SPIN's Best Albums of 2024 (So Far)

Listening to Adrianne Lenker’s music can feel like finding an old love letter in a library book: somehow both painfully direct and totally mysterious at the same time, filled with gaps in logic and narrative that only confirm how intimate the connection between writer and reader is. Made with a small group in what one imagines is a warm and secluded room, *Bright Future* captures the same folksy wonder and open-hearted intensity of Big Thief but with a slightly quieter approach, conjuring visions of creeks and twilights, dead dogs (“Real House”) and doomed relationships (“Vampire Empire”) so vivid you can feel the humidity pouring in through the screen door. She’s vulnerable enough to let her voice warble and crack and confident enough to linger there for as long as it takes to get her often devastating emotional point across. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more,” she sings on “Free Treasure.” Believe her.

Faye Webster’s fifth album marks the point of full immersion when it comes to the Atlanta songwriting prodigy’s sly, shifting aesthetic. The tones are richer and deeper; the arrangements expand and breathe like massive lungs; her voice layers over itself and ripples, decadent and deeply felt. Webster’s genre-blending approach may have been slightly overstated in the past—a result of her early association with Atlanta’s rascally, defunct hip-hop crew Awful Records—but her sonic playfulness has never been more fully realized than it is on on *Underdressed at the Symphony*. Slinky, flute-dotted R&B is situated up against sumptuous country pop and grungy flips on ’50s sock-hop rock music; longtime friend and rap chameleon Lil Yachty pops up on “Lego Ring” as the pair switch off from a Weezer-esque chug to spacey, astral psych-rock. Lyrically, *Underdressed at the Symphony*—which was written and recorded coming off of a breakup—carries Webster’s now-trademarked mixture of emotional intimacy and straightforward humor. She finds potency in simple sentiments (“Thinking About You,” “He Loves Me Yeah!”), and on the sparse hyperpop “Feeling Good Today,” she details the small pleasures that come with moving through one’s daily existence. “I used to be self-conscious/Well, really, I still am/I’m just better at figuring out why,” Webster ruminates over the lush guitars of “Wanna Quit All the Time,” one of several songs that feature Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. This is music that’s as mesmerizing as it is disarmingly personal, and *Underdressed at the Symphony* represents an artist who, similar to cosmic kin Cass McCombs, seems increasingly intent on proving she really can do anything.

In dance music, few boundaries are as powerful as the wall between the mainstream and the underground. Four Tet is the rare artist who has managed to knock it down. The endlessly curious English producer Kieran Hebden—who has been bridging gaps between far-apart sounds like spiritual jazz, indie rock, R&B, and techno since the late ’90s—surprised fans in 2023 when he teamed up with main-stage party boys Skrillex and Fred again.., transforming Coachella and Madison Square Garden into pop-up raves. What had become of their underground darling? But Hebden isn’t one to unpack. Here, on his 12th full-length, he veers back into the cerebral sounds he’s known for: lush, patient, radiant soundscapes that verge on meditations. “Daydream Repeat,” a clear standout, is twinkling and weightless, the sort of flow-state reverie that can lift you outside of yourself. “31 Bloom” has similarly club-friendly grooves but feels fully rooted, with synths and drums that rub together like sneakers across a dance floor. But no track stretches quite like the mystical, New Age-y “Three Drums,” an eight-minute panorama of birdsong flutes, rainfall textures, and pulsing synths that echo Moby’s 1999 hit “Porcelain.” As the song unfolds into an ambient canvas of sound waves and sighs, it begins to feel less like music and more like breath—a blissful sanctuary to slip into and get lost in. As a destination, it isn’t too far from that of his big-tent contemporaries; dance music, in essence, is about freedom and release. In that way, *Three* finds Hebden doing what he does best: finding clever, unexpected ways to bring disparate listeners into the same space.

