Rough Trade's Albums of the Year 2020

Released on Juneteenth 2020, the third album by the enigmatic-slash-anonymous band Sault is an unapologetic dive into Black identity. Tapping into ’90s-style R&B (“Sorry Ain’t Enough”), West African funk (“Bow”), early ’70s soul (“Miracles”), churchy chants (“Out the Lies”), and slam-poetic interludes (“Us”), the flow here is more mixtape or DJ set than album, a compendium of the culture rather than a distillation of it. What’s remarkable is how effortless they make revolution sound.

Proceeds will be going to charitable funds

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”

“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

Jarvis Cocker’s band Pulp might have been one of the defining groups of the mid-’90s Britpop era, but there was something distinctly different about them. In a sea of bands fixated on the past, Pulp’s landmark 1995 album *Different Class* was, musically and lyrically, a step forward. They weren’t the only band taking a critical look at British society, but Cocker was constantly turning his gaze inward. In his songwriting, relationships were messy, memories weren’t always to be trusted, the drugs often had the opposite of their intended effect, and even the losers got lucky—more than just sometimes. On two albums to follow, the Sheffield group would cut further left—and Cocker would go on to explore many more avenues of expression. Two solo albums in 2006 and 2009 (as well as writing most of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s beautiful *5:55*) only further showcased his range—and that’s before he occupied himself as a book editor, a BBC radio host, and, during the COVID-19 shutdown, a housebound orator of great literary works. (Google “Jarvis Cocker’s Bedtime Stories” to hear his soothing baritone recite Brautigan and Salinger.) On the heels of his collaborative project with Chilly Gonzales, 2017’s *Room 29*, Cocker was invited by Sigur Rós to perform at a festival in Reykjavík. He quickly assembled an entirely new London-based group of musicians to work through song sketches he’d developed over the last few years, which became the band-in-progress JARV IS…—emphasis on those three trailing dots. “Usually you put that into a sentence when you are implying that something isn\'t quite finished,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “The whole point of this band was to finish off these ideas for songs that I\'d had for quite a long time but wasn\'t able to bring to fruition on my own.” At a trim seven songs, *Beyond the Pale* still manages to explore a range of themes, most of which revolve around the modern human condition—from aging to FOMO and self-doubt to living in the wake of a bygone era. Evolution plays a big part, too—not just in the subject matter, but in how the music took shape: “Because we were doing this experiment of trying to finish off a record by playing it to people, it seemed logical that we should record the shows so we could see how we were getting on,” he says of what would become “Must I Evolve?”, which was recorded live in an actual cave in Castleton, Derbyshire. “A light bulb went off in my head then, because that\'s every artist\'s dream, really—to make a record without even realizing it. To not go through that self-conscious phase where you go into a studio and start questioning things and the song gets away from you.” Here, Cocker tells us how the rest of the songs came together. **Save the Whale** \"You\'re not the first person to say there\'s a similarity to Leonard Cohen, which I take as a massive compliment, because he\'s really been an artistic touchstone for me, all through my career. There are some artists that show you different ideas of what a song can be, and open up your perceptions of what a song can be. Especially for someone like me, who was basically brought up on pop radio, which lyrically isn\'t very adventurous. So what Leonard Cohen did with words in songs was something that really had an effect on me. But what\'s exciting for me was all the time that I was in Pulp, I was the only person in the band who sang. And in this band, basically everybody sings, especially Serafina \[Steer, harpist\] and Emma \[Smith, violinist/guitarist\]. Rather than it being a monologue, I can tie in other viewpoints with what they say. And sometimes it will reinforce it, sometimes it will undercut it, sometimes it will just comment on it. And it\'s a lot of fun writing that way, because suddenly you\'re writing a dialogue or conversation rather than just me, me, me all the time.\" **Must I Evolve?** \"The starting point for it was me thinking about the development of a relationship, from meeting someone to moving in with them and stuff like that. You could draw a parallel with evolution itself, of two cells splitting and then those cells divide more and then you start to get organisms and eventually you\'ve got some fish and then the fish grows legs and somehow comes out... I guess I was just remembering biology textbooks from school. The idea of the ascendant man, stuff like that. The Big Bang. That was a bit of a joke I had with myself, with the meanings of \'bang.\' Banging, like \'Who\'ve been banging lately,\' and the Big Bang that started the whole of human creation off. Two of the longest songs on the record are questions: \'Must I Evolve?\' and \'Am I Missing Something?\' I guess I\'m at an age where I ask myself those kind of questions, and the songs were some type of attempt on my part to answer those questions. But this really was the key song because it was the first one that we finished and released, and also the call-and-response theme came from this song, because I\'d already written the \'Must I evolve? Must I change? Must I develop?\' But there was no answer to that. We were just rehearsing and I think it was Serafina started going, \'Yes, yes, yes,\' I think as a bit of a joke. And then I thought, \'That\'s such a great idea, let\'s just do that.\' That totally added a new dimension to the song.\" **Am I Missing Something?** \"It\'s in that tradition, I suppose, of those long songs where it very directly addresses the listener. This is the oldest song on the record; the lyrics were written pretty much eight years ago. I wanted to try a bit of a different approach, and so the lyrics aren\'t so much a through narrative; it\'s not just one story. It jumps around a bit. And that seemed appropriate because it\'s about this idea of \'Am I missing something?\' It could mean there\'s something really interesting going on but I don\'t know about it, which is like a modern disease: Too many entertainment and information options to choose from. It can also be like, \'Do I lack something? Is there something missing in me? Do I need to fill some gaping psychological hole within myself or whatever?\' Or actually, ‘Am I overlooking something, am I not getting something?’ That\'s a really important part of a song, that you have to leave some space in it for the person listening to do what they want with it.” **House Music All Night Long** \"People have said, ‘Yes, it\'s a COVID anthem,’ but it wasn\'t conceived in that way at all. For a start, it was written two years ago before anybody was really thinking about any pandemic. It was really just one weekend where I was stuck in London. It was a very hot weekend and everyone I knew had left town. I was in this house on my own and some friends had gone to a house music festival in Wales and I was jealous of that. I was having—people call it FOMO, don\'t they? I just thought to myself, \'Don\'t just sit here feeling sorry for yourself, do something to get yourself out of this trough you\'ve found yourself in.\' So I remembered that there was a secondhand keyboard that I\'d bought from a street market just a few weeks before and it was down in the basement of this house. So I went and found it, brought it up, plugged it in, put it through an amp, and just started trying to write bits of music. I came up with the chord pattern that the song starts off with, and because this keyboard—it\'s an old string machine, so it\'s got a quite naive sound to it, which reminded me of some of those early house records where they would use big, almost symphonic-sounding things but on really crap keyboards. The first chord change really reminded me of something like \'Promised Land\' by Joe Smooth or something like that. So maybe it was because I was thinking about my friends who were having a good time at a rave. Again, once I\'ve got that idea of the two meanings of \'house\'—like, house music and then \'house\' as in a building that you live in. I was stuck in a house feeling sorry for myself whilst my friends were out dancing to house, probably having a great time, as far as I was imagining. And so then the song had already half written itself once I got those basic ideas down.\" **Sometimes I Am Pharaoh** \"I developed a fascination with these street entertainers—human statues. You tend to get them outside famous buildings or in tourist hotspots. So you either get somebody dressed up as Charlie Chaplin—that\'s why it\'s \'Sometimes I\'m Pharaoh/Sometimes I\'m Chaplin.\' And they stand still and then a crowd gathers and eventually they move and everybody screams and hopefully gives them some money. It died out a little bit in more recent years. They’ve been superseded slightly by those levitating guys—have you seen those ones? Where it\'s like Yoda floating, and he\'s holding a stick but obviously the stick—there\'s some kind of platform under him. And I feel sorry for the statue guys, because the levitating Yoda, it\'s just like, anybody could do that. You just go and buy the weird frame—which has obviously got some kind of really heavy base so that it doesn\'t topple over—and you\'re in business. Whereas to actually stand still for hours on end must be really difficult. I was just showing some respect and love to the people that were doing that.\" **Swanky Modes** \"My son \[who lives in France\] goes to this once-a-week rock school. It\'s run by a guy from Brooklyn who moved over to Paris. I\'ve become friendly with him, and he asked me if I would come to the class and help the kids write a song in the space of an hour or something. So we met to talk about how that could work, and then we\'re jamming around and he was playing the piano and I was messing around on the bass and then we started playing what became \'Swanky Modes,\' which is really not a kids\' song at all. The piano that you hear on the record is him, Jason Domnarski. And the first half of the song has got my bass playing on it. So it\'s almost like a field recording. This is probably the most narrative-driven song on the record. Somehow all these events that happened to me at very specific periods of time, which was when I was living in Camden in London, just towards the end of my time at Saint Martins art college, so we\'re talking about 1991. I was only living there for maybe eight months, and all these images from my time of living there suddenly came into my mind really, really clearly. The title of the song, \'Swanky Modes,\' it\'s the name of the shop. It was a women\'s clothes shop that was near where I was living at the time. Again, that\'s one of the mysteries of songwriting—why suddenly, almost 30 years later, these words would come to me that summed up a fairly minor chapter in my life. But it came back in really minute detail and I\'m really glad it did, because now I\'ll never forget that period on my life, because I\'ve got a souvenir of it.\" **Children of the Echo** \"A few years ago I was asked to write a review of a book called *The John Lennon Letters*. I\'m a Beatles fan, and particularly of John Lennon, so I thought if John Lennon wrote lots of letters, I\'d really like to see them. So I was sent an advance copy of the book, and it was just weird. They weren\'t letters. Some of them were just \'Tell Dave to get lasagna from supermarket. Walk dog.\' They were just to-do notes, like a Post-it note that you would put on your refrigerator to remind you to do something. They weren\'t letters. So I was really, really disappointed with this book, so I tried to express this in the review. And this phrase \'children of the echo\' came into my mind, which in the context of the article was talking about how someone in my position—I can\'t really remember The Beatles, because I was a kid. I was born in 1963, when they first broke through, and then they broke up in 1970 when I was seven. They were there, but I couldn\'t really be actively a fan or anything like that. But they left such a mark and they made such an impact that the ripples obviously were coming out and affected everybody a lot. And this made me think of this idea of an echo, of a sound which would be like The Beatles, this amazing sound that changed everything. And then I consider myself to be a child of the echo because I was brought up in the aftermath of that. And I was thinking, \'Well, we\'ve got to get beyond that,\' because that was the problem with that thing that got called Britpop in the UK—that it was so in thrall to the \'60s and The Beatles in particular that it killed it. It stopped it from being what could\'ve been a really forward-thinking and exciting and innovative thing into a retro thing. And you can\'t make another period of history happen again, it\'s just impossible. It seemed like it was exciting, and \'here we come, here\'s the revolution, the world\'s going to change.\' And then it just went into this horrible nostalgic morass of nothing. That\'s when I jumped ship. I think now it\'s so long ago that there is a chance now to do something new, because we have to transcend the echo now, we have to make another thing happen. We can\'t keep living on this echo that gets fainter and fainter and fainter and fainter. Because there\'s nothing to live on anymore.\"

