“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.
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.”
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.
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?
Adeem the Artist digs deeper into their roots on *Anniversary*, the follow-up to the singer-songwriter’s critically acclaimed 2022 record *White Trash Revelry*. A native of the lower Piedmont region in the American southeast, Adeem builds upon the country-inflected folk of past releases to include the blues music that makes up their heritage, finding musical and thematic connections along the way. “Socialite Blues” pairs the Piedmont blues sound with a modern narrative, with an especially charismatic vocal from Adeem. “Rotations” is a clever and heartfelt spin on parenthood, with a gentle arrangement that suits the song’s tender message. And “One Night Stand” makes the case that Adeem could just as easily be a pop country hitmaker, using a big, hooky chorus to center a queer narrative. Adeem recorded the LP with producer Butch Walker in Nashville, setting up for a few days at renowned local studio The Butcher Shoppe. Players on *Anniversary* include Ellen Angelico, Aaron Lee Tasjan, and Megan Coleman, and the record boasts Adeem’s most expansive sound yet, complete with a horn section.
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.”