Stereogum's 50 Best Albums Of 2020

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

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

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

HAIM only had one rule when they started working on their third album: There would be no rules. “We were just experimenting,” lead singer and middle sibling Danielle Haim tells Apple Music. “We didn’t care about genre or sticking to any sort of script. We have the most fun when nothing is off limits.” As a result, *Women in Music Pt. III* sees the Los Angeles sisters embrace everything from thrillingly heavy guitar to country anthems and self-deprecating R&B. Amid it all, gorgeous saxophone solos waft across the album, transporting you straight to the streets of their hometown on a sunny day. In short, it’s a fittingly diverse effort for a band that\'s always refused, in the words of Este Haim, to be “put in a box.” “I just hope people can hear how much fun we had making it,” adds Danielle, who produced the album alongside Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid—a trio Alana Haim describes as “the Holy Trinity.” “We wanted it to sound fun. Everything about the album was just spontaneous and about not taking ourselves too seriously.” Yet, as fun-filled as they might be, the tracks on *Women in Music Pt. III* are also laced with melancholy, documenting the collective rock bottom the Haim sisters hit in the years leading up to the album’s creation. These songs are about depression, seeking help, grief, failing relationships, and health issues (Este has type 1 diabetes). “A big theme in this album is recognizing your sadness and expelling it with a lot of aggression,” says Danielle, who wanted the album to sound as raw and up close as the subjects it dissects. “It feels good to scream it in song form—to me that’s the most therapeutic thing I can do.” Elsewhere, the band also comes to terms with another hurdle: being consistently underestimated as female musicians. (The album’s title, they say, is a playful “invite” to stop asking them about being women in music.) The album proved to be the release they needed from all of those experiences—and a chance to celebrate the unshakable sibling support system they share. “This is the most personal record we’ve ever put out,” adds Alana. “When we wrote this album, it really did feel like collective therapy. We held up a mirror and took a good look at ourselves. It’s allowed us to move on.” Let HAIM guide you through *Women in Music Pt. III*, one song at a time. **Los Angeles** Danielle Haim: “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. It came out of this feeling when we were growing up that Los Angeles had a bad rep. It was always like, ‘Ew, Los Angeles!’ or ‘Fuck LA!’ Especially in 2001 or so, when all the music was coming out of New York and all of our friends ended up going there for college. And if LA is an eyeroll, the Valley—where we come from—is a constant punchline. But I always had such pride for this city. And then when our first album came out, all of a sudden, the opinion of LA started to change and everyone wanted to move here. It felt a little strange, and it was like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to live here anymore?’ I’m waiting for the next mass exodus out of the city and people being like, ‘This place sucks.’ Anyone can move here, but you’ve got to have LA pride from the jump.” **The Steps** Danielle: “With this album, we were reckoning with a lot of the emotions we were feeling within the business. This album was kind of meant to expel all of that energy and almost be like ‘Fuck it.’ This song kind of encapsulates the whole mood of the record. The album and this song are really guitar-driven \[because\] we just really wanted to drive that home. Unfortunately, I can already hear some macho dude being like, ‘That lick is so easy or simple.’ Sadly, that’s shit we’ve had to deal with. But I think this is the most fun song we’ve ever written. It’s such a live, organic-sounding song. Just playing it feels empowering.” Este Haim: “People have always tried to put us in a box, and they just don’t understand what we do. People are like, ‘You dance and don’t play instruments in your videos, how are you a band?’ It’s very frustrating.” **I Know Alone** Danielle: “We wrote this one around the same time that we wrote ‘Los Angeles,’ just in a room on GarageBand. Este came up with just that simple bassline. And we kind of wrote the melody around that bassline, and then added those 808 drums in the chorus. It’s about coming out of a dark place and feeling like you don\'t really want to deal with the outside world. Sometimes for me, being at home alone is the most comforting. We shout out Joni Mitchell in this song; our mom was such a huge fan of hers and she kind of introduced us to her music when we were really little. I\'d always go into my room and just blast Joni Mitchell super loud. And I kept finding albums of hers as we\'ve gotten older and need it now. I find myself screaming to slow Joni Mitchell songs in my car. This song is very nostalgic for her.” **Up From a Dream** Danielle: “This song literally took five minutes to write, and it was written with Rostam. It’s about waking up to a reality that you just don’t want to face. In a way, I don’t really want to explain it: It can mean so many different things to different people. This is the heaviest song we’ve ever had. It’s really cool, and I think this one will be really fun to play live. The guitar solo alone is really fun.” **Gasoline** Danielle: “This was another really quick one that we wrote with Rostam. The song was a lot slower originally, and then we put that breakbeat-y drumbeat on it and all of a sudden it turned into a funky sort of thing, and it really brought the song to life. I love the way that the drums sound. I feel like we really got that right. I was like literally in a cave of blankets, a fort we created with a really old Camco drum set from the ’70s, to make sure we got that dry, tight drum sound. That slowed-down ending is due to Ariel. He had this crazy EDM filter he stuck on the guitar, and I was like, ‘Yes, that’s fucking perfect.’” Alana Haim: “I think there were parts of that song where we were feeling sexy. I remember I had gone to go get food, and when I came back Danielle had written the bridge. She was like, ‘Look what I wrote!’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Okay!’” **3 AM** Alana: “It’s pretty self-explanatory—it’s about a booty call. There have been around 10 versions of this song. Someone was having a booty call. It was probably me, to be honest. We started out with this beat, and then we wrote the chorus super quickly. But then we couldn’t figure out what to do in the verses. We’d almost given up on it and then we were like, ‘Let’s just try one last time and see if we can get there.’ I think it was close to 3 am when we figured out the verse and we had this idea of having it introduced by a phone call. Because it *is* about a booty call. And we had to audition a bunch of dudes. We basically got all of our friends that were guys to be like, ‘Hey, this is so crazy, but can you just pretend to be calling a girl at 3 am?’ We got five or six of our friends to do it, and they were so nervous and sheepish. They were the worst! I was like, ‘Do you guys even talk to girls?’ I think you can hear the amount of joy and laughs we had making this song.” **Don’t Wanna** Alana: “I think this is classic HAIM. It was one of the earlier songs which we wrote around the same time as ‘Now I’m in It.’ We always really, really loved this song, and it always kind of stuck its head out like, ‘Hey, remember me?’ It just sounded so good being simple. We can tinker around with a song for years, and with this one, every time we added something or changed it, it lost the feeling. And every time we played it, it just kind of felt good. It felt like a warm sweater.” **Another Try** Alana: “I\'ve always wanted to write a song like this, and this is my favorite on the record. The day that we started it, I was thinking that I was going to get back together with the love of my life. I mean, now that I say that, I want to barf, because we\'re not in a good place now, but at that point we were. We had been on and off for almost 10 years and I thought we were going to give it another try. And it turns out, the week after we finished the song, he had gotten engaged. So the song took on a whole new meaning very quickly. It’s really about the fact I’ve always been on and off with the same person, and have only really had one love of my life. It’s kind of dedicated to him. I think Ariel had a lot of fun producing this song. As for the person it’s about? He doesn’t know about it, but I think he can connect the dots. I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to figure out. The end of the song is supposed to feel like a celebration. We wanted it to feel like a dance party. Because even though it has such a weird meaning now, the song has a hopeful message. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure it out. I am still hopeful.” **Leaning on You** Alana: “This is really a song about finding someone that accepts your flaws. That’s such a rare thing in this world—to find someone you love that accepts you as who you are and doesn\'t want to change you. As sisters, we are the CEOs of our company: We have super strong personalities and really strong opinions. And finding someone that\'s okay with that, you would think would be celebrated, but it\'s actually not. It\'s really hard to find someone that accepts you and accepts what you do as a job and accepts everything about you. And I think ‘Leaning on You’ is about when you find that person that really uplifts you and finds everything that you do to be incredible and interesting and supports you. It’s a beautiful thing.” Danielle: “We wrote this song just us sitting around a guitar. And we just wanted to keep it like that, so we played acoustic guitar straight into the computer for a very dry, unique sound that I love.” **I’ve Been Down** Danielle: “This is the last one we wrote on the album. This was super quick with stream-of-consciousness lyrics. I wanted it to sound like you were in the room, like you were right next to me. That chorus—‘I’ve been down, I’ve been down’—feels good to sing. It\'s very therapeutic to just kind of scream it in song form. To me, it’s the most therapeutic thing I can do. The backing vocals on this are like the other side of your brain.” **Man From the Magazine** Este: \"When we were first coming out, I guess it was perplexing for some people that I would make faces when I played, even though men have been doing it for years. When they see men do it, they are just, to quote HAIM, ‘in it.’ But of course, when a woman does it, it\'s unsettling and off-putting and could be misconstrued as something else. We got asked questions about it early on, and there was this one interviewer who asked if I made the faces I made onstage in bed. Obviously he wasn’t asking about when I’m in bed yawning. My defense mechanism when stuff like that happens is just to try to make a joke out of it. So I kind of just threw it back at him and said, ‘Well, there\'s only one way to find out.’ And of course, there was a chuckle and then we moved on. Now, had someone said that to me, I probably would\'ve punched them in the face. But as women, we\'re taught kind of just to always be pleasant and be polite. And I think that was my way of being polite and nice. Thank god things are changing a bit. We\'ve been talking about shit like this forever, but I think now, finally, people are able to listen more intently.” Danielle: “We recorded this song in one take. We got the feeling we wanted in the first take. The first verse is Este\'s super specific story, and then, on the second verse, it feels very universal to any woman who plays music about going into a guitar store or a music shop and immediately either being asked, ‘Oh, do you want to start to play guitar?’ or ‘Are you looking for a guitar for your boyfriend?’ And you\'re like, ‘What the fuck?’ It\'s the worst feeling. And I\'ve talked to so many other women about the same experience. Everyone\'s like, ‘Yeah, it\'s the worst. I hate going in the guitar stores.’ It sucks.” **All That Ever Mattered** Alana: “This is one of the more experimental songs on the record. Whatever felt good on this track, we just put it in. And there’s a million ways you could take this song—it takes on a life of its own and it’s kind of chaotic. The production is bananas and bonkers, but it did really feel good.” Danielle: “It’s definitely a different palette. But to us it was exciting to have that crazy guitar solo and those drums. It also has a really fun scream on it, which I always like—it’s a nice release.” **FUBT** Alana: “This song was one of the ones that was really hard to write. It’s about being in an emotionally abusive relationship, which all three of us have been in. It’s really hard to see when you\'re in something like that. And the song basically explains what it feels like and just not knowing how to get out of it. You\'re just kind of drowning in this relationship, because the highs are high and the lows are extremely low. You’re blind to all these insane red flags because you’re so immersed in this love. And knowing that you\'re so hard on yourself about the littlest things. But your partner can do no wrong. When we wrote this song, we didn’t really know where to put it. But it felt like the end to the chapter of the record—a good break before the next songs, which everyone knew.” **Now I’m in It** Danielle: “This song is about feeling like you\'re in something and almost feeling okay to sit in it, but also just recognizing that you\'re in a dark place. I was definitely in a dark place, and it was just like I had to look at myself in the mirror and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucked up. And you need to get your shit together and you need to look it in the face and know that you\'re here and work on yourself.’ After writing this song I got a therapist, which really helped me.” **Hallelujah** Alana: “This song really did just come from wanting to express how important it is to have the love of your family. We\'re very lucky that we each have two sisters as backup always. We wrote this with our friend Tobias Jesso Jr., and we all just decided to write verses separately, which is rare for us. I think we each wanted to have our own take on the lyric ‘Why me, how\'d I get this hallelujah’ and what it meant to each of us. I wrote about losing a really close friend of mine at such a young age and going through a tragedy that was unexplainable. I still grapple with the meaning of that whole thing. It was one of the hardest times in my life, and it still is, but I was really lucky that I had two siblings that were really supportive during that time and really helped me get through it. If you talk to anybody that loses someone unexpectedly, you really do become a different person. I feel like I\'ve had two chapters of my life at this point: before it happened and after it happened. And I’ve always wanted to thank my sisters at the same time because they were so integral in my healing process going through something so tragic.” **Summer Girl** Alana: This song is collectively like our baby. Putting it out was really fun, but it was also really scary, because we were coming back and we didn’t know how people were going to receive it. We’d played it to people and a lot of them didn’t really like it. But we loved everything about it. You can lose your confidence really quickly, but thankfully, people really liked it. Putting out this song really did give us back our confidence.” Danielle: “I\'ve talked about it a lot, but this song is about my boyfriend getting cancer a couple of years ago, and it was truly the scariest thing that I have ever been through. I just couldn\'t stop thinking about how he was feeling. I get spooked really easily, but I felt like I had to buck the fuck up and be this kind of strong figure for him. I had to be this kind of sunshine, which was hard for me, but I feel like it really helped him. And that’s kind of where this song came from. Being the summer when he was just in this dark, dark place.”

