Sputnikmusic's Top 50 Albums of 2021

Most Mastodon fans probably knew it was only a matter of time before the band dropped a double album. The Atlanta metal squad’s intricate songs and dazzling prog tendencies have been begging for the Pink Floyd treatment for years—and the pandemic’s enforced downtime provided them with the window to do it. “With the extra time to work on material, we just kept writing,” Mastodon drummer, co-vocalist, and lyricist Brann Dailor tells Apple Music. “When we got to the point where we had 20 ideas that were pretty fleshed out, we said, ‘We need to stop now.’ From there, it was hard even narrowing it down to 15 songs, so I’m not sure what we would’ve done if we’d needed to make a single album.” Thematically, *Hushed and Grim* largely deals with the death of Mastodon’s longtime friend and manager Nick John, who was taken by cancer in 2018. “It’s definitely a representation of the time period we went through,” Dailor says. “The pandemic, Nick John’s passing, and other things that transpired for us during that time.” Below, he details some key tracks from the record. **“Pain With an Anchor”** “I think that\'s probably one of the first songs that came about for the album. I strung a couple of riffs together, and then \[guitarist\] Bill \[Kelliher\] and I sat down in his basement and combined a few more. He came up with that big, heavy riff at the end and all that cool stuff in the bridge. I added these weird vocal swells—and some thunderclaps—underneath to make it more evil and sinister. The drum intro didn’t come until much later, when we were about to cut it for real. I just had this idea to do this quads intro thing, which sort of cemented it as being the first song on the record.” **“More Than I Could Chew”** “That’s a big Bill riff. I really drove it straight on the drums and I didn’t deviate too much from that, which is a little bit different for me. I’m more of a frantic player, usually. The kick pattern also opened up a lane for me to sing over the top of it. I don’t think Bill was really expecting there to be this higher, soaring vocal over that. \[Bassist\] Troy \[Sanders\] came up with that last riff, the one that \[guitarist\] Brent \[Hinds\] solos over. I just love that part. Troy hasn’t really been a big writer in the band, but this time around he wrote four or five tracks.” **“The Beast”** “This is one of Brent’s, and I wrote some lyrics for him. It’s got that opening country guitar lick and then it goes into what seems like a blues shuffle to me. Brent’s voice is just awesome there—I think it’s really soulful and bluesy. And then it moves into sort of a proggy King Crimson-type part that leads into Marcus King’s solo, which I love. Brent and Marcus are good friends, so it was cool to bring Marcus in to do that. To me, it’s a real proggy-sounding solo and it really flexes Marcus’ talents as a masterful guitar player. And it’s cool for Brent to hand the reins over like that, being an amazing soloist himself.” **“Teardrinker”** “This is a simple two-part guitar thing I came up with on an acoustic. I’m not the most talented guitar player, so most of what I write is pretty simple—and then I turn it over to Bill to get the magic happening. I wrote this at a time when it wasn’t going well for me. I was in a dark place. I was actually living in this apartment that had no sofa, no TV—just an acoustic guitar and a bed. I was hijacking a bit of service off my phone so I could try to watch some shows on my iPad. It was a rough time, but I’m okay now. So it’s a big emotional song, but it turned out pretty catchy.” **“Pushing the Tides”** “There’s not a lot of rippers on this album, but this is a ripper that just feels good to play. It’s another one that came from sitting in Bill’s basement. The first riff reminds me of early AmRep stuff like Chokebore, Guzzard, or early-’90s Barkmarket maybe. There’s some prog influence there, some Killing Joke—all that stuff we’re into, being kids of the ’90s. We sort of came from that whole scene of underground, mathy stuff that was below the upper echelons of grunge. So it’s cool when that stuff pops up. It’s a fun song with a big chorus.” **“Dagger”** “Once you’ve decided that you’re making a double album, you can sprawl out a bit. I don’t know that this song would’ve been as cool as it ended up being if we didn’t go down the rabbit hole with it. We got a sarangi player, and my friend Dave Witte from Municipal Waste came in to do some percussion on these tribal drums and hunks of metal. Then we had our buddy come in and play some crazy Moog at the end. I’m stoked on it, but if it wasn’t for Troy’s voice, you’d have a hard time convincing even a Mastodon fan that this was a Mastodon song.” **“Had It All”** “This is an important song, and very Nick John-centric. He probably shows up in the lyrics of every song, but this one is specifically aimed at his situation. To have Kim Thayil do the solo was amazing, because Soundgarden was one of Nick’s favorite bands. And what a cool turn of events that Troy’s mom got to virtually jam on French horn with Kim on this one. Kim did a really beautiful, heart-wrenching solo, and then Troy’s mom added another beautiful texture with a nice little horn arrangement. This is the closest I think we’ve come to a ballad, I think, but it’s an emotional song for us. The only bummer is that Nick isn’t here to hear it.” **“Gigantium”** “This is another one I wrote when I was in that apartment. I call it the Sadness Hole. I don’t want to get into why I was there, but just to be clear, I wasn’t strung out on drugs or anything like that. It was a personal time. But the last riff really sounded like the end of something. It’s sad-sounding, but there’s also some hope there. So we put some string arrangements on it and Brent did this really beautiful guitar solo. The last line is for Nick John: ‘The mountains we made in the distance will be with us forever.’ I think it’s a beautiful farewell.”

“We decided to call it *Radical* because it cuts a couple of different ways,” Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley says about the title of the Buffalo metalcore band’s ninth album. “It’s radical as far as the personal beliefs I’m expressing as the lyricist of this band, but it’s also radical because it acknowledges that radical changes may need to be made in order for things to ever get better.” Of course, Buckley is aware that “radical” also means different things to different people in 2021. “I was trying to find things that most people in the world can agree on, and what I came up with was ‘fuck cancer’ and ‘I just want to feel good,’” he says. “I don’t think this record will help in the fight against cancer—although I wish it would—but we tried to write something that acknowledges the idea that human beings all long for goodness. But it’s going to require some big leaps of faith in order to make things good.” Below, he discusses some of the album’s key tracks. **“Dark Distance”** “I wrote this in 2019 or maybe even 2018, when I was realizing where I wanted the record to go. I knew that I had an obligation to use my platform for positive things because the world is not a pretty place right now. So, I just had this idea that the whole thing needs to be reset. Pull out the Nintendo game, blow on it, put it back in. And what resets civilization? Historically speaking, a plague does that. So, I started by summoning a plague and then COVID happened. I apologize for that.” **“Planet Shit”** “This is about a kind of old-style French Revolution of the upper-class elite and ruling class. About two months after we recorded the song, the Capitol building was stormed on January 6. I wrote the song to seem like a newscast, so I will say that, yes, I did have some sort of clairvoyant image of the Capitol building being rioted. My guide for the song was Mitch McConnell. He’s the only person I ever see when I’m talking about evil old white people. That’s two clairvoyant things in a row now, so I’m looking into what that means.” **“Post-Boredom”** “I wrote this about what would happen if I died and was reborn. If I had another chance at life, what would I do differently? What would I do the same? It was written during the pandemic, when everyone was bored, so I started thinking about what was going to happen next. And then I actually did get a separation from my wife during the pandemic, so that was a very real second shot for me. But all the songs were written before I was separated, so it ended up having a bigger meaning.” **“Colossal Wreck”** “This one is so fast and so short that I just thought it would be really good to have really memorable, punchy lyrics. Obviously, we’re being ignored by whatever higher power has been looking out for us since the dawn of time. It’s time to realize that we need to make some serious peace here with whatever is running the show because we really fucked it up. It kind of falls in line with ‘Dark Distance’ in that way.” **“Desperate Pleasures”** “Like ‘Colossal Wreck,’ I was just kind of having fun with the imagery here. We’re all lost, so fuck it. Let’s give it back, let nature take over, let’s just stop even trying. Let’s just live with the shit we’ve created and let nature fix it. The mental image I had was of a building on fire. While I’m just standing there, all these people are running past me to the exit. We can fend this off if we want to, but everyone is just running away. Who’s stupider here? Me for standing there, or everyone else for running away? I don’t know.” **“AWOL”** “I thought this song was about something, but then I realized it was about something else. When I was writing it, I thought of it as my vision for what my life would be like when this record is released. But that version of Keith Buckley is not currently in this situation. Maybe he’s happy; maybe he’s not. I don’t know how to reach him because he doesn’t exist yet. But it’s actually not about that. It ended up being about a very specific person and a very specific time. I don’t think anyone reading Apple Music cares about this, so I’ll just say it’s a message to my future self.” **“Sexsexsex”** “That song is about me realizing that I am a very submissive person. That’s a personality trait I have. When most people think of the whole dom-sub thing, they think of whips and leather and stuff like that. The only reference point they have is sexuality. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the power exchange of a dominant and submissive. So, I made this song seem like it’s about sexuality, but it’s not. It’s about an energy exchange.” **“We Go Together”** “Everyone is born into a very specific set of circumstances—a certain time, a certain place, a certain astrology that has never been replicated. Your experience on this earth has never happened before. In a way, you are the only one alive. Everything that you see is your set of conclusions. In a sense, that makes you the source of it all. So, the song is about feeling like you might be at the center of everything. How does that change you?”

