Rough Trade's Albums of the Year 2019

The follow-up to Joe Armon-Jones’ 2018 debut full-length *Starting Today* once again captures the keyboardist’s melodic songcraft, sonic imagination, and beat-driven aesthetic. After expanding his creative reach with drummer/bandleader Makaya McCraven on *Where We Come From (Chicago x London Mixtape)*, Armon-Jones regroups with close London scene colleagues on *Turn to Clear View*, featuring guitarist Oscar Jerome, drummer Moses Boyd, trumpeter Dylan Jones, tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, and others on a set full of rippling funk, inspired Wurlitzer harmony, and layered synth dreamscapes. Georgia Anne Muldrow’s voice on the gorgeous “Yellow Dandelion,” Jehst’s vocal/rap spot on “The Leo & Aquarius,” and Obongjayar’s flowing, laidback turn on the closing “Self:Love” round out a head-bopping, concise album.

Bass-heavy dub and contemporary club culture are the foundations for Joe Armon-Jones’ phenomenal second album. “Turn to Clear View” builds on the celebrated keys player’s singular vision, exhibiting a sound with flourishes of R&B, hip-hop and p-funk, and featuring regular bandmates Oscar Jerome, Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia. He builds on his close-knit core personnel with guest spots from artists he’s long admired, including Georgia Anne Muldrow (Brainfeeder, Stones Throw), Obongjayar (XL) and Jehst. From character-fuelled raps to Afrobeat-influenced jams, Armon-Jones channels the diversity of the ascendant scene that surrounds him. Co-produced with longtime collaborator Maxwell Owin, the record has a carefully-plotted feel that reflects their meticulous approach. The duo carefully perfected every touch, with Armon-Jones ever-present throughout the mixing and mastering processes. Between his highly acclaimed solo career and his work with the influential Ezra Collective, Armon-Jones is building on a rush of acclaim – winning Session of the Year at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards and being nominated for UK Act of the Year at the Jazz FM Awards. His electric, open-ended live shows have brought him to Glastonbury, SXSW, Boiler Room and a sold-out headline show at London’s Village Underground.

“There is a sense of place representing creativity, where endless space and emptiness – albeit with an underlying sense of beauty and timelessness – is a perfect context for creating something” — Arthur Jeffes On October 4th Erased Tapes present Handfuls of Night — the highly anticipated follow-up to Penguin Cafe’s much applauded 2017 album The Imperfect Sea — inspired by the Antarctic, Arthur Jeffes’ journey following in Scott’s footsteps and our penguin friends that reside there. Using gut-stringed violins, viola, cello, bass, percussion, upright and grand pianos, synthesizer, harmonium and more, Arthur Jeffes and his cohorts have crafted a vivid series of panoramic sonic landscapes, that are as rich in cerebral poignancy as they are in emotional depth. Bookended by the atmospheric ambient piano pieces ‘Winter Sun’ and ‘Midnight Sun’, the album traverses glacial minimalism with ease, combining their signature contemporary classical panoramas, such as the melancholic yet upbeat lead track ‘At the Top of the Hill, They Stood...’ and the colossal cinematic piece ‘Chapter’, with the crystalline folktronica on ‘Pythagorus on the Line Again’ — a revisiting and continuation of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s 1993 Union Cafe song on the principles of harmonics. Handfuls of Night began life after Greenpeace commissioned Jeffes to write four pieces of music corresponding to four breeds of penguins, to help raise awareness for the endangered Antarctic seas. A fundraising evening at EartH in Hackney followed, where Penguin Cafe premiered the four songs named after their feathered counterparts to a sold-out audience; the rousing contemporary folk-inflected ‘Chinstrap’, the mournful and minimalistic ‘Adelie’, stoic and rhythmic ‘The Life of an Emperor’ and the wistful, string-laden ‘Gentoo Origin’. “This record started with a core of pieces I wrote specifically about penguins in the Antarctic for a project with Greenpeace in autumn 2018. There are four native Antarctic penguin species – each with their own individual characteristics and natures. I carried on from there to envisage a whole anthropomorphized world, where these penguins had narratives and adventures that we soundtracked”, says Jeffes. But both the album and Penguin Cafe as a project have origins that reach further back: “In 2005 I was asked to join an expedition re-creating Scott’s last Antarctic trip in 1911 for the BBC, using the same Edwardian equipment. I’m no explorer but I was keen, especially as there’s a family link – Scott was married to my great grandmother before she married my great grandfather. Antarctica by this stage being a protected environment, we swapped to the Arctic circle where we spent 3 months on the Greenland ice sheet, first dog-sledding and then man-hauling just short of 1000 km at 10,000 feet, across ice fields and glaciers. I had lots of time to ponder my life back home. It was then that I decided to get my Master of Music degree and focus on composing music, and also then that I realized that even in the most remote silent places, music can still be a huge part of one’s internal world and imagination. Whilst on the expedition. I spent days playing things back in my head and also writing new things, which I would then try and write down at the end of the day.” Handfuls of Night’s tones, textures and melodies evoke otherworldly expanses, which at different junctures are either foreboding, awe-inspiring or peaceful. There’s subtly morphing rhythmic repetition throughout, somewhere between minimalism, krautrock and the piano-cascades of label peer Lubomyr Melnyk. Jeffes creates a kinetic, circling motion, which drives the album forward in the form of a musical trip that mirrors the physical journey it was inspired by. Penguin Cafe was founded by Arthur Jeffes in 2009, after bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians including members of Suede and Gorillaz, to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world-renowned Penguin Cafe Orchestra music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997.

After the billowing, nearly gothic pop of 2016’s *Blood Bitch*—which included a song constructed entirely from feral panting—Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval makes the unlikely pivot into brightly colored synth-pop on *The Practice of Love*. Rarely has music so experimental been quite this graceful, so deeply invested in the kinds of immediate pleasure at which pop music excels. Conceptually and sometimes formally, the album can be as challenging as Hval’s thorniest work. The title track layers together a spoken-word soliloquy by Vivian Wang, the album’s chief vocalist, with an unrelated conversation between Hval and the Australian musician Laura Jean, so that resonant details—about hatred of love, the fragility of the ego, the decision not to have children—drift free of their original contexts and intertwine over a bed of ambient synths. But the bulk of the record is built atop a shimmering foundation of buoyant synths and sleek dance beats, with memories of ’90s trance and dream pop seeping into cryptic lyrics about vampires, thumbsuckers, and nuclear families. In “Six Red Cannas,” Hval makes a pilgrimage to Georgia O’Keeffe’s ranch in New Mexico, citing Joni Mitchell and Amelia Earhart as she meditates on the endless skies above. Her invocation of such feminist pioneers is fitting. Refusing to take even the most well-worn categories as a given, Hval reinvents the very nature of pop music.

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.” Prompted by an urge to find a different kind of language to express what she was feeling, the songs on Love unfurl like an interior dialogue involving several voices. Friends and collaborators Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert, and Felicia Atkinson surface on various tracks, via contributed vocals or through bits of recorded conversation, which further posits the record itself as a kind of ongoing discourse. “The last thing I wrote, which was my new book (forthcoming), had quite an angry voice,” says Hval, “The voice of an angry teenager, furious at the hierarchies. Perhaps this album rediscovers that same voice 20 years later. Not so angry anymore, but still feeling apart from the mainstream, trying to find their place and their community. With that voice, I wanted to push my writing practice further, writing something that was multilayered, a community of voices, stories about both myself and others simultaneously, or about someone’s place in the world and within art history at the same time. I wanted to develop this new multi-tracked writing voice and take it to a positive, beautiful pop song place... A place which also sounds like a huge pile of earth that I’m about to bury my coffin in.” Opening track “Lions” sets the tone for the record, both thematically and aesthetically, offering both a directive and a question: “Look at these trees / Look at this grass / Look at those clouds / Look at them now / Study this and ask yourself: Where is God?” The idea of placing ourselves in context to the earth and to others bubbles up throughout the record. On “Accident” two friends video chat on the topic of childlessness, considering their own ambivalence about motherhood and the curiosity of having been born at all. “She is an accident,” Hval sings, “She is made for other things / Born for cubist yearnings / Born to Write. Born to Burn / She is an accident / Flesh in dissent.” What does it mean to be in the world? What does it mean to participate in the culture of what it means to be human? To parent (or not)? To live and die? To practice love and care? What must we do to feel validated as living beings? Such questions are baked into the DNA of Love, wrapped up in layers of gauzy synthesizers and syncopated beats. Even when circling issues of mortality, there is a kind of humane delight at play. “Put two fingers in the earth,” Hval intones on “Ashes to Ashes”— “I am digging my own grave / in the honeypot / ashes to ashes / dust to dust.” Balanced against these ruminations on love, care and being, Hval employs sounds that are both sentimental and more than a little nostalgic. “I kept coming back to trashy, mainstream trance music from the ’90s,” she says, “It’s a sound that was kind of hiding in the back of my mind for a long time. I don’t mean trashy in a bad sense, but in a beautiful one. The synth sounds are the things I imagined being played at the raves I was too young and too scared to attend, they were the sounds I associated with the people who were always driving around the two streets in the town where I grew up, the guys with the big stereo in the car that was always just pumping away. I liked the idea of playing with trance music in the true transcendental sense, those washy synths have lightness and clarity to them. I think I’m always looking for what sounds can bring me to write, and these synths made me write very open, honest lyrics.” Though The Practice of Love was, in some sense, inspired by Valie Export’s 1985 film of the same name, for Hval the concept of love as a practice—as an ongoing, sustained, multivalent activity—provided a way to broaden and expand her own writing practice. Lyrically, the 8 tracks present here, particularly the title track, hew more closely to poetic forms than anything Hval has made before. (As evidenced by the record’s liner notes, which assume the form of a poetry chapbook.) Rather than shrink from the subject or try to overly obfuscate in some way, Love considers the notion of intimacy from all sides, whether it be positing the notion of art in conversation with other artists (“Six Red Cannas”) or playing with clichés around what it means to be a woman who makes art (“High Alice”), Hval’s songs attempt to make sense of what love and care actually mean—love as a practice, a vocation that one must continually work at. “This sounds like something that should be stitched on a pillow, but intimacy really is a lifelong journey,” she explains, “And I am someone who is interested in what ideas or practices of love and intimacy can be. These practices have for me been deeply tied to the practice of otherness, of expressing myself differently from what I’ve seen as the norm. Maybe that's why I've mostly avoided love as a topic of my work. The theme of love in art has been the domain of the mainstream for me. Love is one of those major subjects, like death and the ocean, and I’m a minor character. But in the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at otherness, this fragile performance, to explore how it expresses love, intimacy, and kindness. I've wanted to explore how otherness deals with the big, broad themes. I've wanted to ask big questions, like: What is our job as a member of the human race? Do we have to accept this job, and if we don’t, does the pressure to be normal ever stop?”  It’s a crazy ambition, perhaps, to think that something as simple as a pop song can manage, over the course of two or three minutes, to chisel away at some extant human truth. Still, it’s hard to listen to the songs on The Practice of Love and not feel as if you are listening in on a private conversation, an examination that is, for lack of a better word, truly intimate. Tucked between the beats and washy synths, the record spills over with slippery truths about what it is to be a human being trying to move through the world and the ways—both expected and unexpected—we relate to each other. “Outside again, the chaos / and I wonder what is lost,” Hval sings on “Ordinary,” the album’s closing track, “We don’t always get to choose / when we are close / and when we are not.”