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

The idea for Daniel Lopatin’s ninth Oneohtrix Point Never LP came as he began revisiting old radio mixtapes he’d made as a teenager just outside of Boston. “Unlike a mixtape that you make for somebody else, they\'re non-sequential,” he tells Apple Music. “You’re reacting to something that you may have not even heard before, that you\'re just titillated by for the first few seconds. It’s like a map of your unconscious in a way.” Meant to simulate the experience of listening to FM radio for an entire day, *Magic Oneohtrix Point Never*—a nod to Boston soft rock station Magic 106, and the name to which Lopatin’s 2007 debut *Betrayed in the Octagon* was originally attributed—had to have “an eclecticism” that made you feel like you were spinning the dial. So in addition to collages of hallucinogenic DJ chatter, there are also mutant pop ballads (“No Nightmares,” which features friend and co-executive producer The Weeknd), warped alt-rock anthems (“I Don’t Love Me Anymore”), New Age satires (“The Whether Channel”), and sculptures wrought from sound that most people would dismiss as garbage or background noise. All of it speaks to a career defined by liquid sensibilities and an open mind. “I wanted to make a cohesive, punchy, 50-minute record that was very personal, but pulled from FM palettes that I was personally interested in,” Lopatin says. “I think it works really well as a metaphor for how I\'ve changed. The things that I try to understand about my own life and being an avid musical listener and how much that\'s influenced me as a musician is kind of apparent on this record. That metaphor of transformation is something that I came to by thinking about the radio.” Here, Lopatin walks us through the day, from sunup to midnight. **Cross Talk I** “You’re in alarm clock territory. You’re waking up kind of inside the fucking radio, not listening to it. I really want the setting of the album to be almost within a kind of psychic environment—Magic Oneohtrix Point Never as a radio station. So you’re waking up. Time to get on with the day.” **Auto & Allo** “It\'s really a track of two parts. The first half is really abstract, and in the second half it comes together. I called it \'Auto & Allo,\' which means self and other. So it’s like you\'re orienting and you\'re moving towards something. The album is becoming, earning its subjectivity out of this haze.” **Long Road Home** “I imagined it as the beginning of the album’s journey. It\'s setting the thesis of the whole record up, which is sort of embracing transformation, even if it\'s kind of disturbing and the future is vast and unfortunately filled with question marks. But that\'s it. That\'s the game. That\'s where we are. That\'s who we are. And so, how to live alongside your incompleteness, instead of fight against it or to think that you can overcome it. There\'s no home you come to. There\'s just this kind of road, and the road is the thing. That\'s what that song is for me.” **Cross Talk II** “You\'re in the Midday Suite. The collaged-together narrative there is the DJ saying, ‘Somehow our childhood fantasies don\'t relate to our adult realities.’ And from there, the record gets a little bit more dense. I like to think of midday as active and energetic. There\'s a lot of optimism, weirdly.” **I Don’t Love Me Anymore** “Basically it’s Frankensteined together—partially a bratty pop-punk song, partially motorik, like psych rock that\'s drum-machine-driven. There\'s a lot of weird over-sampled guitars on it, like the kinds that you might hear in a Sega Genesis video game.” **Bow Ecco** “A lot of the more ambient moments on the record are references to weather. The liminal space of a weather report is always, I\'ve found, really calming, but it’s scary because you\'re essentially just somebody sitting there talking about unpredictable dynamic systems and trying to figure them out and conquer them. A bow echo is a weather pattern that\'s shaped like an archer\'s bow, this thing that could be like a tornado. This song is calm and there’s a lot of repetition. Then I\'m trying to characterize a moment of weather where it flares up like a cyclone, a music-as-sculpture moment where I try to characterize this thing that was like something you\'d see on a Weather Channel broadcast.” **The Whether Channel** “It\'s like ‘Bow Ecco’ is the actual weather outside, happening somewhere in the lower atmosphere. And ‘Whether Channel’ is like a station, a place where something\'s commenting on it, dealing with it, or trying to track it. And so it flows out of that. \[Rapper\] Nolan \[berollin\] did that part off the cuff, and it\'s really interesting because he\'s talking almost in this pseudo-motivational-speaker way, which I thought was really funny. That fit so perfectly and wonderfully into this whole New Age thing that I\'m interested in anyway. I was like, ‘Oh. Let\'s do this kind of Law of Attraction satire where, by the end of his verse, his voice is totally transformed into this super-saturated bit-crushed thing and it sounds like weird baby voices are being pulled apart from each other.” **No Nightmares** “It kind of has this 10cc/Godley & Creme/‘Take My Breath Away’ kind of vibe to it that could be like a late-night thing because it\'s slow. But I felt that it was so sweet and kind of pretty. It also has a kind of blue-sky quality to it even if it\'s kind of slow and romantic. It’s as poppy as the record gets. I mean, this is not a pop record. It references popular music a lot, but it\'s not sequenced or created to be a series of singles in that way. It\'s very much a record that is meant to be listened to almost like how you watch a film, so this really needed to be there in a way for me. It just made sense as the moment on the record—if there is one—that’s going to have this big, brash FM radio moment, right there in the middle.” **Cross Talk III** “It’s sundown now, the sun is setting. This one is pretty lighthearted. I think it was a commercial for a candy bar and I just did a kind of Negativland-style collage where I made the woman in the advertisement talk about styles of music—about background music and elevator music—as if it was something she was tasting.” **Tales From the Trash Stratum** “The trash stratum is a reference to \[author\] Philip K. Dick. Here’s the quote: ‘Elements of the divine trash stratum,’ he says. ‘The clue lies there. Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.’ It’s a very spiritual way of thinking about trash: If everything, if all material, is kind of equally alive in a sense, because we\'re here to witness it and observe it, then everything is kind of special. Trash is a discarded thing, but for a lot of artists—me included—there\'s always been an interest in the abject or in the trash and the discarded stuff. That’s been such a big part of my music and my philosophy in thinking about musical tastes—like trashy tastes or dustbin stuff or throwaway New Age records that really meant a lot to me.” **Answering Machine** “Really, the record to me is about listening—and all these sort of overlapping modes of listening. We have voicemails now, but I remember the eeriness of an answering machine, and having to come home and press a button. There\'s this weird beep and you could hear the sort of mechanism itself, the thing—there’s a tape in it and it looks all weird. I wanted to make an interlude that had an homage to this other thing that I would imagine I\'d be listening to while I was listening to the radio. It\'s as simple as that.” **Imago** “In nature, an imago is the fully realized final stage of an insect when it becomes its final form—so a butterfly when it\'s fully winged. I wrote the piece first and then named it that because it seemed to have that kind of narrative to it—it sounds like pieces in between that are almost barely there, like something\'s happening. Beautiful music was a style of music on the radio that was essentially background music, and to me this sounded like a really doomed piece of beautiful music that you\'d never hear. As the song progresses, it both decays and becomes more itself at the same time. By the time the strings come in and there\'s this really crazy kind of symphonic string arrangement that hugs the decaying loop, it occurred to me that that was kind of like an imago, a butterfly abandoning its exoskeleton and becoming this new thing.” **Cross Talk IV / Radio Lonelys** “The beginning of the overnight, and that’s when things get a little darker, seedier, and, in a way, more fun and cynical. Things open up. To me, the overnight programming on freeform radio was either generically stuck in there and wasn\'t actually what the station was doing all the rest of the time, or it was this inverse—a more freeform chunk where it was more libidinous and weird. I mean, it\'s overnight, so who the fuck is up listening?” **Lost But Never Alone** “It\'s like ‘Lost But Never Alone’ and ‘No Nightmares’ are two sides of the same coin. I just love a triumphant power ballad, and I love Def Leppard. To me, this is like a Def Leppard song but it\'s hybridized with other things that are a little bit more like 1980s synth-pop but on the gothier side of it, so like Depeche Mode’s *Violator* and stuff like that. That was always alchemically interesting to me, because you were either hair metal or you were goth—but if you were both, you were schizophrenic, basically.” **Shifting** “Arca and I really connect on this idea that we\'re both interested in transformation as a powerful formal device in music. Because you can do stuff with sound design and production in a way that can really encapsulate all these other ways of thinking about transformation, whether it\'s bodily transformation or evolving your ideas or devolving your ideas. The whole thing is sort of reinforcing that theme of liquid ideas as liquid sounds, and I really wanted Arca to be on the record somewhere because I think she\'s doing it and has been doing that so well for so long. I always felt such a kinship with her that way.” **Wave Idea** “Much like ‘Shifting’—which I think of as a weird spooky theremin, kind of an Ed Wood vibe but turned into something really futuristic—‘Wave Idea’ is like, what if you could animate this sort of stuff between the dials and sculpt it into something that had a body, that had its own sort of psychic importance and its own physical kind of manifestation? So it\'s like a creature, my hallucination, how I sculpt something that becomes much more interesting than just noise or trash.” **Nothing’s Special** “There\'s a kind of thesis in it. It was a really rough fucking year and it\'s been hard for everybody. Something that\'s always given me a lot of solace when I\'m in a funk is that I notice that I\'ve become disenchanted. The thing that can kind of re-enchant me very quickly when I get there is to remember that—like the Philip K. Dick quote said—everything is kind of divine, and everything is interesting, including the stuff between the dials. The noise. I wanted to end the album on a high note, so it crescendos towards the lyric that says no matter how bleak things get, I\'m still fundamentally fascinated that I can find such enchantment in such random, small things.”

