Sound Opinions: Jim DeRogatis's Best Albums of 2022

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

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

In May 2021, amidst a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US stemming from the pandemic, the Los Angeles Public Library posted a video of four young girls from Los Angeles playing a song called “Racist, Sexist Boy” for AAPI Heritage Month—two minutes of wonderfully sludgy outrage inspired by an interaction that drummer Mila de la Garza had with a classmate just before lockdown began. The song quickly went viral, creating an audience for The Linda Lindas before they’d ever had a chance to launch a proper tour. “In a way, I felt like we kind of had something to prove, to show for ourselves that we\'re actual musicians,” Mila tells Apple Music. “We\'ve been around for three years, and it\'s not just that we had one viral moment then we were going to go away.” While most teenagers spent the pandemic fumbling through remote school and social isolation, The Linda Lindas seized the opportunity to record their debut album. (They released a self-titled EP in 2020.) Written and rehearsed almost entirely through Zoom while all of its members—Mila and her sister Lucia, their cousin Eloise Wong, and Bela Salazar—were also feeling their way through the chaos of high school and middle school from home, *Growing Up* is a set of blistering, deeply felt pop-punk that meets the moment head on, whether they’re grappling with solitude (“Why”), self-care (“Remember”), spirals of thought (“Talking to Myself”), or disgruntled house cats (“Nino”). Here, the band takes us inside every song on the album. **“Oh!”** Mila de la Garza: “‘Oh!’ was actually written all together on our front porch.” Lucia de la Garza: “We had amps inside and we had cords running out the screen door to Bela and Eloise on opposite sides of the porch. The neighbors didn\'t like it, but it\'s okay.” Eloise Wong: “There was a situation at school where I tried to help someone who was being bullied, but then it kind of just blew up in my face. I wasn\'t really sure what to do and I was kind of angry at stuff. That\'s how the lyrics came about.” **“Growing Up”** Lucia: “It was hard being at home and feeling at this age that I had to figure out who I was. I felt like I was supposed to know what I want to do with my life. We were all apart from each other, and I didn\'t want to grow up in a way, and I realized you can\'t make growing up happen. You can\'t stop it from happening either. I was really, really nostalgic and sentimental about all the times that we had, because I didn\'t realize how much the band meant to me until it wasn\'t really in full swing anymore. I think I was realizing that music is special to me, too. All the parts of my life that were suddenly gone.” **“Talking to Myself”** Mila: “It\'s basically about needing someone else to talk to. Because being by yourself can be a blessing, and it\'s like you need that sometimes, but you also, you can\'t be by yourself forever. The song is about having someone else to take you out of a spiral, having someone else to bring you back up when you push yourself down so much.” **“Fine”** Eloise: “I think that a lot of oppression in society is just so normalized. In the words that we say and the things that happen, I feel like we\'re just taught to see it and just not blink an eye. It happens all the time, but no one does anything about it, because, you know, it\'s fine. But sometimes it gets to a point where it\'s not fine, where it\'s hard to take. Because some of these things that are just normal shouldn\'t be normal, and they push other people down, and it\'s not okay. I was kind of fed up about that and wrote that song.” **“Nino”** Bela Salazar: “On our EP, I wrote a song called ‘Monica,’ and that was about my other cat. I would play ‘Monica’ and my cat Nino would get really pissed. I don\'t know how he understood, but he would just start yelling. So I was like, ‘Okay, I have to write you a song now, because it\'s not fair.’” Mila: “I feel like I was most nervous for Nino\'s reaction to ‘Nino.’ Like, what if Nino doesn\'t like it?” Bela: “He was purring when he heard it, so that\'s a good sign.” **“Why”** Mila: “It\'s just pandemic stuff, missing people. I feel like during the pandemic we all kind of figured out more of who we are.” Lucia: “Isolation brings up a lot of emotions that you didn\'t know were there. I feel like being by yourself for that long kind of takes a toll on your mental health. Eloise\'s lyrics are very poetic on that one, I just have to say.” **“Cuantas Veces”** Bela: “I grew up listening to a lot of bossa nova, and I wanted to mix some of the stuff that I listened to into what we\'re doing. I chose to do a song in Spanish because I\'m not very good at sharing my emotions and this felt like a way that I could do it, but also have it still be a little bit more intimate and personal. I wasn\'t completely ready.” **“Remember”** Lucia: “There was a lot of feeling like every day is the same during the pandemic. There was a lot of feeling like I could have been doing so much more with my day. I didn\'t learn anything in school; I didn\'t pay attention; I was just lounging around watching Netflix all day. I was trying to find a way to forgive myself for not doing anything during my pandemic, and I think this song is just about forgiving yourself for that. Kind of remembering that it\'s okay to make mistakes and it\'s okay to regret and it\'s okay to not be okay sometimes.” **“Magic”** Lucia: “Teenagers complain—that\'s just how it is. I\'m around them every day. It’s a thing. But I always remember that I\'m super fortunate—to have discovered music and discovered a passion for it at my age. And obviously the world needs to be better and the world needs to change. Magic is always treated as like a curse and a gift—it depends on who is wielding it. But what if it’s this fantastical thing that might could save us all? What if *we* are the magic?” **“Racist, Sexist Boy”** Mila: “Before, it was more of an angry song, directed at one person. But now it\'s more a prideful song about bringing people together. Telling people that they\'re not alone, because other people go through that stuff too.” Eloise: “You write that song and it\'s made for blowback—you expect all the racist, sexist boys out there to be like, ‘What? Racism doesn\'t exist. Sexism doesn\'t exist.’ But instead we got all these positive comments. It was so cool just to see. There is good in this world, you know?”

