Rough Trade's Albums of the Year 2020

Midwestern by birth and temperament, Freddie Gibbs has always seemed a little wary of talking himself up—he’s more show than tell. But between 2019’s Madlib collaboration (*Bandana*) and the Alchemist-led *Alfredo*, what wasn’t clear 10 years ago is crystal now: Gibbs is in his own class. The wild, shape-shifting flow of “God Is Perfect,” the chilling lament of “Skinny Suge” (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked-up part of that is I know I supplied the n\*\*\*a that sold it”), a mind that flickers with street violence and half-remembered Arabic, and beats that don’t bang so much as twinkle, glide, and go up like smoke. *Alfredo* is seamless, seductive, but effortless, the work of two guys who don’t run to catch planes. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs claims, “God made me sell crack so I had something to rap about.” But the way he flows now, you get the sense he would’ve found his way to the mic one way or the other.

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Los Angeles psych-soul four-piece Chicano Batman announce Invisible People, out May 1st via ATO Records. The album is both the band’s most sonically-varied and cohesive. It is a statement of hope, a proclamation that we are all invisible people, and that despite race, class, or gender we can overcome our differences and stand together. For the album, Chicano Batman worked with Shawn Everett, the GRAMMY-award winning mixing engineer known for his work with Alabama Shakes, War on Drugs and Julian Casablancas. With Leon Michels’ producing and Everett’s mixing steering the record’s direction, the band’s lush Tropicalia-tinged sound has transformed into their most polished and densely layered. Invisible People is an illuminating and encapsulating sonic landscape, one that hasn’t lost the essence that put Chicano Batman on the map.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

Cenizas was made between 2017 and 2019.

Richard Russell is many things—musician, DJ, producer, and co-founder of XL Recordings. Making a second album as Everything Is Recorded revealed another calling, though. “Giggs once said to me that I was a time traveler, and I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Russell tells Apple Music. “But this made me aware that a big part of my work is being a connector between people and between eras. With the samples, I’m taking records from the ’70s and ’80s mostly and I’m presenting them to artists who are of now and the future, trying to connect these different times to make something exciting and present.” *FRIDAY FOREVER* tells the turbulent story of a night out and the next day through narrators including UK rap superstar Aitch, punk godhead Penny Rimbaud, and R&B riser Infinite Coles. Russell’s method was to find collaborators based on an emotional connection to their music and what the samples and sketches he’d been working on might inspire in them. They’ve coalesced into a record that bottles the havoc and adventure of a night out before peering uneasily through the bottom of that bottle the following morning. “When I started making music, which was the rave era, I never made an album, I made a bunch of different tracks,” he says. “This is my rave album—but because I’ve made it at this point in my life, it’s as much about the aftermath as it is about the rave.” Here, he takes us though the story track by track. **09:46 PM / EVERY FRIDAY THEREAFTER (Intro) \[feat. Maria Somerville & Berwyn\]** “It’s very minimal. You mainly hear Maria Somerville, Berwyn doing backing vocals and me playing an MS-20 synth. But there\'s definitely some spiritual quality there. Friday night was Sabbath in my family house growing up. It was taken very seriously and I used to participate in that. But then I used to be trying to escape and get on the Northern Line and go into town and go clubbing. So there\'s just a hint of that feeling, and I think it is a spiritual feeling, Friday night is a spiritual moment in different ways for me.” **10:51 PM / THE NIGHT (feat. Berwyn & Maria Somerville)** “Its a very minimal, noisy bit of music. I left all the feedback in, all the noise, didn\'t clean it up at all. Totally raw. I\'ve got a metal water canister and I\'m banging that with a drumstick. I\'m stomping on the floor and I\'m banging on the wooden stair outside my studio. And I just looped me doing that over the Smog sample \[‘Hollow Out Cakes’\]. And then there\'s this great performance by Berwyn. Berwyn is like two people in that song, because there\'s a great song performance and a great rap performance. I think there\'s a bit of danger to it, there\'s edge there, there’s anticipation and there\'s tension.” **12:12 AM / PATIENTS (F\*\*\*\*\*G UP A FRIDAY) \[feat. Aitch & Infinite Coles\]** “Aitch was able to very easily and directly capture that sense of being in the club and things being out of hand. From the first time I heard him—my teenage son played a freestyle of his to me before it had all gone nuts for him—I thought he was amazing. I just thought, ‘What a flow. What a voice. What an attitude.’ He came to the studio and did those two verses incredibly quickly. Infinite is offering a slightly more introspective take on the night out. There\'s very little music in this apart from the 909 drum machine, and the reference there is Schoolly D’s ‘P.S.K.,’ which is one of my favorite rap songs of all time. The music\'s got to spark something for the vocalist, and I think it sparked something for Aitch and Infinite. They both delivered amazing performances.” **01:32 AM / WALK ALONE (feat. Infinite Coles & Berwyn)** “Infinite’s voice has always sounded how I imagine the Paradise Garage to have sounded—although it was a little bit before my time. I started working in Vinylmania Records in New York two to three years after the Paradise Garage closed. That was the record shop that Larry Levan \[Paradise Garage DJ\] used to go to. The record I sampled on here—Man Friday, ‘Love Honey, Love Heartache’—was released on the Vinylmania record label and was produced by Larry Levan. This song is a complete homage and appreciation of \'80s New York, updating that sound—which is incredibly resonant now. What happened at the Paradise Garage had such a seismic, eternal impact on clubbing. There would be no clubbing as we know it really without the Paradise Garage, which in turn was heavily influenced by The Loft.” **02:56 AM / I DONT WANT THIS FEELING TO STOP (feat. FLOHIO)** “I love the Mikey Dread sample \[‘Dizzy’\]. That was on his album *Pave the Way*, which is great. I was actually cutting it up live in the studio and tweaking it, slowing it down, speeding it up, and filtering it while Flohio was writing and doing her vocal performance. That felt very much like a club-type environment, and you can kind of feel that in there, it\'s got that energy. That sample—\'I don\'t want this feeling to stop, I like it\'—caught that peak club moment and that feeling, *which can\'t last* but is what people are looking for on their night out. Then Flohio ran with that. It was a really, really fun, quick, spontaneous song to record.” **03:15 AM / CAVIAR (feat. Ghostface Killah & Infinite Coles)** “This beat was me and Ben Reed, who plays with Frank Ocean sometimes, just jamming. I was playing a really simple 4/4 beat on an MPC, banging it out robotically, and he came up with that rolling bassline. I was like, ‘Yeah, that\'s it. Got something.’ Infinite told this story about an experience he\'d had heading in a taxi in New York to an after-party and these misadventures they were getting into. Infinite \[and I\] talked about doing something with \[Infinite’s father\] Ghostface. We sent the whole thing to him and he just sent that verse back. We couldn\'t believe it when we got it. It was incredible. He\'s such an incredible vocalist in a way that goes beyond any type of genre—he’s just one of the great voices of all time. And obviously Wu-Tang is as resonant and as powerful as ever. So we were really honored for him to join it. And funnily enough, it has my son on it too, playing the live drums that come in halfway through.” **04:21 AM / THAT SKY (feat. Maria Somerville & James Massiah)** “\[We were\] playing around with the Sun Ra sample, and that very free, loose kind of lo-fi feeling it gave, jamming over it with different keyboards, guitar. Maria came in and her voice has this real ethereal beauty to it. I felt like we were getting into that kind of chill-out moment—you’re back at someone\'s house, this is the kind of music you want to hear. I was trying to imagine myself in that spot and what you want to hear. Then James Massiah comes in and he\'s actually telling you about what\'s been happening in his night so far.” **05:10 AM / DREAM I NEVER HAD (feat. A.K. Paul)** “It’s a slightly psychedelic, woozy, kind of melodic fever dream as you’re drifting off. Things not being totally real and things not being totally clear. The Teardrop Explodes sample \[‘Tiny Children’\]—that’s my childhood bedroom music. That came out when I was 10, and Julian Cope’s a hero, I totally love that song. It was really easy to build the rest of it around that. Samples are like giving someone a gift that might spark some kind of response. You’ve got to think about the recipient of the gift. I would think, ‘The sample of Mikey Dread, I want to play that to Flohio. The sample of Julian Cope, I want to play that to A.K. Paul.’ A.K. Paul’s got that sort of Prince-influenced vocal and guitar—Prince had that psychedelic edge.” **09:35 AM / PRETENDING NOTHINGS WRONG (feat. Kean Kavanagh)** “There’s two samples here. There\'s Tangerine Dream, which is those very ominous chords, and then Lamont Dozier saying, ‘Pretending nothing’s wrong when all the time the pain goes on.’ And then Kean Kavanagh…I think those lyrics are just brilliant. We wrote those together, this incredibly visceral, pretty brutal thing that everyone’s experienced: He talks about putting his face down on the lino and feeling the cold of the floor to try to cool himself down, and putting his finger down his throat, and it’s grim. That was the feeling. Then you have this conversation between him and Berwyn, catching up about what the hell happened last night. Those next-day phone conversations are pretty funny, and it was nice to capture that. The song is fairly eerie, but the humor’s very important. That era I started in, there was a lot of humor to all that music, in the hardcore thing. It’s very British. It has to happen naturally, but a lot of music makers are very funny. So when that crops up, it\'s a nice thing.” **10:02 AM / BURNT TOAST (feat. Berwyn & A.K. Paul)** “It’s got that laconic, mellow kind of feel to it. Berwyn\'s rap is quite dark. It\'s a really, really good lyric. And I think A.K. brings that melodic feeling to it. It’s tough and it nods back maybe to a ’90s Bristol sound with that slightly dusty and dark atmospheric, and hip-hop influence. It’s slightly folky as well—a feeling that I think is present on the record.” **11:55 AM / THIS WORLD (feat. Infinite Coles & Maria Somerville)** “I’m as proud of this as of anything I\'ve ever done—just because it has so much feeling to it. \[Before embarking on *FRIDAY FOREVER*\] I was doing a bunch of stuff with Infinite. We did this song, \'This World’s Gonna Break Your Heart,’ which was based on a Maddy Prior & The Carnival Band sample—‘Poor Little Jesus.’ It was beautiful and it really felt like a morning-after song. Then he wrote ‘CAVIAR,’ and he also had a lyric for ‘PATIENTS.’ And I was reading an interview with Francis Ford Coppola, who said, ‘If you want to tell a story, it’s a good idea to have the ending first.’ It suddenly struck me that here was the story: Even in these three songs was a story of going out, things reaching some type of a crescendo, and then the next day. And that made me think we should make a record based on that. I could approach it like a movie, cast it, and tell the cast members, ‘Well, here\'s the story and you can kind of write your scene.’ I play guitar on this, we kept that from the demo, and Owen Pallett added the strings, and there\'s some vocals from Maria right at the end, and it’s really very beautiful, I think.” **11:59 AM / CIRCLES (Outro) \[feat. Penny Rimbaud\]** “It’s a reprise of ‘THIS WORLD.’ Crass were incredibly important to me. Anyone who identifies with that punk spirit, whether they know it or not, they’re relating to Crass. Crass was such a part of the formula: punk being about a DIY approach, about self-reliance, but also being about a communal spirit, and not being pushed around and doing what you think is right. Penny \[Rimbaud, Crass frontman\] embodied that. He does spoken word and is a very spiritual man. When I played him ‘THIS WORLD’ and said, ‘Do you think you could add something on this theme?’ he said, ‘Well, perhaps, but you have to remember I’m an optimist.’ And when he said that, I thought, ‘Actually, so am I. Nonetheless, there’s still something in the idea that this world’s going to break your heart.’ And he was into that. It brings things all the way round. He’s saying, ‘I knew then that I had come down to earth.’ So this really finishes off this kind of journey. I recorded 20 or 30 friends and people who were in the studio just saying the words ‘This world\'s going to break our hearts.’ But then Penny says, ‘With joy.’ That’s an optimistic note, and, as we record this \[interview, during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak\], a bit of optimism feels very, very important and possibly something people are going to struggle to find for the time being. It feels like a timely song, I suppose.”

Restlessness is the first step towards pleasure. We make comfort out of discomfort, pleasure out of pain. That journey isn’t always a straight line, but at least we’re going somewhere real. “I had to move, Lord I couldn’t be still” is the unsettled way that Video Age’s new album and title track, Pleasure Line, begins. But as the song unfolds, it uplifts us into a romantic space of possibility and love. Just as “love” is both a noun and a verb, Pleasure Line is both a road to be traveled and the act of crossing that road. Video Age’s first two albums were about loneliness and discovering oneself, but Pleasure Line takes on a whole new attitude, considering songwriting partners Ross Farbe and Ray Micarelli are both getting married this year (just a few weeks apart from each other, too). But these songs aren’t expressions of one-dimensional puppy love—this is euphoria with depth, ecstasy with complications. Video Age’s third album, due out from Winspear on August 7, 2020, pairs neon-bright 80s pop melodies with a vast range of influences (including Janet Jackson, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney) to create an optimistic sound all their own. The influences vary song to song, but they’re all tinted with the same rosy hue. These are catchy, memorable songs that radiate big “glass half-full” energy. Pleasure Line is a salve that protects against cynicism—listening to this album, you can’t help but feel the world around you is full of romantic potential.