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date. The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain. Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album. Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating." His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says. Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider".

A bold step forward, Dawn Chorus is also Greene’s most collaborative project to date, featuring additional production and instrumentation from film composer Brian Reitzell (Lost In Translation), cello by London’s Oliver Coates, additional production from Clams Casino and original vocal contributions from ambient artist Julianna Barwick, rapper Cadence Weapon and singers Ebhoni and Rochelle Jordan, all sampled, processed and stitched back into the album. The Album is available on Limited Edition Clear Vinyl (Exclusive to LuckyMe and Rough Trade) CD and Digital Formats Artwork by Hassan Rahim

The majestic French duo Alcest has been mixing shoegaze textures with grinding black metal and hypnotic post-rock since 2005, essentially inventing the so-called \"blackgaze\" of bands like Deafheaven, Oathbreaker, and Bosse-de-Nage. They\'ve kept things mostly uplifting over the course of five records, but their sixth, *Spiritual Instinct*, explores some darker emotions. \"We\'d been touring a lot for the previous record, and I think I started to have some kind of burnout,\" leader and songwriter Neige tells Apple Music. \"I was feeling really, really down and I thought I was losing touch with myself and the things that I like. One of them being spirituality. And when it was time to write a new album, all these feelings went into the music. That\'s pretty much the idea about this album: trying to find the balance between my two sides.\" In turn \"Sapphire\" is a piece of gleaming alt-metal that ends in screams. The title track moves from churning to triumphant. Apple Music talked to Neige, who broke down the album\'s six tracks. **Les jardins de minuit** “The midnight gardens. The Alcest realm—it\'s a very bright and green and springtime type of place. \'Les jardins de minuit\' is like the same place but at night and when all the doubts are rising, and melancholy and the sadness. It\'s the other side of the coin. These are the midnight gardens; it\'s the place where you just wander at night to try to find peace and reflect upon yourself. Musically, it\'s quite fast. I think it\'s one of our fastest tracks. It has almost like a small Nordic black metal thing in the riffs. Some very, very dreamy vocals, and some much more pissed-off ones, too.” **Protection** “It\'s the first song that I wrote for this album. When we were done touring for \[2016\'s\] *Kodama*, I came back home and wrote this song. It all came out at once. Almost like some kind of exorcism. It means that the emotion in the song is very, very genuine. It\'s basically a song about protecting yourself from your own demons. And a song about inner struggle.” **\"Sapphire** “It\'s more or less like a pop song—you know, intro, verse, bridge, chorus. I like to write these type of songs because our fans know me for writing very, very epic songs with different parts that don\'t repeat necessarily. It has almost this \'80s post-punk vibe. I think I was a little bit inspired by The Cure for the riffs. It doesn\'t have any lyrics, just some kind of improvised language that I have. It allows me to not be limited by the sounds and the meaning of an actual language. It\'s a great way to have a very spontaneous way to sing. You don\'t have to follow any text. You just sing the way you feel like singing.” **L\'île des morts** “It\'s some kind of a tribute to this painting by the symbolist painter Böcklin \[\"Isle of the Dead\"\]. And for me, this painting is a great metaphor of the big mystery around spirituality and the question \'What is going to happen when we die?\' In the painting, you see this island that looks a little bit like some kind of cemetery. Some kind of place lost in the middle of nowhere. And you are this tiny boat that is almost reaching the island but doesn\'t reach it. The painter, he has done five versions of this painting over the years. And the boat actually never reaches the island. And I think that\'s a great way to summarize what spirituality is: It\'s the risk maybe not to get any answers at the end of your quest. All the work, you have to do it by yourself.\" **Le miroir** “This one is very, very different from the others. It\'s a bit more like a soundtrack. It also could sound like something from the band Dead Can Dance. Very ritualistic and ancient.” **Spiritual Instinct** “Unfortunately, I\'ve lost one of my friends. And I wrote this song right after. I think it was the last song I wrote for this album. I wasn\'t thinking about him necessarily when I wrote the song. But I can\'t help believing that there is a connection between his death and the fact that I wrote this song. As a paradox, the end is quite bright, you know? It\'s not as dark as the beginning of the album. Since the album was overall quite dark, I wanted to end on a more uplifting note.”

There is a closeness at the heart of Turnover’s aptly titled new album, ‘Altogether.’ Though it’s the first collection the trio has written while living on opposite coasts, the record actually represents the group’s most collaborative and connected work to date, showcasing the intuitive, near-telepathic relationship frontman Austin Getz has developed over the years with his bandmates. “Instead of making things more difficult, being far apart helped us learn to appreciate each other even more,” says Getz. “As a band, we’re closer now than we’ve ever been before.” Recorded at Philadelphia’s Studio 4 with longtime creative foil Will Yip at the helm, ‘Altogether’ finds the group breaking new ground on a number of fronts. Pop sensibilities inform the writing for the first time, with elements of funk, jazz, lounge, and disco mingling alongside the band’s trademark indie grit and punk energy. Lush melodies and infectious hooks reflect the newfound freedom and confidence that have inspired Getz since his cross-country move to northern California, while adventurous recording techniques and instrumentation lend a fresh perspective without sacrificing the kind of precise detail and rich intricacies that have come to define the band’s recent studio output. The result is an album that boasts both sonic sophistication and emotional accessibility in equal measure, a major leap forward in sound and vision that reveals time apart as the true key to togetherness. The title is fitting in another way as well, according to Getz. “On this record, more than in the past, we wanted to keep in mind the beauty of writing ‘popular music,’” he explains. “By that I mean music for people who don’t have the time to delve into the niches and find fringe artists, music for those of us who are busy with work or our families or whatever problems might be around. Music is real magic that can change people’s days and lives, and the more people listening and loving, the better.” Turnover first emerged roughly a decade ago in Virginia Beach, VA, but the group’s critical and commercial breakthrough didn’t arrive until six years later, when they cracked the Top 5 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart with their acclaimed sophomore album, ‘Peripheral Vision.’ The band—which consists of Getz, his brother Casey on drums, and their childhood friend Danny Dempsey on bass—followed it up in 2017 with ‘Good Nature,’ a streaming smash that racked up roughly 40 million plays on Spotify alone and which Vice proclaimed to be “their best album yet.” Reviews were similarly glowing around the world (Pitchfork praised the record’s “rhythmic propulsion and harmonized guitar sparkles,” while Exclaim! hailed its “shimmering instrumentation and luscious harmonies,” and The Line of Best Fit swooned for its “plush production” and “subtle maturity”), and the album earned the band headline dates everywhere from Brooklyn Steel to The Fonda Theatre along with their first appearance at Coachella. “With ‘Peripheral Vision,’ I was starting to experiment with psychedelics, and I was feeling alienated from a lot of the things I’d been raised to believe and accept,” Getz reflects. “That album asked a lot of questions, and I felt like ‘Good Nature’ was my attempt to find the answers to those questions. This time around, though, I found myself in a very different place, both literally and metaphorically.” Starting over from scratch somewhere new, particularly somewhere as rural and isolated as Getz’s new home in northern California, proved more challenging than he had anticipated. “The move was great in a lot of ways,” he explains, “but the experience also de-romanticized a lot of the notions I had about leaving everything behind and relocating to the woods. I realized I’d been undervaluing a lot of things that were actually really important to me, like having friends and family close by. I had to come to terms with being a stranger and learn how to trust new people and make new connections all over again.” For the first time, Getz found himself looking inwards instead of outwards for inspiration, writing as an act of self-exploration rather than in response to any external stimuli. “There was a deepening of my relationship with music that came out of the whole experience,” he explains. “Instead of waiting for some revelation to arrive, I would make myself sit down with a guitar or at the piano and just play until something interesting happened. Often what came out surprised me.” Sometimes an entire song would reveal itself in ten minutes; other times, Getz would land on a guitar riff or a chord progression that he’d revise for months. The band spent time writing together in-person on tour and during time off in New York and Portland, with Yip flying out to join the band for the latter. “Will’s much more than just a producer for us at this point,” says Getz. “He’s a close friend and a reliable piece of what our sound has become.” That sound is the product of a remarkably wide range of influences and tastes, which Turnover synthesizes on the album into a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. “Working remotely for the most part, everybody was able to send ideas around on their own schedules, and nobody felt too protective of anything, so the new songs started to reflect each of our personalities more than ever before,” says Getz. “Collectively we like everything from jazz to folk, disco to rock and roll, and a lot in between, and it’s where we all intersect that things start to feel special. With the three of us and Will all contributing to the writing together, the songs turned out better than anything any of us could have done on our own. That’s what makes the experience of being a band really unique as opposed to just one artistic mind.” ‘Altogether’ demonstrates the band’s eclectic mix of personalities from the very start, opening with a lo-fi, jazzy intro that quickly gives way to the driving drums and delay-drenched guitar of “Still In Motion.” Like much of the album to come, the song is a meditation on change and perspective, on learning to quiet your mind and appreciate the moment before it’s gone. The bittersweet “No Reply” reckons with guilt over failing to be present with a loved one, while the effervescent “Much After Feeling” recognizes the sacrifices we make to stay connected across geographical distance, and the breezy “Parties” grapples with the kind of self-consciousness that can leave us prisoners of our own design. “There’s a part in that song where the tone completely changes,” says Getz, “and that represents the moment when your walls finally come down and you start to just appreciate where you are. The lyrics go from describing the nervousness you feel in a particular moment to just describing the moment itself because you’re finally out of your head and able to recognize the beauty that’s all around you.” Getz taps into that beauty throughout the record, stopping to smell the roses and ground himself in ways that might have seemed impossible even just a few years ago. “Starting to feel at home in the country,” he sings on the hazy “Valley of the Moon,” while the sultry sax of “Ceramic Sky” hints at the simple and sensual pleasures of falling in love, and the playful “Plant Sugar” channels 80’s Britpop as it makes a case for mindfulness. “I was stressed out when I first started writing that song, but then I looked up at the sky and saw the constellations and felt ridiculous for being worried about anything,” he laughs. “It reminded me that sometimes you just need a little change in perspective to appreciate how lucky you really are.” Turns out, that’s all Turnover needed, too.

Drop into the anonymous project Sault’s 2019 debut and you might mistake it for a compilation of ’70s soul/funk obscurities, the kind of tracks that don’t hit a commercial sweet spot but marshal their influences with such style that the particulars get subsumed into the big, intoxicating whole. Like post-punk? “Don’t Waste My Time.” The Chi-Lites vis-à-vis Erykah Badu? “Masterpiece.” Flower-crown funk? “We Are the Sun.” And so on. Vintage as the sound is, the sentiments—“Why Why Why Why Why,” “Foot on Necks”—are unnervingly current, a nod to the reality that while sounds change, state-sanctioned violence has long been ingrained in the American consciousness.