For any band, signing to a major label at the beginning of your career is a dream come true. For LGBTQ+ Los Angeles power pop-rock trio MUNA (musicians Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson all identify as queer), it was merely their first milestone. Great freedom and success came later, when they were dropped by their label after releasing two albums and just as quickly picked up by Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. Now an independent band on their self-titled third full-length, they never sounded more confident. “\[*MUNA*\] has a lot to do with identity and agency and self-definition, the ideas that we project onto other people,” Maskin tells Apple Music. “It’s an interrogation of interpersonal relationships, and sexuality, and desire, and just trying to be a person in the world and present in your life.” Those complicated ideas are articulated with an eclectic musical nuance, from the country-folk of “Kind of Girl” and the Peter Gabriel-indebted “Solid” to the jagged, Robyn-esque synth-pop of “What I Want” and the playful pop of “Silk Chiffon.” “Music helps us feel less alone in our human experience, and I think we want people to feel that,” Gavin says. “There’s a hope that these songs can foster moments of connection and joy for people, like for our queer community—we want these songs to be a soundtrack to new experiences that aren\'t full of torment.” Below, MUNA walks Apple Music through their new album, track by track. **“Silk Chiffon” feat. Phoebe Bridgers** Naomi McPherson: “The song has been kicking about since the end of 2019. Katie wrote it, and at the time it was just the pre-chorus. The bridge lyrics were in the place of the chorus. It was synth-ier, but Jo and I had the instinct to make it feel like opening credits of a late-\'90s, early-aughts rom-com. We had been kicking around the idea of having someone feature on the second verse, and Phoebe came to mind—this was prior to us signing to her label. She loved the song and was so stoked to hop on it, which made us feel so, so good.” **“What I Want”** Katie Gavin: “This was a song that started as actually a Zoom co-write. I did it with Leland, who is an amazing songwriter and artist in his own right, and who has also done a lot of work on songs in the universe of *RuPaul\'s Drag Race*. I had a couple beats from Naomi, and I took them into the session and we both liked that one. After the session, I sent a demo to Naomi and Jo, and I remember Naomi freaking out and knowing that it was going to be a banger and wanting to work on it. I was a little bit scared of the song initially because of how much of a banger it is. There are strings in the chorus that were very inspired by \'Toxic,\' the classic Britney song.” **“Runner’s High”** NM: “MUNA’s anti-running song. The funny thing about this track is, I think, that the beat came about in the most peculiar way. During 2020, a friend of ours was letting us use her studio for very cheap, and we were trying to take making music very seriously. We wanted to do something where it\'s like, we had no songs that we were currently working on, so we came up with a game called \'the five-minute game,\' where each of us had to make a part in a five-minute period, and then someone else adds a part on top. The start of this song came from that game. And I don\'t think I\'ve ever heard a song that has this specific metaphor; obviously, it is one of a kind and the song slaps. So, you can run to it. We won\'t, but we hope that people do.” **“Home by Now”** Josette Maskin: “This came about in a pretty classic MUNA way. All the songs have different trajectories and paths, but this one was something that Katie wrote when we were on tour with Phoebe in the fall of 2021. We sometimes find that being on the road can be pretty inspiring. When you\'re away from your stuff and you don\'t have the obligation to work on an album that has a pending deadline, it can take you out of your element and inspire you in a way.” **“Kind of Girl”** KG: “For songs that I start on my own, there\'s two categories: I did it on Ableton, which was \'Home by Now,\' or I did it on an acoustic guitar, which is \'Kind of Girl.\' \'Kind of Girl\' I wrote in a bathtub. I wrote it from start to finish, chronologically, first the pre-chorus, then the chorus. I was thinking about the power that the words we choose to identify with have on the way that our story unfolds. How those affect what we think is possible and not possible and what we think is fixed or unfixed. We recorded just a bunch of layers of acoustic guitar and Josette\'s slide through a toy amp and built this world out.” **“Handle Me”** JM: “Katie wrote this song in January 2020. When we first did this song, Naomi and I were thinking a lot about, funny enough, 311—there’s a guitar part based on those early-2000s songs, something that would be on *The O.C.* Naomi felt really inspired about changing the drums and then I played the guitar part slightly differently and we tried to make it more of a lo-fi sexy track. I really fought for the song to be on the record, because I was like, ‘Oh, we don\'t really have a song in our discography that is sexy in this specific way.\' It shows a different side of MUNA.” **“No Idea”** NM: “‘No Idea’ started at the top of 2020. At the time we were toying with the idea of the third record being an alternative reimagining of the past wherein we were the biggest boy band in the late \'90s and early 2000s. But we are ourselves, and gay, we cast ourselves into that canon. I think of \'No Idea\' as our \'90s Max Martin moment meets a little bit of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk. Katie had written the song, it was pretty finished, but there wasn\'t a second verse. We had a session with Mitski; she came over to me and Jo’s apartment at the time, and we talked about disco. She thought the song was hot and fun to work on; she gave us a kick into the direction that the song found itself in.” **“Solid”** NM: “‘Solid’ has been around since 2018, 2017, I think. It just didn\'t have a place on the second record. It was in the archive for a bit and then it reappeared. It is one of my favorites. We’re always super inspired by \'80s music. I mean, who doesn\'t, that makes pop music nowadays? That artistic innovation, computerized sound, and synthesized sound. It was just fun to work on after all these years. It bops.” **“Anything But Me”** KG: “I wrote this song in my car. I had my laptop, and I was eating a burrito, and I came up with the first lines of the song and I was just like, ‘That\'s so stupid, but it\'s stupid in a way that\'s almost brilliant.’ This song is in 12/8, a really specific groove, and it has a buoyant energy. I had written the verse and the pre-chorus and had the basic groove down, and I sent it to Naomi and Jo. Naomi was like, \'There needs to be a section after the pre-chorus where you\'re doing something very like Shania \[Twain\] with the word “me,” holding it out and having a moment with it.\' We fleshed it out from there. When Jo and Naomi were working on it, they had some influence from Mariah Carey.” **“Loose Garment”** NM: “‘Loose Garment’ started because I was looking at furniture and I made a beat and called it ‘Teak Wood Nine.’ I sent Katie a bunch of beats that had wood and furniture names. We all love Imogen Heap and her collaboration with Guy Sigsworth. The band Frou Frou, they\'re a touchstone for us, both her solo project and that band; it felt like maybe \[the song\] could live in that universe. We switched the beat up and gave it a pulsating feel that motivated the song. It’s definitely a sad one. Cynthia Tolson killed it. She played strings on it and just went off.” **“Shooting Star”** KG: “This song was written literal weeks before we turned in the album. That\'s very MUNA. I always write until it is pencils down. I had written this on acoustic guitar, and it was this folky bassline guitar part that really turned Josette off, and I remember I wanted it. We always intended for this to be a 10-song record. There\'s a certain kind of guitar that we got obsessed with using, and I feel like we associate it a lot with the sound of music in LA: It\'s a rubber-bridge, vintage acoustic guitar, and Jo reworked the guitar part into something that was better. It was Naomi\'s idea to have kind of this Coldplay moment at the end where the song explodes into this more cathartic beat and arrangement, and that was really, I think, a big moment for that song as well.”

MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms, could have made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Since MUNA — lead singer/songwriter Katie Gavin, guitarist/producer Naomi McPherson, guitarist Josette Maskin — began making music together in college, at USC, they’d always embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience: the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But sometimes, for MUNA, after nearly a decade of friendship and a long stretch of pandemic-induced self-reckoning, the most radical note possible is that of bliss. MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is a landmark — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. It’s marked by a newfound creative assurance and technical ability, both in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace. Here, more than ever, MUNA musters their unique powers to break through the existential muck and transport you, suddenly, into a room where everything is possible — a place where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof, and self-consciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.

