Rough Trade's Albums of the Year 2025

What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.

After back-to-back albums focused on their love of horror, experimental hip-hop trio clipping. head into the cybernetic unknown on their sixth, *Dead Channel Sky*. Even as their sound has become progressively more streamlined since the lurching abstractions of their self-titled debut on indie institution Sub Pop back in 2014, co-producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes conjure pure and jagged bolts of electricity across these 20 tracks, borrowing equally from the mechanical menace of early house and techno and the kitchen-sink IDM of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. As with clipping.’s previous records, *Dead Channel Sky* is a highly collaborative affair: Wilco guitarist Nels Cline contributes scorched licks to the inside-out instrumental “Malleus” while indie hip-hop legend Aesop Rock lends his distinctive pipes to “Welcome Home Warrior.” But the speed-demon dexterity that is Daveed Diggs’ rapping skills remain as clipping.’s mainframe; he acrobatically hops across the album’s ones-and-zeroes eruptions like a computer virus avoiding detection, guiding listeners through *Dead Channel Sky*’s corroded landscape with ease.

The members of Parcels had barely graduated high school when they left Byron Bay, Australia for Berlin in 2014, five friends sharing a dream and a cramped one-bedroom apartment. Within a year, they had released their debut EP and signed a label deal; by 2017, they were collaborating with Daft Punk on the band’s single “Overnight,” a track that would become the dance icons’ final production. After two albums—2018’s self-titled debut and 2021’s double LP *Day/Night*—and nearly a decade in motion, Parcels finally took a break in 2023. For six months, they lived their ordinary lives while working on songs individually before reconvening to finish them together. Whereas *Day/Night* was recorded in a single studio and meticulously planned out, their third album *LOVED* was made more loosely, with sessions in Berlin, Byron Bay, Sydney, and Mexico City, and a go-with-the-flow approach that let the album emerge on its own. “It\'s kind of like Parcels back to our most authentic self, in a way,” bassist Noah Hill told Apple Music’s Travis Mills in April 2025. “This one feels a lot more pure and direct, and more to what we naturally have inside of us.” From opener “Tobeloved,” *LOVED* is dotted with moments of laughter and colorful ad-libs that drop listeners right in the booth with them. That joy permeates the production, a vintage blend of peppy keys, hand-claps, chest-swelling crescendos, and funky guitar riffs that beg for a little shimmy. They also bring tenderness: “Ifyoucall” offers unconditional love with the warmth of a long hug, and “Leaveyourlove” is a starry-eyed declaration of devotion. The latter, written in Mexico while watching the sun set over the ocean, became the album’s anchor point. “We were all writing our own individual verses about our own love stories at the time, and wanting to lean into that directness and not being afraid to talk about love so directly,” said Hill. “This track just clicked with all of us instantly.” But *LOVED* also refers to the emotion in the past tense. The disco fizz of “Yougotmefeeling” sugarcoats the realization that a relationship is past saving, and the more delicate “Summerinlove” aches with post-breakup yearning. Other songs like “Safeandsound” and “Finallyover” embrace the unknowable future with optimism, while closer “Iwanttobeyourlightagain” circles back to where it all began: “I remember when we were green/Five people and two sets of keys/Trying so hard to be seen.”

For more than a decade, the musician born Nat Ćmiel has been exploring what it means to be a 21st-century human (or post-human): On 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, yeule probed the limits of the flesh by way of modulated vocals and decaying Danny L Harle beats; on 2023’s *softscars*, the artist who once identified as a cyborg tiptoed into the corporeal world, inspired by the fuzzy rock music of the late ’90s. Their fourth album, *Evangelic Girl Is a Gun*, takes their glitchy avant-pop even further out of the matrix, eschewing Auto-Tune entirely to showcase their vocals at their rawest and most visceral. Enchantingly abject vignettes about doomed love and ego death play out over sexy-sad soundscapes that draw from ’90s trip-hop and alt-rock, with production from Mura Masa, A. G. Cook, and Clams Casino. Imagine the most morose possible version of a Charli xcx song and you’ve got the title track, on which yeule purrs dispassionately: “Nosebleed on the Sunset Strip/He picks me up in a fast whip/He laces up my leather boots/He wears a blood-stained velvet suit.”

Olivia Dean’s follow-up to 2023’s *Messy* suggests she’s anything but. From the radio-friendly uplifter “Nice to Each Other” to the sweeping, late ’60s Dionne Warwick-esque soul of “So Easy (To Fall in Love),” *The Art of Loving* finds Dean self-assured as she slinks freely through R&B and pop. “You can make whatever you want, there’s no rules and that’s such a freeing feeling,” she tells Apple Music’s Rebecca Judd. Dean describes her songwriting on *The Art of Loving* as “real, fresh, and honest” and she makes it sound so easy. It’s no surprise that the overarching theme—love in its different forms—came naturally. “I had the title quite quickly,” she says. “I’ve also been fascinated by love. It’s the one thing that everybody is looking for in their life in some capacity, whether it be friendship, family, romantic, but it’s something that we’re not taught. There’s not a love module in school. It’s this magic thing we’re supposed to know how to do. So I wanted to take a closer look at it and what it means to me and the art of it, the craft of loving someone properly.” The album opens with the instant hit “Nice to Each Other,” the obvious choice for Dean. “As soon as I wrote it, I knew it was going to be the first song. It’s got a Fleetwood Mac guitary feel and it’s cheeky, it’s flirty,” she says. There might be heartbreaks and wistful moments along the way, but Dean leaves listeners in no doubt she’s in a happy place. “How could I not be?” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about touring and what I want to sing live and I want it to be joyful. So I’ve been moving towards joy.”

There has always been something deeply old-fashioned about DJ Koze’s music, a sense of wonder and invention more closely related to the rush of a Bugs Bunny cartoon or the moony romance of a prewar pop song than anything from the modern era per se. *Music Can Hear Us* is only his fourth album in 20 years—DJ work keeps him busy, and in general he does not seem like one to hurry—and builds on the pan-electronic style he developed on *Amygdala* and *Knock Knock*. The songs shuffle between tropical pop (the Damon Albarn-featuring “Pure Love”), melancholy ambience (“A Dónde Vas?”), lightly psychedelic club tracks (“Aruna,” “Buschtaxi”), and doo-wop sweetness (“Unbelievable,” “Umaoi”) with a fluidity that can feel both playful and dizzying. Music for tickling your third eye.

