SPIN's 30 Best Albums of 2020

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.

“I’m honored that people have accepted these songs, that my fans enjoy and that have such feeling in them,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music about the success of “Ignorantes” and “Vete,” the two hit singles that preceded the surprise Leap Day release of *YHLQMDLG*. The album’s title is an acronym for “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana,” or “I Do What I Want,” and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio spends his highly anticipated follow-up to 2018’s *X 100PRE* living up to that promise, luxuriating in the sonic possibilities, presenting exemplary versions of Latin trap and reggaetón while expanding the genres in new directions with elements of rock and global pop. While *X 100PRE* featured a relatively small number of credited vocal guests, the follow-up embraces música urbana’s love of collaboration, pairing El Conejo Malo with an impressive array of features. Reaching back towards reggaetón’s 1990s roots, he taps veteran Yaviah for the hypnotic “Bichiyal” and the inimitable Daddy Yankee for “La Santa,” while linking up elsewhere with contemporary Latin R&B wave runners like Mora and Sech. Bad Bunny talked with Apple Music about a few of his favorites off the album and some of the people who helped make *YHLQMDLG* a reality. **Si Veo a Tu Mamá** “All of my songs come from my experience or are based on a real-life experience of mine. Everyone falls in love in life. Everyone has relationships. Everyone has had someone. There’s something so natural in writing about love, because we all feel love every day and share love.” **La Difícil** “What I like most about collaborating with \[producer duo\] Subelo NEO is how talented they are. They are such humble people who know how to work as a team. They understand the good vibes that I’ve built my fame on, because we shared them at the beginning of my career. I like what they do.” **La Santa** “This was a very special track for me. Working with Daddy Yankee is always an honor and a pleasure. I’ve learned a lot from him in the studio. This one inspired me so much. Always, always, always when I do something with Daddy Yankee, it’s just so exciting, fabulous, and makes me feel very happy and proud.” **Safaera** “This was something that I have always wanted to do. It is a very much a part of Puerto Rican culture and the roots of reggaetón. It was special because I made it with one of my best friends in my entire life, someone I started out with in music and who supported me a lot from the beginning and to this day, DJ Orma. He fell in love with this music just like me, with this type of rhythm—reggaetón, perreo old-school.” **Hablamos Mañana** “I love this one. It’s the most energetic of the album and the most different. In general, there’s a lot of strength and feeling in rock music. I’ll make whatever music that God allows me to. At some point, if I felt like making a rock en español album, I would. If I wanted to make a bachata album, I would.”

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

“This feels like \[2017’s\] *Crack-Up*’s friendly brother,” Robin Pecknold tells Apple Music of his fourth LP under the Fleet Foxes name. Written and recorded alongside producer-engineer Beatriz Artola (Adele, J Cole, The Kills) throughout much of 2019 and 2020, *Shore* is an album of gratitude—one that found its lyrical focus in quarantine, as Pecknold began taking day-long drives from his New York apartment up to Lake Minnewaska and into the Catskills and back, stopping only to get gas or jot down ideas as they came to him. “It was like the car was the safest place to be,” he says. “I had this optimistic music but I’d been writing these kind of downer lyrics and it just wasn\'t gelling. It was realizing that in the grand scheme of things, this music is pretty unimportant compared to what\'s going on.” At the album\'s heart is “Sunblind,” an opening statement that pays glimmering tribute to some of Pecknold’s late musical heroes—from Richard Swift to Elliott Smith to David Berman, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Judee Sill, and more. “I wanted the album to be for these people,” Pecknold says. “I’m trying to celebrate life in a time of death, trying to find something to hold on to that exists outside of time, something that feels solid or stable.” Here, Pecknold walks us through every song on the album. **Wading in Waist-High Water** “I would have a piece of music and then I would try and sing it, but I would always try and pitch my voice up an octave or manipulate my voice to make it match the calming, mourning tone of the music a little more. And then a friend of mine sent me a clip of Uwade Akhere covering \[2008’s\] ‘Mykonos’ on Instagram, and I was just in love with the texture of her voice and just how easy it was. That was a signal that this was going to be a different kind of album in some ways. It was like I finally found a song where I was like, ‘You know what? This is just going to be more of what I want it to be if someone else sings it.’ And that\'s been an awesome mindset to be in lately, just thinking more about writing for other voices and what other voices can naturally evoke without just trying to make my voice do a ton of different things to get to an emotional resonance.” **Sunblind** “I knew I wanted it to be kind of a mission statement for the record—kind of cite-your-sources energy a little bit. And then find a way to get from this list of names of dead musicians that I\'m inspired by—whose music has really helped me in my life—to somewhere that felt like you were taking the wheel and doing something with that feeling. Or trying to live in honor of that, at least in a way that they\'re no longer able to, or in a way that carries their point of view forward into the future. ‘Sunblind’ is like giving the record permission to go all these places or something. Once it felt like it was doing that, then the whole record kind of made more sense to me, or felt like it all tied into each other in a way that it hadn\'t when that song wasn\'t done.” **Can I Believe You** “That riff is the oldest thing on the album, because I wrote that in the middle of the *Crack-Up* tour and tried working on it then but never got anywhere with it really. Once I was thinking less about some second party that\'s untrustworthy and more just one person\'s own hang-ups with letting people in—like my own hang-ups with that—then the lyrics flowed a little better. Those choral voices are actually 400 or 500 people from Instagram that sent clips of them singing that line to me. And then we spent days editing them together and cleaning them up. There\'s this big hug of vocals around the lead vocal that’s talking about trust or believability.” **Jara** “I wanted ‘Can I Believe You’ to be kind of a higher-energy headbanger-type song, and then after that, have a more steady groove—a loop-based, almost builder-type song. That\'s the single-friend kind of placement on the record. Jara is a reference to Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer. A national hero there who was killed by Pinochet’s army. But it\'s not about Victor Jara— it\'s more like with ‘Sunblind,’ where you\'re trying to eulogize someone, to honor someone or place them in some kind of canon.” **Featherweight** “It\'s the first minor-key song, but it\'s also the first one that\'s without a super prominent drumbeat. It’s lighter on its feet. I thought it was following a train of thought—where with ‘Jara’ there is a bit of envy of a political engagement, in ‘Featherweight,’ I feel like it\'s kind of examining privilege a little bit more. This period of time accommodated that in a very real way for me, just making my problems seem smaller. Acknowledging that I\'ve made problems for myself sometimes in my life when there weren\'t really any.” **A Long Way Past the Past** “Everything I tried was either too Michael McDonald or too Sly Stone or too Stevie Wonder. At that tempo it was just hard to find the instrumentation that didn\'t feel too pastiche or something. While I was writing the lyrics to it, I was thinking, ‘How much am I living in the past? How much can I leave that behind? How much of my identity is wrapped up in memories?’ And asking for help from a friend to maybe fend through that or come on the other side of that. So I thought it was funny to have that be the lyric on the most maybe nostalgic piece of music on the record in terms of what it\'s referencing.” **For a Week or Two** “The first couple Fleet Foxes records, it was a rural vibe as opposed to an urban vibe. I think on the first album, that was just the music I liked, but it wasn\'t like the lyrics were talking about a bunch of personal experiences I had in nature, because I was just 20 years old making that album and I didn\'t have a lot to draw from. ‘For a Week or Two,’ that\'s really about a bunch of long backpacking trips that I was taking for a while. And just the feeling that you have when you\'re doing that, of not being anyone and just being this body in space and never catching your reflection in anything. Carrying very little, and finding some peace in that.” **Maestranza** “Musically, I think for a while it had something in it that had a disco or roller-skating kind of energy that I was trying to find a way out of, and then we found this other palette of instruments that felt less that way. I was trying to go for a Bill Withers-y thing. I feel like a lot of the people that get mentioned in ‘Sunblind,’ their resonance is there, influencing throughout the record. In the third verse, it’s about missing your friends, missing your people, but knowing that since we\'re all going through the same thing that we\'re kind of connected through that in a way that\'s really special and kind of unique to this period. I feel more distant from people but also closer in terms of my actual daily experience.” **Young Man’s Game** “I thought it would be funny if Hamilton \[Leithauser\]’s kids were on it. My original idea was to have it sung by a 10-year-old boy, and then that was just too gimmicky or something. But I wanted there to be kids on it because it\'s referencing immaturity or naivete—things about being young. Because people say ’a young man’s game’ in kind of a positive way. Sometimes they\'re sad they aged out or something. But in this song I use it more in the negative sense of ‘glad you\'ve moved on from some of these immature delusions’ or something. When I was younger I would be much too insecure to make a goofy song, needing everything to be perfect or dramatic or whatever mindset I was in.” **I’m Not My Season** “A friend of mine had been telling me about her experience helping a family member with addiction. As she was describing that, I was imagining this sailing lesson I had taken where we were learning how to rescue someone who had fallen overboard and you have to circle the boat around the right way and throw the ropes from the right place. Time is just something that\'s happening around us, but there\'s some kind of core idea that you\'re not what\'s happening to you. Like wind on a flag.” **Quiet Air / Gioia** “The chords had this kind of expectant feel or something, like an ominous quality, that\'s never really resolving. And I think that kind of led me to want to write about imagining someone, speaking to somebody who is courting danger. Some of the lyrics in the song come from talking to a friend of mine who is a climate scientist, and just her perspective on how screwed we are or aren’t. Just thinking about that whole issue hinges on particulate matter in air that is invisible. You can just be looking at the sky and looking at what will eventually turn into an enormous calamity, and it\'s quietly occurring, quietly accruing. It\'s happening on a time scale that we\'re not prepared to accept or deal with. The ending is this more ecstatic thing. Just imagining some weird pagan dance, like rite of spring or something, where it just kind of builds into this weird kind of joy. Like dancing while the world burns.” **Going-to-the-Sun Road** “The Sun Road is a place in Montana, a 60-mile stretch of road that’s only open for a couple months every year. It’s where they filmed the intro to *The Shining*, where they\'re driving to the lodge and it’s just very scenic. I grew up fairly close to there. A lot of the studios that I worked at on this record were places that I had always wanted to go and work, places where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, one day I\'ll make a record there.’ That song is about being tired of traveling, wanting to slow down a bit and wanting to not fight so hard personally against yourself. Or trying to have as many adventures as possible, but then having this one place—almost like a Rosebud kind of thing—where it\'s like going to the Sun Road is the last big adventure. The one that\'s always on the horizon that you have to look forward to that keeps you going.” **Thymia** “Getting back to work on the record \[after the pandemic hit\] was so rewarding. And I feel like if there was a relationship being discussed on the record, it\'s between me and my love affair with music. ‘Thymia’ I think means ‘boisterous spirit’ or something. The image and the lyrics to that song in my head were kind of me driving around with some camping gear in my back seat that\'s clanging out a rhythm of some kind. And that feeling of, even if I\'m driving alone, there\'s something. That sound is pulling me to the thought of music. It\'s kind of accompanying me. I\'ve known it for a long time. Even though it\'s ephemeral, it\'s the most solid thing that I have.” **Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman** “I wanted to use the sample of Brian Wilson because that clip meant a lot to me growing up, him layering vocals on ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).’ That song has the most stuff I\'ve ever put on a song, and it\'s the most overdubby—very much in that lineage of just layer after layer after layer. Emotionally, it’s similar to that idea of, like, ‘My clothes are torn but the air is clean.’ That feeling like it can be okay to be a little ragged and you can still feel good, like being exhausted at the end of a long run or something. That image of the maternal and feminine would again be a reference to music. Like my receiver, cradling me again. Kind of like being subsumed by music and comforted and consoled by it.” **Shore** “‘Cradling Mother’ could be the climax maybe, and ‘Shore’ felt like an epilogue. In the same way that ‘Wading in Waist-High Water’ is a prologue. Lyrically, it\'s tying up some loose ends, talking to the kin that you rely on—your family or your heroes—and thanking them. It references the shore as this stable place and questions whether you\'re really at the boundary between danger and safety when you\'re there. I\'d actually had a surfing accident where I snapped my leash and I really felt like I was going to drown. It took me 15 minutes to swim to shore and I kept getting pummeled by waves. I was so happy to make it back. I\'ve been pretty afraid since then to do that much surfing in bad conditions. But to me, that image was this comforting thing that then kind of dissolves. The vocals break apart and then it\'s like you\'re getting back in the water and you\'re catching one sound and your voices are blending together and falling apart. You\'re subsumed by water, and then the seas calm, but you\'re floating into the future.”

