Rough Trade's Albums of the Year 2025

“I found a crouton underneath a futon,” singer Sebastian Murphy intones over a steady bass throb punctuated by flute accents on “Uno II,” one of the many clever and catchy tunes on the quasi-self-titled *viagr aboys*. “Mama said I couldn’t eat it ’cause all my teeth are gone.” Such is the delightfully absurdist world of Viagra Boys, a Swedish quasi-punk group with an American vocalist and an undying hunger for shrimp and shrimp-related products. The band’s fourth album doubles down on the self-deprecating, society-skewering antics and infectious grooves of 2022’s *Cave World* with gleeful abandon. Powered by slashing guitars and a droning chorus, “Man Made of Meat” offers historical perspective for modern complainers: “I don’t wanna pay for anything/Clothes and food and drugs for free/If it was 1970, I’d have a job at a factory.” Jet-propelled bass boogie “The Bog Body” doubles as a commentary on superficiality that plays out like an inversion of the Demi Moore body-horror flick *The Substance*, complete with a zombielike swamp woman. “Pyramid of Health” simultaneously apes and lampoons Marcy Playground’s grunge-esque ’90s hit “Sex and Candy” before veering into carnival music and electronic noise. Resurrecting a successful template from previous albums, Murphy cuts loose with a hilarious, possibly stream-of-consciousness rant over skronky free jazz on “Best in Show Pt. IV.” With breathy backing vocals and a chiming minor-key organ melody, “Medicine for Horses” is more plaintive, reflective, and—maybe—straight-faced. The same could be said of Murphy’s mournful, wavering vocal on closer “River King,” but who knows? Where Viagra Boys are concerned, it’s anyone’s guess.

Certainly, any Pulp fan who caught the long-dormant Britpop legends on their 2024 reunion tour would’ve been completely satisfied with just hearing the ’90s classics we never thought we’d get to hear performed live again. But the surprise inclusion of some new tunes on the set list made it clear Jarvis Cocker and co. were not interested in being a mere nostalgia act. And now, less than a year later, Pulp has gifted us with a new album—and while it arrives 24 years after their last one, *More* actually came together with unprecedented expedience. “The previous two Pulp records \[2001’s *We Love Life* and 1998’s *This Is Hardcore*\] had a bit of a concept for them, and that slowed everything down,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “And this time I just thought, let’s not think about it. Let’s do it. And then you’ve got a lot of time to think about it later. Like the rest of your life, for instance.” With *More*, Pulp carries on as if the first two decades of the 21st century never happened, restoring their singular balance of disco decadence (“Spike Island,” “Got to Have Love”) and string-swept elegance (“Tina,” “Farmers Market”). As the elder black sheep of Britpop, Pulp always possessed a self-deprecating wit and lived-in wisdom that distinguished them from their more brash, lager-swilling peers, and as such, they were always less interested in glorifying youthful hedonism than probing adult relationships. So they can effortlessly reclaim their role as Britain’s shrewdest observers of social manners and misbehavior even as Cocker has crossed the threshold into his sixties. *More* is imbued with the simmering anxieties of a singer who knows he’s not getting any younger: Echoing the streetwise strut of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” the urgent “Grown Ups” finds the guy who once sang “Help the Aged” starting to “stress about wrinkles instead of acne” himself, while the Spector-esque splendor of “Background Noise” closes the curtain on a long-term coupling where familiary has curdled into contempt. But even by the group’s sophisticated standards, piano ballad “The Hymn of the North” (featuring Chilly Gonzales) is a breathtaking display of melancholy and majesty that affirms Pulp is still in a different class all their own.

Geese—a band of four 23-year-old longtime pals from Brooklyn and Manhattan—represent such an exciting jolt of rock ’n’ roll possibility that they successfully convinced marquee producer Kenny Beats to change his name in order to work with them. When the members of Geese were still in elementary school, Beats was showing up on increasingly big hip-hop records by Smoke DZA, ScHoolboy Q, Freddie Gibbs, and Vince Staples. But as he doggedly pursued Geese through 2024 and convinced them to give his new Los Angeles digs a try, they offered a caveat: He should drop the Beats once and for all and just be Kenny Blume. The swap proved worth it. Together, Geese and Blume made one of this year’s truly great rock records, finding an often-hidden seam between old-school indie-rock idiosyncrasy and the mainstream’s explosive power. *Getting Killed* feels like a burst of new life. Geese signed a pandemic-era deal for their high-school debut, *Projector*, before raising the stakes with their indulgent, discursive, and beguiling *3D Country*. But their flock unexpectedly grew early in 2025, when *Heavy Metal*—the brilliant solo debut of singer and leader Cameron Winter, actually released late in 2024—became an unexpected and uncanny breakthrough. Fans of that album may recognize its tunefulness at the start of Geese’s “Cobra,” where lilting keyboards indeed conjure “Love Takes Miles.” Aside from Winter’s singular voice and barbarically blunt lyrics, though, the similarities stop there: *Getting Killed*is a savage and beautiful thing, anchored by the athletic rhythm section of bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin and given a serrated edge by guitarist Emily Green. Where “Islands of Men” moves from a warped Rolling Stones strut into art-rock transcendence, “Bow Down” is nervous and mean start to finish, Winter howling about lost love over an instrumental that feels like heart palpitations. Hinging around howled lines about bombs in cars, opener “Trinidad” indeed lands like a piece of twisted scrap metal. Geese, though, can be tender and exquisite. “Half Real” is an anthem for holding love close as the world tries to chip away at it, while the climactic soul stunner “Au Pays du Cocaine” is a let’s-stay-together update for our era of shared discontent. Geese have recently flamed the eternal embers of rock-savior dialogues, their imaginative but relentless approach suggesting for many talk about the next Strokes or Radiohead. And, sure, that might happen. But more importantly, Geese have simply done what so many great rock bands in the past have done—they’ve learned the lessons of their forebears, ripped them apart, and reordered them in a way that sounds as thrilling to them as to us. “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” Winter warbles on the title track, echoing Neil Young a half-century on. Whether you’re in heaven or hell, it’s hard not to nod at least a little bit of assent to one of rock’s most electrifying new crews and gripping new voices.

Turnstile is hardly the first band raised in a tight-knit DIY hardcore punk scene to graduate to big-tent popularity and grapple with what that success should look like. For the Baltimore-based five-piece, a stint opening for blink-182’s 2023 reunion tour served as a hands-on apprenticeship. “That summer was definitely a master class of existing in that space,” Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Riding with blink, they’re great people, but also their supporting cast—everything they do behind the scenes is very sharp, and it was cool to be in a situation where you have to learn how to mend your creative way to a different lens.” These lessons all came in handy in the making of their fourth album, *NEVER ENOUGH*, which doubles down on the genre-expanding—and, subsequently, audience-expanding—twists of 2021’s breakthrough *GLOW ON* and throws in an ambitious visual-album component that ties all 14 songs together. Among those songs are not just the tuneful, heavy midtempo anthems like the title track and “DULL” and hopped-up hardcore like “BIRDS” and “SUNSHOWER” that made *GLOW ON* stand out, but even bolder stylistic gambits like “I CARE” and “SEEIN’ STARS,” which channel The Smiths and The Police, respectively. The nearly seven-minute centerpiece “LOOK OUT FOR ME” somehow seems to incorporate bits of all of these at once. For singer Brendan Yates, who also produced the album, this is all part of a more thoughtful, confident, and collaborative approach to songwriting that was certainly helped by the luxury of having more time—and more resources—to let ideas evolve. “If there is a song that’s just very simple and you’re like, ‘This doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done, and maybe people are going to hate this, but the intangible is really there for me right now,’” he says. “So it’s like embracing that.” And sometimes trying new and more daring things also means throwing all those away in the end. Yates cites the album-closing “MAGIC MAN” as a song that began as a demo with just himself and a synth, expanded and contracted through many more iterations, and ultimately wound up as…just himself and a synth. Turnstile credits their versatility and trust in one another to having spent half their lives in Baltimore’s punk scene learning instruments on the fly, playing in multiple bands at once, and innately understanding the importance of community. These lessons, too, come in handy as the band begins to find themselves headlining the kinds of venues—possibly with pit-unfriendly seats—where they very recently were guests. What looks from the outside like complex ambition really is, from the band’s vantage point, little more than close friends with shared history indulging one another’s biggest swings. “When trust is your really big element that makes things function easily, that involves people’s happiness, too,” says Yates. “And being able to just be happy to do what you’re doing and be happy looking forward to what you’re about to do, it requires a certain amount of willingness to throw yourself into the deep end.”