\"I think it might be a relief to listeners to be like, ‘Oh good, this song isn\'t sad,’\" Jeremy Bolm tells Apple Music about Touché Amoré\'s fifth record *Lament*. \"Or not even sad, like, \'Oh, this is a song that I don\'t have to be afraid to listen to or be concerned to listen to because it might make me feel a certain way.\'\" After tackling the death of his mother on 2016\'s *Stage Four*, Bolm felt it would be best for his mental health to simply write about what\'s been going on in his life since that moment. He expresses his vulnerabilities both good and bad throughout, ranging from an appreciation for his partner (\"Come Heroine\") to the panic of shouldering other people\'s grief (\"I\'ll Be Your Host\") and feeling abandoned by those closest to him (\"A Broadcast\"). The Los Angeles quintet linked up with producer Ross Robinson to push forward their boundaries, as the album implements pedal steel guitar (\"A Broadcast\"), pop structures (\"Reminders\"), and post-punk (\"Feign\") into the band\'s relentless blend of emo and hardcore. \"I\'m so proud of it, and I know that\'s not unique, but in my heart of hearts, I feel like this is our best record,\" Bolm says. Below, he takes us track by track through *Lament*. **Come Heroine** “This one immediately felt like an opening track. I think it also does a pretty good job of setting you up for some of the context of the record, just in terms of how it\'s, in a way, part appreciation. It’s about my partner\'s incredible ability to be supportive and there. And just how, even when things seem to be as bad as they could be or as crazy as could be after the loss of my mom and all that sort of stuff, just that sort of reassuring presence from someone who also hasn\'t exactly had the happiest life. I think that kind of a person deserves a million songs written about them.” **Lament** “I just sort of had to take a step back, and I looked at the track titles, and I was like, \'Honestly, I feel like even just the word *lament* sort of ties up a lot of what we\'re going for here.\' So it became the title track, and for me, this song is just about how, for lack of a better term, something that\'s triggering can just throw your day off completely. The big part toward the end of the song—\'So I lament, then I forget/So I lament, till I reset\'— I think that just feels like the cycle that a lot of us go through.” **Feign** “This song is completely about impostor syndrome. I think when anyone is struggling with their art form in general, the first thing they do is find themselves to be a fraud. I\'ve always done my best to not take all the accolades that people have been kind enough to give me since I started making music with this band. And I\'ve come to realize that the times where I\'m sort of feeling the most free, the most carefree about what I\'m writing, some of those lines that get written end up being the ones that I think people connect to the most, and I can\'t help it. I always feel like it was accidental.” **Reminders** “Arguably the poppiest song in our band\'s catalog. The song was pretty inspired by the early-2000s Bright Eyes records, between *LIFTED* and *I\'m Wide Awake, It\'s Morning*, where he has a few songs that have a really good juxtaposition between a verse that\'s hyper-political and then the next verse that\'s deeply personal. I always looked at that ability that Conor Oberst had in a very envious light. So this was me sort of trying my hand at that, and it was written the day that Trump was exonerated from being impeached. We can\'t rely on the system to make our days better, we have to rely on what\'s around us. To keep our heads up, to keep ourselves going.” **Limelight** “We’re all made to believe that a loving relationship is one where it\'s consistent PDA or you\'re consistently romantic, or you have a passionate kiss every single day, and things like that. Which, I think, once you\'re with someone long enough, I don\'t think that\'s true. I think passion for me is the ability to just be around each other and love each other\'s company. And then also having heavy, heavy experiences together. Like the people in her family that have passed since our relationship, people in my family that have passed since our relationship. We\'ve now had three, four pets die. And every one of those was a very devastating situation, but brought us even closer together. So a lot of that was sort of on my mind when writing this song. And sort of not letting any outsiders have any sort of idea of what my kind of love is.” **Exit Row** “We put this song as the first song on Side B because I feel like it\'s a good energy boost situation. I feel like, at this point, every one of our records has this kind of song on it. I love the half-time drop in it; I feel like it makes me want to fucking kick a bunch of boxes over.” **Savoring** “After the shutdown happened, we were getting the mixes of the songs, and the opening lyrics just cracked me up: ‘Savoring the days that we spent inside as if tomorrow will be different, whatever we decide.’ But the part that makes you realize that it wasn\'t written for this is when I say it\'s nurturing, because this shit is not nurturing. I think any musician or any person who travels will tell you that when you\'re on the road, you\'re thinking about being home; when you\'re home, you wish you were on the road.” **A Broadcast** “\[Guitarist\] Nick \[Steinhardt\] had started learning how to play the pedal steel. Less than a year before we did this record, he wrote that song on it. Every one of our records has what I call the ‘weirdo track.’ I was a little nervous with it, because it started coming together and I started freaking out, like, ‘What am I going to do on this thing?’ So when I was out in the desert writing the song, I was freaking out about that. I read probably like 50 Leonard Cohen poems, listened to a few of the songs, and one of the things that I think Leonard is so amazing at is his ability to write the four-line stanzas. I wrote probably 12 different stanzas, if you want to call them that. And then I just sort of cherry-picked the ones that I think connected the best with how I was feeling. So this is me just sort of paying homage to the people that have inspired me and influenced me in so many different ways.” **I\'ll Be Your Host** “This is my panic of the countless messages and conversations that I\'ve endured about people losing people in their life, and how that\'s had a dramatic effect on my personal life. It\'s really, really difficult to navigate other people\'s tragedies on a consistent basis. I\'ll be approached, and someone will let me know the person in their life that recently died, or whatever. And the thing is I understand completely why people are doing this. I would do the exact same thing. I completely get it. But I can\'t deny what it\'s done to me. It\'s a really hard thing to take on, and I do feel guilty that I don\'t respond to fans about it.” **Deflector** “Being such a fan of Glassjaw and the records that Ross did, I found myself hearing a lot of those elements in the ideas that he had for this song. The last chorus where the kick drum is just consistent, that was an idea from him. The chorus, for me, deals with situational anxiety, conversations that I\'m uncomfortable having, and also the impostor syndrome as well, sort of all tied together with not being comfortable with a lot of situations. So that was me trying to try my best to be a John K. Samson, with painting an image of two trapeze artists doing their act and missing the connection and falling to the ground. And what that means for the trapeze artist, and what that means for myself in a more literary sense.” **A Forecast** “I lost some family because of Facebook. It\'s the social platform that allows your family to comfortably, openly speak about things that you really wish they hadn\'t. So for me, the first big section of this opening song, it\'s really heavy, and it\'s really uncomfortable. And it\'s not an easy first couple lines here. I\'m in this extreme, insane jazz phase where I\'m obsessed with discovering new records constantly with it. And I never had the patience before. I\'ve always respected jazz to an extreme level, but it\'s just never connected to me.”

