Slant Magazine's 50 Best Albums of 2023

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

Conforming to the expected has never been Amaarae’s strong suit. And it should come as no surprise that the Ghanaian American artist would create a sonic otherworld where the trappings of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, punk, and alternative rock mesh with globe-trotting instrumentation and exist harmoniously without question on her album *Fountain Baby*. The result? A culmination of what a transnational pop star is in 2023—boundless. *Fountain Baby* lends its credence to Amaarae’s continued quest for growth and mastery, but not in a contrived way. There are pockets of carefully crafted yet carefree melodies like the dreamy “Angels in Tibet” and sultry “Reckless & Sweet.” On “Counterfeit,” the singer-songwriter swiftly glides with confidence on production by KZ Didit that’s reminiscent of an early-2000s movie soundtrack. “Wasted Eyes” opens with a quick koto solo and progresses as Amaarae soliloquizes about a wounded romance. The 14-track solo project pushes the ante of its 2020 predecessor, *The Angel You Don’t Know*, towards newer heights.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

The charm of Russian electro-pop artist Kate NV’s fourth album is its ability to be both baby-toy cute and violently weird. There’s an absence of the relatively conventional songwriting she exercised on 2020’s *Room for the Moon* here. Instead, tiny explosions of sound—bright and tactile—turn the synthetic into the organic through sheer force of play, whether it’s the bloblike bass parading through “Nochoi Zvonok (Night Call)” or the clang of bells and bubbles on “mi (We)” conjuring a fledgling creature on a solo flight. *Wow* is what your imaginary friends listen to while you’re busy being real.

Kate NV’s WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling it across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life. Learn more at www.rvng.com

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

Throughout human history, the two most reliable motivations for making art have been revenge and infatuation. Carly Rae Jepsen has written hundreds, if not thousands, of aching synth-pop bangers dedicated to the latter, a body of work devoted rigorously to The Crush—crush as a means of transformation, crush as a psychedelic experience, crush as a night drive on a dark highway with the wind in your hair. “Do you really think this is a good idea?” a man’s voice asks as an engine revs on “So Right,” to which Jepsen replies, “I mean, no, probably not, but...” Moments like this lend a magic crackle of electricity to the air on *The Loveliest Time*, a B-side companion piece to 2022’s *The Loneliest Time*, as has been the Canadian songwriter’s custom since 2015’s *Emotion*. But where its predecessor highlighted the ways a crush can flourish in solitude, *The Loveliest Time* dives headfirst back into new love and all the wonderfully messy feelings that come with it. And this time around, the sounds of chill-out lounges occasionally slink in next to the sparkly disco numbers—like “Aeroplanes,” where Jepsen flirts with downtempo shuffle as she pledges to a diamond in the rough that she would “fly airplanes in the ocean for your touch.” “Shy Boy” plays it a tad cooler, a crush-drunk ’90s pop strutter on which she ever-so-coyly offers, “I put you on my list, so come downtown.” It’s a full buffet of love—stadium-sized love, weekend love, and the kind of love on “Psychedelic Switch,” Jepsen’s take on Daft Punk-y house euphoria.

The Atlanta-born artist and Playboi Carti disciple (he’s signed to Carti’s Opium imprint) steps out from the limelight of his mentor, establishing his own vision that stands out in Atlanta’s always evolving scene. Distorted synths and rumbling drums provide the backdrop for Carson’s futuristic croons, which are affected by layers of Auto-Tune and digital manipulation. If Outkast were the original aliens out of the ATL, Ken Carson is a cyborg, reprogramming the city to sound like Young Thug soundtracking *Blade Runner*. Lyrically, Carson reflects on struggles, successes, anger, heartbreak, trauma, and more. From the song titles alone, it’s clear that *A Great Chaos* is a deeply personal effort. “Fighting My Demons” and “Paranoid” reflect the bad, but “Rockstar Lifestyle” provides an ample turn-up moment. The album ends with “i need you,” a metallic, bass-heavy ode to true love that finds Carson stripping the window dressing and revealing his rawest self: “Like oxygen, without you, baby girl, I can\'t breathe.”

Three years before *Gag Order*, Kesha released 2020’s *High Road*, a cheery-sounding LP that attempted to return to her early party-pop days, despite the clear-eyed courage of its predecessor, 2017’s soulful *Rainbow*. After the “TiK ToK,” Jack Daniel’s-swilling early days of Kesha’s career came very public litigation with her former producer and label head Dr. Luke, whom she accused of sexual assault. It’s not something she can legally address on record, but the title of her fifth studio album is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to her ongoing battle. Produced by Rick Rubin, the album is her most innovative to date. There’s the minor-key, Auto-Tuned ode to hallucinogenic transcendence “Eat the Acid” and the indie-folk neuroticism of “Living in My Head.” The minimal synth turned explosive experimentalism of “The Drama” was co-written with Kurt Vile and includes an inspired interpolation of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” If early fans celebrated Kesha for her bravado, now they’ll find her fearlessness expressed in both new sonic textures and a new emotional vocal performance: laid bare, raw, undeniable.

ANOHNI’s music revolves around the strength found in vulnerability, whether it’s the naked trembling of her voice or the way her lyrics—“It’s my fault”; “Why am I alive?”; “You are an addict/Go ahead, hate yourself”—cut deeper the simpler they get. Her first album of new material with her band the Johnsons since 2010’s *Swanlights* sets aside the more experimental/electronic quality of 2016’s *HOPELESSNESS* for the tender avant-soul most listeners came to know her by. She mourns her friends (“Sliver of Ice”), mourns herself (“It’s My Fault”), and catalogs the seemingly limitless cruelty of humankind (“It Must Change”) with the quiet resolve of someone who knows that anger is fine but the true warriors are the ones who kneel down and open their hearts.

Like it did for listeners, Polly Jean Harvey’s 10th album came to her by surprise. “I\'d come off tour after \[2016’s\] *Hope Six Demolition Project*, and I was taking some time where I was just reassessing everything,” she tells Apple Music of what would become a seven-year break between records, during which it was rumored the iconic singer-songwriter might retire altogether. “Maybe something that we all do in our early fifties, but I\'d really wanted to see if I still felt I was doing the best that I could be with my life. Not wanting to sound doom-laden, but at 50, you do start thinking about a finite amount of time and maximizing what you do with that. I wanted to see what arose in me, see where I felt I needed to go with this last chapter of my life.” Harvey turned her attention to soundtrack work and poetry. In 2022, she published *Orlam*, a magical realist novel-in-verse set in the western English countryside where she grew up, written in a rare regional dialect. To stay sharp, she’d make time to practice scales on piano and guitar, to dig into theory. “Then I just started,” she says. “Melodies would arise, and instead of making up vowel sounds and consonant sounds, I\'d just pull at some of the poems. I wasn\'t trying to write a song, but then I had all these poems everywhere, overflowing out of my brain and on tables everywhere, bits of paper and drawings. Everything got mixed up together.” Written over the course of three weeks—one song a day—*I Inside the Old Year Dying* combines Harvey’s latest disciplines, lacing 12 of *Orlam*’s poems through similarly dreamy and atmospheric backdrops. The language is obscure but evocative, the arrangements (longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish produced) often vaporous and spare. But the feeling in her voice (especially on the title track and opener “Prayer at the Gate”) is inescapable. “I stopped thinking about songs in terms of traditional song structure or having to meet certain expectations, and I viewed them like I do the freedom of soundtrack work—it was just to create the right emotional underscore to the scene,” she says. “It was almost like the songs were just there, really wanting to come out. It fell out of me very easily. I felt a lot freer as a writer—from this album and hopefully onwards from now.”