By the time Black Country, New Road released their sprawling second album *Ants from Up There* in 2022, lead vocalist Isaac Wood had departed the London-based indie experimentalists and a magical first phase of the group had come to a close. Rather than tour those records without their original singer, they rejigged their dynamic and wrote a whole new batch of songs—captured on 2023’s *Live at Bush Hall*—to initiate a new period of the band where vocals and much of the songwriting were led by Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw. It made for an exhilarating fresh start and their third album *Forever Howlong* directly picks up from the momentum of starting over again. “We’d done a lot of touring of the live album and we really wanted to further develop this new lineup and write new songs so we could get them into the set list,” saxophonist Lewis Evans tells Apple Music. “There’s a whole bunch of songs within the album that were written fairly early on as a buffer to the *Live at Bush Hall* songs so we could not have to play the same thing every single night.” That feeling of trying to capture the energy and edginess of a live show runs right through *Forever Howlong*. It’s a record of tightly mapped baroque folk pop, jagged indie explosions, and woodwind-heavy art-rock explorations, and it feels punchier and more contained than their previous work. “\[The songs\] developed way more on the live setting,” says Evans. “Our headspace was to really make sure that all of the songs that were brought into the writing room, to the rehearsal room, were arranged in such a way that the song could be served as well as possible and not adding anything to it that didn’t need to be there.” Drummer Charlie Wayne thinks that, even without the lineup change, the band was always heading towards doing something different. “I think it was always trending in this direction,” he says. “Having the three different singers definitely gave it a different quality, both in terms of the outcome and also in the actual songwriting. Three different perspectives grants you three completely different worlds to dive into and to try and pull together.” Let Evans and Wayne guide you through *Forever Howlong*, track by track. **“Besties”** Lewis Evans: “It’s a great big fanfare opening, really ramshackle and swashbuckling. It’s a great introduction into the new sound. It’s still got this very BCNR musical-communication thing that we have but also feels like a new style. That’s also why it was good to do as the first single, it was a good welcome to the new thing.” **“The Big Spin”** LE: “This was the first of the songs which we’re calling the Holy Trinity on the record, those songs being ‘The Big Spin,’ ‘Besties,’ and ‘Happy Birthday,’ which all came together at a very similar time. May brought this song in. It was much more light-hearted and groovy, and it had this light feel that we haven’t had before as a band. That went on to really inspire Georgia’s writing for ‘Besties,’ which then really inspired Tyler’s writing for ‘Happy Birthday,’ so this was the start of the domino effect of those three pop-ish songs on the record.” **“Socks”** Charlie Wayne: “This was one that we wrote at the beginning of last year. I think we saw Tyler performing a version of it on the piano before we’d thought about it as a band thing. It’s weird because it’s like a mini musical in itself, there are loads of ups and downs, and you can really focus in on the songwriter and the voice, and the band operates around it and expands and contracts. There are moments of real softness and rubato, that the time is moving in and out and it’s not, you’re just focusing in on the piano. Tyler recorded it all in that way, and the band had to try and play around her performance instincts where she allowed herself to just be on the piano playing with it.” **“Salem Sisters”** LE: “I originally wrote this song and sang on it live for a while when I was singing in the band for a short spell. I decided against singing anymore because I just didn’t enjoy it whatsoever. I thought that Tyler would be best suited for singing it. She wrote new lyrics, and it benefits a lot more from her vocals. I wasn’t able to bring what she can to the song. It’s like the closest we get to a ’70s songwriter-y throwback tune on the record I think but it still retains quite a bit of weirdness that I don’t think would exist quite yet in the ’70s. It’s a catchy song.” **“Two Horses”** CW: “This slightly preceded the actual getting under the bonnet and figuring out what the album is. It was the first time that Georgia really felt as though she brought a song specifically for BCNR with the intention of figuring out what her songwriting was going to maybe look like. Georgia had written a pretty good, complete song and all the arrangements had already been thought out. One of the big takeaways in the album is just serving songs and sometimes they don’t need to be these enormous expansive things, no one needs to be playing extremely loud all the time. It can just be following the journey.” LE: “This is quite a unique record for us because there’s no one way that we’ve written all the songs. This one is the only time we’ve ever written a song where it was all thought out before it was in the practice room. Georgia had a proper Brian Wilson imagination with this song and she knew exactly how she wanted it to sound. We were like, ‘No, let’s put our own thing on it,’ and then it worked out actually better the way that she decided it in the first place.” **“Mary”** CW: “This is the bit in the album where you can kind of step back from the instrumentation, which can often be a massive focal point of the band. It was a song that was always just going to work with the three vocals. It’s heavily inspired by The Roches. Having very light instrumentation behind it gives you the opportunity to see it as like group storytelling, watching those voices deviate away from each other and then come back.” **“Happy Birthday”** LE: “This was the quickest song to put together. It basically arranged itself. Tyler played us a couple of songs that she’d been writing when she went on a writing retreat in Italy with some friends. She played ‘Happy Birthday,’ which was called ‘Kids’ at the time, but we didn’t want to name it the same as the MGMT song, so we opted for a more famous song. We took it into the rehearsal room and just banged it out in a couple rehearsals, really. It was so satisfying and punchy, it really felt like we were so in the groove at that point. We all knew what the record was. We all knew at that point this song was going to be the thing that completes the album a little bit.” **“For the Cold Country”** LE: “May played this for the first time on the piano, or at the rough outline of it, when we were mixing *Live at Bush Hall*. I remember being like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy. How the fuck are we going to make that into a BCNR song?’ We spent the next two years trying to write it, because it is just unwieldy and enormous.” CW: “It didn’t really make sense until we’d gotten into the studio and we felt as though we could place everyone in a small room and then expand out again from there.” LE: “This was one of those songs that really didn’t benefit from us playing it loads live because we realized what was best suited for it was that the first half be this acoustic, really acoustic, warm, woody feeling section that would then open up into a more expansive guitars would turn electric.” **“Nancy Tries to Take the Night”** LE: “This was also an earlier-stage one. Tyler had the whole first half of the song, just the two acoustic guitars and the chorus, the chorus melody thing that happens. The whole minimalist section hadn’t yet been written. We felt like we wanted a new part of the song, and so I wrote this minimalist cell block kind of thing. It was quite inspired by something that I heard on a new Kiran Leonard record. That allowed us to have these two very different sections that are really contrasting.” **“Forever Howlong”** CW: “We started off doing a band arrangement for this and it didn’t quite fit. After speaking about it, May was like, ‘I think maybe it would sound really good if all of us were playing five clarinets as an arrangement,’ which was a cool idea, but maybe slightly impractical. The next best step was five recorders. The beginning of the song is fairly sparse and simple because all of us didn’t know how to properly play the recorder, and it gets more complicated towards the end. The bit at the end, which is a bit like a carousel, is a bit of a victory lap for us because we just all get our individual parts to play because we can all actually play them. The Royal Society of Recorders and Recorder Players should be getting in touch soon.” **“Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”** LE: “This is the oldest song on the record. Georgia brought this in when we were writing *…Bush Hall* stuff in 2022 and because she just wasn’t around enough because of Jockstrap commitments \[Ellery is also one half of Jockstrap\], we didn’t play it. We’d kind of made a half-baked version of it and it was good, but it really wasn’t sitting with the stuff that we were doing on *…Bush Hall*. But then as these songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘The Big Spin’ and ‘Besties’ came about, it really started to make more sense. We were really trying to go for a Neil Young thing on this tune, and the way that it can feel loose, but also there’s a deeper feeling in the pit of your stomach about it that is an unexplainable thing that just grooves. I don’t know if we quite achieved it, but the ending was meant to sound like The Beta Band’s ‘Dry the Rain.’ I don’t know if we achieved that at all! It ends up its own thing a bit, which is what you aim for when you say you want to have a reference for something—if it ends up not sounding like that, then you’ve won a little bit.”

Samia’s third album, *Bloodless*, sounds as if someone’s opened a nearby window, allowing for a gush of fresh air to carry Samia Finnerty’s voice into the skies. The 28-year-old Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter’s follow-up to 2023’s *Honey* feels lithe and buoyant even at its most emotionally weighty. At times—the slinky “Lizard,” the echo-laden swell of “Sacred,” the thicket of woodwinds and vocals that run through closing track “Pants”—Samia recalls the ethereal New Wave of British pop-rock phenom The Japanese House, or the timeless bounce of Fleetwood Mac. At the center of such gestures is Samia’s close-to-the-bone lyricism, which continues to convey her pitch-perfect sly humor; atop the stormy strums and electronic frissons of “North Poles,” she wraps her bell-clear voice around evocations of “spyware lipstick” and fistfuls of natural wine before lobbing a grenade of reflection at the listener’s feet: “When you see yourself in someone/How can you look at them?”

Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.

As the frontwoman for pop-punk heroes Paramore, Hayley Williams has spent her entire professional life in the major-label system, having first signed to Atlantic Records in 2003 when she was just 15. But following the worldwide arena tour for Paramore’s 2023 album, *This Is Why*, the contract expired, and she returned to her concurrent solo career as a fully independent artist for the first time, completely unburdened by the weight of commercial expectations—and from any conventional notions of what even constitutes a proper album. In August 2025, she dropped a whopping 17 new tracks online at random, inviting fans to create their own playlist permutations. “I really did want to shirk the responsibility,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe at the time. “I was kind of interested in other people’s perspective, also, because there’s just a point where you’re in the eye of that storm, you’re making things, you’re going through shit, and you can’t possibly have perspective.” However, four weeks after that initial data dump, Williams finalized her own version of the tracklist and officially corralled those songs under the title of *Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party*. You can understand why sequencing these tracks was such a daunting task: *Ego Death* feels a lot like listening to five-disc CD changer stocked with ’90s faves on shuffle mode, bounding between fuzzy Breeders-styled odes to anti-depressants (“Mirtazapine”), No Doubt-like tropical-pop mash notes (“Love Me Different”), and pure Alanis-worthy catharsis (“Hard”); she even works the chorus of Bloodhang Gang’s “The Bad Touch” into the grungy folk dirge “Discovery Channel,” transforming the original’s horndog hook into a raw expression of animalistic lust. But while *Ego Death* draws from a kaleidoscopic pop palette, Williams’ punk-rock heart beats loudly throughout, as she takes side-eyed shots at the Nashville establishment on the deceptively breezy title track, while using the gothic trip-hop backdrop and deadpan Lana-esque vocal of “True Believer” to paint a damning portrait of so-called Christians who “pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all the children.” As a parting gift, Williams appends *Ego Death*’s original 17 loosies with the previously unreleased “Parachute,” which seamlessly folds Williams’ punk past and alt-pop present into a triumphant closer that sounds like Chappell Roan working up the nerve to stage-dive into the pit at Riot Fest.