“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”

When The Killers couldn’t tour their 2020 album *Imploding the Mirage* because of the pandemic, lead singer Brandon Flowers didn’t sit around waiting for a chance to get back on the road. Instead, he came up with an idea during quarantine that would eventually become the band’s seventh studio album, where he also reunited with founding member Dave Keuning on guitar. For Flowers, the introspection that came from lockdown kept leading him to the town of Nephi, Utah, where he grew up. “There was some trepidation at first,” he tells Apple Music. “Because it’s such a small town, and you wonder how that’s going to resonate with people all over the world. And it’s such a specific place in the Southwest. But then I couldn’t escape it. Every time I went to the keyboard, these ideas kept coming out, all based on characters that I grew up observing, or experiences that I had in town, or memories. So I went with it.” *Pressure Machine* is unlike anything in The Killers’ repertoire. From the use of instruments like harmonica and fiddle to the deeply personal storytelling and interviews with people who still live in the town, the album is a love letter to the places you grew up and the people you left behind—anchored in melancholy and dotted with hope. “Tragedy and religious disenchantment were the launchpads,” Flowers explains. “When you’re a kid, you’re getting new experiences all the time, so when something shocking or tragic happens, it really resonates. Those experiences are the things I was gravitating towards.” Flowers explains more about those experiences and how they influenced each track on *Pressure Machine* below. **“West Hills”** “There\'s a whole subculture in Utah, in my experience, because we associate Utah with Mormonism. Having grown up there, a lot of people \[outside of Utah\] aren\'t aware of people that don\'t adhere to religion. There’s this whole thing of dirt bikes and four-wheelers and beer and finding different ways to find your salvation, other than in a church pew on Sunday. I took some liberties on the song, but it\'s based on a real story.” **“Quiet Town”** “I was in eighth grade when two seniors got hit by a train. Their names were Raymond and Tiffany. I was surprised to find 25 years later how much I was still affected by it. I felt like it was the end of an innocence for me and for the town, because afterwards I noticed things started to happen. It was almost like opening this door of darkness. A lot of times we talk about stagnation with snarky terms, and I think it’s one of the things that\'s associated with towns like Nephi, but it can also be a beautiful thing, because it\'s these people that are holding on to ideals and traditions. I hope that it never changes in that respect.” **“Terrible Thing”** “Years after high school, you hear about a kid you went to school with that was gay and nobody knew. It\'s just such a cowboy, football, hunting country town. I tried to work through this person\'s experience in town and how hard it must be to be in a culture like that. To not even feel safe to tell anyone who you are. Because when you were a kid or you\'re in high school, you don\'t have that courage, and I don\'t blame them.” **“Cody”** “‘Cody’ is a culmination of a bunch of my friends\' big brothers. I had two friends that had older brothers that seemed particularly dangerous. And so, again, those memories stand out, that you might\'ve been afraid of them, or you hear stories about what they\'re doing, or getting arrested, or whatever it is. And so I was able to sort of melt them into this one character.” **“Sleepwalker”** “The first line that I knew was good in that song was ‘It doesn\'t come from without/It comes from within.’ So I built all the rest of the lyrics around that. I had just recently moved back to Utah and was experiencing seasons again. Because in Vegas, it gets hot and then it gets cold, that’s it. You don\'t get to go through the beauty and the sometimes stark changes of the weather. I was caught up in that, the anticipation for spring and new life. I was able to use that sort of analogy for a person becoming a new creature and coming back to life.” **“Runaway Horses” (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)** “Life\'s going to be hard for whatever choice or whatever road you take. There\'s going to be obstacles and hurdles. In this case, it\'s about two people that think that they\'re going to finish the race together, and then they end up sort of going in different paths. It’s also about coming home. No matter where you go, how far you drift, you’re always trying to get home.” **“In the Car Outside”** “This song started really quickly, and it was one of those moments that you\'re always waiting for. One of the reasons why you get in the garage in the first place is just this communal experience that you can share with people. And it was born really fast, and it was really exciting to be a part of it.” **“In Another Life”** “I think everyone goes through things like wondering what life would\'ve been like if we\'d done things differently. Or if not, at least you wonder if your significant other is going through that. And I think this guy\'s just questioning the choices that he\'s made and wondering if he\'s measuring up to what his wife had hoped that he would be. It’s definitely a sad song, seeped in melancholy.” **“Desperate Things”** “This was a little scandal that took place \[in Nephi\] that I took some liberties with in the third verse, where I take it off the rails. I like telling stories, and there\'s people like Nick Cave and Johnny Cash and people that are great storytellers who are really influential to me. You don\'t get a lot of third verses in pop songs, and it\'s not something you associate with a typical Killers song, but I needed that third verse to tell the story. This is probably as dark as I\'ve ever gotten.” **“Pressure Machine”** “I think there\'s a sadness to how quickly we grow up, and being a parent and watching that. Everybody tells you when you have a kid, ‘Make the most of it. They\'re going to grow up before you know it.’ And it sort of gets redundant, and then it really is true and it\'s kind of a heartbreaker.” **“The Getting By”** “Even though there is struggle, and even though there is strife and toiling, there\'s still hope. That\'s what makes these people who they are. They get up and go to work every day. I have a lot of respect for them, and I don\'t feel that far removed from them. And I thought about people like my uncles and my dad and my nephews and my cousins. And really wanted to capture what I saw in their lives.”