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

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

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

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

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

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

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

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

You don’t make a 22-track album without experiencing doubts—even when you’re Britain’s biggest band. “We kept laughing to ourselves,” The 1975’s Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “‘Can we really put out a record like this? Can we really be where we are?’ The success of \[2018 album *A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\] didn’t change us, but it certainly made us think, ‘God, this is a lot of responsibility. To be compared to Radiohead. Fucking hell. What are we going to do?’” The way they saw it, there were two options. The first was to play to expectation and try to become even bigger. The second—the path they chose—was to return to when they were smallest. “Go back to when we were wearing Spider-Man T-shirts,” says Healy, “and the reason I wanted Ross \[MacDonald\] to play bass was not because we could eventually be in some culturally informative, cool thing but because that noise sounded cool with this noise.” On an album that begins with an address by Greta Thunberg and winds down with a song written by Healy’s dad, Tim, the noises that sound cool together include folk, UK garage, Max Martin-inspired pop, and hazy, discolored indie. Over that questing backdrop, Healy digs further into his inner self. “It has a lot of heart, this record,” he says. “A lot of the ideas have evolved. There was stuff like \[2015 single\] ‘Love Me,’ earlier work, which was about ego; those ideas are still there, but it’s now more about self-love in the truest sense—that people only change when it’s too hard not to. You’ve got to look out for yourself, accept that you’re not a Superman. There’s a lot of self-reflection. It’s the most me record. It’s the truest.” Here, he talks us through that truth track by track. **The 1975** “We were talking about how we were going to do *that* statement—the same statement that we always make musically—and we wanted it to be us at our most modern. That first track always has to be us checking in. That got us into the conversation of what is the most modern statement, or who has the most modern statement, and Greta was the decision. I think it sounds like how a lot of us feel. There’s a lot of hope in it, but it’s quite a somber piece of music. It’s very 1975 in the way that it’s quite beautiful superficially but also quite sad, quite pretty but also quite ominous. Greta has a lot of reach, but I really wanted to see her exist formally in pop culture, not just as an anecdote of somebody.” **People** “This song is right back to where we came from—almost what we were like in our first incarnation of the band. Very inspired by bands like Refused and Converge and stuff like that. It was around the time of the Alabama abortion bill and we’d just played a show in Alabama. It was the feeling of oppressive, conservative religion. It happened up on the tour bus. It was kind of like our ‘Youth Against Fascism’—\[UK journalist\] Dorian Lynskey said that. I was definitely thinking about that Sonic Youth song. I think that it’s about fear and apathy and referencing how annoying responsibility can feel. I wanted there to be like a slapstick madness to its urgency.” **The End (Music for Cars)** “The actual reason that it\'s called ‘(Music for Cars)’ is because...I wasn\'t going to tell anybody, but there was a song called ‘Hnscc,’ which was an ambient piece of music about death, the death of one of my family members, that was on the \[2013\] EP *Music for Cars*. And ‘The End’ is a reinvention of that, basically an orchestral version. And yeah, ‘Music for Cars’ has kind of become the umbrella title for this whole era.” **Frail State of Mind** “\[During our early teens\], we were super into hardcore and making noise and, like most people in the UK, super into dance music. I think Burial is quite an obvious one that you can hear on this, and even people like MJ Cole. That darker side of garage is something that I’ve always really loved. It’s very dreamy and sounds like driving down the M25 at night with the passing of lights and the smoking of stuff. Mike Skinner spoke about how garage clubs and the actual garage scene was always a bit intimidating to him as a late teen, so he would experience these things at his mates’ houses or in cars with his mates smoking weed. That’s what my experience was—with so much time spent in my car listening to music and then going home and making music with George \[Daniel, drummer and co-producer\] and then going out in my car and listening to it for context. That was one of the happiest times of my life.” **Streaming** “Sonically, it’s a tribute to our formative years and what we were into–Cult of Luna and Godspeed \[You! Black Emperor\] and Sigur Rós, all of these big ambient artists. And UK garage music. This record is like a bit of that with a bit of Midwest emo thrown in. What we love in ambient music, we call it Pinocchio-ing: It’s stuff that’s trying to sound like a real boy. Sigur Rós sounds like it’s striving to sound like a river or a landscape. All of the kind of visuals that you get with that kind of music. It really takes you back to one’s relationship with nature and texture and temperature. To be honest with you, we took quite a lot of that off. A lot of that made way for more actual songs.” **The Birthday Party** “It was the first thing that I wrote for this album that I knew was great. And it was the first thing that we got excited about. Inherently, excitement equals projection, \[so it was originally going to be the first single\]. And then we went off on tour and I wrote ‘People.’ And we were like, ‘Right, well. If we don’t start with this, where are we going to put it?’” **Yeah I Know** “I fucking love ‘Yeah I Know.’ I don\'t know what it reminds me of. It\'s kind of like Hyperdub. I remember super, super minimal ravehead music when I was growing up. It was just a synth and a drum kit. We’re also big Thom Yorke fans, outside of Radiohead, so I think there\'s probably a bit of that.” **Then Because She Goes** “It doesn\'t have a bridge or anything. It’s just this little moment. But this is how I feel about life. There’s so many fleeting moments of beauty on the record, which was really important because most of my favorite records always have them. Especially if we’re talking about shoegaze records. I think a lot of that comes from the slacker mid-’90s thing of Pavement or Liz Phair. There’s a lot of Life Without Buildings and stuff like that, especially in this song. And it’s like faded splendor, as I always call it. I love pop songs that sound like they’re drowning. Like My Bloody Valentine. Like a Polaroid that’s gasping for air. That really sunny but sun-flared feeling is quite across the record because—for the time and for the kind of person that I am, and my political views—it’s inherently quite a warm record.” **Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America** “This song happened quite early in the record. It reminded me of America so much in its ambience. It even goes back to \[*A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\]—I think I wrote it around that time. There’s quite a bit of folk music on the record. I’ve never really collaborated with anybody before, and it was so easy making music with \[guest vocalist\] Phoebe \[Bridgers\] that every time I had an idea or I wanted a slightly different texture to the vocals, I just got her to do it. Phoebe does all the backup vocals on ‘Roadkill’ and then ‘Playing on My Mind.’” **Roadkill** “‘Roadkill’ is about touring America, it’s about getting burnt out and searching for things. Anecdotal things that happen on the road—pissing myself on a Texan intersection, all those kind of things. I don\'t know what it