“The de-evolution of man.” That’s how Viagra Boys frontman Sebastian Murphy sums up the theme of the band’s third album. “My inspirations were how divided everyone is, people’s ideas of why things are happening, and just general craziness—especially reactions to the pandemic,” he tells Apple Music. “I was also very inspired by a few documentaries about monkeys.” As always, the American-born vocalist of the Swedish punk group puts a witty and humorous spin on the subject matter, but its roots come from the genuine despair he feels viewing his home country from abroad. “I definitely use the States as a reference point because it’s a real melting pot of insanity, in my opinion,” he says. “I mean, those types of people definitely exist here in Sweden, but they’re not storming the Capitol or anything.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Baby Criminal”** “My girlfriend said, ‘I used to be a baby, now I’m just a criminal.’ She said she had that feeling once, and I could really relate to that. There’s been times in my life where I’ve excused everything I do because I was just a kid. And then it just got to this point where I’m dealing drugs and getting into trouble. I’m just a criminal. But I took a more playful twist on it—I made up a character named Jimmy, who’s this guy sitting in his basement making a nuclear reactor. That’s inspired by a true story. I think there was a kid in the States who did that when he was 14 or something.” **“Cave Hole”** “This is a freestanding interlude made by a guy called DJ Hayden. He works with our producer, and he was working side by side with us while we were recording some of these songs. He makes super-cool electronic music, and I just wanted to have a few weird interludes between the songs. I actually wanted to call the album *Cave Hole*. I like it because it reminds you of a K-hole, so I’m glad I got to fit it into the tracklist.” **“Troglodyte”** “If one of these school shooters or mass shooters were to live back in the days when we were apes, and they had these ideas of doing a mass murder or some shit like that, they wouldn’t have a chance because the other apes would just maul the shit out of them. It’s basically a mixture of me saying that we would have been better off as monkeys, and at the same time, it’s a fuck-you to a lot of these angry idiots with extreme right-wing ideas.” **“Punk Rock Loser”** “I’m painting a picture of this guy who’s a real asshole, but at the same time, I’ve been that asshole as well. It’s a song I could’ve written a couple of albums ago because I was that person. Sometimes I definitely feel like I’m a punk-rock loser. It’s like a flashback to my life five years ago. I’m making fun of it, and I’m also kind of romanticizing it in a way, like when you’re walking down the street and you feel like you’re the king of the world. I love that feeling, but it’s not often I get to feel that way.” **“Creepy Crawlers”** “This is very inspired by this dude I saw get interviewed by Channel 5 News. He started ranting about the vaccine causing kids to grow tails and animal hair. I’m like, ‘How do you know if the hair is human or animal?’ But I have a love for extreme absurdities, like stuff you would read in the *Weekly World News*—stories about two-headed babies or the idea of Hillary Clinton using adrenochrome to stay young, or the idea that the global elite are these reptiles plotting against us. So, this is me putting myself in the shoes of a conspiracy theorist.” **“The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis”** “This is based on a documentary about chimpanzees that has the same title. It’s about this trade-off that happened millions of years ago, when we were all still chimpanzees and lived up in the trees. We could count at incredible speeds to assess a threat really easily, like a pack of predators coming in. When the chimpanzees moved from the trees down to the savanna, they suddenly developed a need to communicate with each other about these threats, like, ‘There’s a lion over there—maybe don’t go there.’ So, they developed the ability to speak, and the theory is that we traded our ability to count things really fast—really good short-term memories—for long-term memories. And my idea is, that’s what fucked us. Long-term memories gave us the ability to plan murder and shit like that. Monkeys don’t think about that. They live in the now.” **“Globe Earth”** “That’s another DJ Hayden thing, and the name is obviously from flat-earthers. When they try to diss us globe-earthers, that’s what they call us. Like, ‘You fucking globe-earther.’ I love it.” **“Ain’t No Thief”** “This is about being accused of something that I obviously did, but being a bit delusional about it, which I have been in many periods of my life. Especially when I was a speed freak, I would get accused of something and I would just be like, ‘How the fuck could you think that about me?’ Like this feeling of being betrayed because someone thinks that you’re a certain way, when in fact you are that way. It’s supposed to be a bit funny.” **“Big Boy”** “We were pretty drunk in the studio at, like, 3 am, and we had this idea of sounding like a ’70s rock band recording a blues song. So, we all got in there and we’re playing our instruments and it sounded like shit. But at the same time, it was cool. We ended up adding a hip-hop beat, and I made up lyrics on the spot that were the stupidest thing I could think of—feeling like a big boy. It goes back to that feeling you had when you were a kid, but you’re an adult. Like, ‘I’m a big boy. I’ve got an apartment with a big TV’—as if that makes you a grown person. It doesn’t. You can still be very childish and pay your rent.” **“ADD”** “I wanted to write a song about ADD because it’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager. I’ve just always had this inability to concentrate, and I forget things all the time. I’ll leave the house without my keys or put something down and forget it right away. Or someone sends me an important email and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to answer this.’ And then I never do. It’s about this inability to do menial tasks—that’s what defines ADD for me. I just can’t motivate myself to do the easiest thing in the world.” **“Human Error”** “This is another DJ Hayden instrumental.” **“Return to Monke”** “I saw a meme that was just a picture of a monkey, and it said, ‘Return to Monke,’ spelled like that. I love meme culture, and especially that meme. So simple and yet so strong. When I wrote the song, I imagined us playing live and I pictured people in the crowd completely losing it and turning into monkeys—flying all over the place, throwing shit, taking off their clothes. It was inspired by Rage Against the Machine as well. I wanted to create a song that people could sing along to, like chanting in a cult. That phrase ‘leave society, be a monkey’ is just taking the piss out of these people who think the world is a big conspiracy against them. Maybe they should just leave.”

Katie Kim announces her fifth full-length album, Hour of the Ox, on her own I Actually Like Music label. "Hour of the Ox is a collection of quiet moments that began alone, in flow, that were then generously reconstructed and reinforced with TMT steel. A sort of time capsule recorded over a period of time that became a world within itself"

Grammy and Americana-award-winning singer-songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires has pushed the reset button with 'Take It Like A Man', releasing a record that is so unlike anything she has ever recorded that you would be tempted to think it’s her debut album instead of her seventh. Shires, who also plays in The Highwomen, worked with producer Lawrence Rothman (Angel Olsen, Kim Gordon) to make a fearless confessional, showing the world what turning 40 looks like in 10 emotionally raw tracks.

Drive-By Truckers nod once again to their Southern roots on their 14th studio album and the follow-up to 2020’s *The Unraveling* and *The New OK*. Club XIII refers to a real bar in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood cut their teeth before forming the band, with lyrical references to the Truckers’ early days peppered across the album. Highlights on the LP, which the band recorded at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens, include opening track “The Driver,” which chronicles memories from early days on the road, and the contemplative “Shake and Pine.” Margo Price, Schaefer Llana, and R.E.M.’s Mike Mills all guest on the album.

