Slant Magazine's 50 Best Albums of 2022

Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was.   The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.  All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”  The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. 

Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.

Alvvays never intended to take five years to finish their third album, the nervy joyride that is the compulsively lovable Blue Rev. In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock. Global lockdowns notwithstanding, circumstances both ordinary and entirely unpredictable stunted those sessions. Alvvays toured more than expected, a surefire interruption for a band that doesn’t write on the road. A watchful thief then broke into singer Molly Rankin’s apartment and swiped a recorder full of demos, one day before a basement flood nearly ruined all the band’s gear. They subsequently lost a rhythm section and, due to border closures, couldn’t rehearse for months with their masterful new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell. At least the five-year wait was worthwhile: Blue Rev doesn’t simply reassert what’s always been great about Alvvays but instead reimagines it. They have, in part and sum, never been better. There are 14 songs on Blue Rev, making it not only the longest Alvvays album but also the most harmonically rich and lyrically provocative. There are newly aggressive moments here—the gleeful and snarling guitar solo at the heart of opener “Pharmacist,” or the explosive cacophony near the middle of “Many Mirrors.” And there are some purely beautiful spans, too—the church- organ fantasia of “Fourth Figure,” or the blue-skies bridge of “Belinda Says.” But the power and magic of Blue Rev stems from Alvvays’ ability to bridge ostensible binaries, to fuse elements that seem antithetical in single songs—cynicism and empathy, anger and play, clatter and melody, the soft and the steely. The luminous poser kiss-off of “Velveteen,” the lovelorn confusion of “Tile by Tile,” the panicked but somehow reassuring rush of “After the Earthquake”. The songs of Blue Rev thrive on immediacy and intricacy, so good on first listen that the subsequent spins where you hear all the details are an inevitability. This perfectly dovetailed sound stems from an unorthodox—and, for Alvvays, wholly surprising—recording process, unlike anything they’ve ever done. Alvvays are fans of fastidious demos, making maps of new tunes so complete they might as well have topographical contour lines. But in October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes. And then, as Everett has done on recent albums by The War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves, he spent an obsessive amount of time alongside Alvvays filling in the cracks, roughing up the surfaces, and mixing the results. This hybridized approach allowed the band to harness each song’s absolute core, then grace it with texture and depth. Notice the way, for instance, that “Tom Verlaine” bursts into a jittery jangle; then marvel at the drums and drum machines ricocheting off one another, the harmonies that crisscross, and the stacks of guitar that rise between riff and hiss, subtle but essential layers that reveal themselves in time. Every element of Alvvays leveled up in the long interim between albums: Riley is a classic dynamo of a drummer, with the power of a rock deity and the finesse of a jazz pedigree. Their roommate, in-demand bassist Blackwell, finds the center of a song and entrenches it. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan joined Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley to write more this time, reinforcing the band’s collective quest to break patterns heard on their first two albums. The results are beyond question: Blue Rev has more twists and surprises than Alvvays’ cumulative past, and the band seems to revel in these taken chances. This record is fun and often funny, from the hilarious reply-guy bash of “Very Online Guy” to the parodic grind of “Pomeranian Spinster.” Alvvays’ self-titled debut, released when much of the band was still in its early 20s, offered speculation about a distant future—marriage, professionalism, interplanetary citizenship. Antisocialites wrestled with the woes of the now, especially the anxieties of inching toward adulthood. Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become. The spinster with her Pomeranians or Belinda with her babies? The kid fleeing Bristol by train or the loyalist stunned to see old friends return? “How do I gauge whether this is stasis or change?” Rankin sings during the first verse of the plangent and infectious “Easy on Your Own?” In that moment, she pulls the ties tight between past, present, and future to ask hard questions about who we’re going to become, and how. Sure, it arrives a few years later than expected, but the answer for Alvvays is actually simple: They’ve changed gradually, growing on Blue Rev into one of their generation’s most complete and riveting rock bands.

Like AC/DC before them, Beach House’s gift lies in managing to make what feels like the same album a hundred different ways. Even the new inflections on *Once Twice Melody*—the string section of “ESP,” the rhythmic nods to hip-hop (“Pink Funeral”) and Italo-disco (“Runaway”)—fit immediately into their plush, neon-lit world. And while specific moments conjure specific eras (“Superstar” the triumph of an ’80s John Hughes movie, “Once Twice Melody” a swirl of ’60s surrealism), the cumulative effect is something like a fairytale rendered in sound: majestic, inviting, but dark enough around the edges to keep you off-balance. And just like that (snap), they do it again.

Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions. Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell. The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy-yet-referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and *Yeezus*-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.\" Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish-yet-austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Traditionally, a band releases their debut album and heads out for an extended stretch on the road, honing their live chops, twisting their songs into new shapes. But when Black Country, New Road released *For the First Time* in February 2021, that route was blocked off by the pandemic. Instead, the London-based band set out to tweak and tamper with their experimental post-rock sound for a transformative second album. They might not have been able to travel, but their music could. “By the time the first album came out, those songs had existed for so long that we were very keen to change the way we wrote music,” bassist Tyler Hyde tells Apple Music. The material that makes up their second record, *Ants From Up There*, soon came to life, the group using the labyrinthine “Basketball Shoes,” which had been around before their debut, as a springboard. “We wanted to explore the themes we’d created on that song,” says Hyde. “It’s essentially three songs within one, all of which relatively cover the emotions and moods that are on the album. It’s hopeful and light, but still looks at some of the darker sides that the first album showed.” The resultant record sees the band hit hypnotic new peaks. *Ants From Up There*, recorded before the departure of singer Isaac Wood in January 2022, is less reliant on jerky, rhythmic U-turns than their debut (although there is some of that), with expansive, Godspeed You! Black Emperor-ish atmospherics emerging in their place. “Fundamentally, we relearned an entirely new style of playing with each other,” says drummer Charlie Wayne. “We learned a lot about how to express ourselves just for each other rather than for anything else going on externally.” Here Hyde, Wayne, and saxophonist Lewis Evans take us through it, track by track. **“Intro”** Lewis Evans: “This uses the theme from ’Basketball Shoes,’ compressed into these little micro cells and repeated over and over again. It’s just a straight-up, impactful welcome to the album.” **“Chaos Space Marine”** Tyler Hyde: “In this song, we allowed ourselves to get out all the stupid, funny joke style of playing. It was just our way of saying yes to everything. There are many things across the album—and in previous songs from the last album—that are seemingly good ideas, but they’ve come about through a joke. I think the rest of the album is much more considered than that. It’s our silly song. It’s a voyage. It’s a sea shanty. It’s a space trip.” **“Concorde”** Charlie Wayne: “I love how it follows the same chord progression the whole way through, and it’s driven but very soft. It’s got real moments of delicacy, and it’s a song that we all thought quite a lot about when we were getting it together. When you’re restricted to that one-chord sequence, you want it to feel as though it’s going somewhere and progressing, so the peaks and troughs have to be considered.” **“Bread Song”** LE: “It’s like two different songs in one. You’ve got this really quite flowing and free track in a melodic and conventional harmonic way, but rhythmically free and flowing accompaniment to Isaac’s vocals. It feels quite orchestral, and the way that we all play together on this recording is so in sync with each other. We were listening to each other so much, so the swells that one person starts making, people start responding to, and everybody is swelling at the same time and getting quieter at the same time. Then it turns into this almost Soweto, kind of township-style pop tune at the end. It’s a really fun ending to an intense, emotional tune.” **“Good Will Hunting”** LE: “This is another slightly silly one, and it’s got a really silly ending which actually never made the cut on the album, but it’s heavily driven by the riff on the guitars. I think at the time we were listening to quite a bit of Kurt Vile, especially rhythmically. I can remember a conversation about when we wanted the drums to come in and to be super straight, super driven. Then for the choruses, rhythmically, to completely flip and not feel like they were big at all. So for both the choruses, the drums are just tiny.” **“Haldern”** TH: “We were playing at Haldern Pop Festival in north Germany during lockdown. We’d just been allowed to fly for work purposes, and we were doing this session. We did two performances there, and the second one was a livestream, and we weren’t allowed to play songs that weren’t released. At the time, that left us with not very much that we weren’t already bored with, so we decided to do some improv. It was a very lucky day where we were all very in sync with one another. So ‘Haldern’ was totally from improv, which is not how we write ever.” **“Mark’s Theme”** LE: “This is a tune written kind of for my uncle who passed away from COVID in 2021. I wrote it on my tenor saxophone as soon as I found out. I just started playing and wrote that. It’s a reflection on him and my feelings towards him passing away and everything being really bleak. He was a massive fan and supporter of the band, so it felt right to put that on the album and to have his name remembered with our music.” **“The Place Where He Inserted the Blade”** CW: “For me, this is about as far away as we went from the first album. Aesthetically, where the first album has moments of real dissonance and apathy, ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’ is very warm and rich and quite uplifting. I think it strikes right to the heart of what the album is for me, which is fundamentally being in the room, making music with my friends.” **“Snow Globes”** LE: “This is another tune where we really thought about what we wanted from it before we wrote it. We had examples of things we liked, and one of them was Frank Ocean’s ‘White Ferrari.’ We liked the idea of it almost being like two different bands \[playing\] at the same time. So you’ve got this quite simple but quite heart-wrenching, fugal-sounding arrangement of all the instruments with a drum solo that is just crazy and doesn’t really relate too much to what is going on in the other instruments. We react to the drum solo, but he doesn’t react to us. It’s that kind of idea.” **“Basketball Shoes”** TH: “It’s essentially a medley of the whole album. It’s got literal musical motifs that are repeated on different songs in the album. It touches on all the themes that we’ve been exploring, and it’s the most climactic song on the album. It wouldn’t really make sense to not finish with it, it’s so exhausting. It’s such a journey. I think you just wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to anything that followed it because you’d be so wiped out after listening to it.”

Black Country, New Road return with the news that their second album, “Ants From Up There”, will land on February 4th on Ninja Tune. Following on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of their acclaimed debut “For the first time”, the band have harnessed the momentum from that record and run full pelt into their second, with “Ants From Up There” managing to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before, as well as a natural progression. Released alongside the announcement the band (Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Charlie Wayne, Luke Mark, Isaac Wood, Tyler Hyde and Georgia Ellery) have also today shared the first single from the album, ‘Chaos Space Marine’, a track that has already become a live favourite with fans since its first public airings earlier this year - combining sprightly violin, rhythmic piano, and stabs of saxophone to create something infectiously fluid that builds to a rousing crescendo. It’s a track that frontman Isaac Wood calls “the best song we’ve ever written.” It’s a chaotic yet coherent creation that ricochets around unpredictably but also seamlessly. “We threw in every idea anyone had with that song,” says Wood. “So the making of it was a really fast, whimsical approach - like throwing all the shit at the wall and just letting everything stick.” Their debut “For the first time” is a certain 2021 Album of the Year, having received ecstatic reviews from critics and fans alike as well as being shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Released in February to extensive, global, critical support - perhaps best summed up by The Times who wrote in their 5/5 review that they were "the most exciting band of 2021" and The Observer who called their record "one of the best albums of the year" - the album made a significant dent on the UK Albums Chart where it landed at #4 in its first week, a remarkable achievement for a largely experimental debut record. The album also reached #1 on Any Decent Music, #2 at Album Of The Year and sat at #1 on Rate Your Music for several weeks, remaining the record to generate the most fan reviews and site discussion there this year. Black Country, New Road were also declared Artist Of The Week and Album Of The Week by The Observer, The Line Of Best Fit and Stereogum, and saw features, including covers and reviews, from the likes of Mojo, NPR, CRACK, Uncut, The Quietus, Pitchfork, The FADER, Loud & Quiet, The Face, Paste, The Needle Drop, DIY, NME, CLASH, So Young, Dork and more. With “For the first time” the band melded klezmer, post-rock, indie and an often intense spoken word delivery. On “Ants From Up There” they have expanded on this unique concoction to create a singular sonic middle ground that traverses classical minimalism, indie-folk, pop, alt rock and a distinct tone that is already unique to the band. Recorded at Chale Abbey Studios, Isle Of Wight, across the summer with the band’s long-term live engineer Sergio Maschetzko, it’s also an album that comes loaded with a deep-rooted conviction in the end result. “We were just so hyped the whole time,” says Hyde. “It was such a pleasure to make. I've kind of accepted that this might be the best thing that I'm ever part of for the rest of my life. And that's fine.” Black Country, New Road's live performances have already gained legendary status from fans and has seen them labelled "one of the UK's best live bands" by The Guardian. After the success of their livestream direct from London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, stand-out performances at SXSW and the BBC 6 Music Festival, and following a sold-out UK tour this summer, high-profile festival appearances, and a 43 date UK & EU tour to follow in the Autumn with sold out US dates next year, the London-based seven-piece today announce further UK & IE dates in support of the album for April 2022, preceded by their biggest London headliner to date at The Roundhouse in February. Black Country, New Road Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, will be available as part of the Deluxe LP and CD versions of ‘Ants From Up There’. Fans who pre-order any format of ‘Ants From Up There’ from the Black Country, New Road store, their Bandcamp page and the Ninja Tune shop, will be able to gain access to the pre-sale for the 2022 UK headline tour dates. The full set of dates are as follows: 22/10/2021 - Rotondes, Luxembourg 23/10/2021 - Bumann & Sohn, Cologne – DE (SOLD OUT) 24/10/2021 - Botanique Orangerie, Belgium – BE (SOLD OUT) 25/10/2021 - Le Trabendo, Paris - FR 27/10/2021 - Le Grand Mix, Tourcoing - FR 28/10/2021 - Lieu Unique, Nantes - FR 29/10/2021 - Rockschool Barbey, Bordeaux - FR 1/11/2021 - Teatro Duse, Bologna - IT 2/11/2021 - Auditorium Della Mole, Ancona - IT 05/11/2021 - Circolo della Musica, Turin - IT 06/11/2021 - Bogen F, Zürich - CH (SOLD OUT) 08/11/2021 - Underdogs', Prague - CZ (SOLD OUT) 09/11/2021 - Frannz Club, Berlin - DE (SOLD OUT) 10/11/2021 - Hydrozagadka, Warsaw - PL (SOLD OUT) 11/11/2021 - Transcentury Update Warm Up @ UT Connewitz Leipzig - DE 12/11/2021 - Bahnhof Pauli, Hamburg - DE 14/11/2021 - Le Guess Who? Festival, Utrecht - NL 16/11/2021 - Paradiso Noord, Amsterdam - NL (SOLD OUT) 20/11/2021 - Super Bock En Stock, Lisbon - PT 21/11/2021 - ZDB, Lisbon - PT (SOLD OUT) 29/11/2021 - Chalk, Brighton - UK (SOLD OUT) * 30/11/2021 - Junction 1, Cambridge - UK (SOLD OUT) * 01/12/2021 - 1865, Southampton - UK * 03/12/2021 - Arts Club, Liverpool - UK (SOLD OUT) * 04/12/2021 - Irish Centre, Leeds - UK (SOLD OUT) * 06/12/2021 - O2 Ritz Manchester, Manchester – UK * (SOLD OUT) 07/12/2021 - Newcastle University Student Union, Newcastle Upon Tyne - UK * 08/12/2021 - SWG3, Glasgow - UK * 09/12/2021 - The Mill, Birmingham - UK * (SOLD OUT) 10/12/2021 - The Waterfront, Norwich - UK * 12/12/2021 – Marble Factory, Bristol – UK (SOLD OUT) * 13/12/2021 - Y Plas, Cardiff - UK * 15/12/2021 - Whelan's, Dublin - IE (SOLD OUT) * 08/02/2022 - Roundhouse, London - UK 18/02/2022 – DC9 Nightclub, Washington, DC – US (SOLD OUT) 19/02/2022 – The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA – US (SOLD OUT) 22/02/2022 – Sultan Room, Turk’s Inn, Brooklyn, NY – US (SOLD OUT) 23/02/2022 – Elsewhere, Brooklyn, NY – US 25/02/2022 – Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia, PA – US (SOLD OUT) 26/02/2022 – Bar Le Ritz, Montreal, QC – CAN 28/02/2022 – Third Man Records, Detroit, MI – US 01/03/2022 – Lincoln Hall, Chicago, IL – US 03/03/2022 – Barboza, Seattle, WA – US (SOLD OUT) 04/03/2022 – Polaris Hall, Portland, OR – US 05/03/2022 – The Miniplex, Richard’s Goat Tavern, Arcata, CA – US 06/03/2022 – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – US 08/03/2022 – Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA – US (SOLD OUT) 09/03/2022 – Regent Theater, Los Angeles, CA – US 06/04/2022 - The Foundry, Sheffield - UK 07/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Oxford - UK 09/04/2022 - Liquid Room, Edinburgh - UK 10/04/2022 - The Empire, Belfast - UK 11/04/2022 - 3Olympia, Dublin - IE 13/04/2022 - Albert Hall, Manchester - UK 14/04/2022 - Rock City, Nottingham - UK 16/04/2022 - Concorde 2, Brighton - UK 17/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Bristol - UK 02/06/2022 – Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona - ES 08/07/2022 - Pohoda Festival, Trencin – SK * - with Ethan P. Flynn Pre-sale to The Roundhouse show and April 2022 UK / IE dates available from Tuesday 19th October at 9am BST. Tickets go on general sale on Friday 22nd October at 9am BST.