Justin Vernon has never been shy about bearing the weight of his instantly mythical origin story and his fast, unlikely trajectory into global stardom. Four albums and 18 years after *For Emma, Forever Ago*, *SABLE, fABLE* is a document of finding peace—joy, even—and a testament to the work it’s taken to get there. “This record, as much as that first record, if not more, was really just a keystone for healing and growing away from this time period where I felt trapped,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Once COVID wiped out the tour plans for 2019’s *i,i*, Vernon, like pretty much everyone, used the time to take stock, and he came to understand, among other things, that touring might not be the healthiest thing for him. So he made songs. “It really was like, ‘Okay, I’m not well and I won\'t make it if I don\'t do something to change this pretty drastically and stop the whole touring engine,” Vernon says. “There was a sense of relief and an incredible grief to say goodbye to the team that we built. I was like, ‘Let me just get these songs done and just sneak them out there so I can just get them off my chest,’ because that’s what I really needed: to finish them, to learn what was inside them.” The first of these songs, written at the beginning of lockdown, “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is a snapshot of that lonely, uncertain time, but it feels bigger and more hopeful than that to Vernon with five years of hindsight. “In the short term, it makes you feel better, but it’s also a way to lean into your grief and lean into your pain and lean into your guilt,” he says. “I think eventually when I hear that song now, I feel clean from everything that I was dealing with when I had to write it and after I wrote it. But it takes years for things to take shape and for internal things to budge.” From there, the album begins to let more light in with songs like the evidently more hopeful “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (“It’s just all about celebrating this moment right here and just sort of trying to express that heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest feeling”) and “If Only I Could Wait,” featuring vocals from Danielle Haim of HAIM, which Vernon considers nothing less than his favorite American rock band. The album splits the difference between the immediacy of *For Emma* and the often inscrutable maximalism of *22, A Million* and *i,i*. It was during the album’s long gestation that Vernon’s profile was boosted by his work with Taylor Swift, even as his own project remained in the shadows, Vernon exercising a patience and restraint and creating a healthier perspective that was nothing less than career-saving, if not life-saving. “We are insanely beautiful creatures,” he says. “And so I think where I’ve got to with the simplicity of this music, it was just like, I just want to give it to you. I just want to have it be my version of Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’—just boom, here it is. We’re not going to hide, we’re not going to put it behind any drapery. We’re going to just give it to you as much as humanly possible.”

Watching the pure joy of Glastonbury-goers doing the Woke Macarena to CMAT’s anthem “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” at her 2025 performance might make you think Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is having an easy time being a pop star. But the story behind her third album, *EURO-COUNTRY*, released two months later, suggests otherwise. “I didn’t think I was going to make another record so quickly, and when all these ideas started landing, I knew I needed to do this before I could do anything else,” CMAT tells Apple Music of the follow-up to 2023’s *Crazymad, for Me*. “It was a very hard album to make for a number of reasons, and it’s a very heavy subject matter. What we were trying to pull off was so difficult that I had a really hard time making it. But that being said, I’m really proud of it,” she says. It’s a big album. While “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” provided the perfect—and well-deserved—pop crossover, complete with viral TikTok dance, CMAT was keen to stay true to her roots and go “full country” on songs like “When a Good Man Cries.” CMAT recorded the album in New York, addressing themes of grief, loss, and “the ambition to be bigger and more important than you currently are,” both in terms of herself and her native Ireland. “In general, I have to work on things on the road when they’re in their infancy,” she says. “But place-wise, I think this album was born of grief and loss and sadness and stuff, and things being put into perspective for me in a way that they hadn’t been before. All of this suffering I endured making it, and now I’m bearing the fruits.” Read on as CMAT talks through *EURO-COUNTRY*, one track at a time. **“Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy”** “I definitely needed something to open up the record that wasn’t my voice. A lot of this album is criticizing Ireland, which is something I love more than anything else in the world. So, I wanted something that captured my love for it and to show people I wasn’t coming from a snotty place. One day, I randomly came across a documentary, and this scene happened. Billy Byrne is about to free a lot of pigeons, and this is a phone call that he makes from a telephone box that’s in the middle of a beach. He sums up everything that I love about Ireland: its weirdness, its beauty, and its warmth.” **“EURO-COUNTRY** “‘EURO-COUNTRY’ is a bit of a Frankenstein song—I wrote bits of this years ago for a completely different thing. I knew the album was going to be called *EURO-COUNTRY* and then I thought, ‘I’d love a title track for this record.’ Usually, it’s the other way around. The line ‘I feel like Kerry Katona’ came because I have a real fascination with beautiful blondes who are destroyed by the press. I’ve written about Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith in the past, and I think Kerry is another one of those women that was rinsed by the British press, completely fucking unfairly. I really do admire her, and I think she’s very strong.” **“When a Good Man Cries”** “I’m really glad the way those two songs run into each other. That’s one of the most successful bits of the album. I needed to go full country immediately, so everyone knew what the record was. This is me going in on myself because I made an ex-partner cry. He hadn’t done anything wrong. There’s this thing in third-wave feminism, which is, I feel, now outdated, where women should be like men. Making a man cry is turning a trope on its head. I repeat ‘Kyrie Eleison’ \[‘Lord have mercy’\] over and over again at the end, which is a reference to my favorite song of all time, ‘The Donor’ by Judee Sill, in which she’s begging God for another chance to become a good person.” **“The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”** “‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is a meditation on irrational hatred and intolerance. It’s based around me getting annoyed every time I saw a poster of Jamie Oliver because when we were on tour, we’d eat a lot of sausage rolls from his branded delis. I don’t actually have any beef with Jamie Oliver, so I’m kind of like, ‘Ciara, you need to stop being a bitch. He’s got kids.’ And then there\'s a stream-of-consciousness section in the bridge where I’m going through my own history to try and figure out how I became such a bitch. I think it’s good to be self-critical—I don’t think anyone should ever rest on their laurels when it comes to kindness and their capacity for it. We should all be trying way harder.” **“Tree Six Foive”** “This song has been around for two years, and it used to be called ‘365,’ but there’s a little artist called Charli xcx who released a song with the same name, which is enormous. So, I was like, ‘I can\'t call it that, so I’ll just call it what it is in my phonetic spelling.’ It’s about looking back on my history again and thinking about a time where I made the decision to try and not to be treated badly anymore. I wanted it to be a proper flashback of a song. Even though I don’t have these feelings anymore, it’s a former version of myself that’s doing bad foreshadowing. A stupid song written by a stupid person to illustrate the person that I used to be, I guess.” “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” “If I’m making an album that is so much about capitalism, the cruelty of the modern condition, and how lack of community has made everyone be an asshole, I had to do one song where I was like, ‘I have also been a victim of this.’ The thing that had been rattling around in my head the most was last year, when we were doing festivals, and there were all the comments being nasty to me over my physical appearance and my weight. I remember saying, ‘Let’s make this the most accessible-sounding, biggest, fattest pop song so that loads of people are forced to listen to the most uncomfortable lyrics I’ve ever written.’ Under no circumstances did I think it was going to go anywhere near as big as it did, with Julia Fox doing a little TikTok dance to it, but I knew it would pop off in some way.” **“Ready”** “A lot of people in my life really loved this song, but I didn’t know how I felt about putting it on a record because it felt too optimistic and poppy. And I still don’t really know how I feel about the song, but I really like the place that it occupies in the record. It’s about somebody who is giving up after a period of complete stagnation. I wrote it in a COVID-y time. I’m saying I’m so bored of having depression that I’m going to do something self-destructive but fun because I don’t care anymore.” **“Iceberg”** “This is a song about my best friend Bella. It’s funny, we’ve been best friends since we were 14, and I’m a pop star and she’s a lawyer. She’s the most studious, hardworking person in the world. When she got her job which she’d worked towards her whole entire life, I saw the pressures of this ambition and this full-time work completely beat her down for a while. And she started to go in on herself. I found it really funny that she thought that I wouldn’t know she was suffering. This is the thing in female friendships that I think is so beautiful—you cannot pull the wool over my eyes. I know who you are. There’s a joking line in the beginning of it where I’m like, ‘Where did you go, crazy girl boss?’” **“Coronation St.”** “I wrote bits of this when I was 23. Leaving something to sit and marinate in one form for seven years is something I like doing, so it’s like I’m in collaboration with a former version of myself. It’s about jealousy, being stagnant, and feeling like I didn’t get everything I thought I was owed by life. I wanted to capture that deadness and feeling of having nothing happening in your life and really double down with hindsight just how harrowing it was. I used to do a weird job managing and cleaning apartments in Manchester, and one of them overlooked the set of *Coronation Street*. I found it mad that it was fake buildings. I was like, ‘Wow, even Coronation Street’s not real.’” **“Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”** “Weirdly, this is the least profound song on the record. It’s about loss. My friend died, and I had to write the story of us in it because it was the first time I lost someone I was really close with. You make friends with people without thinking much about it, just enjoying their company. And then, when they’re gone, you realize what the point of them was. I only realized how much he meant to me when he died, and so much about his death annoyed me. I felt quite stupid being a touring musician/pop-star person because I was like, ‘What\'s the point in this?’ And then, I went to see the flat we both lived in together, and there was a charger and a Tesla parked outside it, and I remember being so angry about that.” **“Running/Planning”** “I wasn’t going to bring this song to the studio, but we made a draft of it in one night, which sounds almost exactly the same as it does now. It was so instinctive and so immediate. This is another song about ambition, drive, and the downsides of it. I was thinking about how there’s a treadmill of life that you get on when you’re in a heterosexual relationship. You date for a couple of years and then you get engaged, get married, and then you have a baby and live the rest of life. There’s a transactional element to romantic relationships that muddies something that’s otherwise quite beautiful. And also, societal pressures to conform. With conformity comes the weird prejudices against people who don’t \[conform\]. Carving your own path and going against it makes your life so hard.” “Janis Joplining” “‘Janis Joplining’ is a name I’ve given to being self-destructive. What’s weird is that’s not what the song’s about. I just thought it was a good line. Maybe it’s a bit salacious, but I had a crush on a guy who was married, and I realized a lot of it was born of seeing him and his wife interact with each other. Actually, what I was longing for was the community they had formed and their intimacy. It ends the record because after everything I’ve just spoken about, what I want is this egalitarian relationship and to comfortably talk intimately with everyone in the world, and if I can’t have it, then I self-destruct and go Janis Joplining. I wanted to end on a note that sounds like I think I have a solution to all the problems I’ve just spoken about for 45 minutes.

