Stereogum's 50 Best Albums of 2022 So Far

Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was.   The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.  All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”  The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. 

“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy-yet-referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and *Yeezus*-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.\" Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish-yet-austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far.

The New Yorker has finally gotten his flowers as one of the finest MCs in the contemporary underground after a cool couple decades grinding it out with his label, Backwoodz Studioz; 2021’s *Haram*, from Woods’ Armand Hammer duo with E L U C I D, felt like a high watermark for a new NY scene. On *Aethiopes*, Woods’ first solo album since 2019, he recruits producer Preservation, a fellow NY scene veteran known for his work with Yasiin Bey and Ka; his haunted beats set an unsettling scene for Woods’ evocative stories, which span childhood bedrooms and Egyptian deserts. The guest list doubles as a who’s who of underground rap—EL-P, Boldy James, E L U C I D—but Woods holds his own at the center of it all. As he spits on the stunningly skeletal “Remorseless”: “Anything you want on this cursed earth/Probably better off getting it yourself, see what it’s worth.”

DIGITAL VERSION OF THE ALBUM DROPS ON APRIL 8, 2022. Aethiopes is billy woods’ first album since 2019’s double feature of Hiding Places and Terror Management. The project is fully produced by Preservation (Dr Yen Lo, Yasiin Bey), who delivered a suite of tracks on Terror Management, including the riveting single “Blood Thinner”. The two collaborated again on Preservation’s 2020’s LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, which featured a memorable billy woods appearance on the song “Lemon Rinds”, as well as the B-side “Snow Globe”.

Like AC/DC before them, Beach House’s gift lies in managing to make what feels like the same album a hundred different ways. Even the new inflections on *Once Twice Melody*—the string section of “ESP,” the rhythmic nods to hip-hop (“Pink Funeral”) and Italo-disco (“Runaway”)—fit immediately into their plush, neon-lit world. And while specific moments conjure specific eras (“Superstar” the triumph of an ’80s John Hughes movie, “Once Twice Melody” a swirl of ’60s surrealism), the cumulative effect is something like a fairytale rendered in sound: majestic, inviting, but dark enough around the edges to keep you off-balance. And just like that (snap), they do it again.

Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions. Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell. The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

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

*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.