In the context of Nilüfer Yanya’s second album, the word “painless” has a few different meanings. “I was enjoying the process of making the record, and thinking, ‘Why do you have to beat yourself up in order to make something?’” the London singer/guitarist tells Apple Music. “Obviously, you have to work hard, but often the idea of really struggling is something that people inflict on others, just because it\'s the idea they sell to them, like, ‘Oh, you need to go through this.’” Yanya felt that she hadn\'t given herself enough time and space to make her 2019 debut, *Miss Universe*—a record based loosely, and playfully, around the concept of self-help and wellness, and what happens when you get too in your head about things. So, in the thick of the pandemic, she eased into making *PAINLESS*, writing the songs more collaboratively—mostly with producer Will Archer—than she had been used to. “I kind of felt a bit like, ‘Am I cheating?’ Because you\'re sharing the work, it feels lighter,” she says. \"But then because of that, I kind of delved in deeper and it got a bit darker.” (The album title actually comes from the “shameless” lyric “Until you fall, it\'s painless.”) Those depths can be felt both in Yanya\'s vocal dynamics and the sense of urgency that underpins much of the album, particularly on opener “the dealer” and “stabilise,” the first single. “I think the rhythm plays a big part in these songs,” Yanya says. “You feel like there needs to be an escape somewhere.” Here Yanya talks through *PAINLESS*, track by track. **“the dealer”** “It\'s like when someone\'s hiding behind their layers, or not being honest, but then also you\'re not being honest with yourself. My favorite lyric is \'I hope it\'s just the summertime you grew attached to,\' because it\'s like you\'re lying to yourself. You’re not saying, \'Oh, it was this person that made the difference, or it was this person that I miss.\' You\'re just saying, \'I had a great time,\' and you\'re not being honest about why.” **“L/R”** “\[Producer\] Bullion played me this beat, and it had this pitched drum in it. It just made me feel really happy and warm. It had this kind of marching feeling to it, which I really liked. It took us like a year to finish it, but the initial idea came really quickly. I like the almost spoken element to it, because it sounds like you\'re speaking rather than singing, but then the chorus is very much singing—and it took a while to get that right. It\'s kind of about so many things. In my notebook at the time, I\'d written, \'Do less things\'—like, less is more. That was my thinking behind the song: trying to enjoy simple things and not overcomplicate things.” **“shameless”** “It\'s a really intimate song. I felt like it was about someone that\'s trying to run away from stuff in their life, but they kind of don\'t have much hope. The vocals are very celestial—not something I really experimented with in the past. At first, I was going to kind of speak the words, but it needed a lighter touch, like something even more delicate.” **“stabilise”** “That was the first one me and Will did together. All the others kind of grew off that song. It\'s about environments and the way they impact you, and not being able to escape your environment, taking it with you wherever you go. And it kind of becomes your cage or the way you view things. You know when you\'ve been somewhere too long and then it\'s hard to imagine the world another way? Definitely a very lockdown song.” **“chase me”** “I really liked the line \'Through corridors your love will chase me,\' because it was like the safe feeling you can get when you know you are loved, but you don\'t necessarily want it. It\'s almost like an ego song for me. It\'s very confident.” **“midnight sun”** “I was digging into more of an overall feeling and a mood. I feel like it\'s a song about confidence and finding your own voice in order to speak up, whether that\'s about your own feelings or bigger issues: ‘I can\'t keep my mouth shut this time. I can\'t keep my head down. I\'m not going along with this anymore.’” **“trouble”** “That song is so sad—in a beautiful way, if I may say so. It also felt like quite a brave one for me because it\'s very different. When I was writing, I was like, \'Am I doing a straight-up pop song?\' It\'s not. I think it definitely has that take on it. The vocals needed to be more intimate. Like one voice, and it just all keeps spilling out. It\'s quite challenging to sing. ‘Trouble’ is one of those words—I think I heard it in a Cat Stevens song—\'Trouble, set me free\'—and I really loved the way it was being referred to almost like a person. In the lyrics here, it\'s something that\'s quite persistent and it\'s not going away. Something\'s definitely broken that you can\'t fix.” **“try”** “This one is about getting better, and feeling the need to connect on a deeper level, finding new depths and making new connections, but becoming confused, tired, and dejected with the effort it takes.” **“company”** “It\'s about giving up and you\'re not in a happy place. Originally it started out as, like, you\'re in a relationship that you are just really not sure about and you\'re trying to give signs across that you\'re trying to get rid of someone. But I think the song now is definitely about your inner demons, and they\'re not really going away.” **“belong with you”** “I did this with Jazzi Bobbi, who\'s in my band. She does more electronic stuff, so that definitely comes into play. I feel like builds are always my favorite things in songs, and at the beginning we actually tried to overcomplicate the song and there was like a whole other section and it changed tempo and it just wasn\'t working. And I was like, \'We just need to keep building and that\'s it.\' What it\'s about is like you\'re tied into something, but you know you\'re too good for it or you want to leave. I feel like these are all the songs, in a way. It’s like, escape—but you can\'t escape.” **“the mystic”** “It\'s about watching other people get on with their lives and feeling like you\'re being left behind. I spend a lot of time doing music, so that\'s where I put all my energy, and I was like, \'Oh, I thought we were all still doing that.\' Other people have got other plans and you\'re like, \'Oh, you\'re a grown-up. You\'re going to move in with your boyfriend,\' or, \'Oh, you can drive now.\' The verse is really sad, because it\'s about watching that happen, and feeling very insecure and unconfident.” **“anotherlife”** “For me, this has a completely different energy. It\'s kind of like you\'re admitting you\'re lost now, but in a parallel universe or in the future, you won\'t always be lost. It\'s not always bad to be in that kind of lost, super-emotional, flung-out state. I find sometimes when something bad happens and you get really upset, it\'s kind of— I don\'t want to say cleansing, but you see things with this new kind of brilliance and clarity. And that\'s kind of a beautiful moment.”

Nilüfer Yanya runs head first into the depths of emotional vulnerability on her anticipated sophomore record PAINLESS. Recorded between a basement studio in Stoke Newington and Riverfish Music in Penzance, the record is a more sonically direct effort, narrowing her previously broad palette to a handful of robust ideas. Yanya's debut album Miss Universe (2019) earned a Best New Music tag from Pitchfork and saw support tours with Sharon Van Etten, Mitski and The XX.

Life on Earth is a departure for the New Orleans-based Segarra (they/she). Its eleven new “nature punk” tracks on the theme of survival are music for a world in flux—songs about thriving, not just surviving, while disaster is happening. For their eighth full-length album, Segarra drew inspiration from The Clash, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Bad Bunny, and the author of Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown. Recorded during the pandemic, Life on Earth was produced by Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver, Kevin Morby). Life on Earth has received critical praise already, appearing on most anticipated records of 2022 lists by NPR, Pitchfork, the Guardian, Stereogum, the Observer, Vulture, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, the Evening Standard, and the Irish Times, among others. The Guardian says, “What’s most impressive about Life on Earth is the way Segarra metabolises bleak and disturbing subjects into songs that brim with hope, beauty and cheer,” while the Observer says, “Hurray for the Riff Raff promises a manual for Life on Earth, a ‘nature punk’ album for tough times,” and NPR’s Ann Powers says, “If you need some music to take you forward in this strange winter, I think Life on Earth is gonna do it for you.” Mojo, in its four-star review, calls it “a remarkably delicate, tender record full of gentle empathy, of lines that ring with the truth of shared experience. Hurray for The Riff Raff might not be able to save the world, but Life on Earth is a compassionate, humane record at a time when it can only be a gift.”

It’s not easy to dance with one’s tongue buried deeply in cheek. But Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul effortlessly combine lean, punchy electro-pop with an unapologetically sarcastic sense of humor. On the Belgian duo’s debut album, *Topical Dancer*, the two musicians draw on their multicultural backgrounds to take sly potshots at racism, sexism, and self-doubt. On “Esperanto,” Adigéry riffs on microaggressions over plunging electric bass, and on “Blenda,” she marries a crisp, funky groove with a surprisingly vulnerable chorus: “Go back to your country where you belong/Siri, can you tell me where I belong?” Co-produced by their longtime collaborators Soulwax, the album slices neatly across the overlap between punky disco, indie dance, and underground house; ’80s avant-pop influences (Art of Noise, Talking Heads) brush up against the sing-speaking wit of contemporaries like Marie Davidson and Dry Cleaning. Some of the album’s most powerful moments transcend language entirely: On “Haha,” Adigéry’s laughter is chopped up and dribbled over an EBM-inspired beat, making for a slow-motion floor-filler that’s as surreal as it is captivating.

“You can’t come get this work until it’s dry. I made this album while the streets were closed during the pandemic. Made entirely with the greatest producers of all time—Pharrell and Ye. ONLY I can get the best out of these guys. ENJOY!!” —Pusha T, in an exclusive message provided to Apple Music

Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, has released five albums in the last decade—and each one is an expansion of and challenge to his indie-folk instrumental palette. From the stark rock/folk contrasts of *Fear Fun*’s ballads and anthems to the mariachi strains of *I Love You, Honeybear*’s love notes to the wry commentary and grand orchestrations of *Pure Comedy* and *God’s Favorite Customer*, Tillman has a penchant for pairing his articulate inner monologue with arrangements that have only grown more eclectic and elaborate. *Chloë and the Next 20th Century* builds on all of the above—the micro-symphonies, the inventive percussion, the swift shift from dusty country-western nostalgia to timeless dirges plunked out on a dive-bar piano. A swooning sax solo in a somber jazz number (“Buddy’s Rendezvous”) is immediately followed by the trill of a psychedelic harpsichord (“Q4”); “Goodbye Mr. Blue” recalls the acoustic inclinations of his early work, and warm strings wash over the record, from its first single, the romantic “Funny Girl,” through “The Next 20th Century,” the album’s sardonic closer, which resurfaces the ever-simmering existential dread of *Pure Comedy*. “If this century’s here to stay,” he sings on the track, “I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the love songs/And the great distance that they came.”

Father John Misty returns with Chloë and The Next 20th Century, his fifth album and first new material since the release of God’s Favorite Customer in 2018. Chloë and the Next 20th Century was written and recorded August through December 2020 and features arrangements by Drew Erickson. The album sees Tillman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson resume their longtime collaboration, as well as Dave Cerminara, returning as engineer and mixer. Basic tracks were recorded at Wilson’s Five Star Studios with strings, brass, and woodwinds recorded at United Recordings in a session featuring Dan Higgins and Wayne Bergeron, among others. Chloë and The Next 20th Century features the singles “Funny Girl,” “Q4,” “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” and “Kiss Me (I Loved You),” and will be available April 8th, 2022 worldwide from Sub Pop and in Europe from Bella Union.

*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.