Today, on the Autumnal Equinox, Fleet Foxes released their fourth studio album Shore at 6:31 am PT/9:31 am ET. The bright and hopeful album, released via Anti-. Shore was recorded before and during quarantine in Hudson (NY), Paris, Los Angeles, Long Island City and New York City from September 2018 until September 2020 with the help of recording and production engineer Beatriz Artola.The fifteen song, fifty-five minute Shore was initially inspired by frontman Robin Pecknold’s musical heroes such as Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guebrou and more who, in his experience, celebrated life in the face of death. “I see “shore” as a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death,’” commented Pecknold. “Tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.” Pecknold continues: Since the unexpected success of the first Fleet Foxes album over a decade ago, I have spent more time than I’m happy to admit in a state of constant worry and anxiety. Worried about what I should make, how it will be received, worried about the moves of other artists, my place amongst them, worried about my singing voice and mental health on long tours. I’ve never let myself enjoy this process as much as I could, or as much as I should. I’ve been so lucky in so many ways in my life, so lucky to be born with the seeds of the talents I have cultivated and lucky to have had so many unreal experiences. Maybe with luck can come guilt sometimes. I know I’ve welcomed hardship wherever I could find it, real or imagined, as a way of subconsciously tempering all this unreal luck I’ve had. By February 2020, I was again consumed with worry and anxiety over this album and how I would finish it. But since March, with a pandemic spiraling out of control, living in a failed state, watching and participating in a rash of protests and marches against systemic injustice, most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together. In its place came a gratitude, a joy at having the time and resources to devote to making sound, and a different perspective on how important or not this music was in the grand scheme of things. Music is both the most inessential and the most essential thing. We don’t need music to live, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. It became a great gift to no longer carry any worry or anxiety around the album, in light of everything that is going on. A tour may not happen for a year, music careers may not be what they once were. So it may be, but music remains essential. This reframing was another stroke of unexpected luck I have been the undeserving recipient of. I was able to take the wheel completely and see the album through much better than I had imagined it, with help from so many incredible collaborators, safe and lucky in a new frame of mind.

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

You don’t listen to KA albums so much as you sink into them: the hushed, laser-focused flow, the dense imagery and virtually drum-free production, the sense of darkness lurking quietly around every corner. Loosely organized as a metaphorical play between Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and KA’s own violent memories of youth in east Brooklyn, *Descendants of Cain* is, yes, deadly serious and noir to the marrow. But between the whiplash-worthy observations—“All our Santas carried them hammers/Our guidance counselors was talented scramblers” (“Patron Saints”), “The meek heard ‘turn the other cheek’/I got different advice” (“Solitude of Enoch”)—is a sense of almost meditative calm, the sort of resolve that comes not from the heat of youth but from the steadiness of middle age. The pace is measured, the tone is cool, but the past still haunts him.

Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.

The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.

Midwestern by birth and temperament, Freddie Gibbs has always seemed a little wary of talking himself up—he’s more show than tell. But between 2019’s Madlib collaboration (*Bandana*) and the Alchemist-led *Alfredo*, what wasn’t clear 10 years ago is crystal now: Gibbs is in his own class. The wild, shape-shifting flow of “God Is Perfect,” the chilling lament of “Skinny Suge” (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked-up part of that is I know I supplied the n\*\*\*a that sold it”), a mind that flickers with street violence and half-remembered Arabic, and beats that don’t bang so much as twinkle, glide, and go up like smoke. *Alfredo* is seamless, seductive, but effortless, the work of two guys who don’t run to catch planes. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs claims, “God made me sell crack so I had something to rap about.” But the way he flows now, you get the sense he would’ve found his way to the mic one way or the other.

After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”

The impending arrival of 21 Savage’s *SAVAGE MODE II* was announced with a trailer directed by Gibson Hazard and narrated by Morgan Freeman. The takeaway, aside from the fact that Savage and collaborator Metro Boomin were emerging together from separate and presumably unrelated periods of inactivity, is that the project was much more than just two pals hanging out. With *SAVAGE MODE II*, the pair have effectively reached back to the era when 21 Savage wanted nothing more than to let rap fans know he was a “Real Ni\*\*a” with “No Heart.” *SAVAGE MODE II* follows 2017’s *Without Warning*—also featuring Offset—as the third collaboration between the pair, the first being 2016’s *Savage Mode*. Savage and Metro would go on to become exponentially more successful in the years following, but *SAVAGE MODE II* songs like “Glock in My Lap,” “Brand New Draco,” and “No Opp Left Behind” effectively recreate the us-against-the-world energy of the original. Elsewhere on the project, Savage is every bit the rap superstar we know in collaboration with Drake and Young Thug on “Mr. Right Now” and “Rich N\*\*\*a Shit,” respectively. But whether he’s talking about “Snitches & Rats” (with Young Nudy) or opening up about a relationship gone sour on “RIP Luv,” 21 Savage sounds like he\'s at the top of his game while he’s back in the saddle with Metro. Or as Morgan Freeman puts it in the trailer, “When someone is in Savage Mode, they’re not to be fucked with.”

