The *Little House* EP finds Rachel Chinouriri still a month shy of celebrating the one year anniversary of her career-accelerating debut album, 2024’s *What a Devastating Turn of Events*, an anthemic, Britpop-inspired chronicle of her turbulent early twenties. With her star in rapid ascendance—critical acclaim, two BRIT Award nominations, a sold-out headline tour of her own, and an A-list guest spot opening for Sabrina Carpenter—the London-born singer-songwriter’s 180-degree pivot from devastation to satisfaction marks this four-track EP. It’s out with the self-doubt and second-guessing that shrouded her previous works and in with sunny optimism and an unassuming confidence, amplified by the heady rush of new love. Chinouriri is an expert when it comes to channeling boundless levels of unchecked feelings into potent shots of ear-snagging indie pop and while the tenor of her emotions has shifted, it’s clear from the effusive one-two punch of “Can we talk about Isaac?” and “23:42” that she has ample raw material at her disposal. The former recalls Chinouriri’s meet-cute moment in a burst of barely suppressed excitement propelled by surfy guitar riffs and finger-snapping percussion; on the latter she pinballs between delight and disbelief at her romantic luck over a cheerful, jaunty beat peppered with sci-fi synth stabs. Later, “Indigo” slows all the gushing to a measured pour, echoing the refrain “You make love feel like...” and letting an atmospheric swell of harmonic vocals fill in the blank. Sandwiched in between, “Judas (Demo)” is somewhat of an outlier, but the simple combination of Chinouriri’s anxious late-night musings backed by the soft strum of an acoustic guitar offers a familiar flash of haunting vulnerability—a reminder of the strong foundations *Little House* is building on.
“It feels really good to be in the driver’s seat,” singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on the eve of releasing *Shawn*, his first album in four years and most personal record to date. A teenage social-media sensation who became one of pop’s biggest stars in the late 2010s, Mendes pulled back after the release of 2020’s *Wonder*, canceling a 2022 tour and setting out on a journey to find himself, a decision he calls “terrifying” but one that was ultimately liberating. “It was the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself,” he says. “I gave myself a life. The best part about that is, it taught me that the next time I’m standing at the crossroads between choosing something in my truth or doing what would make everyone else happy, I have this reference point.” “Everything’s hard to explain out loud,” Mendes sings on the hushed opener “Who I Am,” a sketched overview of where Mendes has been and what’s to come over the next half-hour. It strips down Mendes’ music to its essence—vocals and strummed guitar framing lyrics that detail the way his thoughts raced as his life got too big around him. *Shawn* feels loose and confident even as it’s economical, putting Mendes’ reflections and smoke-plume voice front and center on the campfire sing-along “Why Why Why” and his tender, album-closing cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” The swaying “Heart of Gold” is a Laurel Canyon-inspired cut where Mendes laments the way a longtime friend slipped out of his circle before passing away, its weeping slide guitar providing a counterpoint to the bittersweet reminiscing about the days when he and his friend “shot for the stars.” “That’ll Be the Day” is fatefully lovelorn, its arrangement as delicate as lace, as Mendes muses on the idea of eternal love. On “The Mountain,” Mendes takes aim at the many rumors that have swirled around him and his intimates over the last two years in gently devastating fashion, rebuking anyone who might put him in a box while acoustic guitars roil beneath him. “Call it what you want,” Mendes sings on its refrain, and that phrase became an almost-defiant mantra for him as he was working on his fifth album. The song references a spiritual experience he had in Kauai. “Without going into the exact details of it, leaving that mountain that day gave me something I’ve always wanted, which was a sense of security that no success could ever provide me, no relationship could ever provide me,” he says. “It was security with myself. A lot changed after that, because when you’re not chasing something, you let go. And then it almost feels like things are starting to appear.” As he tells Lowe, whatever label people might want to place on him “really doesn’t matter, because I feel this.” *Shawn*, as a whole, is a statement of purpose from a musician who’s a veteran of the game in his mid-twenties—and it shows what he’s capable of when there’s nothing holding him back.