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

Adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims the sanctity of human dignities, freedoms, and well-being. If, today, it remains a far-off destination, its values continue to guide and inspire. Max Richter’s *Voices* is a beautiful sonic journey through the Declaration’s principal ideas, combining resonating soundscapes with passages from the document. These appear first in a recording by one of its authors, Eleanor Roosevelt, and are then narrated by actor Kiki Layne, with fragments echoed in more than 70 different languages—each voice crowdsourced via social media. The whole project was 10 years in the making. “The original impetus for *Voices* was the events around Guantanamo, when the revelations came out about the way people had been treated there,” Richter tells Apple Music. “I felt in that moment that the world had gone wrong in a new way, and I wanted to make a piece of music to reflect on it—almost to process it.” There’s a structure and repetition to the Declaration that appeals to Richter, providing a framework for the album. “The way the word *everyone* comes back all the time is very clever,” he says. “It’s got a ritualistic quality—it’s very powerful.” At the core of *Voices* lies a string orchestra that’s “upside down” in terms of its proportions. “It’s all basses and cellos—dark-sounding instruments,” says Richter. “But what I wanted to do is make music which had a sense of hopefulness, luminosity. So I set myself a challenge to make bright music from dark materials. It’s like alchemy—trying to make gold out of base metal.” A “Voiceless Mix” of each piece means listeners will also be able to hear Richter’s score without narration. “It’ll be a chance to think about it all,” he says, “like revisiting a landscape but arriving from another direction.” Here, he guides us through *Voices*, piece by piece. **All Human Beings** “*All Human Beings* sets everything up. It starts with a choral drone, which makes you listen—we have to pay attention to the texts, and I don’t want the music to get in the way of them. So the sound is very reduced and drone-like while we hear readings by Eleanor Roosevelt and Kiki Layne. Then it slowly grows in density and complexity. Once the readings are over, the music blossoms to become something in itself, rather than an accompaniment. I’ve worked a lot with this choir, Tenebrae. They specialize in Renaissance music, and I love that clean sound.” **Origins** “A big part of this project is the idea of a piece of music as a place to think about the world we’ve made and the world we want to make. So the first part of *Origins* is really just that—a chance to reflect on what we’ve just heard, the spoken texts, and the things we’ve just felt. *Origins* starts very simply as a solo piano piece and, with a solo cello, becomes more melodic as it progresses.” **Journey Piece** “*Journey Piece* is mostly choral—it’s quite a short piece. But it speaks to the concept of displacement. In our comfortable Western lives, we think of travel as being something you do for work or pleasure. But a lot of people travel very much against their will. The texts here reflect on these things, and *Journey Piece* is a place to think about them.” **Chorale** “*Chorale* is scored for the orchestra with soprano and violin solos. The title comes from the cyclical nature of the material, echoing the verse structure of J.S. Bach’s chorales. Over its span, the music and the soprano line rise continuously, so the intention is that the music gets brighter the longer it plays.” **Hypocognition** “*Hypocognition* means not being able to express something because you don’t have a name for it. I thought that was an interesting idea. And I think it points to the inability to be in someone else’s shoes, to see someone else’s point of view. The piece is largely electronic and has a conversational relationship with the text. The text is, in a way, the data or frontal-lobe information. And the music evokes the feelings. So, you’re given some information and then given a space to think about it.” **Prelude 6** “‘A little piano piece which seems simple but isn’t. And I think that’s a metaphor for our situation. We all know what the problems are, but it’s not easy to fix them. The piece is in two overlapping time signatures, so it has a slightly unsettled quality.” **Murmuration** “*Murmuration* explores again the idea of migration, of movement against your will, and it occupies a hybrid space between acoustic and electronic music. The sounds are mostly choral, which evoke a sense of ritual, but there is a lot of synthesis and computing going on, which provides a kind of amniotic fluid for the music to inhabit. It just floats in this space.” **Cartography** “*Cartography* is the art of mapmaking, the study of places, so the piece has similar preoccupations to *Murmuration*. It’s a very solitary kind of piece, though, and it sits within a deep silence. Again, it’s a piece that’s not as simple as it sounds—it’s irregular and repetitive and is very much in the style of a lot of my piano music.” **Little Requiems** “The text here is all about motherhood and children, and the need to afford them protection. The less able somebody is, the less they’re able to look after themselves. And, of course, children are disproportionately the victims of everything that’s going on, whether it’s migration or the situation in Syria, for example. It affects the powerless disproportionately. The music here features the string orchestra underneath a rising soprano solo, which allows you the mental space to think about that and the sampled texts.” **Mercy** “*Mercy* is scored for violin solo and piano, and was the first piece I wrote for the album. The title comes from Portia’s speech in Shakespeare’s *The Merchant of Venice*: ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ It’s a wonderful speech, all about forgiveness. But it’s about rights, too—if you cut me, do I not bleed? The message is that all people are the same. All through *Voices*, you’ll hear little clues of *Mercy*, so the whole album ends up being a sort of theme-and-variations in reverse.”

Hailing from Melbourne, but with a sound stretching from 60s and 70s afrobeat and exotica to Fela Kuti-esque repetition, the proto-garage rhythmic fury of The Monks and the grooves of Os Mutantes, there’s an enticing lost world exoticism to the music of Bananagun. It’s the sort of stuff that could’ve come from a dusty record crate of hidden gems; yet as the punchy, colourfully vibrant pair of singles Do Yeah and Out of Reach have proven over the past 12 months, the band are no revivalists. On debut album The True Story of Bananagun, they make a giant leap forward with their outward-looking blend of global tropicalia. The True Story of Bananagun marks Bananagun’s first full foray into writing and recording as a complete band, having originally germinated in the bedroom ideas and demos of guitarist, vocalist and flautist Nick van Bakel. The multi-instrumentalist grew up on skate videos, absorbing the hip-hop beats that soundtracked them - taking on touchstones like Self Core label founder Mr. Dibbs and other early 90’s turntablists. That love of the groove underpins Bananagun - even if the rhythms now traverse far beyond those fledgling influences. "We didn't want to do what everyone else was doing,” the band’s founder says. “We wanted it to be vibrant, colourful and have depth like the jungle. Like an ode to nature." Van Bakel was joined first by cousin Jimi Gregg on drums – the pair’s shared love of the Jungle Book apparently made him a natural fit – and the rest of the group are friends first and foremost, put together as a band because of a shared emphasis on keeping things fun. Jack Crook (guitar/vocals), Charlotte Tobin (djembe/percussion) and Josh Dans (bass) complete the five-piece and between them there’s a freshness and playful spontaneity to The True Story of Bananagun, borne out of late night practice jams and hangs at producer John Lee’s Phaedra Studios. “We were playing a lot leading up to recording so we’re all over it live”, van Bakel fondly recalls of the sessions that became more like a communal hang out, with Zoe Fox and Miles Bedford there too to add extra vocals and saxophone. “It was a good time, meeting there every night, using proper gear [rather than my bedroom setups.] It felt like everyone had a bit of a buzz going on.” Tracks like The Master and People Talk Too Much bounce around atop hybrid percussion that fuses West African high life with Brazilian tropicalia; the likes of She Now hark to a more westernised early rhythm ‘n’ blues beat, remoulded and refreshed in the group’s own inimitable summery style. Freak Machine is perhaps the closest to those early 90’s beats, but even then the group add layers and layers of bright guitars, harmonic flower-pop vocals and other sounds to transmute the source material to an entirely new plain. Elsewhere there’s a 90 second track called Bird Up! that cut and pastes kookaburra and parrot calls as an homage to the wildlife surrounding van Bakel’s home 80 kilometres from Melbourne. Oh, and there are hooks galore too – try and stop yourself from humming along to Out of Reach’s swooping vocal melody. Bananagun are first and foremost a band enthused with the joy of living and The True Story of Bananagun is a ebullient listen; van Bakel - as the main songwriter - is keen not to let any lyrical themes overpower that. There’s more to this record than blissed out grooves and tripped out fuzz though: The Master is about learning to be your own master and resisting the urge to compare yourself to others; She Now addresses gender identity and extolls the importance of people being able to identify how they feel. Then there’s closing track Taking The Present For Granted, which perhaps sums up the band’s ethos on life, trying to take in the world around you and appreciating the here and now. A keen meditator, van Bakel says of the track: “so often people are having a shit time stuck in their own existential crisis, but if you get outside you head and participate in life and appreciate how beautiful it all is you can have a better time.” Even the band’s seemingly innocuous name has an underlying message of connectivity that matches the universality of the music. “It’s like non-violent combat! Or the guy who does a stick up, but it’s just a banana, not a gun, and he tells the authorities not to take themselves too seriously.” The True Story of Bananagun then is perhaps a tale of finding beauty in even these most turbulent of times.

Field Music’s new release is “Making A New World”, a 19 track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels. The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath.” If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told. The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts - a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum administrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.

If there was any concern that the red-bearded Queens emcee had abandoned his lyrical signature in favor of oceanography, *Only for Dolphins* opener “Capoeira” quashes that notion quickly. Here, the always entertaining Action Bronson clobbers his way through all of his favorite topics like a pro wrestling gauntlet match. The whistles and clicks made by its titular aquatic mammal play like hip-hop producer drops throughout, but apart from that the album recalls much of his canon and its easygoing greatness. A psychotropic joyride, “C12H16N2” trips through a Lincoln Center screening of Martin Scorsese’s *The Irishman* and its similarly ritzy after-party. From the reggae blasts of “Cliff Hanger” and “Golden Eye” to the lounge dirge of closer “Hard Target,” no matter what type of beat comes his way, Bronsolino mightily molds it to his whim.