sounds like—maybe like Pinegrove, or there’s a band called Limbeck that I used to love.” **Me & You Together Song** “We’ve gone full circle–this album is very like the early EPs: dreamy, hazy, and quite broken and deconstructed. A lot of our hardcore fans emotionally relate to our EPs and see them as our first albums, so it’s nice that we’ve ended up back there. Our favorite music is music that’s kind of inherently beautiful. It’s not pretty but kind of fractured or a bit jangly or overly distorted. I think the whole record is like that, and this is a stark example of that idea.” **I Think There\'s Something You Should Know** “It’s explicitly about impostor syndrome, depression, that kind of a sense of isolation. I think there’s a lot of that in this record. I think it’s also about the lack of desire to communicate about those things as well—like, if I’m talking to someone close to me who’s not aware of what’s going on. And I think the reason for that is normally because it’s exhausting to take it out of your head and put it on the table.” **Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied** “It’s quite a lo-fi hip-hop track. It came from George jamming on the piano, and I was putting a really low-resolution breakbeat over the top of it. Stuff like that is really fun for us sometimes. If it’s really simple and you’ve got a loop to work with, you can kind of just go into producer mode. And—like any producer normally is—we’re huge J Dilla fans and all that kind of stuff. Lyrically, it’s just more self-reflection. I think it’s about also doing your bit as an artist—if you give people nothing to work with, if you say nothing, then you leave room for people to project anything. I find that a lot of people who are out there doing their thing musically, who aren’t challenging any ideas, are only made interesting through association or projection. I don’t feel like a lot of people stand by stuff.” **Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)** “This is the anomaly on the record for me. I don\'t know where it came from. That was me fucking around when the record was feeling really, really relaxed. It reminds me of all the kind of proper pop music that I grew up listening to, like Backstreet Boys. And it’s like an ode to early Max Martin, late-\'90s pop. I don\'t think we ever do anything retro. We never do anything pastiche-y. But there’s definitely a reflection on a certain time of our musical upbringing. And that was very much part of that. And it’s got a great Temptations sample at the beginning, and kind of reminds me of Kanye or something.” **Shiny Collarbone** “Cutty Ranks did all those vocals for us. It started out as a sample, but then we spoke to him to clear it and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it again.’ That’s Manchester, that tune, to me, man. That just sounds like going to town—that kind of dreamy, deep, dreamy, slow deep house music. Again, it’s like a fractured shard. There’s so many shards on this record. A lot of that is George. George always talks about how I’m quite expressive, how I have the ability, or even the desire, to express myself outside of music. And that can be in lyrics or in conversation. Whereas, because he’s not like that, he takes a really big responsibility on himself to express himself through sonics. That’s a really good way of explaining why a lot of our records are almost OCD in their detail. It’s because that’s George’s language.” **If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)** “If your vibe is instilled in people’s brain from what your earlier work is like, then probably \[it is the most 1975 song on the record\]. When I hear bands that are sounding—or are trying to sound—like The 1975, it’s normally *that* 1975 that they’re trying to sound like—that reference to post-punk pop, ’80s pop. And that does come out quite naturally in \[the album\] sometimes, because that’s very much in our blood. This song is very on-the-nose for this album. But I like that, because it’s another completely different tone to the album and it kind of comes out of nowhere.” **Playing on My Mind** “This takes us back into that American, James Taylor-y, Jackson Browne-y kind of sound. Again, Phoebe is just great to have there. As soon as I write something, if I get her to put a harmony on it or to just do something over the top of it, it completely changes. And that was really easy and really natural. I think this is my funniest record; there’s some lines in there that still make me smile when I listen to it. \[With\] ‘Playing on My Mind,’ there’s one line I really like: ’I won’t get clothes online ’cause I get worried about the fit/That rule don’t apply concerning my relationships.’ I thought that summed up me really, really well.” **Having No Head** “This is George, man. All George. It’s the only thing that George titled as well; he\'s very much into his Eastern philosophy. You can ask him what it\'s about. I don\'t fucking know. That\'s just George meditating. That\'s what that sounds like to me. That is how George gets it out, this big, sprawling ambience, his artwork, like tapestries.” **What Should I Say** “Bane of my fucking life. Honestly, for two years. This was going to be on *A Brief Inquiry*. It was just this piece of house music that we never really quite got right. I think it\'s about social media. It was kind of like Manchester again; we always thought about New Order when we were making this, for some reason. I’ve seen New Order, I’ve been a couple of times during the making of this record. I mean, we even met Brian Eno recently. The reality that we get to fuck with these people now: Whether it gives you a confidence...it gives you a *something*.” **Bagsy Not in Net** “We finished \[the album\] and after we’d done all of our deliberations, the record came down to 21 tracks. Now, we were looking at it and thinking, ‘But hold on: It *was* 22 tracks.’ It’s not that we didn\'t want to lose the preorders, it’s just that it didn\'t really make sense to me. But we weren’t just going to make up an interlude or something for the sake of it and put it on what we want to be our best album. We’d been with Mike Skinner recently, and I was talking to him about this tune, which is basically using that string sample. The conversation just turned to that, and then George started doing it, making the beat, and it was so fucking exciting. So we set the mic up and recorded the whole thing in, like, a day. It’s about wanting to die with your partner. Don\'t want to lose someone that I love. If somebody wanted to know what the album sounded like in a clip, I would play them this. We knew exactly what \[the album\] was just at the very end, whereas during the creation of it, we just didn’t.” **Don’t Worry** “‘Don’t Worry’ is the first song that I ever heard, I think. In 1989, 1990, our dad was in a band, just a fuck-around band, and he had this song that he wrote for my mum about her postnatal depression. It’s a song that I remember because my dad would play it on the piano. Looking back, in the way that \[this album\] is about me and my family and my life, it just felt right \[to do a version of the song\]. It was written 30 years ago, and it’s me and my dad singing—that was just a really special moment. He’s a good songwriter, my dad. It’s a very 1975 interpretation of his work. And he loves that. He’s very, very proud to be on the record.” **Guys** “There\'s not many love songs about some of the most beautiful, powerful relationships in your life. Especially straight guys or whatever in rock music, \[they\] tend not to write about how much they love their mates, or how this would be impossible and frivolous and completely pointless if we weren\'t all doing it together. One of the things we say to each other all the time is ‘Imagine being a solo artist. Imagine being here, now, on your fourth day in Brisbane, waiting to go…’ It’s hard out here if you’re just constantly traveling. And we’ve been a band since we were 13, and they’re my best friends. And we\'ve never fallen out. It’s a really true song. They’re the thing that gives me purpose.”