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.
History gets harder and harder to make, but never in the long, weird history of popular music has there been an analogue for this. Doorstop box sets with troves of fan-coveted rarities are de rigueur for any legacy artist, very much including Bruce Springsteen, whose 1998 compilation *Tracks* dutifully assembled 66 of these—four and a half hours of alternate history to one of rock’s most vaunted narratives. Twenty-seven years later, its nominal sequel is composed of seven full and distinct stand-alone albums recorded between 1983 and 2018, largely unknown to even the most devout Springsteen cryptographers. That something so auspicious and audacious bears the modest title *Tracks II* is the slyest joke of his career. Individually, these albums demonstrate logical extensions of his classic songwriting that manage to meet that impossible standard—much like outtakes from *Darkness on the Edge of Town* and *The River*, which were both full LPs’ worth of parallel material every bit the equal of the latter works, as well as tantalizing, disciplined, and fully realized genre exercises that have no real precedent in his discography. As a whole, the collection begs nothing less than a wholesale reevaluation of an already deeply considered career. A collection of gussied-up home recordings that bridges the gap between 1982’s *Nebraska* and the 1984 supernova *Born in the U.S.A.*. An entire album in the subdued synth-pop vein of “Streets of Philadelphia” and “Secret Garden.” (The long-held idea that the ’90s was a relatively fallow period for Springsteen goes very much out the window here.) An atmospheric soundtrack to a shelved western that answers the question, “What if Springsteen transformed himself into Tom Waits?” One pure honky-tonk album and one of jazz standards-style torch songs. An album influenced by traditional Mexican music, another of full-bore, more recent vintage rock songs. These are the worlds contained within *Tracks II* and below is a quick and deeply insufficient guide to Springsteen’s most recent epic. ***LA Garage Sessions ’83*** Few words in the rock lexicon are more malleable than “garage.” For Springsteen in 1983, this meant an apartment over the garage of his new home in the Hollywood Hills, where he decamped in the interregnum between 1982’s spare, downcast *Nebraska* and 1984’s *Born in the U.S.A.*, which catapulted him from mere rock star to global icon and—forgive us—brand. Probably not a surprise, then, that these semi-polished home demos split the difference between those two vibes: “Don’t Back Down on Our Love” and “Don’t Back Down” have the bones of what could have been a couple of vintage E Street rave-ups, while “The Klansman” is a pitch-black song about the son of a proud KKK member learning the ropes. ***Streets of Philadelphia Sessions*** While on paper, this may seem similar to *LA Garage Sessions*—Springsteen working largely alone, at home, with a drum machine—it feels less like rough demos than a collection of fully realized songs that happen to share a specific dynamic. Even adding the word “sessions” into the title feels like a hedge. Springsteen’s slump-busting hit “Streets of Philadelphia,” written for Jonathan Demme’s 1993 film *Philadelphia*, was pared down to his voice, synths, and drum loops—a combination he found appealing enough to continue for another 10 songs, fleshed out in places by members of his early-’90s post-E Street backing band. While “Secret Garden” found its way to a greatest-hits compilation, the others were lost to lore—a whispered-about but never heard “drum loops album.” It’s not the rap or trip-hop album that those whisperers may have been imagining; it is, rather, a logical extension of the two known songs to come out of these recordings, only maybe a little hornier. “Maybe I Don’t Know You” has “Brilliant Disguise” DNA in its blood, while “One Beautiful Morning” comes the closest to a more traditional full-band sound. ***Faithless*** In 2005, Springsteen was commissioned to compose the soundtrack to what he has called a “spiritual western” called *Faithless* by an as-yet-unnamed director, but probably someone we’ve heard of. The movie never wound up being made, but Springsteen held up his end of the bargain, and the result is as revelatory as anything in his career—a