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

If 2014’s *Singles* was Future Islands’ unexpected breakthrough, its follow-up, 2017’s *The Far Field*, was a reminder to slow down. “We’d played 800 shows and then we did *Letterman*, and all of a sudden, our star was on the rise for the first time ever,” frontman Samuel T. Herring tells Apple Music. “At 30 years old, we were in the spotlight, which is kind of weird. Things just got bigger than we could control, and we essentially gave a lot of decision-making away, to make our lives easier. What we\'re trying to do now is put the load back on our own shoulders.” While *The Far Field* was made quickly in an effort to capitalize on the momentum that *Singles* had generated, the Baltimore outfit spent an entire year recording and rerecording, reworking and rewriting all of *As Long As You Are* until it felt finished. The result finds Herring, newly in love, singing about pressing political issues (a first) just as soulfully as he would matters of the heart. “It\'s funny, because I told my partner, when we first started dating, that I would never write a song about her,” he says. “I didn\'t want to screw it up, like I did all the other people that I wrote songs about. But then you find yourself in those moments: You write about your life, and what you feel. Just having that person in my life—someone who really trusted me, someone who I trusted—gave me more space and confidence to write about things that I was afraid of.” Here, he walks us through every song on the record. **Glada** “A *glada* is a type of bird in Sweden, a bird of prey with a large V-shaped tail. That song was written in the countryside in Southern Sweden, the Skåne region. A big part of Swedish life is spending time in nature—in the summertime, you\'re basically not allowed to go inside your house until it\'s time to go to sleep. The song is about the rebirth of spring, and the rebirth of feeling love again, with Julia in the countryside. And I think the bigger question in the song is the question of feeling deserving of love. When we met, I\'d given up on the idea that I\'d ever find that kind of love, the kind that makes you feel giddy—like a young love. We deserve the good feelings, and the bird is just evocative of that.” **For Sure** “I feel like our music has always been imbued with certain amounts of hope, within the darkness. It\'s the idealism of a song like ‘Light House’—which is a song about suicide—and hoping that someone will save you from yourself. People find hope in that song because it’s there. This song in particular is filled with those understandings of love and trust, and feeling free to be oneself. And being given the courage to do the things that we want to do in this world, because someone else gives us that courage.” **Born in a War** “I work completely off feeling and vibe. I don\'t really have an agenda—the world is an inspiration, especially right now. To me, gun violence in America is a huge issue. And growing up—where me and \[keyboardist\] Gerrit \[Welmers\] and \[bassist\] William \[Cashion\] grew up—everybody has guns and everybody goes hunting. And then they go to church. It\'s just a way of life. The second verse of this song is about being a man, and being told to man up, saying, ‘Why don\'t you have a gun? What\'s wrong with you?’ One of my favorite lines of this album is ‘Raised up in a town that\'s 80 proof/Shotgun shells under every roof, every jail.’ We are in that mind state, a mental jail of our own making.” **I Knew You** “This whole song is a true story. It’s one of those things written about a person that I said I would never write another song about, as an agreement—someone that\'s canon in Future Islands\' work. They pulled some crazy shit one night. And I have to write this down. I have to tell this story. ‘This has lived on record and I\'m going to end it on record,’ is how I felt. I was told that I was poison to this person, and that I ruined their life. I say it in the song: I was happy to hear these things. This person left with no closure. They left in radio silence. So this was me finally getting closure.” **City’s Face** “‘City’s Face’ was inspired by a relationship that I was in, my only relationship that I had in Baltimore. It\'s the relationship that ‘Seasons’ is about, and it\'s about somebody that really hurt me. They cheated on me a bunch and made me feel paranoid in my own city. I didn\'t deserve to be treated that way. She didn\'t deserve to be treated that way. I think I was allowing myself to be a victim, and not owning up to my own bullshit. Hating a place just because of a person is kind of crazy.” **Waking** “This one I fought with a bit. Sometimes the guys write a song that\'s so good and catchy that I don\'t think that I can do anything with it. We\'re at a point culturally, in our society, where we can\'t just sit back and not say something, or not do something. It’s as simple as helping your neighbors. That does mean something. It does mean something to say hello. It means something to reach out to people within our communities. That song is about those self-defeating feelings, and trying to get over them. And knowing how the hardest thing sometimes is just starting something, within our daily lives, to better ourselves.” **The Painter** “To me, ‘The Painter’ is about race in America, and the way that we see things and we paint things. We\'re art school kids, but I always thought that to be able to make a painting that everyone saw the same exact way was the greatest possible thing that you could do. It\'s like, ‘Why can\'t we see it the same way?’ And understanding that we fight these ideological battles, but this isn\'t something that we can debate over, when it\'s people\'s lives that we\'re talking about. So ‘The Painter’ is about red and blue, and it\'s about black and white. And it\'s about red, white, and blue, and what the hell that means. I think it\'s about people that paint it the way they want to see it, and say that they don\'t see color, but that\'s all they see. It\'s a charged song, and it\'s begging of those people to open your eyes. Because this isn\'t a painting, this is life.” **Plastic Beach** “I have had issues with my body since I was cognizant of what that meant. This song is about those struggles with self. I spent a lifetime in the mirror trying to change myself. And all those ideas of the way you love your family and who they are, and then you look at your own face. How can you hate it, when it has those bits and pieces of your own family in it? I think a lot of things were heightened through our visibility, through *Letterman* and things like that, where you can become a meme or a joke online. It\'s easy for people not to see how that might affect us. ‘Plastic Beach’ is a song that\'s a thank-you to the people who see us for who we are, who see people for who they are. And thanking the people around you, for loving you for those reasons. I\'m getting a little emotional talking about it.” **Moonlight** “It\'s very much a love song. It\'s also a love song about depression. And another song about acceptance. The line ‘So we just laid in bed all day/I couldn\'t see/I had a cloud in my arms’ is to say, ‘I was carrying a rain cloud.’ This gray thing—it’s my depression. ‘But if I asked you/Would you say it\'s only rain?’ Which is to say, it doesn\'t matter how you feel, I still love you. You don\'t have to apologize for those feelings, I still love you.” **Thrill** “The setting of this song is Greenville, North Carolina, where some of us went to college. And it\'s about feeling completely alone in Greenville. It\'s about drug addiction. It\'s about alcohol abuse. It’s about being drunk at the bar, being refused drinks with no friends around. It\'s about being drunk on the way to the bar. It\'s about being drunk on the way home from the bar. And it\'s about that isolation, and that anger, and that fear of feeling different in this place. Greenville is a quintessential college town, and in a big way, it\'s a quintessential Southern town. There\'s definitely issues of race there. On the north side of town, there’s the Tar River, which is famous for flooding. This song is about this diluted, dirty river that\'s been used for hundreds of years by Americans. It’s about all of that stuff spilling over into the river, spilling over into us, our American experience, and that question of how will we feel when this water rushes over us—will we sink or swim in it?” **Hit the Coast** “I had this old tabletop desk recorder that we used to record jam sessions and pratice tapes on, back in 2009 or 2011. It’s the actual deck that we sampled here. I played a loop through the vocal mic, recorded that, and then we laced it in. If you listen back, right when I say that line, ‘Pressing play on this old tape was a bad move/Reduced to hiss/Some record I love/Some record I\'ve missed,’ you\'ll hear it. And then the song ends with me pushing stop on the tape—just that big *p’chunk*. Sometimes I think a record label will usually tell you to start big, go with your hit, go with your single for the first song, and end things more somber. And we just wanted to flip it on its head. It made sense to end on this kind of triumphant note.”