You can call this a comeback, but don’t call it a happy ending. In his memoir, *Rumours of My Demise*, which arrived tandem with this album, The Lemonheads founder Evan Dando recalls his band’s lurch towards international fame during the early ’90s and the lifestyle that came with it—before addiction led to his often-public unmooring. Three decades later, his dependency on hard drugs, he writes, has no end. He’s only ever in periods of using or not using. If the first Lemonheads album of original material in 19 years doesn’t mark the redemption of Evan Dando then, there’s still plenty of joy and triumph to be had from its existence. Largely recorded in his new home of Brazil, with bassist Farley Glavin and drummer John Kent, and wholly recorded with Dando in an enduring “off” period, it’s a robust and rangy reminder of his way with wistful, indelibly catchy guitar pop. At 58, Dando understandably presents as a little more worn-in than the catwalk-handsome slacker who fronted 1992’s succinct and spotless *It’s a Shame About Ray* and gold-selling follow-up *Come on Feel the Lemonheads* (1993). The voice is deeper and more frayed, especially when straining to break out of a mumble on “Be-In” and its portrayal of salvation found in new love. But if aching closer “Roky” offers a rueful and bruised reflection on past behaviors and “Deep End” sets an ominous tone amid zippy riffs and a J Mascis guitar solo (“Watch the clouds come over/Canary in a coma”), he’s equally defiant and galvanized elsewhere. “I’ll be out here if you want to find me/I’d rather die than let your thoughts confine me,” he sings on the urgent power pop of “In the Margin,” while he’s unapologetic about speaking his truth—whoever it upsets—on scruffy freak-folk ballad “The Key of Victory.”

On the three fearlessly freaky EPs Saya Gray released between 2022 and 2024, no style was off-limits: Hyperpop, folk, jazz, industrial alt-rock, glitchy electronica, even metal were all fair game, sometimes within the span of a single song. You got the sense the Toronto-based artist was coming up with ideas faster than she could commit them to tape. But for her first proper full-length album, she grounds her manic, collagist aesthetic in a more old-school approach. *SAYA* was written primarily on an autumn 2023 retreat to Japan, where she cozied up with an acoustic guitar and reconnected with the music of classic-rock icons like The Beatles and Joni Mitchell. You can feel the difference within the opening seconds of “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE ),” where a sunrise-summoning melody, gritty guitar groove, and a soothingly slack drumbeat meld into a ’90-style alt-pop anthem. But even when working in more conventional singer-songwriter mode, Gray’s idiosyncratic, genre-mashing spirit cuts through loud and clear: The breezy country lullaby “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” is teed up with a brain-bending acoustic arpeggio worthy of a prog-rock record; “H.B.W” is a harmonious fusion of dreamy psych-folk melodies and dark trip-hop textures; while the exquisitely chill closer “LIE DOWN” sounds like a Fleetwood Mac classic given a dub remix.

*Raspberry Moon* begins exactly how you’d expect a Hotline TNT album to begin: with another melancholic missive from singer/guitarist Will Anderson wrapped in candy-coated distortion. But just when you think the opening “Was I Wrong?” is about to fade into the fuzz, it takes an unexpected detour into an extended, synth-washed ambient fadeout that goes on for so long, it earns its own track-title distinction (“Transition Lens”). And while that left turn doesn’t exactly portend Hotline TNT taking a *Kid A*-sized leap into the electronic unknown, it is nonetheless emblematic of a band in the midst of an exciting evolutionary phase. *Raspberry Moon* marks the first time Anderson has recorded with his touring band, and you instantly sense the difference in both density and depth on “The Scene,” a psychedelic sludgefeast that harkens back to Dinosaur Jr.’s SST era. But the sonic upgrade is as much about enhancing nuance as amplifying noise: When they’re not consistently striking the shoegaze/power-pop sweet spot on Teenage Fanclub flashbacks like “Letter to Heaven” and “Candle,” Hotline TNT bring graceful acoustic textures to the fore on “Dance the Night Away” and “Lawnmower,” putting the focus squarely on Anderson’s gleaming melodies. And with the rousing “na na na na” hook of “Julia’s War,” Anderson confirms his former DIY project is ready to conquer festival stages.

California singer-songwriter Jensen McRae’s cut an impressive figure over the last few years, from her striking breakout single “Wolves” and her debut LP *Are You Happy Now?* to a profile-raising stint opening for Noah Kahan on 2024’s Stick Season tour. Her sophomore bow *I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!* finds the 27-year-old taking her confessional folk-rock style—equally influenced by Tracy Chapman’s raw lyrical expressionism and Taylor Swift’s melodic grandeur—and blowing it up on the widest screen possible. Over bell-clear production courtesy of studio wiz Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee), McRae’s songwriting breathes like never before, from the countrified and Phoebe Bridgers-esque “Savannah” to the closely-mic’d piano ballad “Tuesday,” which features McRae leaning into her sturdy lower vocal register and spinning the type of quietly devastating lyrical gestures she’s become renowned for: “If you spent a day in my shoes/You’d know how it feels to be used.”

“It is because of my faith that I’m sitting here with you right now,” Malice tells Apple Music’s Ebro Darden about reforming Clipse with Pusha T. “That is the only reason that I get to sit here with my brother.” Brethren both in blood and in song, the Thorntons made up one of the most vital rap duos of the 2000s. Signed back in the day to The Neptunes’ Star Trak imprint, the Virginia Beach pair spat intricate yet gratifying narco bars over cutting-edge production. Yet despite dropping three essential, consequential albums over the course of that decade, an apparent crisis of Christian values appeared to prompt a creative split. Not long after the late-2009 release of *Til the Casket Drops*, a hiatus commenced as both members explored solo careers with distinct differences. Pusha T continued his coke-rap ascent within the GOOD Music roster, while Malice purposefully rebranded himself a Christian artist under the subtly adjusted moniker No Malice. Thankfully, their bond could never be broken. A momentous 2019 appearance by both brothers on Kanye West’s *Jesus Is King* suggested a greater musical reconciliation. Yet it took the return of longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams, a core architect of the classic Clipse sound, to produce *Let God Sort Em Out*, their first new album in some 15 years. “It just felt like a real good family setting,” Malice says of the studio sessions in Paris that yielded these tracks. “The creative aspect, the same as it’s always been from yay high.” “We get caught up in the feeling of certain records,” Pusha T adds. “You got to realize that before we even get to the process of hooks and writing, man, we’re so entranced by the beat.” Considering the triumphant sound of Pharrell’s production on the first single, “Ace Trumpets,” it’s hard not to believe the sincerity of that statement. Reunited at last, their chemistry feels as potent as ever beginning with “The Birds Don’t Sing” where, with a little help from John Legend, they pay respect to their departed parents with their respective verses. “The framework of the song was my last conversation with my mom and his last conversation with my dad,” Pusha T says. “It was therapeutic, but it was the hardest record to make. That’s why it actually starts the album.” Notorious for taking out his foes with acutely pointed bars, Pusha T once again wields his surgical summer skill set with incisive precision on “So Be It Pt. II.” It’s little wonder they invited the like-minded Kendrick Lamar to join in on the fun with a euphorically acrimonious verse on “Chains & Whips.” And while the album boasts a handful of choice rap features by everyone from Neptunes superfan Tyler, The Creator to Griselda affiliate Stove God Cooks, one of the biggest moments comes from an artist who preceded and inspired Clipse. “I was like, ‘Man, this, this piece right here is made for Nas,’” Pusha T says of the title track’s guest appearance, adding that the Queensbridge legend was originally meant to rap on his 2022 solo album, *It’s Almost Dry*. “His excitement was through the roof.” For Malice, it was his younger sibling’s enthusiasm towards the new music that lit a proverbial fire underneath him. “It just reminds me of how it was when we started,” he says. “We ain’t felt like this in a while.” That feeling comes through in a major way with every single verse from the rejuvenated elder brother, slipping a stunning blend of religious imagery and key memories into tracks like “P.O.V.” and “So Far Ahead.” Aglow with gospel vibes and synth swells, the latter of these succinctly sums up the spiritual dilemma that kept Malice away from Clipse for so long with one crucial insular line: “I done been both Mason Bethas.” “It is in the suffering when you start looking for answers,” he says. “Nothing is going to help you until you get into that word of God. That’s where I get all my peace from.”