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U),” the Bronx-born MC’s biggest hit to date and the song that has soundtracked an unknowable number of after-school hangs, almost wasn’t. “The song was really a throwaway for me,” Spice told Apple Music’s Ebro. “I made it, and I was like, ‘All right, let me put that away.’ And the people I was playing it for—I played it for a bunch of people, and \[they\] was just like, ‘Oh. OK, cool.’” But the song was not to be denied. By the time “Munch (Feelin’ U)” hit streaming platforms in August 2022, Ice had accumulated a legion of local fans eagerly awaiting its release, having heard a snippet she’d uploaded to socials earlier that summer. Once the phrase “You thought I was feelin’ you?” made it to TikTok, the rest was history. Or as Spice herself puts it on January’s *Like..?* EP, “In the hood, I’m like Princess Diana.” Twenty-three-year-old Ice Spice was born Isis Gaston and got an early start at rapping. “I had little raps and shit since I was a kid,” she says. “I never made full songs, though.” She began recording properly in 2021, with things really revving up after meeting producer and frequent collaborator RIOTUSA while in college at SUNY Purchase. Though her popularity rose fast, her first and likely most important fan was her father, an MC in his own right who, Spice says, used to run with DJ Doo Wop in the early 2000s. “In the crib or on the way to school and everything, he would be on some, ‘Let me hear something’ and always trying to film me, pushing me to do something,” she says. “Or if I would tell him about girls that I didn’t really fuck with in school, he would be like, ‘Write a rap about them.’” He likely couldn’t be prouder of his little star upon the release of *Like..?*, a six-track EP that was, at its arrival, already 50 percent hits. “Munch (Feelin’ U)” is, of course, here, as are the instantly viral “Bikini Bottom” and “In Ha Mood.” Add to those the NYC drill-expressive “Princess Diana,” the P. Diddy “I Need a Girl, Pt. 2”-sampling “Gangsta Boo,” and the Jersey club-indebted “Actin a Smoochie,” and you’ve got a picture of a young talent who is just getting warmed up. “Those are six songs that I already made,” Spice says of *Like..?*. “Fans going to eat that up. And then there’s always time to evolve and grow as an artist. So, I’m not rushing to jump into another sound or rushing to do some different shit. If it happens, it happens. I just want everything to be natural.”

Like…? is Bronx, New York newcomer Ice Spice’s debut EP. Following up the success of “Munch (Feelin' U)” and “Bikini Bottom,” on November 16, 2022, during an interview with RapCaviar, Ice Spice announced that she was working on an EP, stating: I’m excited for this new music. I’m about to put out an EP. It’s about to be like six songs. ‘Bikini Bottom’ is on there, and then there’s some that people haven’t heard. It’s about to be a vibe. Visuals coming with it, too. Yeah, a bunch of content around it. It’s lit. On December 25, 2022, Ice Spice released the EP’s third single, “In Ha Mood.” Although no other information about the EP was announced, the day before it’s release, Ice Spice took to social media revealing the cover art and tracklist. Lil Tjay serves as the sole feature.

No one could accuse Sonny Moore of being unmotivated in the years following 2014’s *Recess*—the electronic maverick better known as Skrillex kept up a seemingly endless stream of singles, remixes, high-profile collabs (Justin Bieber, Travis Scott), and co-signs of rising artists—but the lack of a follow-up album was nevertheless conspicuous. Nine years later, with *Quest for Fire*, he more than makes up for lost time. At once sprawling and punchy, the 15-track LP offers the fullest picture yet of the visionary producer’s range. Skrillex’s fondness for bass is well-represented: Virtually every track is flooded with voluminous low-end frequencies, typically in the form of stonking FM patches that glisten like oil slicks. The opening “Leave Me Like This” rides a wriggly riff straight out of the UK style known simply as bassline; “Tears,” a collaboration with UK producer Joker and Sleepnet, an artist from Noisia’s orbit, pays tribute to old-school South London bass music. Yet dubstep, for all its importance to Skrillex’s origins, is little more than a footnote on *Quest for Fire*. Stylistically, the album covers lush, melodic garage (“Butterflies,” with Starrah and Four Tet), Middle Eastern club (“XENA,” with Palestinian singer/composer Nai Barghouti), futuristic dancehall (the gargantuan “Rumble,” with Fred again.. and Flowdan), and more. What it all has in common, beyond the seismic undertow, are Skrillex’s filigreed vocal chops and intricate drum programming, which continue to unlock new levels of hyperkinetic energy. Skrillex has always tended to pack the studio with pals, and *Quest for Fire* is his most collaborative effort yet, stuffed with names both big and small. Missy Elliott drops new verses (and a clever interpolation of “Work It”) on the hip-house anthem “RATATA.” Rave dreamweaver Porter Robinson and hitmaker Bibi Bourelly add emotional uplift to “Still Here (with the ones that I came with),” a teary-eyed garage banger. The most surprising cameo might come from Eli Keszler, an experimental percussionist better known for working with avant-garde figures like Laurel Halo. Sometimes, the collaborators help lead Skrillex to some unexpected places: Who knows what kind of alchemy resulted in “TOO BIZARRE (juked),” in which rapper Swae Lee, post-everything producer Siiickbrain, and bass musician Posij come together in an unprecedented fusion of R&B, juke, pop punk, and screamo. Yet no matter who ends up in the booth with Moore, there’s no mistaking who’s behind the boards. Simply put, nobody else sounds like Skrillex, and no matter how far he roams, his sound is always unequivocally his.

To call *Fuse* Everything But the Girl’s first album in 24 years is to downplay everything the husband-and-wife duo of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have been busy with since—the partial sum of which includes seven solo albums, three children, five memoirs, and three record labels. “We were very much on our separate tracks until the pandemic,” Watt tells Apple Music. “When things started getting back to normal, we both realized we had been changed a lot by the whole experience, and wondered if a change and a new direction could be a good idea.” But for as much of a contextual shift as the project might’ve been for Watt and Thorn personally, their music has always been both of its time and slightly out of it in ways that make *Fuse* feel as singular and natural as anything they’ve done before. Certain tracks bear obvious markers of the 2020s, whether it’s the 2-step beat of “Nothing Left to Lose” or Thorn’s duet with her eerily Auto-Tuned self on “When You Mess Up.” But others—like the quiet desperation of “Run a Red Light” or the after-hours bliss of “No One Knows We’re Dancing”—tap into the same small, oblique sophistications that have driven their music since before they discovered drum machines. “We had more time on our hands and more with each other,” Watt says of making their first record together since 1999’s *Temperamental*. “Tracey just said, ‘Maybe now is the time; if not now, then when?’ When we began—after the first tentative steps—we realized we still had so much in common. A common language. A love of economy, direct emotion, space.” Here Watt and Thorn talk through the album, track by track. **“Nothing Left to Lose”** Tracey Thorn: “This was the last track we wrote and recorded. I think we could only do it once we had got our confidence levels up. We were buzzing off the tracks we had already done, and thought we just needed one more to really nail it. When Ben put the backing track together, with that beat and the heavy tremolo bass and loads of space for my vocal, it felt like a nod to our past but fresh. It was so atmospheric and it inspired this really raw, heartfelt lyric.” **“Run a Red Light”** Ben Watt: “We were a few songs into recording when one evening I played Tracey some songs I’d demoed a few years back. This was one of them, and Tracey picked it out immediately, saying, ‘That is a killer song, you must let me sing it.’ The ‘run a red light’ lines only appeared once, as a coda at the end, but we turned it into the chorus instead and sang the lines together, with my vocal heavily Auto-Tuned so that it has a bit of what Mark Ronson calls that ‘sad robot’ quality. The lyric is a portrait of the kind of guy I often met at the end of the night during my DJ days, the guy who thinks he just needs one break and he could turn everything around.” **“Caution to the Wind”** TT: “It’s quite an unusual track for us in that it’s house tempo but almost euphoric. Usually we inject sadness into this musical mood, but this one has a proper celebratory lyric: the stars, the sky like a cathedral, the idea of a person coming home, and throwing caution to the wind, demanding to get close to someone. The ‘caution to the wind’ lines made me think of Stevie Nicks while I was singing them. It’s got a slight ravey Fleetwood Mac vibe to it—big tom fills and floaty scarves.” **“When You Mess Up”** BW: “This was the first song we wrote together since 1999. I had recorded a series of piano improvisations on my iPhone—just playing, without imagining I was writing a song, trying to free myself from any pressures and expectations. And using slightly unusual chord voicings, 4ths and 6ths, etc. Tracey wrote this lyric about how that transitional stage between middle age and the future reminds you of all the tension and uncertainty of being young. But she’s trying to be forgiving of herself, saying, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, we all mess up, life is difficult.’ We messed around a bit with Tracey’s vocal on some of the lines, pitching it higher, bending its tone, so it sounds like a little devil on her shoulder, or some internal voice digging at her.” **“Time and Time Again”** TT: “This is the kind of song where you can’t quite tell which is the verse and which is the chorus, it’s more circular than linear. The lyrics are about someone looking at a friend who can’t get out of a relationship, imagining that at some point they’re gonna have to come and save them. Ben and I are singing together on the verses, really nice downbeat kind of vocals. And then my voice is sped up again and used as a kind of effect in the middle section. The feel reminds us a bit of our earliest forays into electronic music in the ’80s, where some tracks on *Idlewild* were inspired by Jam & Lewis productions, that pop/R&B vibe of the time.” **\"No One Knows We’re Dancing”** BW: “The lyric is a kind of homage to Lazy Dog, the club night I ran in Notting Hill with Jay Hannan for several years from the late ’90s onwards. It took place on Sundays, starting in the afternoon and ending at midnight, and the song captures—with a bit of added color—some of the regulars who turned up or people who worked there. It’s about that secret, self-enclosed world of the club, magnified by this sense that you’re down in the dark basement dancing at 5 pm, while outside in the street normal life is just going on, and the sun is blazing. Ewan Pearson added some extra synth and drum programming, and it turned into a real dubby Italo-disco vibe.” **“Lost”** TT: “This was an early piece of music that Ben had created, recording it at home during lockdown. A hypnotic, arpeggiated repetitive cycle of a song. He had typed the words ‘I lost…’ into Google and followed all the suggestions which came up to create the lyric: I lost my mind, I lost my bags, I lost my perfect job. It seems quite random and almost detached, but then you are hit by the line ‘I lost my mother’ and you realize that it is about loss of all kinds, and how it hits you. I then improvised singing another set of lyrics as a kind of counterpoint in the background, and they are exhortations not to give up in the face of loss, to keep going, and not to call yourself a loser.” **“Forever”** BW: “This was the first track on this project where I added a four-on-the-floor beat, and I remember Tracey running into the room going, ‘I like this!’ But it isn’t really a dance track, and we quite like that. It’s got quite a dark, pulsing arpeggiator going through it, and a kind of intense mood. The lyrics are about trying to work out what’s important—letting go of game playing and time wasting, trying to work out who’d be there for you in a crisis…as the lyric says, ‘When everything burns down.’” **“Interior Space”** TT: “This started as another one of Ben’s piano improvisations, and is layered up with a sonic landscape of drones and swooshes and a field recording our engineer Bruno had made of a beach in Wales while on holiday with his family. It also features some of the only guitar on the album from Ben. My vocal is heavily treated so it sounds like the inside of my head, woozy and psychedelic, a little bit out of it. The lyric is about not understanding yourself, feeling unknowable, and the arrangement tries to dramatize that feeling, make it vivid and real.” **“Karaoke”** BW: “A slow empty groove to end the album—distorted organ, CS-80, West Coast Moog. The verse lyrics are about a trip I made to a karaoke bar in San Francisco some years ago. The early evening was fairly humdrum, then the regulars arrived and a woman sang Jennifer Hudson’s ‘Spotlight’ and brought the house down. It inspired Tracey to add the chorus lyrics, which introduce another idea into the song, asking, ‘What is singing for? Do you sing to heal the brokenhearted or get the party started?’ Both, is the obvious answer.”