As a kid in the late ’60s, Wayne Coyne lived in fear of losing his oldest brother to drugs. “A lot of times, when he left the house on his motorcycle, I just thought, ‘He’s going to crack,’” the Flaming Lips frontman tells Apple Music. “If he didn\'t come home ’til 4:00, I would literally be up in my bed, scared that he was dead somewhere. That’s a real thing.” The Lips’ 16th studio LP is a haunting exploration of how we see the world as children and adults, high and sober, innocent and experienced—and its cover is a photo of Coyne’s brother in 1968. Featuring guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves, it’s also—by Flaming Lips standards—a song-oriented reimagining of American classic rock that’s inspired, in part, by a passage in the late Tom Petty’s biography about Petty and his band Mudcrutch stopping to record in Coyne’s native Oklahoma in 1974, as they traveled cross-country to make a go of it in LA. “There\'s never been anybody who’s ever uncovered it or ever noticed it or anything,” Coyne says of the Tulsa session. “But in that little gap, I wondered what that music would have been. So \[multi-instrumentalist\] Steven \[Drozd\] and I just took it further. Like, ‘What if Tom Petty and his band would have run into my older brother, if my brother went up there and they all got addicted to drugs and they got caught up in all this violence and they never became Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, but they made this very sad, fucked-up, beautiful record in Tulsa?’ And then we said, ‘Let\'s make that record.’ Here, Coyne tells the story of every song therein. **Will You Return / When You Come Down** “A lot of music is trying to tell you, ‘Dude, go blow your mind.’ And ‘Being insane is great.’ Steven and I\'ve always been like, ‘Dude, I think I\'m insane anyway.’ And I think we\'re glad to finally be embarrassed enough or old enough or whatever it is to say, ‘Yeah, we\'re singing about drugs.’ Part of it is our friends that have died from crashing their car. Part of it is our friends that have died from drug overdoses. And a part of the song is survivor’s guilt, while part of me was glad that I wasn\'t the one who died. But now as you look at yourself later, you’re like, ‘I wish was there with you.’ I think when you\'re a teenager and your friends die in a car accident, part of you has this fantasy you\'ll see them in heaven. Or if we live a thousand lives, you’ll be something else and I\'ll meet you again. And all of these are just fantasies, so you really have to face the horrible truth that you\'re never going to see that person again. The song’s you singing to these ghosts and hoping that they understand how you feel about it.” **Watching the Lightbugs Glow** “We like to always leave room for instrumentals. We like that it just floats along. You don\'t have to listen to it so intensely. Once we convinced Kacey Musgraves to sing on one track \[‘God and the Policeman’\], I thought, ‘Well, while we\'re there, why don\'t we try to do two songs?’ So we came up with another song, and then we end up coming up with a third song \[‘Flowers of Neptune 6’\], and she ended up liking all the things that we presented. I asked her about the song \[2018’s\] ‘Mother.’ She talked about this idea of light bugs, and they were floating around in her yard and she got one with a leaf and she put it in the house and she played some music for it and they danced together. All of this was on a very pleasant acid trip, but she did say that not all of her acid trips were pleasant—she understood sometimes they go horribly bad. While we were coming with this thing, I thought, well, let\'s just have her do kind of a wordless melodic thing, and we would let it be about that story. We could relate to it and she could relate to it and it would be real. And it would be true. I think that\'s why we put it second. Like, ‘Let\'s just not be in such a hurry to say more stuff, just let it just float along with the mood.’ But I wouldn\'t have done it without her. We would have never done it as one of us singing. It was made for her.” **Flowers of Neptune 6** “‘Flowers of Neptune’ came from an insanely great demo that Steven made, but it was long enough that we could envision it being a bigger, more epic song. As we started to make it, we were like, ‘I don\'t think it\'s as good if it keeps going too long, because it\'s got such a crescendo of emotion. Let’s just make it two songs.’ One, ‘Lightbugs,’ could be a little bit more fun and kind of floaty and melancholy—but optimistic. The other, ‘Flowers of Neptune,’ could be more powerful and personal. There is some connection to that idea that our older brothers and their friends, they were these characters that we didn\'t relate to. They were crazy and they were going to go to jail. They were going to go off to war, they were going to get in a fight, they were going to get in a motorcycle accident and we weren’t. And then at some point we realized their life and ours is the same. I am me because of them. You can\'t really express it, but in a song you can, because it\'s big and it\'s crescendos and it\'s emotional and you find somehow you\'re able to express this thing that we would never, ever consider saying to our real brothers, in real life. You\'d just be too embarrassed. But music wants you to go all the way.” **Dinosaurs on the Mountain** “I remember being in the back of the station wagon with my family as we were traveling down a highway, in the middle of the night, on our way to Pittsburgh. And seeing these giant trees, pretending that they were dinosaurs, falling over and killing each other. And also remembering that this is like the last time that I felt that I could just see fantasy and not worry that we\'re driving down a highway, my father might be falling asleep, and we could crash the car and die—all these things you start to think about when you\'re becoming an adult. The times we went back after, I didn\'t see the dinosaurs in the trees. They were just trees. You can\'t get that back. It’s trying to make that into a song that an adult can relate to instead of being like a children\'s storybook or a Disney movie.” **At the Movies on Quaaludes** “I only did quaaludes once, and I have to say, I didn\'t feel anything. There\'s a line at the very beginning of the novel *The Outsiders*—which when you live in Oklahoma, you read in junior high and high school because it\'s set in Tulsa—about coming out of a movie theater. You were so immersed in the movie that you forgot, ‘Oh yeah, this is real life out here.’ My brothers and their friends, they would go to movies all the time in the middle of the day and they would just be so completely fucked up. There was hardly any moments that they weren\'t on some drugs. And I just remembered for myself sometimes, the shock of being in a movie theater, so immersed in that, and you walk outside and you\'re back in real life, whereas I think sometimes they never came back to real life. It\'s just one big, long movie. So there\'s something wonderful about that. It\'s like a dream that you know is never going to come true, but the better to dream it and know it isn\'t going to come true. Or is it worse to not dream it at all?” **Mother I’ve Taken LSD** “This one is devastating for me. It has to be 1968, 1969—there’s a lot of talk about LSD. It’s in the news every day, and when we would be at school, dudes in suits would come with a briefcase full of drugs and say, ‘Don\'t take drugs. And especially don\'t take LSD, because it\'ll make you think that you can fly, and you\'ll go to the top of a bridge and jump off and you\'ll die.’ So all this is in our minds and I\'m only seven or eight years old. It’s like, ‘Fuck. The Beatles think it\'s cool, but the police think it\'s horrible. What do I do here?’ So my brother and my mother are sitting on the porch and they’re having a conversation. I remember my brother saying, ‘Well, mother, I\'ve taken LSD.’ I just couldn\'t believe it. My own brother is doing the things that the police are coming to school to tell me about and he’s going to go insane. I\'m singing about it like it\'s sad for her, but really, it was just sad for me. It’s stayed with me my whole life because it was such a blow.” **Brother Eye** “Steven was like, ‘Why don\'t you just write down some words and I\'ll make up a song around your words?’ Which we never do. Usually, he\'s got a melody and I\'ll put lyrics to it, or I\'ll have lyrics and stuff and he\'ll help me with melodies. I think I wrote out, \'Mother, I don\'t want you to die.’ And then he was like, ‘Well, you have too many songs about mothers. Let\'s do one about brothers.’ His older brothers and his younger brother, all of them, his whole family is dead. When his oldest brother died, I know it devastated him, and we really don\'t sing about it. But in this way of me presenting words to him, I know that he put it in a way of saying we\'re just doing a song. But both of us knew somewhere in there, we\'re singing about this heavy thing. When it came time to be like, ‘Well, are you going to sing it or am I going to sing it?’ I just told him, ‘I think you’ve got to sing that.’ And he was just like, ‘Oh shit.’” **You n Me Sellin’ Weed** “When I was 16 and 17, I started selling pot because everybody around me was selling pot and some were making better money than they were working in a restaurant like I was. But I didn\'t want to do it for very long, because I did fear that I\'d get put in jail or something worse. The second verse is about that. It sounds pretty gentle, but it\'s really about a friend of ours who was involved in a murder. He owed the drug dealer a lot of money and the drug dealer was threatening to kill his little girl. So he went over to his house and he stabbed \[the dealer\] to death. He was put in jail for murder and he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life there. And a year or two later, he committed suicide in jail. It\'s a blissful story about a state of mind for just a moment, before the violence and all these things rush in and kill you. I was very lucky that my experience stayed an adventure. That time could have been where everything went badly and our family destroyed itself. Because we saw it happen and because we knew them and they were just like us, I think it changed us to say, ‘Let\'s not let that happen.’” **Mother Please Don’t Be Sad** “When I was 17, there was a robbery happening in the restaurant that I was working in. The guys came in and I thought for sure that I was going to be killed. This song is what I was saying to myself while I laid on the floor, waiting to be shot in the head. I was going to stop at my mother\'s house after I got off work that night and leave my dirty work uniform there, and talk to her for a little bit. I\'m laying on the floor and I know that I\'m going to die. And I\'m thinking, ‘Mother is going to wonder where I\'m at because I\'m going to be late, and she\'s going to start to worry. Then the cops are going to show up like they do in all these horrible movies, and they\'re going to tell her that I died in the robbery.’ And that line, ‘Mother, please don\'t be sad’: I said that laying on the floor there because I just knew it was going to be horrible. It was me that was going to die, but I just thought I\'ll be dead in a second, and it\'s going to be horrible for her. I wanted her to know that I wasn\'t doing something dangerous, I wasn\'t doing something fucked up. I was just at work and this happened, so don\'t worry about it. This was just the chaos of the world. Sometimes there\'s nothing you can do. You\'re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” **When We Die When We’re High** “That beat that Steve plays—in the hands of a lot of drummers, it would be flashy and it would be pompous, but he\'s doing these things that are just so effortless that you don\'t realize what an insane beat it is. And man, that one note with that beat, that\'s got a good menacing joy about it. And then to put that title to it. A friend of ours was killed in a car accident, and everybody in the car was completely zonked out. The car hits a telephone pole and part of his head is just completely taken off and he\'s just dead right there at the scene. This is real stuff. And part of you, what you do to get around just how brutal and how horrible this is, is you do music. Well, he was so high when he died that he wouldn\'t know he was dead. He\'s going to wake up later in the afterlife, everything will be cool. We\'re saying, ‘If you\'re high when you die, do you really die?’ It\'s ridiculous, but it\'s fun to sing.” **Assassins of Youth** “I think in the beginning, it was intended to be on that Deap Lips collaboration that we did with the girls from Deap Vally, and it just never really went anywhere. Something about it reminded us of ABBA. And what I liked about ABBA is that they\'re singing about something that sounds rebellious and revolutionary, but it\'s very sweet-sounding at the same time. And because English too wasn\'t their first language, I always felt like they didn\'t quite know what they were talking about, which was better. So we took this ridiculously overused line, ‘assassins of youth,’ and we pretended that we were like ABBA—we’re not quite sure what it means in English, but we know what it means in Swedish or whatever. It\'s just great, triumphant classic-rock stuff. It presents itself like it\'s an important message. And then when you dissect it, you’re like, ‘I\'m not sure what you\'re saying.’ That, to me, is wonderful.” **God and the Policeman (feat. Kacey Musgraves)** “When Kacey heard it, she came back to me and was like, ‘Now, this is the one. This is the one I want to be on, for sure.’ I kept looking at it like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. I thought it would be perfect for her, a song about a fugitive on the run. On the run from what, I don’t know, but it tied into another drug story, a friend of ours who got caught up in a bad drug deal. It sounds like I\'ve told this one before, but another guy I know, a drug dealer was telling him, ‘Well, if you don\'t pay me, I\'m going to kill you.’ So he went over to \[the dealer’s house\], and the drug dealer, he thought that he was bringing him what he owed him and he just went over there and killed the guy. And he said, ‘See you later. I\'ll never see my friends again. Better than being killed by this biker drug dealer.’ I can\'t talk too much about it, but I feel like enough time has gone by, I really don\'t even know if he\'s alive anymore.” **My Religion Is You** “It still feels like a folk song or religious song or something, but nothing in our life—my life, anyway—was ever so heavy that I had to turn to God. I always had my mother, my father, and plenty of people around to explain the mysteries of pain and all that to me. I remember, when we initially went to school, our first and second grade, we went to a Catholic school. And there\'d be a lot of talk about Jesus sacrificing himself for us. I didn\'t really understand. I would ask my mother, like, ‘Well, what do they mean? Why is Jesus dying? I don\'t want him to die. Why does he have to die for me?’ And she\'d say, ‘Well, these aren\'t things that most people have to deal with. It\'s for people who don\'t really have families and brothers. People don\'t love them, so Jesus loves them. They don\'t have anybody that will listen to them. So they need God to listen to them.’ And I said, ‘Well, my religion is you.’ She\'s like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