Few genres feel as inherently collaborative as jazz, and even fewer contemporary artists embody that spirit quite like Kamasi Washington. After bringing a whole new generation of listeners to jazz through his albums *The Epic* and *Heaven and Earth*, as well as his collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, the Los Angeles native and saxophonist amassed an impressively eclectic set of guests to join his forthcoming bandleader project *Fearless Movement*. Among the guests were Los Angeles rapper D Smoke and funk legend George Clinton, who joined him for “Get Lit.” “That was definitely a beautiful moment,” Washington tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “The sessions were magical; it was like being in a studio with just geniuses.” Originally written by Washington’s longtime drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. (also known as the brother of bass virtuoso Thundercat), “Get Lit” sat around for a bit before the divine inspiration struck to invite Clinton and D Smoke to build upon it. After Washington attended the former’s art exhibition and the latter’s Hollywood Bowl concert in Los Angeles, it couldn’t have been clearer to him who the band needed to make the song shine. Washington compares Clinton’s involvement to magic, marveling in the studio at just how the Parliament-Funkadelic icon operates. “It\'s like we\'re listening to it and he\'s living in it,” he says, conveying how natural it felt having him participate. “When he decides to add something to some music, it\'s like water.” As for D Smoke, Washington was so impressed by the two-time Grammy nominee’s sense of musicality. “He plays keys, he understands harmony, and all that other stuff. He just knew exactly what to do.” As implied by “Get Lit,” the contributors on *Fearless Movement* come from varied backgrounds and scenes, from the modern R&B styles of singer BJ the Chicago Kid to the shape-shifting sounds of Washington’s *To Pimp a Butterfly* peer Terrace Martin. Still, the name that will stand out for many listeners is André 3000, who locked in with the band on the improvisational piece “Dream State.” The Outkast rapper turned critically acclaimed flautist arrived with a veritable arsenal of flutes, inspiring all the players present. “André has one of the most powerful creative spirits that I\'ve ever experienced,” Washington says. “We just created that whole song in the moment together without knowing where we was going.” Allowing himself to give in to the uncertainty and promise of that particular moment succinctly encapsulates the wider ethos behind all of *Fearless Movement*. “A lot of times, I feel like you can get stuck holding on to what you have because you\'re unwilling to let it go,” he says. “This album is really speaking on that idea of just being comfortable in what you are and where you want to go.”

As important as it is to foreground the Tuareg/Nigerien heritage of Mdou Moctar’s scorching psychedelic rock, it’s just as important to note its connection to the American underground. After all, *Funeral for Justice* isn’t “folk music” in any touristic or anthropological sense, and it’s probably as (if not more) likely to appeal to fans of strictly American weirdos like Ty Segall or Thee Oh Sees as anything out of West Africa. Still, anyone unfamiliar with the stutter-step rhythm of Tuareg music should visit “Imajighen” and the lullaby-like hush of “Modern Slaves” immediately, and it pleases the heart to imagine a borderless future in which moody teenage guitarists might study stuff like “Sousoume Tamacheq” the way Moctar himself studied Eddie Van Halen. As with 2021’s breakthrough *Afrique Victime*, the intensity is astonishing, the sustain hypnotic, and the combination of the two an experience most listeners probably haven’t had before.