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

At this point, Lizzo needs no introduction. The endlessly witty, playfully braggadocious, and proudly plus-size powerhouse has been pocketing Grammys and flying private for a minute now, and in many ways, her celebratory fourth album *Special* is a snapshot from her view at the top. “I felt a lot of pressure to follow up *Cuz I Love You* with more bangers,” she tells Apple Music. “Or to capture this post-‘Truth Hurts’-single-girl-era Lizzo. But concepts have never really been my bag. It feels like I’m lying. Instead, I just wrote honestly about where I’ve been for the last few years, and who I’ve become.” Given these tumultuous times, the tone of the album shifted a bit. In its early phases, *Special* was a political project of angry, protest-oriented rock songs—a way to “address the injustices I see in the world,” she says. But her songwriting led her into brighter, more positive territory. “I started writing from a place of gratitude rather than fear, and that’s always where I wanted to be,” she says. “Whether I have everything in the world or it’s all taken away from me, I always want my base level to be gratitude. These songs are a celebration of who I am right now.” Laced with campy one-liners (“It’s bad bitch o’clock/Yeah, it’s thick thirty”), hard-to-get clearances (Beastie Boys, Coldplay, Lauryn Hill), and chunky disco-funk beats designed to make you move, these spirited, charismatic anthems are her most adventurous yet. They also detail Lizzo’s keys to happiness: counting your blessings and loving yourself first. **“The Sign”** “This was originally track two. The first track I had was a sad song about love and loss, because I wanted to catch people by surprise. Like a traditional Lizzo album starts with a big fanfare, it\'s very in-your-face. As this album evolved and I made peace with not putting a lot of those darker notes on here, it became clear to me that the right way to start this was by being my honest self. That meant: ‘Hi, motherfucker!’ That in-your-face fanfare. I think it works great as a tone-setter, too, because honestly, where else would this song go? It can\'t go at the end. It can\'t be in the middle. It\'s definitely not track three. It’s a kick-off. It’s saying, ‘We\'re about to have fun. This is about to be a musical journey.’” **“About Damn Time”** “I have been making feel-good music for a long fucking time now—as early as ‘Good as Hell’ for people who\'ve known about me. So when I made a song like ‘Juice’ that had this funky disco feel to it, I didn\'t really realize what I was doing. I was just letting the song happen. It was the complete opposite with ‘About Damn Time.’ For this record, I was like, ‘We are making a disco record.’ I wanted a song that would be emblematic and reflective of the times. And I associate disco with resilience; it helped so many people stomp out of a dark era in this country. So I hoped that a contemporary disco song would have a similar effect. Now, I don\'t know what we\'re walking into. Things have gotten crazy. But I do know that we\'re always moving. I wanted this song to be a marching song \[that would help\] us move forward.” **“Grrrls”** “benny blanco and I had never worked together before this album. We’d eaten together, but we\'d never worked together. Then one day I heard he wanted to get in the studio and I was like, ‘Oh shit, okay, let\'s make it happen.’ He came with one track and it was this. So I sat with it for a while. Eventually I was like, ‘Listen, this is either going to be the greatest song ever or the biggest waste of our time.’ Because Beastie Boys were one of the greatest copyrights of all time. No one, and I mean no one, has done this. Until now. Dude, Beastie Boys cleared ‘Girls’ for yours truly. It’s an honor.” **“2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)”** “This is the first record I made with Max Martin, and it’s a dream record. As someone who\'s been writing songs since I was 9, who studied music since I was 12, and who dreamed of being a performer, Max Martin is the dream collaborator. Recording it was like watching a legend in action. He’s an extremely collaborative, open, creative soul. The song is a callback to when pop records had key changes—that golden era of late-’80s and early-’90s pop when singers had massive records that were vocally impressive but also danceable, and the production quality was very intentional. I think it\'s a work of art. It’s a masterpiece.” **“I Love You Bitch”** “‘I Love You Bitch’ came from a tweet, and it\'s not the same as ‘Truth Hurts,’ so don\'t come at me for royalties, Twitter. Shortly after ‘Rumors’ with Cardi B dropped, Cardi tweeted that she wanted to hear a love song from me next. And I was like, ‘Okay, if Lizzo did a love song, what would it be? I love you, bitch?’ It was one of those rare times where I had the title before the song. I got in the studio with Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin and told them about my idea. Omer started playing the guitar, and I started freestyling to it. I\'m from Houston, and there\'s this Houston rapper named Z-Ro who has a song called ‘I Hate U Bitch.’ Suddenly I was like, hold up, what if I sang the ‘I Hate U Bitch’ melody but said ‘I Love You Bitch’ instead? It just came out, and it might be the greatest thing we’ve ever done. As I was writing the lyrics, I realized that I wanted to write a universal love song—one you could sing to the person you\'re fucking and your best friend, to your family or to someone you just met at a bar.” **“Special”** “After ‘Rumors,’ I received a lot of backlash. I think it was because people hadn\'t heard from me since *Cuz I Love You* and this was their opportunity to attack me because I was visible, you know? But I turn my pain into music. I turn my pain into profit. I make it work for me. So I went into the studio to write a song for myself that would remind me how special I am. In the second verse, I say, ‘Could you imagine a world where everybody\'s the same? And you could cancel a girl ’cause she just wanted to change? How could you throw fucking stones if you ain\'t been through her pain? That\'s why we feel so alone, that\'s why we feel so much shame.’ I was trying to flip the mirror on people, that same mirror that I check myself with. It’s me saying, ‘You attack people like they\'re the monster, but you\'ve become the monster.’ No one\'s giving anyone the space to be themselves, to show their specialness, and to grow.” **“Break Up Twice”** “This is my second dream collab: Mark Ronson. And let me tell you, this is quintessential Mark. His style and swag is inescapable. Working with him made me feel like a kid again, because you just jam. And I used to be in a rock band, so that’s my bread and butter. When I first heard the guitar part, I was like, ‘This is classic shit right here.’ And when I heard those Lauryn Hill ‘Doo Wop’ chords, I was like, ‘Do we run from this or lean into it?’ You’ve got to lean into it. She cleared it in a day and I was beside myself. The story behind it is like, I’d had a barbecue and one of my friends threatened the guy I invited. She was like, ‘If you fuck with her, I\'m gonna slash your tires.’ I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’ I took it into the studio and Mark thought it was brilliant. The idea is: I don\'t break up twice. We\'re only going to do this once, and we\'re going to do it right.” **“Everybody\'s Gay”** “I wanted to write a fantasy song, like one of those Hollywood songs where you\'re taken away to a picture that I\'m painting, a dream sequence kind of thing. It\'s very cinematic. I wanted to write about this wild costume party where everybody gets together and has a good time. And no, when I sing ‘Take your mask off,’ I didn\'t mean your N95. I meant like the mask of the person that you have to uphold when you\'re out in the world, the mask that protects your true self. Take that off, because we accept you for who you are in this space. This high-key is the centerpiece of the album, musically, for me. It\'s a cornucopia of sound.” **“Naked”** “Goddammit, where do I even start? Pop Wansel made this beautiful track, and I was like, ‘If I don\'t use this track, I\'m going to think about this for the rest of my life. If I don\'t use this beat, I\'m going to think about this beat for the rest of my life.’ Initially, I wanted to write a song about how comfortable I\'ve become with myself, but then I evolved as a person. And as I’ve evolved, ‘Naked’ has undergone a lot of rewriting. It has evolved with me. So now it’s like, ‘How accepting are you of me?’ It’s very intimate. I saw Solange perform a couple years ago now at the Lovebox Festival in London, and I was in awe of her set because she had so much nuance. Meanwhile, I\'m all bravado. I\'m in-your-face, loud-loud-loud, full-throttle. I was like, ‘Man, on my next album, I want nuance.’ Because there\'s nothing like the control that she has, the power she has in the quiet. So on ‘Naked,’ I\'m in a half-falsetto for most of the song. I’m ad-libbing here and there. I’m having a little chat. It’s under your breath. Also, I had a sinus infection when I sang this, and frankly I give the best vocals with a sinus infection.” **“Birthday Girl”** “I did this with \[production duo\] Monsters & Strangerz, and it all came from a freestyle. I was like, ‘Is it your birthday, girl? ’Cause you lookin\' like a present.’ I literally think I freestyled that. And they were like, ‘Whoa.’ Mind you, the song wasn\'t about birthdays. I thought it was going to be like the first line of the first verse but then I’d go on to talk about how fine my friends are and whatever. And they were like, ‘No, no, this is the song.’ I felt tied to the song’s initial concept, which was to celebrate my friends and how much I love and appreciate them, but then I realized that birthdays symbolize that. Birthdays are a big deal for me. Every friend that I have, I try to make their birthday the biggest blowout every year. Helicopters, Omarion. Lizards. Three-tiered cakes. Like I say in the song, ‘When you\'ve been through the most/You got to do the most.’ That\'s an Instagram caption for life.” **“If You Love Me”** “This was the first song I wrote for the album, and it was something I needed to get off my chest. It’s about all of the times I go onstage and talk to the crowd and am like, ‘You guys show me so much love, so much support, and I want to thank you for supporting a woman who looks like me—a big Black woman from Houston, Texas. If you could show this same energy to people who look like me but who aren’t Lizzo, who aren’t dancing onstage and entertaining you... If you could show it to a woman on the street, show her some love and respect...’ Because historically, that hasn\'t been the case. It’s asking: How do we take the time to be kind to ourselves and kind to the person next to us, no matter what they look like or where they come from? How can we take this respect that we give to entertainers and apply it to people in the real world? This is a record that fans who\'ve been following me for a long time will get it as soon as they hear it.” **“Coldplay”** “This song was literally created from a 45-minute freestyle to a piano loop. Ricky Reed had me sit in the booth and just talk, so I started romanticizing about this trip I’d just taken to Tulum, about the experiences I’d had and how I was singing Coldplay and crying. A few weeks later, he was like, ‘Hey, you remember that freestyle you said in the booth? I wrote a song using your words.’ He played me a track that sampled Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy.’ Ricky was like, ‘We should call this “My Love Is You.”’ And I was like, ‘Nah, we should call it “Coldplay.”’ Because I\'m going to tell you: Black people call people the name of their band. We call Adam Levine ‘Maroon 5.’ ‘Oh, there goes Maroon 5.’ I thought there was something funny and real about calling a song that samples Coldplay ‘Coldplay.’ Their songwriting is so simple and poetic. So I was like, ‘Let\'s honor them. Let\'s not run from it.’ On this album, I didn\'t run from anything. If there’s a thesis to this album, it’s that. Embracing myself.”

