Sound Opinions: Jim DeRogatis's Best Albums of 2021

As Amyl and the Sniffers came off the road in late 2019, they moved into a house together in Melbourne. “It had lime green walls and mice,” frontwoman Amy Taylor tells Apple Music. “Three bedrooms and a shed out back that we took turns sleeping in. We knew we were going to come back for a long period of time to write. We just didn’t know how long.” Months later, as the bushfires gave way to a global pandemic, the Aussie punk outfit found themselves well-prepared for lockdown. “We’ve always kind of just been in each other’s pocket, forever and always,” Taylor says. “We’ve toured everywhere, been housemates, been in a van, and shared hotel rooms. We’re one person.” With all rehearsal studios closed, they rented a nearby storage unit where they could workshop the follow-up to their ARIA-winning, self-titled debut. The acoustics were so harsh and the PA so loud that guitarist Dec Martens says, “I never really heard any of Amy’s lyrics until they were recorded later on. She could’ve been singing about whatever, and I would have gone along with it, really.” And though *Comfort to Me* shows a more serious and personal side—as well as a range of influences that spans hardcore, power pop, and ’70s folk—that’s not necessarily a byproduct of living through a series of catastrophes. “I was pretty depressed,” Taylor says. “It’s hard to know what was the pandemic and what was just my brain. Even though you can’t travel and you can’t see people, life still just happens. I could look through last year and, really, it’s like the same amount of good and bad stuff happened, but in a different way. You’re just always feeling stuff.” Here, Taylor and Martens take us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Guided by Angels”** Amy Taylor: “I feel like, as a band, everyone thinks we’re just funny all the time. And we are funny and I love to laugh, but we also are full-spectrum humans who think about serious stuff as well, and I like that one because it’s kind of cryptic and poetic and a bit more dense. It’s not just, like, ‘Yee-haw, let’s punch a wall,’ which there’s plenty of and I also really love. We’re showing our range a little bit.” **“Freaks to the Front”** AT: “We must’ve written that before COVID. That’s absolutely a live-experience song and we’re such a live band—that’s our whole setup. We probably have more skills playing live than we do making music. It’s the energy that is contagious, and that one’s just kind of encouraging all kind of freaks, all kind of people: If you’re rich or poor or smart or fat or ugly or nice or mean, everyone just represent yourself and have a good time.” **“Choices”** Dec Martens: “\[Bassist\] Gus \[Romer\] is really into hardcore at the moment, and he wanted a really animalistic, straight-up hardcore song.” AT: “Growing up, I went to a fair handful of hardcore shows, and I personally liked the aggression of a hardcore show. In the audience, people kind of grabbing each other and chucking each other down, but then also pulling each other up and helping each other. I also just really like music that makes me feel angry. I constantly am getting unsolicited advice—or women, in general, are constantly getting told how to live and what to do. Everybody around the world is, and sometimes it’s really helpful—and I don’t discount that—but other times it’s just like, ‘Let me just fucking figure it out myself, and don’t tell me what kind of choices I can and can’t make, because it’s my flesh sack and I’ll do what I want with it.’” **“Hertz”** AT: “I think I started writing it at the start of 2020, pre-lockdown. But it’s funny now, because currently, being in lockdown again, I’m literally dying. I just want to get to the country and fucking not be in the city. So, the lyrics have really just come to fruition. I was thinking about somebody that I wasn’t really with at the time. It’s that feeling of feeling suffocated—you just want to look at the sky, just be in nature, and just be alive.” **“No More Tears”** DM: “I was really inspired by this ’70s album called *No Other* by Gene Clark, which isn’t very punk or rock. But I just played this at a faster tempo.” AT: “And also inspired heaps by the Sunnyboys, an Australian power pop band. Last year was really tough for me, and that song’s about how much I was struggling with heaps of different shit and trying to, I guess, try and make relationships work. I was just feeling not very lovable, because I’m all fucked in the head, but I’m also trying to make it work. It’s a pretty personal song.” **“Knifey”** AT: “It’s about my experience—and I’m sure lots of other people’s experience—of feeling safe to walk home at night. The world’s different for people like me and chicks and stuff: You can carry a weapon and if somebody does something awful and you react, it comes back to you. I remember when I was a kid, being like, ‘Dad, I want to get a knife,’ and he was like, ‘You can’t get a knife because you’ll kill someone and go to jail.’ But so be it. If somebody wants to have a go, I’m very happy to react negatively. At the start, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do these lyrics. I don’t know if I’d want to play that song live.’ It’s probably the only song that I’ve ever really felt like that about. It hit up the boys in the band in an emotional way. They were like, ‘Fuck, this is powerful. Makes me cry and shit,’ and I was like, ‘That’s pretty dope.’” **“Don’t Need a C\*\*t (Like You to Love Me)”** AT: “It’s a fuck-you song. When I’m saying, ‘Don’t need a c\*\*t like you to love me,’ it’s pretty much just any c\*\*t that I don’t like in general. There could be some fucking piss-weak review of us or if I worked at a job and there was a crap fucking customer—it’s all of that. I wasn’t thinking about a particular bloke, although there’s many that I feel like that about.” **“Snakes”** “A bit of autobiography, an ode to my childhood. I grew up in a small town near the coast—kind of bogan, kind of hippy. I grew up on three acres, and I grew up in a shed with my sister, mom, and dad until I was about nine or 10, and we all shared a bedroom and would use the bath water to wash our clothes and then that same water to water the plants. Dad used to bring us toys home from the tip and we’d go swimming in the storms and there was snakes everywhere. There was snakes, literally, in the bedroom and the chick pens, and there’d be snakes killing the cats and snakes at school—and this song’s about that.”

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”

During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”

Here’s what a typical day of lockdown looked like for Courtney Barnett in 2020: “Wake up, watch the sunrise, do some meditating, drink some coffee, do some work and then some songwriting,” she tells Apple Music. “Go for a walk, call a friend, then some more work.” Living alone in a friend’s empty Melbourne apartment, Barnett found herself in a reflective mood, often watching the world and seasons change from her window, a guitar in her lap. “A lot of the time there wasn\'t much else to do,” she says. “But I think it\'s good sometimes to just sit and watch or listen, to take a minute.” Written in the quiet of hotel rooms or that very apartment, Barnett’s intimate third LP is a set of meditative rock that feels uniquely present, the Aussie singer-songwriter playing like she’s got nowhere to go and nowhere else she’d rather be. It’s music that feels akin—spiritually and sonically—to that of one-time collaborator Kurt Vile, a placid coming together of jangly guitars, purring drum machines, and zen turn of phrase. “I feel that quietness is often a reflection of the writing, but also I think that I was just craving a quieter sound,” she says of the album. “I\'ve gotten used to just taking things as they come over the years. Nothing is ever how you think it\'s going to be, so it\'s just trying to live in those moments and make the most of them.” Here, Barnett guides us through a few of the album’s songs. **“Rae Street”** “The chorus \[‘Time is money and money is no man’s friend’\] is something that I remember from my childhood, something my dad would say as a bit of a joke, as a hurry-up if we were late for school or whatever. It\'s just always stuck in my head, and when I reflected on it as an adult, it took on a whole new meaning, especially in the context of last year when the world slowed down or stopped in some places, and people lost jobs.” **“Sunfair Sundown”** “That was inspired by a party with friends—one of those nights you feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for friendship and connection. I started writing it the next day, just because of that overwhelming, beautiful, big feeling—it was that simple. It was just celebrating very special small moments and the fact that small moments can mean so much. Sometimes, to one person, it\'s just another day, but it could totally change or affect someone else\'s life.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “I just remember when I wrote that song, it felt special straight away. The guitar chords and the melody—it all came quite naturally and quickly. It started as a letter and then it turned into a song, and over time it’s morphed, as songs do. It’s constantly evolving. I just think it\'s such a simple, beautiful song—I feel a lot when I play it.” **“Turning Green”** “Starting out, we did this whole version that sounded like a jangly guitar-pop song. But it didn\'t grab me, so we pulled it apart and \[Warpaint drummer\] Stella \[Mozgawa\] reprogrammed some drums. I put the guitar down because it just didn\'t seem like it fit, and we kind of flipped it on its head to see if it would inspire a better feeling. And it did, straight away—just singing along to it made the words come to life in a different way. Sometimes, in the studio, you just want to throw so much stuff onto songs and it just gets crowded and busy, and then you kind of lose track of what\'s happening. The change gave the words space and that space was really important for a lot of this album, but this song especially.” **“Write a List of Things to Look Forward To”** “The song’s title came from someone saying, ‘You should write a list of things that you\'re looking forward to.’ And that just inspired the thought behind it—what that means and what it represents. It’s a song about gratitude, but it is also about connections in life, this idea of life and death and being afraid of it and just being at peace with that progression.”

