘This is better, but it’s missing something.’ It always felt like space to me, so I said to Kennie \[Takahashi\], the engineer, ‘Are there any samples you can find of people in space?’ We found these astronauts about to crash, which is kind of dark, but it gave it this emotion it was missing. It gave me goosebumps. Later, we found out that it was a fake, some guys messing around in Italy in the ’60s for an art project or something.” **Interlude (Loving the People)** “‘Final Days’ was sounding amazing, but it needed to go somewhere else at the end. I had this melody on the Wurlitzer, and originally it was an instrumental bit that comes in for the end of ‘Final Days’ so that it ends somewhere completely different, like the spaceship’s landing at its destination. But I was like, ‘Let’s stretch it out. Let’s do more.’ Danger Mouse found this \[US congressman and civil rights leader\] John Lewis sample, and it sounded beautiful and moving over these chords, so we put it here.” **Solid Ground** “When everything gets stripped away—all the strings, all the sounds, all the interludes—I’m still just a dude that sits and plays a song on a guitar or piano. I felt like the album needed a glimpse of that. Rosie did a beautiful arrangement and then I finished it off—everyone was out somewhere, so I just played all the instruments, apart from drums and things like that. So, ‘Solid Ground’ is my little piece that I had from another place. Lyrically, it’s about finding the place where you feel comfortable.” **Light** “I just thought ‘Light’ was a nice dreamy piece to end the record with—a bit of light at the end of this massive journey. You end on this peaceful note, something positive. For me, light describes loads of things that are good—whether it’s obvious things like the light at the end of the tunnel or just a light feeling in my heart. The idea that the day’s coming—such a peaceful, exciting thing. We’re just always looking for it.” *All Apple Music subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV can listen to thousands of Dolby Atmos Music tracks using any headphones. When listening with compatible Apple or Beats headphones, Dolby Atmos Music will play back automatically when available for a song. For other headphones, go to Settings > Music > Audio and set the Dolby Atmos switch to “Always On.” You can also hear Dolby Atmos Music using the built-in speakers on compatible iPhones, iPads, MacBook Pros, and HomePods, or by connecting your Apple TV 4K to a compatible TV or AV receiver. Android is coming soon. AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, BeatsX, Beats Solo3, Beats Studio3, Powerbeats3, Beats Flex, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro Works with iPhone 7 or later with the latest version of iOS; 12.9-inch iPad Pro (3rd generation or later), 11-inch iPad Pro, iPad (6th generation or later), iPad Air (3rd generation), and iPad mini (5th generation) with the latest version of iPadOS; and MacBook (2018 model and later).*

On her fifth proper full-length album, Sharon Van Etten pushes beyond vocals-and-guitar indie rock and dives headlong into spooky maximalism. With production help from John Congleton (St. Vincent), she layers haunting drones with heavy, percussive textures, giving songs like “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen” explosive urgency. Drawing from Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, and fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, *Remind Me Tomorrow* is full of electrifying anthems, with Van Etten voicing confessions of reckless, lost, and sentimental characters. The album challenges the popular image of Van Etten as *just* a singer-songwriter and illuminates her significant talent as composer and producer, as an artist making records that feel like a world of their own.