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

On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”

It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”

On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”

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NO DREAM is the 4th studio record from the Death Rosenstock band full of chords, words, beats and more! Tracked live in a big room for that classic "is that a mistake?" sound by Grammy-nominated recorded "Grammy Jack" Shirley, you are GUARANTEED to have not heard this record before you've listened to it! We hope it makes you feel good, but if it doesn't, that's on you sorry.

“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

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

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

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

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

one long song recorded nowhere between May 2019 and May 2020 released Aug. 7th, 2020 as a 2xLP by P.W. Elverum & Sun box 1561 Anacortes, Wash. U.S.A. 98221

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

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

Autechre albums are like language immersion programs: At first they don’t make sense, but listen close and familiar shapes emerge. Not that *SIGN* is accessible per se: We’re still talking about something closer to computer programming than what most people would consider music. But for a group that can be almost mythically forbidding (2016’s four-hour-long—and 12-hours-dense—*elseq*), *SIGN* is almost pop. Thirty years in and the UK production duo’s roots still show: Hip-hop on “M4 Lema,” house on “psin AM,” far-out synth soundtracks on “F7” and “Metaz form8.” But it all remains deconstructed and once removed. Most music depends on memories of something you’ve heard before. With Autechre, you can feel your brain stretch as you listen. Normally they sound like they’re pushing forward or settling in. With *SIGN*, it’s both.

“I\'ve put out songs like ‘Body Like a Back Road’ or ‘Kinfolks’—they\'re just upbeat, fun songs that are hopefully universally relatable,” Sam Hunt tells Apple Music, calling out some of the hooky singles the Georgia-bred singer released ahead of *SOUTHSIDE*, the long-awaited follow-up to his star-making 2014 debut *Montevallo*. The 12-song set flexes his down-home fluency in the rhythms of pop, hip-hop, and R&B, blending beats and throwback country textures and vocal styles and the mellow brooding of his most confessional-sounding performances. “I think if you asked somebody that really knows me well which record they heard more of me on,” he says, “I would bet that those people would say, ‘I could hear you, the person that I know, in those songs, even more so than the first record.’” Here he talks through some of the tracks that reflect the album’s range. **2016** “That song is a little more vulnerable and personal. And I know a lot of my buddies who listen to music, they don\'t want to hear somebody laying in about their issues. They just want to hear something fun that\'s easy to listen to. So that song was a little bit of a risk. I\'ve talked about some of the reasons why it took me so long to put out a new record—this song touches on that a little bit. When I hear it now, I don\'t hear myself anymore, I just hear a song. People will be looking at me funny as I\'m singing it, like, ‘Man, he\'s really putting it out there on this one.’ But to me, it\'s just another song from the set. Not that I don\'t want to still get in that place when performing it and try to authentically be in the moment, but at the same time, once it\'s over with, once it\'s written, once it\'s recorded, it\'s almost like it\'s not even me anymore in terms of feeling vulnerable about singing it or playing it in front of people.” **Hard to Forget** “Luke \[Laird\] has just such a great taste in music. He knows his country music history, but he\'s also a big fan of a lot of the stuff that I grew up listening to outside the genre. I don\'t know if he had heard that Webb Pierce song \[‘There Stands the Glass’\] somewhere, or if it just came to mind. I think he sang the Webb Pierce part and then beatboxed his drum part and took it to the studio and then worked it up. I\'ve been looking for a song to sample for a while and just haven\'t been able to find the right song. I\'ve been messing with songs from like the ’80s and ’90s, but I think the trick was to go way back. To hear those things work together, it makes a little bit of a point. I didn\'t want to hit anybody over the head with it in that way, but at the same time it does make that clear, I think.” **Young Once** “Nowadays I write a lot with producers who can build a track in the room, and a lot of times they\'ll build something before I even get there, or sometimes we\'ll build something in the room. We wrote that song originally on just piano and guitar, and it sat around in my phone. I just had a voice memo of it forever. Then we put it down over at Zach \[Crowell\]\'s and started playing it and put some drums on it. We had players play on it and it just kept growing. It\'s one of those, like, I\'m old enough now to be nostalgic about my youth, and that\'s a big thing in country music, is reflecting back on the good old days. I wanted to have a song that did reflect on youth, and I\'m surprised nobody had written that, had hooked ‘Young Once’ in that way.” **Let It Down** “I remember talking to the guys and saying, ‘What if the verses sounded like an R&B song but then you drop to this chorus and it feels like a classic bluegrass or old country?’ I\'m so fascinated by that, when different genres or different worlds can come together. A lot of times, you can miss by an inch or miss by a mile and it doesn\'t work. I think my whole career, I try to blend R&B and country. I can\'t help but sing country at the end of the day, so even when I do R&B, I don\'t really do R&B. I\'m just doing a country boy\'s impression a little bit. So somehow it kind of comes together.” **Breaking Up Was Easy in the 90’s** “We remember telephones on the wall and pre-social-media relationships. So just thinking about the world and how much it\'s changed because of all those things, it was a song I wanted to write. The trick was not filling it up with a bunch of technology references and trying to find the story within it. It\'s just the world\'s so much smaller now. In a lot of ways, like the fact that I can release the record and still stay in touch with my fans, there\'s so many positives. But when it comes to relationships and navigating old relationships or new relationships and especially breakups, it can be tricky. I have a hard time focusing and organizing and really concentrating on getting something finished. There\'s something about the ninth hour that centers my focus. If I know that I have to turn something in tomorrow, I have more mental clarity on that day than I would have had combined in the months before. I sat around on those verses thinking, ‘What would you do? How would you write this? I could do this, I could do that.’ And then I had one day and it was like, ‘Okay, this is it. Boom.’” **Drinkin’ Too Much** “I didn\'t really have a place to put that song, but I decided last minute to include the songs that have been out that didn\'t really have a home. There were nine songs without the three that I put out prior to this record, and it just felt incomplete. And one day I just typed in those songs to the list and then it felt like a record all of a sudden. I just wanted them to have a home, especially just for me. Not that I\'m OCD about it, but there\'s something about looking back on it 10 years from now and feeling like, ‘This was record one, this was record two,’ without having stragglers out there. \[As for the hymn on piano\], faith is a big part of my lifestyle adjustment during those three years. So I wanted to acknowledge that somehow without being too overt about it or pushing it on anybody. That was a way to give credit for a little bit of redemption in a subtle way. And that\'s one of my favorite gospel songs. \[‘Drinkin’ Too Much’\] is such a heavy thing, and it\'s a lot to take in, so I just wanted to leave it on a hopeful note.”