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

Tomberlin, the moniker of indie folk artist Sarah Beth Tomberlin, might’ve titled her second full-length LP *i don’t know who needs to hear this…*, but she knows who did: “I did,” she tells Apple Music. “On this record, there’s a lot of searching for space for myself,” she says. “A lot of my songs are me holding up a point-and-shoot camera that has the focus ability, zooming in and zooming out on these small moments.” Before this album, the Baptist pastor’s daughter wrote songs about faith and self-doubt from the distance of her own loneliness; her first full-length, 2018’s *At Weddings*, was acclaimed for its spareness, the way she could write a sacred moment in a fingerpicked guitar riff. Now she’s developed a new language for relationships, and blows it up to enormous size with orchestral instrumentation: horns and Una Corda (“easy”), pedal steel (“born again runner”) and tenor saxophone (“collect caller”). The record is her exploring “just how to be in the world,” she says. “I just turned 27 and *At Weddings* was when I was 21. This is a different chapter of life, with new circumstances and things to investigate.” Below, Tomberlin walks through her album, track by track. **“easy”** “I wrote this song on acoustic guitar, and it was very simplistic. I wanted it to have a little bit more of a being-at-sea feeling, of rocking out in the ocean, rudderless. I remember telling Philip \[Weinrobe\], who co-produced with me, that I didn\'t want it to be a guitar song. We had already been using the Una Corda, this certain kind of piano, on the record. I loved how it sounded—eerie, but really beautiful as well. We combined those two elements and we kind of built it out from there. We turned all the lights off and had candles lit. It was very witchy. We were all in a circle, in this room, with the mics in front of us—really listening, not being too loud so the instruments didn\'t bleed into each other.” **“born again runner”** “The title is attributed to an Emmylou Harris song, \'Born to Run,\' which my dad always says reminds him of me. It\'s a song for him. It\'s a song about loving my dad and wanting to have a relationship with him, even though we\'re very different people.” **“tap”** “I moved to New York in September 2020. I assimilated by going on really long walks through the city, across the Williamsburg Bridge and into Brooklyn, on the West Side Highway, by the water. I was missing being in the country and the woods. I was trying to find ways to connect myself. The first line I had for the song was ‘I\'m not a tree/I\'m in a forest of buildings.\' It\'s about things that disconnect us. I was thinking of how narrative singers can struggle with wanting to put ourselves in a good light. No one is a perfect person. We also pulled a bunch of twigs and grass and flowers from the garden and were hitting the drums with them, so it has this extra brushy, freaky, witchy thing going on.” **“memory”** “I actually did a session with Danny Harle—he co-produced Caroline Polachek\'s record \[*Pang*\]. He wanted to meet when I lived in LA, so we rented a studio space and he was like, \'It\'s no pressure. Let\'s just hang out and see if something happens.\' We spent maybe three hours working on music, and it was just us meeting really for the first time. I really liked the lyrics that I came up with, and that\'s how I wrote that song, which was wild to me. I was really stressed out about writing something with someone in the room. It\'s like writing a paper when the deadline is the next day and somehow you write something good.” **“unsaid”** “It was February \[2020\], before everything went to shit. I wrote it about LA and trying to figure out how to be planted there, because it\'s not really a city. In my opinion, it\'s just this sprawl. It was really hard for me to know how to feel grounded there. It\'s beautiful and fake. Making that song was like trying to comfort myself.” **“sunstruck”** “This one is definitely about examining a relationship with a person that was sputtering on again, off again. A lot of time had passed, we were still friends, and I got some recent news about some changes in their life, and a desire to work on themselves. It was a magic thing to hear, and that song fell out afterwards. I felt released from that relationship. And often, growth comes from being uncomfortable, some drought and some storms. It is a bit mournful of examination, but it ends in a hopeful way.“ **“collect caller”** “Stuart \[Bogie\], who is in fact a legend of New York, plays saxophone on this song, and wow. He came in for a couple songs. I kept saying, \'I’ve collected all the deep-feeling musicians for this record,\' because some people can play an instrument well, but some people, they\'re so mathematical about playing. We somehow collected the people that just deeply feel the music, and Stuart is one of those people. I love him.” **“stoned”** “‘Stoned’ I wrote when I was feeling a bit exasperated—anger but trying to have compassion. I think the anger that I was feeling was just and right, but I didn’t want to become hardened by it. I wasn\'t a big partier growing up; no one\'s asking the pastor\'s kid to go rage. But I was a young adult at this time, and living in Louisville, and someone invited me to a party. It was like, oh, this is in my John Hughes movie, everyone is jumping in the pool, taking their clothes off. I was walking away from it barefoot, drenched wet, holding my shoes, the sun was coming up, it was probably 5 am. When I started writing this song, I was thinking about that moment a lot, of experiencing this fun thing, but actually being in my head. Walking away from it alone and feeling very alone.” **“happy accident”** “\[Cass McCombs\] invited me to come jam one day. I played him some new stuff and he actually hit up Saddle Creek being like, \'Hey, does Tomberlin need someone to produce? I\'m interested in working with her,\' which blew my mind. He\'s a legend to me. I knew that I wanted to recruit Cass for this song, and he played on \'stoned\' as well. On \'stoned,\' I\'m playing the lead rhythm guitar and he\'s doing all the solo-y stuff.” **“possessed”** “I think it\'s cool to have a really short song. I need to get better at that. It\'s really a private song, almost trying to motivate myself. Writer’s block vibes. I thought it would be a fun intro to the record for a while. It\'s really cinematic to draw it back a bit. Each song is its own world, and I love that about different records, and I wanted it to be this way. But there is a sonic thread that sews it together throughout.” **“idkwnthat”** “I was walking around in Brooklyn and going through my voice memos and clicked ‘new recording 430’ or whatever. I don\'t label them. I\'m sitting by the window playing guitar; I sound really tired. I\'m singing that song to myself. Even though I\'m saying, \'I don\'t know who needs to hear this,\' obviously I did. That was the first song that we recorded in the process of the record. Everyone says it\'s a weird time. I feel like it\'s always a fucking weird time to be alive as a person in the world, but especially right now, I guess. This record does go through a flurry of different feelings and emotions. It\'s good to feel all of them. So it felt like a perfect way to end the record.”