Dream Wife isn\'t the kind of band to do things at half pace. See, for evidence, 2018’s fizzing self-titled debut, which the former Brighton University students—guitarist Alice Go, bassist Bella Podpadec, and singer Rakel Mjöll—recorded in just one week (squeezing in two high-octane live dates for good measure). But after two years of nonstop touring, the punk rock trio hit the pause button when it came to recording its follow-up, *So When You Gonna...*. “We had this moment to collect ourselves separately, and come back as sisters and as a well-oiled machine,” Go tells Apple Music. “We wrote this record in about six months, and it was the polar opposite of the experience of the first album. This time, we could just sit still with the songs and actually reflect.” Slowing down, however, meant burning no less brightly—the frenetic melodies and fearless lyrics that defined Dream Wife’s triumphant debut are all present and correct—but it did enable the band to showcase something of a softer side. As such, Dream Wife fully, as they put it, “lean into” their pop influences (think Blondie and Robyn) alongside helpings of indie, shoegaze, and even balladry. “There’s this light and shade in the body of work which is different to the first album,” admits Go. “We were really proud of the sounds we’ve been able to make, because there were a lot of things that we’ve been wanting to try for a really long time.” Between the unabashed, tongue-in-cheek fun of “Sports!” and empowered anthems about owning your desire (“Homesick,” “So When You Gonna...”), the band also gets personal—delving into the discombobulating nature of touring and relationships coming to an end. Then, in *So When You Gonna...*\'s most powerful, bare moments, they move into miscarriage and abortion. It’s a mix indebted to Rakel’s grandmother, who once told the band, “You’ve got to make them laugh before you can make them cry.” But such honesty is also the product of the all-female team Dream Wife assembled around them, led by producer Marta Salogni (Björk, FKA twigs). “This was a safe space. It didn’t feel like we were exposed,” says Go. \"It felt like we could push ourselves in these new ways and go to those difficult places.\" Below, let Dream Wife guide you through that process, one song at a time. **Sports!** Rakel Mjöll: “This song happened after a game of badminton. We had been touring a lot prior to writing and we just weren’t used to sitting down to play music. We needed some way of running about, so we took a lot of breaks. Often they’d lead to us playing badminton in the garden at Bella’s family home, where we wrote a lot of the album. None of us have really taken the time to learn the rules of badminton, so we kind of made our own rules. The only rule was never to apologize.” Alice Go: “It was about making your own rules and doing things on your own terms. Also: Sports have existed in this kind of macho environment. With us playing this rock song about sports, it was totally about taking ownership and doing things your way. I was fed a lie at school that sports were the only legitimate way to engage with your body. Through music, I’ve found profound and exciting other ways to do that. You don’t have to play by the rigid rules of school in order to be physical and active in your body.” **Hasta La Vista** AG: “I think of us as a rock band, but we really like pop music. With this album, it was about leaning into those pop sensibilities. There’s a lot of Blondie inspiration in the mix.” Bella Podpadec: “Our love of Blondie is especially prevalent here. This song is about being still enough to take stock of how your life is and what needs to be there and what needs to change or go.” RM: “This was the first song we wrote after touring. We’d had a few weeks off and realized that the people around us, the relationships, the places—everything—had changed. And so had we. It was a good song to be the first we wrote because we were sort of saying good bye to that time, and saying thank you in a way. When we finished writing it, we were like, ‘All right, thank you. Thank you for that time. Thank you for the change.’ So it was nice.” **Homesick** AG: “This track is kind of us hopping back to the more spiky sound from the first record, but with a pop sensibility. It’s us elevating that sound further. My memories of writing this and playing it are about being present in a sweaty room and just playing it and it’s kind of chugging and you’re riding it. It’s really nice that we’ve got a track like this in the mix. Lyrically, we thought of the Blondie song ‘Picture This’ and her lyric ‘I will give you my finest hour/The one I spent watching you shower.’ It’s a woman claiming her sexuality and being like, ‘I’m telling you, I’m looking at you. And I like it.’ There’s something so bold about that. It\'s all about women observing something that she finds sexy. It’s so powerful.” RM: “That conversation about those Blondie lyrics gave way to the line ‘Tongue, cheek, nip, clit, take a peek and then come up for air.’ It’s basically teaching you about oral sex. Our label manager was listening to the songs and was like, ‘You do realize there\'s two songs on this record with the word “clit” in it.’ I\'m like, ‘Yeah, duh. Is that going to be a problem for radio?’” **Validation** AG: “I love the way Rakel wrote the lyrics on this, because it weaves in a lot of those moments about coming back from touring. We were coming back into contact with our friends, with our community, and to me, the song is like this little story of those moments of coming back to land and finding our place again. And acknowledging it and being grateful for it.” RM: “It’s also about this instant, absurd validation you have from being on stage for an hour a day. And then leaving that and reentering your world. The song goes into questioning yourself as a musician and ends with the validation of a lover. At the end, it talks about the different types of validation we have in our community. Sonically, there’s not really a chorus and it has one kind of tempo—one beat—and it doesn’t drop. It was so great to have that sort of song in the middle of the album.” BP: “Validation is kind of a really necessary part of human experience in a lot of ways. We need to have our humanity witnessed by others. I feel that is a really fundamental need, but like Rakel was saying, it\'s about questioning the places that you get validation from, and how it can be destructive as well as constructive.” **Temporary** AG: “We were talking about The Smiths while making this album. Here, we lean into a slightly softer guitar over a rougher guitar—those bittersweet Johnny Marr-type sounds. There’s an interplay here: The song is sad, but there’s also an element of hope in it. And the way it all pieces together is quite swift and catchy, which is yet another tone we\'ve been able broaden our palette out to on this record. This is a really simple pop song in many ways, and it was about letting that happen rather than pushing the punk thing or the live show thing so much.” RM: “We found the idea of pop songs tackling difficult subjects really interesting. The song is talking about the stigma behind miscarriages and going through heartbreak again and again, which is what a miscarriage is. It was written for a friend of ours who had multiple miscarriages in a short amount of time. The lyrical content is about putting your body through so much, and your heart through so much, and doing it again and again. It’s about having that strength. Something I’m not sure I would have personally. The song was written when that friend became pregnant for the third time. It was a prayer in a way, hoping that this might be the one, but that if it’s not, I’m here for you. We have your back, however it goes. She is due any day now. Third time\'s a charm.” **U Do U** AG: “There aren’t actually any guitar strings being played on this song. It’s pushing the sound a guitar can make. Honestly, it’s kind of about me rebelling against my guitar style in a way. It’s experimental, it’s almost shoegaze, it’s poppy. It feels really exciting to go into these territories. This song is about our shared experience on the road and knowing how that feels in this weird little unit traveling around and how lonely that can be.” RM: “I call this song a love letter to the touring musician. It’s about the camaraderie of musicians. You’re all away from your loved ones. You’re all living this life of having one foot at home and one foot in the tour van. You’re not living the same life that many of your friends back home are living. But you’re all thankful for being able to perform. This isn’t a breakup song, but it’s about the idea of accepting who you are and what you feel at the time. You can’t be a perfect partner at home when you want to play on that festival stage. I also just really wanted a ballad on this album. It was about pulling back and saying, ‘No, let’s not change this into a punk song.’ So it was also about exploring that side and exploring the silence too.” BP: “I think it really speaks to the importance of autonomy, centering your own experiences and feeding your own emotions. And that\'s a kind of weird thing to do when you\'re leaving big parts of your heart and other parts of the world, but it is absolutely fundamentally important and you can\'t live for other people.” **Rh Rn** AG: “The song is about the present moment. On tour, all you can do is be present, and it’s kind of about carrying that through into the writing space. The ‘right here right now’ part slightly drops in tempo. It’s kind of this magnetized thing—the song itself pulls you into the moment by just slowing down. This song has quite a luscious guitar backdrop, but also at its heart it’s an indie banger. It’s the combination of us being able to push it in the studio, but also, as a live band at our core, we need to be able to lock in and play a tight set. So the song feels like a crossbreed between us as a live band and how much we were able to dig in in the studio with Marta.” RM: “I really love that Alice called this song an indie banger. Because when we were writing that, we were like, ‘This is like an indie banger, isn\'t it? I didn\'t know we were indie, that’s exciting.’ We had gone on tour with The Vaccines and we were like, ‘We\'ve been influenced.’ And that came out in this song, our little indie banger.” **Old Flame** RM: “Like with ‘Rh Rn,’ this song was about grabbing you in the moment to feel present. But with this song, the most important part was to get into that tempo of excitement, similar to Robyn and how some of her songs are. The song is talking about something that is familiar but also extremely exciting at the same time.” AG: “When we wrote it, we knew we wanted this pulsating synth. We were talking a lot about Prince, and the idea of the synth that never ends. It kind of speaks to this old flame. And again, it was about elevating it in the studio, and, actually, it’s a bit of an unashamed synth-pop banger. I used EBows on the guitar to create this warm atmosphere. There’s an element of this song that reminds me of Fleetwood Mac. It’s kind of classic. It feels to me like the more sophisticated songwriting—like a level up in our ability as songwriters.” **So When You Gonna...** RM: “This whole song is a buildup, which I love. There’s an excitement. It’s like, ‘Is it going to happen? Is it not going to happen? Come on. I\'ve been waiting forever.’ And then the end, everything cuts loose because it happened, it actually happened. And then I love the fact that the song ends by saying, ‘It was all right.’ It’s often about the buildup rather than the event itself. And it was just so fun to write a song about that, especially as the female voice that\'s like, ‘So when are you going to stop talking? You\'ve been talking for nine hours.’” AG: “We played this song live, and when we recorded it, the energy of it was just instant. It absolutely popped off in the room. And I think yet again this one is another song that kind of does hark back to what we were trying to do on the first record, getting a raw live energy on track. And it\'s a real sort of homage to the live show and to the first record, I think.” RM: “We realized it was a good song when we played it live during festival season last year. Because people went absolutely nuts for it. There were mosh pits, people would be smiling and screaming and clapping. And we were like, ‘You\'ve never heard this song before.’” **Hold on Me** BP: “When we\'re relating closely to people, especially in sexual environments or sexual situations, there is often a perceived sense of ownership, whether that\'s real or imaginary, whether that\'s stemming from the other person or is internal. And I think, for me, this song is kind of questioning that sense of ownership and those systems of ownership.” RM: “Musically, the song is looping quite a lot. And the repetitiveness of the question ‘Why do you have this hold on me?’—I didn’t originally think about it that way, but after we wrote it, I connected those two things together. The whole song is a conflict between your inner thoughts.” AG: “I think as a song, it\'s amazing how it can kind of cut through many different situations. It feels very emotional to me, and that kind of feeling is reflected in the form of the song in the circular nature of the back-and-forth with the inner mind, for sure.” **After the Rain** AG: “The last minute of the album is rain. I went up Blythe Hill \[in South East London\] to record it. People were actually setting off fireworks, and Marta meticulously edited this to edit them all out. It felt really important to end on this really still, reflective moment. It felt like giving the song, and its message, the moment it deserved. We wrote the song in a bit of a different way because it felt important to create the tapestry to let the lyrics and meaning of the song shine. We had to deliver that message in a respectful way.” RM: “The song was originally a voice memo I recorded. Lyrically, I don\'t think it changed from that at all. It\'s that kind of sincerity and melody of me having a conversation with my sister, and her going through the difficult stages of shock of realizing that she\'s pregnant and that she didn’t want to have the child. Going through these multiple waves of community shame, and lack of trust, of also being disconnected from your own body. And not being able to articulate those feelings. We were talking and I picked up the phone and sort of wrote what she was saying to me, but in song format. And then I sent it to her, shortly after our conversation. And she felt like I was being able to speak the words she could not say. She used the voice memo as a kind of mantra of healing. We spoke a lot about the silence on this song. That was important, because the silence is also an instrument. It was a really beautiful way of approaching something, of keeping it close to the voice memo of the initial feeling, and then have it turn into a song.”

Dream Wife (Alice Go, Bella Podpadec and Rakel Mjöll) are back with their second album and just like the title suggests, this is a record brimming with adrenaline and playful excitement (“It’s an invitation, a challenge, a call to action,” says Rakel). From the jagged, CSS-like guitar of “So When You Gonna…” to the hooky brightness of album opener “Sports!” and the whip-smart lyrical asides of “Validation”, these are moreish, pumped up, sparkling tracks that feel like newer, dynamic evolutions of debut standouts, like “F.U.U.” and “Hey Heartbreaker.” But they often lean into sweeter, softer, more emotional moments too. “Temporary” and “After the Rain” in particular – songs about miscarriage and abortion, respectively – are complicated, painful stories told through a soft and hopeful lens. These were difficult subjects to write about, but Dream Wife think it’s important to bring these conversations into the public sphere, to refuse to brush things under the rug, to empower and support others in the process. Dream Wife have always been outspoken about holding up other womxn and non-binary people in the creative industries, but these aren’t just words or sentiments. With a gender divide in music production currently estimated at around ninety-five percent male to five percent female, the band are proud to have worked with an all-female recording team for So When You Gonna..., including producer and mixer Marta Salogni (Björk, Holly Herndon, FKA Twigs) engineer Grace Banks (David Wrench, Marika Hackman) and mastering engineer Heba Kadry (Princess Nokia, Alex G, Beach House). “It was a way of us practicing what we preach,” says Alice, “It felt like an honour to be able to deliver this baby with these three amazing midwives.” “Put your money where your mouth is!” adds Rakel, quoting the lyrics of “Sports!”

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band themselves. This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.” This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet. ‘Viscerals’, their third proper is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Whilst the fearsome opener ‘Reducer’s battle cry “ego kills everything” brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, elsewhere ‘Rubbernecker’ may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction. Meanwhile the sinister sound-collage of ‘Blood And Butter’ delves into jarring abstraction anew, ‘New Body’ countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby and - perhaps most memorably of all - the perverse banger ‘Crazy In Blood’ marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger. “We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way”. Yet for all that this record is the most far-reaching yet, its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band (whose rogues gallery is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley). “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word!” “At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed they all jump on too and for just a few minutes we all feel liberated, together.” Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough. ---

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever wanted to get back in touch with the things that bring meaning to their lives after touring extensively in support of 2018’s full-length debut *Hope Downs*. The Melbourne five-piece has always approached their music with a keen sense of geography. On *Hope Downs*, singer/songwriter/guitarist Joe White and singer/songwriter/guitarists Fran Keaney and Tom Russo, who split songwriting duties, told stories about characters in distress in settings both familiar and remote—from the beautiful stretches of the Aeolian Islands in Sicily to the vast iron ore mines in Western Australia. On their second studio LP, *Sideways to New Italy*, they\'re also looking within themselves to connect with their feelings and emotions. “We went into the interior geography rather than writing about the outside,” says Russo. “It took us back to our formative places, and the places that we grew up and the places that we never guessed that we had idealized from a distance.” It also helped them recapture the excitement of being in a band together. “We wanted to carry through the positivity we always had when we started this band before we started touring,” says Keaney. “All together in the same room, not writing the songs until we\'ve actually had a chance to rip them apart and take them in different directions.” Here, Keaney, Russo, and White walk us through the album track by track. **The Second of the First** Fran Keaney: “That was one of the earlier ones that we wrote or started writing. And it informed the path that we would take for the rest of the album, which is that we found something that we were really excited about. I had a few chords for it and a rough idea for a song, and I brought it to the band, but then we ended up just taking it down a different path and left that song for dead. We had this jam that we were really excited about, but that\'s all it was. It was just two chords, and we just stuck on it, you know, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then just recorded it on an iPhone and then sat with it for a while and tried to work out what that new song might be.” Tom Russo: “We were going back to our roots of bringing in whoever is at hand to help do little bits and pieces on the album. And Joe\'s girlfriend, and one of our best friends, we got him to come in and do a spoken-word part. And that\'s not to our original spirit where we used to do that without first recording through it, just throwing the kitchen sink at it.” **Falling Thunder** Russo: “It’s about the constants of change, when you find yourself the next year in the same season. It’s written in that point where fall turns into winter. And I find that to be a really reflective time. Everyone else was on holiday in Europe, taking some time off. And I was just riding around in the tour van for a few days throughout Europe with our tour manager and our tech, which was a great experience, getting ferried around like that. I was in the van on my own, and I remember chewing the bones of this song, on my computer, in the back of a tour van watching Germany and the Midlands going by. When we eventually took it back to the band, we really pulled it apart and ended up surgically connecting two different songs.” Keaney: “Normally when we would do an operation like that, the body ends up rejecting the prosthetic, but this one was a complete success. We try to relate to our handsome monsters, our beautiful monsters. There’s a lot of—I know the metaphor is getting a bit weird—limbs on the cutting room floor. We can be brutal now. We\'re all very much open to collaborating, and while we do have a personal connection to ideas that we put in, everybody accepts that everything\'s up for grabs and everything\'s up to be moved around. So I think we\'ve got better at that over time. So yeah, there\'s a lot of carnage.” **She’s There** Joe White: “‘She\'s There\' was definitely one of those songs that just fell out of my hands really quickly on the guitar. I just knocked up a really quick demo on my computer at home. We went into pre-production with our producer Burke \[Reid\], who quickly informed us that whatever I created that day was a bit too confusing and a bit too odd. I think we were trying to push some boundaries of what\'s cool and what\'s normal and what\'s adventurous, so I guess an attitude we tried to take into this record was to not try to use the same verse-chorus-verse song structures that we\'ve used before. We hadn\'t really considered that idea of the listener, just going in it as this cool, weird pop song that can just jump around all different parts and do whatever it wants. Turns out maybe that isn\'t the case, but in the end, it informed what we have now. I feel like I used my brain more than I ever used it before, and I\'d go to sleep thinking about songs and then wake up in the morning with those songs in my head.” **Beautiful Steven** Russo: “I was thinking about the places that shaped me and shaped us. It\'s loosely set at the small, pretty tough Catholic boys\' school that Fran, Joe \[Russo, RBCF bassist\], and I went to. It would have been better to be in a co-ed school with boys and girls; there\'s something strange about getting a whole bunch of teenage boys together in like a concrete box. It\'s a bit of an unrequited love song from a teenage boy to their best friend.” **The Only One** White: “It started on my phone trying to make a synth-pop banger. I pulled the chords out of that and started playing it on the guitar. And then it turned into this kind of sad country song. So it was living in these two worlds. I think I went to bed one night while we were recording, watching *Stop Making Sense*, that live Talking Heads video-like concert. I liked the way that they introduced the elements, just one by one, and how they still managed to get so much groove, so much working for the song with so few elements. I had a little minor epiphany and thought, ‘Oh, all right. Maybe that is how we approach this song.’” Keaney: “I remember the very start and the very end of recording it. It was late at night and Marcel \[Tussie, RBCF drummer\] was probably pretty exhausted and he had his top off. So he was just walking around in his shorts, like he’s a man on a mission. He was losing his mind a bit. He was in his room, almost like he was boxed in a zoo, and Burke was playing around with all these drum sounds. I think he ended up using a plastic paint tub for one of the toms.” **Cars in Space** Keaney: “It\'s set at the time of the breakup between two people, and all that time before the breakup, when there are all the swirling thoughts and meandering words that happened at that time. When we were recording it, Burke said that he can see the rising and falling of the song, which is what happens in the verses. When it shifts between the chords and the hi-hats come up and the electric guitars move in and out, it\'s sort of the waves of \'Am I going to say it now? Is she going to say it now?\' For a long time, we tried to preserve the idea that it would be in two parts, that it would be \'Cars in Space\' and \'Cars in Space II.\' The first had another chorus on it, but then once you got to II—which is now the outro of the song—it just didn\'t make sense. You\'re on this journey, and it feels like watching a Hollywood movie and then having another 45 minutes stuck on the end. That was sort of the idea why we couldn\'t really keep it as a song in two parts, so we ended up abandoning that idea.” **Cameo** Keaney: “The setting of the song was inspired by a place in the city of Darwin. We played at the Darwin Festival, and then there was this after-party at the park just next to it. It was a really cool scene. It sort of felt like we were in *Priscilla, Queen of the Desert*. There were all these different types of people, all congregated in Darwin. There\'s someone that I liked there, and then nothing happened. As I walked back home, I let my mind go down the alternative path of just being with that person, reaching through to eternity with that person. This is an absurd sort of an idea, a bit like letting your mind wander.” **Not Tonight** Keaney: “My auntie, a few years ago, was talking about how she hated the song ‘Miss You’ by The Rolling Stones. Because it reminded her of when she was a kid. Her older brother, my uncle, would start to get ready to go out to parties or going out on a Saturday night rather than staying at home and watching TV and being in a warm house. He would be in the next room listening to ‘Miss You’ while he was putting on some cheap fragrance and putting on his cowboy shirt, getting ready to go out and drink booze and maybe get into a fight, that sort of thing. It always made her nervous and worried. And I could see that so vividly in my head. I thought that that would be a nice place to set a song.” Russo: “It started out as a country punk song. We tried to do surgery because it didn\'t quite sit right. There was a mix between both, and some parts which were almost like \'90s radio rock. And that didn\'t sound like us—it was too powerful. It had a bit of an identity crisis for a long time. Joe knocked the cowbell against it to give it that weird country disco swing. And that was the last thing, so we were all dancing around like, \'This is the end of the album,\' like a celebratory cowbell. It\'s my first cowbell recording experience, and possibly my last. I\'ve heard about this rule that you\'re only allowed to record a cowbell once in your life. So we\'ve used up that ticket already. I think it\'s the right song to use it on.” **Sunglasses at the Wedding** Keaney: “I did this thing that Mick Jones from The Clash does. Apparently, he writes the lyrics first, and then he just looks at the words and tries to find melody, tries to find the song in the words. There\'s all those really good soul songs about weddings and marriage. And I really like the tug of those, like \[*singing*\] \'Today I meet the boy I\'m going to marry\' and \'Going to the chapel, I\'m going to get married.\' I like those songs that are set at a wedding or near a wedding; it\'s such a momentous day. So I wanted to somehow try and carry that across. It\'s a bit dreamlike.” White: “The last thing we added to the song was that really sort of bubbly, nasally electric guitar that washes over the whole thing that, again, puts it back into that dream world. So it does make it feel like it\'s got a breath, a change of pace on the album, that also takes you into a different headspace.” **The Cool Change** Russo: “It\'s another one that\'s a bit of a mix of fact and fiction. It\'s someone remembering someone who comes in and out of their lives. In places like Australia, there\'s always someone whose ego kind of outgrows their town, and they go to other places to be bigger than they can be there. So they might go to LA or New York or London to be a star in one of the fields. It\'s about a person like that, but then they keep coming back to their old relationship and they\'re never going to love anyone else more than they love themselves. It\'s based on an amalgamation of a few people; I feel everyone knows someone like that. Musically, it was like a weird, folky little number. We didn\'t really know what to do with it; it was a bit countryish and it didn\'t really fit in our world. We looked at amping it up a bit, making it a bit faster, and then it suddenly turned into this sleazy LA country-rock number. But a good kind of sleazy, like riding a motorbike down the freeway.” White: “The backwards guitar helps fight that element. I just took my lead guitar track and chopped it up and reversed some of it and stuck it back in certain spots. That immediately just takes it to that *Sweetheart of the Rodeo* \[The Byrds’ 1968 album\] psych-folk kind of thing. But I\'ll also say that drumbeat is not bad at all. It lives between those worlds.”