Making a debut album was a bruising experience for Dublin post-punk quintet The Murder Capital. “I didn’t know you could experience such a range of emotions in a day, every day,” singer James McGovern tells Apple Music. “I could feel utter despair, thinking that it was just not going to happen, it’s completely run ruin and it’s gone. Then, 20 minutes later, it’s genius and some new thing comes in and it’s just an overwhelming experience.” Recorded in London with storied producer Flood, *When I Have Fears* is as stirring to listen to as it was to make. Twisting through emotions that run from throbbing-temple rage to tender reflection, it’s an absorbing account of, among other things, isolation, grief, and a fading sense of community. Here, in a track-by-track guide, McGovern recalls the sleepy boat trips, stunned silences, and angry farmers that helped create the album. **“For Everything”** “This ended up being the opener because it feels very cinematic and we are all cinephiles. Also, the opening lyric seems, for me, like the right initial imprint on the floor. I wanted to go away on my own, so I looked for the cheapest flight I could find and went to Oslo—without looking at the price of stuff in Oslo. So I got this hostel for five nights and ate very rarely. I went around writing. I deleted everything off my phone and left. I left the world for five days, which was unbelievable. I went on a boat trip with some fjords and wrote it on that—there are a lot of little references to things I saw. I wrote a quick poem and then fell asleep for the entire boat trip that I paid 40 quid on.” **“More Is Less”** “In that incubation period in the very beginning \[of the band\], everything was just getting thrown in so quickly. If we played two shows a month, there might have been three or four new tracks in each show. I think ‘More Is Less’ was the first time we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll keep this.’ It sounds like it was written in a time of urgency, like I was fed up with something. I think your environment, politically and socially, naturally bleeds into you. It affects your mood and your view of yourself and the world. Even though it wasn’t that long ago, I feel like it was really naive at the time—but in a beautiful way.” **“Green & Blue”** “We were going through a pretty heavy drought in the writing room. I saw an article about \[American photographer\] Francesca Woodman and showed it to the boys. Everyone was hit in the chest by it, maybe even moist at the eye. There was something so alive about the way she depicted isolation. And something going through the record is this idea of isolation within a community, or the absence of fear giving love and the absence of love giving fear. We watched her documentary and the next day ‘Green & Blue’ just fell out.” **“Slowdance I”** “We got this cheap Airbnb in Mayo to finish writing. We actually had to move because a farmer threatened to shoot us for the noise. But in that first house, we wrote ‘Slowdance I,’ ‘Slowdance II,’ ‘Don’t Cling to Life,’ and something else. We were going in to record on March 2 and we went into that house on January 2, so that’s how up against the ropes we were. ‘Slowdance I’ came together over that bassline. We were fighting against keeping it at that tempo, going, ‘Don’t speed up, don\'t speed up.’ It was like pulling a rope at a mooring—it’s not giving way. We thought, ‘Maybe this is the way it should stay.’” **“Slowdance II”** “Part II was being written as a different idea. I named it that day, and then it very much became its own thing. Giving it that name became a visualization thing for us, imagining people moving to this track, that flow of the body. We love the idea of having something that just flows into the next thing. It just became this lotus flower or this opus. Lyrically, it became about disassociation somehow.” **“On Twisted Ground”** “My best friend took his own life and I couldn’t write about it for ages. When you’re writing about something so overtly personal, you can’t let anything go. It just has to be perfect. It was one of the hardest nuts to crack in the studio. Eventually, Cathal, our guitarist, just said, ‘Fuck everything: James and Gabriel \[bassist\] go in that room and play it alone.’ Immediately after we played it back, there was this crazy five minutes of silence. It was just so intense, like it was vibrating through you. Flood said he had never experienced anything like it in the studio before. Then we had this chat about how personal grief feels, and how hard done by you feel by it because your love for that person and their love for you is specific to you. No one else had that. It’s not a thing that gets better or worse or this bullshit of ‘it gets easier after time.’ You’re just like, ’I’m trying to fill my space with more positive things around that hole that will be there forever.’” **“Feeling Fades”** “We played the Sound House in Dublin. I came off the stage, went for a cigarette in the smoking area, and just started writing this poem to occupy the mind, because the feeling you get after getting offstage is weird. That’s reflected somewhat in the lyrics. It was also wondering if our generation is being robbed of a sense of community by whatever this natural evolution of technology and society is. I don’t want to be stuck in the past, but it feels like that sense of togetherness, that knocking over to a friend’s house, you have to *talk about* it now for it to exist. Humans still love each other just as much and are trying to understand each other better than ever, but something about the disassociative nature of technology is sort of harrowing. I just wanna hang out with people, you know?” **“Don’t Cling to Life”** “Gabriel’s mum became severely unwell, and she actually passed away within the first two weeks of recording. While this was going on, we discussed that idea of songs like ‘Perfect Day’ or ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,’ where it sounds happy but it’s completely not. Gabriel came into the house \[in Mayo\] and he was like, ‘Let’s just write something we can dance to.’ It was quite a tough nut to crack because it was veering more to the pop side of things than to anything we had written before. I like the possibility it gives you for juxtaposition: It doesn’t have to be really dark, it can be really hopeful as well—it just depends which way you play the words in your mind. You can go to it for anything.” **“How the Streets Adore Me Now”** “That was one that wasn’t written \[before going into the studio\]. Cathal had this droning, repeated piano idea. He was playing it on an old upright, and I remember just flicking through my journal and finding this poem. I sat in next to him and we figured it out and had it recorded within an hour. When we listened back, we were all like, ‘Holy fucking shit.’ Flood was like, ‘You’re not going to touch that.’ I think it is my favorite song.” **“Love, Love, Love”** “We decided, pretty quickly, that this was going to close the record. It was very important for us to have that. It was imperative that there was a narrative, there was a feeling of where do we bring you now and where do we go next and how are you left and are you being challenged? We look to people like Alexander McQueen, who said, ‘If you aren\'t affected by my show, then I haven\'t done my job.’ Sometimes music or art or theater should be making you uncomfortable. It should be confronting you with something, then almost immediately comforting you and all those things. ‘Love, Love, Love,’ I find, does that. It’s also satisfying to finish an album saying, ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’”