Melina Duterte is a master of voice: Hers are dream pop songs that hint at a universe of her own creation. Recording as Jay Som since 2015, Duterte’s world of shy, swirling intimacies always contains a disarming ease, a sky-bent sparkle and a grounding indie-rock humility. In an era of burnout, the title track of her 2017 breakout, Everybody Works, remains a balm and an anthem. Duterte’s life became a whirlwind in the wake of Everybody Works. After spending her teen years and early 20s exploring an eclectic array of musical styles—studying jazz trumpet as a child, carrying on her Filipino family tradition of spirited karaoke, and quietly recording indie-pop songs in her bedroom alone—that accomplished album found her playing festivals around the world, sharing stages with the likes of Paramore, Death Cab for Cutie, and Mitski. In November of 2017, seeking a new environment, Duterte left her home of the Bay Area for Los Angeles. There, she demoed new songs, while also embracing opportunities to do session work and produce, engineer, and mix for other artists (like Sasami, Chastity Belt). Reckoning with the relative instability of musicianhood, Duterte turned inward, tuning ever deeper into her own emotions and desires as a way of staying centered through huge changes. She found a community; she fell in love. And for an artist whose career began after releasing her earliest collection of demos—2015's hazy but exquisitely crafted Turn Into—in a fit of drunken confidence on Thanksgiving night, she finally quit drinking for good. “I feel like a completely different person,” she reflects. Positivity was a way forward. The striking clarity of her new music reflects that shift. After months of poring over pools of demos, Duterte, now 25, essentially started over. She wrote most of her brilliant new album, Anak Ko—pronounced Anuhk-Ko—in a burst during a self-imposed week-long solo retreat to Joshua Tree. As in the past, Duterte recorded at home (in some songs, you can hear the washer/dryer near her bedroom) and remained the sole producer, engineer, and mixer. But for the first time, she recruited friends—including Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott, Justus Proffitt, Boy Scouts’ Taylor Vick, as well as bandmates Zachary Elasser, Oliver Pinnell and Dylan Allard—to contribute additional vocals, drums, guitars, strings, and pedal steel. Honing in on simplicity and groove, refining her skills as a producer, Duterte cracked her sound open subtly, highlighting its best parts: She’s bloomed. Inspired by the lush, poppy sounds of 80s bands such as Prefab Sprout, the Cure, and Cocteau Twins—as well as the ecstatic guitarwork of contemporary Vancouver band Weed—Anak Ko sounds dazzlingly tactile, and firmly present. The result is a refreshingly precise sound. On the subtly explosive “Superbike,” Duterte aimed for the genius combination of “Cocteau Twins and Alanis Morissette”—“letting loose,” she says, over swirling shoegaze. “Night Time Drive” is a restless road song, but one with a sense of contentedness and composure, which “basically encapsulated my entire life for the past two years,” she says—always moving, but “accepting it, being a little stronger from it.” (She sings, memorably, of “shoplifting at the Whole Foods.”) Duterte focused more on bass this time: “I just wanted to make a more groovy record,” she notes. The slow-burning highlight “Tenderness” begins minimally, like a slightly muffled phone call, before flowering into a bright, jazzy earworm. Duterte calls it “a feel-good, funky, kind of sexy song” in part about “the curse of social media” and how it complicates relationships. “That’s definitely about scrolling on your phone and seeing a person and it just haunts you, you can’t escape it,” Duterte says. “I have a weird relationship to social media and how people perceive me—as this person that has a platform, as a solo artist, and this marginalized person. That was really getting to me. I wanted to express those emotions, but I felt stifled. I feel like a lot of the themes of the songs stemmed from bottled up emotions, frustration with yourself, and acceptance.” The title, Anak Ko, means “my child" in Tagalog, one of the native dialects in the Philippines. It was inspired by an unassuming text message from Duterte’s mother, who has always addressed her as such: Hi anak ko, I love you anak ko. “It’s an endearing thing to say, it feels comfortable,” Duterte reflects, likening the process of creating and releasing an album, too, to “birthing a child.” That sense of care charges Anak Ko, as does another concept Duterte has found herself circling back to: the importance of patience and kindness. “In order to change, you’ve got to make so many mistakes,” Duterte says, reflecting on her recent growth as an artist with a zen-like calm. “What’s helped me is forcing myself to be even more peaceful and kind with myself and others. You can get so caught up in attention, and the monetary value of being a musician, that you can forget to be humble. You can learn more from humility than the flashy stuff. I want kindness in my life. Kindness is the most important thing for this job, and empathy.”

“It’s a mad, mad world,” Jordan Rakei repeatedly observes on the opening track of his third studio album, but the expat—born in New Zealand, raised in Australia, now based in Britain—refuses to give in to pessimism. *Origin* is an expansive and artful collection of electronic pop songs that dives deep into the chaos of contemporary life and examines both fundamental failings and revitalizing moments of wonder. The record’s palette is vivid and wide-ranging: Funk bass and tingling guitar licks underpin “Rolling Into One,” while “Mind’s Eye” mixes slinky Afropop guitar and dreamy electronic melodies. It’s an album about opening things up, whether it be Rakei’s songwriting or the listener’s perceptions. The lineage these songs tap into is a rich one, taking in Stevie Wonder’s masterful 1970s recordings and the soulful laments of Marvin Gaye through to the evocative textures of James Blake. The common thread is humanity, as Rakei sings about finding it in others on “Wildfire” and remembering to value his own on the bewitching “Signs.” It’s ambitious but always coherent.

Soulful, intimate and expansive all at once, Jordan Rakei’s third album, “Origin”, cuts straight to the point, in every sense of the word. The melodies are brighter, the sound is bigger and the vision behind it more finely-tuned. Switching up from the highly personal and intimate portrait he painted with 2017’s “Wallflower”, which was a way of grappling with his experience of anxiety and introversion, “Origin” is overtly inspired by dystopian visions of our future - notably Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. “I’m worried that we’re losing a sense of connection,” explains Jordan, with many of the album lyrics exploring technological growth, and how it affects our sense of humanity. For example, new single ‘Say Something’ is “about speaking up for what you believe in”, a call to arms for future humans to stand up against the AI systems which govern a now-dystopian world. It follows recent single ‘Mind’s Eye’, which envisions a future world where malfunctioning tech implanted in the human body has flooded the users mind with projections of chaos. He meditates daily, something he adopted partly in response to his issues with anxiety, and something which has shaped his worldview and informed his writing and production process. Since signing to Ninja Tune and releasing “Wallflower”, Jordan Rakei has stamped his authority as a preternaturally talented songwriter, producer and live performer and cemented his worldwide rep as a modern soul icon in the making. New Zealand-born and Brisbane-raised, Jordan settled in London in 2015 and quickly found himself in a network of like-minded individuals, forming friendships that have spawned many professional collaborations. He is part of the “Are We Live” crew with Tom Misch, Barney Artist and Alfa Mist, who put on gigs, record podcasts and make music together, and Jordan has written, produced and performed on four tracks for Loyle Carner’s new album (including recent single ‘Ottolenghi’ and ‘Loose Ends’ feat. Jorja Smith). He has also found the same passion for experimentation and rhythm in frequent collaborator Richard Spaven (drummer and don of the British jazz scene who has collaborated with Flying Lotus, Jose James and Mala). Likewise, in the founder of the dance party and label Rhythm Section - Bradley Zero - who released Jordan’s “Joy, Ease, Lightness” EP under the pseudonym Dan Kye in 2016. Simon Green aka Bonobo also included an exclusive Dan Kye track on his recent “Fabric presents Bonobo” DJ mix, having previously invited Jordan to perform alongside him at Alexandra Palace in 2018. Beyond the London scene too, there is no doubt that the depth and craftsmanship of Jordan’s music is turning heads worldwide. He recently joined Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers in the studio for a writing session and, following his show at Cape Town Jazz Festival last year, Jordan came off stage to find Robert Glasper and Terrace Martin (producer for Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg and Herbie Hancock) waiting in the wings to commend him for his performance, with Martin wasting no time in inviting him out to LA to record together in his studio. On “Origin”, Rakei has scaled up his ambitions, and is more confident in the way he goes about achieving them. Making tracks that speak more confidently, in brighter colours, and which deal with something bigger than himself. He channeled the classic songwriting and musicality of his heroes Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, striving to surprise and delight with the form of his work, and always infusing it with the same effortless swing and human feel that he fell in love with listening to A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock and 9th Wonder.

Chronogram Q&A with Thurston Moore Spirit Counsel is described as representing, among other things, “a period of reflection on spiritual matters.” One might say your music has always had a spiritual element running through it, at times perhaps more pronounced than at other times. Was focusing on that spiritual aspect a conscious intention when you were writing the music for this album, or was it something you’d realized you’d done after the music was written and recorded? How did it evolve and what pulled you in that direction? Writing and playing music has always been, for me personally, an engagement with spiritual life. So you are correct in the saying this is not such a new statement to make. But what distinguishes Spirit Counsel, as a collection of recent writing, is that I approached the presentation as a wordless sonic message of pure tonal/noise expression. The current "leaderships" have taken WORDS and put them to the nefarious activity of despair, divisiveness and degradation. I stripped out words and made the instruments the total sound. Picking up guitars and drums is not something I foresee these politicians having any wherewithall to co-opt. You gravitated toward New York in 1976 because of the early punk scene there and were especially attracted to no wave, the noisier, more avant-garde, and less obviously “rock ’n’ roll” tangent of the scene that Sonic Youth eventually sprang from. What was it about the no wave bands that you found so compelling and inspiring? I suppose I was always attracted to the subversive and the outlier. Seeing images of Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart, Iggy, cross-gender signifying Wayne County and David Bowie resonated a thrill of "otherness" in me. I would see pictures many times before i would hear the actual music. I could only imagine what these artists would sound like and I would seek out the records, an adventurous exposition in the early 1970s. Luckily these records were discounted as they were very unpopular (mostly by the labels who deigned to release them, it seems). I would find surprises like Can's Ege Bamyasi LP or the first Stooges LP in the "cut-out" bins for forty-nine cents! And they were like strange friends that were far more interesting then the kids in school. I loved them and when realizing there were others with this smae experience collecting around places like CBGB I ran there. Of course we all loved Patti, Blondie, Hell et al but when Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Arto Lindsay, Rudolph Grey and the other No Wave musicians, who existed concurrently with the 1976 class of ground zero punk rock, began performing with their bands where any traditional concept of virtuosity was replaced with completely original vision and heart I was struck, though not initially, by it's elemental brilliance. When Sonic Youth came together this was where each of our sensibilities were in tangent with. It’s been pointed out repeatedly how the music Sonic Youth made collectively and via its individual members has altered the course of contemporary music. Do you hear or detect the influence of your art in that of others? Do any especially humbling, flattering, or surprising examples of your music having resonated with other artists come to mind? At some point in the late 1980s and certainly into the 1990s I would hear, or it would be brought to my attention, the playing of bands utilizing inspirations of Sonic Youth. Yes, flattering but always it was via a prism of transferring our approach, where alternate tunings and non-traditional chordings are primary, through more standardized technique. Sometimes I'd be alerted that Radiohead woud have a "Sonic Youth " part in a song, but it was always reigned in with "proper" finesse. I prefer bands who don't necesarilly play by the rules. At all. There came a point where, in criticism, bands would have "Sonic Youth" parts which invariably meant noise and distortion, which I felt to be a simplifying of our output, but I understood. Given Spirit Counsel’s themes of reflection, what do you most hope will be the hallmarks of your legacy as an artist and what do you most hope people in the future get from hearing your music when they discover it? I don't consider legacy so much these days as it only reflects ego and self-importance and, like money, it is essentially worthless. I want to think of the future where we can continue to fight and resist the negative energies that seek power and mechanisms of control over organic life. I want to further explore and exhibit expressions of wonder, joy and collective consciousness where we care for every living thing. This is the only way to make music, as far as i can see.