Soon after The National singer Matt Berninger released his solo debut, *Serpentine Prison*, in the fall of 2020, its name seemed to backfire. After two decades as one of indie rock’s most magnetic lyricists and vocalists, he was trapped inside writer’s block, stuck in a cycle where anything that resembled work or even input induced despair. That trap slowly broke as he and his band began work on 2023’s *First Two Pages of Frankenstein* and its surprise follow-up, *Laugh Track*; their rebuilt rapport slowly revived his lexicon. That same year, Berninger and his family left Los Angeles after a decade, with their country escape to Connecticut recalling scenes of his Ohio childhood. He settled into new rhythms and modes, writing lyrics between the seams of baseballs. *Get Sunk*—a reference to that earlier depressive period and, implicitly, springing out of it—steadily took shape. To make *Get Sunk*, Berninger and longtime engineering partner and producer Sean O’Brien bounced around a Los Angeles studio, building beats and sequences for six hours at a time until Berninger finally found the words that fit. They recruited a sterling support cast, including Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, session ace Booker T. Jones, and Ronboy leader Julia Laws. They called their dozen or so helpers the “Saturday Musicians.” Berninger’s voice has always been The National’s calling card, the athletic baritone at its center. Wouldn’t a solo album, especially a second, just feel redundant or reductive, an imitation of its more famous setting? But *Get Sunk* is marked by an unexpected versatility. Where he cannily mumbles his way through the textural maze of “Nowhere Special,” he becomes ultimately approachable on “Junk,” a gorgeous and gothic love song that suggests Nick Cave. Where “Frozen Oranges” is a Middle American fever dream about searching for contentment, “No Love” documents the end of personal chemistry, of a relationship that once held meaning now corroding into, at best, niceties. The linchpin, though, is closer “Times of Difficulty,” where that whole big band gathers together to offer an anthem for interdependence, to reaching out for a lift when you get sunk. “Feels like we missed another summer/If we’re not dying, then what are we?” he moans. Getting on, best we can.

The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP *Okey*, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On *Big city life*, their second studio album (following 2021’s *Believer*), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen. On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.

“We were feeling really energized, confident, and excited,” The Last Dinner Party singer Abigail Morris tells Apple Music, as she thinks about making their not-very-difficult second album, *From the Pyre*. “There was no pressure from any outside force. It was all coming from us, what was inspiring us and what made us excited in the studio.” After the huge buzz (and BRIT Awards) that followed their debut album, 2024’s *Prelude to Ecstasy*, the band found the follow-up came surprisingly easily. Combining heavy themes and postmortems on past relationships with imagery involving nature, fire, and farming implements, the five-piece still manage to make their lyrics wry and cheeky. “This Is the Killer Speaking” takes them into murder ballad territory, while “Inferno” finds them watching *The Real Housewives* as a way of dealing with their meteoric rise. “The record feels simultaneously a lot darker, more serious, and aware of the state of the world,” says Morris. “Also, I think it’s tongue-in-cheek sometimes and a bit wry, which is the way we approach the world: having that balance of absurdity and deep emotion.” In early 2025, TLDP teamed up with Grammy-winning producer Markus Dravs. “We admired so much of his previous work,” says bassist Georgia Davies. “He’s worked with Florence, Wolf Alice, and Björk and we were like, ‘Tick, tick, tick.’ We didn’t have all the songs fully written like we did with the first album. There were seeds of ideas and skeletons of songs that we built up all together as we were going along, which was a different process. It was really fun as well.” The last step was to name the album, which happened over dinner and sake in Japan. “Having a really evocative title like that is important,” says Morris. “I love the word ‘pyre.’ It’s so medieval. The record’s meant to be a dark *The Canterbury Tales* \[Chaucer’s Middle English pilgrimage collection\].” Read on as Morris and Davies take you through *From the Pyre*, track by track. **“Agnus Dei”** Abigail Morris: “I wrote this in three parts because I had a crush on someone and was imagining being with them. We actually got together, and then I wrote some of it about that, and when we broke up, I finished it. Lyrically, it’s a nice way to set up the record because a lot of the songs are discussing relationships. It’s about the nature of being a musician and having a romantic life, writing about people you date and how you mythologize the other person and make them immortal by turning them into a character in the song. Sometimes you write about someone you only met once or sometimes it’s a relationship. I think it’s just the way we communicate if you choose to date only musicians.” **“Count the Ways”** Georgia Davies: “This was an old song. We were trying to work on it for the first album, so we had the genesis, but took it down a thousand different roads. All of them were dead ends. So we revived her for the second album. We were in America and listening to Arctic Monkeys, and we were like, ‘Oh, it should sound like *AM*.’ So I wrote the intro and the bass guitar line that runs throughout the song. It’s very fun to play, and I feel like people will sing along to it. Then it built up, and we added this choir outro with crazy strings.” **“Second Best”** AM: “This came from Emily \[Roberts, guitarist\] because of a relationship that she went through. That was a really interesting song lyrically because Emily started it and she wrote the choruses. Then, she took it to Lizzie \[Mayland, guitarist\] and Lizzie wrote the intro, and then I wrote the verses. So it was a committee song, which we’ve never done before. Emily was like, ‘This is what the song’s about. Interpret that.’ It’s about feeling inferior and betrayed and frustrated at being let down by someone you love and feeling you’re not their priority. It was a creative writing exercise.” **“This Is the Killer Speaking”** AM: “I was upset, confused, and angry after being ghosted for the first time, so I decided that the way to process it was to write a character song and make it funny. Originally, I wrote it just for myself as a joke. I was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Nick Cave and thinking, ‘I want to write a song like that.’ I think it was easy to make light of it instead of getting angry because, obviously, I don’t want to murder anyone.” GD: “This was also the song I think that helped us realize the concept of the album. It’s so character driven and we were thinking about how it sat and what connected this cowboy murder ballad to songs like ‘Agnus Dei’ and ‘Inferno.’ Using the lens of this song helped us to figure out what the whole album was about.” **“Rifle”** GD: “Lizzie wrote the lyrics for this one, and I think that it’s both metaphorical and quite literal because it’s talking about warmongering in general. Obviously, looking at it now, it’s quite clearly about the genocide in Palestine, but it’s also about how it would feel to know and love someone who went on to wage war and the devastation and anger that would cause to a mother. The whole song is quite angry in the choruses, but I think that clouds over this deep sadness and devastation. When the French section in the middle occurs, it feels like a parting of clouds temporarily for this personal address to one another, which is in the two-part harmony.” **“Woman Is a Tree”** AM: “This was another one that came from a place of wanting to do something specific with a song in the same way that ‘Killer’ was a murder ballad, but I wanted to write a folk song about womanhood, female friendships, and how men factor into your circle. I was drawn to this classic metaphor that a lot of folk stories and myths use, which is conflating women in nature. I feel like there’s such a rich well of imagery to draw on, and I wanted to write something more atmospheric. Not about one specific thing, but more of a mood of relating my perception of femininity to my perception of nature.” **“I Hold Your Anger”** AM: “Aurora \[Nishevci, keyboards\] wrote this song late in the process, and we were like, ‘That has to be on the record.’ We’re all in our mid-to-late-twenties, and this is the time when you start thinking about motherhood, family, and what you want from your life and feel intimidated and frightened. If you want children you have to decide, ‘So do I want to do an album or to have a baby?’ I can’t imagine trying to do both at the same time.” GD: “I think that Aurora saw her own parents make so many sacrifices for her. It’s about the expectation as well as the anxiety of ‘Am I capable of being this selfless to give my entire being to another person? What is the expectation of a mother?’” **“Sail Away”** AM: “I wrote this with my boyfriend at the time, maybe four years ago. We had the chorus and lyrics, and, at that time, it wasn’t about our breakup. Then, I started trying to write the verse lyrics when we were still together and nothing really was sticking. I got custody of the song, so when we broke up, I was able to write the verse. The processing of the breakup was tumultuous, so this is me trying to distill every good thing about the relationship into one song. Even if relationships end badly, it’s nice to be able to recognize the good moments. It’s the same person I wrote ‘Nothing Matters’ about, so it’s like this is the circle on the next record. We were in a car and now we’re on a boat.” **“The Scythe”** AM: “I wrote the chorus as part of another song when I was a teenager, and it wasn’t really about anything, because at that age I hadn’t been in a relationship. I found it a few years ago and started writing on top of it with more experience of love, then I realized that I was actually writing about grief. The nature of grief is it takes years and years to realize what’s going on and how deeply it’s affected you. My father passed away when I was 17, and now I’m 25 and still figuring out how to talk about that loss. When I was writing a song about a normal breakup, I realized that I was also writing half from the perspective of me and half from the perspective of my mother.” GD: “I think one of the beautiful things as a result of putting the song out is all of our comment sections on Instagram and YouTube become these places where people come to share their own stories of grief and the way that they respond to it, how it makes them feel held and comforted to hear this beautiful perspective on grief.” **“Inferno”** AM: “‘Inferno’ is my favorite song on the record because it’s the last one I wrote. So it feels the most up-to-date with where I am as a person. I wrote it on a break from touring in Paris—I was walking around and there was an art gallery with a crucifix hanging in the window. It looked so weird and out of place in this really brightly lit, white gallery. The song’s about being in the band and the swirling chaos of how it felt to come up over the last 18 months. There’s a reference to *The Real Housewives* because if we weren’t going out, Georgia and I would sit in our hotel room shellshocked and watch it in silence.”