On their second record, Sideways to New Italy, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have turned their gaze inward, to their individual pasts and the places that inform them. From a town in regional Australia that serves as a living relic to how immigrants brought a sense of home to an alien place, to the familiar Mediterranean statues that dot the front lawns of the Melbourne suburbs where the band members live, the inspiration for the record came from the attempts people make at crafting utopia in their backyard (while knowing there is no such thing as a clean slate). In searching for something to hold onto in the turbulence, the guitar-pop five-piece has channelled their own sense of dislocation into an album that serves as a totem of home to take with them to stages all over the world.

for audio stream or download : awal.ffm.to/galore 1 - little one 2 - fall 3 - unearth me 4 - god's chariots 5 - galore 6 - nightime 7 - asturias (ft. Zero) 8 - rosebud 9 - girl on my throne (ft. Casey MQ) 10 - another night 11 - I didn't give up on you

“I want to get to that point where I can just write one lyric and people understand what I’m about,” IDLES singer Joe Talbot tells Apple Music. “Maybe it’s ‘Fuck you, I’m a lover.’” Those words, from the song ‘The Lover,’ certainly form an effective tagline for the band’s third album. The Bristol band explored trauma and vulnerability on second album *Joy as an Act of Resistance.*, and here they’re finding ways to heal, galvanize, and move forward—partly informed by mindfulness and being in the present. “I thought about the idea that you only ever have now,” Talbot says. “\[*Ultra Mono*\] is about getting to the crux of who you are and accepting who you are in that moment—which is really about a unification of self.” Those thoughts inspired a solidarity and concision in the way Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire, and drummer Jon Beavis wrote music. Each song began with a small riff or idea, and everything that was added had to be in the service of that nugget. “That’s where the idea of an orchestra comes in—that you try and sound, from as little as possible, as big as you can,” Talbot says. “Everyone hitting the thing at the same time to sound huge. It might also be as simple as one person playing and everyone else shutting the fuck up. Don’t create noise where it’s not needed.” The music’s visceral force and social awareness will keep the “punk” tag pinned to IDLES, but *Ultra Mono* forges a much broader sound. The self-confidence of hip-hop, the communal spirit of jungle, and the kindness of jazz-pop maestro Jamie Cullum all feed into these 12 songs. Let Talbot explain how in this track-by-track guide. **War** “It was the quickest thing we ever wrote. We got in a room together, I explained the concept, and we just wrote it. We played it—it wasn’t even a writing thing. And that is about as ultra mono as it gets. It had to be the first track because it is the explosion of not overthinking anything and *being*. The big bang of the album is the inner turmoil of trying to get rid of the noise and just be present—so it was perfect. The title’s ‘War’ because it sounded so violent, ballistic. I was really disenfranchised with the internet, like, ‘Why am I listening to assholes? You’ve got to be kind to yourself.’ ‘War’ was like, ‘Yeah, do it, actually learn to love yourself.’ That was the start of a big chapter in my life. It was like the war of self that I had to win.” **Grounds** “We wanted to write a song that was like AC/DC meets Dizzee Rascal, but a bit darker. It’s the march song, the start of the journey: ‘We won the first battle, let’s fucking do this. What do you need to stop apologizing for?’ That’s a conversation you need to have when all these horrible people come to the forefront. I was being criticized for speaking of civil rights–whether that be trans rights or gay rights or Black rights, the war on the working classes. I believe in socialism. Go fuck yourselves. I want to sleep at night knowing that my platform is the voice of reason and an egalitarian want for something beautiful—not the murder of Black people, homophobia at the workplace, racist front lines. We were recording in Paris and Warren Ellis \[of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman\] popped in. He sat with us just chatting about life. I was like, ‘It would be insane if I didn’t ask you to be on this record, man.’ I just wanted him to do a ‘Hey!’ like on a grime record.” **Mr. Motivator** “\[TV fitness guru\] Mr Motivator, that’s my spirit animal. We wrote that song and it felt like a train. I wanted to put a beautiful and joyous face to something rampantly, violently powerful-sounding. ‘Mr. Motivator’ is 90% lethal machine, 10% beautiful, smiley man that brings you joy. The lyrics are all cliches because I think *The Guardian* or someone leaned towards the idea that my sloganeering was something to be scoffed at. So I thought I’d do a whole song of it. We’re trying to rally people together, and if you go around using flowery language or muddying the waters with your insecurities, you’re not going to get your point across. So, I wanted to write nursery rhymes for open-minded people.” **Anxiety** “This was the first song where the lyrics came as we were writing the music. It sounded anxiety-inducing because it was so bombastic and back-and-forth. Then we had the idea of speeding the song up as you go along and becoming more cacophonous. That just seemed like a beautiful thing, because when you start meditating, the first thing that happens is you try to meditate–which isn’t what you’re supposed to do. The noise starts coming in. One of the things they teach you in therapy is that if you feel anxious or scared or sad or angry, don’t just internally try to fight that. Accept that you become anxious and allow yourself the anxiety. Feel angry and accept that, and then think about why, and what triggered it. And obviously 40-cigarettes-a-day Dev \[Adam Devonshire\] can’t really sing that well anymore, so we had to get David Yow of Jesus Lizard in. He’s got an amazing voice. It’s a much better version of what Dev used to be like.” **Kill Them With Kindness** “That’s Jamie Cullum \[on the piano\]. We met him at the Mercury Prize and he said, ‘If you need any piano on your album, just let us know.’ I was like, ‘We don’t, but we definitely do now.’ I like that idea of pushing people’s idea of what cool is. Jamie Cullum is fucking cooler than any of those apathetic nihilists. He believes in something and he works hard at it—and I like that. When I was working in a kitchen, we listened to Radio 2 all the time, and I loved his show. And he’s a beautiful human being. It’s a perfect example of what we’re about: inclusivity and showing what you love. I didn’t write the lyrics until after meeting him. It was just that idea that he seemed kindhearted. Kindness is a massive thing: It’s what empathy derives from, and kindness and empathy is what’ll kill fascism. It should be the spirit of punk and soul music and grime and every other music.” **Model Village** “The part that we wrote around was something that I used to play onstage whenever Bowen was offstage and I stole his guitar. So it had this playfulness, and I wanted to write a kind of take-the-piss song. I’m not antagonistic at all, but I do find things funny, like people who get so angry. I wanted this song to be taking yourself out of your own town and looking at it like it’s a model village. Just to be like, ‘Look how small and insignificant this place is. Don’t be so aggressive and defensive about something you don’t really understand.’ It’s a call for empathy—but to the assholes in a non-apologetic way.” **Ne Touche Pas Moi** “I was getting really down on tours because I felt a bit like an animal in a cage. Dudes are aggressive, and it’s boring when you see it in a crowd. Someone’s being a prick in the crowd and people aren’t comfortable—it’s not a nice feeling. So I wanted to create that idea of a safe arena with an anthem. It’s a violent, cutting anthem. It’s like, ‘I am full of love, but that doesn’t mean you can elbow me in the face or touch my breasts.’ We can play it in sets to give people the confidence that there is a platform here to be safe. I said to Bowen, ‘I really wish there was a woman singing the chorus, because it’s not just about my voice, it’s more often women that get groped.’ A couple of days later, we were in Paris recording Jehnny Beth’s TV show and I told her about this song. It was a nice relief to have someone French backing up my shit French.” **Carcinogenic** “Jungle was a movement based around unity—very different kinds of people getting together under the love of music. It was one of the most forward-thinking, beautiful things to happen to our country, \[and it\] was shut down by police and people who couldn’t make money from it. I wanted to write a song that was part garage rock, part jungle, because both movements have their part to play in building IDLES and also building amazing communities of people and great musicians. Then I thought about jungle and grime and garage and how something positive gets turned into something negative with the media. Basically, any Black music that creates a positive network of people and communities, building something out of love, is dangerous because it’s people thinking outside the box and not relying on the government for reassurance and entertainment and distraction. So then it got me thinking about ‘carcinogenic’ and how everything gives you cancer, when really the most cancerous thing about our society isn’t anything like that, it’s the class war that we’re going through and depriving people of a decent education, decent welfare, decent housing. That’s fucking cancer.” **Reigns** “This was written around the bass, obviously. Again, another movement—techno—and that idea of togetherness and the love in the room is always apparent. Techno is motorik, it’s mesmeric, it is just a singularity—minimal techno, especially. It’s just the beat or the bassline and that carries you through, that’s all you need. Obviously, we’re a chorus band, so we thought we’d throw in something huge to cut through it. But we didn’t want to overcomplicate it. That sinister pound just reminds me of my continual disdain for the Royal Family and everything they represent in our country, from the fascism that it comes from to the smiley-face racism that it perpetuates nowadays.” **The Lover** “I wanted to write a soul song with that wall-of-noise, Phil Spector vibe—but also an IDLES song. What could be more IDLES than writing a song about being a lover but making it really sweary? When I love someone, I swear a lot around them because I trust them, and I want them to feel comfortable and trust me. So I just wrote the most honest love song. It’s like a defiant smile in the face of assholes who can’t just accept that your love is real. It’s like, ‘I’m not lying. I am full of love and you’re a prick.’ That’s it. That song was the answer to the call of ‘Grounds.’ That huge, stabby, all-together orchestra.” **A Hymn** “Bowen and I were trying to write a song together. I had a part and he had a part. Then my part just got kicked out and we wrote the song around the guitar line. We wanted to write a song that was like a hymn, because a hymn is a Christian, or gospel, vision of togetherness and rejoicing at once for something they love. I wanted to write the lyrics around the idea that a hymn nowadays is just about suburban want, material fear. So it’s like a really subdued, sad hymn about materialism, suburban pedestrianism. And it came out really well.” **Danke** “It was going to be an instrumental, a song that made you feel elated and ready for war—and not muddy it with words. A song that embodies the whole album, that just builds and pounds but all the parts change. Each bit changes, but it feels like one part of one thing. And I always finish on a thank you because it’s important to be grateful for what people have given us—so I wanted to call the song ‘Danke.’ Then, on the day of recording it, Daniel Johnston died. So I put in his lyrics \[from ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’\] because they’re some of the most beautiful ever written. It fits the song, fits the album. He could have only written that one lyric and it’d be enough to understand him. I added \[my\] lyrics \[‘I’ll be your hammer, I’ll be your nail/I’ll be the house that allows you to fail’\] at the end because I felt like it was an offering to leave with—like, ‘I’ve got you.’ It’s what I would have said to him, or any friend that needed love.”

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.