There’s a haunting intensity and rare poetic beauty about Ryuichi Sakamoto’s blend of ambient sounds, stripped down to the bare essentials of melody and rhythm. And for all its simplicity, this is an album that is profoundly moving. His dozen pieces, created spontaneously in March 2021 during the early stages of convalescence from major cancer surgery, speak of life’s fragility and of music’s power to comfort, console, even to heal. It feels almost intrusive at first to listen to what originated as private musical thoughts, conceived on synthesizer and piano out of an innate need for the presence of pure, unadorned sounds. Sakamoto’s choice of 12 favorite sketches, each named for its date of composition, charts the stages of his recovery, from pieces infused with his labored breathing to a sublime final sequence of impressionistic miniatures.

In an interview just after the release of 2020’s *Reunions*, Jason Isbell said the difference between a good songwriter and a great one was whether or not you could write about a subject beyond yourself without making it feel vague. Ten years out from the confessional rawness of *Southeastern*, not only are Isbell’s lyrics ever closer to his ideal, but he’s got a sense of musical nuance to match. *Reunions* and 2017’s *The Nashville Sound* all blend anecdotes and memories from Isbell’s past with fiction, but *Weathervanes* tells a broader story with these vignettes, one with a message that became painfully clear to him throughout the pandemic: You can’t fully appreciate and acknowledge the good in your life without experiencing, and holding space for, the bad. “When I went into writing these songs, it started sort of at the tail end of the lockdown period and continued through our reentry into society; it kind of feels like a new world, for better or worse,” Isbell tells Apple Music. “A lot of these stories came from that, because when you start adding up the things that you\'re grateful for as somebody who tells stories, then automatically I think your mind goes to the counterpoint of that or the inverse of that. And you start thinking, \'Well, where could I be if I hadn\'t made the choices that led me to here?\'” This led to a fundamental shift in his approach to songwriting. “The more specific and the more intense something is, the more likely I am to come at that through a character,” he tells Apple Music. “If I\'m writing about love or death or having kids, I will go from the first person and it\'ll be me. But if I\'m writing about something like a school shooting, it feels like I have to say, \'Okay, this is how this affects me, and this is how this makes me feel.\' The only way I can be honest with that stuff is come at it from a character\'s perspective when it\'s a very specific topic like that.” Sometimes, that means creating these characters—or even reflecting on a younger version of himself in a difficult situation, as he does in “White Beretta”—and trusting them to lead the song down the path it needs. “So many times I didn\'t know what I was talking about until I got to halfway through the song, and I like it best when it happens that way,” he says. “I\'ll just get started and I\'ll say to myself, \'If I make a real person here and actually watch them with an honest eye, then after a couple of verses, they\'ll tell me what I\'m writing about.\'” Below, Isbell tells the stories behind the songs of *Weathervanes*. **“Death Wish”** “This is the kind of song that I have wanted to write for a long time. It\'s expansive from the production, but also you can tell from Jack White doing the acoustic cover that he did, it still feels like a broad, expansive sort of thing. That\'s a modern type of songwriting that I\'m really drawn to, but it\'s also antithetical to the roots-music ideal. And after \'Death Wish\' is over, I feel like, you\'ve hung in there with me through this sort of experimental thing. Now I can give you something that is a little bit more comfortable for your palate, something you\'re a little more used to from me.” **“King of Oklahoma”** “I was out there filming in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. There was a project that I had been asked to be a part of with Darius Rucker, Sheryl Crow, and I think Mike Mills, and a couple of other people. For a minute there, I was like, ‘Well, if I can get home in time to record with you all, that sounds like a really fun time. So I will do that.’ But I was never home in time because they kept changing my filming schedule, so I just missed it. But I wrote that song thinking, ‘Well, maybe I need some songs for this; I don\'t know if this is going to work for them or not.’ Eventually I thought this should be just a song of my own.” **“Strawberry Woman”** “This one\'s probably the closest I come to nostalgia on this record, I think, because there are a lot of moments here that are things that Amanda \[Shires, Isbell\'s wife and frequent collaborator\] and I shared together early on in the relationship. There\'s an undercurrent of the beginning of a relationship when you really need each other in ways that, if everybody\'s progressing like they\'re supposed to, you might not wind up needing each other in the same way 10 years down the road. And there\'s loss in that. It\'s a beautiful thing to grow as a human being, and both of us have, I think a lot, but then all of a sudden, at the end of that, you start trying to figure out what you still have in common. Even though you might not have the codependent nature that the relationship had early on, it\'s still something worth doing and worth working on, worth fighting for. You have to adjust your expectations from each other.” **“Middle of the Morning”** “After the experience of *Reunions*, Amanda and I took a little bit of a break from doing that stuff together. For the most part, I just sat and worked on my own until I got all these done. ‘Middle of the Morning,’ I don\'t know if she likes that song or not, maybe she does. That one\'s very personal as far as the perspective goes. That was a tough one to write and a tough one to sing, because I know there\'s some assumptions in there, and there\'s this sort of feeling of living in under the same roof through the pandemic and feeling so disconnected from each other.” **“Save the World”** “It was right after the Uvalde school shooting, but I didn\'t know that that\'s what I was writing about when I started. When I started, I was writing about leaving my wallet behind, and then I was writing about a phone conversation, and then all of a sudden I was writing about a school shooting. Once I realized that\'s what I was writing about, I thought, \'Oh, shit. Now I\'ve got to do this and handle it correctly.\' It took a lot of work. I finished that song and played it for Amanda, and she was like, \'I think you should write this again. You\'re not saying what you want to say. And at this point, it doesn\'t have enough meat, doesn\'t have enough detail.\' And I was like, \'Yeah, but that\'s going to be really fucking hard. How do you write about this without it seeming exploitative?\' And so it took more than one stab.” **“If You Insist”** “This song is from the perspective of a woman, and I wrote it for a movie—I don\'t remember the name of the movie, and I wound up not using it for the movie. They had given me my own song \[\'Chaos and Clothes\' off *The Nashville Sound*\] as a reference, and so I wrote something very similar to that in feel. I just really liked the song, and whoever we were negotiating with for the situation with the movie, they didn\'t want us to own the master, but I said, \'Well, I\'ll just keep it.\' And so we just kept it and I put it on the record.” **“Cast Iron Skillet”** “I think for a lot of songwriters that are writing whatever ‘Southern song’ or outlaw country they feel like they\'re writing is to go into this idea of, \'This is all the stuff that my granddad told me, and it\'s this down-home wisdom.\' What I wanted to say was, \'There is an evil undercurrent to all these things that our granddads told us, and there is darkness in those woods.\' I don\'t mean to sound like I\'m better at it than anybody else. Sometimes people are aiming for a different target, but I get bored with songs that do the same thing over and over. I wanted to turn that on its head and say, \'Let\'s frame this with this nostalgic idea of our romanticized Southern childhoods—and then let\'s talk about a couple of things that really happened.\'” **“When We Were Close”** “This is about a friendship between two musicians, and a lot of people ask me who it\'s about, but that\'s not the point. It\'s about me and a whole fucking bunch of people, but it\'s fairly specific. I had a friend who I made a lot of music with and spent a lot of time with, and we had a falling-out, and it never got right. It was so severe, and then he was gone, and that was the end of that. There was no closure. I remember when John Prine died, I was very sad, but I was also very grateful that the grief that I felt for John was not complicated. You don\'t have to be angry and you don\'t have to feel like there are things left unsaid or unresolved. This story was really the inverse of that, because it was like, yes, I am grateful for a lot of the things that we did together and that person showed me and a lot of the kindnesses, but at the same time, it was complicated. I have to be able to hold those two things in my head at the same time. You could call that the theme of this whole album, honestly.” **“Volunteer”** “The connection that I have to my home is complicated, because I am critical of the place where I grew up, and also, I\'m very, very fortunate that I grew up there. But my heart breaks for small towns in Alabama, and those small Alabama towns are scattered all over America and all over the world. I go play music in a lot of them, and I feel welcome, but not entirely. I also feel like an interloper. This story is a narrative based on a character that is fictional, but it came from that idea of like the Steve Earle song, \'nothing brings you down like your hometown,\' that same thing. It\'s like, why can\'t I really feel like I have a strong emotional connection to this place where I grew up? And also, why can\'t they get it together? The older I get, the more I think I feel comfortable discussing that and discussing the place.” **“Vestavia Hills”** “It started as me writing about somebody else, but the joke was on me. I got about halfway through the song and I was like, ‘I see what I\'m doing. You asshole.’ Then I thought about, man, what would it be like to be an artist\'s crew member? Let\'s make our character the crew guy, the sound guy who has been doing this for a long time and really believes in the work and really cares about the artist, but he has had enough. Basically, this is him turning in his two-week notice and saying, \'I\'m going to do one last tour with you, and then I\'m going home, because my wife makes a lot of money. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and I don\'t have to put up with this shit anymore.\'” **“White Beretta”** “At this song’s heart there\'s this regret, and it\'s not shame, because I love the concept of extracting helpful emotions from shame. I feel like shame is kind of to protect you from really looking at what actually happened. I can look back and say, \'Well, yeah, it wasn\'t all my fault, because I was raised a certain way to believe a certain set of things.\' I didn\'t say, \'Don\'t do this.\' I didn\'t say, \'I don\'t want you to terminate this pregnancy.\' I was just kind of on the fence. But I was a teenager; I didn\'t know what to do, and I had been raised in a very conservative place, and there was a lot of conflicting emotions going on. A song like that is hard because you have to make an admission about yourself. You have to say, \'I haven\'t always been cool in this way.\' I don\'t think you can give an example to people of growing if you don\'t give an example of what you\'re growing from.” **“This Ain’t It”** “This is sort of post-Southern-rock, because it sounds very Southern rock, but the dad in this song is somebody who would completely, unironically love the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The perspective is he\'s basically trying to sneak back into his daughter\'s life at a very inopportune time. It\'s another one of those where the advice might not be very good, but he certainly believes it, and it\'s coming from his heart. I\'ve proven what I need to prove about my tastes and about serving the song, and sometimes the song just needs to have a bunch of guitar on it and rock, and maybe even some fucking congas.” **“Miles”** “I kept trying to shape it into something that was more like a four-minute Jason Isbell song, and then at one point I thought, ‘No. I think we could just play the way that I\'ve written it here.’ I would have a verse on one page and then that refrain written out on a different page, and I had to go back through the notebook and figure out what belonged to that song. The approach was kind of like if Neil Young was fronting Wings. It was like a McCartney song where it\'s got all these different segments and then it comes back around on itself at the end, but also sort of with Neil\'s guitar and backbeat. It felt like I had a little bit of a breakthrough in what I would allow myself to do, because I\'ve always loved songs like this, and I\'ve always sort of thought, \'Well, you need to stop.\' When Lennon was out of the picture, McCartney was making \'Band on the Run\' and all this stuff. It\'s just one big crazy song all tied together with little threads.”

Margo Price’s fourth album is a record born from journeys. There’s the physical one, in which the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and her husband/collaborator, the musician Jeremy Ivey, traveled first to South Carolina to focus on writing new material, much of which made it onto *Strays*, then to California’s Topanga Canyon to record the final LP. And, perhaps more consequently, there’s the spiritual journey, as Price and Ivey spent part of their writing retreat taking intentional, exploratory psilocybin trips in an effort to tap more deeply into their own creative wells. Accordingly, *Strays* is Price’s most expansive, adventurous LP yet, employing an intricate, far-reaching soundscape of rock, psychedelia, ’70s pop, and subtle flourishes of her earlier brand of left-of-center country. The shift in sound didn’t shift Price’s focus, though, which is, as always, crafting songs that stand the test of time. “Sonically, it’s a little bit different,” she tells Apple Music. “But if you strip away all the instruments, what you have left at the end of the day is still a song that’s great that you can play on the piano or guitar and it’ll stand up on its own.” Opener “Been to the Mountain” is part origin story, part battle cry, as Price chronicles the many roles she’s played—a mother, a child, a waitress, and a consumer, among others—before defiantly declaring, “I’ve been called every name in the book, honey/Go on, take your best shot.” The Sharon Van Etten collaboration “Radio” is Price at her poppiest, pairing melodic hooks with frank observations on womanhood and motherhood. “County Road” grapples with mortality and pays tribute to late drummer Ben Eyestone, envisioning the afterlife as an escape from earthly troubles. And closer “Landfill” opens with a gut punch of a lyric—“I could build a landfill of dreams I deserted”—before ultimately ending the LP on a hopeful note. Below, Price shares insight into several key tracks on *Strays*. **“Been to the Mountain”** “This was one of the very first songs that flowed out the next day after we came down from our mushroom trip. I just really wanted to incorporate poetry. I wanted it to be really psychedelic, and I wanted this album to be able to serve as a record that people could put on if they were going to maybe dabble in psychedelics. I think it can be a companion piece in that regard. I feel like whenever I have taken a psilocybin trip, there’s always that moment right before everything starts happening in your brain and your body, and you feel like you’re about to go on a roller coaster. That’s what I wanted—to capture that feeling.” **“Radio” (feat. Sharon Van Etten)** “The melody to the song came to me when I was walking in the woods. I just started singing the melody and the words into my phone and made a little voice memo. I got back home, picked up the guitar, and I was really proud of what I had, but I really wanted the label to be excited and to trust in my ability to write a pop song. So, I said that it was written with somebody I had planned to co-write with, and it just didn’t happen. But I did send it to Sharon Van Etten, and I was like, ‘Does this need a bridge? Do you like this song?’ And she’s like, ‘I absolutely love this song. It’s incredible. I don’t think it needs a bridge, but I would change these lines.’ She began co-writing on it and then put all those incredible harmonies and just added her touch to it. I think she’s one of the greatest writers that’s currently out there right now. I love her and I think everything she touches gets this beautiful, I don’t know, chrome feeling to it. There’s just a little bit of magic in everything that she worked on.” **“County Road”** “This is a song \[for late drummer Ben Eyestone\] that means a lot to me and my band collectively. We truthfully all have to hold back tears when we play it; we just miss him so much. But we know that he is still around, and sometimes we’ll feel his energy when we’re playing that song. It was just really tragic how he passed. A lot of things were at play. I think the American healthcare system and a lot of things just worked against him. He died \[from cancer\] so tragically and so suddenly. But at the same time, it was pre-pandemic. It was before everything changed in our world in so many ways during that year of 2020. It’s a dark song. We say things like, ‘Maybe I’m lucky I’m already dead.’ But really, I think that there is this freedom that has to come with death. You’re not suffering here and going through all these incredibly difficult life lessons.” **“Lydia”** “It’s strange sometimes how you have this premonition that you don’t want to come true, or you don’t think it’s going to go this way. I never saw this *Handmaid’s Tale* future. I thought things were fucked up, but they weren’t this bad. That song was written after walking around Vancouver and seeing a lot of people there that were struggling with opioid addictions. They all seemed like they had this vacant, ghostly quality, and so did the city and the area of town that we were in. There was a methadone clinic really close by, and the venue owners literally told us, ‘Be really careful. There’s a lot of needles out the back door. You guys go that way.’ It was just a really heavy mood. While it has pieces of me and little vignettes of who I’ve been at times in my life, I think this is definitely a character study. It was a person that I created, something that was fictional but that is ultimately a portrait of what it might be to be living in the lower class and struggling in America right now.” **“Landfill”** “I think we go through such wild territory throughout the album, and we’re definitely getting some high highs and some low lows. I really just wanted to end the album with a little bit of clarity and a little bit of peace. I wanted the last word that I say on this album to be ‘love.’ I wrote that song also in South Carolina, and it was at the very end of our trip, after we’d been there for seven or eight days. We were trying to find this abandoned lighthouse and passed a landfill on the way. I just started thinking about the metaphor of how your mind can be that way; you have so many memories and difficult things that you bury and push down. But I wanted it to still be hopeful.”