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ 2007 collaborative album *Raising Sand* remains, nearly a decade and a half after its release, a landmark record in roots music. The LP earned Plant, of Led Zeppelin fame, and reigning bluegrass queen Krauss five Grammys at the 2009 ceremony, including the coveted Album of the Year trophy, among many other accolades. The album also offered a new vision for how artists could work within an already nebulous genre, with the two recording favorite songs new and old for a collection that still sounds timeless. Plant and Krauss reconvene on *Raise the Roof*, seeming, somehow, to pick right back up where they left off. Still present are the pair’s intimacy, their contrasting but complementary vocal styles, and, notably, the gentle hand of producer T Bone Burnett, who also helmed *Raising Sand*. While much remains the same, *Raise the Roof* is a decidedly larger affair than its predecessor, even in its quieter moments, thanks likely to each artist’s growth via work with other projects (Band of Joy and Sensational Space Shifters for Plant; longtime band Union Station for Krauss) in the intervening decade-plus. Covered artists include Calexico (“Quattro \[World Drifts In\]”), Allen Toussaint (“Trouble With My Lover”), and Merle Haggard (“Going Where the Lonely Go”), with the album’s tracklist revealing a catholic breadth of influences. The duo is backed by some of Nashville’s finest players, including guitarists Buddy Miller and Bill Frisell.

On the intro to Tony Allen\'s posthumous *There Is No End*, we hear the voice of the iconic Nigerian-born, Paris-based drummer himself, explaining this album’s very title. Quite literally, he says “there is no end” to the hypnotic loop of a distinctive drum groove called Afrobeat, which Allen created and implemented as a cofounder of Fela Kuti’s groundbreaking band Africa 70. On a more spiritual note, there is no end to the creative legacy of a figure like Allen, despite his death in 2020 at 79. With Afrobeat’s supple accents and subdivisions, its calm yet inescapable funk, Allen impacted groove-based music in a league comparable to fellow drummers Bernard Purdie and Clyde Stubblefield. In his post-Fela years, Allen struck up collaborations with the likes of Blur’s and Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn, who coproduced “Cosmosis” here (featuring Nigerian British rapper Skepta and Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri). Allen also signed with Blue Note and released *The Source* in 2017, favoring a more acoustic sound with brass and saxophones. *There Is No End*, by contrast, places Allen in more of a hip-hop context, collaborating with younger rappers and singers. Allen completed the backbone of the project in 2019, but it was up to producers Vincent Taeger and Vincent Taurelle to finish it with Allen’s blessing after his death. Allen’s airborne beats hold it all together, and the rappers feed off of his drive and syncopation with riveting results—especially the female guests on “Stumbling Down” (Zambian-born Sampa the Great), “Mau Mau” (Kenyan-born Nah Eeto), and “One Inna Million” (West London underground phenom LAVA LA RUE). Detroit’s Danny Brown takes a ferocious turn on “Deer in Headlights,” its grungy, stripped-down feel highlighting Allen’s trademark groove with exceptional clarity.