“Pain makes you more humane,” Shakira tells Apple Music. “Being able to take that pain and transform it into something else, that is an opportunity and a luxury that us artists have.” Assuredly, the Latin-pop superstar’s romantic and professional woes in recent years have been significant, often converted into cruel tabloid fodder that, no doubt, amplified the issues and surrounding emotions. Yet with *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran*, her first new album in nearly seven years, she transforms the numbingly dull lead of personal hardship into a glorious musical gold. “In a way, it’s kind of good not to have a husband,” Shakira says of the impact her breakup had on her creativity. “Now I feel like working. It’s a compulsive need of mine that I didn’t feel before.” Even before the album emerged, that compulsion came through clearly and eventfully with the release of singles like the award-winning “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” showing the world that she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind during trying times. “No one should tell any woman how she’s supposed to heal and lick her wounds.” *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran* exemplifies that sentiment. As expected, given her prior hits, she retains a mastery of the dance floor with the benefit of autobiographical lyricism. Here, she provides such expertly executed versions as the Bizarrap-assisted “La Fuerte” and the emotionally potent “Tiempo Sin Verte.” One of many successors to Shakira’s bilingual pop lineage, Cardi B joins for the opener “Puntería,” a sweat-inducing track dripping with erotically charged metaphors. More than willing to branch out beyond what her legacy already holds, she also demonstrates just how integral she’s become to the modern reggaetón landscape, lending her cosign to Manuel Turizo on “Copa Vacía” and finding a kindred spirit in KAROL G on “TQG.” Far more surprising are her successful forays into other genres represented throughout the album, namely the música mexicana team-ups “(Entre Paréntesis)” with Grupo Frontera and “El Jefe” with Fuerza Regida, as well as the brisk bachata cut “Monotonía” with Ozuna. Still, Shakira hasn’t forgotten her long-standing rock listenership, bringing energy and grace to the cathartic “Cómo Dónde y Cuándo.” Similarly, her balladry remains exemplary, the revelatory messages of “Acróstico (Milan y Sasha)” and “Última” obviously driven by her experiences and in response to these challenges. Ultimately, against all odds, she emerges from this album with a sense of hope and optimism. “Love is the most amazing experience a human can live, and no one should take away that opinion from you,” she says. “It doesn’t matter the shitty experiences you go through in life; there’s always a lot more to look forward to.”

“We weren’t really expecting it at such a rate,” The Last Dinner Party’s guitarist and vocalist Lizzie Mayland tells Apple Music of the band’s rise, the story of which is well known by now. After forming in London in 2021, the five-piece’s effervescent live shows garnered an if-you-know-you-know kind of buzz, which went into overdrive when they released their stomping, euphoric debut single “Nothing Matters” in April 2023. All of which might have put a remarkable amount of pressure on them while making their debut record (not least given the band ended 2024 by winning the BRITs Rising Star Award then topped the BBC’s new-talent poll, Sound of 2024, in January). But The Last Dinner Party had written, recorded and finished *Prelude to Ecstasy* three months before anyone had even heard “Nothing Matters.” It meant, says lead singer Abigail Morris, that they “just had a really nice time” making it. “It is a painful record in some ways and it explores dark themes,” she adds, “but making it was just really fun, rewarding, and wholesome.” Produced by James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Jessie Ware), who Morris calls “the dream producer,” *Prelude to Ecstasy* is rooted in those hype-inducing live shows, its tracklist a reflection of the band’s frequent set list and its songs shaped and grown by playing them on stage. “We wanted to capture the live feels in the songs,” notes Morris. “That’s the whole point.” Featuring towering vocals, thrilling guitar solos, orchestral instrumentation, and a daring, do-it-all spirit, the album sounds like five band members having an intense amount of fun as they explore an intense set of emotions and experiences with unbridled expression and feeling. These songs—which expand and then shrink and then soar—navigate sexuality (“Sinner,” “My Lady of Mercy”), what it must be like to move through the world as a man (“Caesar on a TV Screen,” the standout, celestial “Beautiful Boy”), and craving the gaze of an audience (“Mirror”), as well as loss channeled into art, withering love, and the mother-daughter relationship. And every single one of them feels like a release. “It’s a cathartic, communal kind of freedom,” says Morris. “‘Cathartic’ is definitely the main word that we throw about when we talk about playing live and playing an album.” Read on as Morris and Mayland walk us through their band’s exquisite debut, one song at a time. **“Prelude to Ecstacy”** Abigail Morris: “I was thinking about it like an overture in a musical. Aurora \[Nishevci, keys player and vocalist\] composed it—she’s a fantastic composer, and it has themes from all the songs on the record. I don’t believe in shuffle except for playlists and I always liked the idea of \[an album\] having a start, middle, and end, and there is in this record. It sets the scene.” **“Burn Alive”** AM: “This was the first song that existed in the band—we’ve been opening the set with it the entire time. Lyrically, it always felt like a mission statement. I wrote it just after my father passed away, and it was the idea of, ‘Let me make my grief a commodity’—this kind of slightly sarcastic ‘I’m going to put my heart on the line and all my pain and everything for a buck.’ The idea of being ecstatic by being burned alive—by your pain and by your art and by your inspiration—in a kind of holy-fire way. What we’re here to do is be fully alive and committed to exorcising any demons, pain or joy.” **“Caesar on a TV Screen”** AM: “I wrote the beginning of this song over lockdown. I’d stayed over with my boyfriend at the time and then, to go back home, he lent me a suit. When I met him, I didn’t just find him attractive, I wanted to *be* him—he was also a singer in another band and he had this amazing confidence and charisma in a specifically masculine way. Getting to have his suit, I was like, ‘Now I am a man in a band.’ It’s this very specific sensuality and power you feel when you’re dressing as a man. I sat at the piano and had this character in my head—a Mick Jagger or a Caligula. I thought it would be fun to write a song from the perspective of feeling like a king, but you are only like that because you’re so vulnerable and so desperate to be loved and quite weak and afraid and childlike.” Lizzie Mayland: “There was an ending on the original version that faded away into this lone guitar, which was really beautiful, but we got used to playing it live with it coming back up again. So we put that back in. The song is very live, the way we recorded it.” **“The Feminine Urge”** AM: “The beginning of this song was based on an unreleased Lana Del Rey song called ‘Driving in Cars With Boys’—it slaps. I wanted to write about my mother and the mother wound. It’s about the relationship between mothers and daughters and how those go back over generations, and the shared traumas that come down. I think you get to a certain age as a woman where your mother suddenly becomes another woman, rather than being your mum. You turn 23 and you’re having lunch and it’s like, ‘Oh shit, we’re just two women who are living life together,’ and it’s very beautiful and very sweet and also very confronting. It’s the sudden realization of the mortality and fallibility of your mother that you don’t get when you’re a child. It’s also wondering, ‘If I have a daughter, what kind of mother would I be? Is it ethical to bring a child into a world like this? And what wound would I maybe pass on to her or not?’” **“On Your Side”** LM: “We put this and ‘Beautiful Boy’—the two slow ones—together. Again, that comes from playing live. Taking a slow moment in the set—people are already primed to pay attention rather than dancing.” AM: “The song is about a relationship breaking down and it’s nice to have that represented musically. It’s a very traditional structure, song-verse-chorus, and it’s not challenging or weird. It’s nice that the ending feels like this very beautiful decay. It’s sort of rotting, but it sounds very beautiful, but it is this death and gasping. I really like how that illustrates what the song’s about.” **“Beautiful Boy”** AM: “I come back to this as one that I’m most proud of. I wanted to say something really specific with the lyrics. It’s about a friend of mine, who’s very pretty. He’s a very beautiful boy. He went hitchhiking through Spain on his own and lost his phone and was just relying on the kindness of strangers, going on this beautiful Hemingway-esque trip. I remember being so jealous of him because I was like, ‘Well, I could never do that—as a woman I’d probably get murdered or something horrible.’ He made me think about the very specific doors that open when you are a beautiful man. You have certain privileges that women don’t get. And if you’re a beautiful woman, you have certain privileges that other people don’t get. I don’t resent him—he’s a very dear friend. Also, I think it’s important and interesting to write, as a woman, about your male relationships that aren’t romantic or sexual.” LM: “The flute was a turning point in this track. It’s such a lonely instrument, so vulnerable and so expressive. To me, this song is kind of a daydream. Like, ‘I wish life was like that, but it’s not.’ It feels like there’s a deeper sense of acceptance. It’s sweetly sad.” **“Gjuha”** AM: “We wanted to do an aria as an interlude. At first, we just started writing this thing on piano and guitar and Aurora had a saxophone. At some point, Aurora said it reminded her of an Albanian folk song. We’d been talking about her singing a song in Albanian for the album. She went away and came back with this beautiful, heart-wrenching piece. It’s about her feeling this pain and guilt of coming from a country, and a family who speak Albanian and are from Kosovo, but being raised in London and not speaking that language. She speaks about it so well.” **“Sinner”** LM: “It’s such a fun live moment because it’s kind of a turning point in the set: ‘OK, it’s party time.’ I was quite freaked out about the idea of being like, ‘This is a song about being queer.’ And I thought, ‘Are people going to get that?’ Because it’s not the most metaphorical or difficult lyrics, but it’s also not just like, ‘I like all gendered people.’ But people get it, which has been quite reassuring. It’s about belonging and about finding a safe space in yourself and your own sense of self. And marrying an older version of yourself with a current version of yourself. Playing it live and people singing it back is such a comforting feeling. I know Emily \[Roberts, lead guitarist, who also plays mandolin and flute\] was very inspired by St. Vincent and also LCD Soundsystem.” **“My Lady of Mercy”** AM: “For me, it’s the most overtly sexy song—the most obviously-about-sex song and about sexuality. I feel like it’s a nice companion to ‘Sinner’ because I think they’re about similar things—about queerness in tension with religion and with family and with guilt. I went to Catholic school, which is very informative for a young woman. I’m not a practicing Catholic now, but the imagery is always so pertinent and meaningful to me. I just thought it was really interesting to use religious imagery to talk about liking women and feeling free in your sexuality and reclaiming the guilt. I feel like Nine Inch Nails was a really big inspiration musically. This is testament to how much we trust James \[Ford\] and feel comfortable with him. We did loads of takes of me just moaning into the mic through a distortion. I could sit there and make fake orgasm sounds next to him.” LM: “I remember you saying you wanted to write a song for people to mosh to. Especially the breakdown that was always meant to be played live to a load of people throwing themselves around. It definitely had to be that big.” **“Portrait of a Dead Girl”** AM: “This song took a long time—it went through a lot of different phases. It was one we really evolved with as a band. The ending was inspired by Florence + the Machine’s ‘Dream Girl Evil.’ And Bowie’s a really big influence in general on us, but I think especially on this one. It feels very ’70s and like the Ziggy Stardust album. The portrait was actually a picture I found on Pinterest, as many songs start. It was an older portrait of a woman in a red dress sitting on a bed and then next to her is a massive wolf. At first, I thought that was the original painting, but then I looked at it again and the wolf has been put in. But I really loved that idea of comparing \[it to\] a relationship, a toxic one—feeling like you have this big wolf who’s dangerous but it’s going to protect you, and feeling safe. But you can’t be friends with a wolf. It’s going to turn around and bite you the second it gets a chance.” **”Nothing Matters”** AM: “This wasn’t going to be the first single—we always said it would be ‘Burn Alive.’ We had no idea that it was going to do what it did. We were like, ‘OK, let’s introduce ourselves,’ and then where it went is kind of beyond comprehension.” LM: “I was really freaked out—I spent the first couple of days just in my bed—but also so grateful for all the joy it’s been received with. When we played our first show after it came out, I literally had the phrase, ‘This is the best feeling in the world.’ I’ll never forget that.” AM: “It was originally just a piano-and-voice song that I wrote in my room, and then it evolved as everyone else added their parts. Songs evolve by us playing them on stage and working things out. That’s definitely what happened with this song—especially Emily’s guitar solo. It’s a very honest love song that we wanted to tell cinematically and unbridled, that expression of love without embarrassment or shame or fear, told through a lens of a very visual language—which is the most honest way that I could have written.” **“Mirror”** AM: “Alongside ‘Beautiful Boy,’ this is one of the most precious ones to me. When I first moved to London before the band, I was just playing on my own, dragging my piano around to shitty venues and begging people to listen. I wrote it when I was 17 or 18, and it’s the only one I’ve kept from that time. It’s changed meanings so many times. At first, one of them was an imagined relationship, I hadn’t really been in relationships until then and it was the idea of codependency and the feeling of not existing without this relationship. And losing your identity and having it defined by relationship in a sort of unhealthy way. Then—and I’ve never talked about this—but the ‘she’ in the verses I’m referring to is actually an old friend of mine. After my father died, she became obsessed with me and with him, and she’d do very strange, scary things like go to his grave and call me. Very frightening and stalker-y. I wrote the song being like, ‘I’m dealing with the dissolution of this friendship and this kind of horrible psychosis that she seems to be going through.’ Now this song has become similar to ‘Burn Alive.’ It’s my relationship with an audience and the feeling of always being a performer and needing someone looking at you, needing a crowd, needing someone to hear you. I will never forget the day that Emily first did that guitar solo. Then Aurora’s orchestral bit was so important to have on that record. We wanted it to have light motifs from the album. That ending always makes me really emotional. I think it’s a really touching bit of music and it feels so right for the end of this album. It feels cathartic.”