Inspired by and steeped in the wonders of the natural world, Wolves in the Throne Room are American black metal’s foremost spiritual conjurors. The band’s seventh album, *Primordial Arcana*, is their first self-contained work—recorded, produced, and mixed by drummer Aaron Weaver, guitarist/vocalist Nathan Weaver, and guitarist Kody Keyworth at their own Owl Lodge Studios in the Cascadian Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. It’s also the first WITTR record for which Keyworth was involved from the beginning. “He was there for the very first stirrings of the conceptual framework all the way through the persnickety details of the final polish,” Aaron tells Apple Music. “So, there’s a vitality and a freshness to the record, like a cool breeze flowing down off of a mountaintop, and I attribute part of that to Kody’s presence and third perspective.” Below, Aaron offers a poetic interpretation of each song. **“Mountain Magick”** “There is a feeling that I love, standing high in the mountains under the full moon. Lunar light glittering upon the surface of an alpine lake. Beckoning my soul to journey into the very stones. In the heart of the mountain, I begin to feel the presence of elemental spirits. The mountain is alive.” **“Spirit of Lightning”** “I feel summer daylight in the mountains. There is a hunting lodge here. A wild river rushing nearby. Horned God! Bring bounty, vitality, and strength to the people. The spirit of swiftness is called forth. The arrows are blessed. Wild feasting and celebration after the successful hunt. Mead and meat served in epic quantities. Cernunnos is praised!” **“Through Eternal Fields”** “Autumn sunlight through leaves in the forest. Waterfalls at golden hour. Waterfall spirits draw me deeper into the mystery. To the castle in the forest. My beloved is there. Radiant energy fills me with peace. My eternal loneliness has ended.” **“Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)”** “Tantric union of fire and ice. Cosmic forces intertwine, conjoin. Serpent channels in the body open to healing magic. The source of creativity, of art, of magic is unleashed. Call upon the eagle as your protector...for the spinning green electricity is hot, too hot for some.” **“Underworld Aurora”** “This song is a true invocation of the goddess: Freya, Inanna, Babylon. In the form of a bear. A serpent. Dancing, conjuring in the desert. Goddess! Blow upon the fires in our forge. The sun rises, new life emerges.” **“Masters of Rain and Storm”** “A return to the Stone Throne Room, royal seat of the cult of the snake. Here, the mountain magic flows. Storm cloud waterfalls exploding with power. Sun-bleached fallen trees in the glory of the wildflower season. There are spirits deep under the mountain. Their fires and drums rage.” **“Eostre”** “Have we been in this glade before? Time loops back...a stream nearly forgotten. A cloaked figure crouches next to the body of the dying king. When you awake, the world will be born anew.”

Taking its name from a computer virus developed by the NSA and leaked by hackers in 2017, the debut album from Canadian alt-metal trio Spiritbox has nothing to do with cyberattacks. Instead, vocalist Courtney LaPlante uses the term to describe the mood that permeates the record. “The story of the computer virus is fascinating—especially how it came into existence and how much it messed with people’s stuff,” she tells Apple Music. “But I latched onto it because of how cool the phrase is. Now, the words mean something completely different to me than when I first heard them.” Below, she describes each track on *Eternal Blue*. **“Sun Killer”** “We wrote this in January of 2020, and we instantly knew that it would be the intro of the album. This has the drama that I look for when I’m listening to an opening of an album—it’s like when the band is walking out onstage for a show. When I hear this, I’m surprised by the flexibility of my voice because I’ve had a vocal cord injury for a long time. It’s finally healed itself up in the last couple of years, so this performance is like a mini-celebration that I feel like myself again.” **“Hurt You”** “All of our songs have a narrative, but they’re more about the feeling of the song. To me, this feels like the ups and downs of a toxic relationship. We always write the music first in this band, but I think it’s fun when you can have the lyrical content mimic the vibe of the music. The working title of this was ‘Heavy Clown,’ like Clown from Slipknot, because a lot of our favorite nu-metal references made it into this song.” **“Yellowjacket” (feat. Sam Carter)** “This is one of my favorites on the record. I think it’s a double drop-D guitar tuning, so it’s inhumanly heavy. I don’t do a lot of screaming on this song, but it definitely has some of the lowest, scariest screams I’ve ever gotten out of me. The rest of the song is me talking, and my inspiration for that was a lot of the alternative music of the ’90s—bands like Butthole Surfers, that had all this weird spoken-word stuff in their songs. And then, we had Sam Carter from Architects do some vocals on it, which sound amazing.” **“The Summit”** “I have this fantasy in my mind where there’s this new genre of music that doesn’t make sense, but it’s almost like the parameters are pulled off some genres that I like. And that’s where ‘The Summit’ lives. It’s hard to classify it as a metal song, but the guitar is so low and clear. Vocally, I took a lot of inspiration from The Weeknd and Charli XCX, especially the way she lets the last line of a chorus descend in a really playful way.” **“Secret Garden”** “This is one of the first ones we wrote back in the summer of 2019, but it wasn’t quite ready back then. The working title was ‘Chino’ because it reminded us a little bit of Deftones, who we are very inspired by. I think the song has such a nice vibe to it—it feels romantically sorrowful. Lyrically, it’s me being introspective and advocating for myself. I think a lot of musicians fear losing who they are as their star rises, but I think anyone who’s in any transition period in their life can understand that feeling.” **“Silk in the Strings”** “A lot of the songs on this album are heavy and open and slow, but all the more intense songs—like this one—were written later. When \[guitarist\] Michael \[Stringer\] first showed me this one, I wasn’t sure what to do because I always feel like the vocals need to match the energy of the song. So, whenever there’s something bouncy, I try not to think about what a metal vocalist would do. I look more to what I think good rappers would do. For this song, I was like, ‘How would the Wu-Tang Clan do this song?’ I would absolutely never be able to rap, but I really admire how important the flow is.” **“Holy Roller”** “We don’t really have a lot of other music that sounds like this song, but we just wanted something selfishly heavy. The narrator in this song is clearly not a good person. A lot of times in metal music, a song about a bad person is very on the nose—very graphic and explicitly violent. I wanted to explore something more insidious, like the religious cultism of someone like Jim Jones. I find those kinds of people so much scarier than a song about cutting someone’s head off or something like that.” **“Eternal Blue”** “This is one of the first tracks we wrote, and I think it’s my favorite. Our producer, Dan \[Braunstein\], really helped us dig a little deeper with the synth part of it, taking a lot of reference from New Wave acts from the ’80s, like Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode. I just love how heavy and beautiful the song is, and it has a very rare Michael Stringer guitar solo in it, which I love. Lyrically, it’s about someone who is at rock bottom but is trying not to romanticize that. Many people seem to glamorize depression, but I think it’s important not to get caught up in that.” **“We Live in a Strange World”** “Every time I listen to this song, I feel different about it. We first wrote it before the pandemic, before the band started gaining success. When I recorded it in February 2021, I had a lot more to say about how weird the world is. It feels like I’m just watching this stuff happen to me like a viewer—rather than it actually happening to me—because I’m just sitting in my house watching all of these people online starting to know who the band is. It’s a bizarre feeling, and you worry about messing it up.” **“Halcyon”** “This one’s Michael’s favorite song. Like ‘Sun Killer,’ I just love how dramatic it is. It’s a big heavyweight of a song, and it gives me a lot of room with my singing range. Most of these songs are me thinking about not wanting to mess up and not wanting to get my little spirit crushed. This one is me looking at all those successful people and the version of me that’s going to compromise everything so that they can be one of those people.” **“Circle With Me”** “This is the newest song on the record, and it was written in the studio. Michael wrote it in an afternoon. Some of the darker and dramatic parts remind me of Evanescence, but on the chorus I took reference from Tears for Fears. So, it’s this weird little song, but it really kind of unlocked a lot of creativity in us to make all of our songs better. We ended up putting it out first because it really represents how we’re feeling about our band right now.” **“Constance”** “Just as ‘Sun Killer’ was always to be the opener and ‘Holy Roller’ was always meant as the middle point, followed by ‘Eternal Blue,’ ‘Constance’ was always meant to be the last song. But the lyrics didn’t really start to form until last year when my grandma passed away. Writing this song just helped me think about the feelings of losing someone, and it’s dedicated to her because she always wanted me to put out a song that doesn’t have screaming in it.”