A couple of years before she became known as one half of Wet Leg, Rhian Teasdale left her home on the Isle of Wight, where a long-term relationship had been faltering, to live with friends in London. Every Tuesday, their evening would be interrupted by the sound of people screaming in the property below. “We were so worried the first time we heard it,” Teasdale tells Apple Music. Eventually, their investigations revealed that scream therapy sessions were being held downstairs. “There’s this big scream in the song ‘Ur Mum,’” says Teasdale. “I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” That mix of humor and emotional candor is typical of *Wet Leg*. Crafting tightly sprung post-punk and melodic psych-pop and indie rock, Teasdale and bandmate Hester Chambers explore the existential anxieties thrown up by breakups, partying, dating apps, and doomscrolling—while also celebrating the fun to be had in supermarkets. “It’s my own experience as a twentysomething girl from the Isle of Wight moving to London,” says Teasdale. The strains of disenchantment and frustration are leavened by droll, acerbic wit (“You’re like a piece of shit, you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat,” she chides an ex on “Piece of shit”), and humor has helped counter the dizzying speed of Wet Leg’s ascent. On the strength of debut single “Chaise Longue,” Teasdale and Chambers were instantly cast by many—including Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Florence Welch—as one of Britain’s most exciting new bands. But the pair have remained committed to why they formed Wet Leg in the first place. “It’s such a shame when you see bands but they’re habitually in their band—they’re not enjoying it,” says Teasdale. “I don’t want us to ever lose sight of having fun. Having silly songs obviously helps.” Here, she takes us through each of the songs—silly or otherwise—on *Wet Leg*. **“Being in Love”** “People always say, ‘Oh, romantic love is everything. It’s what every person should have in this life.’ But actually, it’s not really conducive to getting on with what you want to do in life. I read somewhere that the kind of chemical storm that is produced in your brain, if you look at a scan, it’s similar to someone with OCD. I just wanted to kind of make that comparison.” **“Chaise Longue”** “It came out of a silly impromptu late-night jam. I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I stay over, she always makes up the chaise longue for me. It was a song that never really was supposed to see the light of day. So it’s really funny to me that so many people are into it and have connected with it. It’s cool. I was as an assistant stylist \[on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ video\]. Online, a newspaper \[*The New York Times*\] was doing the top 10 videos out this week, and it was funny to see ‘Chaise Longue’ next to this video I’d been working on. Being on set, you have an idea of the budget that goes into getting all these people together to make this big pop-star video. And then you scroll down and it’s our little video that we spent about £50 on. Hester had a camera and she set up all the shots. Then I edited it using a free trial version of Final Cut.” **“Angelica”** “The song is set at a party that you no longer want to be at. Other people are feeling the same, but you are all just fervently, aggressively trying to force yourself to have a good time. And actually, it’s not always possible to have good times all the time. Angelica is the name of my oldest friend, so we’ve been to a lot of rubbish parties together. We’ve also been to a lot of good parties together, but I thought it would be fun to put her name in the song and have her running around as the main character.” **“I Don’t Wanna Go Out”** “It’s kind of similar to ‘Angelica’—it’s that disenchantment of getting fucked up at parties, and you’re gradually edging into your late twenties, early thirties, and you’re still working your shitty waitressing job. I was trying to convince myself that I was working these shitty jobs so that I could do music on the side. But actually, you’re kind of kidding yourself and you’re seeing all of your friends starting to get real jobs and they’re able to buy themselves nice shampoo. You’re trying to distract yourself from not achieving the things that you want to achieve in life by going to these parties. But you can’t keep kidding yourself, and I think it’s that realization that I’ve tried to inject into the lyrics of this song.” **“Wet Dream”** “The chorus is ‘Beam me up.’ There’s this Instagram account called beam\_me\_up\_softboi. It’s posts of screenshots of people’s texts and DMs and dating-app goings-on with this term ‘softboi,’ which to put it quite simply is someone in the dating scene who’s presenting themselves as super, super in touch with their feelings and really into art and culture. And they use that as currency to try and pick up girls. It’s not just men that are softbois; women can totally be softbois, too. The character in the song is that, basically. It’s got a little bit of my own personal breakup injected into it. This particular person would message me since we’d broken up being like, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you. I dreamt that we were married,’ even though it was definitely over. So I guess that’s why I decided to set it within a dream: It was kind of making fun of this particular message that would keep coming through to me.” **“Convincing”** “I was really pleased when we came to recording this one, because for the bulk of the album, it is mainly me taking lead vocals, which is fine, but Hester has just the most beautiful voice. I hope she won’t mind me saying, but she kind of struggles to see that herself. So it felt like a big win when she was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to sing. I’m going to do this song.’ It’s such a cool song and she sounds so great on it.” **“Loving You”** “I met this guy when I was 20, so I was pretty young. We were together for six or seven years or something, and he was a bit older, and I just fell so hard. I fell so, so hard in love with him. And then it got pretty toxic towards the end, and I guess I was a bit angry at how things had gone. So it’s just a pretty angry song, without dobbing him in too much. I feel better now, though. Don’t worry. It’s all good.” **“Ur Mum”** “It’s about giving up on a relationship that isn’t serving you anymore, either of you, and being able to put that down and walk away from it. I was living with this guy on the Isle of Wight, living the small-town life. I was trying to move to London or Bristol or Brighton and then I’d move back to be with this person. Eventually, we managed to put the relationship down and I moved in with some friends in London. Every Tuesday, it’d get to 7 pm and you’d hear that massive group scream. We learned that downstairs was home to the Psychedelic Society and eventually realized that it was scream therapy. I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” **“Oh No”** “The amount of time and energy that I lose by doomscrolling is not OK. It’s not big and it’s not clever. This song is acknowledging that and also acknowledging this other world that you live in when you’re lost in your phone. When we first wrote this, it was just to fill enough time to play a festival that we’d been booked for when we didn’t have a full half-hour set. It used to be even more repetitive, and the lyrics used to be all the same the whole way through. When it came to recording it, we’re like, ‘We should probably write a few more lyrics,’ because when you’re playing stuff live, I think you can definitely get away with not having actual lyrics.” **“Piece of shit”** “When I’m writing the lyrics for all the songs with Wet Leg, I am quite careful to lean towards using quite straightforward, unfussy language and I avoid, at all costs, using similes. But this song is the one song on the album that uses simile—‘like a piece of shit.’ Pretty poetic. I think writing this song kind of helped me move on from that \[breakup\]. It sounds like I’m pretty wound up. But actually, it’s OK now, I feel a lot better.” **“Supermarket”** “It was written just as we were coming out of lockdown and there was that time where the highlight of your week would be going to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, because that was literally all you could do. I remember queuing for Aldi and feeling like I was queuing for a nightclub.” **“Too Late Now”** “It’s about arriving in adulthood and things maybe not being how you thought they would be. Getting to a certain age, when it’s time to get a real job, and you’re a bit lost, trying to navigate through this world of dating apps and social media. So much is out of our control in this life, and ‘Too late now, lost track somehow,’ it’s just being like, ‘Everything’s turned to shit right now, but that’s OK because it’s unavoidable.’ It sounds very depressing, but you know sometimes how you can just take comfort in the fact that no matter what you do, you’re going to die anyway, so don’t worry about it too much, because you can’t control everything? I guess there’s a little bit of that in ‘Too Late Now.’”

Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.

“Often, for me,” Dan Snaith tells Apple Music, “the worst enemy of making music is thinking too much about it. I just *do* it, and what it is and why it is comes into focus later.” Doing, and making people dance, were the drivers for the Toronto producer’s first Daphni album since 2017’s *Joli Mai*. *Cherry* is a dazzlingly diverse set—there are bold expressions of house, techno, and disco here—with Snaith (who also releases music as Caribou and Manitoba) admitting it reflects the roller coaster of the early 2020s. “There are tracks on here that were made in the depths of the pandemic, when I was yearning for clubs to return and experiencing music collectively,” he says. “And there were tracks made as things started to reopen. I wanted something to play at my first DJ gigs and wondered what would connect people after so long away.” One of the record’s most striking characteristics is its directness. Tracks are relatively short—and cut deliciously to the chase. “They’re mostly without intros or outros,” Snaith says. “The music just careens between ideas and moods—as if under the control of a particularly mercurial DJ. I like that style of DJing anyway. Alternating between hypnosis—the same loop for a long time—and surprise. This album captures that, I hope.” Read on for Snaith’s track-by-track guide. **“Arrow”** “The loop that makes up this album is so simple but somehow alluring. It doesn’t need to do much of anything—it just needs you to keep staring at it. One of my favorite things about dance music is that, with the aid of repetition, small variations can seem momentous. I also like the idea that the album starts with no messing around—straight in at full speed—and then stands pretty much still throughout this track.” **“Cherry”** “This is one of the last tracks I made and, somehow, filled in a puzzle piece that I didn’t know was missing. As soon as I’d finished it, I knew that it was going to be a central track on the album. That twisting, turning synth line that’s both disorienting and compelling is like a musical ouroboros—the snake eating its own tail.” **“Always There”** “This is one of my favorite tracks to play out in my DJ sets, probably because it works when it shouldn’t. The textures in this track—the fast guitar lines, snaking reed instrument, and shakers—stand out immediately in a club, where people are used to dancing to drum machines and synthesizers. The arrangement makes you wait for things to drop a couple times, and often, when I play it in a club, I tease it out for much longer, so that the riff has been weaving in and out for a long time before it drops.” **“Crimson”** “I’m not much of a ‘gear’ person, but every so often, I come across a piece of equipment that sounds so fantastic and has so much character that it feels like it writes the music for you. The synthesizer playing the main blippy pattern here is an ARP 2600, and you can almost hear me moving the sliders on it as I try to lure the track to a climax.” **“Arp Blocks”** “The title here refers to the ARP 2600 that is the only instrument in this track. I don’t think I’ve ever released any music that is one live take of one instrument playing solo before. The ‘Blocks’ of the title refers to a piece of software that allowed me to control the 50-plus-year-old ARP synthesizer in a completely new way and get sounds out of it that would not have been previously possible, allowing the synth pattern to twist and turn and jump up and down to different harmonic registers.” **“Falling”** “People who know my music probably know that I have a hard time resisting a repeated hook—a mantra that takes on more meaning the more it’s repeated. This one could have stayed longer and been built out into a larger track, but to keep the pace fast, it sticks around for only a little over a minute before we’re on to something else.” **“Mania”** “A lot of the tracks on this album have a loose, playful feeling, and that really reflects how it was making them. Even though it’s just me in the studio, it’s still possible to capture that sense of jamming—putting one loop or sound together and then rushing to another piece of equipment and playing the first thing that comes to mind on it. This track came together pretty much in the order that you hear the elements being introduced into the track. There’s a point, halfway through, where the harmony changes and the track feels like it’s floating—that’s always a really nice moment when I play this out in a club.” **“Take Two”** “So much of my favorite dance music is about the search for a perfect loop—often a loop that harkens back to house music’s antecedent: disco. This track weaves a few different loops together. In fact, it started out as two different tracks that I realized, at some point, were in the same key, the same world—but hopefully sound like they could almost be the parts from a forgotten disco record. Music that almost sounds like a live band, but not quite.” **“Mona”** “I love techno that’s based around one repeated stab sound. The best of those tracks tend to last a long time and do very little other than roll along, using repetition as their central premise. This track sets up that way but is an example of how I decided to shift the focus of some of these tracks away from making arrangements that would be most effective in a club and stick to what’s most exciting on the album, where the shorter tracks mean that different sounds and vibes are flying by rapidly. Digital DJing means that it’s not hard to rearrange and extend the tracks you’re playing on the fly—when I play this track in a DJ set, it usually ends up being about twice the length it is here.” **“Clavicle”** “This track almost didn’t end up on the album. I’d put a version of it on my *Essential Mix* in 2020 and then mostly forgot about it. But just as I was assembling this album, a couple people asked me about it and if I was ever going to release it. I had finished all the other tracks on the album and was about to send the album off to have it mastered and just added this track in at the last minute. I’m glad I did!“ **“Cloudy”** “I grew up playing the piano as my main instrument. There was a time when I thought that I was going to try and make a living as a jazz pianist. I must have spent thousands and thousands of hours playing the piano when I was a kid—so much time that that familiarity will always be with me. The piano you hear on this track isn’t a real one—it’s a software emulation played on a controller keyboard—which is why I can warp it and give it the character that you hear, but feeling so at home with the sound of a piano is why I’ll always return to look for ideas there. There have been a bunch of people online asking what the piano sample is for this track, but it’s not a sample—it’s a loop that I played while noodling around in the studio.” **“Karplus”** “The word ‘Karplus’ refers to a delay effect named after Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong, where a short, pitched delay on a sound creates a note similar to the sound of a plucked string. I’m not sure whether what I’m doing with this track is really the Karplus-Strong effect though—it’s mostly just a drum loop through a phaser!” **“Amber”** “I love the big, chunky, awkward swing of this track. It’s a loop that always feels like it’s just about to topple over and collapse. When I first started going to clubs when I lived in Toronto, DJs from New York would come through town all the time, and when people like Masters at Work would play, people who could really dance would show up—not just people shuffling their feet and pumping their fists in the air like I, and most of us, do when we’re at a club. In my mind, this is the kind of loop that I can imagine getting the kind of reaction that I remember seeing from the dancers at those nights.” **“Fly Away”** “I’m always looking for those tracks that are like a breath of fresh air in a club—that, after hours of playing music with relentless, heavy kick drums, are melodic and euphoric. I made this track with that kind of feeling in mind, and it always has that kind of effect on the room when I’ve played it. People stop dancing and look around; they start whistling and shouting. It’s a great one to play at the end of the night, so why not at the end of an album?”

On her expansive debut album, singer/songwriter/producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia introduces her alter ego Ethel Cain, a Southern anti-belle desperate to escape the smothering grip of familial trauma, Christianity, and the American dream. On *Preacher’s Daughter*, the Florida-reared conceptualist and recovered Southern Baptist finds a sense of freedom in darkness and depravity, spinning a seedy, sweeping, slowcore yarn of doomed love and patriarchal oppression with cinematic ambition. Cain allows the titular preacher the first word on droning opener “Family Tree (Intro),” then teases a little pop-star charm on the twangy “American Teenager,” before digging her teeth deep into sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll with the provocative pout of Lana Del Rey. She laments a lost love on the heartland heartbreaker “A House In Nebraska,” hitchhikes west on the sprawling Americana saga “Thoroughfare,” and spirals into Dante’s hell on the thunderous industrial nightmare “Ptolemaea.” Cain’s voice haunts and lingers like a heavy fog, long after she’s devoured by a cannibalistic lover—in a blaze of glam-metal guitar—on the album’s grandiose finale, “Strangers.”