In the course of making his fourth album, Loyle Carner came to the conclusion that perhaps it was time to lighten up a little. “I needed to not take myself so seriously,” he tells Apple Music. “I think I’m learning how to do that slowly.” One thing that has undoubtedly helped iron out that furrowed brow is just how much the South London rapper, songwriter, spoken-word artist, and now actor, born Ben Coyle-Larner, is reveling in fatherhood. “My son was in the studio so much, we were just in a place of living in the moment,” he explains. “When you’re around kids, that’s the only thing that exists to them. There’s no present or past or future or whatever.” That sense of savoring the here and now runs right through *hopefully !*. It’s an album that shakes off the contemplative turmoil of 2022’s *hugo*, where he explored his relationship with his own father, with these songs possessing a reassuring warmth. An airy, elegant hip-hop record from an artist who sounds totally at ease with himself, *hopefully !* has a cover that serves as the perfect snapshot for its themes of paternal love. “It always happens that my son just decides to draw on my face,” he says. “My partner captured the moment. What’s so nice is you can’t tell in that photo if he’s supporting me or comforting me or if I’m comforting him. I think that’s true of our relationship. It’s quite ambiguous, who’s looking after who?” Let Loyle Carner guide through the soothing sounds of *hopefully !*, track by track. **“feel at home”** “This was made with a friend of mine called Zach Nahome. I went to his house and we made it quite quickly. I was trying really hard to not write too many words down. Then, when I brought it back to the studio with my friends that I was working on the rest of the album with, I played them a little voice note I had on my phone of my son playing wind chimes in the park and it just happened to be in the perfect key with the song. Literally, he was kind of playing along with the song. It had to be at the start of the song and everyone around me was like, ‘It has to be the opener.’” **“in my mind”** “If ‘feel at home’ is the opening credits then ‘in my mind’ is the first scene. This was actually the first song we made together as a band and the first song for this album. We were in the studio in between sessions on tour and we had two days in the studio. It was a totally clean slate. I was listening to a lot more music from my childhood, The Smiths, The Cure, Bob Dylan, Stevie Smith, Elliott Smith—a lot of Smiths!—and new stuff too like Fontaines D.C.. Trying to get back to the stuff I listened to before I was told what I should listen to. That was feeding into it a lot.” **“all i need”** “This is one of my favorites. I wrote it in the car park of a Big Yellow Self Storage in East London. I was struck with how many things people keep, all the stuff that they hold onto. I wish that we had less stuff as people. I was thinking about all the emotional baggage that you don’t see that people carry around. I wish you could put that in a Big Yellow Self Storage instead.” **“lyin”** “This was written just before my daughter was born. It was about not being sure if she was going to make it or not. Birth and pregnancy is so complicated, and it doesn’t always work out. I was thinking about who she would be and hoping that she makes it. Also, putting my son to bed and thinking about how that’s my favorite time and how scared I was the first time around I was having a kid and how light and chill I was the second time because I knew it was easier than I thought.” **“time to go”** “‘time to go’’s days were numbered on the album for a long time. I was trying to get it to fit into the palette of the rest of the music, it was cool but it sounded so big and I wanted it to feel small. Then we went around the houses, tried to take everything away from it and, in the end, we decided that it was meant to be what it was and we couldn’t change it. We left it how it was and gave it a chance. We knew that there was something about it that made us feel good. We were like, ‘Look, if we can’t figure out how to change it, but we want it to come out, it’s going to have to be what it is.’” **“horcrux”** “I was thinking about my son and my daughter. In Harry Potter, Voldemort has the Horcruxes, where he takes a piece of his soul and puts it somewhere else. Someone had said to me, ‘You only get out of life alive through your kids. They’re the ones who get you out of life alive.’ I thought it was such a funny saying but I thought about it a lot because all of the best bits of me, I’ve taken them and tried to put them into my kids.” **“strangers”** “I made this with the intention of passing it over to someone I’m a big fan of: Adrianne Lenker. I really wanted her to sing it. I thought she could sing better than me, but she wasn’t around or whatever, so it fell back to me. At first, I was going to put it in the bin, and then I was like, ‘Actually, maybe this has got a chance.’ Other people started saying to me, ‘Please don’t lose this song. I really love it,’ so I gave it a shot, and here it is. Singing is fucking scary, if I’m honest. I didn’t think it through until it was too late. Obviously, it’s easy in front of no one. Then, the more people who started to come into touch with it and start to listen to it, it’s been a bit more scary. I’m trying to roll with it, trying to brave it.” **“hopefully” (with Benjamin Zephaniah)** “This features Benjamin Zephaniah. I was trying to be a little bit more coded in my language and be abstract a bit more to protect my kids, it’s so hard to express my love for them, literally. The echo you can hear is me and my son underneath a bridge on our bike. Every time we cycle underneath a bridge, he says, ‘Echo,’ because he likes the way it sounds, and so do I. I’ve recorded loads of those. Then, Benjamin Zephaniah, at the end, I had watched this documentary the day before and I heard that excerpt, and I was like, ‘That sums up what I’m saying in a more literal and pointed way.’” **“purpose” (with Navy Blue)** “This features Navy Blue. That was a dream come true, to collab with him. It came about really easily. We had been texting a bit. I texted him on a whim and was like, ‘I made this song, I think you’ll like it.’ He was sat on a beach in Jamaica and he wrote to it then and there and sent it back the next day.” **“don’t fix it” (with Nick Hakim)** “This is me and the main man, Nick Hakim. It was the last song we made for the album. It was in the studio at his in New York. It was quite a profound day for me to watch him. I’m a big fan of Nick Hakim. He wasn’t singing because obviously it’s a hard thing to part with when it’s so special to you. Then he got hunched up into the corner, put the mic to his lips, and spoke this little chorus into the mic. It was a privilege to watch someone do the thing they’re meant to do in your presence.” **“about time”** “It had to be at the end of the album because of my son, ’cause it sounds like he’s telling me to stop making music and focus on being a dad. I wanted it to be quite close to the beginning so it didn’t get lost but then it couldn’t be anywhere else. It was made to be there.”

Nation of Language is one of the 2020s’ undeniable indie-rock success stories, as the Brooklyn trio’s strange but delectable alchemy of pulsing electronic pop and the oaky, baroque sounds of late-2000s indie have reached a steadily growing audience with each release. You’ve likely heard “Weak in Your Light” from 2023’s *Strange Disciple* if you’ve turned on a single TV show in the last few years, and their fourth album *Dance Called Memory* continues their hot streak of broadly appealing and emotionally resonant songcraft. With frequent collaborator and LCD Soundsystem live member Nick Millhiser behind the boards, these 10 songs sparkle and bounce with every rhythmic twist, as lead singer Ian Richard Devaney’s angelic vocals hover above the proceedings. And lest you think they’re becoming easy to pin down, *Dance Called Memory* has a few tricks up its sleeve: Witness the brittle backbeats that make up the framework of “In Another Life” or the glistening shoegaze textures that course through “Now That You’re Gone.” It’s these subtle tweaks to their sound that prove that, even as they grow in popularity, Nation of Language continues to evolve in new and surprising ways.

Few pairings in modern hip-hop history have had the impact of Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist. More than just another timely rapper-producer duo project, 2020’s *Alfredo* differed in tone from the former’s critically acclaimed collabs with Madlib and the latter’s work with Action Bronson, Boldy James, and Earl Sweatshirt. However, capturing the unique magic of a confirmed classic a second time around has challenged many in this genre, as so many middling sequels show. In this case, though, both artists rise to the proverbial occasion with cinematic flair, changing the thematic crime scenery from mafioso to yakuza along the way. Simply titled *Alfredo 2*, their recorded reunion draws from a corresponding short film released ahead of the album drop, the narrative playing up their perceived distance only to bring them back together in dramatic fashion. Even without that context, these 14 songs showcase what makes their partnership so dynamic. Gibbs is downright gripping from the get-go, riding the gleaming groove of “1995” with cocksure bars likening him and his cohort to *Lethal Weapon* heroes Riggs and Murtaugh. That attitude persists on the defiant “Skinny Suge II” and the profane “Lemon Pepper Steppers,” both backed by airy, jazz-inflected production. His way with words remains poetically brash, vividly detailing his point of view on cuts like “Gas Station Sushi” and “Mar-a-Lago.” Yet as good as these verses would sound even over some pretty basic boom-bap, Alchemist’s instrumentals elevate the proceedings without fail. His ability to cultivate and maintain a vibe is all but unparalelled, putting listeners at ease with the hazy comforts of “I Still Love H.E.R.” and “Jean Claude.” Elsewhere, he exercises an extraordinary restraint with the soul of “Shangri La,” never letting the samples overpower the MC.