Following the widescreen dream pop of 2021’s *Blue Weekend*, Wolf Alice felt some sonic skin shedding was in order for their fourth album. “We were thinking about what we were doing in a much more calculated way,” bassist Theo Ellis tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I don’t know whether it’s age or whether it’s having done this for the fourth time, but less was more with this record.” Recorded in LA with Adele/Paul McCartney producer Greg Kurstin, *The Clearing* finds the North London four-piece stripping back the alt-rock fuzz and shoegazey FX that had characterized their earlier releases for a more classic sound. One with a warm analog glow and rich FM radio-friendly melodies that positions them closer to ’70s soft rock than the 2010s indie scene from which they broke out. Listen closely, and there are nods to that golden era bubbling up throughout *The Clearing*: drummer Joel Amey’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”-cribbing shuffle on “Leaning Against the Wall,” the ELO/Beach Boys chug that drives “Bread Butter Tea Sugar,” and guitarist Joff Oddie switching between breezy strumming, intricate fingerpicking, and searing melodic lines like *Rumours*-era Lindsey Buckingham. Such echoes reflect the band’s listening habits: a stack of records on heavy rotation in the studio that included Fleetwood Mac, George Harrison, and folk-rock outliers Pentangle. “This time, we weren’t afraid to give references. Maybe in the past I felt that I didn’t want to give them because then it would sound like that,” singer Ellie Rowsell says of the band’s touchstones when making *The Clearing*. “But now I felt much braver to say, *this* is my reference. I knew that it was going to sound like us because I understood what we were a bit more.” The wide-open space afforded by *The Clearing*’s musical palette allows Wolf Alice’s finest set of songs to date to shine. Whether it’s “Just Two Girls’” sparkling, disco-flecked pop, Rowsell’s hushed reflections on aging and motherhood on “Play It Out” or “White Horses”—a remarkable interpolation of folk and krautrock that startles without having to turn everything up into the red. “Maybe there are people who are scared of rock music that is soft. ‘Soft rock’ has felt like something I should never say out loud up until now,” reflects Rowsell. “I don’t care. I’m interested in music that you can play live that is energetic and performative without having to be all distortion pedals and shouting and fast and loud. I like that stuff still, but there’s certain songs that we have in our set where I’m like, ‘Why is this an “up” part of the set when it’s just a good acoustic guitar?’ Or, ‘How come I feel like I am giving 100 percent when I’m not stomping around on stage screaming in people’s faces?’”

Don’t be fooled by the brief burst of Beethoven’s Fifth that caps the introductory track on The Hives’ seventh album—Sweden’s most swaggering garage rockers have not entered their symphonic prog phase. It’s just a mischievous misdirection that thrusts us slam-bang into “Enough Is Enough,” whose buzzsaw guitars and spine-cracking backbeat provide intentionally unsubtle echoes of The Hives’ 2000 signature, “Hate to Say I Told You So” (while proving that even in his late forties, lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist isn’t about to retire his nickname). Cramming 13 tracks into 33 minutes, *The Hives Forever Forever The Hives* retains the band’s strict adherence to punk’s loud/fast parameters, even as they reformulate their Molotov-rocktail recipe with liberal doses of synth-spiked indie (“Legalize Living”), Clash-of-’77 valor (“Paint a Picture”), and high-voltage AC/DC riffage (“Bad Call”). As a Y2K-era sensation that’s endured past the quarter-century mark, The Hives have more than earned the right to write their own self-celebratory theme song, and with the needling, New Wavey title track, they deliver the sort of shout-it-out chorus that their crowds will still be chanting long after the house lights go up.

Each Stereolab album functions as a portal to a future we once imagined but never achieved: a world of flying cars, egg chairs, and space-age bachelor pads where the coolest Franco-pop, German psychedelic, and Brazilian jazz records are spinning 24/7. And so it remains on the indie icons’ first new album in 15 years, which begins with a minute-long flourish of oscillating synths that sounds like an old mainframe being rebooted back to life. *Instant Holograms on Metal Film* finds the Stereolab machine in perfect working order after an extended period of inactivity, and, if anything, the group sounds eager to make up for lost time with gloriously overstuffed songs that key in on familiar pleasure points while introducing all manner of shapeshifting surprises. “Immortal Hands” eases you into a laidback loungey groove before hitching itself to a funky drum-machine beat and coasting through a dizzying swirl of brass and flutes; “Electrified Teenybop!” plays like the theme music to some alternate-universe dance show where the kids get down to a frenetic fusion of ping-ponging Kraftwerkian electronics and lustrous disco orchestrations. But, as ever, Stereolab’s splendorous soundworld is built atop a foundation of pointed political commentary addressing our present-day struggles and inequalities: Embedded within the breezy kaleidoscopic pop of “Melodie Is a Wound” is a scathing indictment of social media disinformation and the oppressive elites that manipulate it to their advantage. And yet, when the band returns to their motorik hypno-rock roots for the song’s exhilarating second act, they reassure us that utopia is still within our reach.

Snõõper’s birdbrained synth-punk is both a sign of our screen-addled times and a callback to a long history of weirdos who use punk as a portal to childlike, almost alien states, from Devo and The B-52’s through Butthole Surfers and Brainiac to contemporary artists like Prison Affair. *Worldwide*—their second album for Jack White’s Third Man Records—boils down their style to its essence: brief (12 tracks, 28 minutes), noisy, catchy, bright; endlessly entertained (“Company Car”) but deeply fried (“Blockhead”)—all your favorite notifications, all at once. As with the Ramones before them, the real radical idea is that maybe all this getting dumber stuff isn’t so bad.

By sheer force of will, MIKE has become a leading voice in New York’s underground rap renaissance. He drops one or two albums a year, each expanding his lyrical scope, laidback delivery, and excellent ear for beats. His crew runs deep, and 2024’s *Pinball* with producer Tony Seltzer featured many of his closest collaborators, like Earl Sweatshirt and Tony Shhnow. His 2025 effort, *Showbiz!*, is similar in the sense that it’s a deeply immersive effort, but the guest list is limited. MIKE’s world is nevertheless unmistakable, filled with weed smoke, knotty lyrics, and beats that continue to help forge a new golden age in New York. “Then we could be free” takes an old soul sample and highlights the bassline, giving MIKE’s unrelenting delivery a funky underbelly. “Lucky” features drums that explode like fireworks and synths that dance around MIKE’s voice, approximating his slippery flow without ever tying it down to a consistent rhythm. It’s loose but never sloppy.