“It was just a big experiment, the process of making this album,” Tom Misch tells Apple Music. “There wasn\'t too much thought process behind it.” On this freewheeling passion project born of breakneck jam sessions, songwriter and producer Misch unites with virtuoso jazz drummer Yussef Dayes for a sound that fluidly combines elements of jazz, hip-hop, and electronica. Freddie Gibbs—the album\'s sole vocal feature—adds menace on “Nightrider,” “The Real” riffs on Dilla-era soul chops, and “Sensational” throws a nod to the swirling solos of percussive greats. This wickedly unrestrained vision has landed the Southeast London pair a maiden release on the pioneering jazz imprint Blue Note Records. “It\'s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be associated,” says Dayes, reeling off Blue Note luminaries including Coltrane, Hancock, and Blakey. “It makes you want to work harder, because those guys, they were on another level.” The process also prompted a bout of déjà vu for Misch. “I have this memory of seeing this guy on drums, like, 15 years ago in a talent show in this school, and thinking, ‘This guy\'s insane.’ When we were working on the album, I was like, \'Shit. Are you that dude who...\' So it was kind of a weird one,” he says. “I was always performing at school,” Dayes admits. “It\'s a way for me to express what I\'m feeling. A chance for me to connect with the people that are into the music and give them some energy and vice versa. But with us two collaborating, coming from two different fields, we have to meet in the middle. It\'s give and take from both of us.” Here, the pair run through the album track by track. **What Kinda Music** Tom Misch: “This was one of the first tracks we did. I had a session with Loyle Carner in summer 2018. We were recording and I called up Yussef to try some drums on this track I was producing. He came down and recorded the drums for what is now ‘Angel,’ on Loyle\'s \[*Not Waving, But Drowning*\] album. So, he left the studio, and then Yussef and I were there for the rest of the day. The origins of \'What Kinda Music,\' \'The Real,\' and \'Storm Before the Calm\' came from that day. It was just a crazy day.” Yussef Dayes: “From there, we realized it wasn\'t a one-track collaboration. We felt like it could be a tape or something. Sometimes you collaborate and it doesn’t quite click, but if from the get-go it\'s clicking and it\'s sounding good, you know there\'s something there. It\'s a unique sound this track; I felt like that was a fresh sound that neither me or Tom had explored completely, so I wanted to see us start with the off-kilter thing.” **Festival** TM: “This was a day with me, Yussef, and a bassist, Tom Dressler. We recorded a bunch of stuff over the three days. And the basis for this song was something we recorded there. I knew I liked the vibe, but I wanted to sing on it, and it took a while to execute the vocals. It\'s about when you\'re younger, you have this natural presence as in you\'re in the *now*, generally, when you\'re young. And then you kind of lose that as you grow older. It\'s saying how you still have that, that you\'re still able to be present. Yussef was like, ‘I want to call it \"Festival Tune.\"’ So I was like, \'Fair enough.\'” YD: “This is a big tune. It sounds like it could score a David Attenborough documentary, you know? On something about the planet, for the real earth people. It\'s just emphatic. I can imagine this being performed at Glastonbury; I can hear people singing along.” **Nightrider (feat. Freddie Gibbs)** TM: “The vibe of the instrumental felt kind of woozy, a bit hazy. And I remember going on the *Knight Rider* trailer on YouTube, playing it with the music, and it was just a perfect combination. We knew we wanted to get a rapper on the record, and I wrote down a list of people that we like. I\'m just going through the list and Yussef said, \'Let\'s do Freddie Gibbs.\' I\'m really chuffed about getting him because I\'m a big fan of Freddie. It really adds a different vibe to the record.” YD: “We recorded this with a good friend of mine, \[producer and engineer\] Miles James. We were just were rocking. We recorded the drums and bass down in Eastbourne and then we came back and produced it up. It\'s the same thing again. My job is...my drumbeat should be able to give everybody the music that they hear on top of it. I just was like, \'Yeah, we\'ve got to get Freddie on this, man.\' I\'d been in contact with him already, just sending him beats, and I just thought this needed that extra, that little touch, man.” **Tidal Wave** TM: “You can just hear the rawness of it, the moments where we\'re just shouting and stuff. Really low in the mix you can hear me shout out, \'All right, now it\'s like a chorus, so play drumming.\' Because at that point, even though we were just jamming, I knew it had potential to be a song.” YD: “This was me, Tom, and Rocco Palladino on bass. We set up, pressed record, and just jammed some ideas. We did that twice on this record, and this was the second time, just three hours worth of music. It was just one of those days, man, just light up the incense and catch a vibe, man. Not even thinking. I was just trying to do some different stuff on the drums, different cymbals that I hadn\'t used before, some wood blocks and stuff, and try to switch up a bit.” **Sensational** TM: “This represents a bit of the rawness on the record. It’s just a little cut from a day of jamming, a little insight, and I hit up Tobie Tripp, he’s an amazing strings player. I got him to lay some violin on it and double up the guitar part.” YD: “I wanted to make sure there\'s skits and interludes and off-cuts on the records, because all my favorite albums, when I listen to the Fugees or D\'Angelo, those albums play with skits in between that tie it together. I think \'Sensational\' is one of those things—it\'s like some country-western shit, sort of, like some Django shit. This is, I suppose, my bag, man. This kinda shit. I\'d love to get a rapper on this for a remix maybe.” **The Real** TM: “For me, this was kind of like me going back to being a beatmaker. The drums are from that day I was in the studio with Loyle, and then I went home and I started chopping some Aretha Franklin. That\'s what I like about this one. It\'s kind of me going back to what I used to do.” YD: “This is definitely one of my favorites. It\'s from the same day as \'Angel.\' This is one of the beats from that day, and I recorded the drums and then I forgot about this. Tom went away, he put the Aretha sample to it, processed the drums a bit, and came back later. I was like, \'Wow, what\'s this? I don\'t even remember this.\' I love that kind of stuff. I love gospel music. That\'s a big influence to me, man. That\'s a dream of mine, to record with a live choir at some point, and obviously Aretha Franklin, that\'s legendary.” **Lift Off (feat. Rocco Palladino)** TM: “I linked up with Rocco through Yussef. They have a proper sort of musical bromance. And it\'s cool to play with them, because they\'re very much in sync. It\'s been interesting finding my voice within that trio. It\'s brought out something different in me.” YD: “I\'ve known Rocco for about 10 years now. I think we\'ve started performing together the last three years now. He\'s crazy, man. You always can tell, because bass players—they\'re very specific, man. He\'s definitely the best at what he does, and obviously he comes from... \[Welsh musician and producer Pino Palladino\], his dad\'s an amazing bass player, too. He knows what he\'s doing, man. Let\'s put it that way.” **I Did It for You** TM: “We just clicked record and we were jamming for a whole day. And this is one of the joints that came up in the evening. We jammed something, then we\'d go up to the control room, we listen. I remember thinking, \'Shit, that sounded really nice.\' I knew I wanted to sing on that one. I was like, \'Yeah, this is a vibe.\'” YD: “We recorded this nearly two years ago, it was one of the first tracks. I\'d been to Brazil a few years back, years ago, and I remember Tom wanting to go. I think he did in the end, so that track was kind of inspired by some of those rhythms and that kind of energy. It\'s closer to Tom\'s sound, I think.” **Last 100** TM: “I was playing some piano, messing around, Yussef was up on the drum kit. It was after a session. We\'re just messing around before we go home, and then I start playing those chords. And I recorded it on my iPhone. I was like, \'This is nice.\' We came back to it the next day and recorded the bassist. This is kind of like the love tune on the record. It\'s a summery, feel-good one.” YD: “You have the initial session and then obviously some of the tracks you need to produce up, so you spend a couple of weeks on them. Tom would write his vocals or add little synths to it, to get those sections there, but the drums are obviously the main thing you want to record and get that first. Then after that, it’s just adding the structure around it. ‘Last 100’ is definitely one of those ones we produced up and got the arrangement and added different instrumentation and backing vocals.” **Kyiv** TM: “So this one was actually recorded in London, but the live video was recorded in Kiev. That was a very, very cold day. It was about minus five degrees. And we were recording the live video for ‘Lift Off’ in this ex-community center in Kiev. It\'s an amazing old building. It looks like a Call of Duty zombie level. It was pretty cool. It was interesting to be in that part of Europe, the fashion and the architecture, ex-Soviet kind of architecture. And everyone in fur jackets and stuff. I want to go back.” YD: “It was in a mad building. It was like a freezer in there. They said we had one reel left, and we’d already wrapped up ‘Lift Off,’ then Rocco started playing these chords and we just recorded real quickly. It just came. What I like to do is still like to make it like it was a song. You play your part. The music is still the most important thing, even though you want to freestyle and you want to solo and all this stuff. You want to make a beat. You want to make something people will listen to as well. It’s just that know-how, how to, even if you are freestyling, just make it into the thing straight away, man.” **Julie Mangos** YD: “That’s our dads speaking on this one. It\'s a medley of little skits and stuff that we\'ve recorded. My dad’s talking about Deptford Market, where he used to sell Caribbean and West Indian food. He\'s describing what it was like in the market. About 20 years ago, he had a stall down there, and we used to have fruit imported and pick it up from the docks. This is just me and Tom trying to give a bit of context to where we\'re coming from. To get our dads on the record, and family involved—it\'s a touch, man.” TM: “Both our dads have been quite involved in coming down throughout making this record. Just coming and listening, giving their opinions on stuff. I called my dad, another day. Clicked record without him knowing, and I asked him what he thought of the record. So we put those on. I think my dad knew that this is something that I really wanted to do, making this record. Because I\'d tell him how excited I was about working with Yussef, and the way the tracks were sounding initially. There\'s a lot of excitement making this record. I think he sensed that.” **Storm Before the Calm (feat. Kaidi Akinnibi)** TM: “Kaidi is an amazing saxophone player. I met him when I was about 12 and he was seven or something. We met at a jazz youth club called Tomorrow’s Warriors. He was just insane at the sax at that time. Then fast-forward 10 years, I hit him up and we start jamming, and he featured on one of my tracks from \[2017 EP\] *5 Day Mischon*. And then we hit him up again, and he\'s been playing in my band, he\'s been touring with me. Thought we\'d try him on this track, and he just destroyed it.” YD: “He\'s 20 years old, and he\'s killing it already. It\'s one of the first ones we recorded as well. It\'s *that* same day, man. The same day, the \'Angel\' day, we recorded this one as well. This one’s got these dark synths, it\'s like a storm. It was always going to be the outro or the intro, but I think it just closes off with a different vibe before you check out. We were just trying to experiment with synths and the OP-1, which is this mad little synth I’ve got, and just span different sounds.”

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

“Sometimes I feel like we’re just sleepwalking through our lives. We’re not really present.” Hazel English wants us to open our eyes. Through her shimmering, daydream-pop, the California based singer-songwriter is on a mission to rattle the cages of our very existence, asking us to dig deep and ask challenging questions of ourselves. Wake UP!, her debut album, is a call to arms: an attempt to “make people become more aware and mindful,” she says. Since debuting with bittersweet single ‘Never Going Home’ in 2016, the Sydney-born artist has felt the urge to connect with her listeners in a meaningful way. Blending wistful, candid lyricism with jangling psych and beach-pop sounds, English’s compelling songwriting has earned her over 25 million streams, airplay on BBC Radio 1, 6Music and Beats, praise from Lauren Laverne and Annie Mac, and press acclaim with double EP Just Give In/Never Going Home labelled by The 405 as “one of the strongest records of the year”. 2019 saw her gain an even wider audience after touring with Lord Huron and Death Cab For Cutie. Where the double EP was very much a lo-fi, bedroom-produced record, English left her home setup behind in favour of roomy recording studios and tapped up session players for her debut album. Bigger, lusher, and more live-sounding, the LP shows a new side to English: one that conveys the joy and excitement of collaboration. Drawing from a more grandiose sonic palette while pulling on the same sun-kissed thread of her previous work, half of the record was made in LA with super-producer Justin Raisen (Sky Ferreira, Charli XCX, Angel Olsen), while English flew to Atlanta to work with Ben H. Allen (Deerhunter, M.I.A, Animal Collective) on the other half. Listening to the record, it should come as no surprise that ‘Revolver’-era Beatles, The Mamas & The Papas, The Zombies and Jefferson Airplane were all at the forefront of her mind while recording. “Radical messages need a raw and vibrant backdrop to pop,” she says, and she’s kept her trademark sunshine-filled sound that fits her Los Angeles dwelling, but with bigger, stirring choruses. It's a testament to English’s writing style and ear for a hook that she won’t make anything that she couldn’t play stripped back to its bones, refusing to rely on production to carry a song. Standouts like the infectious ‘Off My Mind’ and ‘Like A Drug’, with its swirling hypnosis, find English’s songcraft at its most accomplished. Lead single ‘Shaking’ wears its ‘60s psych influences on its paisley patterned sleeve. Written by Hazel and frequent collaborator Blake Stranathan (Lana Del Rey), it was a painstaking effort: “I just couldn’t rest until I had gotten it to a place where it felt like I could sleep at night. And I’m really glad I did,” she says. Tackling themes of power, lust, manipulation, pleasure, and control, its Erin S. Murray-directed video strikes right at the heart of this idea, finding English as the charismatic ringleader of her own Manson-esque cult, manipulating her subjects in a babydoll dress and beehive hairstyle. “It presents the promise of a spiritual awakening as a kind of seduction,” she says. An open sufferer of anxiety, English wrote the record following something of an existential crisis. Stuck and isolated, she felt like life was becoming a series of mundane objectives. She began asking herself: “am I happy? Do I like the direction I’m going in life? Am I engaged with my community? Do I feel connected to others?” English realised that the answers to all these questions were, for her, resounding nos. The album’s title became a kind of personal mantra to her – “a reminder to wake up and be present in a time where we are used to switching off and looking for constant entertainment,” she says. “[‘Wake UP!] will mean something different to everyone. Like, oh yeah, I’ve been sleeping on this goal of mine, or I need to spend more time with my kids. It’s for whatever people need to confront.” Obsessing over old movies and vintage clothing since the age of 15, English took cues from surrealism, dadaism and the writings of sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick for the record. She wrote words before she became a musician – before a student exchange programme prompted her San Francisco move, English was studying creative writing in Melbourne and writing poetry prolifically. After reading Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, English began pondering our obsession with self-image. In it, Debord considers how we get caught up in the ‘spectacle’: How am I perceived by others? How can I make it seem like I'm successful? English draws parallels from the ‘60s text with our social media-crazed present as “essentially creating a fabricated version of yourself and making sure it seems like you’re living this amazing life. It’s not a true experience. That just makes us unhappy, I think.” Confronting issues with the rampant, consumerist nature of capitalism and “our human propensity for dissatisfaction,” Wake UP! also explores power struggles, with English looking at how shifting dynamics affect relationships, be it in the music industry or in romantic life. The record dives into unbalanced power dynamics, be it “feeling stuck in a one-sided relationship where the other person cares less,” “needing space in order to seek power within myself, or feeling like I’m the one holding all the cards in a relationship.” Wake UP! is a rallying call to our 2020 selves; a reminder of what our core values are, packaged up in a glorious, sparkling record. “I hope I can inspire others to also search for their inner truths and find their own inner strength in the process,” English says. “I wanted to create something really dynamic, and kinda wild.”

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

Everything changed for The Beths when they released their debut album, Future Me Hates Me, in 2018. The indie rock band had long been nurtured within Auckland, New Zealand’s tight-knit music scene, working full-time during the day and playing music with friends after hours. Full of uptempo pop rock songs with bright, indelible hooks, the LP garnered them critical acclaim from outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, and they set out for their first string of shows overseas. They quit their jobs, said goodbye to their hometown, and devoted themselves entirely to performing across North America and Europe. They found themselves playing to crowds of devoted fans and opening for acts like Pixies and Death Cab for Cutie. Almost instantly, The Beths turned from a passion project into a full-time career in music. Songwriter and lead vocalist Elizabeth Stokes worked on what would become The Beths’ second LP, Jump Rope Gazers, in between these intense periods of touring. Like the group’s earlier music, the album tackles themes of anxiety and self-doubt with effervescent power pop choruses and rousing backup vocals, zeroing in on the communality and catharsis that can come from sharing stressful situations with some of your best friends. Stokes’s writing on Jump Rope Gazers grapples with the uneasy proposition of leaving everything and everyone you know behind on another continent, chasing your dreams while struggling to stay close with loved ones back home. "If you're at a certain age, all your friends scatter to the four winds,” Stokes says. “We did the same thing. When you're home, you miss everybody, and when you're away, you miss everybody. We were just missing people all the time.” With songs like the rambunctious “Dying To Believe” and the tender, shoegazey “Out of Sight,” The Beths reckon with the distance that life necessarily drives between people over time. People who love each other inevitably fail each other. “I’m sorry for the way that I can’t hold conversations/They’re such a fragile thing to try to support the weight of,” Stokes sings on “Dying to Believe.” The best way to repair that failure, in The Beths’ view, is with abundant and unconditional love, no matter how far it has to travel. On “Out of Sight,” she pledges devotion to a dearly missed friend: “If your world collapses/I’ll be down in the rubble/I’d build you another,” she sings. “It was a rough year in general, and I found myself saying the words, 'wish you were here, wish I was there,’ over and over again,” she says of the time period in which the album was written. Touring far from home, The Beths committed themselves to taking care of each other as they were trying at the same time to take care of friends living thousands of miles away. They encouraged each other to communicate whenever things got hard, and to pay forward acts of kindness whenever they could. That care and attention shines through on Jump Rope Gazers, where the quartet sounds more locked in than ever. Their most emotive and heartfelt work to date, Jump Rope Gazers stares down all the hard parts of living in communion with other people, even at a distance, while celebrating the ferocious joy that makes it all worth it--a sentiment we need now more than ever.

Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”

“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

Brigid Mae Power paints expansive songs that are effortless, hypnotic and folk-oriented like Judee Sill, Bill Callahan and Sharon Van Etten. The third album from the celebrated singer/songwriter, ‘Head Above The Water’ is a coming of age opus featuring a ground-breaking amalgamation of traditional folk and country - an engaging blend of strings, bouzouki, piano and Power’s distinctive vocal make this an achingly beautiful body of work. Recorded in analogue studio The Green Door in Glasgow with Alasdair Roberts co-producing alongside Brigid and Peter Broderick. It’s a continuing tale of everyday survival; more diverse, different, a bigger canvas, with broader brushstrokes… Country and traditional folk rub shoulders, making for a juxtaposition of threads, with added instrumentation from five musicians lured into the studio to provide larger dynamics. “Power meditates on the dichotomy that’s always existed in her work, melding atmospheric bliss and stark desperation.” Pitchfork “Power invokes the elements, either in contrast to internal weather or in sympathy with it.” The Guardian. “Haunting and haunted” (The Line Of Best Fit), ‘Head Above The Water’ continues in that vein becoming more ethereal, more personal and even more alluring. After two lauded albums for Tompkins Square, Brigid Mae Power releases her new album on 5th June via Fire Records.

It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”

A CERTAIN RATIO are back with a new album, ACR Loco. Revitalized by their most successful tour in over two decades, the band returned to the studio to record their first album in 12 years – due for release September 25 on Mute. The new 10-track album will be released on CD, cassette, limited edition colored vinyl and digital platforms. The vinyl will be available in one of four colors: white, blue, red and turquoise, randomly packed, with each color of varying rarity. ACR Loco was recorded by the core line up of Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson with contributions from the ACR live line up – Tony Quigley on sax, Denise Johnson adds vocals and Matt Steele provides keyboards. Additional guests include Sink Ya Teeth’s Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford, Gabe Gurnsey (Factory Floor) and Manchester luminaries Mike Joyce and Eric Random. “This album is a culmination of everything we've ever done,” explains Kerr. The album distills the different directions and styles that have run throughout the band’s career, one that began in the late ‘70s with Factory Records’ first ever 7” release. “Digging into the past for the boxset [ACR:BOX was released in 2019 on Mute] must have rubbed off on us and influenced the current album,” says Moscrop. “I think it helped spark up our imagination. It allowed us to work in some of the past as we move forward into the future.” Keen on the joys of collaboration and sharing, it makes sense that adding the ACR touch to other artists via a series of reworks led to their latest album taking shape. Recent reworks of tracks for the likes of Barry Adamson, The Charlatans and Maps saw the band return to the studio to unpick those original tracks. “The reworks were crucial,” says Donald Johnson. “They got us back in the studio and forced a union and a bond. They allowed us to start getting a groove again.” Kerr mirrors this. “We love doing the reworks because it's just us doing our thing,” he says. “The three of us jamming is really the basis of it all. Once you get that groove there’s no stopping us.”