“I really am the worst person in the world at recognizing what is potentially a hit,” Dermot Kennedy tells Apple Music. “But then I’m also the person who didn’t watch *Game of Thrones* for four years because every single person in the world loved it. Something seems to get in my way.” On a debut album over a decade in the making, nothing is in the Irishman’s way. Kennedy’s rich, emotional folk-pop swoops and soars with bombastic choruses and smart, hip-hop-owed production. It’s an intoxicating brew, and one he’s insistent stays bespoke. “I’ve been in lots of situations where a song’s needed to get done and it’s been suggested that a producer can finish things off,” he says. “Basically suggesting I don’t need to be present. I always have to drive home the fact that I have to be there because if you leave something alone, it’ll sound generic. When I play the piano or synths, I’ll play in my trademark clumsy way. And that’s what’s important, you know? Everything has to sound like me.” Who better, then, to talk you through *Without Fear*… **An Evening I Will Not Forget** “It feels right to be first in a bunch of ways. In a boring way, it was the very first song I brought out properly. This is a new version that we\'ve been playing live; it\'s far more produced and it sounds huge. For me, it\'s important because I feel like it\'s the only song I\'ve got that captures every important life event I\'ve experienced. I always wanted to have a song that felt like a poem and that sort of rises with intensity as you go through it. I think a song I always go back to that does that for me is ‘One Mic’ by Nas. I think the way it starts out pretty chilled out and then turns into this super intense thing with sirens and everything, that was really inspiring.” **All My Friends** “I remember the very first thing that came about with this song was that rolling piano line. I wrote it ages ago, and I always, always want to write things that are atmospheric. So I wanted this to have a darkness to it—without becoming spooky and weird—and sound like it was from a movie. I love that it\'s become a key song, because it\'s certainly not what I set out to do. I just wasn\'t in that headspace in the studio to find the ‘killer hook’ like there’s pressure to do sometimes. It was this really free process and it all came about naturally.” **Power Over Me** “This was essentially the opposite writing experience to ‘All My Friends.’ We intentionally started with the hook and the ‘power over me’ lyric. I’d never done that before, and so the job was then to keep that sentiment and build around it. It felt quite jarring at first, but I got into it. There are things like the ‘woo!’ on the back end of the track, which was a completely natural moment. I know they seem like a tiny thing, but as I move forward and I’m deeper into ‘the industry,’ little ad-lib moments like that help me reclaim my authenticity and integrity, and all that stuff.” **What Have I Done** “If you just read the title, you\'d probably assume this is a negative song. It sounds like sort of some disaster is unfolding. But I always wanted to capture a sense of disbelief—‘How did I happen upon this beautiful love?’ We made this out in LA, and I wrote and sang it in one day. It\'s the only song on the album where I kept the vocal takes from the first time I did them. I often find myself wanting to go back to certain things—it\'s just part of the type of person I am. Artists can often find themselves trying to do what they did in a demo because they think they should, and then just never capturing that feeling again. So I just left it alone. I wasn’t going to sing the chorus in that way again.” **Moments Passed** “I had come back from a trip to Toronto working on what was going to be the next single, but I wasn\'t passionate about it. The guy I had been working with sent me a few snippets of that opening part—just a bunch of my vocal takes mixed up and distorted. Instantly, I was so excited and felt it was what I wished we’d done. So I called off the release of the song we’d been planning and started chasing this idea. In terms of me presenting my sound to the world in an album, this song is so important. Oh, and it’s also the track that I once played over FaceTime to Travis Scott. I was in the studio with \[Texan hip-hop producer\] Mike Dean and Travis called so we gave him a blast. I *think* he liked it!” **The Corner** “This one came to be when management and the label were all pushing for that one song to hang the campaign on. So I spent a lot of time going around trying to write that track, which can be pretty arduous and disheartening. We then had a writing session set up with Starsmith \[British songwriter and producer Finlay Dow-Smith\] and another guy in London. The other guy didn’t show, and Starsmith is the most chilled-out guy and lovely, so we quickly reached a point where we just wrote whatever we felt. He absolutely encouraged me to stop worrying about finding that big single. I loved the idea of this song just having a couple of choruses and opening out into this big, triumphant end section. I had Mumford & Sons in mind, actually. We perform it live and play that end section around eight times. I actually wrote a newer version that was a bit more cryptic, but decided it needed to be this direct.” **Lost** “I wrote this with Carey Willetts \[British bassist, songwriter, and producer\] in London. We also wrote ‘Moments Passed’ and ‘Without Fear’ together, and he is one of my favorite people to work with. My favorite thing in making music is when Carey and I get five days to really go in on a song. In the studio, there\'s a lot of time spent kind of just sitting around and talking, which was leaving me quite fed up, so I went downstairs to the piano and started writing. The first verse and piano part just sort of fell out of me.” **Rome** “I started writing songs in the first place because I was deeply affected by songwriters and straight-up acoustic songs. Tracks like ‘Shine’ by David Gray and Foy Vance’s ‘Homebird’—that was the type of music I fell in love with. Over the last few years my music has developed and I’ve branched out into using electronic and hip-hop production—things that make all this so exciting for me. It’s where I want to be creatively, but I also like to go back to reminding myself why I started writing songs in the first place. A lot of the album has very big, fleshed-out production, so this became vital as it’s a ballad with just piano and organ. We tried beefing up the production on it, but kept stripping it back. This is where it needed to be.” **Outnumbered** “This is an example of good things happening when you don\'t overthink absolutely everything and analyze every single choice you make. And believe me, I did analyze it to death afterwards. I had got into London on this stupid 6:05 am Ryanair flight from Dublin. I don\'t go to sleep early, so I think I’d slept for two hours. Now, I personally think good things can happen when you\'re knackered because your super-alert conscious self isn\'t necessarily there and so you just think, ‘Fuck it. I\'ll be out of here soon and I can go to bed.’ Maybe because of that, this song came about pretty much in a day. I wrote it a good while ago in certain circumstances that, luckily, I\'m free of now. But I wanted the song to be a small element of solace and comfort for somebody.” **Dancing Under Red Skies** “I was 17 when I wrote this. Maybe you’re never more romantic than when you’re 17—you’re spoiled by the world. I first played this in a band called Shadows and Dust. The version we played then was seven minutes long because we were all falling in love with Bon Iver and wanted everything to have four-minute intros of ambient sounds. It’s another example, in my opinion, of how you’ll likely strike gold if you’re left to your own creative devices. I like it here, too, because this section of the album feels very nostalgic. I have a lot of songs—including this one—that I wrote while I was in love with somebody that I wasn’t in a relationship with and couldn’t have at the time. I was basically writing love songs trying very hard to not sound like I had nothing to base it on.” **Outgrown** “I had a lot of fun with this. I was writing the song with \[US producer\] Scott Harris in New York and he instantly told me who he wanted to produce the song. He had bumped into this 19-year-old kid called Jonah Shai at an NYU music workshop. So we go with him into the studio for this song, and it was just the most exciting thing, because he’s so young—there was zero ego.” **Redemption** “This one was quite scary. It’s different to anything I’d done before, but it’s exciting to be out of your comfort zone. I think of people like Francis and the Lights and Chance the Rapper when I hear it. It’s very easy for someone like me to get bogged down on lyrics and trying to make things sound as emotional as possible. But I also put a lot of importance on what the guys in my band think—and they all love this one. They’re people who latch on to music and melody and the way songs are built. It’s easy for me to worry about the feel of the song, because it’s uplifting and hopeful as opposed to being a super sad thing. I’m bringing out 13 songs, so I should be able to mess around with one, you know?” **Without Fear** “It’s always nice when you find a song you wrote ages ago and are still proud of. So I thought it’d be a nice thing to name the album *Without Fear*, too. Recently someone asked me whether the title is a reminder to myself. It’s a lovely way to put it. In terms of how the album moves—with the highs at the beginning, then the lows, then nostalgia, and then the hopefulness at the end—I feel like the title captures the whole story within it. This song went on a journey, too—from a little acoustic track to this big, giant album closer Carey and I wrote on one of our five-day stretches. He was the first person I ever wrote with in London, so it really was a lovely way to bring it all full circle.”

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.

In the middle of writing his sixth album *Flamagra*, Steven Ellison—the experimental electronic producer known as Flying Lotus—took up piano lessons. “It’s never too late!” the 35-year-old tells Apple Music. “It\'s always nice to have someone checking your technique and calling you on your bullshit.” For the past decade, Ellison’s primary tool has been his laptop, but for this album, he committed to learning each instrument. “It actually made me faster,” says the artist, who is a product of LA’s beat scene and the grandnephew of John and Alice Coltrane. “Suddenly, I could hear every part.” Inspired by the destructive wildfires that swept California\'s coastline and the deadly 2016 Ghost Ship fire, which broke out at a warehouse in Oakland, *Flamagra*—a jazzy, psychedelic concept album that spans 27 tracks—imagines a world in which Los Angeles was lit by an eternal flame. “One that was contained, and good,” he says. “How would we *use* it?\'\" To explore that heady framework, he tapped some of pop culture\'s most out-of-the-box thinkers, including George Clinton, David Lynch, Anderson .Paak, and Solange—all visionary artists with specific points of view who, Ellison knows, rarely do guest features. \"The fact is, most of these artists are my friends,\" he says. \"I like to do things organically. That\'s the only way it feels right.\" Read on for the story behind each collaboration. **Anderson .Paak, \"More\"** \"I first met Andy a long time ago. He\'s a drummer and grew up around Thundercat and Ronald Bruner Jr., two amazing musicians Andy was probably inspired by. So I chased him down and we recorded the demo to \'More.\' It was dope, but it was never done. There were things both of us wanted to change. For years I\'d run into him at parties where he\'d be like, \'What\'s up with the song, man? Is it done yet? Why ain\'t it done yet?\' It became this running joke with his big ol\' toothy smile. Then, finally, we got it done. And now we don\'t have nothin\' to talk about.\" **George Clinton, \"Burning Down the House\"** \"I made this beat while I was in a big Parliament phase. One day, George came through and I threw it on. We sat next to each other working on it—the lyrics, the arrangements. And even though he\'s so brilliant, I was able to help fill in little gaps that made it work with the album\'s concept, so it was truly collaborative. It also gave me more confidence writing lyrics, which isn\'t something I normally do that often.\" **Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon, \"Spontaneous\"** \"I\'d been trying to work with Little Dragon for forever. We\'ve always been playing similar shows, passing each other at festivals, being like, \'We gotta do something! We gotta do something!\' Finally I was like, \'I\'ma reach out and get this poppin\'.\' The song was actually one of the last to get added onto the album.\" **Tierra Whack, \"Yellow Belly\"** \"Honestly, I was just a fan of hers from SoundCloud. Then, one day, Lil Dicky came over to play some music and brought her along. He didn\'t really give her the proper introduction. He was just like, \'This is my friend Tierra, she makes music.\' She didn\'t say much, but she was cool and we were vibing out. A couple hours later, Dicky was like, \'Okay, wanna listen to some of this Tierra Whack music?\' I was like, \'Wait a second, you mean, you\'re the—oh my god! I know all your songs. I mean, you\'ve only got two of them, but I know \'em both!\' I super-fanned out.\" **Denzel Curry, \"Black Balloons\"** \"The thing I love about Denzel is that he\'s got so much to prove. He\'s got a fiery spirit. He wants to show the world that he\'s the greatest rapper right now. I love that. But the difference is that he actually comes back better every time I hear him. He\'s putting in the work, not just talking shit. He cares about the craft and is such a thoughtful human. So there\'s an interesting duality there. He\'s got the turn-up spirit, but he\'s very conscious and very smart.\" **David Lynch, \"Fire Is Coming\"** \"This album has a middle point—like a chapter break moment—and David Lynch couldn\'t have been more perfect to introduce it. You know, initially I thought it should be a sound design thing, something weird and narrative and unexpected. I wasn\'t thinking about chopping David Lynch on the beat. But when I sent them a version that was basically atonal jazz—you know, weird sounds—they hit me back like, \'Hey, so we think this would be so cool if it had that Flying Lotus beat!\' I was like, \'Oh, all right, okay, I got you.\'\" **Shabazz Palaces, \"Actually Virtual\"** \"This one is special to me. He came out to my house, stayed in my guest room, and we worked on songs for three days straight. And the truth is, we made so much stuff that we forgot about this track. When I found it later, randomly, I was like, \'What the fuck is this? It needs a little TLC, but man, it could really be something.\' After I spent some time on it and sent it back over to him, he just goes, \'That\'s hardbody.\' Such an East Coast line.\" **Thundercat, \"The Climb\"** \"The thing is, Thundercat is on every track. He\'s pretty much playing on 90 percent of the album. But this is the only one he\'s singing on. We started this song the way we start everything: frustrated and depressed about the world, knowing we want to make something that reminds people that most of the chaos out there is just noise. Be above all that shit. Be above the bullshit.\" **Toro y Moi, \"9 Carrots\"** \"Toro is the person I always wind up in vans with at festivals. Somehow, I always wind up in the van with Toro. We play a lot of the same shows, we get picked up from the same hotels, and he\'s just always in the van, or on the plane, things like that. Over time, I guess I started to feel a kindred spirit thing, even though he\'s someone I don\'t know too well. But finally we were like, \'We gotta make something happen.\'\" **Solange, \"Land of Honey\"** \"I\'d been trying to make this song happen for a long time. We initially started it for a documentary film that didn\'t pan out. But I really loved the song and always thought it was special, so I kept on it. I kept working on it, kept to trying to figure out how to tie it into the universe that I was building. Eventually, we recorded it here at the house and just felt really organic, really natural. She\'s someone I\'d definitely like to keep working with.\" **Honorable Mention: Mac Miller** \"A couple songs on the album, like \'Find Your Own Way Home\' and \'Thank U Malcolm,\' were inspired by Mac. \'Thank U Malcolm\' is special to me because it\'s my way of thanking him for all the inspiration he left behind in his passing, and for all the fire he inspired in me, Thundercat, and all of our friends. He made us want to be better, to let go of the bullshit. And now, you know, none of us are out here experimenting with drugs or anything. That\'s largely because of him. After he left us, everyone was like, \'You know what? Fuck all that shit.\' In a way, in his passing, he\'s got friends of mine clean. He\'ll always mean a lot to me.\"