Produced by Margo Price and Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty), Strays was primarily recorded in the summer of 2021, during a week spent at Fivestar Studio in California’s Topanga Canyon. While the songwriting began the summer prior – during a six-day, mushroom-filled trip that Price and her husband Jeremy Ivey took to South Carolina – it was amongst the hallucinatory hills of western Los Angeles that Price experienced the best recording sessions of her career. Instilled with a newfound confidence and comfortability to experiment and explore like never before, Margo Price and her longtime band of Pricetags channeled their telepathic abilities into songs that span rock n roll, psychedelic country, rhythm & blues, and glistening, iridescent pop. Having been together since the days before Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, her 2016 debut that Rolling Stone named one of the Greatest Country Albums of All Time, Price and her band tracked live in the same room, simultaneously expanding upon and completely exploding the notions of every other album they have made together. With additional vocals from Sharon Van Etten and Lucius, plus guitar from Mike Campbell, strings, synthesizers and a breadth of previously untapped sounds, Strays is also Price’s most collaborative record yet. “I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating,” says Margo Price. “You get stuck in the same patterns of thinking, the same loops of addiction. But there comes a point where you just have to say, ‘I'm going to be here, I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm not going to put so much stock into checking the boxes for everyone else.’ I feel more mature in the way that I write now, I’m on more than just a search for large crowds and accolades. I’m trying to find what my soul needs.”

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.

“It was very easy to do,” Joanna Sternberg tells Apple Music of making their second full-length. “I was having fun and as comfortable as could be. It felt like the right thing.” Recorded over five days in the cartoonist/singer-songwriter’s native New York—with indie guitar hero Matt Sweeney producing—*I’ve Got Me* certainly sounds like it came easy. But Sternberg—a virtuoso musician who studied jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music—has a way of making difficult things sound simple and obvious, whether it’s self-acceptance (the huglike title track), resilience (“Mountains High”), or playing every instrument here. Yet, somehow, every line feels like it might weigh a ton, too. “It’s hard for me to get up the courage to show people one of my songs,” Sternberg says. “I have to really, really, really, really consider if I show people. I haven’t shown people a lot of them, but I have, like, 200.” **“I’ve Got Me”** “It’s kind of just about what it says it’s about—being very isolated and not having any friends. I think it’s kind of the theme of the whole album, because writing songs and stuff is what got me to have people wanting to be my friend. I mean, the song is about not feeling lonely—like I stopped being upset about being alone.” **“I Will Be With You”** “I just wrote the song while I was waiting for an orchestra rehearsal to start. I was at the piano, just having fun. I was trying to write an Irish love ballad. I wrote it in, like, three minutes; it was fine.” **“Mountains High”** “I was listening to lots of Cajun music with accordion in it, where they’re repeating accordion patterns. In my building, there’s a practice room in the basement because it’s artist housing. And after 11, you could go in as long as you want, so I would just go in and try to write songs. And I wrote this song in one of the rooms—just came up with the melody, and it kind of just wrote itself very fast.” **“I’ll Make You Mine”** “My mom wanted me to put that on the record, so I did. But that was one of the first songs I wrote, because I just kind of made it up on the piano. I don’t really like the song very much because it’s cheesy, but she said I had to put it on the record.” **“Stockholm Syndrome”** “I thought it kind of sounded like something that reminds me of middle school and the music everyone liked in middle school, and I didn’t like it. So, I didn’t think it was even good. But then all my friends were loving it. So, then I just forced myself to get used to it, and now I like it. I’m very lucky to play my songs, and I love to do it, but that song took a while to write because I thought it was really, really annoying and embarrassing. Then I just kind of accepted it.” **“The Love I Give”** “Sometimes, when I’m walking around, I come up with melodies. My producer Matt Sweeney really encourages me to take walks, so I can come up with melodies. So, that’s really, really helpful that he does that, because I forget to do it. I wrote that song while I was just walking to the train, and I just wrote it really fast. It was just about being around people who are hurtful to you, but you don’t want to change who you are.” **“She Dreams”** “I wrote that song when I was asleep. I wrote it in a dream, and I woke up, and it was all written. It was the only time that’s ever happened. And I think it was the first song I ever wrote. It’s pretty.” **“The Song”** “I kind of wrote it based on the first melody in Dvořák’s *New World Symphony*, of the English horn solo. It was a really nice melody, and then I just went off of that. That was all I needed to just write the whole thing.”

PinkPantheress’ debut album, *Heaven knows*, opens with the sound of a scaling church organ and heavy rainfall. It’s a grand entrance that’s as fitting for this album’s title as it is perhaps surprising for the artist behind it. But if PinkPantheress broke out thanks to the propulsive, UKG- and D’n’B-shaped pop she’d crafted in her bedroom (and her songs’ wild social-media success), the beginnings of *Heaven knows* feel like an acknowledgment—or a declaration—that she’s outgrown its four walls. Sometimes, that feels literal: “True romance” finds her amid the screaming crowds and clicking cameras of a show as she heralds her love for someone much more famous than her. It’s either a sign of the company she keeps these days (“Every song is about you/And everybody’s shouting out your name”) or a play on the darker side of fan obsession (“I know you’re older/But I really know I’m sure/Held my ticket since they landed at my door/I’ve been a fan of you since 2004/You know you got me”). But this album is also a broadening of her musical world, the songs here—made with collaborators including Greg Kurstin (Adele, Gorillaz, Foo Fighters), Mura Masa, Cash Cobain, Danny L Harle (Caroline Polachek) and Oscar Scheller (Ashnikko, Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama)—are noticeably more expansive than those on 2021’s star-confirming mixtape *To hell with it*. You can expect all the nostalgic sounds and breakbeats that defined that release and made the Kent-raised singer-songwriter/producer famous. But also disco (on the excellent “The aisle”), ’90s R&B (“Mosquito” and “Feel complete,” which sounds like it could have been written for a girl group), rock wig-outs (“Capable of love”), and flourishes of strings, church bells and even birdsong en route. (There are also songs that pass the three-minute mark.) Plus, plenty of collaborations, as Pink recruits a crop of culture-shaping artists to appear alongside her: Rema, Kelela, Central Cee, and, of course, Ice Spice, with whom she reached global domination in summer 2023 with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2.” All of which is united by the story of a troubled relationship, the album’s emo-shaped lyricism frequently blurring the lines between heartbreak and death and love and obsession (“You’re not quite stuck with me, but one day you’ll be,” she sings on “The aisle”). It could feel sinister, if her voice—and increasingly boundless, future-facing hyperpop—weren’t quite so sweet. By the time *Heaven knows* closes out with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2,” it’s a reminder of the astronomical heights PinkPantheress reached before even announcing her debut. But right in the middle of it, she hints that—despite her social-media beginnings—she can be anything she wants to be. “I am not your internet baby,” she repeats insistently on “Internet baby (interlude).” “I am not your internet baby.”