“I like that rock ’n’ roll is simple, that it’s 12 bars—the ineptitude of it,” Jason Pierce tells Apple Music. It’s a funny statement to hear from an artist notorious for spending years meticulously fine-tuning his records and hiring enough guest instrumentalists to fill a 747. But as the Spiritualized leader has proven time and time again in his three decades of space-rock exploration, minimalism provides the clearest path to maximalism. “I like the American bands that wanted desperately to sound like The Rolling Stones, but by pure accident, it all came out wrong, and it became their own thing. They were just seeing where it goes. And I still follow that. With records, they say the devil’s in the details, and there’s thousands of details on the record. I’m trying to find a way of crushing all these things together to make something that doesn’t sound like anything else.” On Spiritualized’s ninth album, two of those details jump out at you: a woman’s voice announcing the title of the record, followed by a lunar-shuttle transmission beep—the very same effects that introduced their 1997 psychedelic-gospel masterwork, *Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space*. And much like that album’s opening track, *Everything Was Beautiful*’s first song, “Always Together With You,” builds a simple repeated melody and romantic lyric into an orchestral surge that’s a little overwhelming. It’s the first of many audio Easter eggs on an album that takes a number of sonic and lyrical cues from Spiritualized’s trailblazing ’90s-era explorations in interstellar rock, to the point that *Everything Was Beautiful* often feels like a greatest-hits retrospective made of new songs. But as much as he’s cultivated a reputation as an all-seeing auteur, Pierce insists such callbacks aren’t part of some grand design. For instance, the seeds for “Always Together With You” were actually first planted back in 2014, when an embryonic version of the song appeared on a Record Store Day compilation called *Space Project*, which featured songs incorporating recordings captured by NASA. Pierce knew he always wanted to take another pass on that hastily recorded demo, but even after embellishing it into the rapturous curtain-raiser we hear on *Everything Was Beautiful*, he still felt it was missing something—until work on the 2021 reissue of *Ladies and Gentlemen* inspired a late-game revision. “I felt like it was a big ask to have people listen to six minutes of three-note chords at the top of an album, and I couldn’t resolve that,” Pierce says. “I couldn’t find a way that I wanted to listen to it and present it. So, I did two very simple steals—the transmission beep from the Apollo landing, which is at the top of *Ladies and Gentlemen*, and the announcement of the album. Suddenly, the whole thing felt like a strange transmission—like somebody outside of the planet looking down. It adds some kind of drama to it that wasn’t there.” Such spur-of-the-moment decisions defined the creation of *Everything Was Beautiful*, which is effectively the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s *And Nothing Hurt*. (The titles form a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse-Five*.) Pierce is grateful his record company talked him out of approaching the two albums as a single piece. “My focus was too wide,” he says. “If I had tried to do the whole thing together, I think I’d still be working on it now.” By splitting the project into two separate releases, Pierce gave himself the time and space to exhale and let the songs evolve according to his gut instincts rather than some master plan. To wit, the epic centerpiece track “The Mainline Song” began life as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of longtime live favorite “Electric Mainline” (“It was almost like giving the audience an intermission,” Pierce says) only to suddenly receive lyrics late in the process and get reborn as the album’s most exultant anthem. Even the seemingly simple country ballad “Crazy” had, in Pierce’s words, “its own perverse end.” Due to budgetary constraints, Pierce’s original vision of an orchestral serenade modeled after Lee Hazlewood and Jimmy Holliday gave way to a Mellotron-backed recording, and when he couldn’t decide between two different mixes of the song, he opted to use both in separate channels. But as a result, “Crazy” transcends the realm of pure country pastiche and takes on the undefinable, otherworldly quality that’s allowed Spiritualized to maintain their own lofty orbit for more than 30 years. “Most people edit down—they have 15, 16 tracks that they edit down to eight or nine for an album,” Pierce says. “I feel like I edit up: I haven’t got enough songs to ever edit something out of the equation, so I drag everything up to be the best it could be. And as some songs get better, the bar gets raised for the others.”