“I found myself in a new world of touring and chaos so quickly that I built a separation between myself as Josh and Barry on stage to deal with it,” Josh Mainnie tells Apple Music. “But when it came to writing this album, I knew it had to be for me as Josh. I wanted to bring those two parts back together.” As DJ and producer Barry Can’t Swim, Mainnie has had a meteoric rise since the release of his 2021 debut EP *Amor Fati* and 2023 album *When Will We Land?*. Blending emotive melody with thumping electronic percussion and expertly chopped vocal samples, Mainnie’s signature has become a feel-good dance-floor communion. For his second album, *Loner*, Mainnie turns inwards to explore his rise to fame, moving from the spoken-word soul-searching of “The Person You’d Like to Be” to the trance synths of “About to Begin” and soulful horn fanfares of “Childhood,” all while keeping his introspection anchored in the joy that has become his calling card. “Once I started, it all came together quickly,” he says. “It’s an authentic side of me that needed to come out for everyone to hear.” Read on for Mainnie’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“The Person You’d Like to Be”** “This is a collaboration with a good friend of mine, the poet Séamus. I’ve known him since university and always wanted to work together. We finally managed to make it happen and he came up with these lyrics that set the tone for the themes of the album really well. It’s about having two voices of conflict and duality—myself and Barry. I then put his vocal through an AI voice generator, so that it starts AI and becomes more and more Séamus as the track continues.” **“Different”** “I loved the lyric of ‘everybody different’ in this vocal sample I found and ended up building the entire track around it. I was also really inspired by the track ‘Church of Nonsense’ by Daniele Papini, which I’ve played in DJ sets for years, since it has this incredible rising bassline that I wanted to emulate here. It’s minimalistic and the synth that comes in two thirds of the way through wasn’t originally in there but when I brought it to rehearsals for the live show my keys player Jakes \[UK producer/artist Hannah Jacobs\] added it in and so it stayed!” **“Kimpton” (with O’Flynn)** “‘Kimpton’ is one of the earliest songs I wrote for the album. I wasn’t sure where to begin, so I went round to \[London DJ/producer\] O’Flynn’s house, since he lives around the corner from me, and we just began mucking about. He started this tune himself when he was on tour with Bonobo and I liked the vocal a lot but wanted to simplify it and build a different chord progression and texture around it. It developed as a jigsaw from there and I’m really happy with how it turned out.” **“All My Friends”** “This is another early one, probably written in November or December 2023. I found the vocal sample first and loved it so much I decided to keep it as it was and not overdo it with too much extra instrumentation. I’m generally quite quick in the studio, playing most of the instrumentation live myself and working on ideas until they’re finished rather than multiple things at once.” **“About to Begin”** “I wrote this while I was staying at my parents’ house on the day I delivered the finished album. I didn’t have anything to do, so I decided to quickly make something fresh to keep busy. I picked this vocal from a sample pack and it sounded pretty cheesy and American but I liked the energy of it. I put it through an AI voice generator, which added another persona to the themes of the record, and it’s since become a huge tune in the live show, so it had to go on the record.” **“Still Riding”** “This is one of my favorite tunes I’ve made and it was written a few years ago when I got back from touring in America for the first time. It’s been finished for a while but I couldn’t get the Kali Uchis vocal sample cleared until I think my own profile got bigger and they finally agreed. I’m so pleased because I love the track.” **“Cars Pass by Like Childhood Sweethearts”** “I was listening to a lot of \[French DJ/producer\] Pepe Bradock and his tune ‘Deep Burnt’ when I made this because I love the warmth and texture of the strings loop he uses. I started writing strings inspired by that and built all the other parts around it. It was originally just an instrumental but I spent a couple of weeks digging through samples and eventually found this vocal that works really well with the vibe of the tune.” **“Machine Noise for a Quiet Daydream” (feat. Séamus)** “This is a good place to have a bit of breathing space in the record. Séamus just sent me a poem he was working on one day, and I thought I’d see how it sounded on an instrumental I’d already finished and I loved the energy of it. I didn’t do much else, and none of it is really in time but I fell in love with his delivery on the phone voice note he sent through, so that’s what we kept.” **“Like It’s Part of the Dance”** “I don’t often write tracks for my live show but this is one that found its way into the show very quickly. I’ve been playing it for six or seven months and it always goes off—even when I sent the album to friends and the people I trust, a lot of people picked it out as their favorite. It’s all about the build and drop and energy.” **“Childhood”** “I was in Lisbon on holiday with my partner and I smuggled a keyboard along with me, which is what I ended up writing this one on. I started with the horns and vocal sample and then it was a case of finding a chord progression that led nicely into a sense of release. I felt like the track had a feeling of innocence to it, which comes with childhood, hence the title.” **“Marriage”** “‘Marriage’ ended up having a strange Russian doll process to it, since I wrote the vocal and had someone sing it live over an existing instrumental. Then I realized I didn’t like that instrumental, so I changed it before realizing I didn’t like the vocal anymore either so had to change that too! We got there in the end, and I love that it’s built around the lyric ‘My heart is closed for the season.’” **“Wandering Mt. Moon”** “I was in the toilet of an Indian restaurant in Brick Lane and suddenly heard the strings part of an amazing Bollywood track play through the speakers. I immediately Shazamed it and once I got home, wrote my own part inspired by it. It’s definitely become one of my favorites on the album since it’s such a lush and textured ending to have. The title also comes from a Game Boy *Pokémon* level, where you’re exploring a dark cave with only a ray of light, which is what this felt like to me.”

The indie-pop band fronted by Michelle Zauner released their third album, 2021’s *Jubilee*, to massive critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. After spending five years writing *Crying in H Mart*, her best-selling memoir about grief, Zauner devoted the record to joy and catharsis, all triumphant horns and swooning synths. But for its follow-up, the ambitious polymath found herself drawn to darker, knottier themes—loneliness, desire, contemporary masculinity. She also gravitated to the indie-rock sounds of her past, recruiting producer and guitarist Blake Mills, known for his work with artists like Fiona Apple, Feist, and Weyes Blood. “\[For *Jubilee*\] we wanted to have bombastic, big instrumentation with lots of strings and horns; I wanted this to come back to a more guitar-oriented record,” Zauner tells Apple Music. “I think I’m going back to my roots a little bit more.” When she began to write the band’s fourth record in 2022, Zauner found inspiration in an unlikely literary juxtaposition: Greek mythology, gothic romance classics, and works that she wryly deemed as part of the “incel canon” à la Bret Easton Ellis’ *American Psycho*. From such seemingly disparate sources emerged the gorgeously bleak songs of *For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)*, whose title is presented with an implied wink, acknowledging the many women songwriters whose work is reduced to “sad girl music.” Indeed, the atmosphere on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is less straightforwardly sad, and more…well, it’s complicated. On “Leda,” the story of a strained relationship unfolds by way of Greek myths in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. “Little Girl,” a deceptively sweet-sounding ballad about a father estranged from his daughter, opens with a spectacularly abject image: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite.” And on the fascinatingly eerie “Mega Circuit,” on which legendary drummer Jim Keltner lays down a mean shuffle, Zauner paints a twisted tableau of modern manhood—muddy ATVs, back-alley blowjobs, “incel eunuchs”—somehow managing to make it all sound achingly poetic with lines like, “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded/Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths.” The universe Zauner conveys on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is sordid and strange, though not without beauty in the form of sublime guitar sounds or striking turns of phrase. (“I never knew I’d find my way into the arms/Of men in bars,” she sings on the wistful “Men in Bars,” which includes the album’s only feature from…Jeff Bridges?!) As for the title’s bone-dry humor—sardonically zesty castanet and tambourine add extra irony to “Winter in LA,” on which Zauner imagines herself as a happier woman, writing sweet love songs instead of…these.

After the stylistic sprawl of 2022’s *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You*, Big Thief’s sixth album finds the group bringing their increasingly distinctive sound closer to the vest in a literal sense: *Double Infinity* is their first album as a proper trio, following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik. As a result, these nine songs—woolly, warm, and with frissons of electricity coursing through their veins—capture Big Thief in a state of ragged intimacy, every melodic turn and shift in instrumentation expanding and contracting like a pair of lungs. The rumbling drum fills and strummy framework of “Words” seemingly stretch for miles on end, while the nearly seven-minute “No Fear” carries a faint gothiness in its inky guitar lines that drip around Adrianne Lenker’s bruising vocals. More so than on any other Big Thief album to date, rock music is the name of the game here; even “Grandmother,” which features ambient legend Laraaji lending vocal incantations, bursts and blooms in a manner not unlike what was coming out of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene. Wild-eyed and positively hot-blooded, *Double Infinity* is the work of a band that never stops evolving, even as they continue to sound singularly like themselves.

Since forming in 1995, the brothers David and Stephen Dewaele have spent three decades earning a reputation as one of the 21st century’s most esteemed production duos, building a world of sound that merged rock and electronics, obliterated the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, and elevated the remix to the level of high art. On *All Systems Are Lying*—their first studio album in seven years, following 2018’s *Essential*—the Belgian duo set out to create a rock album sans electric guitars, channeling the energy of a live band through electronic instruments. Built entirely from modular synths, live drums, tape machines, and processed vocals, its 14 tracks counter the anxiety and paranoia of contemporary life with the occasional burst of creative defiance: “I wanna run free with the music,” they sing on “Run Free.” “Oh, you’ll never slow me down.”

The Florida-born singer-songwriter’s 2022 debut album, *Preacher’s Daughter*, was not exactly standard pop fare—a Southern Gothic odyssey steeped in themes of original sin and family trauma, whose fictional protagonist (spoiler alert) dies at the end. Nevertheless, the album broke through to the mainstream, even cracking the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 following its vinyl reissue this spring. Her long-awaited second album, January 2025’s *Perverts*, sat somewhere between passion project and provocation; its 90 minutes of eerie ambient collages seemed designed to challenge fans, if not shake them off entirely. Eight months later, Cain’s third album revisits the narrative that began with *Preacher’s Daughter*, whose centerpiece, “A House in Nebraska,” is a melancholy ode to Willoughby Tucker, the protagonist’s first love. *Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You* functions as a *Preacher’s Daughter* prequel—a story of two young, damaged lovers for whom doom is a powerful aphrodisiac. “I can see the end in the beginning of everything,” she sings on the reverb-drenched “Janie” before concluding grimly: “It’s not looking good.” Between sprawling ambient-folk stunners like “Nettles” and “Tempest,” Cain slips in a handful of moody instrumental interludes à la *Perverts* and a pair of fan favorites initially released as demos: “Dust Bowl,” a staple of her live sets for years, and the 15-minute “Waco, Texas,” for those who like their slow-dance numbers with a hearty dose of fatalism and a sprinkle of ’90s cult lore. Fitting for a concept album set in 1986, there’s also “Fuck Me Eyes,” a synth-pop power ballad starring a hell-raising, denim-wearing angel.