VINYL AVAILABLE AT :https://sliftrock.com/ Out 28th February 2020 on Vicious Circle and Stolen Body Records Written and performed by SLIFT Recorded by Olivier Cussac at Condorcet, Toulouse Produced, mixed and mastered by Jean Fossat and Olivier Cussac For sulfur guitar lovers, Prog from beyond the grave and blip blup blop of old synthesizers. Blitzkrieg fuzz and geyser Free. Bass escaping from the Minas Morgül's dungeons, and Nostromo’s drums travelling at the speed of light. Vicious solos and assassins bends. Acid krautrock and cosmic-comics jazz. There are distant echoes and reveries, celestial choirs illuminating space. And r r e e p p e e t t i i t t i i o o n n. Ancestral voices and ancient extraterrestrial rites. Abyssal doom and apocalyptic noise. There's chaos. And there's silence. Artwork by CAZA 🖖

Time and how we spend it has long interested Ian MacKaye. He screamed about its passage in Minor Threat (“Why is everybody/In such a fucking rush?”), and one of Fugazi’s first songs mused on his anxiousness in starting a new band (“My time is water down a drain”). With Coriky, he is a family man with nothing to prove. The band—MacKaye on guitar and vocals, his wife (and partner in The Evens) Amy Farina on drums and vocals, and ex-Fugazi, current Messthetics bassist Joe Lally on bass)—has existed and played since 2015 but is only releasing a record now, so they sound like a veteran trio rather than newbies. The harmonies resonate like a family band, which it is. MacKaye’s guitar is simple and smart, minimalist in the way of a player who wants to convey an idea and no more; Lally is supple and subtle. Farina is rolling and smart, her solo vocals reflective of her ’90s act The Warmers. The single “Clean Kill” reflects on those who make drone strikes; “Too Many Husbands” reflects on the strictures of childhood education. MacKaye’s Dischord label has always positioned itself as a folk label—the chronicle of a group of people, mostly born in the 1960s, over time. This is the most recent iteration: adult rock for savvy adults.

Coriky is a band from Washington, D.C. Amy Farina plays drums. Joe Lally plays bass. Ian MacKaye plays guitar. All sing. Formed in 2015, Coriky did not play their first show until 2018. They have recorded one album. They hope to tour.

Keleketla! is an expansive collaborative project, reaching outward from Johannesburg to London, Lagos, L.A. and West Papua, “Keleketla!” started as a musical meeting ground between Ninja Tune cofounders Coldcut and a cadre of South African musicians (introduced by the charity In Place Of War), including the raw, South African-accented jazz styles of Sibusile Xaba, and rapper Yugen Blakrok (Black Panther OST). From those initial sessions, the record grew to encompass a wider web of musical luminaries, including Afrobeat architects, the late pioneer Tony Allen and Dele Sosimi, legendary L.A. spoken word pioneers The Watts Prophets, and West Papuan activist Benny Wenda. The album collaborators are as follows: South Africa sessions: Yugen Blakrok, Nono Nkoane, Thabang Tabane, Tubatsi Moloi, Gally Ngoveni, Sibusile Xaba, Soundz of the South Collective, DJ Mabheko London sessions: Tony Allen, Shabaka Hutchings, Dele Sosimi, Ed ‘Tenderlonious’ Cawthorne, Tamar Osborn, Miles James, Joe Armon-Jones, Afla Sackey, Benny Wenda, The Lani Singers, Eska Mtungwazi, Jungle Drummer, DeeJay Random Additionally, The Watts Prophets (Los Angeles) and Antibalas (New York) have contributed to the album. The final product is a future-facing assemblage of influences, drawing connections between different points in a jazz-tipped, soulfully-minded spectrum; it builds outwards, from the solid musical foundations of those first sessions, featuring the likes of Thabang Tabane, esteemed percussionist and son of the legendary Phillip Tabane. On the one hand, there are gqom beats, interlaced with activist chants and and Tony Allen’s live Afrobeat drums; on the other, there are warm, lyrical meditations, aided by horns and keys. The name “Keleketla” means “response”, as in “call-and-response”, a title which speaks to the project’s aim: to build out a shared musical ground, traced across different recording sessions, continents apart. It all started with Johannesburg’s Keleketla! Library, an independent library and media arts initiative, stocked since its 2008 inception with donated items from the local community. Run by artists and musicians Rangoato Hlasane and Malose Malahlela, they met Ruth Daniels of the charity In Place of War (where a portion of the proceeds from the record will go to) who asked who they would choose for a musical collaboration with South African artists. Ra and Malose named Coldcut. The UK duo responded to the invitation to make a trip to South Africa for the recording sessions (supported by the British Council) and so the story started to grow. The duo had long nurtured an interest in South African jazz, and it was through Mushroom Hour Half Hour co-founder Andrew Curnow, whose label and collective have been part of the vanguard of a new generation of jazz-influenced acts from Jo’Burg and beyond, that they were connected to the players for the sessions. The main sessions took place at Soweto’s Trackside Studios, where they started a set of songs and settled down to rehearse and record them. Upon returning to the UK, Black and More sought out extra collaborators, setting up sessions with musicians who could expand and re-imagine the album’s horizons. In many cases, this meant building on the sessions in Soweto, such as in ‘Crystallise’, where Tamar Osborn’s sax parts were added to the lyrics that Yugen Blakrok laid down in Trackside. In other cases, they led to new tracks altogether, such as ‘Freedom Groove’, which came out of an off-the-cuff jam between Tony Allen and Matt Black; Allen’s drum part was taken to build a new track, overlaid with fat, battle-cry brass from Antibalas, and a powerful call to freedom from The Watts Prophets in L.A. Music and politics is a recurring theme on the record, most notably on ‘Future Toyi Toyi’, recorded in Khayelitsha, which features a recording Black and More made of hip-hop activists Soundz of the South, singing a revolutionary chant, referenced in the title, combined with – amongst other elements – a gqom track by Durban producer DJ Mabheko for the single version. Their creation was partly inspired by their experiences with the Keleketla! Library, who held a party during their stay. At the party, they saw the library’s co-founder Hlasane mix a recording of a student chant into a fiery, uptempo moment in his set, sending the crowd into a frenzy. It was a moment where they were reminded of how closely entwined politics and music can be. “It was almost a religious experience,” recalls Black, “to see the effect music could have in galvanising the audience like this.” Likewise, ‘Papua Merdeka’ centres around a political invocation. Led by Benny Wenda, it’s a call for freedom for the nation of West Papua from Indonesia, which Wenda fled in 2004 after being persecuted by the Indonesian military. He now leads a campaign from his home in Oxford, where the vocals for the track were recorded. Tony Allen, the rhythm behind Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat revolution, recorded the drums, along with Miles James, a guitarist who’s played with Michael Kiwanuka and Yussef Dayes, and who – as the son of an old family friend – featured in a Coldcut video when he was just a year old. “Keleketla!” is about finding musical connections. Starting with the tight community around the Keleketla! Library, this project has grown out of those closely forged bonds that can develop around music. Recalling the records he was introduced to and friends made while in South Africa, More says, “There’s music lovers everywhere and that’s what we thrive with.” “Keleketla!” is about embracing that call-and-response tradition, and seeing where it takes you.

Margo Price began writing this album in the middle of touring her last, and says it was a master class in multitasking. “I wrote in Ubers, airports, airplanes, green rooms, hotel rooms, you name it,” she tells Apple Music. “Then, when it was halfway done, I found out I was pregnant. That changed my headspace a bit.” Actually, of all the life forces that had begun to transform her songwriting–fame, motherhood, the loss of a child in 2010, and the demands of touring that put a strain on her marriage–sobriety was the most powerful, she says. It crystallized connections between her past and future (“Gone to Stay” began as a letter to her son Judah but blossomed into a broader meditation about the things parents leave to their children) and led her from introspective outlaw country into glamorous, dazzling classic rock. If the floral veil, curly calligraphy, jangly instrumentation, and *Rumours* hat tip didn’t give it away, Stevie Nicks is a major influence on the album, which was coaxed along by executive producer Sturgill Simpson. “I grew up listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac, and like most girls, I idolized Stevie,” she says. “But I haven’t seen a lot of people occupying that space since, you know? Classic rock ’n’ roll heartbreakers. When I decided to make this album with Sturgill, that’s what we set out to do.” Here, Price tells the stories behind all ten tracks. **That\'s How Rumors Get Started** “I first heard the phrase from my guitar player, Jamie Davis. We were partying on the bus and someone said something gossipy. And he said, ‘Watch what you say, that\'s how rumors get started.’ I immediately wrote it down. I knew it was going to be the album title before I even wrote the song. Everybody has ideas about who they think the song is about, and I definitely wrote it with a couple of people in mind, but the great thing is that it can be about anybody. For me, a lot changed when I became successful. Friendships were compromised and challenged, it became hard to tell what people’s motivations were, there was a lot of jealousy and competitiveness. It can be very lonely. Over time, you learn to keep your mouth shut. You learn how rumors get started.” **Letting Me Down** “\[Price’s husband\] Jeremy \[Ivey\] and I co-wrote this song together after we’d both written to high school friends that we’d become estranged from. It was a really therapeutic exercise, writing to someone from my past, and put me back in touch with feelings I’d forgotten about, like when you’re living in a small town and just want to escape but feel stuck. It’s taken on new meaning during the pandemic—it talks about loneliness, isolation, unemployment, poverty, workers who need to make ends meet, the struggle that small towns face right now. It all hits close to home for me.” **Twinkle Twinkle** “We had played this really terrible beer festival in Florida. There weren\'t that many people, it was really disorganized, and we didn\'t have a very good show. Afterwards, I found Marty Stuart in his trailer tuning all of his guitars, which I thought was pretty spectacular. I was like, ‘You don\'t have a tech that does this for you?’ And he said, ‘You don\'t need no tech if you do it right!’ And then he asked me, ‘Your band\'s been on the road a lot lately, do you hate each other yet?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, we don\'t hate each other, but our marriages are falling apart and our health is deteriorating. But other than that, we\'re good.’ He smiled really big and just said, ‘You wanted to be a star. Twinkle, twinkle.’ It became this running joke when we were on the road and something went wrong, like a canceled flight that forced us to sleep in the airport all night. We\'d turn to each other and go, ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’ My husband brought the guitar riff to me and it had such a cool, gritty vibe. We were going for Neil Young meets Led Zeppelin, but it definitely came out a little more Led Zeppelin.” **Stone Me** “This song has a few different layers to it. When I was out on the road a lot and my husband and I were having trouble adjusting to it, I wrote the first verse with him in mind and sent it to him in a text message. He took it and put a melody behind it, and I was like, ‘Dude, did you just co-write a song that was supposed to be about you?’ I was also, separately, thinking about these two bloggers who have taken a lot of time to dissect my career. They judge everything that I do, and they’re just so certain they know where I\'m coming from. It was really therapeutic to write. My husband threw me the title. I think he was envisioning more of a stoner anthem, but I used it in the biblical sense of, like, those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Because yeah, I’ve learned that once you get put up on the pedestal, you\'re there to be knocked down.” **Hey Child** “My husband and I first wrote this song back in 2012, and it used to be our closer when we played with my band Buffalo Clover. We wrote it when we were hanging out with this wild group of friends. Everybody was treating us like we were rock stars, but we were the furthest thing from it. We were out on the road, drinking too much, taking a lot of drugs, and I just felt like there was this recklessness going on. Jeremy and I wrote the verses to some of our friends, but I also think we were writing it to ourselves. I had totally forgotten about the song until Sturgill convinced me to rerecord it, and then we added the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir on background vocals, which took it to a whole other place.” **Heartless Mind** “This song turned out completely different from how I initially envisioned it. I thought it was going to have a heartbreaker, guitar-driven vibe, but once we got the synths, it became more of a Blondie track. This is the only song that James Gadson didn\'t play drums on, my drummer Dillon \[Napier\] did, and he knocked it out of the park. And then later, when we were doing overdubs, David Ferguson–who co-produced this with Sturgill and I–laid down a drum machine that basically doubled the snare. So really, this is my first song with electronic drums, and I love it.” **What Happened to Our Love?** “I wasn’t expecting to record this song, but my husband loved it and encouraged me to bring it into the studio. It wound up becoming this whole thing that I never knew it could become. Once I figured out how to go into my upper register at the end, with the Nashville Friends Choir on background vocals, it entered this psychedelic Pink Floyd territory that I never expected. I was reading a lot of Leonard Cohen at the time—especially his book *The Flame* that came out posthumously—and I was influenced by the way that he writes, using the push and pull of opposites. I wrote it partially about my own marriage, as well as some of the other relationships I was seeing at the time that were struggling to stay together.” **Gone to Stay** “I knew that I needed to write a song for my son Judah. Somebody told me that at a show a long time ago—they said, ‘You\'ve written a song for the son you lost, you need to write a song for your son that\'s still here with you.’ We wanted to do a ‘Forever Young’ or something—wisdom that you can pass on to your kids and that can stand in for you when you can’t be there there—in my case, when I\'m on the road. But it became something bigger; it’s a letter with advice about protecting the earth and leaving something positive behind. I loved that I got pregnant in the middle of writing it and it turned into something for both of my children. There’s a line that says, ‘You can’t turn money back into time,’ and I think anybody can relate to that, whether they have children or not. All the things we do for work, all the things we miss. That line\'s been resonating with me throughout this quarantine. Because as hard as it is, I\'m finally just here enjoying my time.” **Prisoner of the Highway** “This was written on an airplane tray table while I was headed to California to play the Hollywood Bowl. I was opening for Willie Nelson during his Outlaw Music Festival and had just found out that I was pregnant. I hadn\'t told anybody yet because I was still grappling with the fact that I was going to miss things in my child’s life all over again. There’s a Townes Van Zandt quote that goes something like, \'I knew that if I wanted to do this music thing, I was going to have to sacrifice everything—financial stability, a family, friends.\' I have so much respect for him, because that’s dedication to your art, but it can still feel really selfish to chase your dreams. I think about all of my friends\' weddings that I missed, school events, funerals—all to chase the next perfect line in a song.” **I\'d Die for You** “This is my favorite song on the album lyrically. I\'ve been in Nashville 17 years and have seen so many things change, seen so many communities and local businesses just disappear because of gentrification. So that’s a theme here, as is racism, health care, and poverty. I always insist on telling people that this isn’t a political record, because I don’t want them getting stuck on thinking that I\'m pushing my agenda onto them. To me, this is a humanitarian song. It’s about the struggle of American life. This country is so divided that it’s ironic we\'re called the United States. But when I look at the majority of people in this country, no matter if they\'re blue or red, everybody wants a lot of the same things: a safe place to raise a kid, food on the table, shelter over your head. This song is Jeremy and I reassuring each other and our families that despite all the chaos around us, we can hold on to each other.”

On July 10th, Margo Price will release That’s How Rumors Get Started, an album of ten new, original songs that commit her sky-high and scorching rock-and-roll show to record for the very first time. Produced by longtime friend Sturgill Simpson (co-produced by Margo and David Ferguson), the LP marks Price’s debut for Loma Vista Recordings, and whether she’s singing of motherhood or the mythologies of stardom, Nashville gentrification or the national healthcare crisis, relationships or growing pains, she’s crafted a collection of music that invites people to listen closer than ever before. Margo primarily cut That’s How Rumors Get Started at Los Angeles’ EastWest Studios (Pet Sounds, “9 to 5”). Tracking occurred over several days while she was pregnant with daughter Ramona. “They’re both a creation process,” she says. “And I was being really good to my body and my mind during that time. I had a lot of clarity from sobriety.” While Margo Price continued to collaborate on most of the songwriting with her husband Jeremy Ivey, she recorded with an historic band assembled by Sturgill, and including guitarist Matt Sweeney (Adele, Iggy Pop), bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, John Mayer), drummer James Gadson (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye), and keyboardist Benmont Tench (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers). Background vocals were added by Simpson on “Letting Me Down,” and the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir, who raise the arrangements of “Hey Child” and “What Happened To Our Love?” to some of the album’s most soaring heights. Margo Price and her steady touring band - Kevin Black (bass), Jamie Davis (guitar), Micah Hulsher (keys), and Dillon Napier (drums) - will perform songs from That’s How Rumors Get Started at dozens of shows with Chris Stapleton and The Head & The Heart this spring and summer, in addition to festival appearances and more to be announced soon. Find all dates here and below. That’s How Rumors Get Started follows Margo’s 2017 album All American Made, which was named the #1 Country/Americana album of the year by Rolling Stone, and one of the top albums of the decade by Esquire, Pitchfork and Billboard, among others. In its wake, Margo sold out three nights at The Ryman Auditorium, earned her first Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and much more.