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

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

Lake Havasu is a community of winding hillside roads, launched in the 1960s alongside a brick-for-brick rebuild of the original London Bridge. “It’s this very synthetic, gimmicky place set in this soulful, desolate landscape,” laughs Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, who moved to the Arizona city for one year in seventh grade. Bazan collected his earliest childhood experiences for 2019’s Phoenix, the prolific artist’s celebrated return to the Pedro moniker and the first in a planned series of five records chronicling his past homes. To write its sequel, Bazan traveled to Havasu four times over several years, driving past his junior high campus, a magical skating rink, and other nostalgic locations that evoked feelings long suppressed. “An intersection I hadn’t remembered for 30 years would trigger a flood of hidden memories,” he says. “I was there to soak in it as much as possible.” Driving the inscrutable loops of Havasu’s lakeside, Bazan listened through an audiobook of Tom Petty’s biography, eventually dialoguing with Petty’s voice in his mind. A revelation from the book—that Petty subconsciously wrote the song “Wildflowers” as an act of kindness toward himself—inspired Bazan to approach his own work with radical generosity toward his young self. “I wanted to be there for that kid,” he offers. “That twelve year old still needs parenting, and still needs to process.” To revisit his past with openness, Bazan modified harmful work habits he’d accepted as necessary. That meant doing away with deadlines, and accumulating moments of play as he felt moved to—“Rather than squeezing stones every single time. I’m on a slow journey away from that,” he clarifies. As he worked through the music that became Havasu, flexibility and curiosity informed the arrangements. Bazan began writing on a simple synthesizer and drum machine setup. He detoured to a more elaborate assortment of analog electronic equipment, then woodshed his original two-handed keyboard arrangements on fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Concurrently relearning his catalog for a weekly series of livestream concerts also renewed his gratitude toward songwriting. “I was trying to evaluate what I have to show for 20 years of kicking my own ass,” Bazan quips about the strenuousness of full-time touring. “But the garden of my songs is what I’ve been building. It doesn’t have to be an ego test.” Approaching his discography with appreciation reconciled cognitive dissonance about the music of his childhood, which Bazan had dismissed as cheesy. “As a kid, that Richard Marx song would come on and I would swoon. I’ve been working my whole life to pretend that wasn’t there, and I wanted to honor the sappy, emotional kid that I was. It helped me see myself,” he admits. When he entered the studio with co-producer and engineer Andy D. Park (who worked in the same capacity on Phoenix), Bazan planned to make a desolate, desert-informed record. But the duo quickly realized a rock configuration closer to Pedro’s classic sound would convey the landscape and stories best. Bazan switched to a Les Paul, which brought smoothness and linearity; though he’d planned to use a drum machine, he laid down scratch drum kit and bass as an experiment. Listening back the next day, those initial rhythm section takes had a sense of joy and ease that augmented the record’s themes of psychic healing. “First Drum Set,” which faithfully chronicles Bazan’s lifesaving switch from clarinet to drums, builds the explosive jubilation of musical self-discovery into triumphant fills, like a throbbing heartbeat overflowing with love. “Teenage Sequencer” takes on the rattling anxiety of mind-body disconnect, using trepidatious bass, vacillating guitar slides and hopeful tambourine to evoke the crushed-out ups and downs of the mutable edge of thirteen. “There goes nature, pulling me along like a sequencer,” sings Bazan, wondering: “Will I always be a teenager now?” And on “Making the Most Of It,” stuttering hi-hat adorns downtempo, arpeggiated guitar, adding playfulness to a reckoning with concealed emotion. “I can go along to get along, but let me know when I can quit making the most of it,” Bazan shrugs. Yet the contrasting optimism of the music reflects an imperative to communicate feelings both light and heavy: to break through the scar tissue of tender memory and find peace. Though Bazan wrote, arranged, and performed most instruments himself—as is characteristic of most of his work, solo and with Pedro the Lion—several key collaborators helped him find the self-accepting tenderness needed for Havasu. Pedro live drummer Sean T. Lane makes appearances on every track, but on a self-constructed noisemaking instrument called “the bike.” It’s composed of various metal objects and strings mounted on a bicycle frame, rigged with contact mics and run through a drone-accentuating pedalboard. “It can be percussive, it can be ambient. It’s a real nightmare machine. It’s just great,” Bazan enthuses, highlighting its crucially menacing counterpoint to the otherwise “wistful, melancholy, guilty pleasure romcom” progression of “Own Valentine.” A warm moment exploring his synth setup with longtime collaborator Andy Fitts led to the insistent new wave sound of “Too Much.” And on album opener and cinematic scene-setter “Don’t Wanna Move,” a riff appears that was first devised by Pedro guitarist Erik Walters and used on Phoenix’s closer. “I was psyched to open this record with it,” Bazan says. “I’m trying to have a flow between the records, so if people want to engage with that, there’s something there.” Though the next three albums in the series are not fully written, Bazan currently understands Phoenix and Havasu together as a completed exposition in a traditional three-act structure. “I want to paint a picture of how my family and parents and everyone I love got coopted by nationalistic, authoritarian religion,” he lays out. “I’m planting the seeds for that, and my own culpability is part of it.” Though these careful compositions pave the way for darker stories in later acts, Bazan resolutely emphasizes the curative nature of returning to Havasu, mentally and musically. “It gave me the ability to make vulnerable choices, and connect with a part of my younger self that I didn’t want to turn my back on,” he suggests. “I worked through a lot of self-judgment, and was kinder to myself on this record than I have been before in any songs.” The result is an open-hearted acknowledgment of shame and elation both, spaciously but delicately arranged in affirmation of the nurturing those feelings deserve—even if the kid in need of validation has long since grown up and moved away.

The vibey, moody LA rock quartet (guitarist/vocalists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, drummer/vocalist Stella Mozgawa, and bassist/vocalist Jenny Lee Lindberg) formed in 2004, albeit with a slightly altered lineup—which is to say, its members, now into their forties, have been playing together for nearly half their lives. Throughout that time, Warpaint’s hallmark was their electric live chemistry, its members known to shut their eyes, zone out, and jam with cosmic synchronicity. Their fourth full-length arrives after a six-year hiatus, during which its members pursed their respective solo projects and otherwise settled into their adult lives. But their inexorable bond brought them back together, although this time, songwriting and recording transpired mostly over remote Zoom sessions in makeshift home studios. Elements of the thousand-yard-stare desert rock and wallowy post-punk of their early records remain (the downcast “Trouble,” the lurching “Proof”), but there’s a newfound warmth to *Radiate Like This* inspired by motherhood, stability, and friendships that have stood the test of time and touring. Think chilled-out grooves for road trips to Joshua Tree, laidback love songs about sun and rain and eternity (and the occasional request to send nudes).

Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years –both in and out of lockdown –these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.