*The Long Goodbye* is a turbulent exploration of identity and belonging, and serves as a painstaking yet necessary passage for British rapper and actor Riz Ahmed. It’s the first music released under his full name, and alongside Swet Shop Boys compadre Redinho—who handles production—he weaves a rich tapestry of formative influences, turning a romantic relationship into a detailed extended metaphor for life in post-Brexit Britain. “It’s a breakup album, but with your country,” he explains. Taking cues from Sufi devotional music and poetry, the result is an urgent, chaotic piece that holds up a mirror to the rising tide of division in the land he calls home. “I wanted to make something that lets people into the feeling of this heartbreak, the anger, the denial, the acceptance, the realization, self-esteem and self-love,” he says. Further contextualized through feature skits, the album stars an extended support cast that includes the artist’s mother, Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, activist Yara Shahidi, and *People Just Do Nothing* actor Asim Chaudhry (playing the glorious Chabuddy G). Here, Ahmed talks us through each of the album’s tracks. **The Break Up (Shikwa)** “‘Shikwa’ is an epic poem by Muhammad Iqbal. It’s Iqbal complaining to God saying, ‘Yo, you abandoned us. Look at us. We\'re being killed in the streets. We\'re homeless, we\'re unloved, we\'re unwashed, we\'re uneducated, we\'ve lost our way. God, where are you?\' With Sufi poetry, they use this metaphor of being separated from your beloved as a way of talking about feeling distant from God. It\'s a way of saying, \'I want to feel spirituality back in my life.\' I had written a lot of the tracks that take you through this journey, and then I realized how many haven\'t been answered in the backstory, and I need to explain how we get to this point where one day I come home and she\'s changed the locks. Let me give you the full story, the messy truth of this relationship.” **Toba Tek Singh** “Toba Tek Singh is a place in Pakistan and it\'s also the name of a short story by this satirical writer \[Saadat Hasan\] Manto, who was often jailed for his writing. It\'s about a character who refuses to choose between India and Pakistan, who refuses to pick a side and makes their home in no man’s land instead—in a space between the two countries. We\'re living in a world that\'s increasingly polarized and it\'s being painted in terms of \'us versus them.\' But there are a lot of us who neither belong to \'us\' nor \'them\'—we are culturally hybrid and we have complex identities. And to me I always think that we\'re in this ‘no man\'s land’ but actually there\'s so many of us there, it\'s not ‘no man\'s land,’ it\'s *our* land.” **Mindy: Take Half** “This is really setting up the concept for the next track, \'Fast Lava,’ which is, ‘How did Britain become Great Britain? How did America become the richest country in the world? On whose backs was that built? If there is going to be a separation, then there needs to be some reparations.’” **Fast Lava** “‘I’ll spit my truth and it\'s Brown.’ I think that means actually no longer apologizing for your identity or having to edit your identity. It\'s about saying, ‘You know what, I\'ve been told to hide who I am. I\'ve been told to kind of tailor who I am to your tastes, for your acceptance. But actually, if you\'re going to try and kick me out, then if you\'re going to stop playing rough with me, then why should I hide who I am anymore?’” **Ammi: Come Home** “That\'s \[Ammi\] my mum, and what she\'s saying in Urdu is, \'Look, I told you, she\'ll be no good for you. There\'s no common ground between you culturally. When are you going to listen to me? Now what can we do? What we are going to do is pray? You know what, just leave with your head held high and come back home if you have to.’ I just say, ‘Mummy, can you leave me a voicemail?’ and she does it. It’s probably the reason I\'m an actor, \'cause she\'s just got such a big personality. She\'s such a natural performer.” **Any Day (feat. Jay Sean)** “This is me taking my mum’s advice: ‘You know what, just leave it, man. Just let it go. Let go of the idea that she\'s ever going to accept you.’ It\'s that moment of looking back at the relationship with all of the nostalgia and feeling a bit of heartache. I was so happy Jay Sean could jump on it, too—an absolute pioneer and also a West Londoner.” **Mahershala: Don’t Do Anything Stupid** “So Mahershala is someone I\'ve got to know, just as we were both gaining some momentum in our careers. He\'s just a real dude with a massive heart, and he\'s just been so supportive. We\'re at the point of the story now where I\'ve taken my mum’s advice, ended the relationship, but now I\'m really depressed. Now I\'m feeling really isolated and rejected, and that\'s what Mahershala talks to, leading into the next track.” **Can I Live** “This is about how rejection, hatred, and prejudice affects our mental health. It makes us hate ourselves, it makes us question ourselves. And over the course of the track, what you have is, I question my place in this relationship, in this world, in this country. I also question what the fuck I\'m doing as an artist. I\'m like, ‘What good is it doing\'? I say \'East and West are clashing but cash is the only outcome.’ By me kind of performing my trauma and performing my pain, is it kind of minstrels-y? What is it? Am I putting my foot down or am I tap-dancing to the man?” **Yara: Look Inside** “Yara is such a young woman but such an inspirational leader, an amazing young voice. She comes in with real wisdom at this point to say, ‘You know what? Just because you\'re not accepted in a relationship doesn\'t mean you can\'t still have acceptance in your life. It doesn\'t mean you can\'t have love in your life.\'” **Where You From** “I guess this is a question that is so common, and to some of us can be annoying. But it\'s also a question we all ask ourselves sometimes: Where are you really from? And a lot of us have quite complex identities. Maybe I\'m not from this place or that place. Maybe I\'m from this \'no man\'s land\' in between, and if I am from this ‘no man\'s land,\' it doesn\'t mean we can\'t plant a flag there and make it habitable. Let\'s still find some dignity.” **Mogambo** “This is an anthem of resilience. You may kind of feel like your position is sometimes under threat, or feel sometimes like you’re on the back foot, but they can\'t take us all out, mate. It\'s like a middle finger.” **Chabuddy: Go Southall** “Chabuddy comes in with the voicemail. It gives it the old ‘You know what? Connect. Connect with other people in this no man’s land with you.’ Let’s go Southall. There are people with you on this journey. Not ‘let\'s get on a plane and go to India, or LA\'—nah, let\'s go Southall: No Man\'s Land HQ.” **Deal With It** “‘Slap two pagans saying that’s too Asian.’ It’s about being your unapologetic self. It’s saying, ‘I don’t need your acceptance, Britney. I don’t need you to love me, I accept myself.’” **Hasan: You Came Out on Top** “Hasan \[Minhaj\] comes on and lets you know that by going on this journey, reconnecting with self-love, you’ve come out resilient. You’ve come out on top.” **Karma** “It’s like a victory lap, I guess. It’s saying we’ve all been through some crazy shit and we’re still here. We’re not going anywhere, because the people that are pushed to the periphery of a society are often the people that make that society special.”

Special Clear Vinyl Edition (50 Only) Comes w/ Enamel Pin and is a Bandcamp Exclusive. Available in LP, Special Edition LP and CD Formats. First 200 LPs hand-numbered. Special Edition LPs come with enamel pin (limited to 200). One thing you won’t be able to avoid on Bambara’s Stray is death. It’s everywhere and inescapable, abstract and personified – perhaps the key to the whole record. Death, however, won’t be the first thing that strikes you about the group’s fourth – and greatest – album to date. That instead will be its pulverising soundscape; by turns, vast, atmospheric, cool, broiling and at times – on stand out tracks like “Sing Me To The Street” and “Serafina” – simply overwhelming. Bambara – twin brothers Reid and Blaze Bateh, singer/guitarist and drummer respectively, and bassist William Brookshire – have been evolving their midnight-black noise into something more subtle and expansive ever since the release of their 2013 debut Dreamviolence. That process greatly accelerated on 2018’s Shadow On Everything, their first on Wharf Cat and a huge stride forward for the band both lyrically and sonically. The album was rapturously received by the press, listeners and their peers. NPR called it a “mesmerising...western, gothic opus,” Bandcamp called the "horror-house rampage" "one of the year's most gripping listens," and Alexis Marshall of Daughters named it his “favorite record of 2018.” Shadow also garnered much acclaim on the other side of the Atlantic. Influential British 6Music DJ Steve Lamacq, dubbed them the best band of 2019’s SXSW, and Joe Talbot of the UK band IDLES said, "The best thing I heard last year was easily Bambara and their album Shadow On Everything." The question was, though, how to follow it? To start, the band did what they always do: they locked themselves in their windowless Brooklyn basement to write. Decisions were made early on to try and experiment with new instrumentation and song structures, even if the resulting compositions would force the band to adapt their storied live set, known for its tenacity and technical prowess. Throughout the songwriting process, the band pulled from their deep well of creative references, drawing on the likes of Leonard Cohen, Ennio Morricone, Sade, classic French noir L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafraud, as well as Southern Gothic stalwarts Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews. Once the building blocks were set in place, they met with producer Drew Vandenberg, who mixed Shadow On Everything, in Athens, GA to record the foundation of Stray. After recruiting friends Adam Markiewicz (The Dreebs) on violin, Sean Smith (Klavenauts) on trumpet and a crucial blend of backing vocals by Drew Citron (Public Practice) and Anina Ivry-Block (Palberta), Bambara convened in a remote cabin in rural Georgia, where Reid laid down his vocals. The finished product represents both the band's most experimental and accessible work to date. The addition of Citron and Ivory-Block’s vocals create a hauntingly beautiful contrast to Bateh’s commanding baritone on tracks like “Sing Me to the Street”, “Death Croons” and “Stay Cruel," while the Dick Dale inspired guitar riffs on “Serafina” and "Heat Lightning" and the call-and-response choruses throughout the album showcase Bambara’s ability to write songs that immediately demand repeat listens. While the music itself is evocative and propulsive, a fever dream all of its own, the lyrical content pushes the record even further into its own darkly thrilling realm. If the songs on Shadow On Everything were like chapters in a novel, then this time they’re short stories. Short stories connected by death and its effect on the characters in contact with it. “Death is what you make it” runs a lyric in “Sweat,” a line which may very well be the thread that ties the pages of these stories together. But it would be wrong to characterize Stray as simply the sound of the graveyard. Light frequently streams through and, whether refracted through the love and longing found on songs like “Made for Me” or the fantastical nihilism on display in tracks like the anthemic “Serafina,” reveals this album to be the monumental step forward that it is. Here Bambara sound like they’ve locked into what they were always destined to achieve, and the effect is nothing short of electrifying.

Disq have assembled a razor-sharp, teetering-on-the-edge-of-chaos melange of sounds, experiences, memories, and influences. Collector ought to be taken literally—it is a place to explore and catalogue the Madison, Wisconsin band’s relationships to themselves, their pasts, and the world beyond the American Midwest as they careen from their teens into their 20s. This turbulence is backdropped by gnarled power pop, anxious post-punk, warm psych-folk, and hectic, formless, tongue-in-cheek indie rock. Collector, like the band itself, is defined and tightly-contoured by the ties between the five members. Raina Bock (bass/vocals) and Isaac deBroux-Slone (guitar/vocals) have known each other from infancy, growing up and into music together. Through gigging around Madison, they met and befriended Shannon Connor (guitar/keys/vocals), Logan Severson (guitar/vocals), and Brendan Manley (drums)—three equally dedicated and adventurous musicians committed to coaxing genre boundaries. Produced by Rob Schnapf, Collector is a set of songs largely pulled from each of the five members’ demo piles over the years. They’re organic representations of each moment in time, gathered together to tell a mixtape-story of growing up in 21st century America. The songs are marked by urgency, introspection, tongue-in-cheek nihilism, and a shrewd understanding of pop and rock structures and their corollaries—as well as a keen desire to dialogue with and upset them.

The dream of 1970s downtown New York—contrasting avant-garde art rock and jittery No Wave skronk—is alive in Brooklyn post-punks Public Practice. On their debut album, *Gentle Grip*, the quartet (featuring members of indie-pop group Beverly and clangorous punks WALL) reimagines vintage sounds for modern counterculture, delivered through frontwoman Sam York’s disaffected staccato voice. Anti-capitalist anthem “Disposable” is dystopic B-52’s, making a good partner to the anti-materialist, bass-forward banger “Compromised.” “My Head” is unexpectedly groovy, like something straight out of the downtrodden dance music of Liquid Liquid; “Disposable” is punk-funk New Wave. While Public Practice wears their influences on their sleeve, the band has managed to shape those familiar sounds into something entirely new on *Gentle Grip*: an innovative and tense disco for listeners begging to be challenged.

Digital id out on 5/15 & LPs & CDs ship on 6/26. First 150 black vinyl records hand-numbered on a first come, first served basis. Public Practice is reanimating the spirit of late ‘70s New York with their intoxicating brand of no wave-tinged dark disco. The band came in hot with their punchy balance of punk, funk, and pop on the critically acclaimed Distance is a Mirror EP in 2018, paving the way for their highly anticipated freshman record. Now, after a year of intimate and experimental songwriting in their home studio, they have fleshed out the energetic, playfully oblique sound captured on their debut full-length Gentle Grip. Together, the foursome creates bold, slinky rhythms and groove-filled hooks that get under your skin and into your dancing shoes. The musicians’ unique chemistry and approach to songwriting is part of what makes their world so intriguing. Magnetic singer and lyricist Sam York and guitarist and principal sonic architect Vince McClelland, who were creative music partners for years prior to Public Practice’s formation, come to the table with an anarchic perspective that aims to eradicate creative barriers by challenging the very idea of what a song can be. Paradoxically, Drew Citron, on bass/vocals/synth, and drummer/producer Scott Rosenthal are uncannily adept at working within the framework of classic pop structures. But instead of clashing, these contrasting styles challenge and complement one another, resulting in an album full of spiraling tensions and unexpected turns. Inspired by influential New York bands like Liquid Liquid and ESG, the foursome has a natural inclination toward music that sounds rough-hewn. “We were thinking about classic New York dance albums, and the thing that stuck out is that many sounded like they were recorded in less-than-ideal situations,” McClelland says. “There was always something about them that felt somewhat home-cooked.” McClelland has spent the past few years constructing a home studio with carefully chosen and occasionally hand-made equipment in an effort to recreate that “cobbled together” sound. As three quarters of Public Practice are engineers as well as instrumentalists, their collection of gear, combined with the recording rig McClelland built, allowed the band to record Gentle Grip largely at their own hybrid practice space/studio in Brooklyn. “Having a space and setup that is unique, you're always going to have more of a signature sound,” McClelland explains. They spent the better part of 2019 playing with sounds, riffing on McClelland’s demos, and recording a number of songs live to tape. Although a handful of sessions occurred in traditional recording studios, the band’s autonomy and ability to record themselves imbues their music with a sense of freedom and gives it a distinct character — a home-cooked sound that is purely Public Practice. York, who writes all of Public Practice’s lyrics, with the exception of the McClelland-penned “How I Like It,” explores the complexities and contradictions of modern life overtop danceable rhythms and choruses that disarmingly open up the doors to self-reflection. “You don’t want to live a lie / But it’s easy" York sings on “Compromised," the record’s brisk, gyrating lead single. As York puts it, “No one's moral compass reads truth north at all times. We all want to be our best green recycling selves, but still want to buy the shiny new shoes — how do you emotionally navigate through that? How do you balance material desires with the desire to be seen as morally good?” Towards the slinkier end of the album's auditory spectrum, songs like the supremely danceable “My Head” — which is about tuning out the incessant influx of external noise and finding your own internal groove — are more personally political but still hearken the last days of disco. While York’s songwriting focuses on the existential, McClelland has a serious aptitude for the technical aspects of music-making. He talks about music like an engineer with a sculptor’s mind and is especially drawn to ideas and structures antithetical to the standard pop repertoire. This unconventional creative drive gives rise to songs that play around with chord changes, instrumentation, and timbral qualities like “Hesitation,” Gentle Grip’s final track, which was constructed around the same note repeated on three different instruments. It also accounts for the bold experimentation found on songs like “See You When I Want To,” which was created by the band improvising with sounds over a steady beat while York free-associated lyrics. Far-ranging as Gentle Grip may be topically and stylistically, on their debut long-player Public Practice never lose sight of the fact that they want to have fun, and they want you to have fun too — a fact is inescapably evident in their frenetic live set, with York’s stage presence casting a spell like a young Debbie Harry, or Gudrun Gut circa Malaria! They make it almost impossible not to dance, and reveal that they are a band with a knack not only for curious, catchy songwriting but also for old school New York drama. And whether they are poking holes in commonly held ideas centered around relationships, creativity, capitalism, or chord structures, Public Practice stay on the same plane as their audience and remain part of conversation. After all, who wants to stand on top of a soapbox when there’s a dark, sweaty dance floor out there with room for all of us?