Though his fondness for makeup and platform heels often gets him labeled as a glam rocker, Victoria, B.C., bon vivant Art d’Ecco isn’t so much about recapturing a particular early-’70s era as synthesizing myriad different ones, blurring the boundaries of genre as eagerly as he flouts definitions of gender. On his second proper album, *In Standard Definition*, d’Ecco’s speculative approach to rock history goes into hyperdrive: What if Plastic Ono Band put out a post-punk record in 1978? What if T. Rex’s Marc Bolan lived long enough to make glitzy \'80s MTV hits? What if Sparks staged their late-career comeback with LCD Soundsystem instead of Franz Ferdinand? *In Standard Definition*’s parade of record-collector mash-ups are presented as discrete stations on a record centered around the theme of television and the many roles it plays in our lives: as a source of both amusement and obsession, and as a medium that both brings fantasies to life and destroys dreams. “It\'s an album about our relationship with entertainment,” d’Ecco tells Apple Music. “It\'s told through the point of view of creators—people who work in film or television or music—and it also comes from the perspective of consumers who are interacting with it. And then the third point of view comes from the characters within this world. So I thought, ‘This album does feel a bit like you\'re channel surfing on an old television.’” Here, d’Ecco supplies a track-by-track TV guide. **“Desires”** “I was reading about the former *Family Feud* host Ray Combs, and how he had a head injury and tried to make a comeback, but he was sort of getting pushed out of this thing that he loved doing, and then he takes his own life. It’s such a tragic story. And around that same time, I had watched *Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood*, which is based on a similar trope of the aging, out-of-touch film star who\'s being forced into retirement by the young guard. And I\'m no spring chicken myself—I\'m in my thirties. All of these things just swirled in my head, so I thought, let\'s start this record from the point of view of the entertainer who just can\'t let go, but needs to just go home and stay there.” **“TV God”** “I was thinking of Iggy Pop\'s \'Sister Midnight\'—these sort of grooves that are obviously not disco, but they\'re definitely not post-punk. They\'re somewhere in the middle where they fall on this sort of droning backbeat, and it\'s in that right tempo where it has a little bit of swagger. And then I combined that with that Plastic Ono Band slap-echoey John Lennon effect and round, warm bass tones—that whole kind of thing just stitched into this little pastiche in my brain. In terms of the most literal representation of the whole *In Standard Definition* concept, this one really sums it up: We are so obsessed with celebrities and entertainers—these people that are so godlike to us, and distract us from our boring, stressful, mundane lives. They\'re complete strangers, but they hold so much value to us. It\'s such a weird phenomenon to me.” **“Bird of Prey”** “I had just met the woman who would become my fiancée, and we just started dating. And she said, \'I\'m going to England for two weeks for my birthday with my mom,\' and I house-sat for her. But we had only known each other for like a month or two, so I was just playing all these ’80s-sitcom-style scenarios in my head, like, how weird is it that I\'m house-sitting at my new girlfriend\'s house, but she\'s sort of a complete stranger to me? She had this old dusty acoustic guitar in the corner, and she said, \'You better write a song for me for when I get back!\' And \'Bird of Prey\' kind of just flowed out through me.” **“Nothing Ever Changes”** \"The primordial soup of all of my inspiration comes from a collection of songs called *Day Fevers* that I released in 2016, and one of the songs on that album was a more traditional glammy song with acoustic and electric guitars, bass, and drums—it was almost like the demo to this. And I thought this version is the classic Hollywood remake of an old movie, and we\'re going to try and make it better. I spruced it up and we added the sparkly Human League synths. It\'s kind of a cold song about letting go and severing ties. Maybe it\'s our character from \'Desires\' coming to terms with the fact that they must leave the business, or maybe it\'s about a relationship. Either answer is correct.\" **“I Am the Dance Floor”** “I wanted to show more emotion, more dynamic range, and more bravado in my singing, and it manifests itself in this weird little dance-punk song. I was picturing a movie where the CBGB or the Max\'s Kansas City crowd storms the gates at Studio 54 and lays down the gauntlet. And I was literally playing out a situation in my head where, if you drive around Vancouver on a Friday night, you\'ll see these long lines of millennial kids waiting in the freezing cold without a jacket on, waiting to hear some ironic DJ play early-aughts Britney Spears hits. And I\'m like, \'Oh, you just wait till I put on my motherfucking dancing outfit and just pass by all you little kids and go in there!