If The Smile ever seemed like a surprisingly upbeat name for a band containing two members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, joined by Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner), the trio used their debut gig to offer some clarification. Performing as part of Glastonbury Festival’s Live at Worthy Farm livestream in May 2021, Yorke announced, “We are called The Smile: not The Smile as in ‘Aaah!’—more the smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” To grasp the mood of their debut album, it’s instructive to go even deeper into a name that borrows the title of a 1970 Ted Hughes poem. In Hughes’ impressionist verse, some elemental force—compassion, humanity, love maybe—rises up to resist the deception and chicanery behind such disarming grins. And as much as the 13 songs on *A Light for Attracting Attention* sense crisis and dystopia looming, they also crackle with hope and insurrection. The pulsing electronics of opener “The Same” suggest the racing hearts and throbbing temples of our age of acute anxiety, and Yorke’s words feel like a call for unity and mobilization: “We don’t need to fight/Look towards the light/Grab it in with both hands/What you know is right.” Perennially contemplating the dynamics of power and thought, he surveys a world where “devastation has come” (“Speech Bubbles”) under the rule of “elected billionaires” (“The Opposite”), but it’s one where protest, however extreme, can still birth change (“The Smoke”). Amid scathing guitars and outbursts of free jazz, his invective zooms in on abuses of power (“You Will Never Work in Television Again”) before shaming inertia and blame-shifters on the scurrying beats and descending melodies of “A Hairdryer.” These aren’t exactly new themes for Yorke and it’s not a record that sits at an extreme outpost of Radiohead’s extended universe. Emboldened by Skinner’s fluid, intrepid rhythms, *A Light for Attracting Attention* draws frequently on various periods of Yorke and Greenwood’s past work. The emotional eloquence of Greenwood’s soundtrack projects resurfaces on “Speech Bubbles” and “Pana-Vision,” while Yorke’s fascination with digital reveries continues to be explored on “Open the Floodgates” and “The Same.” Elegantly cloaked in strings, “Free in the Knowledge” is a beautiful acoustic-guitar ballad in the lineage of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and the original live version of “True Love Waits.” Of course, lesser-trodden ground is visited, too: most intriguingly, math-rock (“Thin Thing”) and folk songs fit for a ’70s sci-fi drama (“Waving a White Flag”). The album closes with “Skrting on the Surface,” a song first aired at a 2009 show Yorke played with Atoms for Peace. With Greenwood’s guitar arpeggios and Yorke’s aching falsetto, it calls back even further to *The Bends*’ finale, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” However, its message about the fragility of existence—“When we realize we have only to die, then we’re out of here/We’re just skirting on the surface”—remains sharply resonant.

The Smile will release their highly anticipated debut album A Light For Attracting Attention on 13 May, 2022 on XL Recordings. The 13- track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contempoarary UK jazz players including Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde. The band, comprising Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, have previously released the singles You Will Never Work in Television Again, The Smoke, and Skrting On The Surface to critical acclaim.