Much of Grimes’ fifth LP is rooted in darkness, a visceral response to the state of the world and the death of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia. “It’s like someone who\'s very core to the project just disappearing,” she tells Apple Music of the loss. “I\'ve known a lot of people who\'ve died, but cancer just feels so demonic. It’s like someone who wants to live, who\'s a good person, and their life is just being taken away by this thing that can\'t be explained. I don\'t know, it just felt like a literal demon.” *Miss Anthropocene* deals heavily in theological ideas, each song meant to represent a new god in what Grimes loosely envisioned as “a super contemporary pantheon”—“Violence,” for example, is the god of video games, “My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)” the god of political apathy, and “Delete Forever” the god of suicide. The album’s title is that of the most “urgent” and potentially destructive of gods: climate change. “It’s about modernity and technology through a spiritual lens,” she says of the album, itself an iridescent display of her ability as a producer, vocalist, and genre-defying experimentalist. “I’ve also just been feeling so much pressure. Everyone\'s like, ‘You gotta be a good role model,’ and I was kind of thinking like, ‘Man, sometimes you just want to actually give in to your worst impulses.’ A lot of the record is just me actually giving in to those negative feelings, which feels irresponsible as a writer sometimes, but it\'s also just so cathartic.” Here she talks through each of the album\'s tracks. **So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Art Mix)** “I think I wanted to make a sort of hard Enya song. I had a vision, a weird dream where I was just sort of falling to the earth, like fighting a Balrog. I woke up and said, ‘I need to make a video for this, or I need to make a song for this.’ It\'s sort of embarrassing, but lyrically, the song is kind of about when you decide to get pregnant or agree to get pregnant. It’s this weird loss of self, or loss of power or something. Because it\'s sort of like a future life in subservience to this new life. It’s about the intense experience deciding to do that, and it\'s a bit of an ego death associated with making that decision.” **Darkseid** “I forget how I met \[Lil\] Uzi \[Vert\]. He probably DMed me or something, just like, ‘Wanna collaborate and hang out and stuff?’ We ended up playing laser tag and I just did terribly. But instrumentally, going into it I was thinking, ‘How do I make like a super kind of goth banger for Uzi?’ When that didn\'t really work out, I hit up my friend Aristophanes, or Pan. Just because I think she\'s fucking great, and I think she\'s a great lyricist and I just love her vocal style, and she kind of sounds good on everything, and it\'s especially dark stuff. Like she would make this song super savage and intense. I should let Pan explain it, but her translation of the lyrics is about a friend of hers who committed suicide.” **Delete Forever** “A lot of people very close to me have been super affected by the opioid crisis, or just addiction to opiates and heroin—it\'s been very present in my life, always. When Lil Peep died, I just got super triggered and just wanted to go make something. It seemed to make sense to keep it super clean sonically and to keep it kind of naked. so it\'s a pretty simple production for me. Normally I just go way harder. The banjo at the end is comped together and Auto-Tuned, but that is my banjo playing. I really felt like Lil Peep was about to make his great work. It\'s hard to see anyone die young, but especially from this, ’cause it hit so close to home.” **Violence** “This sounds sort of bad: In a way it feels like you\'re giving up when you sing on someone else\'s beats. I literally just want to produce a track. But it was sort of nice—there was just so much less pain in that song than I think there usually is. There\'s this freedom to singing on something I\'ve never heard before. I just put the song on for the first time, the demo that \[producer/DJ\] i\_o sent me, and just sang over it. I was like, \'Oh!\' It was just so freeing—I never ever get to do that. Everyone\'s like, ‘What\'s the meaning? What\'s the vibe?’ And honestly, it was just really fucking fun to make. I know that\'s not good, that everyone wants deeper meanings and emotions and things, but sometimes just the joy of music is itself a really beautiful thing.” **4ÆM** “I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called *Bajirao Mastani*—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, ‘Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.’ So I was just sort of making fan art, and I then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this doesn\'t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.’ It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started.” **New Gods** “I really wish I started the record with this song. I just wanted to write the thesis down: It\'s about how the old gods sucked—well, I don\'t want to say they sucked, but how the old gods have definitely let people down a bit. If you look at old polytheistic religions, they\'re sort of pre-technology. I figured it would be a good creative exercise to try to think like, ‘If we were making these gods now, what would they be like?’ So it\'s sort of about the desire for new gods. And with this one, I was trying to give it a movie soundtrack energy.” **My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)** “It\'s sort of written in character, but I was just in a really cranky mood. Like it\'s just sort of me being a whiny little brat in a lot of ways. But it\'s about political apathy—it’s so easy to be like, ‘Everything sucks. I don\'t care.’ But I think that\'s a very dangerous attitude, a very contagious one. You know, democracy is a gift, and it\'s a thing not many people have. It\'s quite a luxury. It seems like such a modern affliction to take that luxury for granted.” **You’ll miss me when I’m not around** “I got this weird bass that was signed by Derek Jeter in a used music place. I don\'t know why—I was just trying to practice the bass and trying to play more instruments. This one feels sort of basic for me, but I just really fell in love with the lyrics. It’s more like ‘Delete Forever,’ where it feels like it\'s almost too simple for Grimes. But it felt really good—I just liked putting it on. Again, you gotta follow the vibe, and it had a good vibe. Ultimately it\'s sort of about an angel who kills herself and then she wakes up and she still made it to heaven. And she\'s like, \'What the fuck? I thought I could kill myself and get out of heaven.’ It\'s sort of about when you\'re just pissed and everyone\'s being a jerk to you.” **Before the Fever** “I wanted this song to represent literal death. Fevers are just kind of scary, but a fever is also sort of poetically imbued with the idea of passion and stuff too. It\'s like it\'s a weirdly loaded word—scary but compelling and beautiful. I wanted this song to represent this trajectory where like it starts sort of threatening but calm, and then it slowly gets sort of more pleading and like emotional and desperate as it goes along. The actual experience of death is so scary that it\'s kind of hard to keep that aloofness or whatever. I wanted it to sort of be like following someone\'s psychological trajectory if they die. Specifically a kind of villain. I was just thinking of the Joffrey death scene in *Game of Thrones*. And it\'s like, he\'s so shitty and such a prick, but then, when he dies, like, you feel bad for him. I kind of just wanted to express that feeling in the song.” **IDORU** “The bird sounds are from the Squamish birdwatching society—their website has lots of bird sounds. But I think this song is sort of like a pure love song. And it just feels sort of heavenly—I feel very enveloped in it, it kind of has this medieval/futurist thing going on. It\'s like if ‘Before the Fever’ is like the climax of the movie, then ‘IDORU’ is the end title. It\'s such a negative energy to put in the world, but it\'s good to finish with something hopeful so it’s not just like this mean album that doesn\'t offer you anything.”

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

Conceived in the 1980s in Mexico and brought to California through the border inside of his 6-month-pregnant mother, Rudy de Anda’s debut solo record is a love letter to the long historical lineage of rock ’n roll music as interpreted through his multicultural lens. “I write my own story, I don’t want to be defined by any scene” de Anda proclaims of his personal journey, and his ability to adapt and flit between cities and cultures is part of why L.A. Record has called his sound “deliberately difficult to classify, familiar but novel at the same time.” Since 2005, De Anda has played thousands of shows in various musical projects, but with ‘Tender Epoch’, tellingly the first recorded under his own name, he has clearly found his own voice with a wealth of stories to spotlight. It’s exquisitely crafted pop, with universal messages of heartbreak and loss that still feel appropriate played speeding windows-down on the highway in the coastal sunshine. Above all, De Anda likes to keep people guessing: from the album artwork to the multi-faceted textures of sound, ‘Tender Epoch’ feels ambiguous to any era, a perfect collusion of old and new that showcases a music historian’s knowledge of both past greats and influential peers. Sculpting his own path through a wild ride that feels unlikely to let up, De Anda refuses to settle down or get comfortable, instead carving out a classic record that is sure to set a standard for songwriting to come. The whole Colemine and Karma Chief family is proud to welcome Rudy De Anda and to present Tender Epoch.

The timeless qualities of traditional tunes can carry us across oceans and eons, linking us not only to the past but to each other as well. It was under the banner of those eternal connections that the trio of Bonny Light Horseman came together. From Wisconsin festival fields and a German art hub to a snowy upstate studio and everywhere in between, the astral folk outfit—comprised of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman—is mixing the ancient, mystical medium of transatlantic traditional folk music with a contemporary, collective brush. The resulting album, Bonny Light Horseman, is an elusive kind of sonic event: a bottled blend of lightning and synergy that will excite fans of multiple genres, eras, and ages. Mitchell, the esteemed singer-songwriter whose Broadway smash Hadestown recently won “Best Musical” plus seven other trophies at the 2019 Tony Awards, met the indie rock stalwart Johnson a few years back through that thoroughly modern platform, Twitter. Best known for the Fruit Bats project he has helmed for two decades as well as for stints in The Shins and Califone, Johnson had been friends with producer and instrumentalist Kaufman (Craig Finn, Josh Ritter, The National, Bob Weir) for 10 years. Kaufman and Mitchell were already acquainted; together, the three made an unmistakable artistic connection, and had just begun experimenting when an invitation to perform at the 2018 Eaux Claires festival came from the fest’s co-founders, Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner. Encouraged by the natural ease and intuitive bond they felt while sketching musical ideas in early sessions, the Eaux Claires play provided a target of sorts and they seized upon the opportunity to form the band in an official capacity. “The conversation about starting the group and figuring out the type of music we’d play happened very quickly,” Kaufman says. “It’s like a love story: a really big fire, and the shared ideas of what we wanted the music to feel like. We wanted an openness and for it to feel emotional and personal.” Each musician brought their own musical ideas to the rehearsals and the direction toward traditional songs from the British Isles emerged quickly. “I think it’s fair to say we are all inspired by traditional music in different ways,” Mitchell says. “We wanted to rework old songs but not in a ‘research project’ way. The emotions, the feeling of momentousness, the openness—even the chords being in open tuning—we wanted everything to be wide open. It was very healing to delve into these old stories and images that have existed for so long that you can rest in them.” Following the success of the Wisconsin show, they were invited by Vernon and Dessner’s 37d03d (fka PEOPLE) collective to participate in a week-long artist residency in Berlin. Working at a venue called The Funkhaus, the trio recorded what would become the foundation of the full-length album, featuring fellow artists-in-residence Michael Lewis (bass, saxophone) and JT Bates (drums, percussion) as well as Vernon, Dessner, Kate Stables (of This Is The Kit), Lisa Hannigan, The Staves, Christian Lee Hutson, and more. Leaving Germany with roughly 60-percent of a record, the band reconvened at Dreamland Studios in Woodstock, NY, in January 2019 to finish, bringing Lewis and Bates as well as engineer Bella Blasko and mixer D. James Goodwin along with them. “We kept saying how intuitive and natural this was, some kind of alchemy that worked,” Johnson says. “I trust these guys. We can make stuff and I’m not trying to control anything but my end. It’s very collaborative and we all have complementary skill sets, different ways of working that somehow totally click. We all know this material from slightly different pathways but we meet in the weird middle with most of it.” From the first chords of the eponymous song “Bonny Light Horseman,” the band’s desire to create emotional intensity in open spaces is clear. Mitchell’s voice rises with a fevered energy over a mournful strum, and the song comes off as a lament that’s at once sad-eyed and hopeful. “Deep in Love” began as a Fruit Bats sketch, but after Kaufman recognized its uncanny (and unplanned) similarity to a certain traditional tune, the song took on new life at the hands of the band. Other numbers like “The Roving” and “Black Waterside” feature newly-written choruses sung in harmony—a fresh take on the typically chorus-less ancient ballad form. “Jane Jane” chimes along with a Johnson/Mitchell call-and-response refrain like some forgotten nursery rhyme; “Lowlands” sees Mitchell’s silvery verses cutting through the instrumental’s understated dynamics; and the record-closing duet “10,000 Miles” balances the sadness of leaving with the warmth of requited love. Nowhere on Bonny Light Horseman does the music feel staid, or burdened from the too-tight fit of a stuffy Renaissance collar. This is colorful, textured work: a lush and loving ode to the past with one eye fixed on the present. Not once did the band feel burdened by the errand of a too-faithful homage, instead reveling in a sense of freedom to take leaps and liberties as they saw fit. “The folk singer Martin Carthy once said, ‘You can’t break these songs that are hundreds if not thousands of years old; you’re not gonna hurt them by messing with them,’” Mitchell says. “The songs feel like ours, but they’re not ours. We worked on them and they feel like an authentic expression of us, but we’re also reenacting ritual.” “This record is about timeless humanity,” Johnson says. “These 500-year-old lyrics are so deeply applicable. ‘The Roving’ could be the plot of an ’80s teen movie: ‘I had a wild summer with this awesome girl then she broke my heart!’ How incredible is it that as humans we still just want to love and have sex and feel sad and fight? It’s ancient music that feels, emotionally, right now. It’s thoroughly modern.”