You can trace the seeds of Fongola back to so many different places. It began in Kinshasa, in the Ngwaka neighbourhood where DIY experimental musical instruments are made, and the Lingwala neighbourhood where Makara Bianko sings every night on electronic loops with his dancers and where the band first met. We spent our tours across Europe dreaming about what we wanted to tell the world. It was recorded in makeshift studios we built out of ping pong tables and mattresses in Kinshasa and Brussels. Finally, I spent months putting it all together in Abattoir, Anderlecht like a giant electronic puzzle with pieces that don’t fit and no blueprint.” - Débruit Signed with independent label Transgressive (Flume, SOPHIE, Let’s Eat Grandma), KOKOKO!’s distorted polyrhythms and spontaneous lo-fi sounds provide a chaotic soundtrack to their home country. When most people think of culture in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s The Rumble in The Jungle fight of Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman and the accompanying Soul Power concert with James Brown in the 70s, Mobutu in his abacost and leopard print hat, les sapeurs in their elegant tailoring, and the king of Congolese rumba Papa Wemba. A faded vintage postcard. KOKOKO! represent the antithesis of tradition, and their debut album Fongola - which translates to “the key” - is a torrid, anarchic, youthful journey smashing a new path through modern life in Africa’s third most populous city.

Serfs Up! is a lush and masterful work, lascivious and personal - a triumphant return.

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

“There was no road map for this whatsoever,” Karen O told Beats 1 about her far-out collaboration with Brian Burton, the Grammy-winning producer known as Danger Mouse (Beck, Gorillaz, Broken Bells). Such stylistic freedom may have felt new for the singer, who has spent the past two decades fronting the New York rock trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But after concluding her label contract and, in 2015, giving birth to her first child, she suddenly faced a blank canvas—a fresh start that pushed her in a new direction: “Brian and I realized that we had a similar love for \'90s R&B dance music.” Colorful, funky, and experimental, *Lux Prima* is a vision quest of distorted synths and lo-fi atmospheres littered with left turns: the spoken-word mutterings on “Drown,” the combative chants and howls on “Woman,” the disco-fied seduction of “Leopard’s Tongue.” On the gauzy, groovy “Turn the Light,” she mixes Donna Summer escapism with off-kilter soul. “Starry, starry night/This is how I want to live,” she sings in a weightless whisper. “Gonna lay me down in love/I got so much more to give.” “We were making an album we were trying to listen to as opposed to making an album that we wanted to play,” Burton said. “So that\'s kind of how we made the record.”

Throughout their 15-year run, Glasgow, Scotland miserablists The Twilight Sad have skillfully walked a tightrope between sweeping post-rock and gleaming synth-rock. Led by James Graham’s impassioned brogue, *It Won/t Be Like This All the Time*, their fifth LP and first with Mogwai\'s Rock Action Records, retains their pummeling might, delving into the deepest corners of the soul with their darkest imagery yet. Taking cues from The Cure’s industrial-laced *Pornography* period—it serves to mention that Robert Smith is the band’s most effusive endorser—“The Arbor” and “\[10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs\]” bring back the shrill synthesizers of 2012\'s *No One Can Ever Know*. “Are you not scared/I saw you kill him on the back stairs,” Graham threatens on the chilling “Shooting Dennis Hopper Shooting.” Forbidding words, for sure, but rarely are such sentiments accompanied with a sound that is this positively uplifting.

Ezra Collective ‘You Can’t Steal My Joy’ (Enter The Jungle) You Can’t Steal My Joy is an exuberant, defiant debut album that’s destined to cement Ezra Collective’s status as one of the UK’s most exciting groups. The record features friends and fans, Loyle Carner, KOKOROKO and Jorja Smith, and is preceded by lead single and full-blown banger, Quest For Coin. Ezra Collective are five young Londoners; bandleader Femi Koleoso (drums), his brother TJ Koleoso (bass), Joe Armon-Jones (keys), Dylan Jones (trumpet), and James Mollison (saxophone). The band’s incredible musicianship and spirited, inclusive approach to music - which draws on afrobeat, Latin, hip-hop, grime and more - has seen them break out beyond the thriving UK jazz scene. Ezra Collective’s 2017 EP, Juan Pablo: The Philosopher, won ‘Best Jazz Album’ at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards and the band picked up ‘Best UK Jazz Act’ and ‘Live Experience Of The Year’ at the 2018 Jazz FM Awards. They played Quincy Jones’ birthday party and recently completed a mosh-pit-filled and completely sold out UK tour before headlining Winter JazzFest in New York. Ezra Collective’s forthcoming gigs include All Point East, Lamar Tree and Green Man festivals and full headline tour of the UK culminating at The Roundhouse in London for November 2019. "Growing up as young people in London has challenges but, rather than focus on all the negativity surrounding us, we’ve decided to focus on the positives”, explains Femi. “You can steal a lot of things from us - our ability to travel freely, our access to education, our right to a level playing field, even our ability to live life at its full potential - but as long as we don’t forget our core truth, You Can’t Steal Our Joy.” Ezra Collective bring the fire on a stunning debut album // Crack Thrilling and vital /// Q A real coming of age /// MOJO An urgent, free-wheeling bundle of fun /// NME Ezra Collective have marked themselves out from the crowd with their genre-bridging prowess /// The Guardian the sound of London in 2019 distilled and put down on record /// Clash At the heart of a bubbling scene without a point of entry for many, Ezra Collective stand with their arms wide open /// Loud & Quiet British rave-jazz moves onwards and upwards /// The Observer Potent, rebellious, and uplifting /// Dork There is a lean exuberance to this band that demands a dancing response /// Rolling Stone One of the liveliest groups to emerge from London’s jazz renaissance /// New York Times