mix of moody instrumentals and gospel-tinged Americana ballads that manage to be oddly timeless despite the purported 19th-century setting. At least one song (“All God’s Children”) sounds so much like early-’90s Waits that you may check to make sure you didn’t switch records, while “Where You Going, Where You From” is buttressed by a choir of voices including two of Springsteen’s children. (Note: “Goin’ to California” is *not* a Led Zeppelin cover, but given the experimental streak on display, you’re excused for letting your imagination run a little wild.) ***Somewhere North of Nashville*** If this set were constructed chronologically, and it is not, this one would have been slotted right after *Streets of Philadelphia Sessions*. As Springsteen began reactivating the E Street Band in 1995, he shelved what would have been that solo release and began working on *The Ghost of Tom Joad* and this—a companion album of sorts that took a lighter approach tonally and sonically. *Somewhere North of Nashville* is a honky-tonk lark with a cast of characters including slide guitarist Marty Rifkin. “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart,” a beloved *Born in the U.S.A.*-era B-side, gets revisited here a decade later, and sounds more than a little like R.E.M.’s “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville.” This isn’t exactly Springsteen out of his element, but it may have been greeted in 1995 as the exact kind of cutting loose that fans hadn’t seen from him in a long time. ***Inyo*** A largely solo acoustic affair along the lines of *Devils & Dust*, also recorded around this time, *Inyo* is tied together by Springsteen’s focus on detailed, character-driven stories about the American Southwest and the Mexican border, combining the stark narrative style forged and perfected on *Nebraska* with música mexicana flourishes like mariachi bands and strings. Thirty years later, stories about the Southern border and the people on either side of it wind up being more resonant and urgent than he could have imagined at the time. ***Twilight Hours*** In a sprawling collection that highlights Springsteen’s career-long comfort with formal genre exercises, the grand Burt Bacharach-style ballads of *Twilight Hours* may be the most jarring. Not that The Boss doesn’t deserve some downtime to undo his bow tie and nurse his heartache over a stiff martini, but it’s an era that doesn’t have much of an analogue in Springsteen’s canon. Written more or less alongside the long gestation period that eventually birthed *Western Stars*, songs like the title track, “Late in the Evening,” and “Sunday Love” evoke a smoke-filled lounge that couldn’t have fit anywhere else. ***Perfect World*** While the other six albums here were conceived and finally now realized as stand-alone works, the finale is an odds-and-sods collection of songs from the mid-’90s through the early 2010s with a loose theme: They’re nice rock songs, crowd-pleasers that just never reached any crowds, and are most likely the kind of thing that comes to mind when you close your eyes and think of the words “Bruce” and “Springsteen.” “I’m Not Sleeping” channels Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ “Don’t Do Me Like That,” while coulda-been hits like “Rain in the River” and “You Lifted Me Up” exemplify what makes this entire sprawling set such a unique window into a revered artist’s process: Someone could have forged a legendary career just off the material that one man couldn’t find a place for and barely remembered he made.
The New York-based band Florist make music that captures both the naive sweetness of indie folk and the cosmic abstraction of ambient and New Age. Fuller than *Emily Alone* and more cohesive than the documentarylike *Florist*, 2025’s *Jellywish* feels, in some ways, like the album they have been approaching for years: simple, porchy songs glittering with unexpected bits of processed sound. The childlike voice of Emily Sprague delivers thoughts on death (“Started to Glow”), redemption (“Have Heaven”), and other less-than-childlike things. This is music that feels modest and ordinary but is always reaching quietly into the unknown. The tension between their folksy side and their cosmic one turns out to resolve easily: In both cases, they are looking for the beauty they know is right in front of them.