Ichiko Aoba has come into her own as one of Japan’s most vital artists since debuting at 19 years old, with her boundless curiosity and musical versatility only growing as her career has progressed. On *Luminescent Creatures*, she casts her gaze toward the sea, channeling its moments of tumult and peace into 11 meticulously crafted songs that glow with awe. Ichiko and her chief collaborator, pianist and composer Taro Umebayashi, deftly lead an ensemble through the Kyoto-raised Ichiko’s brief yet complex compositions, on which she shows her precisely honed instincts for employing both airy minimalism and oceanic grandeur. “COLORATURA” rises and falls like waves, its circling flutes and cascading piano propelling her whispered voice into a tangle of strings; on “Lucifèrine,” she creates a mille-feuille of her own voice, bringing to full brightness the “light deep within the soul” marveled over in her lyrics. *Luminescent Creatures* shows how Ichiko has evolved—not just as an artist, but as an observer of the natural world over the last 15 years.

If 2025, as Charli xcx famously prophesied, gave rise to Turnstile Summer, then Militarie Gun Autumn is surely upon us. Like their Baltimore spiritual brethren, Ian Shelton’s LA-based project-turned-band has been burrowing a path from the circle pit to the festival stage, complementing their innate, jugular-bulging intensity with mass-appeal hooks and an eagerness to crowd-surf beyond the parameters of hardcore. And with their second proper album, *God Save the Gun*, Militarie Gun makes their most concerted swing for the bleachers yet. “We wanted to make a big record; we wanted to make a classic,” Shelton tells Apple Music. “We actually took that moment to step back and be like, ‘How do we actually take this as far as we can?’ I think our producer, Riley MacIntyre, was so emotion-forward, and I would say that we’re a very emotion-forward band.” For Shelton, that meant coming to terms with being a former straight-edge kid who, just as Militarie Gun was taking off, had his first-ever sip of alcohol at age 30 and gradually developed a heavy drinking habit. “I’ve been slipping up,” he admits on the album’s gate-crashing salvo “B A D I D E A,” but the song’s irrepressible energy and cathartic chant-along chorus suggest he isn’t wallowing in misery so much as giving himself a kick in the butt to get his life back on track. “I think a huge part of *God Save the Gun* is that you don’t have to burn your life down to make it better,” Shelton says. “We think that you have to hit this rock bottom, but if you know you’re in a tailspin, you could just go ahead and choose to take yourself out of it.” As such, there’s a sense of uplift to even the album’s most incendiary moments: “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down” barrels in on a bruising backbeat caked in distortion, but Shelton’s despairing self-diagnosis—“I feel trapped!”—is delivered on a bed of choral Beach Boys harmonies. And coming out of the blown-out grungy finale of the suicide-themed elegy “I Won’t Murder Your Friend,” the voice of Modest Mouse lead singer Isaac Brock appears on the dreamy interstitial “Isaac’s Song” as if Shelton were being consoled by a guardian angel. But *God Save the Gun* also sees Shelton displaying the confidence to let his melodies shine without feeling the need to rough them up: “Laugh at Me” exudes the jangly sparkle of a ’90s Gin Blossoms nugget, while the acoustic ballad “Daydream” aspires to be nothing less than a “Wonderwall” for the generation aging out of hardcore. “We’ve played in hardcore bands,” Shelton says. “But we are a rock band, and we don’t approach anything from being like, ‘What do people in hardcore think?’ Everything that we do is for self-soothing.”

The hotly anticipated debut album from Split Chain sees the British band spanning decades with a sound that filters some of the 1990s’ dominant genres through a modern sensibility. Vocalist Bert Martinez-Cowles invokes the dreamy delivery of Deftones’ Chino Moreno—but with lyrics about toxic households, impostor syndrome, and living life on your own terms. Meanwhile, drummer Aaron Black, bassist Tom Davies, and guitarists Ollie Bowles and Jake Reid weave heavy shoegaze magic on “bored. Tired. Torn.” and early single “I’m Not Dying to Be Here.” Later, “Subside” trades in smoothed-edge nu metal, while “Who Am I?” builds on the impassioned themes of post-hardcore and Y2K emo.

Love, Davina McCall, and making more tunes to play live: Wet Leg’s inspiration for their second album sounds like it came easily, but they had to shift into new territory on *moisturizer*. Their debut—2022’s *Wet Leg*—provided 36 minutes of lo-fi hooks, wit, and twentysomething confessions to catapult them into a BRIT- and Grammy-winning swirl of well-deserved hype. After a relentless but enjoyable touring schedule, they decided to escape to a seaside town for two weeks at a time to turn their attention to album number two. “I think we’re really fortunate we can write in that traditional band setup,” Rhian Teasdale tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “When we stopped touring, we were like, ‘OK, what are we going to play when we go on tour again? Let’s make some tunes.’” So the band decamped to a house in Southwold, Suffolk and got to work. “There was a kid’s playroom with some LEGO around, so we took the majority of the stuff out and put all of our gear in it,” says guitarist Joshua Mobaraki. “Some days we were like, ‘OK, let’s start at this time and put a shift in.’ And then other times, it was 1 am and all of a sudden we were writing again. It was really cool.” *moisturizer* finds the band once again teaming up with producer Dan Carey and repeatedly nailing the perfect three-minute song on 12 tight tracks. They admit they give away more of themselves than they did on *Wet Leg*. While “catch these fists” has a strong message about reclaiming personal space, they stray into more romantic territory elsewhere. Hester Chambers wrote “don’t speak” for Mobaraki, who’s also her partner, but she subverted the idea. “She wrote me a song from me to her, which is really cheeky,” he says. “CPR” captures the feeling of infatuation, while “davina mccall” and “11: 21” sum up more secure, longer-term love, which are themes Teasdale had avoided before this album. “I’d never even attempted writing any kind of lyrics that were to do with love,” she says. “I had this rule when I was younger to just not even use the word ‘love.’ I was really hesitant because I felt like there were so many love songs out there. Also, it didn’t feel very authentic. When I was younger, I don’t think I really did know love, so I was just pulling out cliche after cliche.” On *moisturizer*, Wet Leg sound as vital and adventurous as they did on their debut—but there’s a new assurance creeping in too. “Our position as a band is to just constantly be surprised that people still want to listen to it,” says Mobaraki. “I don’t know if the imposter syndrome goes or it’s like you turn it into something else. It’s a way of not being like, ‘Everyone’s telling us that we’re amazing. That means that we are amazing.’ Instead, it’s just like, ‘Huh, let’s do another song. I like that one. Let’s do another one.’ I think we’ve developed and grown and we’re different now. We’re giving ourselves permission to take up space.”

Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”

David Byrne’s last album, 2018’s *American Utopia*, wasn’t merely an album: It was a sprawling multimedia work that encompassed music, a stage show, and a film that captured the magic of its performance. In fact, it was so sprawling that its chronology even includes a lengthy period of dormancy, between opening on Broadway at the end of 2019 and restarting in 2021 after COVID restrictions were eased. “During the pandemic, of course, I wanted to write new songs, but I felt like what was happening was bigger than anything I could write about,” Byrne tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of that unexpected gap. “And I didn’t quite know how to address it.” While the songs that make up his eighth album under his given name, *Who Is the Sky?*, recorded with the musically elastic Ghost Train Orchestra, aren’t directly a product of that time, there are threads and themes that trace back to it. “I realized that some of these new songs are coming out of that,” he adds. The most obvious is probably the ode to his living quarters “My Apartment Is My Friend,” where Byrne ruminates on how intimate that physical space has become. \"So forgive me if I hesitate, if a tear comes now and then,” he sings. “You stood by me when darkness fell/My apartment is my friend.” Byrne has always had a gift for making the specific, and even the fantastical, seem universal. “Moisturizing Thing” plays like a Hollywood sci-fi, starring Byrne himself, in which he tries an anti-aging skin treatment only to turn into a toddler, forcing him to see the world through another’s eyes. He’s constantly asking more of himself in these songs: He questions a smiling religious teacher who’s gorging himself on hors d’oeuvres (“I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party”); he ponders the place he’s been put in history (“The Avant Garde”); he wonders how his wife just understands things so naturally (“She Explains Things to Me”); he sees life in cycles of happiness and pain, searching and resolution (“Everybody Laughs”). And he does it all with the playfulness, grace, and naked, life-affirming joy of a musical elder statesman who has never lost his curious, creative spark.

As one of a few shouty, abrasive, angular bands coalescing around Brixton live venue and rehearsal space The Windmill during the late 2010s, shame found themselves being ushered into a pigeonhole. Alongside the likes of Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road, they were heralded as the new wave of post-punk by a UK music press and A&R industry keen to have uncovered the next fertile scene. Wisely, the five-piece did their best to elude those strictures on the follow-ups to 2018 debut *Songs of Praise*. But reflecting on 2021’s *Drunk Tank Pink* and *Food for Worms* (2023), records that benefitted from ideas drawn from psych-rock, folk, jazz, and even singing lessons, shame began to wonder if some of their urgency had been thinned out. As a result, *Cutthroat* arrives with the band’s horizons still broad but their sound revitalized. The title track, with its combustion of riffs and groove, and the agitated polemic of “Cowards Around” captures the bracing, confrontational energy of the band’s live shows. It’s an opening salvo that establishes the vim and efficiency with which they go on to try out rockabilly (“Quiet Life”), the cockeyed but melodic sound of early Pavement (“Plaster”), sing-along indie pop (“Spartak”), and a collision of Portuguese folk, disco, and New Wave (“Lampião”). Against this absorbing backdrop, singer Charlie Steen muses on just how conflicted and paradoxical the human condition is. And he does it with a little more self-assurance and a bit less vulnerability and doubt than before. “Well, you can follow your fashions/You can follow your cliques/And I feel sorry for you/For feeling sorry for me,” he declares on “Spartak.” *Cutthroat* is the sound of shame continuing to explore their sound—and arriving somewhere increasingly unique.

A year after her 2024 synth-shocked opus *Girl with No Face*, LA-via-Toronto pop shapeshifter Allie X has reinvented herself once again. Composed largely on her first instrument, the piano, *Happiness Is Going to Get You* presents the more fantastical flip side to its dance-floor-driven predecessor, with the always glamboyant singer adopting a new persona she dubs the Infant Marie, whose retro-futurist look—part Marie Antoinette, part Klaus Nomi—serves as the album’s sonic mood board. The result is a set of cosmopolitan alt-pop earworms infused with a playfully baroque sensibility. The whistling hook and fleet-footed rhythms of “7th Floor” position it as a close cousin to Peter Bjorn and John’s mid-2000s touchstone “Young Folks,” while the bassy bounce of “Reunite” leads us into a sunshower of twinkling harpsichords. But Allie’s musical extravagance is always anchored by her self-analytical lyrics and devious sense of humor: “I Hope You Hear This Song” sees her dreaming of writing the sort of chart-topping hit that gets played everywhere out in the world—not for fame and fortune, but to haunt and taunt an ex-boyfriend while he’s “shopping at the mall, getting coffee at the stall.” And thanks to its insidious melody and buoyant “Bitter Sweet Symphony” strings, she just might get her wish.

Momma’s follow-up to their 2022 breakthrough album, *Household Name*, opens with the pair skewering a freshly abandoned ex with the line “I love you to death/But I’m outside the door.” No emotion is off-limits for Brooklyn-based songwriting duo Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten (now expanded to a quartet including guitarist, composer, and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks), who’ve created a breakup album full of spiky lyrics and sing-along hooks. “It’s written from the perspective of two people we hurt, so it’s kinda looking at ourselves in a critical lens, which was a really interesting exercise,” Friedman tells Apple Music. “I think it captures the turmoil of us moving on, and these people feeling left behind. The inner struggle of, ‘These people are important to us. I love them, but our lives are growing apart, and I’m changing, so I have to move on.’” *Welcome to My Blue Sky* gave Momma a new spark and a deeper songwriting chemistry that naturally evolved from being such close friends. “I definitely think we wanted to not make a *Household Name* round two, so we were trying to push ourselves to find new things that would excite us,” says Friedman. “With Allegra and I writing these songs with just the two of us on acoustic, it actually allowed more room to play.” Weingarten agrees that their close friendship takes away any hint of self-consciousness that could hamper their creativity. “We’re so connected as songwriters and also friends, there’s a lot less time wasted trying to figure something out on the spot,” she says. “It all came together super fast because when it’s just Etta and I, we can try anything. We learned to trust our intuition and followed that.” From the ’90s slacker sing-along of “I Want You (Fever)” to a nostalgic trip to the grungy dance floor on “Last Kiss,” it’s the sound of a band maturing and moving on up.