“I had a lot to write about,” beabadoobee tells Apple Music of her debut album *Fake It Flowers*. “I’m just a girl with girl problems, and I feel like there are a lot of girls who have the same problems.” Over 12 songs, Beatrice Laus explores those issues in what she calls “diary entries,” written in her bedroom over just a couple of months in late 2019. Here, she shakes off what people think of her (“Further Away,” the hook-laden “Care”), screams out her sadness (“Charlie Brown”), and gives way to the abandon of young love (the woozy, self-aware “Horen Sarrison”). “I made sure that there was a song for every mood and for every Bea that exists,” says the Philippines-born, London-raised singer. “This is a very personal album. It was everything I was supposed to tell someone but couldn’t, or just, like, never did.” The songs here are an unabashed love letter to the \'90s artists—and movies—she was devoted to growing up. (“Everyone glorifies the past,” says Laus of her obsession with a decade that ended a year before her birth.) Only three years after the first song she ever wrote, the hushed, ultra-lo-fi “Coffee,” earmarked beabadoobee as a name to know, the singer wants *Fake It Flowers* to do for other young women what those artists—from The Cardigans to Oasis, via Elliott Smith and Alanis Morissette—did for her. “When I’m really sad, I like to dance in my underpants in front of my mirror,” she says. “I always pick a good album to dance to. And I want *Fake It Flowers* to be that album for someone.” Hairbrushes at the ready: Let beabadoobee take you through her raw debut, track by track. **Care** “As soon as this came to life, I was like, ‘This is the first song.’ It describes the whole sound of *Fake It Flowers*—the big guitars, that nostalgic feeling. And lyrically the song talks about the fact that no one is ever going to get me. But it’s the idea that I\'m going to sing my heart out and not give a fuck if you don\'t like it. I just wanted a really good radio pop song, something that could end \[1999 rom-com\] *10 Things I Hate About You*.” **Worth It** “This song is about the temptations you get when you\'re on tour and when you\'re away—the stupid things you can do when you\'re alone in a hotel room. It was hard to get through it, but I\'m glad I wrote it because it was like an ending of that bit of my life. But sonically, it’s something good out of a bad situation. I wanted to make an album for people to dance to in their bedrooms, despite how depressing the songs are.” **Dye It Red** “This song isn’t actually about me. It\'s stories I\'ve heard from other people, and it’s about stupid boys. I have no filter with the lyrics. It’s also about being comfortable with who you are. At times, I feel like a hypocrite for singing this song, because I always care about what my boyfriend thinks. But I shouldn\'t, right? I wanted ‘Dye It Red’ to fizzle out into a beautiful mess at the end, especially around the lyrics where I\'m like, ‘You\'re not even that cute, that cute.’ I thought it was funny and sassy.” **Back to Mars** “I feel like this is where the album takes a shift into a darker-sounding side. ‘Care’ and ‘Worth It’ are the surface level of my problems. This is where it gets really deep into, like, ‘This is why I\'m fucked up.’ This song pays homage to the space theme of my EP *Space Cadet*, which this song was originally supposed to be for. This was the second take I did—it was just me and my guitar, and then Pete \[Robertson\] put all these amazing atmospheric sounds around it. It was meant to be a really fast-paced track with loads of drums, but it’s a very innocent song.” **Charlie Brown** “This is very heavy! And screaming on this song was probably the funnest moment of recording this album. They asked, ‘Are you sure you can scream?’ But I scream so much in my bedroom when I’m alone, so I was like: ‘I was born ready.’ I wanted to talk about a situation in my life as if I was just taking it out of my system. And what better way to do that than scream? I have a Charlie Brown strip tattooed on my arm—I was obsessed with Snoopy when I was a kid.” **Emo Song** “Originally, this was going to be another heavy one, but Pete suggested making it a super sad and slow one. The songs at this point all bleed into one another. And I did that on purpose, because they were all made together. The song talks about my childhood and how it affected me during my teenage life and what I did to kind of just drag myself of everything that happened to me.” **Sorry** “If my voice sounds vulnerable in this song, it’s because I was half crying while I was singing it. And it was a hard one to sing, because it is just so honest. It speaks about a really sad situation with someone I know and someone I really love. I had a pretty wild teenage life. I think me and my friendship group did what college kids did when we were 15. Anything in excess is bad. And we just did a bit too many drugs, really. And for some, \[it was\] too much—to the point they had to get \[involuntarily hospitalized\]. It\'s just sad to watch someone\'s life kind of wither away, especially knowing that they could have had an amazing life ahead of them. I wish I was more involved. But when something\'s too hard to watch, you just kind of separate yourself from it. Getting all of that off my chest was so relieving. And I said sorry. At least, in my head, I apologized.” **Further Away** “I\'ve always wanted to be a Disney princess. The strings come into play and I wanted to feel like a princess. This is where the positivity comes in the album—there’s a feeling of hope. This song is about all the people who were really mean to me growing up, and I’m just saying how dumb they were. But really, nothing’s real. They were going through the same shit.” **Horen Sarrison** “Literally a six-minute love song of me saying, ‘I\'m in love.’ It\'s supposed to be ridiculous. It\'s supposed to be very outwardly Disney Princess vibes. I was playing it to Pete and I was like, ‘And then the strings go like this,’ humming how I wanted it to sound. And he really brought it to life, and I owe it to him. It definitely is the most grand song on the album. And it’s really fun to play as well, because it just is me talking about how in love I am. I wanted a song for every mood, and this is definitely for that happy mood. And it\'s about Soren Harrison. I thought it was kind of funny to switch the two letters and call it ‘Horen Sarrison.’ It’s just so stupid.” **How Was Your Day?** “I recorded it in my boyfriend’s garden. Lyrically, it talks about my journey and about how hard it was being away from home and missing people. And I feel like it only made sense to go back to my roots on the way I recorded it, on a really shitty four-track, just me and my guitar with a missing string. It was really refreshing. There was always talk about doing a ‘Coffee’ moment on this album. Like, ‘Let\'s strip it back to just you and your guitar.’ And I really wanted it, but we didn\'t know how we were going to do it. Then lockdown happened and I was like, ‘I\'m going to do it, Daniel Johnston style.’” **Together** “This is paying homage to chicks who rock onstage. Like Veruca Salt and Hole. Writing this song made me realize a lot of things—for example, that I have this dependency thing as a person. But ‘Together’ made me realize that sometimes it\'s okay to be by yourself. Togetherness is cool, but being together all the time is kind of unhealthy. Again, I guess it was taking a sad situation and pouring my heart out into a song, and screaming it. And that felt pretty empowering.” **Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene** “The name of this song is simply the names I want to call my children. I\'m literally saying in the song, ‘You\'ll never leave me because you think I\'m pretty, so we\'ll have lots of babies called Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene.’ And it\'s supposed to be really stupid and fun to finish the album off on a positive note. I wanted it to be very messy—like so disgustingly distorted that you can\'t even hear a sound. We recorded it live in Wandsworth in a studio. There were two drum kits and we were just bashing the drums. It was fun, and very Flaming Lips-inspired. The last mood of this album is the really strange, weird Bea. And I think that’s my favorite one.”

Over the last decade, Khruangbin (pronounced “krung-bin”) has mastered the art of setting a mood, of creating atmosphere. But on *Mordechai*, follow-up to their 2018 breakthrough *Con Todo El Mundo*, the Houston trio makes space in their globe-spinning psych-funk for something that’s been largely missing until now: vocals. The result is their most direct work to date. From the playground disco of “Time (You and I)” to the Latin rhythms of “Pelota”—inspired by a Japanese film, but sung in Spanish—to the balmy reassurances of “If There Is No Question,” much of *Mordechai* has the immediacy of an especially adventurous pop record. Even moments of hallucinogenic expanse (“One to Remember”) or haze (“First Class”) benefit from the added presence of a human voice. “Never enough paper, never enough letters,” they sing from inside a shower of West African guitar notes on “So We Won’t Forget,” the album’s high point. “You don’t have to be silent.”

If it weren’t any more clear that The Lemon Twigs are loyal to classic-rock touchstones, then look no further than “Hell on Wheels,” the opening track to their third LP, where the Long Island, New York, duo of brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario manage to cram in Sparks’ rock-heavy pop, Jim Steinman-esque piano strut, and Bob Dylan vocal impersonations over a surging orchestral backdrop. Since they formed in 2015, the duo hasn’t been shy about tackling grand ideas and concepts; after all, they did write a rock opera about a chimpanzee raised by human parents (starring rock elder statesman Todd Rundgren as the father, no less) in 2018’s *Go to School*. But on *Songs for the General Public*, the brothers continue to revere ’70s power-pop songcraft with a theatrical bent—turning more inward as they come to realize that love and heartbreak go hand in hand. For every note-perfect guitar solo (“The One”), there are quirky, proggy touches of electric organ (“Only a Fool,” in which they keep things fun and upbeat as they shrug off romantic pursuits). On “Hog,” Brian cheekily laments the love he’s come to hate over a Badfinger-like power ballad: “Who is this hog? You once were an angel full of glitter/Now of shit.”