“Movement is a big theme across this record,” Slow Pulp’s Teddy Matthews says of his Chicago indie rock outfit’s appropriately titled debut LP. Clocking in at just under a half hour, *Moveys* is a swift and often sublime set of 21st-century shoegaze that emphasizes just how mercurial our emotions can be. And though they started work on it together just after the release of 2019’s *Big Day* EP, they were forced to finish it apart once the pandemic took hold: Just before lockdown, singer-guitarist Emily Massey left Chicago to care for her parents in Wisconsin after a serious car accident had left them both hospitalized. It was there—on a borrowed mic in her father’s home studio—that she recorded nearly all of her vocals for the album. “You really don\'t know how to do it until you do it,” Massey tells Apple Music. “I think up until that point, we had written songs kind of sporadically, and didn\'t really know how to work together in the best way. Finishing this record was like a deep breath. Like, ‘Okay, we can do this type of thing.’” Here, the foursome—Massey, guitarist Henry Stoehr, bassist Alex Leeds, and drummer Teddy Matthews—tell us the story behind every song on the record. **New Horse** Emily Massey: “Spring had come, and winter had been really tough for me. I had hit a pretty low point in terms of being very depressed and very self-conscious. I started to feel this desire to get out of it, like for the first time that I could see the other side of it. I think a lot of the songs that we had started writing before that point, I was having a really tough time trying to finish them or work on anything creative. I had felt like I didn\'t know what kind of music I wanted to make, and really even how to do it. But this song just represented the first time I felt like I can do this, like I don\'t have to be depressed all the time. I can try to see things a little bit differently and be a little different.” **Trade It** EM: “I wrote the lyrics for that one after I got diagnosed with chronic Epstein-Barr virus, which is like mono. Up until that point, I was just sleeping every day and could not function like a normal person. I didn\'t know what was going on. I was really upset with how I had treated myself up until that point, how mean I was to myself for being so tired. Just laying into myself for a lot of things, wishing that I could have taken back a lot of the stuff that I had said to myself that ended up being very damaging, and took a long time to unlearn. The instrumental is one of my favorites in the record.” **Idaho** EM: “I had been reflecting on some of my past relationships, thinking about how I wasn\'t in a very good place, personally, and fooling myself into thinking that I can be in a relationship even though I wasn\'t very healthy myself or ready for it. I think the song is about trying to accept other people\'s love and kindness when you don\'t love yourself. It was really hard to believe in that. I just felt really un-genuine to the people I was seeing, because they\'re saying all these nice things to me, and I just wasn\'t taking it well or believing it, or refusing to believe it. That can be kind of damaging in a relationship. It would already end as soon as it would begin.” **Track** EM: “I have a little notebook with random lines or tiny poems that I’ve written. I had found this poem about a woman that I saw on the train who just reminded me of my grandmother. She passed away from Alzheimer\'s when I was 17, and I think I had had a conversation recently with my mom about Alzheimer\'s. She has a big fear of getting it. It\'s a super genetically based disease, and she has some memory issues sometimes. I think one of the hardest parts about seeing somebody deal with Alzheimer\'s is just them forgetting the people that they loved. The song kind of turned into this reassurance for mom that if she does get it, no matter what happens, I\'m not going anywhere, my family is not going anywhere. We\'ll love her no matter what, even if it\'s hard, even if it\'s difficult.” **At It Again** EM: “Henry had written most of this song and asked me to write the rest of the lyrics. This was at a point when COVID had hit, and I was at home, taking care of my parents, and just felt very in and out of other difficult things that my family and friends were going through at that time. Before all of this happened, I’d started feeling a lot better, and the songs were coming together and the record was coming together. I was really excited about that. I was learning how to take care of myself better. Then when everything happened all at once, it was like a quick slingshot back to feeling really depressed. I wasn\'t doing a very good job of taking care of myself. I was taking care of other people, and wasn\'t on top of my medications, and wasn\'t getting enough sleep, and all that jazz. So the ‘it’ in this context is depression. It\'s funny, because I think it\'s our poppiest, happiest-sounding song on the record.” **Channel 2** Alex Leeds: “That was a song that I started pretty much right after we released *Big Day*. We had started to play it live back then, but it was a pretty different song, even though the chords and the melody were somewhat similar to how they ended up. Then when it came time to record it for the album, it felt like there was something missing from the way it was translating. So we kind of sat on it for a while, and it was getting getting later in the recording process and I just started trying to reimagine it. I was just doing some core exercises one morning, and the melody just popped into my head. Then from the melody came the guitar solo.” **Whispers (In the Outfield)** Henry Stoehr: “When we started to record the album, I bought a weighted keyboard piano and just started playing it a little more. I started playing that chord progression and just fine-tuned it slowly over the course of recording the rest of the album. I realized I was thinking of this one moment, this song from this baseball movie I watched when I was a kid. Really wanted it to hit really hard and be dramatic, but I just couldn\'t get it there. Emily was already home at that point, and her dad is a really, really good piano player. So I had Emily ask him if he wanted to do it, and he was super down. I just sent him the chords, and then he sent me like four different versions of him playing it.” EM: “Yeah, maybe someday we\'ll release that. My dad is a full-time musician and pianist. He has a studio at home, and he engineered all my vocals, except for ‘New Horse.’ This was the first piece of music that he had played after the accident. He was also recovering from a concussion, but he had a neck brace on. It was funny to watch him play it.” **Falling Apart** EM: “I was having trouble coming up with the melody for this one. This was after quarantine. I take a long time to process trauma and emote about it. I think it gets to a point where it\'s a little bit frustrating, because I want to cry, I want to think about it in a healthy way. But I just felt like I didn\'t have time, or I had to be strong for all these people, and take care of these people. It was a weird juxtaposition of being in a place last year where I felt like I was falling apart all the time, and was crying all the time, and was a lot. Then at this point in time, wishing I could do that, but couldn’t.” **Montana** HS: “That was the beginning of us starting a new songwriting approach, where we would send Emily the chords to adjust, so it works with her melody better. I just started a demo with those chords, and it was really different. But then Emily kind of switched it. She started playing it a little bit slower, moved the chorus around. We actually figured that one out at practice, just playing it live together. We switched it to downtempo, made it a lot sludgier. It feels a little more like a country song.” EM: “That was really a reassuring one. I usually write the melody and it\'s just kind of filler words, just random words. But the words and the melody just kind of came out together, and I just liked how they sounded. It just made sense of a fresh start. The lyrics are kind of effervescent, hoping that you can get some of the past experiences or things you\'ve said to yourself or said to other people out of your head, and move forward from it.” **Movey** HS: “It’s pretty bonkers. I\'d just gotten this new tape machine, and I was just goofing off a little bit. It just turned out how it turned out, but I really liked it, right after doing it. I think as we kept writing the album, at one point, Emily had said something about the word ‘movey’ being really a good word for the title of the album. Which got me thinking about putting the actual song ‘Movey’ on it. The way I think of it, it sounds like an end credits song. It’s an album with a really sad ending. Then it’s over. I like how it feels to have a reset button.” Teddy Matthews: “It feels like some way of thinking about emotions being transient and just shifting a lot of the time. Movement was a big theme across the record in general, and there are specific examples too, like Emily\'s ballet dancing. But that emotional shift feels like a part of that, and in kind of a shocking way, I think.”

Slow Pulp’s remarkable full-length debut Moveys is a testament to hard-fought personal growth. In the process of making their new record, the Chicago-based indie rock band powered through health challenges, personal upheaval, and a pandemic, all while learning how to be better songwriters and friends. Full of blistering energy and emotional catharsis, this compelling 10-track collection highlights the band's resourcefulness and resilience to come together even when they were states away.

Some punk rock bands talk as though their music is entirely original, without influence or precedent in rock history, sprung solely from their brilliant brains. X, one of punk’s greatest, has always been blunt about the inspiration they take from 1950s and 1960s music, and on *ALPHABETLAND*, they make that connection clearer than ever. “To me, that was the whole point of punk rock,” singer and bassist John Doe tells Apple Music. “Rock ’n’ roll had gotten away from its roots, and from the freedom it represented. We wanted to bring it back. We wanted to remind people of Little Richard and Gene Vincent, and then, later, country singers like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette.” *ALPHABETLAND*, the LA band’s first album in 35 years with the original lineup—Doe and singer Exene Cervenka (who were married from 1980 to 1985), pompadoured guitarist Billy Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake—similarly broadcasts its influences, from The Doors (whose keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, produced X’s 1980 debut, Los Angeles) to the 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las to the grimy, desperate LA of Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and Ross Macdonald novels. This new set of 11 songs (only one of which is longer than three minutes) follows up on earlier X songs both sonically and in its depiction of not just a city that’s falling down, but a generation, a country, even a world. “The more political songs, or just songs about the world being on an edge, that’s not a unique subject for us,” Doe says. Here he tells the story behind each track on X’s inspired, and inspiring, return. **ALPHABETLAND** “It’s probably the most adventurous song on the record, which is one reason we used it as the album title. It’s about the god Mercury, who either brings carnage or brings riches. The bridge goes, ‘Mercury, you will skate on silver blades/Figure eights on a frozen lake.’ Billy came up with the music for the bridge, which feels completely unexpected. Originally, the song was called ‘Mercury,’ but Billy kept referring to it as ‘Alphabetland,’ like it was some 1950s board game he remembered, even though the lyrics never use the word ‘Alphabetland’—only ‘alphabet wrecked’ and ‘alphabet mine.’ A relationship gets destroyed, so the alphabet gets wrecked and words are meaningless. We finally relented, because it’s like, okay, Billy’s going to call it ‘Alphabetland’ regardless of what the title is.” **Free** “I wrote ‘Free’ in the character of another person, a woman. It’s for all my female partners, sisters, and women I respect. At first, it was called ‘Promised Land,’ but the band gave me a bunch of shit: ‘You can’t use the name of a Chuck Berry song.‘ I also had three different types of music for the verse, different chords that didn’t seem to fit right. D.J. coming up with his drum part, the jungle drums, gave the song the right tension. I wish someone like Pussy Riot would cover this.” **Water & Wine** “It was inspired by seeing a band I love, Shannon & The Clams, who have kind of a surf-rock element. ‘Who gets water and who gets wine’ is about the financial divide in society: who has access, who’s double platinum. We shot some footage, and our friend Bill Morgan, who made *The Unheard Music* \[a 1986 documentary about X\], made a video from that and old footage of a movie called *Ivan the Terrible* from the ’20s. It’s a silent movie, and the characters pour gold coins over one another’s heads—just incredible excess. Billy loves playing the sax, so we say, ’OK, throw it on there.’ It’s nice to bring it in at the very end. We’re not one for high concept, but we do like having a little bit of fun with production.” **Strange Life** “Exene wrote most of the lyrics. We thought about The Doors a lot on this, and their song ‘Strange Days.’ It’s about driving down the road and seeing all the images, mile markers or wooden crosses, and that being a metaphor for going down the road of life, not to get too high-minded. After you’ve been on the road for a while, you take stock of the road, or your life, and you say, ‘Boy, this is strange. How did we get *here*?” **I Gotta Fever** “I wrote that in 1977, and it was called ‘Heater’: ‘I got a heater.’ It’s on an anthology we put out \[in 1997\], *Beyond and Back*. It was about an antihero breaking into someone’s apartment and falling in love, or in lust—a literary exercise for my love of film noir and the Los Angeles of that time. We wanted to rerecord it, but the words were stupid. The whole idea of calling a gun a heater, that didn’t ring true, so I rewrote it. It still has a cinematic quality—the diamond touch and molten lead, people being obsessed and lusting after each other.” **Delta 88 Nightmare** “The second of three old songs we rerecorded, it’s also on *Beyond and Back*. Around 1978, Exene and I and a few friends drove up to Monterey, California, because we’d been reading \[the John Steinbeck novel\] *Cannery Row*. We drove up there in my rattletrap car, an International Travelall, to look for hobos and bohemians. We got there and Monterey was the first time we’d seen a city that had been gentrified. It was full of rich people. We realized we were the bums, the rats crawling out from under the cracks. The music was just too much fun to not have a good version of it. It’s the fastest song of the record.” **Star Chambered** “Exene wrote this in the character of a railroad wife—a person who hangs out in honky-tonk bars. It seemed like a Bob Dylan song to me. And this is where the difference between writing a song in character and writing about ourselves gets blurry. Exene and I define ourselves as the characters we write about. It’s a playful song; I happened on some new chords in the verse, and didn’t expect it to sound so much like ‘Fortune Teller,’ the 1960s song by Benny Spellman. I hope people go back and listen to that. And there’s a reference to \[Tennessee Ernie Ford’s\] ‘Sixteen Tons,’ but it’s ‘I played 16 bars and what did I get?/Another hangover and drunker in debt.’ I think a lot of people can relate to the line ‘I bet on odd ’til I broke even, and then just had to go.’ You do bet on odd. You bet on the chance that you might get through, and you either get what you want, settle for what you got, or you move on. If there’s anything to be said about the band at this point, it’s that we’re grateful to be around.” **Angel on the Road** “Exene wrote this as a poem, and I said, ‘Please give me the words, because I know that’s a song.’ That was the first new song we wrote, back at the end of 2018. It’s about a woman who runs away and her car dies. She’s listening to the Allman Brothers, and then she gets picked up by Duane Allman, and that’s her version of heaven: to ride forever in a big rig with Duane Allman. I love Billy’s guitar solo. It sounds kind of like Robby Krieger of The Doors. There’s also a 1950s-style spoken chorus, like The Ink Spots or something, which I never thought we’d be able to do.” **Cyrano deBerger’s Back** “I never liked the version we recorded on \[X’s 1987 album\] *See How We Are*. This is more like the way it was originally written. The title—maybe I was inspired by that Television song about ‘the arms of Venus de Milo.’ There’s a funk guitar lick, or maybe it’s more like Ben E. King—funk or doo-wop, one or the other. Lou Reed was all about doo-wop, and so were the Ramones.” **Goodbye Year, Goodbye** “That was the last song we worked on. I took the lead, and Exene did some editing and additional lyrics. The music is just straight-up punk rock, because I thought the record needed a good old-fashioned punk rock song. Originally, it sounded too much like \[1980’s\] ‘Your Phone’s Off the Hook,’ so we added a few different things. I was inspired by reading the book *Midnight Cowboy*. Exene gave it to me for my birthday, and the lyric ‘Brother and sister pretend to be lovers’ is from a moment in the book where Joe Buck goes to an Andy Warhol-type party. The first verse, ‘Beats keep beating my brains in,’ means there’s just too much going on. Everybody is so overscheduled, and there’s so much noise.” **All the Time in the World** “Robby Krieger and I know each other and have gotten a little closer in the last five years. He left a long message on my phone, mistaking me for someone else, so I texted back and said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong person.’ He called and said, ‘I’m so sorry. How are things?’ I said, ‘I’m finishing up making an X record.’ He said, ‘You should have me come down and jam on a song.’ It was perfect, because it ended up being similar to some of the stuff he played on \[The Doors album\] *American Prayer*—it’s very beatnik. Billy played the piano part; my bass part was bad, so we took it off, and it’s just Exene, Billy, and Robby on the song. As Exene says, ‘We have all the time in the world... Turns out not to be that much.’ We have whatever time we have, and goddamn, we better make use of it. What a way to end the record.”

