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.
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.
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.
On the one hand, maybe there’s such a thing as too many Neil Young archival releases; on the other…is there? More so than *Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere*, the recordings here capture the extremes of folk prettiness and rock ’n’ roll ugliness that made Young’s music with Crazy Horse so gnarly and ultimately influential. A “Winterlong” weak with heartache and a “Helpless” that trudges forward like a beggar at death’s door. A wild first take of “Down by the River” and an equally wild 14th of “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” on which the band crosses from good and loose into bloodshot and a little unhinged. You can hear why he was considered both forbidding in his rawness and so eminently breakable in his vulnerability, and why he went back to this band over and over and over again: Who else could play with so little grace and make it sound so beautiful?
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.
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.
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.”
Cat Burns knows just how turbulent—and transformative—your early twenties can be. “I think there’s a saying that says, ‘When you are 18 you think you know everything; when you’re 22 you realize you know nothing,’” the South London singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “It’s such a formative time in everyone’s lives.” Those early adult years—and all the chaos, clarity, and, often, pain they can bring—provided the fuel for Burns’ debut, the simply titled *early twenties*. “I think I’ve always had a fixation with growing up—even the first little EP I put out when I was 16 was called *Adolescent*,” she notes. “I knew I wanted to have my album speak about age.” (Unfortunately, she adds, a certain other British pop star already came up with the concept of naming your albums after specific, life-altering ages, so *early twenties* it was.) But, if this record delves into classic territory for that time of life—youthful love, heartbreak, discovering your own character traits and flaws (see the unexpectedly upbeat “people pleaser”)—*early twenties* also finds solace in the certainty that you and your mates are all going through it together, and that one day the turbulence will pass. It’s what lies behind the jubilance of “live more & love more” or “know that you’re not alone,” and the wisdom of the India.Arie-featuring “healing” or “boy crazy,” a woozy love letter to Burns’ younger self before she realized she was queer. It’s an honest listen, but always with a message of hope and resilience. “One of my main whys of making music is always to make people feel less alone and \[make\] people feel seen,” says Burns. She wants you to “feel all of your feelings, but don’t dwell in it because there’s going to be another song to help you come out of it.” Read on as Burns talks us through her moving, cathartic debut—one track at a time. **“alone”** “I wrote ‘alone’ with Steve Mac, who is a legend \[he’s had a hand in the 30 different UK Singles Chart-topping songs\]. I was apprehensive about the session, because I don’t really tend to write the best songs with people who have had massive hits. But we got along really well. I just started word-vomiting to him about my friends who have said, ‘We’re about to be in our mid-twenties; I’m enjoying life by myself, but everyone’s talking about this romantic connection and love that seems to be really lovely, and I have yet to experience that.’ I liked the idea of it feeling like a really dramatic song—I think Gen Z just are quite dramatic! I wanted the drama to begin and grip you and then take you on a journey.” **“go”** “‘go’ probably will always be the most important song to me because it changed the speed and trajectory of my career. It’s not a song that I ever want to forget. Every time I perform it, I’m reminded that it’s not my song, it’s the people who have listened to it, it’s the people who’ve related to it. I wanted to put it quite close to the beginning just to be like, ‘This is me and this is what you are probably waiting for. So here you go, now enjoy the rest.’” **“boy crazy”** “I wrote this with Jonny Lattimer \[songwriter, producer, and musician who’s worked with Ellie Goulding, Tom Grennan, and Rina Sawayama\]. He started playing the bass part on the guitar, and this song just flew out of me. I thought, ‘This could be a really lovely love letter to my younger self in the style of this old-time, prom dance type of song.’ My generation and maybe older queer people didn’t get to have, really, that sort of prom night, where you’re allowed to be with who you want to be with. I think it was quite healing for me. I wanted to make a really lovely, wholesome song for people to think back to their younger selves, but also for younger queer people to hear and think, ‘Oh, actually I do identify with this.’” **“this is what happens”** “I wrote it with \[producer and songwriter\] Yakob in LA. I was there for two weeks, and this was my last session and I was like, ‘I miss working with the Brits. I just want to go home.’ But we met and got on really well. I was in a new country, everything was loud, everything was big, everything was sensory overload, and I just felt so overwhelmed. So I was like, ‘Why can’t I make a song about being anxious?’ It’s such a fun song even though it’s talking about something sad. Two things can be true at the same time: You can be really anxious and not want to leave your house and still want to have a dance to this song.” **“people pleaser”** “I went into the studio with \[producers and songwriters\] Jordan Riley and Gerard O’Connell and said, ‘I really struggle to say no to people.’ Jordan started playing some chords and I was like, ‘This could be quite fun.’ The song just wrote itself. The lyrics and chorus are quite sad. But again, I wanted it to be a happy-go-lucky sounding song to have a juxtaposition to make it not feel like it’s the end of the world.” **“live more & love more”** “I went into the session with the same guys as ‘people pleaser,’ and I was like, ‘I would love to make something that is just quite inspiring, that could get people to want to try something.’ Essentially, what the chorus says, if there is something that you want to try and do, just do it because we only get one life to try things, so there’s no point living with regrets. I wanted to do that in as non-cringe a way as possible.” **“jodie”** “I wrote ‘jodie’ with an amazing writer called Simon Aldred. I wanted to write a timeless love song—a ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ vibe. Simon came up with the chords and the lyrics flew out. I could draw upon my first love—I just wanted to make a really lovely love song for her because she was love personified for me, but also to showcase queer love, especially at the end where it says, ‘Our love goes rings around the sun, and they try and slow it down.’ This was a love song for the person—but also for the community, a love letter to queer love, and the beauty of how pure and natural it is.” **“you don’t love me anymore”** “It’s actually not about anything specific, but a concept that I’ve always wanted to write about. I think the uncertainty of love is such a big thing for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people have that fear that someone will just leave them because they don’t love them anymore—that swift change is really unsettling to think about. I wanted to make a song about that saying, ‘I’d actually rather you have met somebody else than just saying you don’t love me anymore, because I don’t really know how to get closure from that.’” **“no more”** “This is actually about a friend who came out of a longtime relationship, where he didn’t feel seen at all, he didn’t feel like any of his efforts were respected or valued. I thought that was a really interesting concept. It’s going, ‘OK, well, you didn’t see that so you won’t see me again.’ It’s a short and sweet song—only two minutes. Once I’ve said this twice or three times, that’s it. That’s the last time you’ll hear from me and see me.” **“happier without you”** “It’s about a friend, again, who came out of a long-term relationship. I remember I was there for her quite a bit through her realizing that she did not want to be with him anymore and this was not the right relationship for her. I wanted to make a song that’s sad and somber, but hopeful at the same time.” **“healing” (feat. India.Arie)** “I’ve loved India’s music since I was young—she’s one of my biggest inspirations. I covered a few of her songs back in 2020, and she heard one of them and followed me, and said, ‘I think you’re really great. Anything I can ever do to help or just be a part of your journey, I would love to.’ Nothing came of it until I wrote ‘healing.’ I could really hear India on it—she makes healing, purposeful, intentional music about feeling close to yourself and feeling centered within yourself. I sent her the song and she loved it. When she sent over her verse, I was like, ‘This is the most perfect way to end the album.’ People in their early twenties, we always end up getting advice from people older than us who say, ‘You will be fine.’ You find it really dismissive, but they have gone through this probably multiple times, and they’ve come out the other end each time. The fundamental thing is everything is going to be OK and it will pass, and we’ll go into the next stage of our life. So that’s why I ended it with that song.”
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.”