On the cover of Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong*, the singer-songwriter gazes into the mid-distance, the sky behind her red-hot from wildfires. The home she stands before is her own in LA, where she witnessed blazing fires up close in 2020 and sheltered with her family during the global pandemic. It is also where *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* was crafted, the album becoming Van Etten’s attempt to make sense of the pandemic years, our unequal world, and the shaky future she’s raising her son into. “Up the whole night/Undefined/Can’t stop thinking ’bout peace and war,” she sings on “Anything,” a soaring ballad on which she also explores the numbness induced by the monotony of the pandemic. But *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* isn’t just about the collective experience of recent events. Here, Van Etten is also a mother assuaging guilt that her career keeps her away from home (“I need my job/Please don’t hold that against me,” she sings to her son on “Home to Me”), a partner trying to keep intimacy alive (“Come Back,” a track reminiscent of Van Etten’s “Like I Used To” collaborator and indie peer Angel Olsen), and a citizen of the world who’ll do what she can to make it a better place: “Let’s go march/I’ll go downtown,” she sings on the shimmering, anthemic “I’ll Try.” There’s much of what you might expect from a Van Etten record: acoustic guitars, lonesome minor-chord vocals, driving drums, and the jagged electro-pop of 2019’s *Remind Me Tomorrow* (see the hooky “Headspace” or the self-forgiveness anthem “Mistakes”). But despite it being constructed in a shrunken world, this is also an album on which one of America’s foremost singer-songwriters pushes her sound—and voice—to astonishing new heights. That perhaps reaches a peak on “Born,” which begins as a slow-marching piano moment before exploding into a stop-you-in-your-tracks album centerpiece on which Van Etten’s vocals sound not unlike a celestial choir amid swirling synths and cascading, cathartic drums. Like many of this record’s tracks, “Born” is gargantuan and rich, but elsewhere things are more simple. On the raw, delicate “Darkish,” for example, Van Etten includes the birdsong she (and so many of us) heard during lockdown, a poignant reminder of the quietest days of the pandemic. *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* might have been shaped by moments of crisis, but it isn’t colored with despair. Just as something like a smile hovers across her expression on *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong*’s cover, optimism breaks through across this record. “Better stay light/I’m looking for a way,” she sings on opener “Darkness Fades,” before offering her ultimate worldview on “Darkish”: “It’s not dark/It’s only darkish.” We’ve been going about this all wrong, Van Etten seems to be saying, but there’s still time for that to change.

Sharon Van Etten has always been the kind of artist who helps people make sense of the world around them, and her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, concerns itself with how we feel, mourn, and reclaim our agency when we think the world - or at least, our world - might be falling apart. How do we protect the things most precious to us from destructive forces beyond our control? How do we salvage something worthwhile when it seems all is lost? And if we can’t, or we don’t, have we loved as well as we could in the meantime? Did we try hard enough? In considering these questions and her own vulnerability in the face of them, Van Etten creates a stunning meditation on how life’s changes can be both terrifying and transformative. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong articulates the beauty and power that can be rescued from our wreckages. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is as much a reflection on how we manage the ending of metaphorical worlds as we do the ending of actual ones: the twin flames of terror and unrelenting love that light up with motherhood; navigating the demands of partnership when your responsibilities have changed; the loss of center and safety that can come with leaving home; how the ghosts of our past can appear without warning in our present; feeling helpless with the violence and racism in the world; and yes, what it means when a global viral outbreak forces us to relinquish control of the things that have always made us feel so human, and seek new forms of connection to replace them. Since the release of Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten has collaborated with artists ranging from Courtney Barnett and Joshua Homme to Norah Jones and Angel Olsen. Earlier releases were covered by artists like Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Big Red Machine and Idles, celebrating Sharon as a legendary songwriter from the very beginning. When the time came to return to her solo work, Van Etten reclaimed the reins, writing and producing the album in her new recording studio, custom built in her family’s Californian home. The more she faced – whether in new dangers emerging or old traumas resurfacing – the more tightly she held onto these songs and recordings, determined to work through grief by reasserting her power and staying squarely at the wheel of her next album. In fact, that interplay of loss and growth became a blueprint for what would become We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. The artwork reflects that, too, inspired as much by Van Etten’s old life as her new one. “I wanted to convey that in an image with me walking away from it all” says Van Etten, “not necessarily brave, not necessarily sad, not necessarily happy…” We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is intensely personal, exploring themes like motherhood, love, fear, what we can and can’t control, and what it means to be human in a world that is wracked by so much trauma. The track “Home To Me,” written about Van Etten’s son, uses the trademark “dark drums” of her previous work to invoke the sonic impression of a heartbeat. Synths grow in intensity, evoking the passing of time and the terror of what it means to have your child move inevitably toward independence, wanting to hold on to them tightly enough to protect them forever. In contrast, “Come Back” reflects on the desire to reconnect with a partner. Recalling all the optimism of love felt in its infancy, Van Etten begins with the plain beauty of just her voice and a guitar, building the arrangement alongside the call to “come back” to anyone who has lost their way, be it from another person or from themselves. Hovering between darkness and light, “Born” is an exploration of the self that exists when all other labels - mother, partner, friend - are stripped back. Throughout, and as always, we are at the mercy of Van Etten’s voice: the way it loops and arcs, the startling and emotive warmth of it. What started as a certain magic in Van Etten’s early recordings has grown into confidence, clarity and wisdom, even as she sings with the vulnerable beauty that has become her trademark. Nowhere is that truer than on “Mistakes,” where Van Etten creates a defiant anthem to the mistakes we make, and to everything we gain from them. Unlike Van Etten’s previous albums, there will be no songs off the album released prior to the record coming out. The ten tracks on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong are designed to be listened to in order, all at once, so that a much larger story of hope, loss, longing and resilience can be told. This is, in itself, a subtle act of control, but in sharing these songs it remains an optimistic and generous one. There is darkness here but there is light too, and all of it is held together by Van Etten’s uncanny ability to both pierce the hearts of her listeners and make them whole again. Things are not dark, she reminds us, only darkish.