The central theme running through the beguiling third album by Shura is stripping everything back and starting over, no matter how daunting that feels. *I Got Too Sad for My Friends* marks a complete artistic reset for the London-born, Manchester-raised singer-songwriter, one that grew out of a period of emotional turmoil. Moving away from the sad banger synth-pop of her first two records, 2016’s *Nothing’s Real* and 2019 follow-up *forevher*, it’s a record steeped in an Americana-ish sway and folky reassurance. Shura found that the way out of the gloom that enveloped her during lockdown, where she was increasingly cutting herself off from her inner-circle, was to return to how she’d written songs as a teenager: alone in a room with an acoustic guitar. It gave her a path back, the route that led to the hazy, wistful warmth of *I Got Too Sad for My Friends*. It opened up a dramatic overhaul in how she made music. Working with a new producer (Foals and Depeche Mode collaborator Luke Smith), Shura got down the majority of the record in live takes that were tweaked and honed further down the line, constantly daring herself to try new things. It has taken her to the defining album of her career so far, a record full of rich melodic hooks and a soothing melancholic glow, from the country longing of “Richardson” via the expansive ’80s pop of “Recognise” to doe-eyed campfire ditties (plaintive closer “Bad Kid”). It’s a fresh start in all the best ways, a third album that feels like a startling debut. Her pals would surely agree—it was all worth it in the end.
Five years between albums has given Nadia Reid plenty to reflect upon across *Enter Now Brightness*, recorded while she was pregnant with her second child. Besides becoming a mother since 2000’s *Out of My Province*, the Aotearoa New Zealand songwriter relocated across the world to Manchester, England. So themes of renewal run naturally through these warm, open songs, with Reid backed primarily by guitarist/keyboardist Sam Taylor and multi-instrumentalist/producer Tom Healy. Half of these tracks are quite sparse, while the other half deploy bassist Richard Pickard and drummer Joe McCallum for an effective oomph. Even the more stripped-back tracks aren’t as rooted in folk music as Reid’s earlier work was, but rather in a ruminative strand of indie pop. Whichever mode she’s in, she sings with such calm sureness that it’s easy to get swept up in the emotional truth of her lyrics. As horns lick the edges of the woozy ballad “Baby Bright,” she tells her older daughter, “Something tells me that you’re gonna be all right.” And on “Hold It Up,” Reid sounds downright serene as the arrangements wax and wane around her and she assures us, “I can be kind to anyone.”
Gigi Perez pours her life experience into her work. After the viral success of her 2024 single “Sailor Song”—an open plea for queer romantic connection that topped the UK singles chart and went platinum in several other countries—her self-produced debut album plays like unabashed memoir. “Sugar Water” opens with a nod to Perez’s birthplace of Hackensack, New Jersey before recounting schoolyard taunts and even the texture of her childhood Barbie’s hair. Her sister Celene’s death in 2020 sits at the center of “Fable,” with both that song and the closing title track featuring voicemails left by Celene. Perez also unpacks that family tragedy on the darker “Survivor’s Guilt,” while the album’s title was inspired in part by Perez sleeping on the beach after her sister died. The emotive singing and busker-style folk balladry of Perez’s earlier releases is very much at play, though lilting strings interweave with the acoustic guitar on “Crown” and the especially surprising “Twister” adds Auto-Tune and a programmed beat. But again, the lyrics are most often the star here, with the singer-songwriter revisiting her intense religious upbringing alongside love, loss, and other weighty themes.
The cover art for the sixth album from indie-pop dynamo George Lewis Jr.—aka Twin Shadow—features the handwritten signature of his father Georgie, who passed away from cancer in 2024. It’s a poignant visual cue for what is undoubtedly the most nakedly personal and reflective album of Twin Shadow’s career. Where so much of his discography exists in a never-ending summer of ’84 where Prince and Springsteen are jostling for the top of the charts, *Georgie* strips Lewis’ songcraft down to the core. The glistening guitars and neon-tinted synth textures remain, but the tracks are almost entirely devoid of drums or beats and left to freely float in a sea of melancholy and simmering resentment—the bittersweet serenade “Good Times” is really a chronicle of the bad ones and an indictment of fair-weather friends who never seem to be around when you need them the most. But on tracks like “You Already Know” and “Permanent Feeling,” Lewis’ intimately soulful voice displays a Bon Iver-esque ability to transform even the most skeletal songs into full-blooded, heart-pumping hymns.