Deafheaven’s fifth album might seem like a drastic departure from the blackgaze sound they helped pioneer, but to anyone paying attention, it shouldn’t be. The foundation for *Infinite Granite*’s more traditional song structures, nearly metal-free shoegaze, and clean vocals was laid—or at least hinted strongly at—on the band’s 2018 album *Ordinary Corrupt Human Love*. The lyrics also reveal a new level of poetic nuance from frontman George Clarke, as he weaves a narrative marked both by family history and the time the songs were written in. “*Infinite Granite* was originally centered in my relationship with extended family, but because it was written during various social and environmental anxieties of 2020, more immediate reflections were included,” he tells Apple Music. “Throughout the album there is a double narrative: one that highlights familial issues and one that reflects the current world at large.” Below, he comments on each track that contains vocals. **“Shellstar”** “‘Shellstar’ deals with questioning one’s objective feelings toward emotional situations. That idea is coupled with allusions to California fires and Gulf floods.” **“In Blur”** “A song about futility. A nonbeliever, in the wake of having lost a child, reaches out to God for solace knowing nothing’s there.” **“Great Mass of Color”** “‘Great Mass of Color’ describes insomnia during the early-morning blue hour. The lyrics also reflect thoughts on boyhood—what it means to be a man, looking up to other men for a path and the constrictions and conflicts in that experience.” **“Lament for Wasps”** “A love song filled with direct references to insomnia. Blue represented a warm, safe feeling while making this album. It is also the favorite color of my partner, who I use as a character in this song—someone that represents benevolence. I exemplify this benevolence using wasps, as they\'re an irrational phobia of mine.” **“Villain”** “I thought about my family’s history with alcoholism and abuse, how that past affects future generations and what it means to share blood with cruel and violent people.” **“The Gnashing”** “‘The Gnashing’ looks at new parents, state violence, and an idea of taking care of who takes care of you. Like ‘In Blur,’ this song references losing a child, but focuses on a mother figure instead of a father.” **“Other Language”** “While recording ‘Mombasa,’ we were told a friend of ours had died. We stopped the session and went home. That night he was in my dream. We were in a large passenger van and I was sitting on a bench behind him as he told a story to people around us. I put my arm around the front of his chest, holding him by the shoulder while we laughed. When I woke up, I saw thick smoke from the wildfires had come in through the open windows. I laid until I had to leave for the day’s session, writing most of the lyrics in bed.” **“Mombasa”** “My grandfather lived with me for a few years while I helped take care of him. When it became too difficult, my father and I worked to get him into an assisted care hospital. He would speak about how he’d become a burden. He would apologize for having not died. This song is about the kindness and freedom of death, one in which an afterlife reveals itself to be aloneness in cosmic love.”

When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.

For their second full-length, doom outfit King Woman unfurls a concept album loosely based on John Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, a 17th-century epic about Lucifer’s temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. “I was raised Christian, but I’m not Christian anymore,” vocalist Kris Esfandiari tells Apple Music. “There’s a lot of Christian mythology going on in here—stories about some of the major characters from the Bible, like Christ, Adam and Eve, Lilith and Lucifer.” Before she had the album’s concept, Esfandiari had already written the song “Morning Star” about the fallen angel Lucifer. Then a fan gave her an old copy of *Paradise Lost* at a show. “I’d been working on the record, but that was the missing piece of the puzzle,” she says. “It was like an epiphany. So I just went down that road, and here we are. I hope I did it justice.” Below, she discusses each track on *Celestial Blues*. **“Celestial Blues”** “The poem at the beginning comes from these blackout periods I had when I was younger—I guess they were seizures. I had one in the shower, and I woke up screaming and making these crazy noises. My mom ran into the shower fully clothed and started praying in tongues while water was just pouring on both of us. She was trying to cast the spirit of death out of me. But the song itself is about frustration—gender dysphoria and being stuck on this planet of suffering and pain.” **“Morning Star”** “This is partially about Lucifer. To me, they’re kind of an androgynous, Joker type of character who has been scapegoated—and I wanted Lucifer to tell their side of the story. But it’s also about personal experiences where I felt I was a scapegoat in a situation. And that feeling you’ve lost your mind and gone to hell, basically, and come out on the other side a little deranged or crooked and at the same time magnificent. You don’t recognize yourself, but you’ve become this kind of Joker-esque character because of everything you went through.” **“Boghz”** “There are a few translations for this word, but in Arabic it means ‘hatred.’ I’m Iranian, so in Farsi you could translate it as like the lump in your throat before you’re about to cry—or the feeling of pushing it down, like, ‘I’m not going to cry.’ For me, it’s more of a feeling, so I like that it has a few meanings. The song is about a relationship that I tried to make work, but the other person just kept beating me down and being so sadistic. I never really gave up, but I definitely had to walk away in order to survive. A lot of this record is about that relationship, in a way.” **“Golgotha** “This means ‘the place of the skull,’ and it’s where Christ was crucified. That was almost the album title, actually—I have it tattooed on my arm—but I just felt like *Celestial Blues* was more appropriate. The song is about karmic cycles. There’s a lyric in there that says, ‘The snake eats its tail, we return again to this hell,’ which is about how we repeat the same things over and over again and have a hard time learning our lessons. It’s also about the death and resurrection of myself, so there’s a lot to unpack there.” **“Coil”** “This is a continuation of ‘Golgotha’—it’s about the resurrection. To me, it’s like a hardcore gospel song or something. I’ve dealt with a lot of people in the past few years that really tested my patience and my faith in myself, people who made my life difficult and tried to tell me I couldn’t accomplish my dreams—people who insisted that I give all my magic away to them. All those people have since apologized to me, but the song is my declaration that I’m unstoppable. It’s the song of the warrior.” **“Entwined”** “This is a love song about surrendering to emotional availability and commitment. It’s kind of a confession of undying love. It’s about someone from my past. One of their parents passed away from cancer while we were seeing each other, and they kind of disappeared suddenly from my life because of that. So this is my parting gift to them.” **“Psychic Wound”** “We did a video for this one that’s kind of a vampire orgy. In the intro, it’s like I have this clear reflection of myself and then I get involved with these vampires. They start to approach me, it’s a vampire orgy, and then I have a psychotic break. At the end, I snap out of it and I’m returned to my original reflection. There’s a few meanings, but it’s basically about how we all have these wounds from our past, and sometimes vampiric people can sniff those wounds and take advantage of your pain. It’s also about having sex with the devil, so, you know—side note.” **“Ruse”** “This is a song about getting cheated on and taking your revenge. When you get cheated on, you might want to hurt the person who hurt you and feel like you never really knew who they were. There’s a line that says, ‘I’ll wait up for you tonight, you’ll forfeit our love.’ So it’s just about finding out some information that you’re shocked about, and then taking your revenge.” **“Paradise Lost”** “I relate this one back to the Garden of Eden, Lilith, Lucifer, Adam, Eve, God, forbidden fruit, impossible love and betrayal. I feel like this one is about the complexity of relationships and how sometimes they don’t always work out. But it’s also the story that’s been told since the beginning of time—the Garden of Eden.”