Abandoning their debut’s mellow indie pop, London trio Girl Ray—inspired by Ariana Grande and Drake—goes full-on pop on album two. Nobody will mistake *Girl* for the next *Take Care*, although it’s better for it. They try out Destiny’s Child-style recriminations (“Keep It Tight”), dreamy evocations of solitude in the vein of Solange (“Let It Go”), and even a muted dembow stutter (“Because”), asserting their identity via dusty analog production (hear the flute trills on “Go to the Top”) and singer Poppy Hankin’s lovely, nervous voice, which is often caught in the throes of anticipation. Their charm underpins a surprisingly convincing about-face.

High quality, timeless pop songs weren’t always created in offices by handfuls of writers and marketing teams and then farmed out to the highest bidding singers. Once upon a time they were written and recorded by artists – George Michael, Prince or Kate Bush for example – who wanted to use the universal, happy medium of pop music to put across joyous, accessible messages of love, friendship and life to the world. And that’s what Girl Ray have done. They’ve done far more than just “go pop.” To have the confidence to totally change one’s creative output is something so few artists manage, but they’ve nailed it. Back in 2017, the band Girl Ray released Earl Grey: a debut album of expertly-crafted, sweet, hummable songs about longing, friendship, self doubt and contemplation. It was a success. “With Girl Ray, we knew we had found something special,” says Stephen Bass who signed the band in 2016. After their tour rolled to a stop and Girl Ray’s members Poppy, Sophie and Iris floated back to earth, taking up employment in shops and restaurants. They hung about listlessly, struggled with bouts of feeling a bit shit and saw each together ritualistically despite not creating much music. Poppy started writing some new songs for their second record much like the sweet odes to longing, love and friendship on their debut. But the vibes just weren’t there. It was Ariana Grande’s explosion into pop culture that kickstarted a new era for Girl Ray. “Thank U, Next came out and that kind of changed everything,” Poppy says. That, combined with Ari’s ballad of self-love and the party vibe they witnessed when touring with US band Porches (“their live game was so fun and super synthy and so danceable,” Sophie recalls. “It looked like much more of a party,”) led to the band beginning to wonder if they could try their hand at making their own pop. After that realisation, everything clicked into place. Poppy began experimenting with writing songs over beats. “I had to start learning how to write on a computer, using keyboards, and that made everything sound more pop,” she explains. The songs poured out. A collection of shimmering, foot-tapping, sparkling pop bangers. It’s unmistakably Girl Ray, but with added synths. If Earl Grey was a hot cup of tea and a cuddle on the sofa, Girl is being in a cab with the windows down on the way to a beach bar for sundowners. It’s the sun kissed excitement of Rihanna’s If It’s Lovin’ That You Want, combined with the eye-rolling, impenetrable sardonic humour of a girl gang. Among the grin-inducing, trepidatious and intensely courageous R&B-style tracks on the album are beautifully composed piano ballads steeped in the sadness and unrequited love that made Earl Grey feel like a knowing look from an old friend. The band took the demos to Ash Workman at Electric Beach Studios in Margate. “He has more of a pop background [Christine and the Queens and Metronomy] which is exactly why we wanted him for the job,” Poppy says. “We didn’t have to compromise with him, he just got it straight away.” Ash listened to the demos and was keen to help them produce a record that sounded something like “70s Drake.” The band were slightly confused by this, so they stuck pictures of Ariana around his mixing desk to remind him of his raison d’être. Even though Girl sounds a little like a cross between the Love Island soundtrack and The Power Out by Electrelane, it’s almost genre-less. Girl Ray have created something beautiful that hasn’t been seen for a long time now: expertly-crafted pop created by dedicated artists on a mission to make music for people to really enjoy. Music that doesn’t look to confuse or patronise. Music to fall in love to, to dance to. Songs you’d want to send to your friends. “Pop is so fun and universal, even if you’re a super muso nerd who’s into Elliot Smith you’re still going to love hearing a bit of Whitney Houston and that’s really appealing to me,” Poppy says. “If you hear a good groove you can’t not boogie, and we want our shows to be more of a party and for it to be more feelgood music.” “With this new set of songs they have been brave enough to completely change their sound rather than playing it safe yet still remain unmistakably themselves,” says Stephen. “A bold move perhaps, but a sign of that desire to push themselves that only the best artists have.”

debut album from Toronto, Canada's dream pop.

“Go inwards and be bold.” This was Harmony Korine’s advice to aspiring creatives, during a Q&A at the British Film Institute back in early 2016. For the recently-formed Drahla, his words served as something of a directive, encouraging the trio to trust their own instincts, however far removed they might be from those of their peers. Three years on, the Leeds-formed band have defined their own vital subset of art-rock with Useless Coordinates, a debut album that’s as fearless as it is enthralling. Speaking from her current base in south-east London with bassist Rob Riggs, singer/guitarist Luciel Brown recounts the record’s somewhat chaotic gestation. “Most of last year was spent touring, so we were squeezing writing and recording in from the beginning of 2018 until end of August.” In-between a headline tour, support slots with Ought and METZ, and multiple festival appearances - including at Meltdown at the request of The Cure’s Robert Smith - Brown, Riggs and Wakefield-based drummer Mike Ainsley managed 10 days in the studio in total. It was the unsettled nature of the period that part-inspired the album’s title. “[Useless Coordinates] summarised all of our situations,” Brown explains. “We had all these shows coming up and we knew we needed to leave our jobs and change our living situations to make all this stuff happen. So we had all these fixed points and timelines, but at the same time we felt quite lost within all of that.” Though they felt adrift in their personal lives, artistically Drahla thrived amongst confusion. Experimentation was integral to the creative process, with Brown and Riggs continuing to swap instruments as per their live shows, while collectively they were open to relinquishing traditional song structures in favour of adopting a more instinctive approach. Another integral development proved to be the involvement Chris Duffin of XAM Duo, who played saxophone on large swathes of the record and whose esoteric musical tastes were influential. Via Duffin, they discovered the work of Japanese synth pioneers Mariah and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu. These cult figures figure amongst an eclectic array of musical touch points, from Glenn Miller and Swell Maps, to L.A.-band Behavior. As per their earliest releases, No Wave and post-punk remain integral to Drahla’s musical universe, evident in Brown’s brilliantly deadpan drawl, in the Gang Of Four-esque guitars on Gilded Cloud, and in Duffin’s skronking saxophone on React/Revolt, which draws parallels with the work of James Chance and the Contortions. The set’s sharp angles, stark tones and claustrophobic textures are reflected in the album’s artwork. Designed by Brown and Riggs - as per all previous record sleeves and promotional videos - the minimalist, mixed media creation takes inspiration from Talking Heads and Gang Of Four album art, the work of American artist Cy Twombly, and the economical, regimented aesthetic of the Bauhaus movement. “Drahla came about off the back of needing an outlet for creative expression,” Brown explains. “So the whole aesthetic is hugely important. As important as the music.” Whatever the medium, Brown’s interests lie in looking beyond the immediate to the abstract and indefinable. Her lyrics are developed from observations, notes and poems, and the fragmented imagery is spliced together to disorientating effect. On Gilded Cloud elegant snapshots from the golden age of Hollywood are juxtaposed with abrasive guitar textures, Pyramid Estate draws parallels between Ancient Egypt and the present day, and Serenity evokes the violent energy of a Francis Bacon painting. Beneath the abstraction are a diverse array of themes, including gender fluidity (Invisible Sex), city living (Primitive Rhythm) and artistic expression (Unwound). The result is an uncompromising but deeply rewarding debut where the internal and external, cerebral and visceral coalesce to quite startling effect.