Part of the appeal of Alex G’s homespun folk pop is how unsettling it is. For every Beatles-y melody (“Mission”) or warm, reassuring chorus (“Early Morning Waiting”) there’s the image of a cocked gun (“Runner”) or a mangled voice lurking in the mix like the monster in a fairy-tale forest (“S.D.O.S”). His characters describe adult perspectives with the terror and wonder of children (“No Bitterness,” “Blessing”), and several tracks make awestruck references to God. With every album, he draws closer to the conventions of American indie rock without touching them. And by the time you realize he isn’t just another guy in his bedroom with an acoustic guitar, it’s too late.

“God” figures in the ninth album from Philadelphia, PA based Alex Giannascoli's LP’s title, its first song, and multiple of its thirteen tracks thereafter, not as a concrete religious entity but as a sign for a generalized sense of faith (in something, anything) that fortifies Giannascoli, or the characters he voices, amid the songs’ often fraught situations. Beyond the ambient inspiration of pop, Giannascoli has been drawn in recent years to artists who balance the public and hermetic, the oblique and the intimate, and who present faith more as a shared social language than religious doctrine. As with his previous records, Giannascoli wrote and demoed these songs by himself, at home; but, for the sake of both new tones and “a routine that was outside of my apartment,” he asked some half-dozen engineers to help him produce the “best” recording quality, whatever that meant. The result is an album more dynamic than ever in its sonic palette. Recorded by Mark Watter, Kyle Pulley, Scoops Dardaris at Headroom Studios in Philadelphia, PA Eric Bogacz at Spice House in Philadelphia, PA Jacob Portrait at SugarHouse in New York, NY & Clubhouse in Rhinebeck, NY Connor Priest, Steve Poponi at Gradwell House Recording in Haddon Heights, NJ Earl Bigelow at Watersong Music in Bowdoinham, ME home in Philadelphia, PA Additional vocals by Jessica Lea Mayfield on “After All” Additional vocals by Molly Germer on “Mission” Guitar performed by Samuel Acchione on “Mission”, “Blessing”, “Early Morning Waiting”, “Forgive” Banjo performed by Samuel Acchione on “Forgive” Bass performed by John Heywood on “Blessing”, “Early Morning Waiting”, “Forgive” Drums performed by Tom Kelly on “No Bitterness”, “Blessing”, “Forgive” Strings arranged and performed by Molly Germer on “Early Morning Waiting”, “Miracles”

The Beths’ third album finds the Aotearoa indie rockers tighter and brighter than ever, packing chiming melodies and big, buoyant choruses. Elizabeth Stokes’ poignant vocals and diaristic lyrics continue to translate everyday foibles into memorable asides (“Here I go again, mixing drinks and messages”), while lead guitarist Jonathan Pearce proves animated at every turn (see the wild splay of a solo capping off “Silence Is Golden”). For all its noisy freshness, *Expert in a Dying Field* also plays like a studied parallel to the classic power-pop songbook, dispensing sunny harmonies and sharp dynamic shifts. Recorded mostly in Pearce’s own studio, this outing sees all of the band’s strengths balanced across the board. That means Stokes’ witticisms enjoy just as much attention as the fuzzy push-and-pull of the music, alternately driving ahead and pulling back with increasing precision. Stokes may label herself an expert in a dying field when singing about love on the opening title track, but The Beths make whip-smart indie rock look like a flourishing profession indeed.

On The Beths’ new album Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships -- platonic, familial, romantic -- and more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life? The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz. With Expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. They wanted it to be fun in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope. Most of Expert was recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s studio on Karangahape Road in Ta–maki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown. They traded notes remotely for months, songwriting from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone. The following February The Beths left the country to tour across the US, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road, culminating in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. There, Expert finally became the record they were hearing in their heads. The album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. “Love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.” The rest is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum: “Silence is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving. “Knees Deep” was written last minute, but yields one of the best guitar lines on Expert. Stokes strings it all together through her singular songwriting lens, earnest and selfeffacing, zeroing in on the granules of doubt and how they snowball. Did I do the wrong thing? Or did you? That insecurity and thoughtfulness, translated into universality and understanding, has been the guiding light of The Beths’ output since 2016. In the face of pain, there’s no dwelling on internal anguish -- instead, through The Beths’ music, our shortcomings are met with acceptance. And Expert In A Dying Field is the most tactile that tenderness has been.

A great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song can make you feel like you’re on top of the world and have no idea what you’re doing at the same time. The difference here—on their first album since 2013’s *Mosquito*—is a sense of maturity: Instead of tearing up the club, they’re reminiscing about it (“Fleez”), having traded their endless nights for mornings as bright and open as a flower (“Different Today”). And after spending 20 years seesawing between their aggressive side and their sophisticated, synth-pop side, they’ve found a sound that genuinely splits the difference (“Burning”). Listening to Karen O’s poem about watching the sunset with her young son (“Mars”), two thoughts come to mind. One is that they’ve always been kids, this band. The other is that the secret to staying young is growing up.

It could only be called alchemy, the transformative magic that happens during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ most tuned-in moments in the studio, when their unique chemistry sparks opens a portal, and out comes a song like “Maps” or “Zero” or the latest addition to their canon, “Spitting off the Edge of the World featuring Perfume Genius” — an epic shot-to-the-heart of pure YYYs beauty and power. A thunderstorm of a return is what the legendary trio has in store for us on Cool It Down, their fifth studio album and their first since 2013’s Mosquito. The eight-track collection, bound to be a landmark in their catalog, is an expert distillation of their best gifts that impels you to move, and cry, and listen closely.

“Right now, I’m still very much restless,” Charli XCX tells Apple Music. “Because I know that I would be an excellent humongous pop star. But I also unfortunately know that there’s a vision of who I am in the mainstream’s mind. It’s a constant headfuck, to be honest. While I’m a very defiant person, I’m also a human, and sometimes I do just want to be accepted, and I don’t understand why I’m not totally—even though sometimes I relish in the fact that I’m not.” Charlotte Aitchison is one of pop music’s more self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-examining artists. *CRASH* is her fifth studio album, and the final one to be released as part of a longtime record deal. It’s partly, as Charli says, an experiment. An opportunity to utilize a major label’s resources and dress up her left-leaning pop in something ultra luxe. A bold and refreshingly transparent attempt to move up a few rungs, it’s a considered move also designed to clear up some of Charli’s nagging what-ifs. “I’ve always questioned myself,” she says. “And it’s why I’ve made this entire album, really. I ask myself, am I a likable artist? Am I too opinionated? Do I look too weird? Am I too annoying? If I shut up and put out certain songs and do the right features, will I become more accepted, more liked, more commercial?” Of course, Charli’s notoriously engaged fanbase—with whom she exchanged ideas, including song lyrics, directly online for 2020’s quarantine album *how i’m feeling now*—would argue she doesn’t need any such validation. “It’s a blessing and a curse, to be extremely honest,” she says of her “Angels.” “I’m very lucky to have the fanbase that I have, who are extremely invested in literally every breath I take. They are very vocal and very smart, which draws me to them, because they’ve got great taste and amazing ideas—as I found out when doing *how i’m feeling now*. But you can’t please everyone. I’ve done so many different things that people are always going to gravitate to certain eras. Plus, I think that there’s an element where they like to root for an underdog, or an on-the-fringes personality like mine. Because we feel like we’ve been in it together for a really long time, the online discourse can be so vigorous. So I can’t lie, sometimes it’s a bit of a headfuck, because whilst I absolutely adore them, I don’t make music for them specifically when I’m sat in the studio—I’m making it for me. And I don’t think they would admire me as the artist I am if I just kept giving them what they expected.” It’s time to listen for yourself. Explore Charli’s premium pop with her own track-by-track guide. **“Crash”** “Until maybe a week before I made this song, the album was going to be called *Sorry If I Hurt You*. But one day, I was driving in my car and *CRASH* just came to me, and I called A. G. Cook. Even though he wasn\'t a *huge* part of this record, he\'s still very much my creative confidant. He agreed it made sense with the constant car references in my work—and I like the onomatopoeia, I like how it references \[2014 single\] ‘Boom Clap,’ and I like how it feels much more punchy and in-your-face than *how i’m feeling now*. I felt that the title needed a song, so A. G. and I got in the studio pretty quickly and knew we needed to make it sound extremely ’80s—if you could bottle the album into one song, this is it. We—plus the song’s co-producer George Daniel—had been sending a lot of new jack swing beats back and forth, and I knew I wanted this guitar solo, and to add these crazy Janet-esque stabs.” **“New Shapes” (feat. Caroline Polachek & Christine and the Queens)** “Caroline, Christine, and I had worked together many times in different forms, and it was time for the three of us to come together. And actually, this song was recorded a long time ago—pre-pandemic. I like how it\'s an antihero song. We’re saying to the love figure, ‘I haven\'t got what you need from me, because I am not typical. I don\'t operate in the way that you want me to. I want multiple partners. I want somebody else. I want no convention within sex and love.’ And I like that as a statement right after the sound of a car crash in the previous song. To do that song with them—two artists who I really feel have such a unique, defiant, and topsy-turvy vision of what pop music is—felt really classic and right for us. There’s a true connection between us now, in music and in our personal lives.” **“Good Ones”** “I think this song deserved to be bigger, but I will always think that of my work. But I do think it established the Cliffs Notes version of what the record is—it\'s got a darkness to it, and it\'s very pop. I like how drastic the jump was between coming out of *how i’m feeling now* into this, both sonically and in how they were made. *how i’m feeling now* was obviously my quarantine album made in my living room over five weeks by me and two trusted collaborators. This song is produced by Oscar Holter—an extremely active part of the Max Martin camp—and not really written hugely by myself but by two amazing topliners, Caroline Ailin and Noonie Bao. So it’s the absolute polar opposite.” **“Constant Repeat”** “This song features an imaginary scenario I created in my head, where I fell for somebody but imagined that they didn\'t want me—which turned out to not be the case. But it was this fear that I had, and my prediction of the situation. I think it\'s interesting that you can convince yourself of that. When you are falling for someone, unfortunately, I think human nature just crushes in on you and tells you you\'re not good enough, and fills you with doubt and dread and fear and all of those things. This song really poured out of me quite late in the album process, and it just felt so real and natural.” **“Beg for You” (feat. Rina Sawayama)** “Rina wanted to do something uptempo together, and give our fans a bit more of a moment. So when this song idea bubbled up, I called her immediately. She rewrote the second verse, and sounded incredible on it. It’s a very perfect-storm moment, because we’re two artists operating within the pop sphere, but always challenging it and doing something a little bit more left. She also has that hardcore, diehard fanbase—there’s a lot of crossover. Whilst maybe some of them were expecting something a little bit more experimental from us, I think, in a way, you can\'t deny that this actually is the perfect song for us in that we are paying a homage to a gay anthem \[‘Cry for You’ by September\]. She\'s queer, I\'m a queer ally, we\'re coming together to really just live our best lives and sing an iconic pop song.” **“Move Me”** “This song came from a writing camp that I was invited to by \[US producer and songwriter\] Ian Kirkpatrick. I hadn’t done a very classic camp for a while. Not because I\'m anti them—I actually think I thrive quite well in them and enjoy them. I ended up writing this with \[US songwriter and producer\] Amy Allen. We’re actually polar opposites in terms of our styles, which is why this song ended up being so beautiful—the aggressive parts of the song where I was basically yelling into a mic are very me, then you have the balance of Amy’s gorgeous verses. As we were doing it, everyone kept talking about how it’d be a great song for Halsey. I was like, ‘No, I love Halsey, but this is a great song for me and I’m fucking keeping it.’ People talk about writing-camp songs being fake and constructed in a test tube or whatever. But it’s very real. We write from our reality. That’s why we’re good songwriters.” **“Baby”** “This was one of the first tracks I made for this album, probably pre-pandemic, and with Justin Raisen—who was a very crucial part of my first album, *True Romance* \[2013\]. So it felt really good to be going back and working with him in the same house where we made part of the first album. This was a song that I always felt was so passionate and fiery and sexy. And I think the making of this song helped me feel powerful, and want to explore the sexier side of pop music and my artistry. It’s the song that helped me decide that I wanted to dance for this campaign, because I just couldn\'t stop wanting to move to it whilst we were making it.” **“Lightning”** “It began as one of those half demos that I took away and lived with. I then called up Ariel Rechtshaid, who was also a huge part of the first album, alongside Justin Raisen, and said, ‘OK, I have this song. I want to do *True Romance in 2022* with it.” And while I know he’s not really on that hype currently, I told him he was the king of the ’80s and if he felt it needed to go down that road, I trusted him because he has the most impeccable taste. So he sent it back to me, and there was a question mark over the Spanish guitar moment, which goes into a chorus. I sent it to A. G. to ask his opinion. He was like, ‘It\'s insane. I laughed out loud.’ And I was like, ‘OK, great. We\'re keeping it.’” **“Every Rule”** “It\'s the true story of me meeting my previous partner, and both of us being in relationships but knowing that we were meant to be together. I think that that\'s a story that a lot of my friends have also experienced—and obviously there\'s a lot of controversy that comes with that circumstance. People are afraid to talk about it. People feel shame. But it\'s also, it\'s really real. I think you have to be really brave to admit to yourself that you\'re not in love with maybe the person that you\'re with, and that you are in love with someone else. It\'s cruel on both sides, and I think you can really hear that. It was a song that I really only felt comfortable enough to make with A. G. He would never judge me for saying these things. It’s another pre-pandemic song, and A. G. was living in a place with a studio in his garage. There was a tree outside that was always covered in crickets. You can hear the crickets in the recording, which I think is really sweet and charming. Once we’d lived with the song for about a year, A. G. had the idea of asking Oneohtrix Point Never to add some things to the song, which I loved.” **“Yuck”** “I like the drastic gear change here. I like that it makes you laugh. I like those jarring moments on albums and in live shows where you\'re going from the most intimate, quiet song to the most hilarious or poptastic. That was the reasoning behind putting ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Yuck’ back to back. I really struggle with that feeling of being smothered. It\'s probably an only-child thing, or something. When you\'re like, ‘Get away from me, give me some fucking space’—that is seriously how I feel 50% of the time. It also reminds me of that gang vocal element of ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘Boys.’ Not sonically, but more in terms of the way that I\'m singing. I\'m definitely not the most technical singer ever—if you put me next to Ariana Grande and made us both sing the same song, I would sound absolutely insane, and she would sound absolutely gorgeous—but when it comes to singing like this, I feel pretty confident. That’s really nice for me, just in a technical way. It\'s really fun to be like, ‘Yeah. You know what? I can sing this song.’ Which I know sounds stupid because I am a professional ‘singer.’” **“Used to Know Me”** “I was trying to emulate myself on ‘Fancy’—or get back into that headspace. I really remember searching for the chorus melody to ‘Fancy’ in a way that I hadn\'t really searched for a melody before. Normally I\'m very instinctual and spontaneous when it comes to melodies, but with ‘Fancy,’ I had to really maneuver my brain around different corners to figure it out—to understand the formation of the notes. I wrote this on my own at Stargate’s studios, which probably made me feel like I had to write a really big pop song, and then when I was listening to it on repeat in my car, I just started singing the synth line to ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. So I called a few people and was like, ‘Is this possible?’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, but do you care about publishing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess not.’ It feels to me like a big song—it’s about reshaping who you are after a breakup.” **“Twice”** “I had reservations about making this the last song because it\'s such an obvious choice with the key change and outro. And generally speaking, I\'m anti the obvious choice. But then George Daniel, who is very good with tracklisting, simply said, ‘You\'re an idiot if you don\'t put this song last.’ It’s actually interesting lyrically, because it\'s about the end of the world and that you shouldn\'t think twice about intimate moments, or these off-the-cuff moments. Essentially, YOLO, and enjoy delving into these once-in-a-lifetime situations that everybody ends up in. I was picturing the scene from \[Lars von Trier’s 2011 film\] *Melancholia* where Kirsten Dunst’s character is sat on a hill waiting for the end of the world. It’s a perfect closer, and I also think it’s a very beautiful song.”

Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

The award for “strangest boy band of the pandemic era” goes to Drain Gang, the collective of Swedish misfits who’ve attained cult status for their transcendent mix of cloud rap and hyperpop. To record *Crest*, vocalists Bladee and Ecco2k and producer Whitearmor holed up in a remote Swedish beach cabin, near where Ingmar Bergman filmed his 1957 classic *The Seventh Seal*; 60-some years later, the Gang poses similar questions about life, death, and the existence of God, with choruses that feel like prayers and lyrics like “We think we exist, that’s we why suffer, do we not?/Give it to me raw, death is beautiful” (on the nine-minute epic “5 Star Crest \[4 Vattenrum\]”). Slather these existential koans in Auto-Tune, add the ecstatic sounds of a Y2K rave, and you’ve almost got the Drain Gang recipe. But there’s something else there, too: a sweet, sincere yearning for something bigger than themselves.

London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.

When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.

I let my humbleness turn to numbness at times letting time go by knowing I got the endurance to catch it another time I work with every breath in my body cause it’s the work not air that makes me feel alive That’s some real detrimental shit but that’s that shit my perfectionist mind doesn’t really mind because no one knows whats on my mind when I go to sleep at 9 & wake up at 5 - unless I say it in rhyme I can’t remember the last time someone put they phone down, looked me in the eyes and asked my current insight on the times But I remember every single time someone shined a light in my eyes I purposely try to forget what went on between some ppl and I because I know I’m not a forgiving guy even when I try My urge for revenge wins the game against my good guy inside every single fckn time I got plans I can’t talk about with more than like 4 guys because the last time I shared em with someone on the outside…well that’s another story for another night I was tryna get thru that statement to get to saying I’m not @ a time in my life where pats on the shoulder help get me by I’ll take loyalty over an oh my & emoji fire I know if it was a dark night where all the odds were against my side & my skill went to whoever took my life they’d done me off with a big smile & maybe evn post it for some likes I know everyone that tells me they love me doesn’t love me all the time especially when im doing better than alright & they have to watch it from whatever point they at in their life I got here being realistic I didn’t get here being blind I know whats what and especially what and who is by my side Honestly…Nevermind. DEDICATED TO OUR BROTHER V —Drake

The rapping of LA-based MC Yeat rewards repeated listens. He’s got an accent of mysterious origin, his speech slurred and drawn out in a way that makes it hard to understand the whole of what he’s saying—which is probably the point. The production across *Lyfë*—the follow-up to the MC’s 29-song *2 Alivë (Geëk Pack)* and his second project of 2022—is at once cacophonous and future-leaning (the lion’s share coming courtesy of Working on Dying’s Bnyx). The themes are the same ones that permeate most of Yeat’s music to date—drugs, money, that ever-dependable Tonka truck. But what he’s buried deeper therein are explanations for titles like “Flawlëss” or “Wat it feel lykë.” It’s likely best not to think too hard about them; from the sounds of things, those who do have already gotten left behind. As the MC puts it on “Krank,” “You already know who I am, little bitch/I’m man of the year.”

Although Dry Cleaning began work on their second album before the London quartet had even released their 2021 debut, *New Long Leg*, there was little creative overlap between the two. “I definitely think of it as a different chapter,” drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “I think one of the nicest things was just knowing what we were in for a bit more,” adds singer Florence Shaw. “It was less about, ‘What are we doing?’ and more thinking about what we were playing.” Recorded in the same studio (Wales’ famous Rockfield Studios) with the same producer (PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish) as *New Long Leg*, *Stumpwork* sees Shaw, Buxton, bassist Lewis Maynard, and guitarist Tom Dowse hone the wiry post-punk and rhythmical bursts of their debut. The jangly guitar lines are melodically sharper and the grooves more locked in as Shaw’s observational, spoken-word vocals pull at the threads of life’s big topics, even when she’s singing about a missing tortoise. “When we finished *New Long Leg*, I always felt a bit like, ‘Ah, I’d like another chance at that.’ With this one, it definitely felt like, ‘Really happy with that,’” says Buxton. The quartet take us on a tour of *Stumpwork*, track by track. **“Anna Calls From the Arctic”** Nick Buxton: “It was a very late decision to start the album with this. I think it’s quite unusual because it’s very different from a lot of the other songs on the album.” Florence Shaw: “I quite liked that the album opened with a question: ‘Should I propose friendship?’ In the outro, we were thinking about the John Barry song ‘Capsule in Space,’ from *You Only Live Twice*. There’s quite a bit of that in the outro. At least, it was on the mood board.” **“Kwenchy Kups”** NB: “It’s named after those little plastic pots you get when you’re a kid—pots full of some luminous liquid, and you pierce the film on the lid with a straw.” FS: “We were at a studio in Easton in Bristol, and I wrote a lot of the lyrics on walks around the area. It’s a really nice little area, and there’s lots of interesting shops. We wanted to write a few more joyful songs, at least in tone, and the song is so cheerful-sounding. So, some of the lyrics came out of that, too, wanting to write something that was optimistic, the idea of watching animals or insects being just a simple, joyful thing to do.” **“Gary Ashby”** NB: “This is about a real tortoise.” FS: “On a walk in lockdown, I saw a ‘lost’ poster for ‘Gary Ashby.’ The rest of the story came out of imagining the circumstances of him disappearing and the idea that it’s obviously a family tortoise because he’s got this surname. It’s thinking about family and things getting lost in chaos, when things are a bit chaotic in the home and pets escape. We don’t know what happened to him. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, which is a little bit disturbing, but hopefully we’ll find out one day.” **“Driver’s Story”** NB: “We were rehearsing at a little studio in the basement at our record label \[4AD\]. It was just me, Tom, and Lewis, and we weren’t there very long, but quite a few ideas for songs came out of that. The main bit of ‘Driver’s Story’ was one. It felt different to anything we’d done on *New Long Leg*. It’s just got such a nice, oozy feel to it. FS: “There’s a bit in the song about a jelly shoe and the idea of it being buried in your guts. A photographer called Maisie Cousins does photos of lots of bodily stuff and liquids, but with flowers and beautiful things as well. I was looking at a lot of those at the time. The jelly-shoe thing is about that—something pretty, plastic-y, mixed with guts.” Tom Dowse: “It’s got my dog barking on the end of it as well. He’s called Buckley. He is credited on the record.” **“Hot Penny Day”** TD: “I’d been listening to a lot of Rolling Stones, so this is an attempt at that. We were jamming it through, and it started to take on a bit more of a stoner-rock vibe. ‘Driver’s Story’ was also meant to be a bit more stoner-rock until John Parish got his hands in it and took the drugs out of it.” Lewis Maynard: “I found a bass wah pedal in my sister’s garage. I just plugged it in and started playing, and I was like, ‘This is fun.’ I’ve unfortunately not stopped playing bass wah.” NB: “It conjures up quite a lot of imagery. I was listening to some of Jonny Greenwood’s music for the film *Inherent Vice*, and it’s got a washed-out, desert-y feel. This sounds like Dry Cleaning in an alternate, parallel universe somewhere.” **“Stumpwork”** FS: “Quite a lot of the lyrics were gleaned from this archive of newspaper clippings that I went to in Woolwich Arsenal. It’s millions and millions of newspaper clippings on different subjects. There’s a bit \[in ‘Stumpwork’\] about toads crossing roads from this little article I found about a special tunnel being built, so that toads could traverse the street without being run over.” NB: “When we were trying to figure out a name for the record, it felt like the best option. We loved it, and it was really succinct. We liked that the word ‘work’ was in the title.” **“No Decent Shoes for Rain”** TD: “This was two of those jams from the basement of 4AD. We were quite unsure about this song. We took it to show John at the pre-production rehearsals, and he really liked it, and he didn’t really have anything to say about it, which is quite unusual. A lot of people ask, ‘Why did you record with John again?’ And it’s things like that—because he notices things that are good about you that you don’t notice. I was really self-conscious that the end section sounded too trad, classic rock. It sounded like the safest bit of guitar I’ve ever written. But once he said he was into it, I started to look at it from a different way, and it grew from that.” **“Don’t Press Me”** FS: “This has some recorder on it, which I had to play at half-time because it was really fast. I was like, ‘Oh, this would be nice if it had this little bit of a recorder on.’ I tried to play it, and I was completely incapable. I’d thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be able to do this. Kids play the recorder all the time. It’s easy.’ Even at half-time, I had to have loads of goes at it. So, it’s me playing the recorder, sped up, because I have no skills.” **“Conservative Hell”** NB: “I think this song’s really important because through the course of the record there’s two different types of song. There’s these upbeat, jangle, poppy ones and then there’s slightly slower, more groovy ones. This song has two very distinct elements that we’re really happy with. It’s nice as well to be so overtly political, which is not usually our scene.” FS: “The reason it ended up being such an on-the-nose phrase is I was thinking it would be really nice to write a song that was something like ‘Conservative Hell.’ And then, after a while, I was like, ‘That’s pretty good.’ I think it almost sounds like a silly headline, but accurate too.” **“Liberty Log”** FS: “The title comes from thinking about spring rolls. They’re like little logs, aren’t they? Then, later, I was thinking about a stupid monument, something that would be a really dumb statue in a town—just a big log and it’s called the Liberty Log.” LM: “This is one of the ones we took to the studio expecting it to be a shit-ton of editing, structuring, and that John would really fuck with it. We jammed it, and it just stayed the same. This one was first-take vibes, playing it in that way, expecting it to be changed.” **“Icebergs”** NB: “I think this is quite a bleak moment for us. Definitely the most icy-sounding track on the album. It feels like a really good end to the record to suddenly have this explosion of brass come in, and then it just peters out very slowly. I like that the album ends on quite an icy tone, even though that doesn’t necessarily represent us in how we feel about things. It’s a slightly more poignant ending rather than a nice, lovely outro.”

Burial’s music has always been steeped in atmosphere; the omnipresent sounds of vinyl hiss, rainfall, and cavernous reverb are as much a part of his signature as cut-up breakbeats and mournful vocal melodies. But until *Antidawn*, the UK producer’s work had almost always remained rooted in dance music. This five-song, 44-minute EP—long enough to qualify as his third album, if he wanted it to—definitively breaks with the club. Like 2017’s *Subtemple / Beachfires*, *Antidawn* strips away virtually everything resembling a beat, save for a few brief rhythmic flourishes, so muted they’re barely noticeable beneath the static. What’s left is a purely ambient swirl of brooding synthesizers, crackling white noise, and eerily processed vocal snippets. It can be pretty doleful going: “Nowhere to go,” murmurs a voice in the opening “Strange Neighbourhood.” “I’m in a bad place,” intones another in “Antidawn.” But as is usual for Burial, even the blackest cloud is ringed with blinding light: Church organs suggest a hint of uplift, and many of his chords are major, rather than minor. All five tracks unspool like discrete parts of a single overarching composition; they’re murky enough that it can become easy to feel lost in the fog, casting about for a recognizable landmark. But even at his bleakest, Burial’s world radiates a sense of calm. The overall effect is as hypnotic as it is haunting: Burial distilled to his most desolate essence.

Antidawn reduces Burial’s music to just the vapours. The record explores an interzone between dislocated, patchwork songwriting and eerie, open-world, game space ambience. In the resulting no man's land, lyrics take precedence over song, lonely phrases colour the haze, a stark and fragmented structure makes time slow down. Antidawn seems to tell a story of a wintertime city, and something beckoning you to follow it into the night. The result is both comforting and disturbing, producing a quiet and uncanny glow against the cold. Sometimes, as it enters 'a bad place', it takes your breath away. And time just stops.

Death Cab’s mix of youthful fragility and deep, romantic yearning is one of the hallmarks of modern rock. Even at their most melodramatic, they maintain composure in ways their emo ancestors didn’t, and their 10th album in a now-25-year career is no exception. But like the imagery behind its title, *Asphalt Meadows* is a rougher sound than the sometimes porcelain smoothness of their 2010s albums, mining similar tender—brisk New Wave (“I Miss Strangers,” “Asphalt Meadows”), gentle Americana (“Rand McNally”), and big, atmospheric ballads (“I’ll Never Give Up On You”). As always, Ben Gibbard reaches to make specifics feel universal (“We lived on whiskey and Twizzlers”) and universals (“These days I miss strangers more than I miss my friends”) feel like he somehow wrote them just for you.

New 11-track album 'Asphalt Meadows' out now.