On their fifth album, Swedish goth-metal maestros Tribulation deliver an ode to the supernatural inspired by elemental magic and mythology. Taking its title from a line in a song by German darkwave mysterios Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows, *Where the Gloom Becomes Sound* is a ghostly and dramatic record woven with the snaky melodies and death metal propulsion that have become Tribulation’s signature. “The title is all about the music,” guitarist Adam Zaars tells Apple Music. “And not only on this album—I would say that it describes what we\'ve been trying to do ever since our first album.” Seven of *Gloom*’s ten tracks were written by recently departed guitarist Jonathan Hultén (who has since passed the torch to Joseph Tholl of VOJD); the other three by Zaars. Below, he takes us through the songs. **In Remembrance** “Out of my songs, this is the one that I feel the most connected to or pleased with because it has some kind of fresh quality to it. The main riff that goes into the verses just felt right, but I had some trouble completing the song, so I got some help from Robert Pehrsson \[of Death Breath\] and Joseph Tholl. And then we incorporated some Swedish lyrics, which we’ve tried to do a few times in the past, but it always comes out sounding like some kind of trollish black metal. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not very Tribulation. This time we made it work.” **Hour of the Wolf** “This is a Jonathan song. It’s one of the more simple songs, I guess, which is always more difficult, I think. With less ingredients, you’ve got to cook them well. Jonathan said he was inspired by Roky Erickson and the Hungarian band Tormentor, especially their song ‘Elizabeth Bathory.’ Not to make it sound exactly like that, of course, but that was at least where he was starting. And I think it’s probably our most pop-rock kind of song so far. I was skeptical about it at first, but it really worked in the end and I’m really glad we recorded it.” **Leviathans** “This is a very dramatic song, and probably one of my favorites from the record. It’s also a Jonathan song. The spoken-word part is inspired by the recordings of Aleister Crowley—*The Great Beast Speaks*, I think it’s called—where he’s spitting out invocations. But in the song it’s Jonathan speaking. We wanted it to have that sample-like feeling, but we wanted to make it ourselves. Both this song and ‘Hour of the Wolf’ also have electronic drums on them, which is a new thing for us as well. It’s always fun to experiment with sound, and a small detail can add so much to a song.” Dirge of a Dying Soul “That\'s probably the most depressing song on the album—and I\'m saying that as a very positive thing. Again, it\'s a Jonathan song, and I don\'t want to speak for him, of course, but I imagine that this is maybe the most personal song on the album—lyrically, at least. From what I hear, it seems to be inspired by the first record of Dissection, which is very cool in my book, and by classical music as well. It\'s one of the songs that, along with ‘Inanna,’ I really liked the first time I heard them. They sounded very inspired and kind of set the vibe for me to follow with the rest of my composing on the album.” **Lethe** “This is also a Jonathan song, and that’s him playing the piano. In the past, we used to switch around when it came to organs and pianos and synthesizers. Sometimes I would play; sometimes \[vocalist/bassist\] Johannes \[Andersson\] would play, and sometimes Jonathan. But he’s obviously been practicing a lot, so he’s been the go-to guy for piano parts on the last two records. This piece was very much inspired by Swedish folk music, and I think he would agree that it sounds almost like it came off an album called *Jazz in Swedish* by a guy called Jan Johansson. Wonderful, wonderful record.” **Daughter of the Djinn** “The word ‘genie’ comes from ‘djinn,’ if I’m not mistaken, but this song is not about djinns, actually. The phrase ‘Daughter of the Djinn’ comes from Aleister Crowley, and it’s referring to hashish—but it’s not a song about hashish, either. It’s really about that old saying that one man’s food is another man’s poison—and a metaphor for the idea that the world, in my opinion, is never really black or white. It’s always gray, and I think it’s important to remember that things are more complicated than they seem to be when reading the news and so on.” **Elementals** “I don’t know what Jonathan was thinking about when he wrote this song, but when we were recording it, I could only think about what we’ve labeled as ‘post-Blaze \[Bayley\] Iron Maiden’—albums like *Brave New World* and *Dance of Death*. There’s something there that reminds me of it, but musically I think you can hear the red thread that goes throughout the album most explicitly.” **Inanna** “Innana is a goddess that went down to her sister in the underworld, and—like every myth—there are variations of the story. But as we know it, it’s from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the very first \[version\], I believe. This is one of the first songs Jonathan played for us that he’d written, and it immediately felt completely right. Like ‘Dirge of a Dying Soul,’ it really set the vibe for where we were going on this album.” **Funeral Pyre** “This is the last of my songs. It’s almost a heavy metal song to some extent, and one that could have gone in many different directions. At one point, it almost turned into a 10-minute song, but Jonathan was feeling that it really wasn’t very strong, so I had to go back home and rewrite a lot of it. This turned it into a much shorter song than I imagined, and I think this was a really good thing that Jonathan did, because it turned out great, I think. That push really made it into what it is now.” **The Wilderness** “This is an interesting song—Jonathan did the music and I wrote the lyrics. When listening to the music, I really felt there was a strong sense of story—not quite a fairy tale, but something along those lines. It’s probably the longest lyrics I’ve ever written—I think there are seven verses or something. I was reading John Woodroffe’s early-20th-century English translation of the Shat-Chakra-Nirupana, which is about the chakras that became so popular in the West. Some versions of this idea say there are seven chakras in the body, so that became the metaphor for the verses.”

Naming an album after yourself usually indicates an artist just starting out or one opening up after a long period of holding back. In the case of *Laura Stevenson*, it’s neither. A folk-leaning indie-rock songwriter raised in the Long Island ska/punk community during the late ’90s, she’s always put a premium on honesty, however raw—one song from 2019’s *The Big Freeze* describes the compulsion to pick at your own skin, and makes it sound pretty, too (“Dermatillomania”). *Laura Stevenson* is, by comparison, shadowier and less disclosing. There are flashes of anger (“State”), and her passion runs like a current throughout, occasionally overflowing (“Wretch”) but more often than not simmering, calm but alert (“Moving Cars”). You can hear the inspiration to artists like Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker: young female songwriters marrying folk diarism with punk intensity. But she’s also carrying the torch from Lucinda Williams and Neko Case, neither of whom cared enough about tradition to keep the lines between folk, punk, country, and rock ’n’ roll drawn. And while her characters teeter perpetually on the edge of crisis, *Laura Stevenson* is ultimately a diagram of how to pull through, however modest and untriumphant. Or as her friend advises on “Sky Blue, Bad News,” “Shutter up, keep your head down, don’t let it strip you bare.”

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

Side A - it was always worth it Written and recorded by claire rousay Violin by Alex Cunningham Text by Samantha Abney “Innocent” written and performed by Our Lady Peace Mastered by Andrew Weathers Originally released by Longform Editions Side B - ilysm claire rousay - field recordings, synth & editing Derek Baron - flute Mari Maurice - violin Voice recordings from Michael Schoeffel, Ryan Walker, sabrina ghieuw and Twitter personality, roche (aka @kvetchkween) Mastered by Andrew Weathers Originally released by Takuroku Photography by Grace Herndon Layout by Jordan Reyes

A few years removed from his Oscar-nominated work on 2017’s *Call Me by Your Name*, Sufjan Stevens turns to film for inspiration on this collaborative concept LP with LA singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine. Working together in upstate New York, the two would watch a movie in the evening, then write a song in response the next morning, employing the sort of quiet arrangements and pristine melodies that mark their work as solo artists. It’s an ode to maintaining an open mind (or *shoshin*, the Zen Buddhist term whose English translation is the album’s title), Stevens and De Augustine as eager to engage with horror films and commercial blockbusters as they would artier fare—from *All About Eve* to *Hellraiser III*, *Bring It On Again* to *Point Break* and *Wings of Desire*. But whether they’re giving voice to *The Silence of the Lambs*’ Buffalo Bill (“Cimmerian Shade,” sung from the perspective of said serial killer) or exploring the power dynamics of Spike Lee’s *She’s Gotta Have It* (“It’s Your Own Body and Mind”), every song here sparkles and stands on its own. You don’t need to have seen any of the source material to fully appreciate it.