\' So it’s a mashing of those two worlds.” **“Head Rush”** “I was thinking of being in my teens, working in a sweaty kitchen, and just discovering all these rock \'n\' roll albums for the first time. I was having this kind of a sheer, blissful moment of \'remember that time?\' And that memory felt like a feel-good summer teen movie to me, and so I was trying to write within that kind of trippy, gushy nostalgia. \'Head Rush\' isn\'t about doing drugs, it\'s about the high of youth, and as you get older, you realize those special moments—the summer road trips, the bike rides to the movie theater—don’t come back, so to relive them in your brain as an edited perfect little memory is a form of naturally getting high. So I wanted to kind of write from that perspective, and throw in all of the clichéd hallmarks of a classic-rock radio song.” **“Channel 7 (Pilot Season)”** “In the \'80s, you had those TV guide channels, where the listings would just scroll from bottom to top and you had to wait for it to loop around and see what\'s on channel 13. And every once in a while it would cut to some ad—\'come down to Bob\'s Steakhouse for $2.99!\'—and then it\'d go back to the Muzak playing. So I wanted to write a song that would play on that channel. And the \'Pilot Season\' subtitle was just a way to capture the hopefulness and hopelessness of Vancouver actors who flock down to LA every January and February for pilot season. A lot of them experience that crushing blow of coming back home empty-handed, so I was thinking that would be a perfect little subtitle, just to add further context to the music.” **“In Standard Definition”** “This one\'s pretty straightforward: It\'s from the perspective of two people who lie in bed with each other and tune in to something on TV. And then there\'s that time at night where your partner goes to sleep and that\'s the perfect opportunity for you to watch whatever you want. My fiancée will fall asleep to *The Golden Girls*, and while she\'s counting sheep, my way of dreaming is to put on some weird art-house film or some old documentary that would just put her to sleep all over again if she ever woke up. I know that a lot of people have that kind of dynamic in their relationship. It\'s very rare that two people are on board with the exact same taste.” **“Good Looks”** “I was thinking of how the analog way of dating—\'I\'ll introduce you to my friend, I think you\'ll like each other!\'—or how certain ways of engaging in entertainment need not apply in the future. We\'ve got technology that we can offload all of those things to—like, I can see whatever I want, whenever I want, and if I want to go on a date with someone who\'s got black hair and brown eyes and is 5\'10\", I can find that in this little app. And I just feel that you\'re leaving so much of the human experience on the table when you do that. I find the whole modern way of dating and meeting people to be a bit vapid and superficial, so I wanted to take a shot at that.” **“The Message”** “This is probably the most frantic and weird and internal that I get on the album. It\'s a little bit to do with tour life, and how it can make you feel like an alien in outer space—like, ‘Where the fuck am I again?\' And to ground yourself, you flip on a TV to see what the local news is saying, or what the weather is—just give me some sort of feeling of familiarity. And sometimes in those frantic dog days of the tour, I feel so disconnected from myself. The light\'s on upstairs, but there\'s nobody home. I\'m trying to have a conversation with my sense of self and there\'s a disconnect.” **“Channel 11 (Reruns)”** “If you listen to the title track and then go to this song, you\'ll notice that when the droning, pulsating synthesizer takes over, it\'s playing a reprise of the \'In Standard Definition\' bassline. So instead of calling it a reprise, I call it a \'rerun.\' But I was also picturing those ’90s adventure movies like *Jurassic Park*, where you get the big, sweeping, symphonic brass section. And I wanted it to represent the Jekyll and Hyde quality of the organic elements on the album—the brass and violins and pianos and Rhodes and acoustic guitars—and the cold, harsher synthesizer elements.” **“I Remember”** “John Lennon\'s solo stuff was my focal point here. We borrowed \[New Pornographers member and wife of *In Standard Definition* co-producer Colin Stewart\] Kathryn Calder\'s really beautiful old acoustic guitar, and the strings are so rusted and old and worn-out—it\'s a tone that I\'ve never used before, but combined with the really light tapping on the drums, it just sort of winds down the listening experience. And I brought in some players from the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, and they were great on the outro with that sweeping melody. This song just sounds like the ending credits to an old movie to me. It was a nice little touching moment sonically to gift-wrap the whole concept together.”