Kae Tempest says that *Self Titled* is a record borne out of synchronicity. The South Londoner is a master of many arts—he’s a rapper, poet, spoken word act, novelist, and more—but something didn’t feel right as he approached making what he thought would be his fifth solo album. Seeking an outside take on it, Tempest played some of the songs to Fraser T. Smith, with whom he’d collaborated on the Dave and Adele producer’s Future Utopia project, and Smith’s feedback opened up a whole new way forward. “He just said, ‘This isn’t right for right now, this just isn’t quite it, there’s something else I think that needs to come out of you right now,’” Tempest tells Apple Music. “He said, ‘Why don’t you just park this and come into the studio and let’s see what happens?’” What happened is *Self Titled*, a career peak that takes in menacing hip-hop grooves, jubilant, expansive pop, jagged beats, and bombastic soundscapes. By some margin, it is Tempest’s most ambitious musical work to date. Working with Smith unlocked something. “It brought out the bigness of my sound, my intentionality around songwriting, wanting to be more concise, more driven, wanting bigger sound,” Tempest says. “Fraser is a big songwriter.” The process of making the record, he explains, felt like being swept up in a strong current. “We were just going with it, and the minute we tried to lead and not flow, it wouldn’t quite work. If I tried to get something to happen, it just wouldn’t happen.” *Self Titled* is very much the album that Kae Tempest was meant to make right now. Let Tempest guide you through it, track by track. **“I Stand on the Line”** “This is a statement piece. It’s huge. The orchestral instrumentation, the expansiveness of the sound and the production. This was that moment when I said to Fraser, ‘I want big sound. I want to make big songs,’ and this was his response. Lyrically, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. My natural place when I’m writing lyrics is to write from character perspectives or zoom in on one very specific thing but retain some kind of abstract relationship with the object of the poem or the lyric. But with this, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. I realized this is what appeals to me in songs, when you get this insight into somebody’s truth.” **“Statue in the Square”** “I was wondering whether to follow ‘I Stand on the Line’ with this because, in some ways, they tread some of the same ground lyrically, but in other ways, it’s a one-two punch that is so satisfying. I played Fraser Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘HISS’ and Run The Jewels. I was like, ‘I just want something so simple, but I want it to be so big, but so clear in each of its parts.’ I liked the idea of creating something on the piano that felt like an old loop but we’re just playing it now in the room. Lyrically, the first draft went on for ages and ages. The verses were really long, but the chorus jumped out and I thought, ‘OK, I know what this song wants me to do now, I just have to minimize and reduce and distill what I’m saying.’” **“Know Yourself”** “In my late teenage years, I was going through some heavy stuff, I felt at a bit of a crossroads. What I understood to be my older self came into my head and basically instructed my younger self to keep writing, to focus on creativity rather than destruction, and to know myself. That older self was what I understood my lyrics were coming from. Each time I wrote lyrics, it was advice I was getting from my older self. As I got older, I was like, ‘Well, it wasn’t me, I haven’t gone back, so who the fuck was that?’ Writing ‘Know Yourself,’ I was like, ‘This is the moment, this is when I went back,’ and it’s because that kid did what they did, that I can do what I’m doing. Fraser said, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ because he wrote this beat with Tom Rowlands from The Chemical Brothers. They went to school together but they didn’t see each other for 30 years. Tom went to Fraser’s house, they talked about their lives for about 10 minutes, then Fraser picks up a guitar, Tom’s on a drum machine. He said it was like, ‘Suddenly we’re 15 again.’ So lyrically, I’m talking to my younger self, musically, Fraser’s talking to his younger self.” **“Sunshine on Catford”** “I feel very strongly about dynamic and pace and gradient, I love to position albums and live shows, the journey of it all is very important. The idea is that once you know yourself, then you can know love and then in comes this beautiful love song, it’s like a thank you. It’s just a little gratitude prayer to a beautiful moment. We were blessed with the vocal of the fairy godfather of the album who came and sprinkled a bit of magic Pet Shop Boys dust on the record \[Neil Tennant is a guest vocalist on the track\]. This is a hymn of thanks to the small moments when you are trying to make a life with someone, when things just feel great.” **“Bless the Bold Future”** “The lyric began years ago. I always set myself this rule that I mustn’t write backwards because I thought if I ever went back, I wouldn’t be able to go forwards. I always went into the studio with a blank notebook and started from wherever I was at. After writing ‘Know Yourself’ and going back and sampling \[an\] old lyric, I was like, ‘Actually, maybe this is the moment where I can go back into older material with this new perspective.’ This lyric had been floating around and I couldn’t let go of it. There was something about it that I thought was interesting. It never quite found its home before, then we found this fucking absolutely rolling monster beat. It was beautiful.” **“Everything All Together”** “In my live show, I like to take a line from each of the songs at some point in the set and weave them all together and start repeating things that people have heard before. It gives this cumulative trance-like power to the whole experience. As the album was finished, I was saying to Fraser, ‘I want to make this kind of master poem,’ so I took a line from each of the songs and wove them together. We got all the session files up and took the horn line from that song, the snare from that song, one little piano part from that song, so there’s something from every single song and we put it on a grid almost like it was artwork rather than music work. We did it by eye rather than listening to it and then pressed play on that loop. It’s like the soul of the album speaking. It tells you everything that you’ve just heard and everything you’re about to hear.” **“Prayers to Whisper”** “This came out of me experimenting with form, four lines and the repeated fifth line three times. Obviously, it’s about something that’s close to my heart, the death of a friend. The chords Fraser found for it were quite somber. I was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ Lyrically and musically, if the two things are going the same way, it’s death. We need uplift in the music. We need celebration. Fraser found these beautiful chords and it felt massive. It felt anthemic, which is how you want it to feel. It’s tough to feel optimistic in the face of somebody leaving, but there is this push and pull, if you lose somebody to something where they were suffering, to illness, to something painful, then there is some sense of release. I wanted the music to embody that and then it became this huge ballad, big pop song.” **“Diagnoses”** “I wanted to make something playful, celebratory, a summer banger about fucking antipsychotics and HRT. Why the fuck not? That’s your life. You still want to fucking dance. You’re still dancing. It’s another example of the lyric and the music pushing against each other. That’s what creates the good feeling. That’s what I like. It’s like, if this is your life, it’s no big deal. It’s a massive deal. You’re fucked. Life is just mental, of course. But at the same time, it’s just your life. And we are all just dealing with the fallout of what we’re in.” **“Hyperdistillation”** “I loved the beat but I was struggling to find the lyrical shape. It’s a love song to London, to my city, and there were these little hooky moments and I was like, ‘I need something in that hook.’ I went to Raven Bush, the string player from Speakers Corner Quartet, and said, ‘Can you write me a violin line that almost sounds like a soaring melody, like a vocal hook?’ He wrote this beautiful string part. It’s amazing, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more of an uplift. Then I remembered \[singer-songwriter\] Connie Constance, who I’d bumped into a few times backstage and who I just love. She came down to the studio and wrote this amazing part. These fractured pieces suddenly came together in this perfect moment, which is what the song’s about.” **“Forever”** “This started as a love song about the uncertainty of a relationship and having this idea that let’s just fucking enjoy this for all that it is. And then Fraser was saying, ‘I know I was encouraging you to tell your story, but actually I feel like now the album needs more of your outward perspective.’ I totally agreed but I’d grown attached to that hook. If I tried to write a song about the world, I would never have written a hook so tender. The way that hook is addressed to a lover enables it to be more honest and truthful about the world, you escape the narrative trap of ‘I’m going to write a song about everything, which means you can write a song about nothing.’” **“Breathe”** “This is when I knew that the album wanted to be born. This was when Fraser had said to me, ‘Tell your story.’ I loved the beat, I wrote it, scribbled it out, went in the studio. This is the first time I did it. I could barely read the paper, my hands were shaking, and it is like a freestyle, wrote it, rapped it, that’s it. I haven’t quite got my head around what it is that I’m even trying to say, but the rush of that feeling, it is irreplaceable. Getting Young Fathers on there was amazing because within the world of that song I’m talking about, when *Everybody Down* \[Tempest’s 2014 Mercury-nominated debut\] came out, they were there, we were labelmates. They’ve been a part of this journey and it felt like a massive blessing to have them there on this song.” **“Till Morning”** “I wanted it to feel like the morning was coming, the sun was coming out, it was getting warmer, it’s getting brighter. When the chords come in at the end, it’s like the light. By the time we’d got our heads around that arrangement, it was two in the morning. I went in to put the vocal on it and I’d been metabolizing the lyric quite a lot and the take that I did was quite angry. Fraser said there was a tenderness in the original guide vocal because I was being very tentative with it. Sometimes, when something’s really new, you don’t even dare to say it, so I went back in and I did it like that. More gentle, more optimistic, more hopeful, more loving, less raging—and what you get is this very beautiful song about survival and about what comes after, about the possibility, a declaration of love. I thought, ‘How lucky I am to have met Fraser and to be in this relationship with somebody who can give a note like that, that can just shine a light on your performance?’”