“I think everybody was ready to take a hiatus, pull the shades down for a year or so,” The National frontman Matt Berninger tells Apple Music of his band’s state of mind at the end of their tour for 2017’s Grammy-winning *Sleep Well Beast*. “Everyone in the band was exhausted and had no intention of diving back into a record at all. But Mike Mills showed up and had an idea, and then the idea just kept getting more exciting.” Mills—the Oscar-nominated writer and director behind *20th Century Women*, and not, it can’t be stressed enough, the former R.E.M. bassist—reached out to Berninger with the intention of maybe directing a video for the band, but that soon blossomed into a much more ambitious proposition: Mills would use some tracks that didn’t find their way onto *Sleep Well Beast* as the springboard for a short film project. That film—also called *I Am Easy to Find*—features Oscar winner Alicia Vikander portraying a unnamed woman from birth to death, a life story told in picaresque black-and-white subtitled snippets, to the swells of The National’s characteristically dramatic music. Those subtitles in turn informed new songs and inspired the band to head from touring straight into making another full album, right when they should have had their toes in sand. “All the song bits and lyric ideas and emotional places and stuff that we were deep into all went into the same big crock pot,” Berninger says. “We knew there would be a 25-minute film and a record, but it\'s not like one was there to support or accompany the other.” Just as the film is about nothing more and nothing less than an examination of one person’s entire existence, the album is The National simultaneously at their most personal and most far-flung. Don’t be fooled by the press photos showing five guys; though the band has been increasingly collaborative and sprawling over its two-decade run, never has the reach of the National Cinematic Universe been so evident. Berninger is still nominally the lead singer and focal point, but on none of the album’s 16 tracks is he the *only* singer, ceding many of the album’s most dramatic moments to a roster of female vocalists including Gail Ann Dorsey (formerly of David Bowie’s band), Sharon Van Etten, Kate Stables of This Is the Kit, Lisa Hannigan, and Mina Tindle, with additional assists from the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Berninger’s wife Carin Besser, who has been contributing lyrics to National songs for years, had a heavier hand. Mills himself serves as a hands-on producer, reassembling parts of songs at will with the band’s full blessing, despite never having done anything like that before in his life. Despite this decentralization, it still feels like a cohesive National album—in turns brooding and bombastic, elegiac and euphoric, propelled by jittery rhythms and orchestral flourishes. But it is also a busy tapestry of voices and ideas, all in the name of exploring identity and what it means to be present and angry and bewildered at a tumultuous time. “There\'s a shaking off all the old tropes and patterns and ruts,” Berninger says. “Women are sick and tired of how they are spoken about or represented. Children are rebelling against the packages that they\'re forced into—and it\'s wonderful. I never questioned the package that I was supposed to walk around in until my thirties.” The album’s default mood is uneasy lullaby, epitomized by the title track, “Hairpin Turns,” “Light Years,” and the woozily logorrheic, nearly seven-minute centerpiece “Not in Kansas.” This gravity makes the moments that gallop, relatively speaking—“Where Is Her Head,” the purposefully gender-nonspecific “Rylan,” and the palpitating opener “You Had Your Soul with You”—feel all the more urgent. The expanded cast might be slightly disorienting at first, but that disorientation is by design—an attempt to make the band’s music and perspective feel more universal by working in concert with other musicians and a film director. “This is a packaging of the blurry chaos that creates some sort of reflection of it, and seeing a reflection of the chaos through some other artist\'s lens makes you feel more comfortable inside it,” says Berninger. “Other people are in this chaos with me and shining lights into corners. I\'m not alone in this.”

On 3rd September 2017, director Mike Mills emailed Matt Berninger to introduce himself and in very short order, the most ambitious project of the National’s nearly 20-year career was born and plans for a hard-earned vacation died. The Los Angeles-based filmmaker was coming off his third feature, 20th Century Women, and was interested in working with the band on... something. A video maybe. Berninger, already a fan of Mills’ films, not only agreed to collaborate, he essentially handed over the keys to the band’s creative process. The result is I Am Easy to Find, a 24-minute film by Mills starring Alicia Vikander, and I Am Easy to Find, a 68-minute album by the National. The former is not the video for the latter; the latter is not the soundtrack to the former. The two projects are, as Mills calls them, “Playfully hostile siblings that love to steal from each other” -- they share music and words and DNA and impulses and a vision about what it means to be human in 2019, but don’t necessarily need one another. The movie was composed like a piece of music; the music was assembled like a film, by a film director. The frontman and natural focal point was deliberately and dramatically sidestaged in favour of a variety of female voices, nearly all of whom have long been in the group’s orbit. It is unlike anything either artist has ever attempted and also totally in line with how they’ve created for much of their careers. As the album’s opening track, ‘You Had Your Soul With You,’ unfurls, it’s so far, so National: a digitally manipulated guitar line, skittering drums, Berninger’s familiar baritone, mounting tension. Then around the 2:15 mark, the true nature of I Am Easy To Find announces itself: the racket subsides, strings swell, and the voice of long-time David Bowie bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey booms out—not as background vocals, not as a hook, but to take over the song. Elsewhere it’s Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan, or Sharon Van Etten, or Mina Tindle or Kate Stables of This Is the Kit, or varying combinations of them. The Brooklyn Youth Choir, whom Bryce Dessner had worked with before. There are choral arrangements and strings on nearly every track, largely put together by Bryce in Paris—not a negation of the band’s dramatic tendencies, but a redistribution of them. “Yes, there are a lot of women singing on this, but it wasn't because, ‘Oh, let's have more women's voices,’ says Berninger. “It was more, ‘Let's have more of a fabric of people's identities.’ It would have been better to have had other male singers, but my ego wouldn't let that happen."

*Please note, Dizzy Spells will be available in the U.S.A. from Winona Records, Roxanne Clifford's new label*

TOY have announced details of their new album, Happy In The Hollow, which is released on Friday January 25th 2019. Their fourth album, and their first for Tough Love, is unquestionably their most direct and propulsive album to date. Having recently released a limited 12” featuring ‘The Willo’ and ‘Energy’, the band have today shared the latest track from the album, ‘Sequence One’. Talking about the track, TOY say: "‘Sequence One’ is about running through a war zone of post apocalyptic proportions with your significant other. It was one of the first tracks we wrote when we started making Happy In The Hollow. We wrote it on the 5th April." Happy In The Hollow is entirely uncompromising: an atmospheric capturing of a state of mind that touches on post-punk, electronic dissonance, acid folk and Krautrock. Familiar qualities like metronomic rhythms, warping guitars, undulating synths and Tom’s gentle, reedy vocals are all in there, but so is a greater emphasis on melody, a wider scope, and a combining of the reassuring and the sinister that is as unnerving as it is captivating.' The sound has without doubt expanded — and grown more confident — in part because this is the first album for which TOY has become a self-sufficient five-person unit doing everything for themselves. “Each song was a blank canvas,” says Maxim. “Producers inevitably develop their own patterns over time, right down to certain drum sounds. We were starting from scratch and it felt very creative as a result. It’s an album we feel deeply connected to”. The vinyl pressing of the album is available in several different variants - the first, only available via the Tough Love webstore,is on 180gm vinyl includes a bonus 12" featuring remixes by Sonic Boom and Cosey Fanni Tutti, and is limited to 300 hand-numbered copies. The second, in conjunction with the Dinked indie store collective, is limited to 700 copies on ultra clear vinyl, features alternative artwork and a 'secret 7"'. Finally, a third version will be available exclusively from Rough Trade, and features an alternative 'secret 7"' on 'snow white' vinyl, limited to 200 copies.

As Kasabian’s chief creative officer, Serge Pizzorno has never been afraid to engage his experimental impulses. However, his first solo album presented an opportunity for that adventurous spirit to fly freer and further than before. “The usual parameters of record-making were gone,” he tells Apple Music. “There’s things you have to bear in mind making a Kasabian album: a definite vision and sound, like, ‘I need to make sure this is going to be OK to play in front of 50,000 people at a festival.’ But this was like waking up and being able to do whatever—the freedom of making stuff for the sake of making it.” As a result, *The S.L.P.*—it stands for Sergio Lorenzo Pizzorno—is a mercurial adventure in sound. Built around the “Meanwhile…” trilogy of songs—three pieces salvaged from an unused film score Pizzorno worked on—it unfurls as “a little story of where I’m at in Britain right now.” To tell that tale, the album takes left turns through ’70s Lagos, Ibiza, and English motorway service stations—often in a taxi with the radio blasting the Wu-Tang Clan, French touch, Meat Puppets, and the cream of UK rap. In this track-by-track guide, Pizzorno explains it all. **“Meanwhile… In Genova”** “I’ve always been obsessed with soundtracks; it’s been in my work from the start, really. I just like the idea in movies when the melody comes back—and comes back in different forms. You have a few iconic notes that tell the story. I had these three ‘Meanwhile…’ songs, a beginning, middle, and end. Then I went to fill in the gaps in between—visit different parts of my personality, become a different character for each track.” **“Lockdown”** “I always saw ‘Lockdown’ as, like, *Sin City*, sort of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg—a futuristic version of that. \[It’s\] fragments of nights I’ve been out on, things that people say. Those nights when you’re supposed to be keeping your head down and you’re telling everyone that you are but you’re sneaking out the bedroom window. ‘Yeah, I had an early night!’ You definitely *did not* have an early night, you were out until god knows when. It’s little pieces of that kind of life.” **“((trance))”** “It’s sort of French sophistication. Daft Punk, Cassius—they have a really innate coolness. I had this song, it was really beautiful but it needed a twist. I added this beat that suddenly made it quite interesting because it’s really anthemic but it’s not really fast enough for a disco tune; it’s something just underneath that makes you move along. It was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we just opened up into a chorus at the end, a huge sing-along that you were not expecting?’ Then when you listen to it a few times, you just can’t wait for that moment. You’re in this journey, traveling late at night. There’s something amazing about being in taxis or cars, when you’re going to a night out with your mates—the brake lights and your eyes blur. Then when you get there, it opens up and you’re all together on this mad vibe.” **“The Wu”** “Someone sent me some music from Lagos in the ’70s. I was really into the rhythm and the pace: a half-time bassline with a really insistent kick to it, keeping everything minimal and not allowing layers, so when the snare comes in it’s like the biggest thing in the world. This was one of those times when a song just tells you what it wants to be. I didn’t really have any notes on it or any lyrics hanging around, I just played the groove and then the melody came. I listened back and it sounded like I said ‘Wu-Tang’ and I was like, ‘I get that, I know what I’m trying to do here! What better way to shout out the influence they’ve had on everything I’ve done?’ It’s about those nights scuttling around \[hotel\] corridors, listening for the echo of someone playing music, like, ‘Hey, they’re in there. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!’” **“Soldiers 00018”** “This came from a depressing cab ride. One of those where you get a bad \[driver\] spouting off hatred and their point of view on what’s going wrong, why Britain’s fucked. The lyric ‘I’m a soldier but I never hurt no one’—it’s that passion to be heard and to make a statement in a nonviolent, non-hateful way, putting *joy* out into the world. I wanted to have an aggressive tune but it be about soldiers putting out positive vibes and good energy and not taking this negativity and letting it consume you.” **“Meanwhile… At the Welcome Break”** “‘Meanwhile… At the Welcome Break’ is like romantic Italian cinema, a really powerful, emotional tune, and I always thought—just to flip it on its head—about getting a hip-hop verse on it. I read an interview with slowthai and discovered he’s from Northampton and it struck a chord. It’s like reading that someone’s from \[Pizzorno’s hometown\] Leicester: *no one*’s from Leicester, *no one*’s from Northampton. I went to see him play in Birmingham and was blown away. We spoke about the track, set at a motorway service station, and how the whole album is about seeing someone one way but then meanwhile they’re someone else—like the superhero thing. I heard \[the verse\] as being quite aggressive and venomous, but when he sent it back, he’d turned it into this psychedelic tune. I was like, ‘Man, that is genius.’ It shows how talented he is to hear that, be inspired, and *sing*.” **“Nobody Else”** “‘Marvin Gaye in Ibiza’ is the tongue-in-cheek vibe on this. I like the idea of the album’s second half starting with these chords and then going into a real dance moment. There’s that tune from back in the day, ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ \[by Stardust\]—I really like that energy. And I don’t tend to do feel-good music, you know? It’s quite a heavy experience with \[Kasabian\]; it’s annihilation, really. So this was a moment to get the piano out and hit a summer tune.” **“Favourites” (feat. Little Simz)** “It’s a little comment on online dating and the way that we project these perfect versions of ourselves to the world. I used a first date as a metaphor for that: In your head, you have this voice moaning about the bill, but you can’t let on because you put out there that you’re, like, a left-wing activist. I felt you needed a retort or a comeback to that, so I got in Simz, who blew me away and was absolutely phenomenal. I get in her face and she gets in my face. There’s something quite comical about the line ‘She was my favorite’ and ‘You’re on thin ice ’—something about that reminds me of Mark E. Smith, a venomous, cheeky little line.” **“Kvng Fv”** “I wanted to calm the onslaught as you come out of that Haiti carnival sound \[on “Favourites”\]. I’ve always been a massive fan of the Meat Puppets—I love the brittleness and the out-of-time, throwaway nature. It makes it so beautiful, and the dirt in it makes it so authentic and real. This is just having 30 seconds of ‘\[sighs\] OK’ before being thrown back in.” **“The Youngest Gary”** “My mate told me he’d seen a story that the youngest Gary in the country is, like, 28 years old. It’s complete and utter nonsense. But humor’s very important to me, and a title like that, if it was done by another artist, I’d want to hear what that was. I definitely wouldn’t expect it to sound like this. It’s this character wandering about, Ziggy Stardust-like, being in a band, moving to London and going through all the trappings of that. Then it goes into that sort of Parliament/George Clinton second half—and there’s no way you’re expecting that. The whole record is based on surprise and ‘I *did not* expect that to happen.’ I think they’re the albums that stand the test of time.” **“Meanwhile… In the Silent Nowhere”** “The end of the ‘Meanwhile…’ trilogy is about the need to communicate. The importance of surrounding ourselves not just with people we agree with but people we don’t agree with, to try to understand where everyone is coming from. It’s quite a heavy ending, but that’s what the music felt like it was saying to me. It ends on those three notes, and there’s something powerful about dropping off there. Just a reminder that it’s OK to have a great time, but we have to try and figure this out—and we\'re not going to get there without communication.”

Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

We live in divisive times. Multiculturalism rises hand-in-hand with racial tensions, and politicians seem powerless to even bring people within earshot of their convoluted message. It’s time for a different perspective. On his second studio album, More Arriving, Sarathy Korwar blasts out his own vibrant, pluralistic missive for the world to hear. This is not necessarily a record of unity; it’s an honest reflection of Korwar’s experience of being an Indian in a divided Britain. Recorded over two and a half years in India and the UK, More Arriving draws on the nascent rap scenes of Mumbai and New Delhi, incorporating spoken word and Korwar’s own Indian classical and jazz instrumentation. This is a record born of confrontation; one for our confrontational times. With this album, Korwar expands his politicised narrative to envelop the entire diaspora. “This is a modern brown record. The kind of record that a contemporary Indian living in the UK for the past 10 years would make,”Korwar says. “This is what Indian music sounds like to me right now.” It all begins with the title: “More Arriving comes from the scaremongering around Brexit,” Korwar says. “It’s a tongue-in-cheek play on the fact that there are more people coming and you’ll have to deal with it!” Through this defiance, Korwar takes clear pride in the knotty mix of his identity – harking back to the new India of the Mumbai hip-hop kids, as well as identifying with London’s cultural diversity. “I want the idea of brown pride to come through,” he says. “My voice is one amongst a thousand, but this record is a snapshot of something much greater than myself. It’s the chance to send a message.

2020 is the sixth solo album from Richard Dawson, the black-humoured bard of Newcastle. The album is an utterly contemporary state-of-the-nation study that uncovers a tumultuous and bleak time. Here is an island country in a state of flux; a society on the edge of mental meltdown.

Chrystia Cabral explores vast concepts through minimal means in *Mazy Fly*. It’s not every day that an artist will write about a topic as broad as the injustices of the slave trade using a loop pedal and a pair of synthesizers, after all. But for Cabral, who performs under the name Spellling, the unorthodox narrative choice comes as naturally to her as her outré presentation. An experimental renegade from the Oakland music scene, Cabral creates eerie synth sculptures and contorted R&B beats alongside bold makeshift costumes spiritually akin to the visual artistry of Grace Jones. Her mystical sound collage—ritualistic vocal echoes (“Hard to Please”); goth-y, lysergic textures (“Falling Asleep”)—summons an intoxicating atmosphere that equally bewilders and enthralls. On “Real Fun,” campy, Cliff Martinez-like synths float over a fat Afrofuturist groove as Cabral lets out a silky vocal tone.

Mazy Fly, the second full-length by the Bay Area artist SPELLLING, explores the tension between the thrill of exploring the unknown and the terror of imminent destruction. Chrystia Cabral spent the summer of 2018 in her Berkeley studio reflecting on the thresholds of human progress and longing for a new and better tomorrow. She was struck by the way the same technologies that have given humans the ability to achieve utopian dreams of discovery have also brought the world to the precipice of dystopic global devastation. Despite the darkness of this reality, Mazy Fly is defiantly optimistic. It is a celestial voyage into the unknown, piloted by Cabral. Each song on Mazy Fly enshrines distinct sentiments within this imagined voyage, from the deeply personal (“Hard to Please Reprise”) to the cosmic (aliens travel to Earth to hear music on “Real Fun”). “Haunted Water” is an intensely heavy song about the memories of colonial violence that haunt the historical slave ship routes of the Middle Passage. “Under the Sun” is a cosmic prayer for good fortune that sees the potential for radical newness in our own lives in the births of stars. Mazy Fly musically traverses the spaces between languid, honey-soaked vocals and distant angelic whispers, from thumping 808 club beats to crunching tape loops, and from silky, smooth R&B to whirling organ sonatas. Cabral became enamored by the idea of flight as a harbinger of both progress and apocalypse, and that was expressed in the textures and compositional techniques she utilized. Swarms, flocks, flies, angels, spaceships, flying saucers – all are represented sonically by Cabral and her Juno-106 synthesizer. “Secret Thread” is the key to this motif, and the heart of Mazy Fly. When Cabral saw her puppy Cooper running gracefully around an open field, she imagined a winged spirit moving through her new music. She named the spirit, and the album, Mazy Fly. SPELLLING’s 2017 debut Pantheon of Me was Bandcamp’s #4 album of the year, and they raved: “Cabral has it, from her careful sense of composition to her charismatic presence to her ability to communicate with her music straight through to the listener’s heart.” Her first release on Sacred Bones, the “Hard to Please” single, was named a Best Track by The Guardian, who said the song was “like Solange looking in a haunted mirror.”

With powerhouse pipes, razor-sharp wit, and a tireless commitment to self-love and self-care, Lizzo is the fearless pop star we needed. Born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit, the singer and classically trained flautist discovered an early gift for music (“It chose me,” she tells Apple Music) and began recording in Minneapolis shortly after high school. But her trademark self-confidence came less naturally. “I had to look deep down inside myself to a really dark place to discover it,” she says. Perhaps that’s why her third album, *Cuz I Love You*, sounds so triumphant, with explosive horns (“Cuz I Love You”), club drums (“Tempo” featuring Missy Elliott), and swaggering diva attitude (“No, I\'m not a snack at all/Look, baby, I’m the whole damn meal,” she howls on the instant hit “Juice\"). But her brand is about more than mic-drop zingers and big-budget features. On songs like “Better in Color”—a stomping, woke plea for people of all stripes to get together—she offers an important message: It’s not enough to love ourselves, we also have to love each other. Read on for Lizzo’s thoughts on each of these blockbuster songs. **“Cuz I Love You”** \"I start every project I do with a big, brassy orchestral moment. And I do mean *moment*. It’s my way of saying, ‘Stand the fuck up, y’all, Lizzo’s here!’ This is just one of those songs that gets you amped from the jump. The moment you hear it, you’re like, ‘Okay, it’s on.’ It’s a great fucking way to start an album.\" **“Like a Girl”** \"We wanted take the old cliché and flip it on its head, shaking out all the negative connotations and replacing them with something empowering. Serena Williams plays like a girl and she’s the greatest athlete on the planet, you know? And what if crying was empowering instead of something that makes you weak? When we got to the bridge, I realized there was an important piece missing: What if you identify as female but aren\'t gender-assigned that at birth? Or what if you\'re male but in touch with your feminine side? What about my gay boys? What about my drag queens? So I decided to say, ‘If you feel like a girl/Then you real like a girl,\' and that\'s my favorite lyric on the whole album.\" **“Juice”** \"If you only listen to one song from *Cuz I Love You*, let it be this. It’s a banger, obviously, but it’s also a state of mind. At the end of the day, I want my music to make people feel good, I want it to help people love themselves. This song is about looking in the mirror, loving what you see, and letting everyone know. It was the second to last song that I wrote for the album, right before ‘Soulmate,\' but to me, this is everything I’m about. I wrote it with Ricky Reed, and he is a genius.” **“Soulmate”** \"I have a relationship with loneliness that is not very healthy, so I’ve been going to therapy to work on it. And I don’t mean loneliness in the \'Oh, I don\'t got a man\' type of loneliness, I mean it more on the depressive side, like an actual manic emotion that I struggle with. One day, I was like, \'I need a song to remind me that I\'m not lonely and to describe the type of person I *want* to be.\' I also wanted a New Orleans bounce song, \'cause you know I grew up listening to DJ Jubilee and twerking in the club. The fact that l got to combine both is wild.” **“Jerome”** \"This was my first song with the X Ambassadors, and \[lead singer\] Sam Harris is something else. It was one of those days where you walk into the studio with no expectations and leave glowing because you did the damn thing. The thing that I love about this song is that it’s modern. It’s about fuccboi love. There aren’t enough songs about that. There are so many songs about fairytale love and unrequited love, but there aren’t a lot of songs about fuccboi love. About when you’re in a situationship. That story needed to be told.” **“Cry Baby”** “This is one of the most musical moments on a very musical album, and it’s got that Minneapolis sound. Plus, it’s almost a power ballad, which I love. The lyrics are a direct anecdote from my life: I was sitting in a car with a guy—in a little red Corvette from the ’80s, and no, it wasn\'t Prince—and I was crying. But it wasn’t because I was sad, it was because I loved him. It was a different field of emotion. The song starts with \'Pull this car over, boy/Don\'t pretend like you don\'t know,’ and that really happened. He pulled the car over and I sat there and cried and told him everything I felt.” **“Tempo”** “‘Tempo\' almost didn\'t make the album, because for so long, I didn’t think it fit. The album has so much guitar and big, brassy instrumentation, but ‘Tempo’ was a club record. I kept it off. When the project was finished and we had a listening session with the label, I played the album straight through. Then, at the end, I asked my team if there were any honorable mentions they thought I should play—and mind you, I had my girls there, we were drinking and dancing—and they said, ‘Tempo! Just play it. Just see how people react.’ So I did. No joke, everybody in the room looked at me like, ‘Are you crazy? If you don\'t put this song on the album, you\'re insane.’ Then we got Missy and the rest is history.” **“Exactly How I Feel”** “Way back when I first started writing the song, I had a line that goes, ‘All my feelings is Gucci.’ I just thought it was funny. Months and months later, I played it at Atlantic \[Records\], and when that part came up, I joked, ‘Thanks for the Gucci feature, guys!\' And this executive says, ‘We can get Gucci if you want.\' And I was like, ‘Well, why the fuck not?\' I love Gucci Mane. In my book, he\'s unproblematic, he does a good job, he adds swag to it. It doesn’t go much deeper than that, to be honest. The rest of the song has plenty of meaning: It’s an ode to being proud of your emotions, not feeling like you have to hide them or fake them, all that. But the Gucci feature was just fun.” **“Better in Color”** “This is the nerdiest song I have ever written, for real. But I love it so much. I wanted to talk about love, attraction, and sex *without* talking about the boxes we put those things in—who we feel like we’re allowed to be in love with, you know? It shouldn’t be about that. It shouldn’t be about gender or sexual orientation or skin color or economic background, because who the fuck cares? Spice it up, man. Love *is* better in color. I don’t want to see love in black and white.\" **“Heaven Help Me”** \"When I made the album, I thought: If Aretha made a rap album, what would that sound like? ‘Heaven Help Me’ is the most Aretha to me. That piano? She would\'ve smashed that. The song is about a person who’s confident and does a good job of self-care—a.k.a. me—but who has a moment of being pissed the fuck off and goes back to their defensive ways. It’s a journey through the full spectrum of my romantic emotions. It starts out like, \'I\'m too cute for you, boo, get the fuck away from me,’ to \'What\'s wrong with me? Why do I drive boys away?’ And then, finally, vulnerability, like, \'I\'m crying and I\'ve been thinking about you.’ I always say, if anyone wants to date me, they just gotta listen to this song to know what they’re getting into.\" **“Lingerie”** “I’ve never really written sexy songs before, so this was new for me. The lyrics literally made me blush. I had to just let go and let God. It’s about one of my fantasies, and it has three different chord changes, so let me tell you, it was not easy to sing. It was very ‘Love On Top’ by Beyoncé of me. Plus, you don’t expect the album to end on this note. It leaves you wanting more.”