Listening to Liz Harris’ music as Grouper, the word that comes to mind is “psychedelic.” Not in the cartoonish sense—if anything, the Astoria, Oregon-based artist feels like a monastic antidote to spectacle of almost any kind—but in the subtle way it distorts space and time. She can sound like a whisper whose words you can’t quite make out (“Pale Interior”) and like a primal call from a distant hillside (“Followed the ocean”). And even when you can understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t sound like she meant to be heard (“The way her hair falls”). The paradox is one of closeness and remove, of the intimacy of singer-songwriters and the neutral, almost oracular quality of great ambient music. That the tracks on *Shade*, her 12th LP, were culled from a 15-year period is fitting not just because it evokes Harris’ machine consistency (she found her creative truth and she’s sticking to it), but because of how the staticky, white-noise quality of her recordings makes you aware of the hum of the fridge and the hiss of the breeze: With Grouper, it’s always right now.

“I really wanted to make a whole cohesive project,” Genesis Owusu tells Apple Music of his debut album. “I wanted to make something akin to *To Pimp a Butterfly* and *Food and Liquor* and all the awesome concept albums that I grew up listening to.” The Ghanaian Australian artist named Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s debut LP is a powerful concept album that tackles depression and racism in equal measure, characterized here as two black dogs. “‘Black dog’ is a known euphemism for depression, but I’ve also been called a black dog as a racial slur. So I thought it was an interesting, all-encompassing term for what I wanted to talk about.” The music itself is vibrant and boundaryless, with elements of soul, hip-hop, post-punk, pop, and beyond, showcasing not only Genesis Owusu’s remarkable talent and creativity, but the influence of each band member he worked with to write and record, including Kirin J Callinan on guitar, Touch Sensitive (Michael Di Francesco) on bass, Julian Sudek on drums, and Andrew Klippel on keys—all of whom brought their backgrounds and influences to the table. “The album’s eclectic sound is a reflection of all of us as human beings, and also their interpretation of me from their own musical backgrounds,” he says. *Smiling With No Teeth* is split into two thematic halves, each focusing on one of the two black dogs. Owusu-Ansah talks through the entire concept in the track-by-track breakdown below. **On the Move!** “Up to this point in my career, I feel like I\'ve been categorized as ‘the funk guy,’ but a lot of those songs were created within the same two-week span. After those two weeks I was on to other stuff, but because the process of releasing music is so slow, that perception lingered about. So I wanted the intro to shatter that as soon as you press play. It’s explosive. You know something is coming.” **The Other Black Dog** “This song introduces the internal black dog character. Instrumentally, it feels like a movie chase scene. The internal black dog is chasing me through cracks and alleys, trying to be everywhere at once, reaching out, trying to engulf and embrace me. It was a very intentional, conceptual choice to have these songs sound upbeat, dancy, and sexy. But it\'s all a facade, it\'s all a fake smile when you really delve into it.” **Centrefold** “It’s told from the perspective of the black dog, as a sort of distorted love song from the place of an abuser. It doesn\'t respect you at all. It wants to consume you and use you for its own pleasure. And it manifests itself in this distorted love song that sounds groovy and sexy and alluring.” **Waitin’ on Ya** “It’s a sister track to ‘Centrefold.’ The through line has the same story.” **Don\'t Need You** “It’s back from the Genesis Owusu perspective, where the black dog has tried to lure you in, but you reach a point where you realize you can live without it. You don\'t need it, you can break free of those chains. It’s like an independence anthem: You’re breaking free from its clutches for the first time.” **Drown (feat. Kirin J Callinan)** “It continues on from ‘Don\'t Need You,’ analyzing the relationship from a more detached aspect, where you\'re realizing the black dog’s mannerisms. You can separate yourself from it so you\'re two individual beings. You can realize it’s a part of you that you have to let go. You are not your depression. You can make changes and separate yourself. Which leads to the chorus line, ‘You\'ve got to let me drown.’” **Gold Chains** “As an artist, I feel like I\'m just starting to turn some heads and break out, but I\'ve been touring and playing for years. Going from city to city in a van. Playing to no one. But so many people are like, ‘Oh, you\'re a rapper, right? Where\'s your gold chain? How much money do you have?’ So the song plays into the perception versus the reality—‘It looks so gold, but it can feel so cold in these chains.’ The music industry can exacerbate mental health issues and stuff like that, when you\'re overworked or commodified. Instead of an artist creating a product, you become the product.” **Smiling With No Teeth** “This is the center point. It’s encompassing the themes of the album from the narrator’s perspective rather than the black dog. It’s an intermission between Act One and Act Two.” **I Don\'t See Colour** “So much of Act One had honey and sweetness and upbeat tracks, but now we rip all that away. It showcases the personality of the next black dog, which is much more direct and brutal. They\'ve faced the brunt of racism and there’s no more sugarcoating. The extremely minimal instrumental is intentional, so you can completely focus on the lyrics, which are much more scathing. Being a Black person in white society and having to experience the brunt of racism, I\'m often also expected to be the bigger person and the educator. So this arc is validating the emotions and the venting that should be allowed. It’s therapeutic when you\'re faced with those circumstances.” **Black Dogs!** “It was produced by Matt Corby. This one and ‘Easy’ were the only two not produced by the band. It’s a straight-to-the-point song encompassing a day in the life of me, or just any Black person in Australia. It’s not that I\'m getting abused by police every day, but it\'s all the little microaggressions. Sonically speaking, it plays into how I feel every day, going into white spaces and feeling a bit paranoid.” **Whip Cracker** “It’s the ‘I\'ve had enough’ moment. The lyrics—‘Spit up on your grave/Hope my thoughts behave/We\'re so depraved’—play into the bogeymen that people want to see, but obviously as a satirical guise. And then it goes into bigots of all facets, essentially saying enough is enough, times have changed, it\'s over. And musically speaking, halfway through, it just explodes into this funk-rock section. It was very ‘What would Prince do?’” **Easy** “This one was produced by Harvey Sutherland. I was in Melbourne with him doing sessions, and I\'d just gone to the Invasion Day protest, so it was sparked from that. It’s about the relationship between Indigenous or native communities or just people of color, and the colonized country they\'re living in. One partner—the person of color—is fighting their way through a relationship with the very abusive partner that says they care about them and that they\'ll do things for them, but it\'s all lip service.” **A Song About Fishing** “This song started out as a jokey freestyle in the studio, but it turned into this weird parable about perseverance in dire circumstances. I feel like these last three songs are like Act Three of the album. They’re about both of the black dogs. Even though the circumstances seem so dire in the realms of depression and racism, I’m still getting up every day, trying my best and going to this lake where I can never catch any fish, but hoping that one day I\'ll snag something.” **No Looking Back** “It’s a pop ballad about how I\'ve gone through this journey and now I\'m finally ready to put these things behind me, enter a new phase of my life, and be a bigger and better person. It\'s like the transcendental conclusion of the album. And it\'s kind of a mantra: There’s no looking back. Like we\'ve gone through this and we\'re done, we\'re ready to move on.” **Bye Bye** “‘No Looking Back’ was going to be the final track of the album. It was going to end on a very positive note, but it was too much of a Hollywood ending for me. It felt unrealistic. I\'ve learnt a lot throughout my journey, but there’s no point where you can dust your hands off and be like, okay, racism over, depression over. So with ‘Bye Bye,’ the themes are crawling back to you. It signifies that this is an ongoing journey I\'m going to have to face. I had to be clear and real about it.”