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

On 2017’s *This Old Dog*, Mac DeMarco got serious—the LA-based Canadian singer-songwriter tackled personal themes like aging and family relationships head-on with slow, laidback melodies that went down easy. His fourth LP, *Here Comes the Cowboy*, is mellower. Here DeMarco unburdens his mind by embodying the cowboy ideal, an archetype he associates with a simple and unassuming life. He expresses a desire to escape on “Finally Alone” and “Hey Cowgirl,” both of which are punctuated with plucky guitar chords and soft snare hits. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Mac DeMarco album if it didn’t feature a love song or two, and he dutifully delivers on the plainspoken, romantic “K” and “Heart to Heart.” He tones down his usual jocularity throughout, but it’s not absent—take “Little Dogs March,” on which he kicks the cowboy image up a notch by adding foot taps that sound like a horse’s hooves. The dirty funk groove of “Choo Choo” is playful, a far cry from the album’s otherwise quiet and reflective mood—reminding listeners of his sense of humor with a cunning wink.

In some ways, Aldous Harding’s third album, *Designer*, feels lighter than her first two—particularly 2017’s stunning, stripped-back, despairing *Party*. “I felt freed up,” Harding (whose real name is Hannah) tells Apple Music. “I could feel a loosening of tension, a different way of expressing my thought processes. There was a joyful loosening in an unapologetic way. I didn’t try to fight that.” Where *Party* kept the New Zealand singer-songwriter\'s voice almost constantly exposed and bare, here there’s more going on: a greater variety of instruments (especially percussion), bigger rhythms, additional vocals that add harmonies and echoes to her chameleonic voice, which flips between breathy baritone and wispy falsetto. “I wanted to show that there are lots of ways to work with space, lots of ways you can be serious,” she says. “You don’t have to be serious to be serious. I’m not a role model, that’s just how I felt. It’s a light, unapologetic approach based on what I have and what I know and what I think I know.” Harding attributes this broader musical palette to the many places and settings in which the album was written, including on tour. “It’s an incredibly diverse record, but it somehow feels part of the same brand,” she says. “They were all written at very different times and in very different surroundings, but maybe that’s what makes it feel complete.” The bare, devastating “Heaven Is Empty” came together on a long train ride and “The Barrel” on a bike ride, while intimate album closer “Pilot” took all of ten minutes to compose. “It was stream of consciousness, and I don’t usually write like that,” she says. “Once I’d written it all down, I think I made one or two changes to the last verse, but other than that, I did not edit that stream of consciousness at all.” The piano line that anchors “Damn” is rudimentary, for good reason: “I’m terrible at piano,” she says. “But it was an experiment, too. I’m aware that it’s simple and long, and when you stretch out simple it can be boring. It may be one of the songs people skip over, but that’s what I wanted to do.” The track is, as she says, a “very honest self-portrait about the woman who, I expect, can be quite difficult to love at times. But there’s a lot of humor in it—to me, anyway.”

Aldous Harding’s third album, Designer is released on 26th April and finds the New Zealander hitting her creative stride. After the sleeper success of Party (internationally lauded and crowned Rough Trade Shop’s Album of 2017), Harding came off a 200-date tour last summer and went straight into the studio with a collection of songs written on the road. Reuniting with John Parish, producer of Party, Harding spent 15 days recording and 10 days mixing at Rockfield Studios, Monmouth and Bristol’s J&J Studio and Playpen. From the bold strokes of opening track ‘Fixture Picture’, there is an overriding sense of an artist confident in their work, with contributions from Huw Evans (H. Hawkline), Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo), drummer Gwion Llewelyn and violinist Clare Mactaggart broadening and complimenting Harding’s rich and timeless songwriting.