It’s easy to assume that immediate acclaim is the holy grail for aspiring artists. South Londoner RAY BLK topped the star-making *BBC Music Sound of 2017* list and found herself dubbed the UK Lauryn Hill. “I felt like I couldn’t grow and develop as an artist,” she tells Apple Music. “People expected me to make a certain type of music. It wasn’t the direction I imagined myself going in. Over time, I’ve come into my own and become more confident with my own ideas and what I want my sound to be.” *Access Denied* captures a confident artist no longer fazed by external noise, refusing to give time to those who don’t match her energy. Previous releases *Durt* and *Empress* found intersections of R&B, soul, and hip-hop, but this feels like a true crossover project—charged by 808s and trap beats with a blend of rap lyricism and sultry vocals. It’s distinctly RAY BLK. With this confidence comes a willingness to be vulnerable, and tracks including “25” and “Baggage” act as frank confessionals. There are lyrics about witnessing her mother receive abuse from her father and its impact. “Growing up, I thought that love was being disappointed,” she says. “It’s having my dad tell me one day, ‘Oh, I love you, and I’m just going away for a bit,’ then him just leaving my life. He had the opportunity to love me and chose not to. That’s how you form your idea of what love is or what it feels like.” Read on as RAY talks us through a special debut album, track by track. **“BLK MADONNA”** “This summarizes a big part of the album. Like, what artist doesn’t want success? But I think it’s about defining what success is to you. To some people, they’re not successful until they have a No. 1 record. That sounds like absolute hell to me. I can’t imagine the constant chasing of success and not feeling validated until you receive it.” **“Lovesick”** “This song came from rage. Absolute rage. Straight beef. Just anger, fuming. That’s where I was when I made this song. I really wanted to piss off my ex. I wanted to piss him off to let him know, like, ‘Wow, you had all of this. Sorry for your loss!’ With the rap section, there was an artist who I wanted to be on it, and he was just being long. He sent me half a verse, and then was being long on sending the other half. And I was like, ‘Do you know what? Fuck that. I’ll write a better verse.’” **“Smoke” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “I really just wanted to brag and talk my shit. I really had people come and say to me, ‘You’ll be a backing vocalist.’ There’s nothing wrong with being a backing vocalist, but if you want to be a lead singer, for someone to tell you, ‘No, baby, that’s not for you’ can be so demoralizing. I wanted to talk my shit so that the people who said those things to me now know that you can’t even say these things to me anymore.” **“25”** “I was having the worst time of my life. I was in LA, making the album. It was meant to be a fun, amazing time of doing sessions with incredible people. But people kept on canceling on me. So, I just spoke about the pressure of feeling like I needed to make fire music and reflecting on just the space I was in. Being 25, this quarter-life crisis is a real thing where you feel like you have to have it all figured out. But I just couldn’t relate, and I just wanted to pour it into a song.” **“Lauren’s Skit”** “I wrote this skit based off of a conversation I had with a person I was dating. I was fuming, I had had enough, and so I just said everything on my chest. Like, ‘You’ll never be anybody. Look at your life. This is why your life is the way it is, because you waste your time with women.’ There was so much venom I gave to him.” **“Access Denied”** “I was only just beginning to learn about creating boundaries and not allowing people who bring me down into my space. It was the beginning of me learning about self-care. ‘Access Denied’ is not about thinking you’re too good for anybody; it’s thinking, ‘I value you and I would like to be valued as well—for us to share our space together.’ I wanted every line to feel like an affirmation to oneself. I’m protecting my peace. I won’t allow anybody to come and disrupt my mental health.” **“Baggage”** “\[My past\] has definitely molded me into the person I am, for sure. I’m only just unlearning some unhealthy behaviors, and learning what a healthy relationship really is. For so long, I was scared of being disappointed because I learned that love is disappointment. This song is about knowing that people who love you can, and will, stay in your life.” **“Games” (feat. Giggs)** “I wanted to put people on the game that is dating. A lot of these situationships, it’s a game. Don’t get caught up in it and get gassed because it feels good and the sex is so crazy. Enjoy all of that, but let’s come back and focus. He was never going to be your husband. It’s a game. He is not your husband! Let’s remember.” **“If I Die”** “This song is about toxic sex. Really, really good sex that can mess up your brain. You just don’t want to get off the rollercoaster, and you’re loving it. I wanted the song to feel really sensual, like the production—I wanted it to feel horny. I feel like people haven’t really heard me speak the way I’m speaking on this song: explicitly. But that’s a part of womanhood, you know?” **“MIA” (feat. Kaash Paige)** “I will give props to the producer ADP. I wanted to use a throwback R&B sample in the album