Over the course of a career spanning more than three decades, Superchunk has served as a model for how to age and rage gracefully in punk, as they’ve continued to expand their musical palette and deliver sage-like lyrical wisdom without ever losing their agitated, pogo-ready essence. That latter quality resurfaced with a vengeance on 2018’s raucous Trump-era address *What a Time to Be Alive*, but *Wild Loneliness* channels its climate-change and pandemic anxieties into more meditative, cautiously optimistic modes of expression. Not that this shift should come as a huge shock: In between the two albums, the North Carolina veterans (and Merge Records founders) recorded an unplugged version of their 1994 indie-rock classic *Foolish*, and its relaxed feel and earthy tones illuminated the path to *Wild Loneliness*’ congenial jangle. “All the things that were driving *What a Time to Be Alive* are still terrible,” singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan tells Apple Music, “but it\'s hard to sustain that kind of negative energy for too long without it becoming a psychic drain. I wanted to make a record with a different feel to it.” While writing for *Wild Loneliness* began before COVID lockdowns, its creation was inevitably affected by them, with members cutting their parts in isolation. And yet the album radiates a warm communal spirit, thanks to a guest list—including Sharon Van Etten, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, and Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley—that speaks to Superchunk’s enduring cross-generational relevance. “Even though we couldn\'t be together in person, it was very gratifying to be able to still collaborate with people that we admire,” McCaughan says. “That independent community is something that\'s super important to us, and it’s still there, even though so much else in the music industry changes all the time.” Here, McCaughan guides us through *Wild Loneliness*’ rustic terrain, track by track. **“City of the Dead”** “The vibe that a lot of people have these days is: Everything is terrible, and there doesn\'t seem to be any good news on the horizon, but at the same time, here we are making coffee in the morning and going about our day. The kids are going to school, we\'re working, because what else are we supposed to do? The song isn\'t trying to necessarily reconcile those things, it\'s just talking about what it\'s like living in that world of oscillating between being super depressed and terrified, and then also still having the normal day-to-day things that make you happy or at least keep you going. Even though the title makes it sound like it\'s some grim pandemic thing, this was actually written before that, at the end of 2019.” **“Endless Summer”** “This was inspired by waking up on New Year\'s Day 2020, and it was, like, 75 degrees outside. We always go to a New Year\'s Day party that friends of ours have, and usually there\'s a bonfire, but there wasn\'t going to be one that year because it was so hot outside. You want there to be seasons, because seasons are a thing that allow your brain to organize the passing of time, and when there aren\'t any, it\'s a strange, discombobulating feeling. In the song, I reference Spanish Town in Jamaica and Lake Louise in Canada—these places that are so incredible, but who knows what they\'ll be like after all this is done. Glaciers will be melted, islands will be underwater—it\'s super sad. But if the music is sad, and the lyrics are sad—no one wants to listen to that. And because this song is such a power-pop song, it really called out for harmonies. I\'ve known Teenage Fanclub for a long time. And when I think of harmonies, they\'re one of the first groups I think of.” **“On the Floor”** “This was written during lockdown, and it\'s about just being here in the studio in the basement, plugging away, even though it’s like, who knows what\'s happening in the outside world. R.E.M. are a band I grew up listening to and I still love listening to them, and I wanted this song to feel like \'Pretty Persuasion\'—like an upbeat R.E.M. song. There are some people who are not lead vocalists but still bring so much to the song because you recognize their harmonies immediately, and Mike Mills is one of those singers.” **“Highly Suspect”** “This is about the pitfalls of not being honest with yourself and with other people about how you\'re feeling. Keeping up a facade of cheerfulness when everything is terrible is not only unrealistic, it\'s probably not healthy. This is a song where I knew when I sent it to \[guitarist\] Jim Wilbur, he\'d be like, ‘This part\'s too complicated!’ There\'s a couple of weird, syncopated chord-changey parts that are maybe a little different from what we normally do. But it reminded me of the horn section that you’d hear on an Attractions record, like *Punch the Clock*.” **“Set It Aside”** “Since I was already playing acoustic guitar, I decided to do something that had a little bit more fingerpicking than would normally work on a Superchunk record. But I figured as long as we\'re going down this road anyway, we might as well take advantage of it and have a genuinely quiet song. It turned out really well—I think \[drummer\] Jon \[Wurster\] playing with brushes really makes it a nice middle-of-the-record pause. You can tell from listening to it that it was written during lockdown—again, it\'s about acknowledging that everyone is in a fragile place and everyone needs to give everyone a break.” **“This Night”** “We wanted to move away from the anger and frustration of the last record, and I feel like one good way to do that is to look around and acknowledge the things that are good around you—relationships and people that you really value. The battle is always to do that without just becoming strictly nostalgic or sentimental. The title is a Destroyer reference \[to their 2002 album *This Night*\]. Dan \[Bejar\] is always referencing other bands and song titles and lyrics in his songs, so I figured turnabout is fair play. But then, of course, the first and the last line in the song are taken from The Smiths.” **“Wild Loneliness”** “This is about being trapped in your head, being trapped in your house, and having some kind of energy but no way to really let it out. We\'re super lucky: We have woods behind our house, so we can take a walk in this park—it\'s really a pretty good situation. But at the same time, if you\'re still walking that same loop every day, it does start to feel like Groundhog Day, which I think everyone was kind of going through. We got Andy Stack \[from Wye Oak\] to play sax on this. When I first asked him, he was like, \'I don’t know, it\'s not really my main instrument,\' but I was like, \'Dude, I\'ve heard you play it, I think it\'ll be a cool surprising thing.\'” **“Refracting”** “This is a slight throwback in feeling to the last record, because everything that was happening in 2018 is still happening now. So it\'s hard to avoid thinking about people that are trying to ruin the world for everyone else, but even the song itself is about trying to not just be thinking about that all the time. I\'m still playing acoustic guitar on it, but I was thinking about the flow of the album and I felt that if everything is midtempo, I still want a rocker in there somewhere.” **“Connection”** “\'Connection\'—kind of like \'This Night\'—is about thinking of what you do have, as opposed to what you\'re missing, or what\'s driving you crazy, or what you wish you could do. It\'s more about what\'s great about your family or your relationships or whatever you have around you, and not wanting to lose that because of your own psycho tendencies.” **“If You’re Not Dark”** “Because it starts so sparse, I couldn\'t really envision what it was going to be until Jon put his drum parts on it. I was loving the way it was sounding, but I still felt like it needed something. I had known Sharon \[Van Etten\] for a long time, and her partner Zeke \[Hutchins\] used to used to play drums in \[McCaughan’s side project\] Portastatic for a while, and I knew they were in North Carolina. So I got in touch with her about singing on this track, and I was really relieved that she was able to do it, because she really elevates the whole thing. Her voice is so distinctive—it doesn\'t just blend in as a harmony in a good way. It feels like a whole other presence on the song, which I feel like gives the song a broader reach.”

Chicago rapper/producer Saba’s first full-length since 2018’s critically acclaimed *CARE FOR ME* looks existentially inward instead of projecting outward. Whereas its predecessor was often perceived through the lens of grief, with his cousin John Walt’s tragic death weighing considerably on the proceedings, his third album explodes such listener myopia with a thoughtful and thought-provoking expression of American Blackness. Though its title might suggest scarcity on a surface level, these 14 songs exude richness in their textures and complexity in their themes. “Stop That” imbues its gauzy trap beat with self-motivating logic, while “Come My Way” gets to reminiscing over a laidback R&B groove. His choice of collaborators demonstrates a carefully curated approach, with 6LACK and Smino bringing a sense of community to the funk-infused “Still” and fellow Chicago native G Herbo helping to unravel multigenerational programming on the gripping “Survivor’s Guilt.” The presence of hip-hop elder statesman Black Thought on the title track only serves to further validate Saba’s experiences, the connection implicitly showing solidarity with sentiments and values of the preceding songs.