“I wanted to make an album that was more direct from the heart,” Ólafur Arnalds tells Apple Music. “Really, it’s about my own life and it’s about my relationships. And moving towards better days.” If 2018’s *re:member* featured Arnalds at his most ambitious and outwardly creative, *some kind of peace* sees the inventive composer travel to new, more personal territory, spurred along by the circumstances of a very unusual year. “The pandemic reminds us of the importance of communities, and it reminds us of the importance of our daily rituals and our connections with each other,” says Arnalds. “That’s what I explore here.” Just as on many of his previous records, on *some kind of peace*, Arnalds revels in collaborations with artists who bring new ideas and textures to his music. Those include Icelandic singer-songwriter JFDR, composer and producer Josin, and DJ and producer Bonobo, whose hypnotic electronic world opens this album up. “It’s easy to keep repeating yourself and to lose track of the wider vision of everything,” he says. “Collaborations are a way to break out of those boxes and have some new perspective.” Read on as Ólafur Arnalds guides us through the stunning *some kind of peace*, one song at a time. **Loom** “Last summer the DJ and producer Bonobo and I went hiking in the Icelandic highlands and then headed into the studio, just for the fun of it. This is one of the tracks that came out. It’s a funny choice to put as an album opener as it’s electronic, whereas most of the album is not. But it felt perfect because it brings the listener from the stuff that I’ve been doing in the last few years into this new world. ‘Loom’ starts very electronic, dark, and rhythmic, but towards the end, we’ve opened the door to the rest of the album.” **Woven Song** “‘Woven Song’ features a piano alongside Amazonian tribal chanting, which has a connection to me as I have friends who are from the same tribe. I always want my instruments to be very soft and quiet, as I feel more comfortable and free to explore them musically. When it’s so quiet, you have to put the microphone close and then you start hearing the mechanical action and creaking–even from the piano stool. It’s a wonderful side effect. When I’d finished this track, I knew exactly what this album needed to be.” **Spiral** “This track features a melody that repeats for three and a half minutes—first on the violin, then viola, and then finally on the piano. It was initially written for an American TV series, but it didn’t really fit into it, so I took it out and put it aside to use somewhere else. It was one of the last tracks on the album because it wasn’t purposely written for it, but it became like the missing piece of the puzzle. The piano at the end was recorded with a 120-year-old cylinder phonograph to give it an old nostalgic sound.” **Still / Sound** “This is one of the more electronic tracks of the album. And again, I\'m transitioning towards the darker part of it. This is actually one of my favorite tracks on the album. I think it’s perfect. It’s one of the most important tracks on *some kind of peace*, yet I don’t know why.” **Back to the Sky** “‘Back to the Sky’ features JFDR, an Icelandic musician who I’ve wanted to work with for a long time. She’s perfect for this album because she’s very minimal in her writing, so her voice just becomes another instrument. The title is part of JFDR’s lyric, but what’s interesting is that I don’t fully know what she was thinking when she wrote it. But at the same time, it fits perfectly into the album. The track is partly about missed connections—people who go through the same places, but somehow don’t find each other.” **Zero** “‘Zero’ is another turning point in the album. And if ‘Still / Sound’ and ‘Back to the Sky’ represent nighttime and the dark hours, ‘Zero’ is the moment where it turns around. Interestingly, I think it’s the first time in 10 years that I’ve done a modulation in a song, as it’s something I usually hate! It goes from a minor key into a completely different major key at the end. At that point voices gradually come in—they’re almost angelic, like a choir. But they’re very distorted, raw, processed voices.” **New Grass** “As the title suggests, this track is about new ground and new territory—something hopeful, something beautiful and interesting. Happier times. The title is actually attributed to one of my favorite bands Talk Talk, who have a song called ‘New Grass.’ I used it as a little tribute to them. The music here features the album’s biggest string arrangement. Most of the album is very minimal in terms of what the musicians are playing, but this one is a little bit more active.\" **The Bottom Line** “Josin wrote her lyrics to this song based on a conversation that we had. So, in a way, they come from both of us. We found a lot of things in common through transitions that we were going through at the time, as well as the difficulty of getting through those moments and realizing that on the other side, there’s this beautiful perspective that you haven’t seen before. You just have to get to the peak of the mountain. Musically, I tried to follow what Josin is saying in her lyrics. When she says, ‘Open your eyes,’ for example, the strings really follow and open up.” **We Contain Multitudes** “I usually spend part of my year in Indonesia, where I have my friends and a second life. ‘We Contain Multitudes’ came about at a friend’s wooden cabin in the jungle. He had an old electric piano on the floor, and while he was painting, I was playing—just hanging out. The title is a tribute to a Walt Whitman poem, ‘Song of Myself,’ where he says, ‘I contain multitudes.’ He’s realizing that we have all these different personalities depending on where we are and who we’re with. I have a life over there and a life over here, and it can be a struggle to figure out who I am.” **Undone** “The text you can hear, spoken by the late folk singer Lhasa de Sela, is more hopeful than sad. It’s about thinking that we’re about to die, but in reality we’re being born again. It’s a metaphor for the transitions and struggles we go through. They often feel like they won’t end, and they often feel like death, in a sense. But when we get through them, we come through the other side realizing that we’ve gained a new perspective on life. The pianos we hear at the beginning run throughout. They start out unclear, with a random rhythm and no tempo, but slowly they become aligned. The last note is like a final breath.”

The Big Moon’s debut album, *Love in the 4th Dimension*, was an ebullient account of falling in love that earned the London band a Mercury nomination in 2017. By the time singer/guitarist Juliette Jackson began to write songs for the follow-up, she was coming back down to an earth in turmoil. Heavy political, social, and environmental turbulence accompanied personal changes as she watched friends’ lives suddenly shift in new directions. “A lot of this album is about feeling lost and unstable, like there’s this constant feeling that anything could happen,” she tells Apple Music. “I’d love to tell you that we made an album to distract you from the scary things in the real world, but it’s more about facing up to them and finding your strength in turbulent times.” While retaining their gift for crisp melodies, the band enriched their indie rock by plugging in synths and samplers and picking up flutes and trumpets. “We didn’t go full Pet Shop Boys, though,” Jackson says. “I’d just been to a couple of raves and had decided sub-bass and straight-up 4/4 beats were the best and purest thing in the world. You can do a lot with a guitar, but you can\'t get the same sonic depth and width that you can from some electronic sounds. Especially bass. We wanted to be bold.” Here, she guides us through the album, track by track. **It’s Easy Then** “This last couple of years, I feel like I’ve been always looking for ways to find strength. We are living through strange times—we work too much, we think too much, we know too much, so we all worry too much. Our anxieties are stoked every day. Music has this incredible way of helping us see with a new perspective and ties up your feelings in a way that language by itself never could. I wanted to write a song that made me feel better—something that captured the frustrations but also the hope and joy all at the same time.” **Your Light** “I was thinking about how hard it is to tell if things are worse now or if they have always been this way and I just grew up and started paying attention. It feels like we are at this unprecedented tipping point, but then it occurred to me that every generation before us probably had a moment when they thought they were going to be the last generation on earth. This song is about freeing yourself from all of it, just for a moment. It’s a thanks to the one person or thing in your life that knows how to come in and open your curtains and light up the darkness—and restore your strength so that when you clatter back down into the real world, you have the strength to fight your battles, whatever they are.” **Dog Eat Dog** “I wrote this song a couple of days after the fire at Grenfell. I think that what happened really affected London for a long time and we are still grieving and trying to process it. It still stands there as a reminder. It became such a devastating symbol for the huge divisions between rich and poor in our country. There’s a line: ‘I guess tailored suits don’t grow on trees, but tragedies eventually turn into memes.’ I wrote that after reading an article that talked about how much Theresa May\'s election wardrobe cost—it was in the thousands—and later reading how much it would have cost to install fireproof cladding on Grenfell Tower. I think it was literally something like £2. This whole thing could so easily have been avoided, but nobody cared or listened enough to fix it before it happened. Theresa May came out in a nice suit and apologized, and the next day that\'s a shareable video that exists in the same format as cute cat memes and it all gets swept along in the tide of the internet.” **Why** “A lot of this album ended up being about growing up and moving on. This song came about after I met up with an old friend who’d moved to the coast and I suddenly realized how much they’d moved on. I saw my friends’ trainers on the sand on the beach before I saw her, and it just felt like such a poignant image of the loss I felt.” **Don’t Think** “I go to a lot of festivals, and I wanted to capture that magical feeling of running around a field at night with your mates. The flashing lights, the dancing round a pile of bags, the elbowed drinks, the way coincidences seem to happen more often. Something special happens when a lot of people go to one place just to be silly and have fun. It’s like playtime. We turn into kids again. I met my partner at a festival, and I’d always wanted to write a song about taking your chances with a stranger and not always letting your brain talk you out of doing something that seems foolish.” **Waves** “It’s so easy to not notice the signs of a relationship failing, or to ignore them when you do. Sometimes all you have to go on are those signs and little clues around you, and how can you ever tell when they add up to something bigger? It can be a change that’s imperceptible to the human eye, just like the tide coming in. This song was such a pleasure to record. We were all a bit hung over and it was just a whole day of making fuzz and drones on guitar and everyone sat with their hoods up in a trance.” **Holy Roller** “I’ve always been jealous of the devoutly religious: Imagine believing so truly in something so huge, so expansive, that explained everything you couldn’t and gave you a reason for everything that happened, good or bad. I was sick of hearing about the millennial limbo we are all stuck in—yeah, maybe we’ll never own a house, maybe AI will make our jobs redundant, maybe we are all struggling with our mental health...but hey, why don’t we start our own religion where we drink Coke instead of wine and worship our own idols. Like contour kits and payday loans and porn. I love singing this song—it’s simultaneously so dark and so funny, it just makes me laugh.” **Take a Piece** “I initially wrote this song for someone else, speculatively—for a pop star. I’d already written an album’s worth of songs, but a lot of them felt similar to our first album and I wanted to try something different. I’d just watched a documentary about this pop star and seen how insane their life was and their intense relationship with their fans. I was blown away by how much of themselves they’d had to give up to have the life they had. It was a bit of a turning point in the writing process: Sometimes you have to pretend to be someone else to change things up and say things in ways you didn’t know you could. This mega pop star’s life was literally nothing like mine, but I could really identify with the vulnerability of being a performer and feeling the eyes of an audience, which can feel grounding and unifying or—occasionally—scary and isolating. It also has a lot to do with how it felt to write this second album: trying to get out of your head, figuring out which voices to listen to and which to ignore, and ultimately wanting to pour yourself into the thing you’re creating and make something honest and meaningful that might connect with someone else and mean something to them as well.” **Barcelona** “There’s a moment in your twenties where suddenly everything changes, and this last couple of years I’ve really hit that moment—my friends are moving on, moving away, starting to have babies and buy houses and go on new adventures. In a band you can kind of get a bit stuck: You go away on tour for long periods, and each time you come home you find things have changed again. You start to feel left behind. I feel like an overgrown teenager. You’re simultaneously happy for them but also a bit sad that they left you behind—it’s bittersweet.” **A Hundred Ways to Land** “This is about finding confidence in the face of what feels like endless uncertainty—standing tall in your boots even if you\'re completely lost. Things feel unstable these days, and it’s easy to feel powerless. But we aren’t. We all have the ability to make a difference in our own space, our own neighborhood. I guess I wanted to remind myself of my own strength, of the powers we do have.” **ADHD** “This is a song for a close friend who was late-diagnosed with ADHD. We had a late-night conversation and she told me all about her past regrets and things she thought she’d done wrong in her life because of it. I was trying to tell her that she’s always been wonderful and she doesn’t need to regret, she doesn’t have to worry about what other people think. *Is It You, Is It Me, Is It ADHD?* is the name of a book she said she saw on the shelf in a therapist’s office, and for some reason it really stuck with me.”