While everyone is social distancing, closing ranks and donning masks while they shop, life can seem somewhat surreal to the senses. Yet, through all of the chaos, one thing is constant, music brings us together. Now, on the 40th Anniversary of the landmark, Los Angeles, and 35 years since the original band have released an album – X, one of the greatest Punk Rock bands in music history, releases ALPHABETLAND today via Bandcamp. The original foursome - Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Billy Zoom, and DJ Bonebrake have now made the album available for fans to purchase and by adapting to this moment, X continues to embody the same spirit they did when they began in 1977. “When your heart is broken you think every song is about that. These songs were written in the last 18 months & it blows my mind how timely they are,” explained John Doe. “We all want our family, friends & fans to hear our records as soon as it's finished. This time we could do that. Thanks to Fat Possum & our audience.” The bands record label, Fat Possum, listened and agreed. Plans were quickly set in motion to release the new music via Bandcamp and have said they're working to get the record available elsewhere as quickly as possible.

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT got off the ground in the Money Belt, only to find its legs in the Borscht Belt. Musically it has deep roots, from the Southern Delta to the discos of Munich. There’s a kind of folkish inevitability to it, lots of acoustic instruments, on top of the each other and side by side. But as much as folk music is the soil all music grows from, it never hurts to have a boiler room. So, there’s always a rhythm section shuffling under your feet here. Written mostly with longtime co-conspirator klipschutz, this LP steps out of Chuck Prophet’s comfort zone (“two guitars, bass, and drums”). After nailing three tracks in S.F. with Grammy-winning alchemist Matt Winegar, Prophet confesses, “We hit a wall. Schedules. Money. Towed vehicles: a thousand large to get one van out of lockup.”

A couple of months after releasing 2019’s *ZUU*, MC Denzel Curry joined the hardcore band Bad Brains for a rerecording of their 1986 classic “I Against I.” The point was clear: For as steeped as Curry is in the regional vernacular of southeastern rap, he also understood rap’s spiritual link to punk—music that channels the raw, noisy energy of youth. At eight tracks in 18 minutes, *UNLOCKED* is even shaped like a hardcore record, with tracks that mutate, Hulk-like, from sturdy weight-room rap to tangles of warped vocals and dissonant samples that play like experiments frothing over in real time (“Take\_it\_Back\_v2,” “DIET\_”). As exciting as Curry is—to paraphrase an old chestnut about great singers, one could listen to him yell the phone book—the anchor here is producer Kenny Beats, whose tracks mix the feel of classic boom-bap with a sample-splattered approach that captures the tabs-open fever of now.

On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”

Throughout the late ’90s and 2000s, Destroyer was essentially a guitar band. Whether principal singer-songwriter (and erstwhile New Pornographer) Dan Bejar was exploring glam rock’s velvety contours (2001’s *Streethawk: A Seduction*), experimenting with drum- and bass-less baroque pop (2004’s *Your Blues*), or orchestrating a grand rock opus (2006’s *Destroyer’s Rubies*), six strings generally provided his songs their backbone. That changed with 2011’s *Kaputt*. “I cast down the guitar in disgust,” the Vancouver-based Bejar tells Apple Music, partly kidding, but mostly serious. *Kaputt*’s focus on atmosphere and mood (its soft-rock synths, fretless bass, ’80s jazz-pop saxophones) signaled a major shift in not only how Bejar would write songs (“I like to avoid writing on an instrument at all,” he says), but also how each of his subsequent albums would sound. The experiments with chamber strings and horns on 2015’s *Poison Season* and the apocalyptic New Wave of 2017’s *ken* were essentially a lead-up to the band’s 12th album, *Have We Met*, Bejar’s most self-aware, confident, and abstract work to date. It’s also his darkest, filled with scenes of violence, isolation, and existential dread, most of which Bejar wrote and sang into his laptop at his kitchen table at night. (He then sent those files to bandmates John Collins and Nicolas Bragg, who added everything from bass, drums, keys, and guitar to the glitchy bee-swarm textures that close out the LP.) But for all its excursions into the unknown, *Have We Met* is still very much a Destroyer album—those hyper-literate, self-referential lyrical flourishes and melodic arrangements that have become Bejar’s signature still fully intact. No matter how different things might feel this time around, \"You can see a Destroyer song coming a mile away,” Bejar says. Here, he deciphers his 10 latest. **Crimson Tide** \"It\'s composed of the style of writing which I usually call like \'old Destroyer.’ I don\'t see that kind of lyrical attack too much in any song I\'ve written since \[the 2009 EP\] *Bay of Pigs*. I had it in my special ‘this is for something else\' book, and finally wrote the song from disparate chunks of writing that struck me as kind of musical. But it was really all over the place, and I needed to tie it in together somehow. And for some reason I thought a good way to do that would be to constantly say \'crimson tide\' at the end of every stanza. It has specific connotations in America—like a college football team or a submarine movie, which are really dumb. And so I think that\'s important to point out, when there\'s dumb American things that take over language. It has an end-of-the-world ring to it, as like blood on the horizon, or some kind of apocalypse incoming. It was a loaded two words, and it felt good to sing it at the end of each verse and just see what the song ended up meaning.\" **Kinda Dark** \"As opposed to \'Crimson Tide,’ \'Kinda Dark\' I felt was some other kind of writing that I didn\'t really know—a kind of music, especially in the last half of the song, that I felt was a bit more violent-sounding than the band usually is. It\'s supposed to be the three stanzas, with the last one being particularly gnarly. The first one is kind of a cruising imagery, leading up to sitting on a park bench next to the Boston Strangler. The second one is more slightly eerie sci-fi. And the last one is just a dystopic kind of dogfight or something like that. Like a torture chamber with an audience.\" **It Just Doesn\'t Happen** \"That song was kind of different from the rest. I wrote it on the guitar, for one. And I sat down, and I just wrote it. When I do that, the songs always have kind of a ditty quality—a happy-go-lucky quality—as opposed to the song that comes before it, which has none of those qualities. I thought that the song titles themselves \[the lyrics name-check Primal Scream’s “You\'re Just Too Dark to Care,” Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” and The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”\] somehow reflect the vibe of being alone at night in a strange place. Which is something that happens to me a lot. And then wondering if that feeling of isolation is really so special or so specific to you, or is it maybe something that every single person is feeling on and off.\" **The Television Music Supervisor** \"For such specific subject matter, it came to me as if in a dream. It just came to me with the melody in this kind of lilting way. And it was just supposed to be this sad moment in someone\'s life, looking back on their life. It\'s either with perhaps some sense of regret or some sense of amazement. It really depends on what you get out of the words \'I can\'t believe what I\'ve done.\' I also thought the title was maybe such a specific phrase to the early 21st century, just because it\'s possible that in 20 years, no one will actually know what that means—the job that most specifically sums up our day and age. It really rolled off the tongue, too—for such a weird thing, it really feels so musical and melodious to sing it. I think that\'s why I wanted the music to be dreamlike and collapsing, like a fog that I sing through. John \[Collins, producer\] really nailed that one.\" **The Raven** \"I like art that talks about what it\'s going to do when it makes art—and then at the end, that\'s the piece of art. The art that\'s just like, ‘Here\'s my plan, it\'s going to be great,\' and then in the description of the plan, you get the plan, you don\'t get the thing. And that\'s kind of what \'The Raven\' is. The last line that repeats itself kind of alludes to that: \'That\'s what I\'ll write about when I write about The Raven.\' I think it\'s me—or it\'s the singer, because that\'s not me necessarily—talking about... In some ways it\'s kind of like \'When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ the Bob Dylan song. You know, when I get around to writing about the serious topics, this is what it\'s going to be.\" **Cue Synthesizer** \"I like that song a lot, for very different reasons. Part of it is that the production is just way more maniacal than I\'m used to, and extreme in its rhythm. It\'s kind of obliterated by guitar playing that\'s used as samples. I find it very groovy and also ominous at the same time, which is a combo that I like. I also really love stage direction as literature. It\'s maybe my favorite form of literature—the stuff in parentheses before there\'s any action in the play. Like, ‘Cue this, exit that.’ It\'s all a lead-up to the last verse, which is just unbridled dread. I don\'t normally let it loose like that. And when it\'s a song that\'s leading up to a portrait of a doomed world, it\'s interesting to me to see how musical words can be painted or darkened or made evil-sounding when you know what the last verse is. Or I guess before you even know, maybe the point *is* to make them sound terrible—to make the word ‘synthesizer\' or ‘guitar\' or ‘drum\' or \'fake drum\' sound like weapons.\" **University Hill** \"That\'s maybe my favorite song on the record. University Hill is a school in Vancouver in what is now a really nice part of town. When I was a kid, it was kind of a small school where fuck-ups would go. But the main thing that University Hill is is a description of some kind of force that comes and kills and puts people in camps. I mean, that\'s literally what the words describe. So there\'s very little room for interpretation, aside from the very end of the song that has this \'Come on, University Hill!’—like a school rallying cry. What I really needed, though—this will give you deep insights into how I work—the last verse goes, ‘Used to be so nice, used to be such a thrill.’ I needed something that rhymed with \'thrill.’ And I knew deep down it was going to be some kind of hill. And I was like, what hills have I known in my life? And out of nowhere, I was like, oh, there\'s University Hill, and that\'s kind of a big part of my childhood. It comes loaded with real imagery for me.\" **Have We Met** \"The original idea was for the record to be an attack on melody, to completely clamp down on that. But in the end, that\'s not what me and John like. I knew that Nick had been making these guitar pieces over the last couple of years, and I just wanted that one. There was a claustrophobic kind of Max Headroom vibe to the album, which was purposeful. But a moment of sighing, a moment of respite, would be really nice. I also just think it\'s kind of a really beautiful track. I wanted there to be a title track—and it made the most sense for that to be it. I knew the record would be called *Have We Met*. And I wanted that expression to be as open-ended or endless as it could possibly be. As far as the title, I realize I\'ve never heard that said in my entire life, even though I\'ve always heard it said in movies. So it automatically seemed strange to me, and it seemed really deceptively simple. I purposefully left the question mark out, so there could just be words. And there\'s something vaguely noir-ish to it, which I love in all things.\" **The Man in Black\'s Blues** \"I think that song was initially called ‘Death\' or \'Death Blues.’ It\'s just a song about death. One thing that I always seem to write about these days is the world disappearing or erasing itself. And I think that song is supposed to be on the more personal side of that, and it\'s just about what it looks like to be faced with utter loss. But also, it\'s supposed to be kind of like a balm. It\'s not like a dirge. And it\'s not wailing. I feel like it’s kind of a stroll through grief. The original demo was a lot like what you hear at an Italian ice cream parlor maybe, in the late \'80s. It had this kind of weird fairground midtempo disco. More than any other song on the record, I feel like there\'s a real disconnect between what I\'m singing and how I\'m singing it and the music around it, but I didn\'t want it to be a depressing song. I wanted it to be kind of danceable—a moment of levity—especially at the end, where it\'s pretty goofy, and it\'s like, \'Knock knock/Did you say who you come for?\' It\'s literally supposed to be the Grim Reaper at the door, but I kind of sing it in this British funk kind of way.\" **Foolssong** \"I wrote it around the same time that I wrote the *Kaputt* songs, but it didn\'t fit on that record, because there were no 6/8 or waltz-time songs allowed; if you didn\'t have a steady beat to it, then you got kicked off that album. But it was definitely written as a kind of lullaby. A lullaby\'s a vulnerable song, just purely because you sing it to a baby or a small child, which is a vulnerable headspace to be in. I feel like it\'s not a song I could write now. Maybe it\'s the only instance where I\'ve ever thought, like, I\'m serenading myself. And, you know, the lines are not comforting at all. The end refrain, \'Its figures all lit up/Nagasaki at night/At war with the devil\'—I guess maybe lullabies have a history of containing terrifying imagery. But maybe it\'s not so strange. I think there\'s a tradition of gothic horror in lullabies. This makes total sense.\"