Folk Bitch Trio’s debut album contains several very distinct through lines. “The songs are us experiencing things that we mostly experienced together or with real-life narration of, ‘This is what’s happening in my life,’” guitarist/vocalist Jeanie Pilkington tells Apple Music. “They’re songs that come from our shared brain and heart, and individual brains and hearts.” Given that some were composed during the Melbourne band’s extensive national and overseas touring, adjusting to life on the road is another clear theme, particularly in songs such as “Mary’s Playing the Harp.” “A few of them were written in that transition between \[touring\] not being a part of our lives and starting to tour, and starting to make sense of going to weird places to perform and how that feels,” says Pilkington. Adds guitarist/vocalist Heide Peverelle: “I write a lot on the road and a lot of the songs reference feelings of being on tour.” It was during one of those tours, supporting English songwriter Ben Howard on an Australian and New Zealand run in 2024, that the trio stopped by Auckland’s Roundhead Studios to record “God’s a Different Sword” with producer Tom Healy, who would go on to helm the full record. They were drawn to the studio for its equipment. “They have a tape machine, and we had decided we wanted to work on tape for this record,” says Peverelle. The analog recording accentuates the trio’s astonishingly warm vocal harmonies (all recorded live), which sit atop their dreamy, pastoral folk and occasional flourishes of lo-fi electric guitar. “It’s us on a plate,” says Peverelle. “It feels like our hearts are very open.” Here, Pilkington, Peverelle, and vocalist/guitarist Gracie Sinclair take Apple Music through *Now Would Be a Good Time*, track by track. **“God’s a Different Sword”** Heide Peverelle: “When I brought that to the group to arrange and tweak, it felt like an introduction to how we wanted to go sonically. It’s just about the euphoria and optimism you feel \[at\] the end of a breakup, starting afresh.” Gracie Sinclair: “It signifies that feeling of having your own hands back on the wheel. And you’re like, I’m driving my life now.” **“Hotel TV”** Jeanie Pilkington: “It’s about a relationship going bad. Gracie wrote the hook when we were in a hotel in Brisbane, our first time staying out of Melbourne to do music, needing some rest. We needed a fucking break. It really resonated with the rest of the song, ’cause that’s what I was trying to say—I needed to step away, because I was in this suffocated environment that is that hotel room, but also that relationship.” **“The Actor”** HP: “The story is very true; it’s quite a literal song. When you start dating someone, and even if you’ve been married to someone, \[you can\] still not really know them. I think it’s about that and the mask you wear when you’re in a relationship, and if shit gets hard and it crumbles.” JP: “It’s short and it’s punchy. I think it represents a downward spiral that happens very quickly, before you can even catch yourself.” **“Moth Song”** JP: “People think it’s me talking to my bandmates.” GS: “It’s me talking to myself. I’m Gracie and I’m singing, so I say my own name. ‘Moth Song’ is about losing the plot. It’s about wanting more from the relationships that you have around you and feeling very heartbroken and very alone in that. I was sitting on the train feeling very sorry for myself for some reason, and daydreaming and imagining all these moths filling the train carriage, and that’s what I’m talking about in the chorus—I was imagining the train doors opening and all these moths going up into the sky like confetti. That’s a nice release.” **“I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)”** GS: “It’s the closer to the A-side of the record.” JP: “It’s like a breathing point. Originally, we were going to open the record with this because, for a long time, we opened our set with it when we played live—it’s a great way to shut up the room. But it felt a little bit somber to open \[the album\] like that. Now, it’s this really nice point where, if you’re listening on vinyl, it closes out the first side. The B-side of the record is a bit darker and rocks a bit harder.” **“Cathode Ray”** GS: “This was the last song on the record to get finished. It’s about frustration in a relationship, and when you love someone and you feel like you just can’t get through to them. And you really want to and you want to see them come undone.” **“Foreign Bird”** JP: “\[It’s about\] trying to force yourself to do something and then stopping to realize, hang on, why the hell am I doing this, I don’t want to? And just trying to pull yourself out of your own habits.” **“That’s All She Wrote”** HP: “I spent a lot of time in Northeast Victoria and I was really picturing that part of the world when I was writing it. Each verse and chorus feels like it has a time stamp for me—the first verse is a few years ago, and the middle is more recently and again with the last verse. There’s a clear picture in my mind of each scenario \[and\] specific relationships I had.” **“Sarah”** HP: “It’s a breakup song. We really went back and forth about whether it would be on the record ’cause it felt overly earnest. We wanted to really try and bring down the earnestness with the more rocky guitar vibe.” **“Mary’s Playing the Harp”** JP: “It’s a song about being on tour and being heartbroken, and watching a Mary Lattimore set at a festival in Thirroul and thinking about someone I was going to have to see that I really missed, but also was really dreading what that was going to feel like. We did this superlong tour a couple of years ago through regional Australia and it was a real time of peaks and valleys. Some weird experiences, some bad experiences, just trying to figure out how to live on the road and how isolating that can be. A weird thing to experience as a very young woman or femme person, and all those things came into play.”