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

Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”

The new album from Brooklyn noise-rock group Couch Slut has finally arrived. "Take A Chance on Rock n Roll" is the band's first full-length since 2017's "Contempt" and was initially released on the May 1st, 2020 as an unannounced surprise on Bandcamp's no-fee day. Gilead Media is pleased to once again work with one of America’s most sonically vicious bands to bring this new work to the world. Those familiar with Couch Slut's relentless, sludging, noisy style will be pleased to find many of their favorite components of the band’s signature sound vividly present and pushed to an absolute extreme. Ripping guitars tearing through riff after riff following a punishing rhythm section that refuses to give you a moment’s respite. Scathing vocals suffocating any small sonic space left breathing within the songs. Couch Slut strip away all pretense and focus their power entirely upon exploring new colors and moods within their writing while somehow sacrificing zero strength or energy. Even during tracks that clock in at a slower tempo there is still an unimpeachable intensity that rivals any concept of traditional “heaviness” and renders it truly weak by comparison. The band’s lyrical content continues to push the boundaries of the listener’s comfort by broaching themes of drug use, mental illness, trauma (all topics past listeners will find familiar in Couch Slut’s music), while also discussing issues of underage prostitution and domestic violence. The weight and importance of these topics is handled masterfully and truly forces the listener to deeply evaluate a large volume of emotional responses by the end of their listening experience. This album is not a casual listening experience by any stretch. This is an active experience. When you press play on this album you must be prepared to be affected. You will not simply listen to these songs, you will feel them deep within your gut. This is not background music. There is nothing passive about this. “Take A Chance on Rock n Roll” was recorded and mixed at Strange Weather in Brooklyn by Ben Greenberg and mastered by at Telegraph Mastering by Adam Gonsalves. The album will be presented on CD and LP formats, alongside the requisite digital availability, all courtesy of Gilead Media.

“This album was so many albums before it was this one,” Kehlani tells Apple Music of *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t*. Yet her second proper studio album arrives perfectly suited for this moment that is filled with uncertainty—when so many are taking stock of the things we often take for granted and yearning for closeness we can\'t have, whether due to physical or emotional separation. As she aptly sums up in the initial seconds of “Toxic,” the slick opening track, “I get real accountable when I\'m alone.” A central and familiar theme emerges early: the eternal war between need and want, between the sentimental and the carnal. Songs like “Can I,” a lurid come-on, and “Water,” an astrological seduction, smolder with sexual appetite that masquerades as control and confidence. But she offsets the posture in turns—“Hate the Club,” gilded by Masego\'s golden saxophone lines, is passive-aggressive; “Can You Blame Me” reflects the push-pull of desire at odds with pride, and “Open (Passionate)” portrays the insecurity of emotional nakedness. Taken together, it\'s a revelation about how easily, as she proclaims on “F&MU,” “\'I hate you\' turns into \'I love you\' in the bedroom.” But the whole picture isn\'t one that is so neat or simple; the album\'s real feat is its depiction of how we are all many things at once, often contradictory but sincere nonetheless. Kehlani\'s rendering of the personal as universal is a matter of course, but it\'s when she mines her experiences with unblinking specificity that she becomes transcendent. “I\'m kind of in a relationship that has put me in a space of almost processing my parents a little bit,” the Oakland-born singer says, adding that her father passed away from a “gang-related situation” when she was young. “I started diving into \[that\] headspace with the music I was making.” That link emerges most explicitly on “Bad News,” one of the album\'s most poignant performances, which finds her pleading with a lover to choose her over a lifestyle which threatens to pull them apart. Kehlani has always been powerful when she\'s vulnerable—the essence and through line of her music is in the way she allows that which makes her weak to make her strong again. *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t* arrives in May 2020 as many people remain under orders to stay at home and practice social distancing, but this music can be a vehicle to another place, even if that place is your own head. Kehlani shrewdly captures the tangled intricacies of connection in a time defined by disconnect—a hurdle not just to relationships but to productivity as well. “The biggest thing about this whole quarantine was that I impressed myself,” she says. “That\'s why no matter what happens with this album, this might be my favorite project I\'ve ever put out.”

We're very excited to finally share our 2nd LP, 'As We Suffer From Memory & Imagination' in its entirety, with help from our great friends at Zegema Beach Records and Dog Knights Productions. Given the context of the date of this album's release, as well as recent events, we'd like to take this opportunity to echo the many voices decrying the prolonged history of discrimination and violence towards Black people, as well as calling for the abolition of police all across the world. We'd like to express our solidarity with all victims of racialized violence throughout history at the hands of the police, state, and white supremacy, as well as with those out in the streets demonstrating in pursuit of a world that is anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and without police. We feel that it is the duty of all artists, especially within our community of DIY musicians, social centers, and venues to utilize their platform, big or small, to bring awareness and accumulate resources towards this fight to the best of their ability. Therefore, we will be gathering all profits made from our portion of this pressing's physical sales, all digital sales and royalties, and any sales of shirts to be donated to TBD fund(s) assisting demonstrators with legal fees / supplies, as well as to organizations rendering mutual aid and community outreach. From May 15th, 2020 – December 4th, 2020, all the profits made from selling our records and merch was collected and donated to the following organizations: Reclaiming Our Homes Reclaim and Rebuild Our Community Fund Augies Union Workers Fund LA Tenants Union / Food Not Rent Solidarity Fund Koreatown Popular Assembly AWARE LA, The Bail Project People’s Freedom Fund Louisville Community Bail Fund Minnesota Freedom Fund Chicago Community Bond Fund Brooklyn Community Bail Fund Richmond Community Bail Fund and dozens of other bail funds across the US through The Bail Project and other bail fund donation aggregators. Over those 7 months, we were fortunate enough to be able to collect and send over $5100 in donations. We may restart our donation program as necessary in the future, but for now, from the bottom of our hearts, we thank each and every one of you that supported us in this endeavor. If you haven't already, we encourage you to check out and support the previously mentioned funds and organizations, thank you! - - - -