Chaos, beauty, empowerment, and the highs and lows of life are the themes that drive Nova Twins’ third album, *Parasites & Butterflies*—a record that finds duo at their most creative and uplifting. London’s rock disruptors recorded the follow-up to 2022’s *Supernova* in Vermont with producer Rich Costey (Foo Fighters, Muse, LINKIN PARK), but they started writing the bulk of it at home. “We always go into sessions with more ideas than too little,” says bassist Georgia South. “We thought, ‘We don\'t care what people think about it, we’re just going to write how we feel that day and push ourselves in places where we’ve never gone before and not question it.’” Despite two hit albums, plus Mercury, MOBO, and BRIT nominations under their belts, the feeling of not quite belonging hasn’t gone away for Nova Twins. Perhaps it’s a good thing: Georgia South and Amy Love—who met as teenagers and crafted their unique sound that’s unafraid to bounce across genres—bring their own energy and do things their way. “I think it still feels like we’re outsiders, and I wonder if we’ll always feel like we’re the underdog trying to climb to the top,” says South. “When you try and do something different and you look different to the old social norms, you’re always going to feel like that. We try to open the door to as many people as we can and show people a different way. You don’t have to look or sound like what’s trendy, and you can have your own voice, your own sound, and it can work for you with resilience and persistence. We’ve always had this weird sense of thinking anything’s possible.” Read on as Nova Twins take you through the album, track by track. **“Glory”** Georgia South: “This was the last song we wrote. It’s euphoric and ethereal and it sounds quite different from what we’ve done before. We were exploring themes of chaos and beauty, and I feel like it has that juxtaposition where it opens up with this ethereal, glorious chorus and then just smashes with the chaos. It sums up the album really well as an opener.” Amy Love: “*Supernova* was very much a time where we had to fight and be strong. With this one, I think we had time to reflect and then talk about it. We’re exploring a slightly more honest side, and people can hopefully relate to some of it.” **“Piranha”** AL: “The world feels like a scary place, so we wanted a song that reflects on the times and embodies that tension, but also flips it on its head. There’s power in numbers, and if we unify, we have a bigger voice. ‘Piranha’ is a song for strength, but it also touches on the murky waters and what we’re going through right now.” GS: “Violence against women is continuing, especially with trans women at the moment in the UK. We definitely feel proud that this album’s empowering women and that when we step onstage, they can feel our energy and they exchange it right back at us. It’s always beautiful to see women at the front screaming and going for it and feeling their power in that moment.” **“Monsters”** AL: “I feel like at some point or another, your mental health will challenge you, whether something in your life has caused you trauma or you realize something about yourself. Everyone can relate to that. When we write, we’re always looking inwards or at what we’re feeling that day, hoping that it will reach our audience in a meaningful way. We were chatting to Sade’s producer Robin Millar, who’s amazing. He was reflecting on the song and he was like, ‘You can be the strongest person in the world, you can be the fastest person in the world, you can be the smartest person in the world, but this controls everything. It doesn’t matter and you can get in the way of yourself.’ It’s definitely a point of reflection and growth, and there’s something freeing about that song.” **“Soprano”** GS: “I think ‘Soprano’ is part of the beauty on the album. It’s like the light and joy, and we wanted to definitely have moments like that. It’s all about female solidarity, women coming together and having this girl gang. I think in this industry, people love to pit women against each other and make people feel like shit on the red carpet. It’s ridiculous. In life, women love to huddle together and confide in each other, finding friendship and strength. So this song is to celebrate that.” **“Drip”** AL: “We both came up with the tune. G sent this really cool drum-’n’-bass-style music that was so high in energy and so sassy. I got it and I started spitting some lyrics on it and we tweaked it together. The world’s heavy, yes, but we’re still young girls and we like to have fun. We enjoy exploring our sexual nature, understanding our bodies, and we’re definitely growing in that sense as well. When we’re on tour, we’re so disciplined: We don’t drink and we have to stay focused to be able to perform the type of show we do. So when we get home, the odd now and then, we want a blowout and just have one of those ratchet nights.” **“N.O.V.A”** GS: “We really wanted our audience to feel included, so this is for them to sing back with us. Amy’s lyrics are really cool—it’s a testament to both our heritages and exploring who we are. It felt like a celebration, and I think it’s going to be a massive party when we play it live.” AL: “As we grow, we’re understanding balance a lot more. If you have the most euphoric experience, there’s going to be a comedown, and if you feel really, really low, there’s only one way you can go. I feel like we’re both darker people probably by nature, but we love to laugh, so this is about having that balance. The album started off a bit dark ’cause that’s how we were feeling, so we were like, ‘We should pull ourselves out of this. Let’s just inject fun, the stuff that we love to do and the simple things in life that bring us joy.’” **“Sandman”** AL: “Surrealism and escapism are very important. You need to switch off. Sometimes you just want to dip yourself into another world. And sometimes in that world, you deal all the cards. In Nova’s world, we generally like to be the power and the strength.” GS: “I think the theme of the album came from this song. We took the title *Parasites & Butterflies* from the lyrics. We did think of other titles for the album. One was *The Bridge Between Beauty and Chaos*, but we were like, ‘How are you going to abbreviate that?’” **“Hummingbird”** AL: “I find this song quite difficult to talk about. I’ve lost my mum and my nan, and they were the people who raised me, and I wanted a song that paid homage to them. Me and Georgia came up with this beautiful song that explains how you feel after grief. Loads of people suffer with loss, and that can be the loss of a relationship as well. It’s about that point after grief and you’re missing someone, but also accepting it and seeing the beauty in them being at peace. Death is a taboo in the West, and we’re all going to experience it at some point. The more we open up about it, maybe we can find solace in each other’s experiences and not feel so isolated when it happens.” **“Parallel Universe”** GS: “This is about the internet. It’s a dark place and there are corners of it where we think, ‘Don’t look at the comments.’ I’m training myself to not go on Instagram in the morning. It can be really toxic. When you look at young children who have accounts and there’s bullying in schools because of social media, it’s out of control and I don’t know how we can backpedal. Luckily, when we grew up, it wasn’t so massive to be online all the time. We actually got to go to the park after school and hang out. So we want to make people aware of how online bullying can affect anyone. Even if you seem super confident, one negative comment can still come into play and you have to shut them out and drown them out because they’re just being stupid.” **“Hide & Seek”** GS: “This is about one of those relationships where you’re playing cat and mouse with this intense love, but also you have resentment, and you keep flicking between the two. And neither one of you is the enemy at all, you’re kind of equal. At some point you have to just decide whether you have to let each other go or not, because you do love each other, but you’re hurting each other at the same time.” **“Hurricane”** AL: “This is another one about strength. There’s obviously a generation of men who prefer women not to be strong, but we’ve come so far, we want careers, we want more than just what was offered to us. As we start to get into those places and those positions, sometimes you do feel like some men can be intimidated. I guess there must be strong men out there. It’s quite funny ’cause I’ve recently had a breakup. I was like, ‘Am I too strong?’ Georgia’s always like, ‘You need a confident man.’ If someone can’t handle this, then I’d rather be alone. But a stay-at-home husband would be great—he can water the plants while I’m on tour.” **“Black Roses”** GS: “I don’t remember at what point we wrote this song, but we juggled it to put it at the end of the album ’cause we thought it’s a big tune. I think it’s sassy and quite Halloween-y. The ending is very epic, so it’s a good way to wrap up the album as well.” AL: “It definitely has that kind of sass: We’re leaving the black roses everywhere and infiltrating places. I guess in this context it does sound like a relationship when someone messes you over. But I feel when we were writing it, it was probably a bit more than that, like, ‘We’re here whether you like it or not.’ And it’s such a nice little sassy number just to finish off on.”