Brittney Parks’ *Athena* was one of the more interesting albums of 2019. *Natural Brown Prom Queen* is better. Not only does Parks—aka the LA-based singer, songwriter, and violinist Sudan Archives—sound more idiosyncratic, but she’s able to wield her idiosyncrasies with more power and purpose. It’s catchy but not exactly pop (“Home Maker”), embodied but not exactly R&B (“Ciara”), weird without ever being confrontational (“It’s Already Done”), and it rides the line between live sound and electronic manipulation like it didn’t exist. She wants to practice self-care (“Selfish Soul”), but she also just wants to “have my titties out” (“NBPQ \[Topless\]”), and over the course of 55 minutes, she makes you wonder if those aren’t at least sometimes the same thing. And the album’s sheer variety isn’t so much an expression of what Parks wants to try as the multitudes she already contains.

On “Tick Tock,” the second track on *Warm Chris*, Aldous Harding asks, “Now that you see me, what you gonna do? Wanted to see me.” The New Zealand singer-songwriter’s lyrics have always been veiled and poetically cryptic—and she’s made a point of not explaining the meaning behind any of it. But her fourth album feels assured and open in a way that makes you wonder whether the question is directed at an audience that\'s been wanting to learn more about this singular artist. There’s a lot to see here, and like a well-directed film, it benefits from multiple replays, with more nuances and hidden meanings uncovered on each listen. Across her four albums, you’ll notice a linear emotional evolution. Speaking to Apple Music in 2019 about her then-new album *Designer*, she said, “I felt freed up… I could feel a loosening of tension, a different way of expressing my thought processes.” The journey clearly continued. *Warm Chris* is as intimate and curious as ever, but it’s more grounded, more confident. If the tension was loosening on *Designer*, here, Harding has grown accustomed to the relaxed space and made herself at home. The album seems to deal primarily with connections and relationships. She reflects on a lost love during opener “Ennui” (“You’ve become my joy, you understand… Come back, come back and leave it in the right place”), hunts for faded excitement on “Fever” (“I still stare at you in the dark/Looking for that thrill in the nothing/You know my favorite place is the start”), comically complains on “Passion Babe” (“Well, you know I’m married, and I was bored out of my mind/Of all the ways to eat a cake, this one surely takes the knife… Passion must play, or passion won’t stay”), and accepts an ending on “Lawn” (“Then if you\'re not for me, guess I am not for you/I will enjoy the blue, I’m only confused with you”). On the whole, *Warm Chris* feels light and folksy, and the music is relatively simple—though not without its surprises. There are brass embellishments here, a psychedelic guitar solo there, even a brief foray into forlorn vintage blues on “Bubbles.” It leaves space for Harding’s voice to remain in the spotlight. Her vocal acrobatics are as strange and versatile as ever—she can shift from breathy, dramatically deep bass to ultra-fine, ultra-high falsetto in moments, sometimes for only a word at a time. She sounds innocent and paper-thin on the gentle “Lawn,” lively—and inflected with an unusual accent—on “Passion Babe.” Her delivery is so pronounced and hyperbolic on the heart-wrenching “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” that it sounds like something out of a musical. And album closer “Leathery Whip” feels inspired by The Velvet Underground, complete with a deep Nico drawl (occasionally flipping to a Kate Bush-style nasal tone), backing harmonies, a jangling tambourine, and a cheeky refrain: “Here comes life with his leathery whip.”

An artist of rare calibre, Aldous Harding does more than sing; she conjures a singular intensity. The artist has announced details of Warm Chris new studio album, the follow-up to 2019’s acclaimed Designer. For Warm Chris, the Aotearoa New Zealand musician reunited with producer John Parish, continuing a professional partnership that began in 2017 and has forged pivotal bodies of work (2017’s Party and the aforementioned Designer). All ten tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, the album includes contributions from H. Hawkline, Seb Rochford, Gavin Fitzjohn, John and Hopey Parish and Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods).

Twenty years into their time together as a band—and approaching the 10-year milestone of being a hugely successful one—The 1975 felt in better shape than ever. Self-reflection, sobriety, even fatherhood have influenced the way the four-piece, assisted by producer Jack Antonoff, approached the creation of their fifth studio album, resulting in 11 songs that distill the essence of The 1975 without ever feeling like they’re treading old ground. “The working title, up until I chickened out, was *At Their Very Best*,” singer/guitarist Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “But I knew we were coming out in sunglasses and suits, and it could look like a bit of a joke. I’m not joking.” It wouldn’t have been an unfair assumption. Healy has carved out a reputation for building to a punchline—in his lyrics, in conversation, on social media. But he has (mostly) put that defensive reflex aside for this album, dialing back the sardonic interrogations of society that dominated previous records in favor of more soul-baring tracks. “My work has been defined by postmodernism, nihilism, individualism, addiction, need, all that kind of stuff,” says Healy. “As you get a bit older, life starts presenting you with different ideas, such as responsibility? Family? Growing up in general? But they’re less sexy, less transgressive ideas. It would be easy to do another record where I’m being clever and funny. What’s hard to do is just be real and super open.” *Being Funny in a Foreign Language* is indisputable evidence that those 20 years together and the experience gained has paid off. “This is the first time that we’ve been really good artists *and* really good producers *and* grown men at the same time,” Healy says. “It was the right time for this album to not just reaffirm, but almost celebrate who we are. It was a self-analysis and then a reinvention.” Here, he guides us through that reinvention, track by track. **“The 1975”** “On the first three albums, ‘The 1975’ was a rework of the same piece of music. It came from video games, like how you would turn on a Sega Mega Drive, and it had a check-in, load-up sound. The purpose it serves on this album, apart from being this conceptual thing that we’ve done, is to be like the status update. On our previous albums, the whole record has been about the cultural environment, but here I’m setting that scene up right at the beginning, and then the rest of the album is about me living in this environment and talking about how it makes these bigger ideas of love and home and growing up and things like that really difficult.” **“Happiness”** “‘Happiness’ is where we acknowledged that there was a certain lyrical and sonic identity to what The 1975 was. We felt like it wouldn’t be a ’75 record if we didn’t have a song that owned what we did best. The thing is, we weren’t actually very ’80s; we just used loads of sounds that grunge and Britpop made unfashionable because they were associated with Phil Collins or whoever, but we were like, ‘No, that sounds better than *that*.’ It’s a live record, so there’s a lot of call-and-response, a lot of repetition, because we were in the room, jamming.” **“Looking for Somebody (To Love)”** “If I’m going to talk about guns, it’s probably good for me to talk about the thing that I probably understand or empathize with the most, which is that the only vocabulary or lexicon that we provide for young boys to assert their dominance in any position is one of such violence and destruction. There’s a line that says, ‘You’ve got to show me how to push/If you don’t want a shove,’ which is me saying we have to try and figure this crisis out because there are so many young men that don’t really have guidance, and a toxic masculinity is inevitable if we don’t address the way we communicate with them.” **“Part of the Band”** “I really just trusted my instinct. As a narrative, I don’t know what the song is about. It was just this belief that I could talk, and that was OK, and it made sense, and I didn’t have to qualify it that much. I have a friend who is much more articulate than me, and there’s been so many times that he’s explained my lyrics back to me better than I ever could. So, I’ve learned I can sit there and spend five hours articulating what I mean, but I don’t think I need to. A movie doesn’t start by explaining what’s going to happen; it opens on a conversation, and you get what’s going on straight away. So, there’s a level of abstraction in this song where I’m giving the audience the benefit of the doubt.” **“Oh Caroline”** “The chorus of this song came first—‘Oh Caroline/I wanna get it right this time/’Cos you’re always on my mind’—and it just felt really, really universal. I was like, ‘OK, this doesn’t have to be about me. It doesn’t have to be “I was in Manchester in my skinny jeans.”’ You don’t need to have lived a story to write one. Caroline is whoever you want it to be—you can change that name in your head. Sometimes we call songs like this ‘“song” songs’ because they can be covered by other people and still make sense. Well, ‘“getting cucked,” I don’t need it’ would be a weird line for someone, but it’s close enough.” **“I’m in Love With You”** “I was trying to make it like a traditional 1975 song. I wanted to debase the sincerity. But \[guitarist, Adam\] Hann and George \[Daniel, drummer\] really challenged me on it, so I was like, ‘OK, fuck it. I’ll just write a song about being in love.’ At the time, I was in a relationship with a Black girl who was so beautiful, and I was in love with, and there were all these things that came up—especially with the political climate over the last two years—that you can only really learn from experience and living together. Like, our bathroom was full of specific products for skincare and stuff like that. Things you can’t just get at \[UK high-street drugstore\] Boots. So, there’s the line that goes ‘You show me your Black girl thing/Pretending that I know what it is (I wasn’t listening),’ which came from this moment when she was talking about something that I had no cultural understanding of, and all I was thinking was, ‘I’m in love with you.’ And maybe I should have been focusing on what it was, but in that moment, I didn’t care about anything cultural or political. I just loved her.” **“All I Need to Hear”** “Thinking objectively as a songwriter, ‘All I Need to Hear’ is maybe one of my best songs. I was in a big Paul Simon phase, and I was kind of trying to do something similar to what he did on ‘Still Crazy \[After All These Years\].’ He can be as verbose as me, but that song was really, really tight. Almost lullaby-esque. I wanted to write something that was earnest and sincere and didn’t require me, specifically, to deliver it. I almost hope it will be covered by someone else, and that will become the definitive version.” **“Wintering”** “This is very much a vignette, a little story in the middle that paints a picture but doesn’t really tell you much of where I’m at. It’s kind of about my family, and it’s kind of a Christmas song, but it’s also that thing of relatable specificity because everyone knows that feeling of getting home for Christmas and the wanting to, but the not wanting to, but the needing to, and having to do all the driving and that whole thing. Other parts of the record have a bit more purpose, even though they’re slightly more abstract, but ‘Wintering’ is just this moment of brevity, and I think it’s really nice.” **“Human Too”** “There’s lines on the record where I talk about being canceled and acknowledge that it was something that I was dealing with. There’s no insane smear campaign. No one is going to the trouble of ruining my life for a hobby like they do with Meghan Markle. But it does sting when it happens, and this is the first time I’m saying, ‘It does affect me *a bit*. I totally get it, I’m a messy person...but I’m a good person. Give me a break *a bit*.’ I was worried about this song because I didn’t want to sound self-pitying, but it works because it’s really just about empathy and giving each other the benefit of the doubt as humans. We’re all people—let’s not pretend that we’re not going to make mistakes.” **“About You”** “Warren Ellis from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds came in to do the arrangement for this song. It was really simple—it sounded like ‘With or Without You’ essentially—and he made it all weird and shoegazey. Even though it’s major key, he gave it this terror, which makes my performance in it a lot less romantic because everything is mushing together, and it’s violent. I think this has a similar vibe to ‘Inside Your Mind’ from the third album. I’ve always loved those kinds of \[David\] Cronenberg, body-horror analogies, the tension between death and sex. I think that the morose can be quite sensual, and there’s quite a bit of that in my work.” **“When We Are Together”** “The album was finished with. ‘About You’ was Track 11 and there was a Track 10 called ‘This Feeling.’ But because of what the song was about, and also sonic reasons, I was like, ‘That song can’t be on the album.’ But we had to deliver it in four days. So, I said if I could get to New York tomorrow, and Jack \[Antonoff\] was around, with a drum kit and a bass, I had a half-finished acoustic song that would be better for the record. It needed to finish, and at that moment, it didn’t—there was no emotional resolve. So, I went out there, a bit heartbroken post-breakup, and this was written, recorded, and mixed in 30 hours, which is the perfect example of what making this album was like. There’s always been this ‘will they/won’t they?’ question with The 1975. Are they going to split up? Will Matty go mental? That sort of thing. Totally created by me. But I’ve stopped doing that, and I think of it more as installments of your favorite thing. Or like seasons from a TV show. ‘When We Are Together’ is the end of this season.”

The 1975 return with new album, ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’, released on 14th October via Dirty Hit. The band’s fifth studio album was written by Matthew Healy & George Daniel and recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire, United Kingdom and Electric Lady Studios in New York. Formed in Manchester in 2002, The 1975 have established themselves as one of the defining bands of their generation with their distinctive aesthetic, ardent fanbase and unique sonic approach. The band’s previous album, 2020’s ‘Notes On A Conditional Form’, became their fourth consecutive No. 1 album in the UK. The band were named NME’s ‘Band of the Decade’ in 2020 after being crowned ‘Best Group’ at the BRIT Awards in both 2017 & 2019. Their third studio album, ‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’, also won ‘Mastercard British Album of the Year’ at the 2019 ceremony.