In sharply differing ways, thoughts of place and identity run through Fontaines D.C.’s music. Where 2019 debut *Dogrel* delivered a rich and raw portrait of the band’s home city, Dublin, 2020 follow-up *A Hero’s Death* was the sound of dislocation, a set of songs drawing on the introspection, exhaustion, and yearning of an anchorless life on the road. When the five-piece moved to London midway through the pandemic, the experiences of being outsiders in a new city, often facing xenophobia and prejudice, provided creative fuel for third album *Skinty Fia*. The music that emerged weaves folk, electronic, and melodic indie pop into their post-punk foundations, while contemplating Irishness and how it transforms in a different country. “That’s the lens through which all of the subjects that we explore are seen through anyway,” singer Grian Chatten tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “There are definitely themes of jealousy, corruption, and stuff like that, but it’s all seen through the eyes of someone who’s at odds with their own identity, culturally speaking.” Recording the album after dark helped breed feelings of discomfort that Chatten says are “necessary to us,” and it continued a nocturnal schedule that had originally countered the claustrophobia of a locked-down city. “We wrote a lot of it at night as well,” says Chatten. “We went into the rehearsal space just as something different to do. When pubs and all that kind of thing were closed, it was a way of us feeling like the world was sort of open.” Here, Chatten and guitarist Carlos O’Connell talk us through a number of *Skinty Fia*’s key moments. **“In ár gCroíthe go deo”** Grian Chatten: “An Irish woman who lived in Coventry \[Margaret Keane\] passed away. Her family wanted the words ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo,’ which means ‘in our hearts forever,’ on her gravestone as a respectful and beautiful ode to her Irishness, but they weren’t allowed without an English translation. Essentially the Church of England decreed that it would be potentially seen as a political slogan. The Irish language is apparently, according to these people, an inflammatory thing in and of itself, which is a very base level of xenophobia. It’s a basic expression of a culture, is the language. If you’re considering that to be related to terrorism, which is what they’re implying, I think. That sounds like it’s something out of the ’70s, but this is two and a half years ago.” Carlos O’Connell: “About a year ago, it got turned around and \[the family\] won this case.” GC: “The family were made aware \[of the song\] and asked if they could listen to it. Apparently they really loved it, and they played it at the gravestone. So, that’s 100,000 Grammys worth of validation.” **“Big Shot”** CO: “When you’ve got used to living with what you have and then all these dreams happen to you, it’s always going to overshadow what you had before. The only impact that \[Fontaines’ success\] was having in my life was that it just made anything that I had before quite meaningless for a while, and I felt quite lost in that. That’s that lyric, ‘I traveled to space and found the moon too small’—it’s like, go up there and actually it’s smaller than the Earth.” GC: “We’ve all experienced it very differently and that’s made us grow in different ways. But that song just sounded like a very true expression of Carlos. Perhaps more honest than he always is with himself or other people. All the honesty was balled up into that tune.” **“Jackie Down the Line”** GC: “It’s an expression of misanthropy. And there’s toxicity there. There’s erosion of each other’s characters. It’s a very un-beneficial, unglamorous relationship that isn’t necessarily about two people. I like the idea of it being about Irishness, fighting to not be eroded as it exists in a different country. The name is Jackie because a Dubliner would be called, in a pejorative sense, a Jackeen by people from other parts of Ireland. That’s probably in reference to the Union Jack as well—it’s like the Pale \[an area of Ireland, including Dublin, that was under English governmental control during the late Middle Ages\]. So it’s this kind of mutation of Irishness or loss of Irishness as it exists, or fails to exist, in a different environment.” **“Roman Holiday”** GC: “The whole thing was colored by my experience in London. I moved to London to be with my fiancée, and as an Irish person living in London, as one of a gang of Irish people, there was that kind of searching energy, there was this excitement, there was a kind of adventure—but also this very, very tight-knit, rigorously upkept group energy. I think that’s what influenced the tune.” **“The Couple Across the Way”** GC: “I lived on Caledonian Road \[in North London\] and our gaff backed onto another house. There was a couple that lived there, they were probably mid-seventies, and they had really loud arguments. The kind of arguments where you’d see London on a map getting further, further away and hear the shout resounding. Something like *The Simpsons*. And the man would come out and take a big breath. He’d stand on his balcony and look left and right and exhale all the drama. And then he’d just turn around and go back in to his gaff to do the same thing the next day. The absurdity of that, of what we put ourselves through, to be in a relationship that causes you such daily pain, to just always turn around and go back in. I couldn’t really help but write about that physical mirror that was there. Am I seeing myself and my girlfriend in these two people, and vice versa? So I tried to tie it in to it being from both perspectives at some point.” **“Skinty Fia”** GC: “The line ‘There is a track beneath the wheel and it’s there ’til we die’ is about being your dad’s son. There are many ways in which we explore doom on this record. One of them is following in the footsteps of your ancestors, or your predecessors, no matter how immediate or far away they might have been. I’m interested in the inescapability of genetics, the idea that your fate is written. I do, on some level, believe in that. That is doom, even if your faith is leading you to a positive place. Freedom is probably the main pursuit of a lot of our music. I think that that is probably a link that ties all of the stuff that we’ve done together—autonomy.” **“I Love You”** GC: “It’s most ostensibly a love letter to Ireland, but has in it the corruption and the sadness and the grief with the ever-changing Dublin and Ireland. The reason that I wanted to call it ‘I Love You’ is because I found its cliché very attractive. It meant that there was a lot of work to be done in order to justify such a basic song and not have it be a clichéd tune. It’s a song with two heads, because you’ve got the slow, melodic verses that are a little bit more straightforward and then the lid is lifted off energetically. I think that the friction between those two things encapsulates the double-edged sword that is love.” **“Nabokov”** GC: “I think there’s a different arc to this album. The first two, I think, achieve a sense of happiness and hope halfway through, and end on a note of hope. I think this one does actually achieve hope halfway through—and then slides back into a hellish, doomy thing with the last track and stuff. I think that was probably one of the more conscious decisions that we made while making this album.”