“I don\'t really want to tell people stories,” Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. “I want to show them. I want them to feel.” At 28, the Australian artist has more than a few stories to pick from. In the years between 2018’s *Bloom* and this, his third full-length, he’s appeared in several films and series; collaborated with artists like Charli XCX, Lauv, Jónsi, and Tate McRae; and launched a luxury lifestyle brand. But beneath those headline-makers, he simply lived his life and experienced the experiences that laid the foundations for *Something to Give Each Other*. “There’s 10 stories, 10 moments,” he says of the album, which took around two and a half years to complete. Between COVID and filming the TV series *The Idol*, he was granted a “luxury of time” he’d never had before. “It ended up serving the album really well because it gave me time to see which songs stuck around.” “I\'ve felt very hopeful and joyous and connected, but there’s a lot of vulnerability as well,” Sivan says. There’s love, sex, and heartbreak, the thrill of reemerging feelings, fleeting yet vital moments of intimacy and communication. There’s a sweaty club moment (“Rush”), balmy dance pop (“Got Me Started”—which samples Bag Raiders’ definitive 2008 hit “Shooting Stars”), gentle confessionals (“Can’t Go Back, Baby”) and sensual house (“Silly”). And it’s all told through the lens of welcome self-discovery and unapologetic, undiluted queerness. Here, he talks through the stories of each song on *Something to Give Each Other*. **“Rush”** “In the moments between Melbourne lockdowns when we were able to go out, I had these nights that were so fun, they were almost emotional. There was this overwhelming joy and euphoria. I was sober and sweating and just so grateful to be with people. And grateful for music, for life, for youth and sex and connection. So I wanted to write that moment.” **“What\'s the Time Where You Are?”** “I felt pretty emotionally dead for a while after my last relationship, and my feelings didn\'t all come back in one go. There were these little sparks I started to feel, and I was so excited when I did. I was talking to this one guy and I had a little crush for the first time in ages. At one point he messaged me saying, ‘What\'s the time where you are?’ Maybe I over-romanticized, but it was so sweet. Because he could definitely google that. But I saw it for what it was, I think: It was an effort at connection and keeping the conversation going. It sparked this idea of two people separated by a great distance, both out there living their lives, having a great time, but looking for each other in music or nights out or little texts like that.” **“One of Your Girls”** “I think this is my favorite song I\'ve ever worked on. This thing kept happening where I was being approached by guys who’d previously or historically identified as straight. They were flirting with me, saying there was something in me that they were interested in. I just felt all these different things. Firstly, I was placing them on such a pedestal. I was like, why is this so hot? And also questioning myself because I’d always end up heartbroken. I think I knew I wasn’t treating myself with the respect I deserved by being the secret or the experiment. We wrote three different choruses and ended up coming to this sad robot thing, inspired by a movie I’d seen. Even that spoke to the way I’d felt: like I was expected to be there when they wanted me, then disappear when they freaked out, then be there again when they wanted. Like this emotionless object. And yet there I was time and time again. You don\'t want to rush them through the process of figuring shit out. This isn’t me making any sort of statement—I have patience for that experience. I’m just musing to myself about it.” **“In My Room” (feat. Guitarricadelafuente)** “I met Guitarricadelafuente \[Álvaro Lafuente Calvo\] and his boyfriend in Paris at a dinner, and they were so sweet. When I got back to the hotel, I started listening to his music and I was just really, really inspired. So I messaged him that we should write sometime. We wrote the song in one day. It\'s the only collaboration on the album, and I love that it\'s with a queer artist. In my head, I\'m lying on my bed, kicking my legs, daydreaming about someone like I’m a teenager. It was a really nice way to write rather than trying to make narrative: We were both just communicating our feelings.” **“Still Got It”** “It’s about a moment where I bumped into my ex-boyfriend and realized he still had all the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place. One of my favorite lyrics on the album is ‘Said hello like an old colleague.’ It was just that weird thing where you\'re like, wow, I lived with this person, I shared so much of my life with this person, and here we are greeting each other like old colleagues. It was a moment of reflection. I love collaboration and writing with people, but sometimes it\'s really nice to just do it by yourself, say exactly what you feel and worry less about the stuff I normally love worrying about, like, ‘How many syllables is it? Does it work from a pop point of view?’” **“Can’t Go Back, Baby”** “I was pretty angry, and I\'ve never really written from an angry place. I was hurt and felt betrayed. It’s a real journey throughout the song and by the end it\'s like, ‘In the morning, I wake up with the sun across my face/In the evening, there I lay with so much love to take your place.’ That\'s not love from other people, it\'s love I have for myself, being able to show up for yourself. But sonically there’s a softness, because I still have so much care for that person, that relationship. I knew I wanted this on the album, but I was dreading writing it. When I eventually did, I was like, ‘Let\'s just record this today and then I don\'t want to look at it.’” **“Got Me Started”** “It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It was one of those moments of a spark, where someone unlocks that side of you again and you\'re like, ‘Oh, I can feel.’ I love the lyric ‘Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body/Fuck it up just like this party did tonight.’ To me, it\'s just this house party: You\'ve met someone and for whatever reason you just can’t keep your hands off each other—and how exciting it is when that happens.” **“Silly”** “We had sexiness on the album in a few different ways, but one thing we didn\'t have was *icy, cool* sexy—something that just really simmers. I was surprised by the lyrics that came. It ended up being about how someone can get you back into your feelings for them in two seconds. It almost touches on the story of ‘Still Got It.’ I\'ve sung in falsetto as a layer a lot throughout my music, but never as a lead vocal. Here, we started off with that falsetto as a layer, and I was going to track under it, but we left it alone up there. So I essentially got to duet with myself, which was so cool.” **“Honey”** “‘Honey’ started in Melbourne with \[producer\] Styalz Fuego and the Serenity Prayer. My dad taught it to me when I was a kid. One of the lines is something like ‘Give me the courage to accept things I cannot change.’ I love the idea of having these really strong feelings for someone and not knowing how to express them, and almost saying a prayer—even though I\'m very irreligious. ‘Give me the courage to say all these things I feel about you.’ It just felt very joyous, like the confetti moment at the show.” **“How to Stay With You”** “It’s really cruisy and mellow, it’s got saxophone on it. It’s about someone I met who ended up leaving, and I was a bit lost on how to stay with them, because I wanted to, but it didn’t seem possible. There was something interesting to me about putting it at the end. Throughout all the experiences and people on the album, I still have this longing and desire to find a long-term relationship. When it fades out in the outro, the last lyrics on the album are these little background vocals: ‘Starting again when I got all I wanted/Starting to feel a little bit despondent.’ I still haven\'t found the thing I\'m looking for. It doesn\'t negate these prior experiences and how beautiful they are, but I\'m still looking. I thought it was a very real way to end it. I\'m on this journey, I’m really happy and I\'m enjoying every second of it, I\'m so grateful for all the connections, and I\'m curious to see what happens next. But I don’t know what that is yet.”

It's been a long long time coming, but we are delighted to finally announce the release of our new album False Lankum, along with the premiere of the first single, Go Dig My Grave.  The album was recorded across 2021 & 2022 by our longtime producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy in Hellfire Studio and Guerilla Studios in Ireland. The cover was shot by Steve Gullick, famed for photographing Nirvana amongst many greats, with a Gustav Doré illustration featured in the lower third, designed and laid out by Alison Fielding. It is our most ambitious record to date and we are very proud to finally unleash it upon the world. As well as the standard black vinyl, we will be releasing a Limited Edition Burnt Orange Transparent Double LP & CD. There will be an opportunity to obtain four limited edition prints, by legendary photographer Steve Gullick. The individual prints will be available across the world, with a signed edition available from Bandcamp.