*Read a personal, detailed guide to Björk’s 10th LP—written by Björk herself.* *Fossora* is an album I recorded in Iceland. I was unusually here for a long time during the pandemic and really enjoyed it, probably the longest I’d been here since I was 16. I really enjoyed shooting down roots and really getting closer with friends and family and loved ones, forming some close connections with my closest network of people. I guess it was in some ways a reaction to the album before, *Utopia*, which I called a “sci-fi island in the clouds” album—basically because it was sort of out of air with all the flutes and sort of fantasy-themed subject matters. It was very much also about the ideal and what you would like your world to be, whereas *Fossora* is sort of what it is, so it’s more like landing into reality, the day-to-day, and therefore a lot of grounding and earth connection. And that’s why I ended up calling *Fossora* “the mushroom album.” It is in a way a visual shortcut to that, it’s all six bass clarinets and a lot of deep sort of murky, bottom-end sound world, and this is the shortcut I used with my engineers, mixing engineers and musicians to describe that—not sitting in the clouds but it’s a nest on the ground. “Fossora” is a word that I made up from Latin, the female of *fossor*, which basically means the digger, the one who digs into the ground. The word fossil comes from this, and it’s kind of again, you know, just to exaggerate this feeling of digging oneself into the ground, both in the cozy way with friends and loved ones, but also saying goodbye to ancestors and funerals and that kind of sort of digging. It is both happy digging and also the sort of morbid, severe digging that unfortunately all of us have to do to say goodbye to parents in our lifetimes. **“Atopos” (feat. Kasimyn)** “Atopos” is the first single because it is almost like the passport or the ID card (of the album), it has six bass clarinets and a very fast gabba beat. I spent a lot of time on the clarinet arrangements, and I really wanted this kind of feeling of being inside the soil—very busy, happy, a lot of mushrooms growing really fast like a mycelium orchestra. **“Sorrowful Soil” and “Ancestress” (feat. Sindri Eldon)** Two songs about my mother. “Sorrowful Soil” was written just before she passed away, it\'s probably capturing more the sadness when you discover that maybe the last chapter of someone\'s life has started. I wanted to capture this emotion with what I think is the best choir in Iceland, The Hamrahlid Choir. I arranged for nine voices, which is a lot—usually choirs are four voices like soprano, alto, or bass. It took them like a whole summer to rehearse this, so I\'m really proud of this achievement to capture this beautiful recording. “Ancestress” deals with after my mother passing away, and it\'s more about the celebration of her life or like a funeral song. It is in chronological order, the verses sort of start with my childhood and sort of follow through her life until the end of it, and it\'s kind of me learning how to say goodbye to her. **“Fungal City” (feat. serpentwithfeet)** When I was arranging for the six bass clarinets I wanted to capture on the album all different flavors. “Atopos” is the most kind of aggressive fast, “Victimhood” is where it’s most melancholic and sort of Nordic jazz, I guess. And then “Fungal City” is maybe where it\'s most sort of happy and celebrational. I even decided to also record a string orchestra to back up with this kind of happy celebration and feeling and then ended up asking serpentwithfeet to sing with me the vocals on this song. It is sort of about the capacity to love and this, again, meditation on our capacity to love. **“Mycelia”** “Mycelia” is a good example of how I started writing music for this album. I would sample my own voice making several sounds, several octaves. I really wanted to break out of the normal sort of chord structures that I get stuck in, and this was like the first song, like a celebration, to break out of that. I was sitting in the beautiful mountain area in Iceland overlooking a lake in the summer. It was a beautiful day and I think it captured this kind of high energy, high optimism you get in Iceland’s highlands. **“Ovule”** “Ovule” is almost like the feminine twin to “Atopos.” Lyrically it\'s sort of about being ready for love and removing all luggage and becoming really fresh—almost like a philosophical anthem to collect all your brain cells and heart cells and soul cells in one point and really like a meditation about love. It imagines three glass eggs, one with ideal love, one with the shadows of love, and one with day-to-day mundane love, and this song is sort of about these three worlds finding equilibrium between these three glass eggs, getting them to coexist.

There is a way a voice can cut through the fascia of reality, cleaving through habit into the raw nerve of experience. Nika Roza Danilova, the singer, songwriter, and producer who since 2009 has released music as Zola Jesus, wields a voice that does that. When you hear it, it is like you are being summoned -- not to somewhere new, but to a place that's already wrapped inside you, somewhere previously obscured from conscious experience. This place has been buried because it tends to hold pain, but it's also a gift, because once it's opened, once you're inside of it, it can show you the truth. Zola Jesus's new album, Arkhon, finds new ways of losing that submerged, stalled pain. Not long after she had started writing the songs that would comprise the record, Danilova found herself stuck in a creative barrens, a spell of writer's block more stifling than any she'd experienced before. "It got to the point where I couldn't even listen to music. Everything sounded the same," she says. On previous albums, Danilova had largely played the role of auteur, meticulously crafting every aspect of Zola Jesus's sound and look. This time, she realized that her habitual need for control was sealing her out of her art. When the frustration of being unable to create became intolerable, she took a leap of faith and reached out for help, something she had never done this early in an album’s lifetime. "At some point, I had to work with other people. I needed new blood. I needed somebody else." Danilova sent her demos to producer Randall Dunn, known for his work with Sunn O))) and on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for the film Mandy. She also began collaborating with drummer and percussionist Matt Chamberlain, whose prior work appears on albums by Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. His daring, askance patterning would come to help define the sound of the record. Relinquishing a degree of control over her music and hearing others contribute to it began to thaw the creative block that had kept her from working. "I felt that I was able to finally hear my music in a context that was broader than what I could do on my own," Danilova says. "I'm letting people interpret my musical ideas and my songs in a way that is supporting everything, but also expanding it into a sound that I never would have been able to think of on my own. That was so rewarding to hear." Arkhon runs the spectrum from songs whose weight lies in their bare simplicity, like "Desire," an elegiac piano composition about the end of a relationship that was recorded acoustically in a single take, to songs that pulse with dense, evolving structures, like "Sewn," a knotty and glittering electroacoustic composition written in total collaboration with Dunn and Chamberlain. Between those poles, "Dead & Gone" boasts a lush string arrangement by Danilova's friend and touring violist Louise Woodward; the overtones of her composition carve abundant, fertile space for optimism and healing to bloom in the midst of overwhelming grief. The towering, groove-oriented track "The Fall" routes Danilova's demo vocals through a lacerating vocoder effect as it seeks out the delights of shaking loose stagnant pain. Throughout “Lost,” tight, interlocking percussion and samples of a Slovenian folk choir propel narratives of collective despair and mutual comfort in kind. Through these turns, Arkhon reveals itself as an album whose power derives from abandon. Both its turmoils and its pleasures take root in the body, letting individual consciousness dissolve into the thick of the beat. "When I look back at my work, I see there's a theme where I fixate on my fear of the unknown," says Danilova. "That really came into fruition for this record, because I had to let go of so much control. I had to surrender to whatever the outcome would be. That used to be really hard for me, and now I had no other choice." In her creative process, Danilova instead began forging a relationship with the unknown. Rather than try to hold Arkhon in its entirety at every moment of its creation, she began focusing on the direct experience of making work with others, allowing for spontaneous moments of unselfconscious play. After over a decade of classical voice training, she found that this shift enabled her to ease into her singing voice in new ways, leading her to greater flexibility and agility. "I had gone through a deeply transformational process of inner growth. That annihilated a lot of tension in my voice, because my whole attachment to things changed," she says. That process bears out across the record in the way the voice takes off from itself, splits from its core, tendrils out into currents of partial language and electronically mediated noise. In the rush, Arkhon unearths buried tools for bearing grief, loss, and disappointment. The album's title means "power" or "ruler" in ancient Greek, but it also has a specific valence within Gnosticism. "Arkons are a Gnostic idea of power wielded through a flawed god," says Danilova. "They taint and tarnish humanity, keeping them corrupted instead of letting them find their harmonious selves. I do feel like we are living in an arkhonic time; these negative influences are weighing extremely heavy on all of us. We're in a time of arkhons. There's power in naming that." Despite the darkness curled inside reality, there is power, too, in surrendering to what can't be pinned down, to the wild unfurling of the world in all its unforeseeable motion. That letting go is the crux of Arkhon, which marks a new way of moving and making for Zola Jesus. "There is a moment where you stop fighting with yourself. That's when things can really happen," Danilova says. "I was disarmed in a way where I just let the process make the record. I could enjoy being in the moment, putting that into the music and letting it unravel or evolve in its own way. To let it have its own story that I only had a part in telling."

Released on Willie Nelson’s 89th birthday, *A Beautiful Time* testifies to the country icon’s enduring talent and astounding longevity. Perhaps it’s no surprise that mortality is on the mind throughout, but Willie doesn’t get too maudlin about it—the album opens with the sweet, slow-rolling “I’ll Love You Till The Day I Die” and touches on country funk for the celebratory “I Don’t Go To Funerals.” He makes some beautiful cover choices, too, offering a twilit take on Leonard Cohen’s “Tower Of Song” and kicking up the dust on The Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends.” The full weight of Nelson’s life experiences permeate *A Beautiful Time*, but no more so than on the intimate curtain-closer “Leave You With A Smile,” as he sings, “If I run out of time, I’ll wait for you in the sweet by-and-by.”

When Ari Lennox dropped her debut album *Shea Butter Baby* in 2019, the D.C. native was a young woman exploring love and heartbreak while trying to understand her self-worth beyond sex. Now, with her sophomore outing, Lennox ditches the romantic uncertainty and frustrations about not receiving the love she deserves for a sultrier, sexier, more self-assured collection of songs. “I just was being my regular hopeless romantic self and crushing on just completely terrible individuals that for whatever reason in that state I completely romanticized, and I’m recognizing I love the idea of love,” Lennox tells Apple Music radio’s Nadeska. “Sometimes it can feel like something that’s really unavoidable or unhealthy or avoidant. So it’s just really me just trying to maneuver through this dating life, which can be so exhausting.” Described by Lennox as a “transitional space before my current ‘eat, pray, love’ journey,” *age/sex/location* is a play on online dating and AOL chat rooms, where Lennox’s adventures in dating began. The opening track, “POF,” named after the dating site Plenty of Fish, introduces Lennox’s frustrations with the lack of good men in her life. However, despite experiencing not-so-good outcomes with these lackluster relationships, she still desires companionship. Over a bluesy bassline and gentle percussion, Lennox yearns for love but asserts her power in understanding what she doesn’t want. “Young Black woman approachin’ 30 with no lover in my bed/Cannot settle, I got standards,” she sings. Not every song on the 12-track project is about setting boundaries and lovelorn texts; the best moments are when Lennox pivots into the salacious details of her sensual pleasures. On the seductive and hypnotic “Hoodie,” Lennox lustfully crushes on a potential lover while trying to get underneath his clothes. She continues to express her passion and desires on tracks like “Pressure,” “Stop By,” and the Chlöe Bailey-assisted “Leak It.” Other guests on the album include Summer Walker, who lends her buttery vocals on the Erykah Badu-esque closer “Queen Space,” and Lucky Daye, who does his best to woo Lennox on the flirtatious duet-skit “Boy Bye.” The song plays like a game of cat and mouse with Daye’s slick talk and player-like lines, and Lennox, who’s dismissive but secretly is kind of into him too, offers up her cheeky one-liners in response, singing, “Those lines belong in 1995/Just like them funky Nikes.” “I love people who play,” Lennox says of the song. “Or not play with my feelings, but we’re playing around. We’re goofing around as long as your actions or your energy can show that you’re a secure, nice person. Me and Lucky, it was just really innate and natural. And we’re just lovers of soul. I feel like lovers of love.” *age/sex/location* showcases Lennox’s storytelling as the album starts with her search for authenticity in her suitors and ends with removing negative influences (“Blocking You”) and setting boundaries while emphasizing her self-worth (“Queen Space”). The evolution is evident in comparison to her *Shea Butter Baby* debut: Where she was hoping for reciprocation from her lover, now she demands it with a promise of cutting the relationship off without it.

Thebe Kgositsile emerged in 2010 as the most mysterious member of rap’s weirdest new collective, Odd Future—a gifted teen turned anarchist, spitting shock-rap provocations from his exile in a Samoan reform school. In the 12 years since, he’s repaired his famously fraught relationship with his mother, lost his father, and become a father himself, all the while carving out a solo lane as a serious MC, a student of the game. Earl’s fourth album finds the guy who once titled an album *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside*, well, going outside, and kinda liking it; on opener “Old Friend,” he’s hacking through thickets, camping out in Catskills rainstorms. There’s a sonic clarity here that stands apart from the obscure, sludgy sounds of his recent records, executed in part by Young Guru, JAY-Z’s longtime engineer. Beats from The Alchemist and Black Noi$e snap, crackle, and bounce, buoying Earl’s slippery, open-ended thoughts on family, writing, religion, the pandemic. Is he happy now, the kid we’ve watched become a man? It’s hard to say, but in any case, as he raps on “Fire in the Hole”: “It’s no rewinding/For the umpteenth time, it’s only forward.”

White Lung’s Premonition is about birth and rebirth. It’s about growing—and growing older—without losing the furious energy of youth. It’s the last album we’ll be getting from one of the best bands to ever do it

The fate of Earth and the infinite cruelty of man toward nature have been themes in Neil Young’s music as far back as 1970, when “After the Gold Rush” imagined a dystopian scene not too different from what we’re living through now. “We’re so terrified today, don’t you think? Look at people, they’re striking out at each other, worried about the other side,” he tells Apple Music. “We’re scared shitless, because at the bottom of everything, there’s another thing going on: They say the world might not be the same in 15 years. We might be really screwed.” Like 2021’s *Barn*, *World Record*—his 42nd album, and 13th with Crazy Horse—is a loose, folksy outing whose simplicity is backed by a lifetime of thought. There’s innocence (“Love Earth”), there’s anger (“The World \[Is In Trouble Now\]”), there’s nostalgia (“This Old Planet \[Changing Days\]”) and the kind of fortified naivete that has made Young a beacon to anyone sick of how things are but honest about what it might take to change them (“I Walk With You \[Earth Ringtone\]”). Most of the songs started as melodies Young whistled to himself while walking in the woods, and were written start to finish in two days. Producer Rick Rubin says it barely felt like they were making an album. “Most of what you hear on the record were things that, at the time that they were recorded, we were like, ‘Boy, I hope someday they’re going to learn the song,’” Rubin tells Apple Music. But Young’s looseness has always been central to his vitality, and his pessimism has always resolved into messages of hope, however tempered. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he says. “It’s probably the only time in the world that you could ever see where all the people of all the countries all around the world could have the same idea: ‘Wait a minute, we got to do something because this is no good.’ We’re all feeling it.”

The most jarring part about listening to the London band black midi isn’t how much musical ground they cover—post-punk, progressive rock, breakneck jazz, cabaret—but the fact that they cover it all at once. A quasi-concept album that seems to have something to do with war (“Welcome to Hell,” “27 Questions”), or at least the violence men do more generally (“Sugar/Tzu,” “Dangerous Liaisons”), *Hellfire* isn’t an easy listen. But it’s funny (main character: Tristan Bongo), beautiful, at least in a garish, misanthropic way (the Neil Diamond bombast of “The Defence”), and so obviously playful in its intelligence that you just want to let it run over you. The first listen feels like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand. By the third, you’ll be yelling with them.

black midi’s new album Hellfire will be released on 15th July. Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.