\"This record\'s been such a strange, strange ordeal. I mean, every record we\'ve always done, it has some kind of tragic story with it,\" vocalist/guitarist Domenic Palermo tells Apple Music about his Philadelphia-based band Nothing\'s fourth album. \"And this one I wasn\'t expecting to kind of have that, but lo and behold, here we are: The globe is on fire right now.\" Inspired by a 2019 *New York Times* photo of a black hole, *The Great Dismal* is a 10-track odyssey set for the end of the world. \"You can\'t ignore what\'s going on anywhere,\" says Palermo. \"The world has this like apocalyptic vibe. There\'s not a lot of uplifting things to keep your eyes on at this point.\" It\'s a dominant theme throughout the record, whether in the Alex G-featuring \"April Ha Ha,\" which marvels at trying to escape the inescapable, or in \"Ask the Rust,\" a reminder that the past is never far behind. It\'s echoed in the album\'s sonics, which toggle between Nothing\'s eerie slowcore tendencies and a constant onslaught of shoegazey squall: Where the opening track\'s grim beauty is aided by cellist/violinist Shelley Weiss and harpist Mary Lattimore, Cloakroom\'s Doyle Martin adds atmospheric guitar layers to songs like the fuzzed-out \"Famine Asylum\" and sprawling \"In Blueberry Memories.\" Here, Palermo meditates on our existence while guiding us through each track of *The Great Dismal*. **A Fabricated Life** “I had that song written and I didn\'t really know exactly how I was going to approach it, whether I wanted to make it a heavier song or keep it more acoustic-sounding. I finally just leaned in on it—like the way it is now, kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting of guitar tones, like really abstract, wanting to create this wall of sound. Just this mixture of guitars and string sounds, and then adding Mary Lattimore\'s harp, and putting a weird treatment of delays and reverbs on it. And then adding Shelley Weiss is just unbelievable. It turned into more of a cinematic thing. Everyone fought with me about putting it as track one, but for me it was really important to set the pace of the record, because the whole record feels cinematic anyway.” **Say Less** “It\'s funny because \'Fabricated\' is about being born into a body that you had no control over and then dealing with those circumstances and everything that comes with that. It constitutes exactly what you\'re going to do in your life. It\'s everything. To go in with something like that to basically rolling into a song where it\'s like, ‘I don\'t really have anything to say about any of this, I don\'t really care to think about it anymore’—it\'s kind of a quick on/off switch between the two. The music kind of reflects that same thing.” **April Ha Ha** “I’m a big fan of Alex G. We had plans to have him come in the studio and do some guitar work with me and maybe even write a song together. He\'s so self-conscious. He\'s just like me about vocals. He hates the way he sounds just the same as I do. So he was like, \'Oh, man. I don\'t want to do a vocal thing.\' I was like, \'Look, man. You have to. I\'m not giving you a choice. I have this part for you and I think it\'s great; you have to hear you singing these words.\' And he did it and we were all really happy with it. I love it because it\'s just like it really just creeps up on you, and if you don\'t really understand what\'s there or don\'t know, it\'s a pleasant surprise.” **Catch a Fade** “It’s about dealing with the need to create and the need to do what you need to do to survive. This song is really special for me because it was the one song that was a demo that Doyle had, and that was our first attempt at writing together. To me, it really shows. He sent me this really lo-fi demo of this track, and it was real direct, a really beautiful vocal melody, and just a clean song all the way through. Me and Kyle \[Kimball, drummer\] flew to Indiana to kind of massage some of the stuff we had and then work on a couple of things that he had, and we were able to at least get the one track done. We just reworked it from the ground up.” **Famine Asylum** “This is our call to Nothing fans that we\'re writing the best version of Nothing songs yet still. The song is about what people are starting to see now, and just that humanity has really stacked the odds against itself. It\'s kind of getting easier to see now where the blame for everything that\'s happening is, and that there could be a peacefulness in extinction in some cases. And then, it\'s a fine line of sounding like a psychopath and just being realistic. But there\'s a lot of *Dr. Strangelove* tied up into that song, which really speaks to exactly what I\'m saying, just in a less poetic way.” **Bernie Sanders** “I wanted to show what this band is capable of doing—kind of let loose a little bit. Just not be so hung up on what I think I need to do and what I think people want me to do, which is kind of a cruel thing musicians go through that\'s not really ever spoken about. It\'s just there\'s this bar to clear and then there\'s these critics and there\'s a lot of the things that just weigh on your decisions on what you want to do. It\'s sad because I feel like we lose a lot of important things because of that. The OG \'Bernie Sanders\' demo was real strange. When I got the secondary demo down, people were just like, \'This is absolutely going to be the highlight of this record.\' I stuck with it, and when we were recording with Will \[Yip, producer\], I finally became a believer in it. It\'s just nice to take yourself out on that limb and not injure yourself fatally.” **In Blueberry Memories** “I\'ve never done anything as detailed as this and as precise. This thing just became like a symbiote, you know what I mean? Like, it attached itself to me. And, like I said, in the process of achieving this courage to get past the self-doubt. \[2018\'s\] *Dance on the Blacktop* did great, but it felt like a linear move to me in a lot of senses. I feel like we just got comfortable making what we thought was a Nothing record. And with that, there\'s just a lot of things that I was fighting against. Everything I\'m doing on this has just been so calculated so that at the end of the day, if this blew up in my face and it was just a complete disaster, then I could say to myself, \'Well, you did everything that you could, and you made the record that you wanted to make.\' For me, that would be like any way that this comes across is going to be a success to me, and myself, just knowing that I did what I wanted to do, being a person that wasn\'t really supposed to be in this position that I\'m in right now, making this music and stuff. Every day is a win for me because I don\'t feel like I was meant to be here at all.” **Blue Mecca** “This song really sets the tone. If you didn\'t feel like the record had a cinematic feel to it, I think that this one really nailed it. The song\'s about my dad and kind of going through this point in time when he was trying to rehabilitate himself and he chose the route of going through Christianity and it really not being the best way for him to deal with what he was dealing with inside, which was years of PTSD, two tours of Vietnam, drug addiction, bad DNA—a lot of things that religion wasn\'t just going to help. There needed to be some other help, and it wasn\'t there. It kind of created its own storm.” **Just a Story** “This song is literally just about the day that John Lennon was killed, essentially. For some reason, when we were in the studio, we were just sitting there and there was all these Beatles posters all over the wall, because Studio 4 \[outside of Philadelphia\] has done work with John Lennon and The Beatles before. Just being in those same walls for five weeks with all this, the ghost of all these people moving through the studio. It was just this reoccurring thing with John Lennon.” **Ask the Rust** “The song itself is about the readjustment factor of coming home from that time I spent \[in prison\] and to this day just still having dreams about being there. You kind of think that you\'re past something but your past isn\'t always done with you. I think that rings true in these dreams that I have, where I wake up and I did something wrong and I\'m back in prison again. I\'m saying goodbye to people, and there\'s this crushing feeling inside my stomach. Like I fucked everything up. And then, I\'m back again. To me, that\'s why this record is so important in general. That\'s what this whole thing entails. It wasn\'t about me 10 years ago writing *Guilty of Everything* and just seeing all these things that were such a potent factor in my life and how we\'ve addressed them and we\'re good to go. No, it doesn\'t work like that. And I see that now. It\'s how you use them to move forward that is the key. It\'s not about getting past them. It\'s about learning to live with them.”