Forget the mumbled vocals and air of perpetual dislocation—Archy Marshall is a traditionalist, albeit a subtle one. Like all King Krule albums, *Space Heavy* has its jagged moments (“Pink Shell,” the back half of the title track). But as a father on the cusp of 30, he seems evermore in touch with the quiet contentments that make our perceived miseries endurable: a long walk on a chilly beach, a full moon seen from a clean bed. His ballads feel like doo-wop without exactly sounding like them (“Our Vacuum”), and the broken sweetness of his guitars are both ’90s indie-rock and the sleepy jazz of an after-hours lounge (“That Is My Life, That Is Yours”). New approach, same old beauty.

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

The title of Chicago artist Jamila Woods’ third album, *Water Made Us*, is a subtle reference to a quote from Toni Morrison: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” It’s this ethos that runs through Woods’ first album since 2019’s *LEGACY! LEGACY!*, consumed with memory and place, the power of returning, and the way things change even as they stay the same—and stay the same as they change. She recruited LA-based producer McClenney to help build the album from scratch, hammering the songs to fit these themes one by one. *Water Made Us* boasts features from Saba, Peter CottonTale, and duendita, who assists with herR&B-soul concoctions on “Tiny Garden.” The album’s second song, “Garden” features a soul-inspired groove, delicate keyboard chords, and Woods’ upper-register voice floating above. “It’s not gonna be a big production, it’s not butterflies and fireworks/Said it’s gonna be a tiny garden, but I’ll feed it every day,” she sings. It leads the song into a chorus filled with harmonies and technicolor guitar flourishes. The moment is a snapshot of small ideas coalescing into something large, a tiny garden with the scars of history.

Post-humanism was a passion and a coping mechanism on yeule’s breakthrough album, 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, art-pop that escaped into the simulation and drew raw emotion from its artifice. Their third full-length finds the shape-shifting musician regaining their bearings as a human being, and trading short-circuiting electronica for the fuzzy sounds of shoegaze and ‘90s alt-rock. The effect is that of an AI yearning to be flesh and blood: “If only I could be/Real enough to love,” they sing over downcast guitar chords on “ghosts” as their voice glitches into decay. On the bleakly gorgeous “software update,” yeule fantasizes about a lover downloading their mind after their body is gone, over a swelling, reverberating wall of sound. There’s a tactile quality to the album’s digital processing reminiscent of ‘90s Warp Records staples like Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin, shot through with the melancholy that accompanies nostalgia for a time that’s long gone and barely remembered.

“We have to be friends”—the first song written for *PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE*—had a profound impact on its author. “I was like, ‘What the hell is going to be this record? This is going to be my awakening,” Chris tells Apple Music’s Proud Radio. “The song was all-knowing of something and admonishing me finally to stop being blind or something. So I started to take music even more seriously and more spiritually.” Even before that track, the French alt-pop talent had begun to embrace spirituality and prayer following the death of his mother in 2019—a loss that also colored much of 2022’s *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*. But letting it into his music took him to deeper places than ever before. “This journey of music has been very extreme because I wanted to devote myself and I went to extreme places that changed me forever,” adds Chris. “An awakening is just the beginning of a spiritual journey, so I wouldn\'t say I\'m there, it would be arrogant. But it\'s definitely the opening of a clear path of spirituality through music.” After the high-concept, operatic *Redcar*, this album—a three-part epic lasting almost two hours that’s rooted in (and whose name nods to) Tony Kushner’s 1991 play *Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes*, an exploration of AIDS in 1980s America—confirms our arrival into the most ambitious Christine and the Queens era yet. The songs here will demand more of you than the smart pop that made Christine and the Queens famous—but they will also richly reward your attention, with sprawling, synth-led outpourings that reveal something new with every listen. Here, Chris (who collaborated with talent including superproducer MIKE DEAN and 070 Shake) reaches for trip-hop (the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears can be so soft”), classical music (the sublime “Full of life,” which layers Chris’ reverbed vocals over the instantly recognizable Pachelbel’s Canon), ’80s-style drums (“We have to be friends”), and the kind of haunting, atmospheric ballads this artist excels at (“To be honest”). Oh, and the album’s narrator? Madonna. “I was like, ‘If Madonna was just like a stage character, it would be brilliant,’” says Chris. “I pitch it like fast, quite intensely: ‘I need you to be the voice of everything. You need to be this voice of, maybe it\'s my mom, maybe it\'s the Queen Mary, maybe it\'s a computer, maybe it\'s everything.’ And she was like, ‘You\'re crazy, I\'ll do it.’” Chris gave the narrator a name: Big Eye. “The whole thing was insane, which is the best thing,” he says. “The record itself solidified itself in maybe less than a month. I was writing a new song every day. It was quite consistent and a wild journey. And as I was singing the song, the character was surfacing in the words. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a character.’ Big Eye was the name I gave the character because it\'s this very all-encompassing, slightly worrying angel voice, could be dystopian.” For Chris, this album was a teacher and a healer—even a “shaman.” “I discovered so much more of myself and rediscovered why I loved music so hard,” he says. “And it\'s this great light journey of healing I adore.” It also cracked open his heart. “This record for me is a message of love,” he adds. “It comes from me, but it comes from the invisible as well. Honestly, I felt a bit cradled by extra strength. Even the collaboration I had, this whole journey was about friendship, finding meaning in pain too. It opened my heart.”

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji. “With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.