On August 5th, Lee Bains + The Glory Fires will release Old-Time Folks, their fourth full-length studio album, via Don Giovanni Records. Since releasing their first album There Is a Bomb in Gilead in 2012, the road-worn Birmingham, Alabama band – singer and guitarist Lee Bains, bassist Adam Williamson, and drummer Blake Williamson – has built a reputation as being what NPR calls “punks revved up by the hot-damn hallelujah of Southern rock” who carry on “the Friday-night custom of burning down the house,” a raw live sound that they captured with Texas punk producer Tim Kerr on studio albums Dereconstructed (2014) and Youth Detention (2017) before recording a full-on live album at their favorite hometown dive, Live at the Nick (2019). Their work has come to be known, too, for Bains’s lyrics and their literate, incisive social commentary on the band’s beloved homeplace, leading him to publish poetry in the New Yorker and speak at universities from Mississippi to Sweden. Bains and the Williamson brothers can also be found collaborating with artists like Lonnie Holley and Swamp Dogg, lending their bombast to truck-bed protests of Donald Trump and Roy Moore, playing benefit shows for striking Alabama coal miners and Southern Black LGBTQ liberation organizations, and presenting gospel-music live streams for Birmingham and Atlanta food banks. While the Glory Fires have spent a decade propagating what the New York Times calls “pandemonium with a conscience,” in recent years, as the band drove their 400,000+-mile van between shows, they found themselves listening to records that were more produced, arranged, and textured than their own past work, to records that struck them as timeless and immense, ones that invited you in, to get lost in the details. On many bleary-eyed interstate drives, they talked about wanting to make a classic record–not a transparent document of their playing live with the occasional embellishment–but a record. They talked about working with a producer who had made such albums. About taking Bains’s songs and deconstructing them, stripping them down to their most minimal elements, reimagining them, and building them back up again. They talked about closely considering arrangements. Digging into their varied influences. Swapping instruments. Getting high-fidelity sounds. Inviting guest musicians. Incorporating percussion and synthesizers and horns and strings. Maybe even doing a song or two without a blaring electric guitar, or even–gasp–without a guitar at all. So, that’s what they did. They contacted Athens, Georgia’s David Barbe, whose work with the Drive-By Truckers, Sugar, Son Volt, Vic Chesnutt and countless other artists has earned him a legendary reputation amongst Southern independent rockers, and they agreed to set about bringing this vision to fruition. After months of recording demos with John Paul Foster in Montevallo, Alabama and going over arrangements with Texas punk stalwart Tim Kerr, who the band calls their “coach,” the band decamped to Athens to record with Barbe at Chase Park Transduction in December of 2019. Soon after laying down the initial tracks, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and the usually hard-touring trio soon found themselves at home with yet more time to consider, flesh out, and arrange this new batch of songs. The result is an album whose levels of dynamics, nuance, range, and intimacy are new for the band. Enriching those explorations are kindred musical spirits like pianist Thayer Sarrano, organist Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), singer Kym Register (Loamlands), horn players William Washington and Theresa May (Mourning A BLKstar), and string arranger Annie Leeth, whose idiosyncratic contributions to the album deepen that sense of collectivism that the lyrics invoke. The album was nearly named A People’s History, and its thirteen songs are focused on that mission–to investigate the band’s stomping grounds of Alabama and West Georgia, and to summon stories of that land’s peoples, rising up collectively to defend and liberate themselves from systems of power and exploitation. Just as the album’s music meanders between jagged rock’n’roll and churchy swells, feedback-drenched dirges and orchestral rave-ups, the lyrics lead us through those rich varied lands and time itself: black-masked protestors face SWAT tanks in smoggy cities; Muscogee warriors encircle a colonial fort along a muddy river; incarcerated workers noisily strike in a maximum-security prison surrounded by cottonfields; coal miners barricade the entrance of a mine; kids talk politics in the alley out back of a punk show; families gather outside a country church to prepare a dinner on the grounds. As we encounter these people and places, we sink deeper into what Bains calls “old-time,” that which connects us to those who have gone before, to the land, to each other, and to something deeper and older still. While tackling such lofty political, historical and philosophical concepts, the album is also the band’s most intimate, vulnerable and spiritual to date. The perspective is both outward- and inward-facing, Bains never taking on the persona or experience of others, but rather writing about the way his own limited experience and perspective of the band’s place can lift the veils of false narratives, and uncover “piles of winding stories” through time. Throughout the record, great forces–whether exploitative or liberatory, reconciliatory or confrontational, grand or humble, condemning or merciful–show up in the smallest, most personal moments of our lives and relationships, both public and private. Little by little, we are drawn into a long arc of freedom, justice, and beloved community, and into a celebration of and thanksgiving for those who do its work. Bains uses words like a chef, fusing them together like the chips from a multitude of trees are pressed together into particle board. These are songs that are not just songs, but stories and poetry, as well, and Bains’s sense of melody makes the stories into anthems. In an age characterized by individualism, and at a time when the past seems to be the sole domain of the status quo, Old-Time Folks illustrates the deep, thick, tangled roots of liberation, collectivism, mutuality and solidarity in the Deep South, and where they are flowering and bringing forth fruit today.

Anyone encountering the gorgeous, ’70s-style orchestral pop of *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* might be surprised to learn that Natalie Mering started her journey as an experimental-noise musician. Listen closer, though, and you’ll hear an album whose beauty isn’t just tempered by visions of almost apocalyptic despair, but one that also turns beauty itself into a kind of weapon against the deadness and cynicism of modern life. After all, what could be more rebellious in 2022 than being as relentlessly and unapologetically beautiful as possible? Stylistically, the album draws influence from the gold-toned sounds of California artists like Harry Nilsson, Judee Sill, and even the Carpenters. Its mood evokes the strange mix of cheerfulness and violent intimations that makes late-’60s Los Angeles so captivating to the cultural imagination. And like, say, The Beach Boys circa *Pet Sounds* or *Smiley Smile*, the sophistication of Mering’s arrangements—the mix of strings, synthesizer touches, soft-focus ambience, and bone-dry intimacy—is more evocative of childhood innocence than adult mastery. Where her 2019 breakthrough, *Titanic Rising*, emphasized doom, *Hearts Aglow*—the second installment of a stated trilogy—emphasizes hope. She writes about alienation in a way that feels both compassionate and angst-free (“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”), and of romance so total, it could make you as sick as a faceful of roses (“Hearts Aglow,” “Grapevine”). And when the hard times come, she prays not for thicker armor, but to be made so soft that the next touch might crush her completely (“God Turn Me Into a Flower”). All told, *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* is the feather that knocks you over.

August 25th, 2022 Los Angeles, CA Hello Listener, Well, here we are! Still making it all happen in our very own, fully functional shit show. My heart, like a glow stick that’s been cracked, lights up my chest in a little explosion of earnestness. And when your heart's on fire, smoke gets in your eyes. Titanic Rising was the first album of three in a special trilogy. It was an observation of things to come, the feelings of impending doom. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is about entering the next phase, the one in which we all find ourselves today — we are literally in the thick of it. Feeling around in the dark for meaning in a time of instability and irrevocable change. Looking for embers where fire used to be. Seeking freedom from algorithms and a destiny of repetitive loops. Information is abundant, and yet so abstract in its use and ability to provoke tangible actions. Our mediums of communication are fraught with caveats. Our pain, an ironic joke born from a gridlocked panopticon of our own making, swirling on into infinity. I was asking a lot of questions while writing these songs, and hyper isolation kept coming up for me. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” is a Buddhist anthem, ensconced in the interconnectivity of all beings, and the fraying of our social fabric. Our culture relies less and less on people. This breeds a new, unprecedented level of isolation. The promise we can buy our way out of that emptiness offers little comfort in the face of fear we all now live with – the fear of becoming obsolete. Something is off, and even though the feeling appears differently for each individual, it is universal. Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain. Being in love doesn’t necessarily mean being together. Why else do so many love songs yearn for a connection? Could it be narcissism? We encourage each other to aspire – to reach for the external to quell our desires, thinking goals of wellness and bliss will alleviate the baseline anxiety of living in a time like ours. We think the answer is outside ourselves, through technology, imaginary frontiers that will magically absolve us of all our problems. We look everywhere but in ourselves for a salve. In “God Turn Me into a Flower,” I relay the myth of Narcissus, whose obsession with a reflection in a pool leads him to starve and lose all perception outside his infatuation. In a state of great hubris, he doesn’t recognize that the thing he so passionately desired was ultimately just himself. God turns him into a pliable flower who sways with the universe. The pliable softness of a flower has become my mantra as we barrel on towards an uncertain fate. I see the heart as a guide, with an emanation of hope, shining through in this dark age. Somewhere along the line, we lost the plot on who we are. Chaos is natural. But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order. These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment. And maybe that’s the beginning of the nuanced journey towards understanding the natural cycles of life and death, all over again. Thoughts and Prayers, Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood)

When COVID-19 lockdowns prohibited Welsh Dadaist Cate Le Bon to fly back to the United States from Iceland, she found herself returning to her homeland to create a sixth studio album, *Pompeii*, a collection of avant-garde art pop far removed from the 2000s jangly guitar indie she once hung her hat on. In Cardiff, recording in a house “on a street full of seagulls,” as she tells Apple Music, “I instinctively knew where all the light switches were and I knew all these sounds that the house makes when it breathes in the night.” Created with co-producer Samur Khouja, the album obscures linear nostalgia to confront uncertainty and modern reality, with stacked horns, saxophones, and synths. “For a while I was flitting between despair and optimism,” she says. “I realized that those are two things that don\'t really have or prompt action. So I tried to lean into hope and curiosity instead of that. Then I kept thinking about the idea that we are all forever connected to everything. That’s probably the theme that ties together the record.” Below, Cate Le Bon breaks down *Pompeii*, track by track. **“Dirt on the Bed”** “This song is very set in the house. It\'s being haunted by yourself in a way—this idea of time travel and storing things inside of you that maybe don\'t serve you but you still have these memories inside of you that you\'re unconscious of. It was the first song that we started working on when Samur arrived in Wales. It’s pretty linear, but it blossoms in a way that becomes more frantic, which was in tune with the lockdown in a literal and metaphorical sense.” **“Moderation”** “I was reading an essay by an architect called Lina Bo Bardi. She wrote an essay in 1958 called ‘The Moon’ and it\'s about the demise of mankind, this chasm that\'s opened up between technical and scientific progress and the human capacity to think. All these incremental decisions that man has made that have led to climate disaster and people trying to get to the moon, but completely disregarding that we\'ve got a housing crisis, and all these things that don\'t really make sense. We\'ve lost the ability to account for what matters, and it will ultimately be the demise of man. We know all this, and yet we still crave the things that are feeding into this.” **“French Boys”** “This song definitely started on the bass guitar, of wanting this late-night, smoky, neon escapism. It’s a song about lusting after something that turns into a cliché. It’s this idea of trying to search for something to identify yourself \[with\] and becoming encumbered with something. I really love the saxophone on this one in the instrumental. It is a really beautiful moment between the guitars and the saxophones.” **“Pompeii”** “This is about putting your pain somewhere else, finding a vessel for your pain, removing yourself from the horrors of something, and using it more as a vessel for your own purposes. It’s about sending your pain to Pompeii and putting your pain in a stone.” **“Harbour”** “I made a demo with \[Warpaint’s\] Stella Mozgawa, who plays drums on the record. We spent a month together at her place in Joshua Tree, just jamming out some demos I had, and this was one of them that became a lot more realized. The effortless groove that woman puts behind everything, it\'s just insane to me. She was encouraging me to put down a bassline. That playfulness of the bass is probably a direct product of her infectiousness, but the song is really about \'What do you do in your final moment? What is your final gesture? Where do you run when you know there\'s no point running?\'” **“Running Away”** “‘Running Away’ was another song that I worked on with Stella in Joshua Tree. It\'s about disaffection, I suppose, and trying to figure out whether it\'s a product of aging, where you know how to stop yourself from getting hurt by switching something off, and whether that\'s a useful tool or not. It’s an exploration of knowing where the pitfalls of hurt are, because you have a bit more experience. Is it a useful thing to avoid them or not?” **“Cry Me Old Trouble”** “Searching for your touch songs of faith, when you tap into this idea that you\'re forever connected to anything, there\'s a danger—the guilt that is imposed on people through religion, this idea of being born a sinner. Of separating those two things of feeling like you are forever connected to everything without that self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It’s about being connected to old trouble and leaning into that, and this connection to everything that has come before us. We are all just inheriting the trouble from generations before.” **“Remembering Me”** “It’s really about haunting yourself. When the future\'s dark and you don\'t really know what\'s going to happen, people start thinking about their legacy and their identity, and all those things that become very challenged when everything is taken away from you and all the familiar things that make you feel like yourself are completely removed. \[During the pandemic\] a lot of people had the internet to express themselves and forge an identity, to make them feel validated.” **“Wheel”** “In one sense, it is very much about the time trials of loving someone, and how that can feel like the same loop over and over, but I think the language is a little bit different. It\'s a little more direct than the rest of the record. I was struggling to call people over the pandemic. What do you say? So, I would write to people in a diary, not with any idea that I would send it to them, but just to try and keep this sense of contact in my head. A lot of this was pulled from letters that I would write my friend. Instead of \'Dear Diary\' it was \'Dear Bradford,\' just because I missed him, but couldn\'t pick up the phone.”

Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch. Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged. Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever. To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence. The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

“I like to prepare myself and prepare the surroundings to work my music,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music about his process. “But when I get a good idea that I want to work on in the future, I hold it until that moment.” After he blessed his fans with three projects in 2020, including the forward-thinking fusion effort *EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO*, one could forgive the Latin superstar for taking some time to plan his next moves, musically or otherwise. Somewhere between living out his kayfabe dreams in the WWE and launching his acting career opposite the likes of Brad Pitt, El Conejo Malo found himself on the beach, sipping Moscow Mules and working on his most diverse full-length yet. And though its title and the cover’s emoting heart mascot might suggest a shift into sad-boy mode, *Un Verano Sin Ti* instead reveals a different conceptual aim as his ultimate summer playlist. “It\'s a good vibe,” he says. “I think it\'s the happiest album of my career.” Recorded in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the album features several cuts in the same elevated reggaetón mode that largely defined *YHLQMDLG*. “Efecto” and “Un Ratito” present ideal perreo opportunities, as does the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Rauw Alejandro team-up “Party.” Yet, true to its sunny origins, *Un Verano Sin Ti* departs from this style for unexpected diversions into other Latin sounds, including the bossa nova blend “Yo No Soy Celoso” and the dembow hybrid “Tití Me Preguntó.” He embraces his Santo Domingo surroundings with “Después De La Playa,” an energizing mambo surprise. “We had a whole band of amazing musicians,” he says about making the track with performers who\'d typically play on the streets. “It\'s part of my culture. It\'s part of the Caribbean culture.” With further collaborations from familiars Chencho Corleone and Jhayco, as well as unanticipated picks Bomba Estéreo and The Marías, *Un Verano Sin Ti* embodies a wide range of Latin American talent, with Bad Bunny as its charismatic center.