because I wanted it to be very clear this is an R&B album. He picked this DeBarge sample \[‘Stay With Me’\], which is most famously known for the Ashanti song \[‘Foolish’\]. My fear of sampling something is that you can hear it and all you’re thinking about is the original. But I feel like it’s a whole new, different song.” **“Mine”** “I was dating an artist, a popular artist, and as most of these rappers do, he was enjoying the relationship but didn\'t want to be exclusive, even though we were behaving exclusive. They want to have the milk, but not the cow. I remember feeling like, ‘I also want you to be mine, you know?’” **“Dark Skinned”** “I really wanted to make a song that was positive about being Black. I, of course, think it’s so important to highlight the Black struggle and to come together to eradicate that, but at the same time, I also want us to have just as much celebration of Black beauty. The phone call at the end is actually my mum. That’s a standard conversation with her. She’s a pastor, so she’s someone who’s always uplifting people and sharing positive messages.” **“Go-go Girl” (feat. Suburban Plaza)** “I feel like people don’t know that I like to have a good time, because in the past I’ve made such serious music about serious topics. People don’t know, if you see me out, just give me room, because what I need to do is twerk on the floor. So, I wanted to put some of that into the album. We made a strip-club song, but it’s meant to be affirming and uplifting.” **“Over You” (feat. Stefflon Don)** “I wanted this song at the end because I felt like it was a nice conclusion line in terms of the sentiment of letting go of someone or something. It’s good to remember that this, too, shall pass. Hard times, whether it’s a breakup or you’re experiencing depression, at some point it will pass and you’ll be over it, and you’ll feel like dancing and you’ll just feel free. And it gave me that sort of vibe.”

Lucy Dacus’ favorite songs are “the ones that take 15 minutes to write,” she tells Apple Music. “I\'m easily convinced that the song is like a unit when it comes out in one burst. In many ways, I feel out of control, like it\'s not my decision what I write.” On her third LP, the Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter surrenders to autobiography with a set of spare and intimate indie rock that combines her memory of growing up in Richmond, Virginia, with details she pulled from journals she’s kept since she was 7, much of it shaped by her religious upbringing. It’s as much about what we remember as how and why we remember it. “The record was me looking at my past, but now when I hear them it\'s almost like the songs are a part of the past, like a memory about memory,” she says. “This must be what I was ready to do, and I have to trust that. There\'s probably stuff that has happened to me that I\'m still not ready to look at and I just have to wait for the day that I am.” Here, she tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“Hot & Heavy”** “My first big tour in 2016—after my first record came out—was two and a half months, and at the very end of it, I broke up with my partner at the time. I came back to Richmond after being gone for the longest I\'d ever been away and everything felt different: people’s perception of me; my friend group; my living situation. I was, for the first time, not comfortable in Richmond, and I felt really sad about that because I had planned on being here my whole life. This song is about returning to where you grew up—or where you spent any of your past—and being hit with an onslaught of memories. I think of my past self as a separate person, so the song is me speaking to me. It’s realizing that at one point in my life, everything was ahead of me and my life could\'ve ended up however. It still can, but it\'s like now I know the secret.” **“Christine”** “It starts with a scene that really happened. Me and my friend were sitting in the backseat and she\'s asleep on my shoulder. We’re coming home from a sermon that was about how humans are evil and children especially need to be guided or else they\'ll fall into the hands of the devil. She was dating this guy who at the time was just not treating her right, and I played her the song. I was like, ‘I just want you to hear this once. I\'ll put it away, but you should know that I would not support you if you get married. I don\'t think that this is the best you could do.’ She took it to heart, but she didn\'t actually break up with the guy. They\'re still together and he\'s changed and they\'ve changed and I don\'t feel that way anymore. I feel like they\'re in a better place, but at the time it felt very urgent to me that she get out of that situation.” **“First Time”** “I was on a kind of fast-paced walk and I started singing to myself, which is how I write most of my songs. I had all this energy and I started jogging for no reason, which, if you know me, is super not me—I would not electively jog. I started writing about that feeling when you\'re in love for the first time and all you think about is the one person and how you find access to yourself through them. I paused for a second because I was like, ‘Do I really want to talk about early sexual experiences? No, just do it. If you don\'t like it, don\'t share it.’ It’s about discovery: your body and your emotional capacity and how you\'re never going to feel it that way you did the first time again. At the time, I was very worried that I\'d never feel that way again. The truth was, I haven’t—but I have felt other wonderful things.” **“VBS”** “I don\'t want my identity to be that I used to believe in God because I didn\'t even choose that, but it\'s inextricable to who I am and my upbringing. I like that in the song, the setting is \[Vacation Bible School\], but the core of the song is about a relationship. My first boyfriend, who I met at VBS, used to snort nutmeg. He was a Slayer fan and it was contentious in our relationship because he loved Slayer even more than God and I got into Slayer thinking, ‘Oh, maybe he\'ll get into God.’ He was one of the kids that went to church but wasn\'t super into it, whereas I was defining my whole life by it. But I’ve got to thank him for introducing me to Slayer and The Cure, which had the biggest impact on me.” **“Cartwheel”** “I was taking a walk with \[producer\] Collin \[Pastore\] and as we passed by his school, I remembered all of the times that I was forced to play dodgeball, and how the heat in Richmond would get so bad that it would melt your shoes. That memory ended up turning into this song, about how all my girlfriends at that age were starting to get into boys before I wanted to and I felt so panicked. Why are we sneaking boys into the sleepover? They\'re not even talking. We were having fun and now no one is playing with me anymore. When my best friend told me when she had sex for the first time, I felt so betrayed. I blamed it on God, but really it was personal, because I knew that our friendship was over as I knew it, and it was.” **“Thumbs”** “I was in the car on the way to dinner in Nashville. We were going to a Thai restaurant, meeting up with some friends, and I just had my notepad out. Didn\'t notice it was happening, and then wrote the last line, ‘You don\'t owe him shit,’ and then I wrote it down a second time because I needed to hear it for myself. My birth father is somebody that doesn\'t really understand boundaries, and I guess I didn\'t know that I believed that, that I didn\'t owe him anything, until I said it out loud. When we got to the restaurant, I felt like I was going to throw up, and so they all went into the restaurant, got a table, and I just sat there and cried. Then I gathered myself and had some pad thai.” **“Going Going Gone”** “I stayed up until like 1:00 am writing this cute little song on the little travel guitar that I bring on tour. I thought for sure I\'d never put it on a record because it\'s so campfire-ish. I never thought that it would fit tonally on anything, but I like the meaning of it. It\'s about the cycle of boys and girls, then men and women, and then fathers and daughters, and how fathers are protective of their daughters potentially because as young men they either witnessed or perpetrated abuse. Or just that men who would casually assault women know that their daughters are in danger of that, and that\'s maybe why they\'re so protective. I like it right after ‘Thumbs’ because it\'s like a reprieve after the heaviest point on the record.” **“Partner in Crime”** “I tried to sing a regular take and I was just sounding bad that day. We did Auto-Tune temporarily, but then we loved it so much we just kept it. I liked that it was a choice. The meaning of the song is about this relationship I had when I was a teenager with somebody who was older than me, and how I tried to act really adult in order to relate or get that person\'s respect. So Auto-Tune fits because it falsifies your voice in order to be technically more perfect or maybe more attractive.” **“Brando”** “I really started to know about older movies in high school, when I met this one friend who the song is about. I feel like he was attracted to anything that could give him superiority—he was a self-proclaimed anarchist punk, which just meant that he knew more and knew better than everyone. He used to tell me that he knew me better than everyone else, but really that could not have been true because I hardly ever talked about myself and he was never satisfied with who I was.” **“Please Stay”** “I wrote it in September of 2019, after we recorded most of the record. I had been circling around this role that I have played throughout my life, where I am trying to convince somebody that I love very much that their life is worth living. The song is about me just feeling helpless but trying to do anything I can to offer any sort of way in to life, instead of a way out. One day at a time is the right pace to aim for.” **“Triple Dog Dare”** “In high school I was friends with this girl and we would spend all our time together. Neither of us were out, but I think that her mom saw that there was romantic potential, even though I wouldn\'t come out to myself for many years later. The first verses of the song are true: Her mom kept us apart, our friendship didn\'t last. But the ending of the song is this fictitious alternative where the characters actually do prioritize each other and get out from under the thumbs of their parents and they steal a boat and they run away and it\'s sort of left to anyone\'s interpretation whether or not they succeed at that or if they die at sea. There’s no such thing as nonfiction. I felt empowered by finding out that I could just do that, like no one was making me tell the truth in that scenario. Songwriting doesn\'t have to be reporting.”