Dan Smith has long been a storyteller. The London-based singer-songwriter has spent the years since founding Bastille in 2010, originally as a solo project, writing moving, anthemic songs about a cast of characters traversing everything from the people killed in the volcanic ruins of “Pompeii” to the tragic fall of “Icarus.” On Bastille’s fifth album, *&*, Smith reaches the apex of his storytelling songwriting, composing 14 tracks entirely about historical figures. “I’ve always used someone else’s story to write about the themes I want to address in my music,” he tells Apple Music. “Now, I’ve collected these story songs to celebrate a group of people who pushed against the times they lived in and who displayed all the complexities of being human.” From softly picked guitar-led folk on “Emily & Her Penthouse in the Sky,” celebrating the poet Emily Dickinson, to the cinematic strings of “Essie & Paul,” honoring the lives of civil rights activists Paul and Essie Robeson, and the anthemic thump of Leonard Cohen tribute “Leonard & Marianne,” *&* is Bastille at its most imaginative and expansive. “I wanted to show these historical figures as real people and encourage listeners to find out more about them,” Smith says. “It’s been a beautiful world to inhabit.” Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Intros & Narrators”** “I always find it’s helpful to introduce people to the world of a record by writing a song that sets the scene and my intentions at the beginning of it. I felt unworthy writing about a lot of the people I’m singing about on this album, and I wanted to tackle that feeling head-on in this track. It’s about how much trust we put into the people narrating the story we’re hearing, which is me in this case!” **“Eve & Paradise Lost”** “I was really interested in imagining this epic story of Adam and Eve that’s been echoed through so much culture and forcing it into a normalized domestic situation on this song. I was imagining how crazy it must have been to be the first woman with no one around to help or give you advice. It was challenging to write as a man but I’m really pleased with it. ” **“Emily & Her Penthouse in the Sky”** “Most of what is written about Emily Dickinson assumes that she’s this tortured, isolated poet but, after researching her life, I realized a lot of it isn’t true. She was hilarious and sociable and wrote fantastic correspondences. This song is written from the perspective of her sister, describing who Emily really is, and it explores people’s perception of someone and how it relates to their real life.” **“Blue Sky & the Painter”** “The painter Edvard Munch wrote a lot about his relationship with depression and spoke eloquently on how he wouldn’t create his art without the way his mind worked. I became fascinated with that tension between minds that are difficult but that also allow us to create. Musically, this track reflects that feeling by sucking you into thinking it’s quiet and acoustic and then pulling the rug out with blaring distortion.” **“Leonard & Marianne”** “I watched this amazing documentary on Leonard Cohen by Nick Broomfield and was inspired to write this song about his complex relationship with Marianne Ihlen. I’m imagining Leonard living in New York, being famous and thinking back to being with Marianne on the Greek island of Hydra where they met. It’s about the duality of wanting to be with someone but also betraying them.” **“Marie & Polonium”** “Marie Curie is another person I wanted to write about because she was constantly pushing against the society that she lived in by finding a way to be educated as a woman and ultimately inventing radiotherapy, which has saved so many lives. It’s easy to see historical characters as caricatures but I wanted to humanize these people through these songs.” **“Red Wine & Wilde”** “I was reading about Oscar Wilde’s life and his relationship with Bosie Douglas, his on-off partner in his later years, which became quite toxic. Wilde was a leading force for being who he was in a time when it was illegal to be gay, he refused to bow down to regressive societal pressures but he was also complicated because he had a family and children and lived an artist’s life. It’s a big