"2020’s A Hero’s Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London’s iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as “the damnation of the deer”; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer."

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

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

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

The irony of Sophie Allison calling her second Soccer Mommy album *color theory* is that the title would be a better fit for her third, *Sometimes, Forever*. Not only is this record more stylistically varied on a track-to-track level—the flinty, classic indie rock of “Bones” and “Following Eyes,” the industrial tilt of “Darkness Forever,” the country vibe of “Feel It All the Time”—but it amplifies the internal mixings that make Allison’s songs vivid: beauty and dissonance (“Unholy Affliction”), romance and violence (“I cut a piece out of my thigh/And felt my heart go skydiving” on “Still”), bitter wisdom and wide-eyed innocence (“Feel It All the Time”). She’s a devoted student of the ’90s, to be sure—but one who’s rapidly outgrowing her influences, too.

Sometimes, Forever, the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length, cements Sophie Allison’s status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. The album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that made earlier songs so easy to obsess over. To support her vision Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, whose recent credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd’s Dawn FM.

For fans of ’90s indie rock—your Sonic Youths, your Breeders, your Yo La Tengos—*Versions of Modern Performance* will serve as cosmic validation: Even the kids know the old ways are best. But who influenced you is never as important as what you took from them, a lesson that Chicago’s Horsegirl understands intuitively. Instead, the art is in putting it together: the haze of shoegaze and the deadpan of post-punk (“Option 8,” “Billy”), slacker confidence and twee butterflies (“Beautiful Song,” “World of Pots and Pans”). Their arty interludes they present not as free-jazz improvisers, but a teenage garage band in love with the way their amps hum (“Bog Bog 1,” “Electrolocation 2”).

Horsegirl are best friends. You don’t have to talk to the trio for more than five minutes to feel the warmth and strength of their bond, which crackles through every second of their debut full-length, Versions of Modern Performance. Penelope Lowenstein (guitar, vocals), Nora Cheng (guitar, vocals), and Gigi Reece (drums) do everything collectively, from songwriting to trading vocal duties and swapping instruments to sound and visual art design. “We made [this album] knowing so fully what we were trying to do,” the band says. “We would never pursue something if one person wasn’t feeling good about it. But also, if someone thought something was good, chances are we all thought it was good. ”Versions of Modern Performance was recorded with John Agnello (Kurt Vile, The Breeders, Dinosaur Jr.) at Electrical Audio. “It’s our debut bare-bones album in a Chicago institution with a producer who we feel like really respected what we were trying to do,” the band says. Horsegirl expertly play with texture, shape, and shade across the record, showcasing their fondness for improvisation and experimentation. Opener “Anti-glory” is elastic and bright post-punk, while the guitars in instrumental interlude “Bog Bog 1” smear across the song’s canvas like watercolors. “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” and “World of Pots and Pans” have rough, blown-out pop charm. “The Fall of Horsegirl” is all sharp edges and dark corners.