Young Fathers occupy a unique place in British music. The Mercury Prize-winning trio are as adept at envelope-pushing sonic experimentalism and opaque lyrical impressionism as they are at soulful pop hooks and festival-primed choruses—frequently, in the space of the same song. Coming off the back of an extended hiatus following 2018’s acclaimed *Cocoa Sugar*, the Edinburgh threesome entered their basement studio with no grand plan for their fourth studio album other than to reconnect to the creative process, and each other. Little was explicitly discussed. Instead, Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and Graham “G” Hastings—all friends since their school days—intuitively reacted to a lyric, a piece of music, or a beat that one of them had conceived to create multifaceted pieces of work that, for all their complexities and contradictions, hit home with soul-lifting, often spiritual, directness. Through the joyous clatter of opener “Rice,” the electro-glam battle cry “I Saw,” the epic “Tell Somebody,” and the shape-shifting sonic explosion of closer “Be Your Lady,” Young Fathers express every peak and trough of the human condition within often-dense tapestries of sounds and words. “Each song serves an integral purpose to create something that feels cohesive,” says Bankole. “You can find joy in silence, you can find happiness in pain. You can find all these intricate feelings and diverse feelings that reflect reality in the best possible way within these songs.” Across 10 dazzling tracks, *Heavy Heavy* has all that and more, making it the band’s most fully realized and affecting work to date. Let Massaquoi and Bankole guide you through it, track by track. **“Rice”** Alloysious Massaquoi: “What we’re great at doing is attaching ourselves to what the feeling of the track is and then building from that, so the lyrics start to come from that point of view. \[On ‘Rice’\] that feeling of it being joyous was what we were connecting to. It was the feeling of fresh morning air. You’re on a journey, you’re moving towards something, it feels like you’re coming home to find it again. For me, it was finding that feeling of, ‘OK, I love music again,’ because during COVID it felt redundant to me. What mattered to me was looking after my family.” **“I Saw”** AM: “We’d been talking about Brexit, colonialism, about forgetting the contributions of other countries and nations so that was in the air. And when we attached ourselves to the feeling of the song, it had that call-to-arms feeling to it, it’s like a march.” Kayus Bankole: “It touches on Brexit, but it also touches on how effective turning a blind eye can be, that idea that there’s nothing really you can do. It’s a call to arms, but there’s also this massive question mark. I get super-buzzed by leaving question marks so you can engage in some form of conversation afterwards.” **“Drum”** AM: “It’s got that sort of gospel spiritual aspect to it. There’s an intensity in that. It’s almost like a sermon is happening.” KB: “The intensity of it is like a possession. A good, spiritual thing. For me, speaking in my native tongue \[Yoruba\] is like channeling a part of me that the Western world can’t express. I sometimes feel like the English language fails me, and in the Western world not a lot of people speak my language or understand what I’m saying, so it’s connecting to my true self and expressing myself in a true way.” **“Tell Somebody”** AM: “It was so big, so epic that we just needed to be direct. The lyrics had to be relatable. It’s about having that balance. You have to really boil it down and think, ‘What is it I’m trying to say here?’ You have 20 lines and you cut it down to just five and that’s what makes it powerful. I think it might mean something different to everyone in the group, but I know what it means to me, through my experiences, and that’s what I was channeling. The more you lean into yourself, the more relatable it is.” **“Geronimo”** AM: “It’s talking about relationships: ‘Being a son, brother, uncle, father figure/I gotta survive and provide/My mama said, “You’ll never ever please your woman/But you’ll have a good time trying.”’ It’s relatable again, but then you have this nihilistic cynicism from Graham: ‘Nobody goes anywhere really/Dressed up just to go in the dirt.’ It’s a bit nihilistic, but given the reality of the world and how things are, I think you need the balance of those things. Jump on, jump off. It’s like: *decide*. You’re either hot or you’re cold. Don’t be lukewarm. You either go for it or you don’t. Then encapsulating all that within Geronimo, this Native American hero.” **“Shoot Me Down”** AM: “‘Shoot Me Down’ is definitely steeped in humanity. You’ve got everything in there. You’ve got the insecurities, the cynicism, you’ve got the joy, the pain, the indifference. You’ve got all those things churning around in this cauldron. There’s a level of regret in there as well. Again, when you lean into yourself, it becomes more relatable to everybody else.” **“Ululation”** KB: “It’s the first time we’ve ever used anyone else on a track. A really close friend of mine, who I call a sister, called me while we were making ‘Uluation’: ‘I need a place to stay, I’m having a difficult time with my husband, I’m really angry at him…’ I said if you need a place to chill just come down to the studio and listen to us while we work but you mustn’t say a word because we’re working. We’re working on the track and she started humming in the background. Alloy picked up on it and was like, ‘Give her a mic!’ She’s singing about gratitude. In the midst of feeling very angry, feeling like shit and that life’s not fair, she still had that emotion that she can practice gratitude. I think that’s a beautiful contrast of emotions.” **“Sink Or Swim”** AM: “It says a similar thing to what we’re saying on ‘Geronimo’ but with more panache. The music has that feeling of a carousel, you’re jumping on and jumping off. If you watch Steve McQueen’s Small Axe \[film anthology\], in *Lovers Rock*, when they’re in the house party before the fire starts—this fits perfectly to that. It’s that intensity, the sweat and the smoke, but with these direct lines thrown in: ‘Oh baby, won’t you let me in?’ and ‘Don’t always have to be so deep.’ Sometimes you need a bit of directness, you need to call a spade a spade.” **“Holy Moly”** AM: “It’s a contrast between light and dark. You’re forcing two things that don’t make sense together. You have a pop song and some weird beat, and you’re forcing them to have this conversation, to do something, and then ‘Holy Moly’ comes out of that. It’s two different worlds coming together and what cements it is the lyrics.” **“Be Your Lady”** KB: “It’s the perfect loop back to the first track so you could stay in the loop of the album for decades, centuries, and millenniums and just bask in these intricate parts. ‘Be Your Lady’ is a nice wave goodbye, but it’s also radical as fuck. That last line ‘Can I take 10 pounds’ worth of loving out of the bank please?’ I’m repeating it and I’m switching the accents of it as well because I switch accents in conversation. I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Washington, D.C. \[where Bankole has previously lived\], or someone who’s lived in the Southside of Edinburgh, and I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Lagos in Nigeria.” AM: “I wasn’t convinced about that track initially. I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” KB: “That’s good, though. That’s the feeling that you want. That’s why I feel it’s radical. It’s something that only we can do, it comes together and it feels right.”

WIN ACCESS TO A SOUNDCHECK AND TICKETS TO A UK HEADLINE SHOW OF YOUR CHOOSING BY PRE-ORDERING* ANY ALBUM FORMAT OF 'HEAVY HEAVY' BY 6PM GMT ON TUESDAY 31ST JANUARY. PREVIOUS ORDERS WILL BE COUNTED AS ENTRIES. OPEN TO UK PURCHASES ONLY. FAQ young-fathers.com/comp/faq Young Fathers - Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings - announce details of their brand new album Heavy Heavy. Set for release on February 3rd 2023 via Ninja Tune, it’s the group’s fourth album and their first since 2018’s album Cocoa Sugar. The 10-track project signals a renewed back-to-basics approach, just the three of them in their basement studio, some equipment and microphones: everything always plugged in, everything always in reach. Alongside the announcement ‘Heavy Heavy’, Young Fathers will make their much anticipated return to stages across the UK and Europe beginning February 2023 - known for their electrifying performances, their shows are a blur of ritualistic frenzy, marking them as one of the most must-see acts operating today. The tour will include shows at the Roundhouse in London, Elysee Montmartre in Paris, Paradiso in Amsterdam, O2 Academy in Leeds and Glasgow, Olympia in Dublin, Astra in Berlin, Albert Hall in Manchester, Trix in Antwerp, Mojo Club in Hamburg and more (full dates below) To mark news of the album and the tour, Young Fathers today release a brand new single, “I Saw”. It’s the second track to be released from the album (following standalone single “Geronimo” in July) and brims with everything fans have come to love from a group known for their multi-genre versatility - kinetic rhythms, controlled chaos and unbridled soul. Accompanied by a video created by 23 year old Austrian-Nigerian artist and filmmaker David Uzochukwu, the track demonstrates the ambitious ideas that lay at the heart of this highly-anticipated record. Speaking about the title, the band write that Heavy Heavy could be a mood, or it could describe the smoothed granite of bass that supports the sound… or it could be a nod to the natural progression of boys to grown men and the inevitable toll of living, a joyous burden, relationships, family, the natural momentum of a group that has been around long enough to witness massive changes. “You let the demons out and deal with it,” reckons Kayus of the album. “Make sense of it after.” For Young Fathers, there’s no dress code required. Dancing, not moshing. Hips jerking, feet slipping, brain firing in Catherine Wheel sparks of joy and empathy. Underground but never dark. Still young, after some years, even as the heavy, heavy weight of the world seems to grow day by day.

Brimming with astrological fervor and unbridled emotionality, *Red Moon in Venus* finds the Colombian American sensation zeroing in on love. From the proud promises behind “Endlessly” to the sweet little profundities of “Love Between...,” the album plays with genre without losing cohesion or connection. On the guest front, Don Toliver matches her R&B potency amid the polyrhythmic blur of “Fantasy,” while Omar Apollo brings his own certain charm to the sumptuous duet “Worth the Wait.” Yet most of the album keeps the spotlight rightfully on her, leading to breathtaking moments like “I Wish You Roses” and the Sade-esque “Blue.” And while *Red Moon in Venus* returns the artist to a primarily English-language mode, she hasn’t dispatched entirely with the approach taken on 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞*. She brings bilingual lyricism alongside orchestral accents for “Como Te Quiero Yo” and retro grooves for “Hasta Cuando.”

LA-based, Dallas-raised artist Liv.e, announces her sophomore album 'Girl In The Half Pearl' due February 10th via In Real Life. 'Girl In The Half Pearl' seizes on both the creative and personal liberation Liv.e has experienced in the time since her 2020 debut album 'Couldn't Wait To Tell You...'. The album's 17 tracks are a document of self-examination, as she works through realizations prompted by grief and grapples with the dynamics of her role in the relationships in her life. Building upon the foundation she laid with CWTTY, 'Girl In The Half Pearl' bares her process of growth, forgiveness and reclamation of her sense of womanhood across an immersive soundscape. The album's artistic shifts developed during her time experimenting with live performance in London earlier this year while under residency at London's Laylow. The 24-year-old artist first garnered attention with her 2017 EP, FRANK, and 2018's Hoopdreams EP. Over the past year, Liv.e shared the standalone Mndsgn-produced single "Bout It," along with a COLORS performance and released 'CWTTY+', the deluxe version of her 2020 critically-acclaimed debut album. She's since performed alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ravyn Lenae. Liv.e's unique sensibilities have also caught the eye of the fashion world, marked by an appearance in a Miu Miu ad campaign photographed by Tyrone Lebon. Most recently, she was featured on the new Mount Kimbie single titled "a deities encore."