In the early 2000s, few would have bet on The Libertines making it to a fourth album album at all, let alone one as robust as *All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade*. Intra-band strife, prison, and Pete Doherty’s well-documented drug problems seemed to have scuppered the mercurial talent shown on 2002 debut *Up the Bracket* and 2004’s self-titled follow-up for good. However, following 2015’s galvanizing reformation album, *Anthems for Doomed Youth*, *All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade* finds the good ship Albion coming ashore with one of the strongest sets of songs of the band’s career. On an album recorded at The Albion Rooms, the group’s studio-cum-hotel in (UK seaside town) Margate, Kent, the ramshackle charm which sometimes felt like their songs could collapse at any moment has been bolstered by something far more muscular and sturdy. Rollicking opening track “Run Run Run” lands like The Clash at their anthemic peak, while closer “Songs They Never Play on the Radio” transforms a tune Doherty has been tinkering with in various forms for years into a swooning, Beatles-esque ballad. Where Libertines songs of old sprung from a mythical vision of England conjured from Doherty and fellow singer/guitarist/songwriter Carl Barât’s imagination, here they’re more rooted in the here and now. “Mustangs” is populated by a litany of colorful characters observed around Margate, Barât singing about day-drinking mums, day-dreaming nuns, and 24/7 ne’er-do-wells over a glorious Stones-y groove. While “Merry Old England” looks at a land of discarded crisp packets and B&B vouchers from the perspective of migrants traveling to the UK looking for work. “It’s a rich tapestry,” Doherty tells Apple Music. “It’s not just about Margate, it’s about England. I don’t think the English realize how the rest of the world gazes upon us with curiosity and wonder and bafflement, really.” Read on for Doherty and Barât’s track-by-track guide. **“Run Run Run”** PD: “It’s a bit of a belter that one, I love it. It’s got a bit of a Squeeze thing going on.” CB: “The song doesn’t have to be about running away from your past. It’s about running because that’s what you do. It can be in terror, or it can be a thing of great elation or purpose.” PD: “It’s just how you get your kicks, baby.” CB: “Yeah. It can be processing a trauma or getting your kicks. Either way.” **“Mustangs”** PD: “We spent an endless amount of time trying to get this together which isn’t normally our style. At one point it had 10 verses.” CB: “It was like a Velvet Underground epic. It was my \[T.S. Eliot poem\] ‘The Waste Land.’ It took a lot of shuffling in the sand to get that one to settle. It’s got a summer air to it, that kind of looseness. It’s got a Lou Reed-y narrative to it about all these characters in Margate.” **“I Have a Friend”** CB: “That’s a topical song given it’s about war and what’s going on in Ukraine.” PD: “It’s hard to look away from that. A few of us in the band have got Russian and Ukrainian roots. It was too much for me to take, we had to sit down and talk about it which merged into ‘I Have a Friend.’ It was just a desperate cry from all the darkness and confusion of all of this. I kept saying, ‘NATO are going to step in any day, are we too old to enlist?’ I said to my wife, ‘We can’t just sit here and watch it, we’ve got to go!’ She said, ’We’ve got a two-week-old baby.’” **“Merry Old England”** PD: “The people who travel here and risk life and limb to come to England and try and make a life for themselves is something we spend quite a lot of time talking about. A lot of these people are trained doctors, they speak four or five languages. It’s not that I’m pro-illegal immigration, I’ve just got this thing against borders. It’s very easy to create fear and anger and hostility about people.” CB: “It’s about discussing something that’s topical. There’s no didactic approach from us. Maybe we do have opinions, but it’s just a good song.” **“Man With the Melody”** CB: “That’s as old as time, that song.” PD: “From back when we were in Kentish Town. We didn’t have a B&B or our own recording studio or a bar. All we had was John \[Hassall, bassist\]’s basement with our little amps. He’d sit there in his skintight Dairy Queen T-shirt and his cowboy boots strumming this mad little song. We were secretly jealous of it because it was so melodic. So we took it apart, stripped it down and put it back together, put our own bits in and gave it a lick of paint. It’s got this creeping, gothic, Bram Stoker-ish element to it.” CB: “That’s