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

Margo Price began writing this album in the middle of touring her last, and says it was a master class in multitasking. “I wrote in Ubers, airports, airplanes, green rooms, hotel rooms, you name it,” she tells Apple Music. “Then, when it was halfway done, I found out I was pregnant. That changed my headspace a bit.” Actually, of all the life forces that had begun to transform her songwriting–fame, motherhood, the loss of a child in 2010, and the demands of touring that put a strain on her marriage–sobriety was the most powerful, she says. It crystallized connections between her past and future (“Gone to Stay” began as a letter to her son Judah but blossomed into a broader meditation about the things parents leave to their children) and led her from introspective outlaw country into glamorous, dazzling classic rock. If the floral veil, curly calligraphy, jangly instrumentation, and *Rumours* hat tip didn’t give it away, Stevie Nicks is a major influence on the album, which was coaxed along by executive producer Sturgill Simpson. “I grew up listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac, and like most girls, I idolized Stevie,” she says. “But I haven’t seen a lot of people occupying that space since, you know? Classic rock ’n’ roll heartbreakers. When I decided to make this album with Sturgill, that’s what we set out to do.” Here, Price tells the stories behind all ten tracks. **That\'s How Rumors Get Started** “I first heard the phrase from my guitar player, Jamie Davis. We were partying on the bus and someone said something gossipy. And he said, ‘Watch what you say, that\'s how rumors get started.’ I immediately wrote it down. I knew it was going to be the album title before I even wrote the song. Everybody has ideas about who they think the song is about, and I definitely wrote it with a couple of people in mind, but the great thing is that it can be about anybody. For me, a lot changed when I became successful. Friendships were compromised and challenged, it became hard to tell what people’s motivations were, there was a lot of jealousy and competitiveness. It can be very lonely. Over time, you learn to keep your mouth shut. You learn how rumors get started.” **Letting Me Down** “\[Price’s husband\] Jeremy \[Ivey\] and I co-wrote this song together after we’d both written to high school friends that we’d become estranged from. It was a really therapeutic exercise, writing to someone from my past, and put me back in touch with feelings I’d forgotten about, like when you’re living in a small town and just want to escape but feel stuck. It’s taken on new meaning during the pandemic—it talks about loneliness, isolation, unemployment, poverty, workers who need to make ends meet, the struggle that small towns face right now. It all hits close to home for me.” **Twinkle Twinkle** “We had played this really terrible beer festival in Florida. There weren\'t that many people, it was really disorganized, and we didn\'t have a very good show. Afterwards, I found Marty Stuart in his trailer tuning all of his guitars, which I thought was pretty spectacular. I was like, ‘You don\'t have a tech that does this for you?’ And he said, ‘You don\'t need no tech if you do it right!’ And then he asked me, ‘Your band\'s been on the road a lot lately, do you hate each other yet?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, we don\'t hate each other, but our marriages are falling apart and our health is deteriorating. But other than that, we\'re good.’ He smiled really big and just said, ‘You wanted to be a star. Twinkle, twinkle.’ It became this running joke when we were on the road and something went wrong, like a canceled flight that forced us to sleep in the airport all night. We\'d turn to each other and go, ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’ My husband brought the guitar riff to me and it had such a cool, gritty vibe. We were going for Neil Young meets Led Zeppelin, but it definitely came out a little more Led Zeppelin.” **Stone Me** “This song has a few different layers to it. When I was out on the road a lot and my husband and I were having trouble adjusting to it, I wrote the first verse with him in mind and sent it to him in a text message. He took it and put a melody behind it, and I was like, ‘Dude, did you just co-write a song that was supposed to be about you?’ I was also, separately, thinking about these two bloggers who have taken a lot of time to dissect my career. They judge everything that I do, and they’re just so certain they know where I\'m coming from. It was really therapeutic to write. My husband threw me the title. I think he was envisioning more of a stoner anthem, but I used it in the biblical sense of, like, those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Because yeah, I’ve learned that once you get put up on the pedestal, you\'re there to be knocked down.” **Hey Child** “My husband and I first wrote this song back in 2012, and it used to be our closer when we played with my band Buffalo Clover. We wrote it when we were hanging out with this wild group of friends. Everybody was treating us like we were rock stars, but we were the furthest thing from it. We were out on the road, drinking too much, taking a lot of drugs, and I just felt like there was this recklessness going on. Jeremy and I wrote the verses to some of our friends, but I also think we were writing it to ourselves. I had totally forgotten about the song until Sturgill convinced me to rerecord it, and then we added the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir on background vocals, which took it to a whole other place.” **Heartless Mind** “This song turned out completely different from how I initially envisioned it. I thought it was going to have a heartbreaker, guitar-driven vibe, but once we got the synths, it became more of a Blondie track. This is the only song that James Gadson didn\'t play drums on, my drummer Dillon \[Napier\] did, and he knocked it out of the park. And then later, when we were doing overdubs, David Ferguson–who co-produced this with Sturgill and I–laid down a drum machine that basically doubled the snare. So really, this is my first song with electronic drums, and I love it.” **What Happened to Our Love?** “I wasn’t expecting to record this song, but my husband loved it and encouraged me to bring it into the studio. It wound up becoming this whole thing that I never knew it could become. Once I figured out how to go into my upper register at the end, with the Nashville Friends Choir on background vocals, it entered this psychedelic Pink Floyd territory that I never expected. I was reading a lot of Leonard Cohen at the time—especially his book *The Flame* that came out posthumously—and I was influenced by the way that he writes, using the push and pull of opposites. I wrote it partially about my own marriage, as well as some of the other relationships I was seeing at the time that were struggling to stay together.” **Gone to Stay** “I knew that I needed to write a song for my son Judah. Somebody told me that at a show a long time ago—they said, ‘You\'ve written a song for the son you lost, you need to write a song for your son that\'s still here with you.’ We wanted to do a ‘Forever Young’ or something—wisdom that you can pass on to your kids and that can stand in for you when you can’t be there there—in my case, when I\'m on the road. But it became something bigger; it’s a letter with advice about protecting the earth and leaving something positive behind. I loved that I got pregnant in the middle of writing it and it turned into something for both of my children. There’s a line that says, ‘You can’t turn money back into time,’ and I think anybody can relate to that, whether they have children or not. All the things we do for work, all the things we miss. That line\'s been resonating with me throughout this quarantine. Because as hard as it is, I\'m finally just here enjoying my time.” **Prisoner of the Highway** “This was written on an airplane tray table while I was headed to California to play the Hollywood Bowl. I was opening for Willie Nelson during his Outlaw Music Festival and had just found out that I was pregnant. I hadn\'t told anybody yet because I was still grappling with the fact that I was going to miss things in my child’s life all over again. There’s a Townes Van Zandt quote that goes something like, \'I knew that if I wanted to do this music thing, I was going to have to sacrifice everything—financial stability, a family, friends.\' I have so much respect for him, because that’s dedication to your art, but it can still feel really selfish to chase your dreams. I think about all of my friends\' weddings that I missed, school events, funerals—all to chase the next perfect line in a song.” **I\'d Die for You** “This is my favorite song on the album lyrically. I\'ve been in Nashville 17 years and have seen so many things change, seen so many communities and local businesses just disappear because of gentrification. So that’s a theme here, as is racism, health care, and poverty. I always insist on telling people that this isn’t a political record, because I don’t want them getting stuck on thinking that I\'m pushing my agenda onto them. To me, this is a humanitarian song. It’s about the struggle of American life. This country is so divided that it’s ironic we\'re called the United States. But when I look at the majority of people in this country, no matter if they\'re blue or red, everybody wants a lot of the same things: a safe place to raise a kid, food on the table, shelter over your head. This song is Jeremy and I reassuring each other and our families that despite all the chaos around us, we can hold on to each other.”

On July 10th, Margo Price will release That’s How Rumors Get Started, an album of ten new, original songs that commit her sky-high and scorching rock-and-roll show to record for the very first time. Produced by longtime friend Sturgill Simpson (co-produced by Margo and David Ferguson), the LP marks Price’s debut for Loma Vista Recordings, and whether she’s singing of motherhood or the mythologies of stardom, Nashville gentrification or the national healthcare crisis, relationships or growing pains, she’s crafted a collection of music that invites people to listen closer than ever before. Margo primarily cut That’s How Rumors Get Started at Los Angeles’ EastWest Studios (Pet Sounds, “9 to 5”). Tracking occurred over several days while she was pregnant with daughter Ramona. “They’re both a creation process,” she says. “And I was being really good to my body and my mind during that time. I had a lot of clarity from sobriety.” While Margo Price continued to collaborate on most of the songwriting with her husband Jeremy Ivey, she recorded with an historic band assembled by Sturgill, and including guitarist Matt Sweeney (Adele, Iggy Pop), bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, John Mayer), drummer James Gadson (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye), and keyboardist Benmont Tench (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers). Background vocals were added by Simpson on “Letting Me Down,” and the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir, who raise the arrangements of “Hey Child” and “What Happened To Our Love?” to some of the album’s most soaring heights. Margo Price and her steady touring band - Kevin Black (bass), Jamie Davis (guitar), Micah Hulsher (keys), and Dillon Napier (drums) - will perform songs from That’s How Rumors Get Started at dozens of shows with Chris Stapleton and The Head & The Heart this spring and summer, in addition to festival appearances and more to be announced soon. Find all dates here and below. That’s How Rumors Get Started follows Margo’s 2017 album All American Made, which was named the #1 Country/Americana album of the year by Rolling Stone, and one of the top albums of the decade by Esquire, Pitchfork and Billboard, among others. In its wake, Margo sold out three nights at The Ryman Auditorium, earned her first Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and much more.

Fourteen albums is an impressive feat for any band, but it’s especially so for British death/doom pioneers My Dying Bride. In the years that have passed since their last full-length, 2015’s *Feel the Misery*, the band lost two members—including original guitarist Calvin Robertshaw—while vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe’s young daughter was stricken with cancer. “It was as tough as you can imagine it to be, and worse,” Stainthorpe tells Apple Music. “Thankfully, these things are all behind us now for the most part—she’ll require medication for the rest of her life, but we’re moving forward.” Stainthorpe and guitarist/main composer Andrew Craighan channeled their struggles into *The Ghost of Orion*. Below, the singer takes us through their heart-wrenching creation. **Your Broken Shore** “In the past, because we were young and trying to be technical and clever, we put the weirdest song as number one. But ‘Your Broken Shore’ kind of ticks all the My Dying Bride boxes: It has some slow elements, some midtempo elements; it has death metal vocals, clean vocals, it has quite a nice chorus. It\'s not too long—I think it\'s seven-odd minutes, but for us, that\'s average. The idea behind the song is that your world is fractured. You’re not sure where your future is going or who your friends are. The album ends with ‘Your Woven Shore,’ which is about your life coming back together. But obviously we’ll get to that later.” **To Outlive the Gods** “This one is a bit vampire-y, the idea being these two lovers consider their bond to be so great and eternal that they can outlive the gods. They\'re arrogant, almost. But within the track, things go a little bit pear-shaped. It didn\'t quite work out how they expected it to. It’s kind of a midtempo affair, and there’s no death metal vocals on it—which, of course, some people might be slightly disappointed in. But, you know, we try and get a balance. I think we’ve got it just right here. I hate to say it, but I think it’s a future classic.” **Tired of Tears** “This is the only song on the album that’s directly influenced by what happened to me and my daughter. It was a terrible time. I could have filled this entire album with moments from that period, but it would have killed the album for me, because I would have never wanted to listen to it and I would never want to sing any of the songs live because it touches a real raw nerve. But I had to express my thoughts about that period somehow on the album. You know, we spent so long in hospital, and you will physically ache after crying for such a long time. And it\'s exhausting. It is absolutely draining, and I wish it on nobody.” **The Solace** “We’ve got Lindy \[Fay Hella\] from Wardruna on this one. She has an amazing voice. We sent her the music, and she came back with this great composition. The first time I heard it, I thought to myself, ‘That is a magical piece of music and it needs no more.’ Because I was considering doing some vocals on it myself, but once I\'d heard this sort of duet between Lindy and Andrew’s guitar, I thought that\'s all it needs. Let\'s not over-egg the pudding. We have got a magical piece of music, period. And I think and hope that we\'ve done it right.” **The Long Black Land** “It’s a song about questioning whether or not God is real, but without beating people up about it. I’m not trying to be overly controversial—because, you know, opinions and all that. I’m not anti-religion, because I understand that people need religion to help get through the day-to-day existence of life. You know, life can be punishing. If you find the church a help, that’s absolutely fine. But I struggle with organized religions that have got so much money—they have picture frames made of gold—when there’s people starving in the world. So, yeah: Do we need God? Is God real? But without being too shouty about it.” **The Ghost of Orion** “This is a weird one. Maybe it’s a throwback to our old days when we were just trying to go against the grain a bit. And it’s got sort of an almost biblical quality. When you read certain passages from the Bible, some of them flow beautifully—like Shakespeare. Despite not being a particular lover of the Bible, there’s no denying that some of the way it’s written is truly magnificent. I want to be able to write like that. So ‘The Ghost of Orion’ is kind of me gazing up at the stars, thinking about the world in general, and kind of writing about it in a biblical fashion. But without too many ‘thou art’ and ‘thine mother’ and all those tropes.” **The Old Earth** “This is equally biblical. While I was writing, my daughter was still recovering. So I wonder now if I’ve been writing these songs looking for an answer. Looking at them now, months after the event, I can see that these look like they were written by someone who doesn’t know whether God exists or not. So clearly, there is more of this period of my life in here than I thought. I thought ‘Tired of Tears’ was it, but it isn’t. There’s a lot more. Reading the lyrics now, it’s starting to come back to me.” **Your Woven Shore** “This is an instrumental, and I never considered putting words on it. I needed the album to end on some kind of higher platform. Maybe because there aren’t any lyrics to influence where the listener is going, it will leave people with an overall positive feel about the album. Because when I do say things, they’re normally not very positive. They’re quite pessimistic at times. I would have had to end it with a sneer or a snarky little line that would have just annoyed people at the end. So we needed to let them down gently rather than push them down. And it’s a lovely piece of music.”