After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”

clipping.\'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019\'s *There Existed an Addiction to Blood* by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes\' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop (\"Say the Name\" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while \"Eaten Alive\" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of \"Make Them Dead\"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent \"Pain Everyday\"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs\' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today\'s modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the \"final girl\" cliché on its head on the uptempo \"’96 Neve Campbell,\" while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning \"Looking Like Meat.\" Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record\'s many horrors. **Say the Name** William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about *Candyman*. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it\'s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That\'s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there\'s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, *Candyman* already does that for you. It\'s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” **’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)** Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn\'t clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that\'s a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: \"We didn\'t have our *Halloween*, *Friday the 13th* slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed\'s lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There\'s a Benny the Butcher song called \'’97 Hov,\' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that\'s the vibe you\'re going for. So some of the suggestions were like, \'’79 Jamie Lee Curtis\' or \'’82 Heather Langenkamp.\' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a *Scream* reference, \'’96 Neve Campbell\' made more sense.” **Something Underneath** DD: “There\'s a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we\'d work all day and then I\'d go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn\'t stand the vocal performance on. It\'s obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” **Make Them Dead** WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let\'s do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let\'s try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There\'s something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it\'s ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” **She Bad** WH: “That\'s our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn\'t a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It\'s mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I\'ve been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I\'m just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” **Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)** WH: “It\'s a joke about Alvin Lucier\'s beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” **Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)** DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don\'t write whole rap songs in 7/8. It\'s not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it\'s all down, I can\'t hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it\'s in 7/8, it\'s about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” **Check the Lock** WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” **Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9)** DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn\'t going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don\'t work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” **Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)** DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey \[Hussle\] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it\'s like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn\'t know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That\'s why it\'s called \'Eaten Alive,\' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” **Body for the Pile (with Sickness)** WH: “It already came out \[in 2016\]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called *NOISE*. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren\'t going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it\'s out and it\'s done.’ We looked around and I don\'t know, that comp isn\'t really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” **Enlacing** WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on *Splendor & Misery*, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” **Secret Piece** WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended *midcity* with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended *CLPPNG* with a John Cage piece, and then *There Existed* ends with Annea Lockwood\'s \'Piano Burning.\' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it\'s dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you\'re safe, right? The end of *Friday the 13th* one, the sun comes up and she\'s in the little boat, but that doesn\'t end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like *Friday the 13th*.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”

Over the last decade, Khruangbin (pronounced “krung-bin”) has mastered the art of setting a mood, of creating atmosphere. But on *Mordechai*, follow-up to their 2018 breakthrough *Con Todo El Mundo*, the Houston trio makes space in their globe-spinning psych-funk for something that’s been largely missing until now: vocals. The result is their most direct work to date. From the playground disco of “Time (You and I)” to the Latin rhythms of “Pelota”—inspired by a Japanese film, but sung in Spanish—to the balmy reassurances of “If There Is No Question,” much of *Mordechai* has the immediacy of an especially adventurous pop record. Even moments of hallucinogenic expanse (“One to Remember”) or haze (“First Class”) benefit from the added presence of a human voice. “Never enough paper, never enough letters,” they sing from inside a shower of West African guitar notes on “So We Won’t Forget,” the album’s high point. “You don’t have to be silent.”

A few years ago, the members of Pinegrove went looking for a quiet little place where they could make a lot of noise. The Montclair, New Jersey, rock group had broken through with 2016’s sneakily powerful *Cardinal*, an album full of neo-emo anthems that would earn the band a wildly devotional fanbase, inspiring plenty of late-night sing-alongs and first-time tattoos along the way. Not long after the success of *Cardinal*, Pinegrove began scouting properties in upstate New York, looking for a new studio. “The idea,” lead singer Evan Stephens Hall tells Apple Music, “was that, if we didn’t have any neighbors to bother, we could just record at all hours, whenever inspiration spontaneously struck—whenever the cardinal landed in our tree, so to speak.” Eventually, they discovered a remote 18th-century Dutch farmhouse deep in the wild; the closest bystanders were the 600 dairy cows on a nearby farm. Dubbed “Amperland,” the building became Pinegrove’s primary creative space for both 2018’s *Skylight* and the new *Marigold*—an album that was recorded after a tumultuous period for the band, one that had included a self-imposed hiatus. Ultimately, it feels like the group’s most hyper-focused yet, expansive enough to include both the group’s briefest song (the affirmation-like “Spiral,” which clocks in at under a minute) and one of its longest (the gently surging instrumental title track). And while Pinegrove obsessives might be tempted to draw dotted lines between Hall’s lyrics and his personal life, “I want to resist an autobiographical interpretation,” he says. “I want people to see *themselves* in this record. It\'s my hope it inspires feelings of empathy and introspection—and ultimately, of community.” Here, he walks us through *Marigold*, track by track. **Dotted Line** “It’s supposed to be an optimistic anthem of the self. If you drive from a certain place in Manhattan to New Jersey, you encounter something like ten signs welcoming you to New Jersey. There was one particular time when I was crossing the border into my home state when I was just suddenly awake to the repetition of these signs. And for me, that consequently bloomed a story that involved travel, that involved transit, that involved looking across the river—there\'s a ‘to’ and a ‘from.’ And I might point listeners to the fact that the first line of ‘Rings,’ the first song on *Skylight*, is ‘I draw a line in my life.’ And in this song, there’s a line about ‘a dotted line from my antenna.’ So maybe it\'s somebody listening to the song ‘Rings,’ and their experience is mimicking crossing that line that’s been drawn across the border to New Jersey. And on the outro, \[guitarist Josh Marre\] plays a reference to ‘Rings.’ So that’s some of the stuff going on there.” **Spiral** “This one, for me, is imagining the days on a day-by-day calendar just flying off into the wind. On every single line, I\'m imagining as a new day: ‘Good morning/Good morning/Good morning’—that\'s three days. I wanted to address time and our experience within it, and I thought having a song that\'s notably either short or notably long is one way to at least draw attention to that theme. So I wanted to make it as short as possible.” **The Alarmist** “This song takes place the first moment when you are left by yourself—like after a friend goes home or something. It\'s a potent moment, when you are assessing or addressing, or recalibrating. Where your world expands to include this new thing—whatever just happened. You’re like, ‘Okay, this is, this is my life now.’ There\'s something bittersweet about what\'s going on. There\'s an element of wanting independence, and an element of dependence. It\'s a negotiation of how two people are.” **No Drugs** “I don\'t think there\'s anything particularly mystifying about what\'s going on in this song. ‘No Drugs’ was originally recorded for the *Skylight* sessions. And part of the reason I didn\'t feel like it was ready for *Skylight* is that *I* wasn\'t ready. These songs are intended, first and foremost, as a challenge to myself to live more intentionally, more patiently—to be better to me, to be better to you. They’re prayers, in a way—secular prayers, we could call them. And at a certain point in my effort towards leading a more intentional and honest life, I understood that sobriety is a form of honesty. And I understood that the anxiety I feel—and that I had been trying to self-medicate—is part of who I am, part of my terrestrial experience. And so it\'s more important to me to remember to be present, and to be patient. And that’s what I really see as a theme throughout this album: patience.” **Moment** “We chose this as the first single for a pretty mundane reason: We thought the song rocked, and that it showed what this album does. It moves through a few different moods, and given that all of the songs are connected in a way, we were looking for something that didn\'t depend necessarily on the other songs. But this is another song about patience. And I\'ll point your attention to the question at the end of the song, which is, \'It keeps me asking/What\'s in this moment?’ after this person is sitting in a traffic jam. We can react to challenges impatiently. And I think for myself, and perhaps for other people, that is the self-preservational instinct: ‘Hey, I only have so much time here, so let\'s get to it.\' But your brain is the only thing throughout your whole life that you are living with, and so you may as well make it a nice place to live. This song also takes up the theme of driving from ‘Dotted Line.’ I am somebody who has to drive a lot— not for better, and certainly for worse—and that made its way into the album a few times.” **Hairpin** “In the room where we recorded this, there’s an enormous window that looks out into the forest. This was during the springtime, and while I was recording those tessellated guitar lines in the second verse, suddenly there were these huge balls of hail—we\'re talking physical basketballs—just flying through the sky and pounding the roof. It was intense and very cool, and I was imagining the guitar notes as chunks of ice as I was picking them. It was all over by the end of the song, and it amped me up. I was like, ‘All right, this has to be the take.’” **Phase** “The theme of the endless night is introduced in ‘Dotted Line’: ‘Endless night, and I lift my head up.’ So we are narrowing in the aperture in ‘Phase,’ and looking at what that night felt like. It’s about nighttime anxiety—looking around the room, seeing piles of clothes, seeing shit that you should be doing, making lists in your head. It’s about those little anxious versions of yourself, marching around on your pillow.” **Endless** “I see ‘Phase’ and ‘Endless’ as possibly related more closely than the other songs; they\'re just different takes on the same feeling. ‘Endless’ is about patience. Or, more specifically, impatience: just feeling the way time elapses. And there’s a line in the second verse that says, ‘It\'s an honor to feel this way.’ Because that feeling connects me to other humans who are going through something difficult, it’s expanding my capacity for empathy. And though this is all sung in the first person, anybody can sing it. These are songs that are meant for anybody to sing. That\'s why we\'ve put guitar tabs for our songs online—so people can learn it, and play it with their friends.” **Alcove** “In this one, there’s more to establish the darker, more personal mood that some of the other songs are trying to play off of. This is a song that is about being horizontal, and understanding that a depressed person in bed is memetically related to a dead person—who’s also horizontal. I wrote this when I was out visiting California. I have four generations of family living there, the oldest being my grandmother, the youngest being my niece and nephew. It was warm, but I was thinking a lot about home, and what my friends were doing—which is to say, my bandmates. There\'s just something about the winter, when everything outside is in hibernation—and the spirit is hibernating, too.” **Neighbor** “When you’re living in such close proximity to the natural world, you are encountering a lot of wildlife, and a lot of wild death. We\'ve had plenty of squirrels, mice, and insects come into the Amperland house to die. And that was initially disturbing. Ultimately, I had to make a type of cosmic peace with it, but it was very emotional for me. And, you know, I\'ll wake up to the sounds of my neighbors hunting—which is always disturbing. ‘Neighbor’ includes the scene where I\'m just lying in bed, listening to geese, and thinking about how lovely it is, and then I hear a shot—and, clearly, it\'s the geese being shot, because of their audible reaction. It wasn\'t something I saw; it was just something I heard. But there was just such a compressed narrative in that one second, and that was inspiring to me.” **Marigold** “I wanted to drop the listener into an energetic space that was overtly comforting, and that acknowledged that they had just gone through an emotional experience. But I also hoped to move them or resolve them in a place of optimism and community. And I imagined that each peal of guitar is the petal of a flower. ‘Marigold’ is intentionally long—it used to be twice as long, but we had to make some selections to make it make sense within the context of the album. That has to do partly with our understanding that the song is going to finish an album that\'s within the broader context of an algorithm, one that\'s probably going to play some other song that we have no control or curation of, directly after our album. So we wanted to maybe make a little bit of a punctuation of our own—so we could give space for the listener to reflect, if they chose to take it.”