Gary \[Powell, drummer\]’s singing debut. I think it’s the first time we’ve all sung on a song and shared it like that.” **“Oh Shit”** CB: “It’s essentially about the proprietor of The Albion Rooms and her husband. It’s about these young people jacking in their lives and just doing something different and worlds apart. It’s that sort of romance of the road, having no regard for their own immediate safety or life past what’s just straight in front of their faces, and being in love and all the experiences that come with that.” **“Night of the Hunter”** PD: “There’s a lot of references to tattoos. I’ve always been fascinated by that thing of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on the knuckles. When we play it live it really slows down and I like this idea of all these people singing along to ‘ACAB’ which stands for ‘All coppers are bastards,’ which is an old skinhead tattoo. Prison is mostly full of young men, but you always get that old lag in there and they’ve got these weird tattoos and you make the mistake of asking, ‘Oh, what do those dots mean?’ Then you’re like, ‘Oh, fuck…’ You hear some really dark stuff.” **“Baron’s Claw”** PD: “That was mostly born in The Albion Rooms. We were all sleeping there and trying to put the album together. I had these chords and I was playing them and Carl’s room is directly above where I was sitting. It was six or seven in the morning and I was playing it louder and louder, just hoping that it would somehow penetrate his dreams. So I opened the window and then I was playing it on the stairs. He finally came down a bit grumpy, as he tends to be in the morning, and I thought, ‘I’ll wait for him to say something…’ And he didn’t. I waited and waited and then finally I got a little ‘So, was that a new tune, then?’ \[from him\]. Because I don’t think he believed it was.” CB: “You’re lucky. In the old days, if you were playing outside my window I would have told you to shut the fuck up.” PD: “The song’s about this quite shameful episode in our history when we \[Britain\] funded the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. This guy is over there with a unit of White Russians fighting the Red Army and then comes back without a hand. Is it based on a true story? Why not? It could have happened!” **“Shiver”** PD: “If you did a DNA test on that song it would be 23 percent me, 25 percent American bully, a bit of sausage dog, a bit of Scottish terrier, a dash of dachshund…It went on a lot of weird deviations that song.” CB: “We were in Jamaica and we wrote a really misty-eyed ballad about 25 years of friendship and going from rack and ruin and dreams and reasons for staying alive. We cut it down and used the middle eight for ‘Shiver’ and the other song got thrown on the scrapheap. That’s how decadent art can be.” PD: “It turns out with ‘Shiver’ that we’ve actually made a half-decent pop song. That song’s had more radio play in its first month than \[debut single\] ‘What a Waster’ has had in 25 years.” **“Be Young”** PD: “The message of this song was to be young and fall in love, because we were coming out with all this depressing data about the planet’s impending doom. We wrote it in Jamaica as this hurricane was crashing through the Caribbean. We just thought, ‘Well, we’ve got all this stuff in here about being born astride a grave and the world boiling in oil, so let’s throw in a chorus about just being young and in love.’” CB: “It’s difficult to write a song like that. Jim Morrison could say, ‘I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.’ But he died in 1971, do you know what I mean? Now, you can’t have that mentality. You can’t say, ‘Just be young and fall in love.’” PD: “A lot of people do though, a lot of them just don’t give a fuck.” CB: “And more fool them.” **“Songs They Never Play on the Radio”** PD: “We got that song together years ago, at the very beginning. It’s got a checkered past. It’s like an old mate who you really believed in and you’ll always have a place for him in your heart, but he just sort of seemed to fade away. But then, it turns out he’s written the jingle for the new Audi advert and he’s sitting in a fucking mansion.” CB: “The bastard.” PD: “I took it under my wing and made it all jangly and jazzy. I could never quite do it with Babyshambles and I could never quite do it on my own, so I brought it to the table for this one. And then John said, ‘Why don’t you try it like this?’ He turned it into this Beatles thing, and it completely turned it on its head. I was aghast. We wrote another verse, gave it a lick of paint and here it is.”