When it came to crafting her fourth album, Jessie Ware had one word in mind. “Escapism,” the Londoner tells Apple Music of *What’s Your Pleasure?*, a collection of suitably intoxicating soul- and disco-inspired pop songs to transport you out of your everyday and straight onto a crowded dance floor. “I wanted it to be fun. The premise was: Will this make people want to have sex? And will this make people want to dance? I’ve got a family now, so going out and being naughty and debauched doesn’t happen that much.” And yet the singer (and, in her spare time, wildly popular podcaster) could have never foreseen just how much we would *all* be in need of that release by the time *What’s Your Pleasure?* came to be heard—amid a global pandemic and enforced lockdowns in countless countries. “A lot of shit is going on,” says Ware. “As much as I don’t think I’m going to save the world with this record, I do think it provides a bit of escapism. By my standards, this album is pretty joyful.” Indeed, made over two years with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and producers including Clarence Coffee Jr. (Dua Lipa, Lizzo) and Joseph Mount of Metronomy, *What’s Your Pleasure?* is a world away from the heartfelt balladry once synonymous with Ware. Here, pulsating basslines reign supreme, as do whispered vocals, melodramatic melodies, and winking lyrics. At times, it’s a defiant throwback to the dance scene that first made Ware famous (“I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’”); at others, it’s a thrilling window into what might come next (note “Remember Where You Are,” the album’s gorgeous, Minnie Riperton-esque outro). But why the sudden step change? “A low point in music” and \"a shitty time,” says Ware, nodding to a 2018 tour that left her feeling so disillusioned with her day job that her mother suggested she quit singing altogether. “I needed a palate cleanser to shock the system. I needed to test myself. I needed to be reminded that music should be fun.” *What’s Your Pleasure?*, confirms Ware, has more than restored the spring in her step. “I feel like what I can do after this is limitless,” she says. “That’s quite a different situation to how I felt during the last album. Now, I have a newfound drive. I feel incredibly empowered, and it’s an amazing feeling.” Here\_,\_ Let Ware walk you through her joyous fourth record, one song at a time. **Spotlight** “I wrote this in the first writing session. James was playing the piano and we were absolutely crooning. That’s what the first bit of this song is—which really nods to musical theater and jazz. We thought about taking it out, but then I realized that the theatrical aspect is kind of essential. The album had to have that light and shade. It also felt like a perfect entry point because of that intro. It’s like, ‘Come into my world.’ I think it grabs you. It’s also got a bit of the old Jessie in there, with that melancholy. This song felt like a good indicator of where the rest of the album was going to go. That’s why it felt right to start the record with that.” **What’s Your Pleasure?** “We had been writing and writing all day, and nothing was working. We\'d gone for a lunch, and we were like, ‘You know, sometimes this happens.’ Later, we were just messing about, and I was like, ‘I really want to imagine that I\'m in the Berghain and I want to imagine that I\'m dancing with someone and they are so suggestive, and anything goes.’ It\'s sex, it\'s desire, it\'s temptation. We were like, ‘Let’s do this as outrageously as possible.’ So we imagined we were this incredibly confident person who could just say anything. When we wrote it, it just came out—20 minutes and then it was done. James came up with that amazing beat, which almost reminds me of a DJ Shadow song. We were giggling the whole time we were writing it. It\'s quite poppy accidentally, but I think with the darkness of all the synths, it’s just the perfect combination.” **Ooh La La** “This is another very cheeky one. It’s very much innuendo. In my head, there are these prim and proper lovers—it’s all very polite, but actually there’s no politeness about. So it’s quite a naughty number. The song has got an absolute funk to it, but it’s really catchy and it’s still quite quirky. It’s not me letting rip on the vocal. It’s actually quite clipped.” **Soul Control** “I had Janet Jackson in my head in this one. It’s a really energetic number. There is a sense of indulgence in these songs, because I wasn’t trying to play to a radio edit and I was really relishing that. But it’s not self-indulgent, because it’s very much fun. These are the highest tempos I’ve ever done, and I think I surprised myself by doing that. I wanted to keep the energy up—I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’” **Save a Kiss** “It’s funny because I was a bit scared of this song. I remember Ed Sheeran telling me, ‘When you get a bit scared by a song, it usually means that there’s something really good in it.’ My fans like emotion from me, so I wanted to do a really emotive dance song. We just wanted it to feel as bare as possible and really feel like the lyrics and the melody could really like sing out on this one. We had loads of other production in it, and it was very much like a case of James and I stripping everything back. It was the hardest one to get right. But I’m very excited about playing it. It has the yearning and the wanting that I feel my fans want, and I just wanted it to feel a bit over the top. I also wanted this song to have a bit of Kate Bush in there and some of the drama of her music.” **Adore You** “I wrote this when I got pregnant. It was my first session with Joseph Mount and I was a bit awkward and he was a bit awkward. When I\'m really nervous I sing really quietly because I don\'t want people to hear anything. But that actually kind of worked. I love this—it shows a vulnerability and a softness. Actually it was me thinking about my unborn child and thinking about, like, I\'m falling for you and this bump and feeling like it\'s going to be a reality soon. I think Joe did such an amazing job on just making it feel hypnotic and still romantic and tender, but with this kind of mad sound. I think it’s a really beautiful song. It was supposed to be an offering before I went away and had a baby, to tell my fans that I’ll be back. They really loved it and I thought, ‘I can\'t not put this on the record, because it\'s like it\'s an important song for the journey of this album.’ I’m really proud of the fact that this is a pure collaboration, and I have such fond memories of it.” **In Your Eyes** “This was the first song that me and James wrote for this whole album. I think you can feel the darkness in it. And that maybe I was feeling the resentment and torturing myself. I think that the whirring arpeggio and the beats in this song very much suggest that it’s a stream of consciousness. There’s a desperation about it. I think that was very much the time and place that I was in. I’m very proud of this song, and it’s actually one of my favorites. Jules Buckley did such an amazing job on the strings—it makes me feel like we\'re in a Bond film or something. But it was very much coming off the back of having quite a low point in music.” **Step Into My Life** “I made this song with \[London artist\] Kindness \[aka Adam Bainbridge\]. I’ve known them for a long time. In my head I wanted that almost R&B delivery with the verse and for it to feel really intimate and kind of predatory, but with this very disco moment in the chorus. I love that Adam’s voice is in there, in the breakdown. It feels like a conversation—the song is pure groove and attitude. You can’t help but nod your head. It feels like one that you can play at the beginning of a party and get people on the dance floor.” **Read My Lips** “James and I did this one on our own, and it’s supposed to be quite bubblegummy. We were giving a nod to \[Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force song\] ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ The bassline in this song is so good. We also recorded my vocal slower and lower, so that when you turn it back to normal speed, the vocals sound more cutesy because it sounds brighter and higher. I wanted it to sound slightly squeaky. My voice is naturally quite low and melancholic, so I don’t know how I’m going to sing this one live. I’ll have to pinch my nose or something!” **Mirage (Don’t Stop)** “The bassline here is ridiculous! That’s down to Matt Tavares \[of BADBADNOTGOOD\]. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and is just so talented and enthusiastic, and I also wrote this with \[British DJ and producer\] Benji B and \[US producer\] Clarence Coffee Jr. I think it really signified that I had got my confidence and my mojo back when I went into that session. Usually I\'d be like, ‘Oh, my god, I can\'t do this with new people.’ But it just clicked as sometimes it does. I was unsure about whether the lyric ‘Don\'t stop moving’ felt too obvious. But Benji B was very much like, ‘No, man. You want people to dance. It’s the perfect message.’ And I think of Benji B as like the cool-ometer. So I was like, \'Cool, if Benji B thinks it cool, then I\'m okay with that.’” **The Kill** “There’s an almost hypnotic element to this song. It’s very dark, almost like the end of the night when things are potentially getting too loose. It’s also a difficult one to talk about. It’s about someone feeling like they know you well—maybe too well. There are anxieties in there, and it\'s meant to be cinematic. I wanted that relentlessly driving feeling like you\'d be in a car and you just keep going on, like you’re almost running away from something. Again, Jules Buckley did an amazing job with the strings here—I wanted it to sound almost like it was verging on Primal Scream or Massive Attack. And live, it could just build and build and build. There is, though, a lightness at the end of it, and an optimism—like you’re clawing your way out of this darkness.” **Remember Where You Are** “I’m incredibly proud of this song. I wrote it when Boris Johnson had just got into Downing Street and things were miserable. Everything that could be going wrong was going wrong, which is behind the lyric ‘The heart of the city is on fire.’ And it sounds relatively upbeat, but actually, it\'s about me thinking, ‘Remember where you are. Remember that just a cuddle can be okay. Remember who’s around you.’ Also, it was very much a semi-sign-off and about saying, ‘This is where I’m going and this is the most confident I’ve ever been.’ It was a bold statement. I think it stands up as one of the best songs I\'ve ever written.”