Tamara Lindeman’s music as The Weather Station seems to expand and contract with every movement. The long-running project broke through in 2021 as fifth album *Ignorance* grew her folk-rock milieu to encompass the sounds of sophisti-pop acts like The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout, while 2022’s companion record *How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars* pared back her arrangements to nearly nothing. On her seventh album, *Humanhood*, Lindeman has blown up her sound yet again: Alongside the nocturnal vibe she so expertly cultivated across *Ignorance*, these 13 tracks—initially recorded straight to tape over the course of two improvisational sessions in late 2023—encompass freewheeling ’60s psychedelic pop, darkly shaded jazz, and flurries of spoken-word sound collage. Joining her trusty supporting players from the *Ignorance* sessions is a who’s who of left-field sounds, including orchestral-folk auteur Sam Amidon and ambient-saxophone jazz sensation Sam Gendel. At the center of it all, Lindeman’s ability to pull back and let silence briefly reign remains as breathtaking as her most acrobatic vocal moments. Her lyrical focus picks up from where she left off on the previous two Weather Station records, pivoting specifically from the encroaching threat of climate change towards an episode of depersonalization she experienced while contemplating the world’s ever-evolving ills. What results is an album that’s contemplative and soul-searching, as Lindeman avoids finding easy answers and instead seems to channel her thought process in real time. “I don’t know quite where to begin,” she sings over the brushed drums and elegiac piano of *Humanhood*’s quietly devastating closer, “Sewing.” “I know it don’t look like I’m doing anything.” Quite the opposite, in fact.

There’s nothing lucky about the lottery according to sludgy Philly shoegaze revivalists They Are Gutting a Body of Water. On *LOTTO*, they rage against the circumstances of the modern person, birthed into what is meant to be the most prosperous time in world history but littered with more man-made atrocities and horrors than most sane people can deal with. The music on *LOTTO* is angry, but where They Are Gutting a Body of Water make their mark is in the willingness to persist, a defiance that courses through this record. Amongst the crashing cymbals, monotone screeds against modern capitalism, and thunderous guitar melodies, a stubbornness peeks through like a sliver of sunshine in a thunderstorm. This isn’t optimism, but a desire to fight for those no longer able. On the emo-leaning “american food,” they incorporate turntablism and the scraggly indie rock of early Broken Social Scene as the lyrics scan like the most poetic rest-stop bathroom graffiti imaginable; an indictment of the villainy at America’s core: “The benefit of believing you’re bad/Is that you get somebody to blame.”