The Smile, a trio featuring Radiohead prime movers Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood along with ex-Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, sounds more like a proper band than a side project on their second album. Sure, they’re a proper band that unavoidably sounds a *lot* like Radiohead, but with some notable distinctions—much leaner arrangements, bass parts by Greenwood and Yorke with a very different character from what Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood might have laid down, and a formal fixation on conveying tension in their melodies and rhythms. Their debut, *A Light for Attracting Attention*, was full of tight, wrenching grooves and guitar parts that sounded as though the strings were coiling into knots. This time around they head in the opposite direction, loosening up to the point that the music often feels extremely light and airy. The guitar in the first half of “Bending Hectic” is so delicate and minimal that it sounds like it could get blown away with a slight breeze, while the warm and lightly jazzy “Friend of a Friend” feels like it’s helplessly pushed and pulled along by strong, unpredictable winds. The loping rhythm and twitchy riffs in “Read the Room” are surrounded by so much negative space that it sounds eerily hollow, like Yorke is singing through the skeletal remains of a ’70s metal song. There are some surprises along the way, too. A few songs veer into floaty lullaby sections, and more than half include orchestral tangents that recall Greenwood’s film score work for Paul Thomas Anderson and Jane Campion. The most unexpected moment comes at the climax of “Bending Hectic,” which bursts into heavy grunge guitar, stomping percussion, and soaring vocals. Most anyone would have assumed Yorke and Greenwood had abandoned this type of catharsis sometime during the Clinton administration, but as it turns out they were just waiting for the right time to deploy it.

When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”

“I really feel like I just hit a specific intersection between what I\'ve always wanted to say, and my skill catching up with what I\'ve always wanted to say,” WILLOW tells Apple Music about *empathogen*. \"That\'s exactly how I feel about this whole album.” Over the course of her nearly decade-and-a-half-long music career, she’s moved through various genre spaces freely. Yet those who enjoyed her recent full-length forays into artfully angsty post-punk will likely find the vibe shift here more drastic than any jagged guitar rock riff. Conveniently albeit loosely categorized as jazz, these dozen tunes showcase yet another side of her maturing craft. Despite the inherent softness of acoustic compositions like “ancient girl,” WILLOW’s strengths burst through each and every time. Informed to some extent by the presence of guests like Jon Batiste and St. Vincent, two vanguard artists who consistently push against convention, *empathogen* gives her ample space to explore and expand. Her lyrics often feel simultaneously confessional and poetic, her voice thick with emotional resonance on “down” and “symptom of life.” Traces of 2022’s sonically tougher ** linger via the frenetic pop-rock fusions of “between i and she” and “false self.” Still, it’s clear that she’s leveled up on all fronts, perhaps most poignantly on “b i g f e e l i n g s,” a finale as grand as any in her discography. “It\'s trying to bring you in, even though it is extremely complicated,” she says. “Obviously it\'s a lot to take in when you listen to it for the first time, but there are moments that you really get into that rhythm.”