“My language for producing music is way more diverse now and allows me to create different-sounding music,” Yaeji tells Apple Music. With her mesmerizing voice and chill vibe, the New York (by way of South Korea) DJ, producer, and multimedia artist Kathy Yaeji Lee is a unique presence in dance music. Her songs are celebratory yet meditative—influenced by house, R&B, and hip-hop. They’re reflective of her dual heritage and intercontinental mindset, ranging from stunt anthems (“raingurl,” “drink i’m sippin on”) to her lowercased cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit.” Recorded before inking a deal with XL (the home to Tyler, The Creator and other sonic misfits), *WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던* is a personal and intimate mixtape she likens to a musical diary. Sung-spoken in whispery tones in English and Korean, Yaeji’s observations are sharp, whether yearning for stillness (“IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로”), indulging in simple pleasures (“WAKING UP DOWN,” “MONEY CAN’T BUY”), or getting in her feelings (“WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던,” “IN THE MIRROR 거울”). It also represents a time when she soaked up new production techniques and was inspired by 2000s bossanova-influenced electronica, ’80s-’90s Korean music (curated by her parents, who live outside of Seoul), R&B, and soul. Below Yaeji walks through each song on her mixtape. “Every track is a bit different,” she says “I really hope it brings a little bit of positivity.” **MY IMAGINATION 상상** “I wrote it with the intention of warming people up to what I do. I repeat a lot in this song in Korean: ‘If you follow me in this moment I chose, right in this moment.’ And I repeat ‘my imagination’ over and over in Korean. I wanted it to feel really smooth and continuous, almost cyclical, but in a way that felt relaxing. It’s a way to ease you into the next song, which is quite emotional for me.” **WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던** “It’s one of the older songs on the mixtape. It was written at a very emotional time, when I was going through a lot of transitions and growing pains. In the midst of all that darkness, I was able to stay positive because of family around me. I think that notion of family and unconditional love is so Korean to me. Thinking of Korea gets me very emotional. My dad messaged \[himself scatting\] to me on KakaoTalk \[a Korean messaging app\] a year and a half ago. He said, ‘I have a song idea for you. Use it if it helps you in any way.’ When I finished up the mixtape, I realized it would be so perfect and meaningful for the track, so I added it in.” **IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로** “It was written around the time me and my friends were watching a video of Stevie Wonder performing live with a talk box \[a cover of The Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’ on *The David Frost Show* in 1972\]. We were listening to that a lot and it was stuck in my head. I loved how the talk box sounded; it’s so warm and fuzzy, his performance is so playful. It also has such a robotic quality. I wanted to create this feeling but using a completely different technique. I layered nine different vocal tracks to create that harmony you hear in the intro. It affected each layer differently and holds a similar feeling that I received when I heard Stevie Wonder. Emotionally, it was written when I didn’t want things to change. Just for a moment, I wanted things to stay still. It’s about yearning for stillness.” **WHEN I GROW UP** “It’s an idea I’ve been settling and meditating on for a long time. It’s the concept of a younger me, or a younger person, imagining what it’s like to become an adult. There’s another perspective in the song where it’s me, the adult version of myself, telling my younger self: ‘Unfortunately, when you grow older, you’re fearful for a lot of things. You don’t want to get hurt. You suppress your emotions and pretend like everything is OK.’ All these things I had no idea would happen when I was younger; it’s my reality, our reality, as adults. It’s a kind of back and forth about that.” **MONEY CAN’T BUY (feat. Nappy Nina)** “It’s the really playful one. It’s purely about friendship and being goofy and positive. The thing I repeat in Korean: ‘What I want to do is eat rice and soup.’ It’s pretty common for me. I’ll put the rice in the soup and mix it up, so it becomes like a porridge. I’m repeating that and it’s followed by ‘What I want, money can’t buy.’ Friendship isn’t something that’s quantifiable or measurable with materialism. It’s completely magical and far more special than what can be described. It’s like an appreciation song for friendship. It’s kind of perfect that Nappy Nina was featured on it. I had met her last minute. She’s a friend of my mixing engineer. She came in and recorded immediately; we realized we had mutual friends, so now we keep in touch. That lends itself well to the message of the song.” **FREE INTERLUDE (feat. Lil Fayo, Trenchcoat & Sweet Pea)** “It felt really liberating to include this in the mixtape. It was a completely natural, goofy hang with my friends. We were having fun making music together, kind of first takes of freestyles. The spirit of our hang and our friendship is really in that track. It’s a very meaningful one for me.” **SPELL 주문 (feat. YonYon & G.L.A.M.)** “It was a joy to put together. It started as a bare-bones demo that I had lyrics to. When I was writing it, I was thinking of the experience of performing onstage to a sea of people that you’ve never met before and sharing your most intimate thoughts and experiences. It’s casting a spell; you’re sharing something that only you know, and then they’re applying it in whatever way it means for themselves. I thought of YonYon because we went to the same middle school in Japan when I was living there for one year. We’ve stayed in touch since, and she’s doing great with music in Japan, so she’s always on my mind to collaborate, and this felt perfect. G.L.A.M. is a close friend of a friend. I had also played shows with her a long time ago when I moved to New York, so I thought she was also another perfect collaborator.” **WAKING UP DOWN** “Purely a feel-good song. There’s a moment of questioning and hesitation. The Korean verses embody that side of it. The parts in English are about the feeling I had when I had all of these basic life routines down and felt healthy, mentally and physically. It’s a song to groove to and hopefully feel inspired by. And also, not to get too wrapped up in the literal things: cooking, waking up, hydrating. Yes, it’s important, but the Korean lyrics remind you: Don’t forget, there are these bigger themes in life you have to think about.” **IN THE MIRROR 거울** “It’s the dramatic one. I really wanted to try singing in a way that feels like I’m unleashing pent-up energy. It was written after a difficult tour that mentally and physically stretched me quite thin. It came from a thought I had while I was looking in the mirror in the airplane bathroom. I think being up in the air makes you more emotional. I don’t know how true that is, but I definitely feel that way. I was really in my feelings and really upset.” **THE TH1NG (feat. Victoria Sin & Shy One)** “I want to credit Vic and Shy because I knew I wanted to work with them. I sent them a pretty bare-bones demo, just synth and samples. They’re partners and based in London. Vic is an incredible performing artist and Shy is an incredible DJ. Vic came up with all of the lyrics and vocals. They wrote it on their birthday, stayed at home alone in their bedroom, surrounded themselves with plants, meditated, and had an introspective stream of consciousness of what is this ‘TH1NG.’ It sounds really abstract, but they explore the concept. Shy did a lot of the production on it and built on the little things I sent them.” **THESE DAYS 요즘** “Do you know the \[anime\] genre Slice of Life? It feels like a Slice of Life song, which is, the way I understand it, it’s mundane day-to-day lifestyle about meditating on time. I would visually describe it as feeling like sitting on a stoop with your friends on a nice fall afternoon sharing stories with each other about how you’re doing. That kind of feeling. It’s not overly dramatic or purposeful; it’s a mood.” **NEVER SETTLING DOWN** “It’s a song about making a determined promise to myself to never settle. I should always stay open-minded, to continue unlearning and learning things, to shed things that felt toxic to me in the past. I say things like ‘I’m never shooting the shit,’ which is a balance of not taking myself too seriously but also that I’m not playing, I’m working every day. It’s a confident track, and I hope it brings confidence to other people that hear it. At the end, the breaks come in, and it feels like a big release, like a moment where you’re taking flight or dancing like crazy, alone in your room. That’s how I wanted to end the mixtape.”

“For me, the sweet spot in music is when happy and sad come together,” Archie Fairhurst—aka Romare—tells Apple Music. “When they meet in the middle, that’s what I’m trying to create.” Four years on from the experimental psych-disco of *Love Songs: Pt. Two*, Fairhurst has shape-shifted to meet this ambition. His third Romare album quests into American gospel and traditional Irish folk via country, hymns, and classical to explore spiritualty, identity, and belonging. It’s cerebral dance music that sits comfortably on dance floors and more reflective solo environments. Here’s Fairhurst to take you through the superb *Home*, track by track. **Gone** “I feel like this song is about getting lost and then finding a way out. There is a key change which lends to this theme. At times the mood can be dark and at other points it can be light. I remember having the levels up very high in the studio while making the bassline.” **Dreams** “This song underwent a lot of changes before the final version. It contains a gospel sample, but there is more of a focus on instrument composition in this song. A lot of the inspiration came from a newly acquired Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer and from the song ‘Stop’ by B.W.H.” **Sunshine** “I named this song ‘Sunshine’ because of the lyric ‘Through the sunshine’ in its second half. It started off as a melody line over some chords in the key of A minor, which eventually became the breakdown section in the middle of the song. Other melody and basslines were developed from this breakdown section, and then drum patterns and percussion were added from an MFB-522 analog drum machine and my brother’s old Casio keyboard to form the verses.” **The River** “This song probably has the most samples. I came across a nice drum break on a record and then fitted an instrumental loop from another record on top. I distorted a kick drum for the bottom end, which glued these parts together and formed the basis of the song. Like ‘Gone,’ ‘The River’ is a bit of a journey but with more building and release of tension.” **Deliverance** “It’s a simple song but one that I continued to enjoy while working on the album. It’s quite peaceful, and the alternating bassline just about makes up for the sparseness and simplicity of the arrangement and instrumentation. The hiss in the classical music sample also fills in this gap a little.” **High** “This song started off through playing around with a Korg EMX. I liked the sound of the kick drum underneath this snarling synth line which I modulated to pan quickly from left to right. I also enjoyed experimenting with a more acid bassline on this one.” **You See** “I wanted to go deeper on this song. I feel like it is one of the better-produced songs on the record. My favorite section occurs between 3:52 and 3:55. I also like the way there is a pause before the final section, which is another favorite part because it reminds me of dancing around the living room to Enya with my mother as a little boy.” **Heaven** “I’m pretty sure this started as a riff I whistled or hummed one morning. I remember the song began much slower but I felt an urge to increase the tempo, so I did and that informed the style of the song. I was inspired to develop this into one of the longest songs I’ve written after playing a live version at Printworks in London at the end of 2018. The performance gave me the confidence to extend the song and turn it into more of a rollercoaster, with more ups and downs.” **Home** “I was experimenting with my mother’s accordion during a recording and played a few accidental chords at the end while putting the instrument down. Listening back to the recording, I thought there was something nice about this final section, so I looped it and built the song around that. I like the way my father’s 12-string guitar and my mother’s accordion feature in the same song.”

‘3D Routine’ has arrived. Following on from their ‘Induction Party E.P’, Leeds based Mush are circulating their own sonic mythology, blurring the lines between abstract surrealism, existentialism and social commentary. Like its predecessor ‘3D Routine’ is a sensory overload of clattering, hooky, guitar work. However, this time space emerges between the onslaughts and in this respite, room is found for new emotional depth. More expansive than ever before, ‘3D Routine’ manages to maintain the rawness of a classic debut but it’s experimentation and variety portray a band unlikely to rest on their ‘guitar band’ chops.

Shopping return with their new album All Or Nothing – a record that speaks about commitment, leaps of faith and tests of courage. “A lot has happened in our personal lives since we last recorded and we knew this album was going to reflect that exciting and scary feeling that comes with change, heartbreak and personal evolution”, the band explains. Since their last record the band are now spread across the globe with Billy in LA and Andrew and Rachel in Glasgow, and the songs were written in a two week intensive period while they were all together. Taking a bold leap towards pop with their most vibrant & punchy production to date, mixed and produced by Nick Sylvester.

Pole is the project of ground-breaking electronic musician Stefan Betke. The new album Fading is the first since 2015’s Wald. As with every new Pole record, it’s part of a continued forward trajectory but it also connects to a pre-existing sonic framework. “Every Pole record connects to recordings that I've made before,” Betke says, “in order to stay in this kind of vertical development. The ideas from 1, 2, 3 [his groundbreaking first three albums] up to now are connected. I keep the interesting elements, languages and vocabulary that I designed and add new elements.” Fading follows the physical released on Mute of remastered versions of his iconic albums 1, 2, 3 to much acclaim.

When Dehd released *Water* in 2019, it came with a good story: Much of their debut LP had been written after bassist-vocalist Emily Kempf and guitarist-vocalist Jason Balla had ended their years-long romantic relationship, a defining feature of the band that had made itself felt in the way they wrote and harmonized. *Flower of Devotion*, its follow-up, finds the Chicago three-piece (including drummer Eric McGrady) moving forward with naturally cathartic indie rock influenced by the death of Balla’s mother and Kempf’s decision to self-isolate long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. “I came to a point where my obsession with romance and being attached to people became painful,” Kempf tells Apple Music. “I took a step back and went into a period of solitude, kind of unpacked everything. I went through a period of withdrawal and emerged on the other side feeling more stable, as a person who can exist by myself. It\'s so hard to put into words, but a lot of the record reflects that loss. But I feel like Jason and I definitely found our footing.” Here, Kempf and Balla take us through the album track by track. **Desire** Emily Kempf: “I feel like Jason definitely was aiming for this to be the opener, and I think I was skeptical of it, but I think it\'s like a grand entrance, like a curtain opening, a firework into the album. But it feels like it\'s a song we would traditionally play at the end of the set, so it was kind of a cool choice to be like, ‘We\'re going to open with this banger and then have the rest of the songs neatly packaged behind it.’ It\'s like my Patti Smith song, the way I channeled my singing and my vibe. It\'s kind of unhinged and free.” **Loner** EK: “I have a spirit singer for every song—I feel like that\'s my Dolly Parton song. Definitely a centerpiece for me: If I had to sum up the album—and my vibe last year when we were writing and stuff—it’s definitely ‘Loner.’ It\'s joyful and kind of haughty and kind of distressed, but it\'s such a neat little pop song just all tied up with a bow.” Jason Balla: “It was the first song that we wrote incorporating the drum machine. I think it was kind of like an essential figure in setting the tone for how to produce the record. It was like a canvas for us to totally play, add everything, take a bunch of stuff away, and then that was kind of our vision board for the rest of it.” **Haha** EK: “Jason tried to change the title—I said no. This song was me almost writing to myself exclusively. It\'s like my diary or my thoughts to myself, but it\'s in the form of a song. It\'s me kind of making fun of myself or jesting with myself about my relationship with love and crushes and how I just keep falling into these things. It\'s in this funny, lighthearted way where I\'m like, ‘I\'m laughing because it\'s so painful to exist in this way,’ but also I\'m like, ‘This is fine. This is life. Life goes on.’ I’m laughing and crying at the same time.” **Drip Drop** JB: “The song\'s about trying to make a new relationship work while you\'re on tour all the time, the difficulties of the nomadic lifestyle of being a musician. I used to be involved in this project called Earring that was a lot shoegazier and noisier, and I was recording in my room a lot more, and it felt like being a kid and getting into music for the first time. Those kind of things that used to excite you so much was kind of fresh in me, and I think that energy’s coming into the sonics of this song. It’s like you\'re just in a very slow free fall the whole time.” **Month** JB: “It’s about the sort of twisted nature of time—it’s cyclical, so you\'re just constantly coming back to things or reminded of things. Specifically, this one is about missing my mom. Every year, you kind of have just an extra reason to think about things or reflect on the people in your life and how your feelings evolve in everything. Musically, it has one of my favorite moments on the record, this drum fill that Eric does at the end. He never played it before the recording. We track all the songs, and so it winded up turning into me and Eric trying to overdub it for like an hour or something and we couldn\'t quite get it right. The moment Eric nailed it was super triumphant and we were partying in the control room.” EK: “I thought the song was about Jason\'s current partner when we first started doing it in practice, and I didn\'t know until he told us that it was about his mom. I was like, ‘Oh, shit. Damn, this is tough.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh damn, it\'s a different tough.’” **Disappear** JB: “It’s one of the oldest songs, one of the first ones that we wrote that went on the record. It’s about when everything gets complicated or hard and stressful or sad—and you just want to disappear. You just want to get away or just not exist or be in anyone\'s sight, where nothing is demanded of you. It\'s as simple as it sounds.” **Flood** EK: “I love ‘Flood.’ I feel like I wrote it when I was jet-lagged. Sometimes I would come back from being out of the country and then go straight to practice. I remember when I was writing it, I felt like I was underwater and I was almost whispering into the mic, barely singing. But I\'m really proud of the way I sing on it and I\'m really proud of how we recorded it. Me and Jason sweated over the reverb and all the little effects, all the little sparkles we put on the vocals. That song is about someone else that I parted ways with. I was with this person and was fully in love and was like, ‘I turn to water around you. I would do anything for you.’ Almost in a way that\'s unhealthy and harmful. I don\'t think I put this lyric in, but ‘Like water at your feet for you to kick me, like a kid would kick a puddle.’ We broke up, so I adjusted the words to fit the falling in love and the falling out but still being in love with this person and leaving them anyways and trying to make the song hold both of those emotions—the arc of everything—and contain it in one song.” **Letter** EK: “That one I was trying to write for a long time, way before this record was recorded. I was trying to write about the concept of feeling replaced and having to move on. Like trying to sort of grapple with how I can write about my anger and jealousy and feelings of possessiveness and feelings of love and loss and feelings of being erased. Even though all of these things are dramatic and not necessarily what\'s in reality—how do I write about these feelings in a way that isn\'t shitty or barbed with gossip or sort of pulling someone else down? I posed it in my mind as a letter to anyone who would ever date someone I was in love with. I was always going to have a place in their heart so that I felt like, ‘Okay, I have my place and I have my closure. Now I can move on and this is the last song/letter I\'m going to write about this and then I\'m burning the paper and I\'m done. I\'m done. I\'m done, I\'m done.’ It’s a claiming of space and time, a claiming of a heart, but also, ‘you\'ll never have what we had.’ Like that song, ‘I\'ve got your picture and she\'s got you.’ Just painful.” **Nobody** JB: “I think this song is just really fun in general. They make me play a tambourine live, and I hate doing it. Some people love it. For some reason, I always think of the Viagra Boys song ‘Sports’ for this one, but I don\'t think it actually sounds like it at all.” EK: “I think it is directly born from listening to that song. It\'s like a good reminder just to have fun and not take yourself so seriously sometimes.” **No Time** JB: “It was a really hard one to record because it\'s so energetic. It was a challenge.” EK: “I was channeling James Brown, and Elvis maybe—the raspy rocker-guy voice. It\'s my rock ’n’ roll dude song. I just tried to push my raspy, yell-y voice to the limit. It almost didn\'t make the record because I was like, ‘I don\'t know if we captured the spirit.’ It’s about the same person that ‘Flood’ is about and was written early in the relationship when I was like, ‘Fuck this.’” **Moonlight** JB: “Every time I listen to this song, I just picture myself at the end of the bar at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. It\'s just kind of about if you\'re in this dizzy haze and you\'re spinning, lost in the sauce.” EK: “Yeah, looking for love in all the wrong places. It\'s one of my favorite songs Jason wrote on this record. It\'s such a perfectly written song about something that everybody knows about. Even if you don\'t know what it\'s about, just the way he places the words and what he said and how he said it, I think it\'s incredible. It\'s so well-written.” **Apart** EK: “I texted Eric, ‘Hey, what is “Apart” about? Because they\'re going to ask us.’ And he said, ‘I wrote “Apart” in a matter of minutes. It\'s purely fictional. No backstory, no deeper meaning. I wanted to write a song, so I did.’ Classic man of mystery.” JB: “That song existed for a while, and I\'ve always been like, ‘Man, I kind of love that song. Do you ever want to play any of your songs in the band?’ And he\'s like, ‘No.’ And then months later, we were recording the record and he was like, ‘All right. I\'m ready to do this one.’” **Flying** JB: “That song really exists in the chorus and it just kind of paints with these colors. It’s a natural conclusion.” EK: “If ‘Desire’ is a firework, then ‘Flying’ is a reverse firework. The way me and Jason sing that live—I\'ve always loved when we harmonized together, and in the refrain we\'re both jumping up and down, our mouths are open and our hands are slamming our strings, eyes kind of squinted. We\'re singing together, we\'re fully engaged, we\'re in total unison, Eric is wailing away on the drums, and it\'s just really joyful. The thing that you love about a band. I think it\'s a good way to close the record, just because of that image.”