In the two and a half years since 2022’s *NO THANK YOU*, Little Simz attempted to write its follow-up four times, to no avail. From the outside, the London native was at the top of her game. Since 2021’s game-changing fourth album, *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, she’d won a Mercury Prize, owned the Glastonbury stage, and earned a spot among the power players of UK rap. But privately, her personal life was imploding. In 2025, word spread of the lawsuit Simz had filed against Inflo, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator who’d produced her last three albums. The split left the rapper at a loss, as she recounts on “Lonely”: “Sitting in the studio with my head in my hands/Thinking what am I to do with this music I can’t write?” From this turmoil, the 31-year-old musician arrived at a breakthrough that manifests on her sixth album, *Lotus*—named for the flower that thrives in muddy waters. Here Simz pulls no punches on the topic of her former friend, snarling her way through the bluesy opener “Thief” (“This person I’ve known my whole life, coming like the devil in disguise”) and the eerie “Flood,” produced by Miles Clinton James with cameos from Nigerian British pop star Obongjayar and South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly. But the mood lifts on tracks like “Young,” a bit of post-punk method rapping on being dumb, broke, and alive (“A bottle of Rio and some chicken and chips/In my fuck-me-up pumps and my Winehouse quiff”), and on “Free,” a jazzy boom-bap meditation on love versus fear, on which Simz reaches a cathartic conclusion: “Love is every time I put pen to the page.”

You’ll probably recognize the general sounds and styles on Ezra Furman’s 10th album: Beatles-y psych-folk (“Sudden Storm”), quasi-industrial ’90s pop (“Submission”), soft-focus disco (“You Hurt Me I Hate You”), and Springsteen-style garage (“Power of the Moon”). What’s great about Furman is the way she manages to make all these familiar, almost stock forms feel idiosyncratic by pushing them to their expressive limits. Like great karaoke, the key to her performances isn’t the way she pulls things together but the way she falls so joyfully, dramatically, performatively apart, queering the edges of pop tradition until it frays at the seams.

Listening to *MAD!*—the 28th studio album by Sparks, the fraternal duo of Ron and Russell Mael—it can be difficult to remember that they have been a band for more than half a century, with both brothers now on the doorstep of 80. Pairing aggressive programming and vivid electronic textures with sharp rock-band backing, these 12 songs are edgy, canny, and electrifying, eternal trademarks of Sparks’ music that have only sharpened with time. And that has been intentional, confirms Russell. “When you’ve had 28 albums, you want to impress yourself, that you can still do things that are modern-sounding, not like a band with a 28-album history,” he tells Apple Music. “We work hard at trying to do things that are provocative, lyrically and sonically.” The Maels talk about the process behind and inspiration for each track. **“Do Things My Own Way”** Russell Mael: “‘Do Things My Own Way’ is probably the mantra that Sparks has pursued for our entire career, from day one, when Todd Rundgren was the only person to acknowledge Sparks’ capabilities. We were turned down by a million labels, but he said you should always do things your own way. He said that, even on our very first album, we’d created our own universe, and we should continue on that way.” Ron Mael: “This is really the first song written for the album. We don’t carry over older, unused material onto a new album, so we start from scratch. After we recorded all these songs, it seemed fitting that it be in first place, because it is an overall statement of the album and Sparks.” **“JanSport Backpack”** Ron Mael: “We realize the practical uses of a JanSport, but we were in Tokyo and saw quite a few fashionable young ladies who were wearing JanSport backpacks. That isn’t a luxury brand, but they were wearing it as a style statement. That image stuck with us, and we tried to work backward to see how we could use it in a song. So, there’s a girl who’s breaking up with a guy, and the image he has is her walking away with a JanSport backpack. We have much confidence that, on Apple Music, you won’t find another song about JanSport backpacks.” **“Hit Me, Baby”** Russell Mael: “This is someone hoping it’s a nightmare, but the reality is that they are living this nightmare that we all are. We’re in Paris now, so it’s refreshing to not have “that man” in your face all the time, like when you’re in the States. The song obliquely references the hopelessness of the situation all around, but we didn’t want to be so blatant as to spell it out exactly. It can be about anyone else’s own situation, where they’re having a bad time that they hope goes away.” Ron Mael: “It was written in a more general sense before the election, but it became obvious that, even subconsciously, it had a more specific meaning. We like details in songs, but it’s important for us to have lyrics that don’t only reflect a particular subject, that they have a broader subtext. But it still took on a more specific meaning after the election.” **“Running Up a Tab at the Hotel for the Fab”** Russell Mael: “It’s a guy who is trying to impress his partner by taking her to this fine hotel and running a tab in hopes of swaying her. But the guy doesn’t have the means to pay for the extravagant tastes, so he gets thrown into prison at Rikers Island. But he says it’s all worth it, because he’s hoping she’ll come to visit him there.” Ron Mael: “In the distant past, we only wrote a song, then brought it in to record. We still work that way, but we also have the luxury, since Russell has a studio at his place, of just going into the studio and starting without any kind of preconception. We get a more varied approach, and this is one song that was done from the studio standpoint, then working backwards to figure out a melody and lyrics.” **“My Devotion”** Russell Mael: “Some people have tried to look deeper into it and say, ‘Well, surely it can’t just be a really nice love song.’ But, no, it’s just a really nice love song. We hope that, lyrically, it’s charming, with the guy’s devotion being so strong that he’s written her name on his shoe and is even thinking of getting a tattoo. It’s one of my favorite lines on the album.” **“Don’t Dog It”** Ron Mael: “With the line ‘Shake it thusly and you’ll see the light,’ we like having words from two different worlds. ‘Shake it’ is a cliché in a million songs, but ‘thusly’ is such a formal word. They are in conflict as far as the tone, but it’s a formal way to suggest something carnal. We like butting up together, so to speak, words. It’s a Shakespeare thing applied to hip-hop expression. We’re also encouraging movement as a way to fight. The person is seeking help, and the advice that they’re given isn’t something deep and intellectual. It’s ‘shake it thusly.’” **“In Daylight”** Ron Mael: “For most of us, darkness is more advantageous to our opportunities for romantic advancement, let’s say. In so many of our songs, the instrumentation and singing are very direct, even if it’s musically complex. We often attempt to make songs aggressive, but this one was a little more diffuse. There’s an atmosphere here, and it feels blurred, which is the feeling of being between daylight and darkness.” **“I-405 Rules”** Russell Mael: “There’s some sincerity to the image of the I-405 having a beauty in its own way, especially if you look at it at night, when thousands of cars are bumper to bumper, and you see the red taillights. It’s a sea of red, especially if you’re above the freeway, say, at the Getty Center. Lots of other major cities in the world have this beautiful river—the Seine, the Thames, the Sumida. But we don’t have that, except when, once a year, it rains in LA, when it even starts to look like a river. The I-405 is our contribution to the great rivers of the world. This song is also so sonically in your face that it’s overly dramatic for the subject matter, and we like that it goes counter to what we’re singing about.” **“A Long Red Light”** Russell Mael: “We like this song a lot, because it’s not a typical song structure. It’s a piece that evolves over time with a simple subject—waiting for a red light to hopefully turn green someday. Over time, it shifts musically, and, toward the end of it, you can sense the frustration that the light is still red. It turns into this big chorale, with a lot of voices and orchestral drums coming in. The situation becomes really urgent, and we like that in a song that deals with a small situation, a red light that everyone’s been to. That was challenging for us in a positive way.” **“Drowned in a Sea of Tears”** Russell Mael: “It is a devastating relationship breakup song. There’s been pop songs throughout history that have had the theme of drowning. We wanted to find another way of doing that. This one is really melodic, and, in contrast to ‘A Long Red Light,’ it’s a verse and a chorus kicking in a big way.” **“A Little Bit of Light Banter”** Ron Mael: “We see it as this couple that feels that they’re different from other couples that do need all these in-depth discussions. This couple is happy to do something that’s the opposite of that, and they feel a closeness because they just share this love of light banter. They don’t care what the neighbors think, and hopefully it comes across as charming, for a couple that feels they’re outside of the world of heavy-duty discussions. The advice that we’re given is that we’re supposed to read and discuss Kafka at night, but it’s not always wise advice.” **“Lord Have Mercy”** Russell Mael: “It is another take on a relationship. While this woman is asleep, her partner hears her singing this melody, and it’s so beautiful for him to hear. He’s heard melodies from buskers on the street that were OK. He’s heard melodies from various times and periods. But this melody he’s overhearing from this woman in her sleep becomes something so striking and profound for him.” Ron Mael: “He’s not necessarily a believer, but the beauty of her singing while she’s half-asleep has captivated him so much. He hears what she’s singing not in a lyrical sense about religion and being converted, but he just finds beauty in what she’s singing and hopes it continues forever.”