Over the past few years, the North Carolina natives have carved out their own distinct (and influential) lane in indie rock: *Twin Plagues*, the band’s 2021 breakthrough, introduced fans to their noisy hybrid of shoegaze and country, while 2023’s *Rat Saw God* helped kick off a new generation’s alt-country revival. Wednesday’s sixth album, *Bleeds*, hones their signature sound—often gnarly, occasionally sublime—with lyrics by bandleader Karly Hartzman that play out like contemporary Southern gothic short stories unfolding inside of dusty dives or along the banks of creeks in her hometown of Greensboro. *Bleeds* arrives in the wake of a pivotal time for the five-piece band (singer/guitarist Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, bassist/pianist Ethan Baechtold, and drummer Alan Miller): Hartzman wrote much of the album during a grueling world tour, in the midst of which she and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship. But the songs of *Bleeds* are intimate in a different way entirely, built around strikingly detailed anecdotes picked up from conversations with friends or overheard bar wisdom. “Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline/You saw a pit bull puppy pissing off a balcony,” Hartzman sings on “Wound Up Here by Holdin On,” jointly inspired by a line from a friend’s poem and a story about a body pulled out of a West Virginia creek. A rerecorded version of “Phish Pepsi,” first released on Hartzman and Lenderman’s 2021 collab EP *Guttering*, recounts a weird, stoned teenage memory (“We watched a Phish concert and *Human Centipede*/Two things I now wish I had never seen”). And their small-town transcendentalism is at its best on “Elderberry Wine”—the prettiest they’ve ever sounded, though not without its ennui.

A key theme of The Beths’ fourth album is that linear progression is an illusion. “I feel like there’s a through line of difficult things happening, and the realization that everything \[is\] not going to keep gradually improving, and that life is often a bit more cyclical, or more of an up-and-down that you’re constantly moving through,” vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes tells Apple Music. “Which sounds like a depressing thought, but it doesn’t feel depressing. It doesn’t feel optimistic either. It’s just what it is.” In the years preceding the album’s creation, Stokes underwent several challenges that reinforced this notion. Having started taking an SSRI to address mental and physical health issues—she’d recently been diagnosed with Graves’ and thyroid eye disease—she found that the medication’s positive impact was countered by a clouding of her ability to write music. “I wasn’t able to write a song,” she explains. “I feel like I lost my internal compass. The SSRI was great for digging me out of the hole I was in, but my writing is so emotionally driven and my gut reactions were so different.” To counter the writer’s block, Stokes read Stephen King’s *On Writing*, *How Big Things Get Done* by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and *Working* by Robert A. Caro. At one point, she spent every morning writing 10 pages of stream-of-consciousness material on a typewriter. “I’d write about stuff I don’t normally like to write about because it’s too painful or close to home, or it makes me feel weird,” she says. “So, I was able to approach some of that stuff and ended up using a lot of that material. I’ve always written emotionally and from my own experience, but it feels like it’s going further than that. It’s definitely gone deeper.” Whether addressing the numbing side effects of the SSRI in the ragged, frenzied “No Joy” or Stokes’ complicated relationship with her mother in the fragile “Mother, Pray for Me,” *Straight Line Was a Lie* maintains the New Zealand quartet’s knack for pairing pop-infused melodies with spirited, jangly indie rock. Here, Stokes takes Apple Music through The Beths’ fourth album, track by track. **“Straight Line Was a Lie”** “Once I’d found the through line, I didn’t think we had a song that summed it up. I was on the bus on the way home after a session of working on the album and sang it into my phone. I don’t normally do the thing where the second verse is just the first verse, but it felt appropriate for it to be circular and feel like a journey you go on again.” **“Mosquitoes”** “It’s mostly about Oakley Creek, which during the \[2023\] Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods got wiped out. It’s a very beloved space. It’s now 2025, and it still hasn’t recovered. There are no paths anymore; it’s kind of grown wild a bit and changed a lot. To some extent, it feels like a lot of life is just being eroded, but nature continues on in a way that’s comforting. You can say Oakley Creek got destroyed, but it didn’t. It’s still there—it’s just different.” **“No Joy”** “It’s about not finding joy in the things that you normally find joy in. It’s weird. You’re not sad, but you’re also not able to find happiness. It’s its own weird purgatory. That came out in the song where it’s a very tense, neurotic riff. Nothing’s very high or very low; everything’s in the middle but trying to make it feel fun despite that. You don’t want the song to make you feel nothing.” **“Metal”** “It’s talking about existing in a human body and all the systems and functions that your body needs. It’s very complicated, and it’s kind of a miracle that it exists. But also, I’m going through all this weird health stuff, and I don’t really feel in control of what is happening in my body and my brain. I was trying to learn about what was going on with the human body and just being frustrated that I didn’t understand it, and the song’s kind of ping-ponging between those two perceptions of yourself.” **“Mother, Pray for Me”** “It’s about my relationship with my mother. She is a first-generation immigrant from Indonesia. We moved to New Zealand when I was four. It’s about our relationship and the gulf of understanding that exists between us, where we don’t really understand each other, and our lives growing up were such different experiences, and this feeling of trying to meet in the middle and understand the other.” **“Til My Heart Stops”** “It’s a very yearning song. I quite often feel like I push people away. It’s very easy to isolate yourself, especially if you’re feeling a bit weird and you can put walls up between you and other people: people that I love, people that I know well, people I wish I knew better. But there is this real desire to be a part of the world and be close with other people and to not have that. The euphoria I want to experience is there at the end of the song, but you have to fight to get to it.” **“Take”** “‘Take’ is really fun to play. It’s kind of hectic and driving. It’s about the call of the void of taking something to help you through when you’re struggling, whatever that is for you, whether it’s drinking, which is the national sport of New Zealand and Australia sometimes. The call of it is very strong. It’s just about coping, I guess.” **“Roundabout”** “It’s quite constructed, more so than our other songs, and a lot more spacious than we normally are, which is kind of scary. We always want to fill every inch of space. It’s about people you’ve known for a very long time and how you love all the different versions of them. People that you’ve known since you were different people, and you know that you’re going to be different people again in the future.” **“Ark of the Covenant”** “That’s a reference to Indiana Jones. It’s like, don’t look at the Ark of the Covenant ’cause if you look at it, your face will melt off. Sometimes you feel like there are things in your brain which you don’t want to visit, things about yourself that you don’t want to address, ’cause they feel terrifying. And then, you look at them, and they’re not the Ark of the Covenant. Your face doesn’t actually melt off. It’s fine.” **“Best Laid Plans”** “It’s just a fun song to finish on. It’s about the fantasy of giving up and indulging yourself in that. You know you can’t, you can never give up, you shouldn’t give up. But sometimes, when something’s hard, you’re just like, ‘But what if I just did it?’ What if I just let go and float away?’ It’s just embodying that feeling as an indulgent fantasy, and then afterwards, you can come back to earth and get it done.”