With a timeless sound that blends heavy soul and psych-rock, Monophonics have built a reputation over the past decade as one of the best live bands in the country. Led by singer Kelly Finnigan, the band of has drawn on their colorful history — both their experiences as veteran touring performers and as individuals growing up in the Bay Area — to create “It’s Only Us,” their fourth release since 2012. A reflection of what they see as the current state of the world, the record touches on difficult subjects such as broken relationships, mental health issues, gun violence and power struggles, all with an underlying message of unity, resilience and acceptance. The band’s signature style of arrangement has been expanded with top-notch production and creative instrumentation to round out the Monophonics’ trademark soul sound, while Finnigan’s vocals are more powerful than ever. At times these tracks can feel classic, as familiar as an old song you grew up with, while simultaneously raising questions about the state of music in 2020 and what the future might hold. “It’s Only Us” is the sound of a group continuing to grow as songwriters, musicians, performers and people — reflecting on where they’ve been, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the years to come. LP is packaged in high quality Stoughton Tip-On gatefold jacket, LP stored in an anti-static innsersleeve, and includes a download card. Pressed at Gotta Groove Records in Cleveland, OH.

The songs comprising Keeley Forsyth’s debut are, she states simply, “like blocks of metal that drop from the sky.” With its minimal arrangements placing her recollections and dissections of sometimes harrowing experiences front and centre, Debris showcases her elemental voice and an outpouring of candid, haunting lyrics detailing the seismic ruptures which take place behind closed doors. “There was a lot going on in my life that was heavy and hard,” she adds. “Songs were made under that moment.” Born and raised in Oldham, Forsyth first made her name as an actor, and while the creation of music has been a constant feature in her life, she’s taken the long road to its release. A deeply intuitive and singular musician, she began writing several years ago, accompanying herself on harmonium and accordion. “I came up with lots of songs in a very short space of time,” Forsyth recalls. “Most songs were written in the time it took to sing them. But I held them close, and often thought I needed to do something with them. It never felt right to go out and look for it. I felt like I needed to wait and move when I felt inspired.” That inspiration struck one evening while listening to the radio, where she first encountered pianist and composer Matthew Bourne’s work. “I heard his music and suddenly I could hear them both together,” she says of her songs and his compositions. “I felt compelled to write to him. He got straight back and said he loved what I was doing.” What followed were quick and instinctive collaborations with Bourne and producer and musician Sam Hobbs, with the initial burst of momentum Forsyth felt when writing carried through into the studio, preserving the intricacies and accidents that make an album human.

Two years after her breakthrough album *Loner*—a witty, woozy, and very personal New Wave odyssey—Rose returns with an appropriately glossy concept album about fame and misfortune. Over the course of *Superstar*’s 11 tracks, she follows a fictitious striver who dreams of big-screen stardom, for all the wrong reasons. “I’m moving to LA/A weekend in Paris/I’m gonna bask in fame/Fiji in a banana hammock,” Rose sings on “Got to Go My Own Way,” one of the album’s several bright-eyed vision-board boasts. They’re part of a doomed Hollywood journey Rose narrates through both gorgeously slow-burning anthems (“Nothing’s Impossible”) and synth-afflicted dance-floor jams (“Feel the Way I Want”). *Superstar* may not have the happiest of endings, but it’s alluring enough to make you hold out hope for a sequel.

In the early 2010s, the members of Yumi Zouma spent time together on a New Zealand street that gave its name to their first single, “The Brae.” After the 2011 Christchurch earthquake destroyed that street and much of the city, its members took off for other parts of the globe and soon began writing their first songs over email. As a result, the band was born, and distance became a recurring theme in Yumi Zouma’s work. This makes sense given the far-flung cities the group of musicians currently call home: New York City for Burgess, London for Ryder, Wellington for Campion, and Simpson remaining in their native Christchurch. Of course, distance can also manifest metaphorically, and it’s in these figurative chasms that Truth or Consequences, Yumi Zouma’s third album and first for Polyvinyl, finds its narrative: romantic and platonic heartbreak, real and imagined emotional distance, disillusionment, and being out of reach. There are no answers, there’s very seldom closure, but there is an undeniable release that comes from saying the truth, if only to oneself. “In the age we’re living in, there’s an emphasis on making things clear cut” says Burgess about the album’s title. “But in life and in art, nothing is ever that definitive. The truth is usually in the gray zones, and I think that’s so much of what we were trying to explore and understand on this album.” Whilst exploring these realms, Yumi Zouma deliberately pursued a deeper sense of collaboration in order to craft a record that reflects the bond between them. Produced by the band and mixed by engineer Jake Aron (Solange, Grizzly Bear, Snail Mail), Truth or Consequences stems from sessions in Los Angeles, London, and Christchurch, where the band actively took a collegial approach, often working note-by-note, to ensure the foundations of the album reflected a sense of togetherness. “We wanted to make the songwriting process as egalitarian as possible. Completely sharing the process helped us feel like we were capturing a purer sense of atmosphere,” says Ryder. Much like how the first moments of a new year can usher in a wave of emotions, the first notes of Truth or Consequences wash over the listener with the contemplative yet rapturous opener “Lonely After,” in which Simpson softly sings "I was embarrassed when I knew who I was, so wild and zealous and overly down for the cause." As Burgess recalls, it’s about “that pit in your stomach when you start to question your own identity,” who wrote the first lines of the song one lonely New Year’s Eve, during the nebulous beginnings of a budding relationship. Lead single “Right Track / Wrong Man” exhibits a Balearic tempo and bass-heavy energy that belies its underlying tension. Simpson reveals, “At the time I was living with a boyfriend who was quite lovely, but there wasn’t that passion or excitement that you imagine for yourself when you’re young. That song is about accepting that something’s not working, and deciding to just be on your own for a while.” Album centerpiece “Cool For A Second” coalesces the motif of isolation and its ensuing fallout into a letter to a past connection: Whilst on “Truer Than Ever,” the band draws inspiration from the classics to radiate a brazen spirit of perseverance. “I love the duality in a lot of disco songs, where they’re incredibly upbeat, but there’s real frustration in the lyrics – sort of like, ‘Nothing’s going the way I want, but I’ve got to deal with it any way I can,’” Simpson says. Throughout, Simpson’s voice gives weight to whispers of impressionistic poetry, shielding hard truths with soft tones, while Burgess’ vocals reveal a rarified dimension of raw and lucid romanticism. With this being the first Yumi Zouma album to feature live drums, courtesy of Campion, Truth or Consequences is a testament to the success of the band’s approach – a unified body of melody that mines the spaces in between.

“I think most of it takes place in dreams,” Caleb Landry Jones says of his debut solo album, The Mother Stone. “I’m talking more about dreams than I am about what’s happened in the physical realm. Or I’m talking about both, and you’re not sure what’s what.” This is the kind of conversation you end up having about a record like this one, a sprawling psychedelic suite built from abrupt and disorienting detours and schizoid shifts of voice, its manic energy forever pulling the tablecloth out from under classic pop orchestration. One minute you’re squarely in the realm of biographical fact and a moment later you’re having a discussion about lucid dreaming and how Jones once punched up a dream set on a soccer field by willing himself to experience it from the POV of the ball. But maybe that’s just another story about grabbing the wheel of your own hallucination; maybe this pertains to the music after all. Some biographical facts: Caleb Landry Jones was born in Garland, Texas in 1989 and comes from a long line of fiddle players. Three, maybe four generations back, on his mother’s side. His grandfather wrote jingles for commercials, his mother was a singer-songwriter who taught piano lessons in the house, and his father was a contractor who did a lot of work for the Dallas music-equipment retailer Brook Mays and knew a guy if you needed a bass or a banjo. But Jones is not sure if you can hear any of this in his music and he does not play the fiddle. What you can hear on this record are the marks left by conversion experiences, two in particular. First there’s Jones’ formative encounter with the Beatles’ “White Album,” the Fabs record most obviously composed by four Beatles rowing in different directions, and the beginning of what Jones calls “this British Invasion of my soul,” which is still ongoing. Second, there’s Syd Barrett, cracked vessel of Pink Floyd’s most intergalactic ambitions, and the “falling-down-the-stairs” quality of his solo work in particular. “I was dating a girl who was obsessed with him,” Jones remembers, “and the fact that I’d never heard him really pissed her off. So we went and got The Madcap Laughs and we listened to it and I could see why it pissed her off.” “John keeps knocking at the door, and so does Syd,” Jones says of these songs. “And I’m in there somewhere. And so are a few other people, I think. It would be really boring if it was just one guy.” Jones has been writing and recording music since age 16, around the same time he started acting professionally. Played in a band called Robert Jones for a minute, lost his guitar player to higher education, moved into his own place, and broke up with somebody, at which point the songs really started coming hard and fast. “I started playing guitar and playing more keys,” he says, “and then started writing record after record after record after record, because I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a good way of healing. And it felt like as soon as I started doing it, it felt like it needed to happen all the time.” In the ensuing years he’d spend a lot of time carrying unrecorded songs around in his head like goldfish in a bag, waiting for a chance to record them in marathon sessions in his parents’ barn. “You gotta play the songs every day, or every two or three days, to keep ‘em,” he says. “Otherwise I forget them.” Sometimes the ideas fuse together, one chapter to the next; this is how songs grow into seven-plus-minute epics like the ones on The Mother Stone. His back catalog is around seven hundred songs deep— a whole discography of full albums, most of them unheard outside the barn, at least for now. Before long Jones’ other job started to keep him away from the barn for longer stretches. You may have seen him playing the drums on television as a member of Landry Clarke’s death-metal band on Friday Night Lights. You may have seen him in other things, too. But enough about acting, except for this: A few years ago Jones had a pivotal meeting with Jim Jarmusch, the movie director and musician. “I was a big fan of his work,” Jones says, “and I know how I act with people that I’m big fans of their work. So instead of wanting to talk, I thought I’d write him a piece that would somehow let him know who I was.” So Jones spent a few nights composing a new instrumental work for solo piano, and showed up ready to play it for the director at their meeting— which turned out to be at a diner somewhere in Canada, where the amenities did not include a piano, so they had a conversation instead. Jones did slip Jarmusch Microastro and Macroastro, two collections of songs from the barn, most of them four or five or maybe eight years old at that point. Jarmusch liked what he heard, told Jones he should talk to Sacred Bones founder Caleb Braaten, and before long Jones was making the record you’re about to hear— whose opening track, “Flag Day/The Mother Stone” incorporates that piano piece Jones wrote to explain himself to Jim Jarmusch. A few more germane facts: The Mother Stone was recorded at Valentine Recording Studios, where everyone from Bing Crosby to Frank Zappa once logged time, refurbished to time-capsule retro standards in 2015 by studio manager and Mother Stone producer Nic Jodoin. Jones brought his collection of battered Yamahas and Casios up from the barn and played them alongside vintage equipment from Jodoin’s collection. Working in a real studio gave Jones a chance to slow his creative process down. They built the songs up from acoustic guitar, let them sit a while, circled back. Sometimes Jones and his girlfriend would decompress at the Shakey’s down the street, home to a range of acceptable video-arcade options. “They got that thing where you throw it in the clown’s mouth,” Jones says. “That’s fun. I like the look of those clowns.” Maybe the clowns are the key. This isn’t a concept album, it’s a parade led by multiple unreliable narrators who rail against the universe and profess their love and vacate the stage before we can ask them a question. The circus comes to town, the circus leaves town. A young man from suburban Texas winds up and a clown opens its mouth as wide as the sky. -Alex Pappademas