Seven years since their last full-length album, 2014’s *The Dream Walker*, the arena art rock band Angels & Airwaves return—and a lot has happened in their absence. AVA frontman Tom DeLonge quit blink-182, the genre-defining California pop-punk band he cofounded in 1992; released a debut solo album titled *To the Stars… Demos, Odds and Ends*; dropped some films and books; and founded an entertainment and aerospace company, also called To the Stars, best known for releasing footage of UFOs three years before the Pentagon chose to declassify it. (Now his company collaborates with the United States Department of Defense.) As diehard fans know, DeLonge’s interest in space mirrors his fascinations with musical performance, so it’s no wonder that Angels & Airwaves’ sixth studio album, *Lifeforms*, sounds galactic, a whirlwind of cosmic synths and sweeping production not unlike LCD Soundsystem recorded on Mars. And it almost didn’t happen. “There was a time, not that many years ago, I didn’t know if I was going to play music anymore,” DeLonge told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. A “crazy divorce,” a departure from blink-182, working with “people from the government” on extraterrestrial research, and the COVID-19 pandemic left the musician feeling misguided. Then he made an accompanying movie for *Lifeforms* and his ambitions were given an identity: “It just ended up becoming everything Angels & Airwaves was meant to be—this transmedia art project about humanity.” At the center is the record, a collection of songs that ascend to some final frontier: from the post-hardcore, ringing guitars of “Euphoria” and the jangly anti-NRA anthem “No More Guns” to the dark-wave-lite “Spellbound,” The Cure-inspired “Automatic” (Robert Smith was on a blink-182 song, after all), and romantic coda “Kiss & Tell.” “If anything, I just do what I want, and that\'s the most punk-rock thing that I have in my DNA,” DeLonge tells Apple Music. “And I know that people don\'t get it, but it doesn\'t really matter to me, because I know what I\'m doing for the most part, 90%.”

“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”

OBTUSE? I COULD HAVE DONE IT? No, I could have. i could have waited and tried and looked for the right files. BUT I WANTED TO DO IT RIGHT NOW? i did. i didnt want to figure out which clappingseal5 fix 6 vox.wav was the right one. it honestly doesnt matter. somebody has to walk the plank. somebody has to be the plank. pretend all music by spawn wimp idiot decorated by travis understood by travis all sounds by shavis wintorp a miracle by god a beautiful glance from A FAR cover painting by Patrick Quinn most of the guitar stuff on headboard by Kora, an angel Recorded between April-July 2021 In my garage next to a stack of board games and 1/700 scale Napoleonic naval fleets stop bothering my friends

“Things should change and evolve, and music is an extension of that, of the continuity of life,” Hiatus Kaiyote leader Nai Palm tells Apple Music. The Melbourne jazz/R&B/future-soul ensemble began writing their third album, *Mood Valiant*, in 2018, three years after the Grammy-nominated *Choose Your Weapon*, which featured tracks that were later sampled by artists including Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Anderson .Paak. The process was halted when Nai Palm (Naomi Saalfield) was diagnosed with breast cancer—the same illness which had led to her mother’s death when she was 11. It changed everything about Nai Palm’s approach to life, herself, and her music—and the band began writing again from a different perspective. “All the little voices of self-doubt or validation just went away,” she says. “I didn\'t really care about the mundane things anymore, so it felt really liberating to be in a vocal booth and find joy in capturing who I am, as opposed to psychoanalyzing it. When you have nothing is when you really experience gratitude for what you have.” The album had largely been written before the pandemic hit, but when it did, they used the extra time to write even more and create something even more intricate. There are songs about unusual mating rituals in the animal kingdom, the healing power of music, the beauty and comfort of home, and the relationships we have with ourselves, those around us, and the world at large. “The whole album is about relationships without me really meaning to do that,” she says. Below, Nai Palm breaks down select lyrics from *Mood Valiant*. **“Chivalry Is Not Dead”** *“Electrons in the air on fire/Lightning kissing metal/Whisper to the tiny hairs/Battery on my tongue/Meteor that greets Sahara/We could get lost in static power”* “The first couple of verses are relating to bizarre mating rituals in the animal kingdom. It’s about reproduction and creating life, but I wanted to expand on that. Where else is this happening in nature that isn’t necessarily two animals? The way that lightning is attracted to metal, a conductor for electricity. When meteors hit the sand, it\'s so hot that it melts the sand and it creates this crazy kryptonite-looking glass. So it\'s about the relationship of life forces engaging with each other and creating something new, whether that\'s babies or space glass.” **“Get Sun”** *“Ghost, hidden eggshell, no rebel yell/Comfort in vacant waters/And I awake, purging of fear/A task that you wear/Dormant valiance, it falls”* “‘Get Sun’ is my tribute to music and what I feel it\'s supposed to do. Even when you’re closed off from the world, music can still find its way to you. ‘Ghost, hidden eggshell’ is a reference to *Ghost in the Shell*, an anime about a human soul captured in a cyborg\'s body. I feel that within the entertainment industry, but the opposite—there are people who are empty. There’s no rebellion. They’re comfortable in this vacant pool of superficial expression. I feel like there\'s a massive responsibility as a musician and as an artist to be sincere and transparent and expressive. And it takes a lot of courage but it also takes a lot of vulnerability. And ‘Dormant valiance, it falls’—from the outside, something might look quite valiant and put together, but if it\'s dormant and has no substance, it will fall, or be impermanent. And that\'s not how you make timeless art. Maybe it\'ll entertain people for three seconds but it will be gone.” **“Hush Rattle”** *“Iwêi, Rona”* “When I was in Brazil, I spent 10 days with the Varinawa tribe in the Amazon and it changed my life. On my last day there, all the women got together and sang for me in their language, Varinawa, and let me record it. There were about 20 women; they\'ll sing a phrase and when they get to the last note, they hold it for as long as they can and they all drop off at different points. It was just so magical. So we\'ve got little samples of that throughout the song, but the lyrics that I\'m singing were taught to me: ‘Iwêi,’ which means ‘I love you,’ and ‘Rona,’ which means ‘I will always miss you.’ It’s a love letter to the people that I met there.” **“Rose Water”** *“My hayati, leopard pearl in the arms of my lover/I draw your outline with the scent of amber”* “There’s an Arabic word here: *hayati*. The word *habibi* is like ‘You’re my love,’ but to say ‘my hayati’ means you\'re *more* than my love—you\'re my life. One of my dear friends is Lebanese. He’s 60, but maybe he\'s 400, we don\'t know. He’s the closest thing to a father that I\'ve had since being an orphan. He makes me this beautiful amber perfume; it’s like a resin, made with beeswax. There’s musk and oils he imports from Dubai and Syria. So it’s essentially a lullaby love song that uses these opulent, elegant elements from Middle Eastern culture that I\'ve been exposed to through the people that I love.” **“Red Room”** *“I got a red room, it is the red hour/When the sun sets in my bedroom/It feels like I\'m inside a flower/It feels like I\'m inside my eyelids/And I don\'t want to be anywhere but here”* “I used to live in an old house; the windows were colored red, like leadlight windows. And whenever the sun set, the whole room would glow for an hour. It\'s such a simple thing, but it was so magic to me. This one, for me, is about when you close your eyes and you look at the sun and it\'s red. You feel like you\'re looking at something, but really it\'s just your skin. It’s one of those childlike quirks everyone can relate to.” **“Sparkle Tape Break Up”** *“No, I can’t keep on breaking apart/Grow like waratah”* “It’s a mantra. I’m not going to let little things get to me. I\'m not going to start self-loathing. I\'m going to grow like this resilient, beautiful fucking flower. I\'ve made it a life goal to try to at least be peaceful with most people, for selfish reasons—so that I don\'t have to carry that weight. Songs like this have really helped me to formulate healthy coping mechanisms.” **“Stone or Lavender”** *“Belong to love/Please don’t bury us unless we’re seeds/Learn to forgive/You know very well it’s not easy/Who are they when they meet?/Stone or lavender/Before the word is ever uttered/Was your leap deeper?”* “‘Please don\'t bury us unless we\'re seeds’ is a reference to a quote: ‘They tried to bury us, they didn\'t know we were seeds.’ That visual is so fucking powerful. It’s saying, ‘Please don\'t try to crush the human spirit, because all life has the potential to grow, belong to love.’ This song is the closest to my breast cancer diagnosis stuff; it’s saying, ‘All right, who are you? What do you want from life? Who do you want to be?’ Do you emit a beautiful scent and you\'re soft and you\'re healing or are you stone? Before anyone\'s even exchanged anything, before a word is ever uttered, your energy introduces you.” **“Blood and Marrow”** *“Not a speck of dust on chrysanthemum/Feather on the breath of the mother tongue”* “I think is one of the most poetic things I\'ve ever written; it\'s maybe the thing I\'m most proud of lyric-wise. The first lyric is a reference to a Japanese poet called Bashō. I wanted to use this reference because when my bird Charlie died—I had him for 10 years, he was a rescue and he was my best friend—we were watching *Bambi* on my laptop. He was sitting on my computer, and we got halfway through and he died. The song is my ode to Charlie and to beauty in the world.”