Somewhere amongst the 80 head-splitting, vibe-chasing, cosmically grimy minutes of the Oh Sees’ 20-somethingth album, one might begin to wonder if chief Oh See John Dwyer will ever run out of steam. More than two decades into the band’s career, they—Dwyer and his rotating cast—still manage to find new wheat to harvest from the fields of Classic American Freakouts, from bite-sized thrash (“Heartworm,” “Gholü”) to multi-part suites of drug-den soul (the 15-minute “Scutum & Scorpius,” the 21-minute “Henchlock”) tailored to weirdos of all hair lengths. Behold a vision in which punk and prog didn’t just coexist, but spawned. Fun? Menacingly. Evil? Studiously.

You’d think that an artist making her first solo album after nearly 40 years of collaborative work would fall for at least a few pitfalls of sentimentality—the glance in the rearview, the meditation on middle age, the warmth of accomplishment, whatever. Then again, Kim Gordon was never much for soft landings. Noisy, vibrant, and alive with the kind of fragmented poetry that made her presence in Sonic Youth so special, *No Home Record* feels, above all, like a debut—a new voice clocking in for the first time, testing waters, stretching her capacity. The wit is classic (“Airbnb/Could set me free!” she wails on “Air BnB,” channeling the misplaced passions of understimulated yuppies worldwide), as is the vacant sex appeal (“Touch your nipple/You’re so fine!” she wails on “Hungry Baby,” channeling the…misplaced passions of understimulated yuppies worldwide). Most surprising is how informed the album is by electronic music (“Don’t Play It”) and hip-hop (“Paprika Pony,” “Sketch Artist”)—a shift that breaks with the free-rock-saviordom that Sonic Youth always represented while maintaining the continuity of experimentation that made Gordon a pioneer in the first place.

With a career spanning nearly four decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and visionary artists working today. A co-founder of the legendary Sonic Youth, Gordon has performed all over the world, collaborating with many of music’s most exciting figures including Tony Conrad, Ikue Mori, Julie Cafritz and Stephen Malkmus. Most recently, Gordon has been hitting the road with Body/Head, her spellbinding partnership with artist and musician Bill Nace. Despite the exhaustive nature of her résumé, the most reliable aspect of Gordon’s music may be its resistance to formula. Songs discover themselves as they unspool, each one performing a test of the medium’s possibilities and limits. Her command is astonishing, but Gordon’s artistic curiosity remains the guiding force behind her music. It makes sense that this “American idea” (as Gordon says on the agitated rock track “Air BnB”) of purchasing utopia permeates the record, as no place is this phenomenon more apparent than Los Angeles, where Gordon was born and recently returned to after several lifetimes on the east coast. It was a move precipitated by a number of seismic shifts in her personal life and undoubtedly plays a role in No Home Record’s fascination with transience. The album opens with the restless “Sketch Artist,” where Gordon sings about “dreaming in a tent” as the music shutters and skips like scenery through a car window. “Even Earthquake,” perhaps the record’s most straightforward track embodies this mood; Gordon’s voice wavering like watercolor: “If I could cry and shake for you / I’d lay awake for you / I got sand in my heart for you,” guitar strokes blending into one another as they bleed out across an unstable page. Front to back, No Home Record is an expert operation in the uncanny. You don’t simply listen to Gordon’s music; you experience it.

To listen to Rex Orange County is to feel like you know him. “I had a year that nearly sent me off the edge,” he half-croons on “10/10,” the opening track on *Pony*, his third full-length album. “I feel like a five, I can’t pretend/But if I get my shit together, this year maybe I’ll be a ten.” It’s the sort of thing you say aloud to yourself when you’re alone, if not the stuff of a billion filterless Instagrams. But *Pony*—written and recorded entirely by the 21-year-old singer-songwriter, with help from producer Ben Baptie—is pop of and for our very share-y times, a set of casual, Frank Ocean-indebted bedroom soul that’s often stunning in its clarity. “I’m still a boy inside my thoughts,” he sings on “Pluto Projector,” stretching his syllables like chewing gum. “Am I meant to understand my faults?”

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“How people may emotionally connect with music I’ve been involved in is something that part of me is completely mystified by,” Thom Yorke tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Human beings are really different, so why would it be that what I do connects in that way? I discovered maybe around \[Radiohead\'s album\] *The Bends* that the bit I didn’t want to show, the vulnerable bit… that bit was the bit that mattered.” *ANIMA*, Yorke’s third solo album, further weaponizes that discovery. Obsessed by anxiety and dystopia, it might be the most disarmingly personal music of a career not short of anxiety and dystopia. “Dawn Chorus” feels like the centerpiece: It\'s stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful with a claustrophobic “stream of consciousness” lyric that feels something like a slowly descending panic attack. And, as Yorke describes, it was the record\'s biggest challenge. “There’s a hit I have to get out of it,” he says. “I was trying to develop how ‘Dawn Chorus’ was going to work, and find the right combinations on the synthesizers I was using. Couldn’t find it, tried it again and again and again. But I knew when I found it I would have my way into the song. Things like that matter to me—they are sort of obsessive, but there is an emotional connection. I was deliberately trying to find something as cold as possible to go with it, like I sing essentially one note all the way through.” Yorke and longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich (“I think most artists, if they\'re honest, are never solo artists,” Yorke says) continue to transfuse raw feeling into the album’s chilling electronica. “Traffic,” with its jagged beats and “I can’t breathe” refrain, feels like a partner track to another memorable Yorke album opener, “Everything in Its Right Place.” The extraordinary “Not the News,” meanwhile, slaloms through bleeps and baleful strings to reach a thunderous final destination. It’s the work of a modern icon still engaged with his unique gift. “My cliché thing I always say is, \'You know you\'re in trouble when people stop listening to sad music,\'” Yorke says. “Because the moment people stop listening to sad music, they don\'t want to know anymore. They\'re turning themselves off.”

After launching his solo career with 2017’s platinum-selling *As You Were*, Liam Gallagher had a simple mission statement for the follow-up: Do it again and do it better. “I’m never going to change my genre of music,” he tells Apple Music. “I know what the people who come to see me want and I know what they don’t want, so it’s very easy. I’m not trying to make *Sgt. Pepper*, I\'m not trying to make *The Wall*. It is what it is. Neil Young hasn’t changed his sound for fucking 40 years and no one gets on his case. And I’m not saying I’m Neil Young, because I\'m far from it.” Liam is well aware of what he is: the greatest rock ’n’ roll singer of his generation. On *Why Me? Why Not.*, his voice crackles with love, wisdom, vitriol, and hurt. He’s as magnetic as he was when Oasis was in their imperial period—and these are some of the best songs he’s been on in the last two decades. He’s thrillingly barbed on the punchy glam-rock of “Shockwave” and adrenalizing on “The River,” a set of psych-rock jumper cables for the soul. The tender moments are just as stirring, not least when he pledges enduring love for his daughter Molly on “Now That I’ve Found You.” The centerpiece is “Once,” a reflective heart-sweller with the sort of goosebump chorus that he’s been nailing for 25 years. “It’s one of those songs that you come across every couple of years, or once in your lifetime,” he says. “We had a few of them in Oasis. If Noel had wrote it or if it was going out under the Oasis name, I think a lot of people’d be creaming in their pants. It’s up there, I think, with anything Lennon’s ever done, or Pink Floyd or Bowie. I feel like I levitate when I\'m singing that. So if you see me floating about up in the sky, you know I\'m having a good time.” On “One of Us,” he sings, “Come on, I know you want more/Come on and open your door/After it all, you’ll find out/You were always one of us.” It’s an olive branch extended to Noel—not that Liam thinks it will be accepted. “Oh, god, no. No way, man. He doesn\'t want to get in the ring with me again, for many reasons. You know why? Because he knows that he has to share the load, and standing next to me, he becomes very, very small. He’s already fucking small. So he doesn\'t want that, he wants the limelight for himself. But there you go, you keep trying, don\'t you? I think that’ll be the last one. I’m done. I’m going to get on with me shit, man. “But I’ll still dig him out, because he needs to be dug out. And he’ll dig me out because I need to be dug out. But it is love, love, love, it’s not hate, hate, hate. I don’t hate him. I love him, you know what I mean?” The explosive end of Oasis and his subsequent band Beady Eye’s gentler winding down wasn’t what Gallagher had planned for either group. But having found two collaborators “who know exactly what I’m about”—writer-producers Greg Kurstin and Andrew Wyatt—he’s getting on with the business of being the singular, outstanding voice of big, emotive rock tunes. “Listen, man, I had four years in the wilderness not doing anything,” he says of the tough time between Beady Eye and *As You Were*, which included a divorce. “I wasn\'t stranded in the desert with no food. I wasn\'t captured by the Taliban. I was in the pub getting off me tits, but, still, it was a good thing for me to get my personal life in order. You can\'t have an untidy house. I’ve got a lot of making up to do. As long as people want it, I\'ll do it, because there\'s nothing else to do, and it\'s the best gig in the fucking world.” Twenty-five years after he first emerged with Oasis, Gallagher’s in great shape personally and professionally, and he’s doing what he’s always set out to do: “Sing some tunes and have the craic.” *Why Me? Why Not.* is further proof that the world of rock is a better, brighter place with him in it. “I\'m good at being a rock ’n’ roll star. There’s a new generation out there that want a bit, so they\'re getting it.”