Just after she’d released her second album, 2016’s *Oh No*, Jessy Lanza’s life was in a bit of an upheaval. She’d broken up with her partner and co-producer, Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, and moved from her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, to New York City to start a new relationship. But things didn’t immediately gel. “I had a vision of what that move was going to mean and how I was going to feel,” the songwriter/producer tells Apple Music. “And then when I ended up feeling pretty much how I did before I left, I just started feeling lost and homesick. I think I just underestimated how moving away from my family and from familiarity and all that stuff would affect me.” But as the songs for her third LP, *All the Time*, began to take shape, “it just became this thing I could connect to and engage with that made sense,” she says. “I was a bit of an emotional mess writing this record. I was really depressed and I used the album as a way to claw myself out of this hole that I was in.” Listening to these tracks—by turns woozy and propulsive, ruminative and joyful, taking inspiration from ’80s funk and quiet storm, ’90s house and techno, and 2010s footwork and hip-hop—you wouldn’t necessarily suspect they’re the product of dark times. But it is, at its core, a dance record, meant more for catharsis than self-pity: “It was hard not to write these meaningful, really emotional lyrics,” she says. “It sounds like a cliché thing to say, but I do feel like overthinking the lyrics is my first step in ruining a song.” Despite having established a new working relationship with Greenspan, who helped produce the album, that feeling of upheaval hasn’t entirely gone away. When the pandemic hit, and her NYC lease was up, Lanza hit the road and landed—at least temporarily—in Palo Alto, California, where she told us more about the genesis of *All the Time*. **Anyone Around** \"That was the last song we wrote for the record. I wrote it while we had started mixing, so it was really late to be added to the tracklist, but it\'s one of my favorite songs. It’s about realizing that maybe you\'re the asshole in your life. I was just thinking about the plot, like in a film noir where it\'s at the end and the protagonist realizes they\'re the murderer or whatever. I was just thinking like, at the end of my life, I don\'t want to suddenly realize that actually I was the asshole the whole time. It\'s about pushing people away and not having self-awareness.\" **Lick in Heaven** \"I wrote that after I had a particularly bad fight with my partner. I was in the remorse phase of feeling like I really need to apologize for what I said, and then I started thinking about that moment in a fight when somebody really has the choice to either go back or let their pride or their ego get the better of them, and then they just go full nuclear. And then I thought of the idea of spinning out, and how that would be a fun lyric to write the chorus around.\" **Face** “This was an edit fest of a song; it was a lot of experimenting on new equipment that I just got. I had a bunch of semi-modular stuff that I didn\'t really know how to use, so I would do just really long takes at the BPM that I wanted ‘Face’ to be at, and then just edited stuff together after. I know Jeremy did the same thing; he was experimenting a lot with new modules he added to his Eurorack. It started with that bassline that\'s in the song. For me, the bassline is the hook. In house music, that bassline really is everything, so I was thinking about that a lot in ‘Face’—trying to get a good bassline—but it\'s a lot of editing. That song just became a clusterfuck of a song. The lyrics were the last thing I wrote. I was riding home on the subway in New York and just being a bit creepy and looking at everyone\'s expression and had this thought of \'I wonder what these people are actually thinking about. Are they pissed off?\' I thought it would be fun to write lyrics about that.” **Badly** \"I think ‘Badly’ is my favorite track from the album. I know I already said that maybe about \'Anyone Around,\' but I like ‘Badly’ a lot. The reason I have an affection for it is because it was a lot of happy accidents in that song. The sub line at the beginning of the song was kind of a mistake. I don\'t even know how the sampler in Logic made that...it just happened. I did a lot of modular experimenting in that song too, and then Jeremy added—in the breakdown there\'s this really cheesy Mariah Carey pop-ballad breakdown in the middle that when I first heard it, I was like, \'I don\'t know if I like this.\' But it really grew on me, and I think of that song really fondly.\" **Alexander** \"I was pretty sad when I wrote that one. I was trying to do a cover of the Alexander O\'Neal song \'A Broken Heart Can Mend.\' And then it just wasn\'t going anywhere and it just didn\'t sound very good, so I changed the key. I just started messing around with it over the course of a couple weeks, and it changed from that cover into \'Alexander,\' and I just kept the title.\" **Ice Creamy** \"I think the vocals ended up sounding that way because Jeremy and I passed that one back and forth quite a few times, and I would run it through some of my vocal effects and then Jeremy would have a go at processing it, and it just took on this weird shift. I kind of can\'t tell what key it\'s in. It\'s a weird song. I went on this tour in 2017, all by myself, which was a really bad idea. I was trying to be tough and thinking, \'Oh, I traveled around. I\'ll be fine.\' It just really fucked me up by the end of it. I was taking these pills that I bought over the counter in Mexico to sleep—tramadol. It just makes you not care about anything, and so by the end of that tour, I was taking tramadol to sleep, and it was just not good. It just was a big mistake to do that. It\'s not a problem for me anymore, but \'Ice Creamy\' was about basically taking tramadol and not giving a shit about anything, and how sad that is.\" **Like Fire** \"I kept hearing \'In My Feelings,\' the Drake song, because in 2018, when it came out, I would just hear it everywhere I went. I was just like, \'The drums are really good for this song. I\'m going to try and figure out what\'s going on,\' and so it was just an experiment trying to learn a Drake beat, and then also I was working on a HOMESHAKE remix at the same time, which wasn\'t going anywhere, so it became kind of like a failed HOMESHAKE remix and also me trying to figure out a Drake drum pattern, and then it turned into \'Like Fire.\'\" **Baby Love** \"I wrote it after coming home from the hospital after meeting my niece for the first time. It was just a different feeling than I\'ve ever felt before. I was really just so happy. So that song is dedicated to her.\" **Over and Over** \"I was really into this one S.O.S. Band song called \'Looking for You.\' In the first verse, Mary Davis does this little speaking thing where all of a sudden she breaks from singing. I just thought it sounded so good. At the time, I was feeling really angry, really sad, and just trying to write in opposition of that feeling, so I think \'Over and Over\' is a very good example of me trying to do that—and trying to copy Mary Davis. It comes back again to the theme of patterns in your life that, if you\'re lucky, you\'ll notice them before you die. Not to get too self-help, like we\'re in a therapy session, but it really is about just noticing things that just keep happening over and over, and I think it comes back to, \'Wow, these issues in my new relationship are the same issues I\'ve been having throughout my adult life with people.\'\" **All the Time** \"\'All the Time\' was like the catalyst for the whole record, because it was the oldest song on the record. Jeremy sent me a really simple chord progression and drums, and it was right when I was moving and we just weren\'t sure if we were going to make another record together. And then I wrote the vocal and the lyrics over top of what he sent me, and we were both so happy with it. I think it was a good omen or something. It was just a sweet, sad song that we both loved so much, and it was a really nice motivator. It was the spark to make a whole nother record together.\"

Nick Hakim may be a formally trained musician—he attended Berklee College of Music—but his songs are the product of someone who finds comfort in a looser approach. Though he admits that balance is key, the multi-instrumentalist tends toward the unconstrained, preferring to let go and let be where others may be prone to overthinking and overanalyzing. “Despite how long I went \[to Berklee\], right when I left, I feel like I went back into this childlike state of thinking about music and relearning how to do a lot of stuff and picking up new interests within the process of making music,” he tells Apple Music. \"I want to keep that kind of mentality. I have some of the language to communicate in a certain way and articulate some of the really technical things around theory, but I don\'t think like that unless I have to.” *Green Twins*, his 2017 debut album, is maximalist in many ways and blows out his experimental inclinations. *WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD* is comparatively scaled back in sound but even more freewheeling in structure. The arrangements unfurl, sometimes haphazardly, often forgoing traditional song setups in favor of a mood more akin to tinkering around or an impromptu jam session; this is, in effect, music for—and of—just figuring it out. Hakim\'s aim was to create without the boundaries of expectations or consumerism, and the sentiment spilled over into every facet of the process, including editing. “For the most part, if there\'s any live musicians or any live takes, it\'s \'If you played that, that\'s what stays on the record,\'” he says. “There needs to be a kind of energy. There\'s so much stuff that\'s super polished in a way that\'s just like—it\'s okay to just be. It doesn\'t have to be perfect.”*WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD* is a portrait of a person trying to navigate this life and what comes with it—from grief and self-destruction to love and redemption. “All these songs kind of represent a feeling, rather than them having like a literal definition behind them,” Hakim says. “And for me, my job is to just do my best to articulate that.” Below, he articulates the stories behind each song on his second album. **ALL THESE CHANGES** “Just musically, I think it\'s one of the best melodies that I\'ve written. I just feel like the melody is really strong—the string melody and the verse melody and the vocal melody. That\'s a song that reflects a lot of the changes that we feel and see in Mother Earth and global warming. One of the lyrics is \'All the limbs in her are changing/Growing pains, the hope is fading/Can we bring her love back to health?/We\'ve been guests here for a while.\' It\'s kind of like a reflection of just like the Earth reacting to us, and it\'s pretty cinematic and kind of has a lot of different layers.” **WTMMG** “There\'s probably like 30 vocal tracks on that song, and there\'s groups of personalities that I did, and this was very intentional. There\'s one where I\'m literally screaming at the top of my lungs, and then there\'s one where I kind of imitate Iggy Pop, and then there\'s just my natural kind of breathy voice, and then there\'s affected vocals where I\'m running my voice through tape and I\'m just fucking with the tape reel and it sounds all bubbly. There\'s all these weird layers of vocals and a lot of dynamics with the personalities of the characters that are singing on that song. The chorus is pretty stripped back, and then the second verse is very clean. There\'s all this weaving of characters, and it\'s all kind of manic because it\'s about a system that overmedicates their youth to control them.” **BOUNCING** “That song is just about feeling uneasy and feeling restless, and it\'s really just a meditation. And Kyle Miles, he\'s been playing bass with me since like 2010—he\'s my go-to guy. Him and I just did a whole take to the drums with me on guitar and him on bass, and I didn\'t edit anything. I also recorded piano and organ at Richard Swift\'s house. I was with him like two months before he passed away. He gave me the keys to the studio and just let me record for a couple days by myself. I really miss him. We were becoming really close.” **LET IT OUT** “That track was a moment for me, I think, with the whole process of writing lyrics. It almost set a tone for me in a lot of ways when I wrote the record, because it’s just one lyric, ‘Let it out.’ I made the track really quickly, probably in 15 minutes, and there\'s not really any edit. It\'s like a loop of something, and then me playing keys on top of it, and then me singing it. I remember recording those vocals, and it was such a specific kind of energy—I could feel myself start to kind of tap in. It was like a certain kind of gluing moment for the whole project.” **QADIR** “After I heard about \[my friend\] Qadir passing in February 2018, I became really affected by it and just started writing. I had pages in my notebook, and I was just writing like free thoughts about just about everything—about him, about his family, his mom, and how I wish that I could\'ve been there for him a little more. He was really struggling with some hurdles and some mental health issues and stuff. So I started making music, and I had this music for a long time, and I went to the studio, and we recorded an 11-minute version of what you hear on the record except it\'s cut down a little bit. I think it\'s my proudest song I\'ve ever written. Obviously it\'s a dedication to Qadir and to the family, to his mother, to his family, to his siblings and everybody that we grew up with that knew him. It\'s also about all the little details behind the mentality of having loved ones around you and you never know what people are going through. A lot of people wear these metaphorical masks and use masks as a metaphor for how to protect yourself or hide yourself in certain ways, and it\'s also about how this system, the society that we live in makes us believe in all of these false projections of what beauty is, what real love is. It\'s all these different things about how his passing made me feel and a reflection of a lot of different things.” **ALL THESE INSTRUMENTS** “It\'s literally like, let\'s get the fuck out of here and go somewhere away from here. Let\'s go down south—and when I say \'down south,\' I\'m talking about South America, because I really want to go back at some point and just spend time consistently and have a routine or an annual ritual of going down there and being with my family, but also just fantasizing about living down there, like in the countryside of Chile. My younger brother wrote that music. When I was 17, he was like my only writing partner; it was just him and I. It\'s kind of a more mature version of the shit we were doing.” **DRUM THING** “‘DRUM THING’ is cool because, first of all, it\'s all improvised. I made the drums, and then I played piano, and so the track started with just drums, piano, and vocal. And then I got Kyle Miles to come play bass on it a little afterwards. Literally everything—the drums are a loop that I slammed through a tape machine, and it was distorting and sounded amazing. I wanted to make a drumbeat that sounded like it was a living organism. It also kinda ties into supporting my family, but the vocals are completely improvised. I did one take and it was the only take I ever did.” **VINCENT TYLER** “I wrote this song when it was hard for me to write in general, and it was around the same time that I was like piecing together songs like ‘QADIR’ and ‘WHOO’ or songs like ‘DRUM THING’ or ‘CRUMPY.’ Vincent Tyler is someone that we found in my godmother\'s alley—he was shot up, and it\'s a story about that day and the steps to finding his body. And you know what\'s really crazy is his younger brother sent me a message on Instagram and was like, \'Thank you so much.\' He was like eight years old when it happened.” **CRUMPY** “I love that song. It\'s like there\'s a sweetness to it and a lot of different energy in it. There\'s this kind of manic person—I mean, there\'s definitely me living in New York. It uses all these metaphors about the subway and the concrete. I wrote the song during a time when I was pretty vulnerable, because I was just reflecting on when I was almost evicted from the place I was living because I hadn\'t paid rent in like five or six months. I\'d got into a bike accident where I lost my tooth, and I could barely move my shoulder for a long time. It was because I was working and also doing dumb shit on my bike. That\'s how I made money for a long time, like food delivery and all kinds of delivery services and shit.” **GODS DIRTY WORK** “It\'s cool that it comes after \'CRUMPY\' because—I feel like ‘CRUMPY,’ ‘GODS DIRTY WORK,’ and ‘SEEING DOUBLE’ are all in position on the album. They\'re like a very specific kind of—same drummer, different bass player, but same band. I wrote those chords also around the same time that I was writing \'VINCENT TYLER,\' and I was working on \'QADIR,\' and I had all this music. It\'s also kind of lyrically an extension of \'CRUMPY\' because it talks about a character that\'s riding their bike around in New York and working for a delivery service that goes into people\'s homes and gives them a substance that makes them laugh and eyes bleed.” **SEEING DOUBLE** “It\'s simply just about kind of deconstructing yourself and trying to find self-love and doing that kind of tough work. But it\'s also a reflection of being easy on yourself and trying to forgive yourself in the process of doing that, and about how to love yourself and how to manage your mind. I guess, for me, it\'s really just about me. The \'seeing double\' part is—I\'ve controlled it a lot better, but I had some kind of bad tendencies with alcohol. I would always get to this point where I would see double. That moment in the song when I start saying that is kind of like the shit that I\'m trying to work against.” **WHOO** “It\'s kind of warm and leaves on a very kind of beautiful note. \'I stopped abusing myself around you, I started using myself around you\'—you can interpret that however you want, but it\'s pretty straightforward in my opinion. It\'s somebody that just brings the best out of you and makes you feel good. I think it\'s hopeful, and it just felt right. A common theme here on this record is self-love and finding ways to deal with the strange, confusing world that can really test you, and I think this song is kind of a pledge of what I want to be with someone, or it could be even talking to yourself, you know?”

Nick Hakim announces his new album WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD out May 15th via ATO Records. First single "QADIR,” is a fitting introduction into this new era. The nearly eight minute cut is the heart of the album and the first song he wrote for the record, made as an ode to his late friend and a reminder to check in on your loved ones. "If I really sink into a recording, I don't want it to end," Hakim says. "It's repetitive and hypnotizing, like a trance -- that's intentional. The song is my ode to him. It's my attempt to relate to how he must have been feeling." While WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD is distinctly Nick Hakim, it does represent a tonal shift from Green Twins that reflects the ideas with which he grappled while making the record