story, and I wanted to zoom in on a night between Wilde and Bosie to capture the complexity of their relationship in a snapshot.” **“Seasons & Narcissus”** “The Narcissus myth has been retold in so many ways because it’s so relevant to the way we live our lives now, constantly being confronted by our own image on phones or Zoom calls. I wanted to tackle that obsession by writing an earnest love song that we come to realize is between Narcissus and his own reflection, producing a pretty morbid ending. ” **“Drawbridge & the Baroness”** “This is one of the oddest and most unique songs on the record but I love it. It’s based on a philosophical dilemma called the drawbridge exercise, which is all about power and people’s worldviews. I chased the idea while sitting at my kitchen table, layering up hundreds of tracks of my own voice harmonizing with itself. I’m really proud of it.” **“The Soprano & Midnight Wonderings” (feat. BIM)** “I thought people could do with a break from my voice for a minute on the record, so this track features BIM, who is a fantastic vocalist that has toured with us for many years. It’s a story from her life that we wrote together on tour and then finished at my house. It felt really important for her to sing it since she’s such a beautiful artist.” **“Essie & Paul”** “I wanted to write about Paul and Eslanda Robeson, who were husband and wife and civil rights activists. They had a complex relationship and I wanted to capture the compromises of long-term love on this song, as well as giving a musical nod to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with the track being only strings and vocals. I love Sufjan Stevens and artists that bring in orchestral elements to their songs, so this one is a dream for me.” **“Mademoiselle & the Nunnery Blaze”** “Halfway through writing the album, I got in touch with the historian Emma Nagouse to put me onto unusual stories I could explore. She told me about this incredible French opera singer from the 17th century, Julie d’Aubigny, who had an amazing life and once broke her girlfriend out of a nunnery by burning it down. I wanted to write about that sweeping love story and the two of them not caring about the constraints of her time. It also features me trying my hand at singing in French!” **“Zheng Yi Sao & Questions for Her”** “Another figure that Emma directed me towards was Zheng Yi Sao, who ran a piracy empire that was so big it challenged the Chinese empire in the early 19th century. It’s crazy to me that she isn’t more well-known and this song looks back at her with awe from the present day, asking how she managed to achieve it all. It’s definitely the most bombastic song on the album.” **“Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024”** “When I was 13, my dad gave me a book of poems he wrote when he was traveling across America with my mum, and in it was a verse about homelessness in San Francisco that I decided to turn into a song. It’s always been something I’ve wanted to pick up again and this album felt like the perfect opportunity to do that. I added a verse from my perspective in 2024, addressing my dad’s words and ending the record from my voice, just as I started it. It also features my mum singing backing vocals, which was very special.”
Though Becca Harvey rose to alt-pop fame with her 2022 debut album, *When I’m Alone*, she felt as if she were working in the shadow of her collaborators, writing along to their melodies. For its follow-up, the Atlanta singer-songwriter rethought her creative approach, trusting her own lyrical and melodic instincts. The resulting songs are bittersweet and raw (despite the album’s deceptively sweet title), telling the story of a four-year relationship and its aftermath in bleary vignettes. On “I Just Do!” she draws the blackout curtains and sleeps through a flight in the arms of a new crush; next thing you know, she’s looking at old photo-booth strips, wondering how it all went wrong. The 26-year-old’s lyrics are wide-open and bemused, countering her grief with a shrug or a wink; on “Windows,” she slips in a knowing reference to Fleetwood Mac’s iconic breakup banger: “You are my silver spring/No matter what you do/You will always hear me sing.”