“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”

“What do you think about a samurai Eddie?” That was the question Iron Maiden bassist, co-lyricist, and all-around mastermind Steve Harris posed to his bandmates when he came up with the Japanese theme for the imagery and title track of the band’s 17th studio album, *Senjutsu*. Roughly translated, the term means “tactics and strategy,” but the idea of Maiden’s shape-shifting mascot, Eddie, in full samurai regalia was immediately appealing. “Let\'s face it, we\'ve plundered a few cultures over the years with Eddie,” Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson tells Apple Music. “We had a Mayan Eddie and we\'ve had a sci-fi one. We\'ve had a space monster Eddie, an Egyptian Eddie, a mummy Eddie. We actually did have Eddie with a samurai sword on the *Maiden Japan* EP, but that was years and years ago. The band has always been quite popular in Japan, which is a pretty exotic place with a very rich samurai history. But most of the songs are unrelated.” Below, Dickinson comments on some of the album\'s highlights. **“Senjutsu”** “This starts out with some ominous drumbeats from what is intended to sound like those big Japanese taiko drums. Then Nicko \[McBrain\] comes in with this beat which is not the Keystone Cops, because I think we\'ve got to the point where we feel confident enough that we can be dramatic without being in a hurry about it. And ‘Senjutsu’ has got drama all over it. To me, it builds and builds and builds. There’s a vocal fugue in the middle with echoes going over the top and then another vocal line. It resolves beautifully into this really magisterial vocal line as you get towards the latter half of the tune. Does it have a chorus? No. There\'s millions of different ones, all strung together. For the most part, the vocal is done in a two-part harmony. It\'s one of my favorite tracks, and it\'s going to be a great way to open a set live.” **“Stratego”** “Stratego is a board game. I’ve never played it, but it’s kind of similar to chess. I was doing a little bit of searching and discovered that Stratego was based on a French board game from the 19th century. That game was based on something called military chess. Japanese military chess, in turn, is a game called shogi. The characters are basically flat stones with Japanese calligraphy on them, each denoting a warrior of some description. You’ve got a black side and a white side, but it’s entirely possible for characters to change sides. Not only that, but they can also transform into a different character. It’s a game of strategy and tactics, but also betrayal and intrigue.” **“The Writing on the Wall”** “The song is basically in two parts, and the intro sets the scene. When I first heard it, I was thinking, ‘This is a bit Tarantino here. It’s a little bit desert.’ I could see a Mad Max scenario opening up. I think \[guitarist\] Adrian \[Smith\] already had the title and a great riff, so we worked the body of the song around that. I thought it was a great title for what’s going on in the world now. There\'s lots of things coming up like objects in the rearview mirror—they may be closer than they appear. There’s a lot of choices people need to make about what kind of world they want to live in. I wrote the song without trying to preach, but to say, ‘You can’t bury your head in the sand. This stuff will bite you if you don’t do something about it.’” **“Lost in a Lost World”** “At the beginning, you would believe that you accidentally wandered into The Moody Blues or Pink Floyd doing something in about 1973, with the layered vocals and things like that. We’ve never done anything as explicitly detailed as that before. But it doesn\'t last for that long before some fiend comes out and hits you over the head with a mallet and the track kicks in. And then it takes you on a journey to a fantastical world that has ceased to exist.” **“Days of Future Past** “This track is as close as you\'re going to get to *Piece of Mind* or *Powerslave*-era Maiden. Four minutes, super high-energy riff, big anthemic chorus, big vocals—all that. Incredible riff from Adrian, and basically no guitar solo. The lyric is a reimagining of the graphic novel *Constantine*, particularly the movie version with Keanu Reeves. It’s kind of an interesting setup, because there’s always the assumption that God is the good guy. In this scenario, God seems to be a manipulative narcissist. He’s almost like a psychopath: ‘I\'m going to do all this horrible stuff to you, and then you just have to love me.’ How does that work? That’s what the song asks.” **“Darkest Hour”** “‘Darkest Hour’ refers not to just the movie about Winston Churchill—it’s about him as a person as well. A lot of people criticize Churchill because he made a lot of mistakes and did things people didn’t approve of. He was almost certainly a full-blown alcoholic, but a functioning one. He said horrible things about women. He did all these things that he would aptly be condemned for. But the bit that people forgive all that for—certainly, I do—is that he stood up to the Nazis and said, ‘No, these are barbarians. Even though the odds are stacked against us, we as a nation are going to resist.’ Half of his cabinet and government would’ve sided with the Nazis and done a deal. But he inspired the nation to do the right thing.” **“The Parchment”** “You really have to be careful about this one if you’re one of these people who likes flotation tanks and you’re going to put this one on in the headphones. It’s a processional, really. The end sounds like the emperor coming back, the prodigal son returning home after a long journey. But the whole middle section is absolutely hypnotic. It’s a monster track, but it\'s layer upon layer upon layer of different iterations and repetitions. If you get under the skin of it, it\'s really complex. I think Steve locked himself away for days to come up with this one. We had to learn it in pieces because it was the only way possible.” **“Hell on Earth”** “Steve is quite an unconventional personality. He\'s not an extroverted person—except onstage when he goes raving mad with a bass. But I think he feels a lot of things really deeply about the world he\'s in. The English band Blur had an album called *Modern Life Is Rubbish*, and I think Steve would concur with that sentiment and say, ‘What kind of world are we creating? Maybe I should just go to sleep. And then if I pass into the next life, maybe I\'ll come back and it\'s going to be better—because this place is hell on earth.’ But I don’t think he’s recommending accelerating your passage into the next world, because we’ve got a tour to do. But he’s genuinely concerned about stuff.”

On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.

This is a 7 song instrumental concept album, that functions as one complete piece from front to back. It took 10 years of writing, multiple line up changes, and we couldn't be more proud to present this to you.