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

“You can’t come get this work until it’s dry. I made this album while the streets were closed during the pandemic. Made entirely with the greatest producers of all time—Pharrell and Ye. ONLY I can get the best out of these guys. ENJOY!!” —Pusha T, in an exclusive message provided to Apple Music

Yumi Zouma’s Josh Burgess likens the band’s songwriting process to gardening, “Someone brings in a seed and through collaboration, it grows into a song that is vastly different from its original form.” Like any garden, this one requires dedicated tending, a practice that seems rather inconvenient if not straight-up difficult, considering the fact that the four members live in disparate parts of the world – calling New York, London, and New Zealand home – but long-distance has always been a feature of their songwriting process, not a bug. Their new album, Present Tense, is the product of those efforts, a work Christie Simpson describes as “a gallery wall displaying these different moments in each of our lives. A process of curation, revisiting the past and making it relevant to the present.” You might assume that while some artists have struggled to rethink their processes during a pandemic, Yumi Zouma would be perfectly suited to lockdown, but the opposite proved to be true. Without looming tour dates driving them to release new music, the prolific band found themselves at a standstill. On the day that the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the band released their third LP, Truth or Consequences, via Polyvinyl, and had sold out their first American tour. After Yumi Zouma’s first show in Washington DC, the tour was canceled and the four members went their separate ways, an experience memorialized on Present Tense opener “Give It Hell.” “It was disorientating,” Charlie Ryder admits. “We generally work at a quick clip and average about a record a year, but with no foreseeable plans, we lost our momentum.” So they set a date. By September 1st, 2021, the album needed to be finished, regardless of whether they’d be able to tour it or even meet to record together. Before the September deadline goaded the band into action, they had what felt like endless amounts of time to record the album. What began in fits and starts became a committed practice again as Yumi Zouma dug through demos from as early as 2018 to collaborate on and make relevant to the peculiar moment in time the band, and world, was experiencing. “The lyrics on these songs feel like premonitions, in some regards,” Simpson reflects. “So much has changed for us, both personally and as a band, that things I wrote because the words sounded good together now speak to me in ways I didn’t anticipate.” Remote and in-person sessions in studios in Wellington, Florence, New York, Los Angeles, and London all played a role, and Yumi Zouma brought in new collaborators from different disciplines to broaden their sound. Studio recordings of drummer Olivia Campion were incorporated into every song, while pedal steel, pianos, saxophones, woodwinds, and strings were played by friends around the globe who were able to lend their talents and support. The band enlisted multiple mixers in Ash Workman (Christine & The Queens, Metronomy), Kenny Gilmore (Weyes Blood, Julia Holter), and Jake Aron (Grizzly Bear, Chairlift), and recruited the mastering expertise of Antoine Chabert (Daft Punk, Charlotte Gainsbourg) for the first time. “This is our fourth album, so we wanted to pivot slightly, create more extreme versions of songs,” Ryder says. “Working with other artists helped with that, and took us far outside of our normal comfort zone.” You can hear the impulse on “In The Eyes Of Our Love,” a song that’s seemingly twice as fast as any prior release, and closer to the classic rock of Dire Straits than the dream pop aesthetics that the band has built their career on so far. Campion’s drums crash in hard from the outset, sending the accompanying band into a revelry that only breaks upon arriving at the first bridge, when Simpson sings: “But we won’t lose sight of what we said/ I'll sing from the dirt instead.” There’s a defiance heard throughout Present Tense, a refusal to bend to what might seem fated, communicated not only through lyrics but in the boldness of these arrangements, metamorphosing between tracks without ever losing momentum. The triumphant chorus of “Where The Light Used To Lay” belies any of the pain beneath its surface, a technique Simpson likens to the work of folk-adjacent rock acts like Bruce Springsteen and Phoebe Bridgers. “We wanted quiet moments to give into a big, brash chorus, something that approaches cliché,” Simpson says. “The chorus feels like a dramatic encapsulation of who we want to be as a band,” Ryder adds. Two years away from the road gave Yumi Zouma a new appreciation for the friendship they’ve sustained and the opportunity an abundance of time off-cycle offered. “We used to run on adrenaline, and if a song wasn’t working we’d just nip it in the bud and move on. This process gave us the opportunity to really sit with songs and rethink them until they felt like they belonged in the collection,” Burgess says. Album closer “Astral Projection” is one such song, originally conceived by Burgess, who felt as if he’d been handed a sliver of brilliance after the song had been rewritten and abandoned by Ryder and Simpson. “It was as if I’d been given this rescue cat who had the potential to be great,” he says, laughing. Between them, the song developed into a bass-driven slowburner, moody and oddly prescient,“A hint of panic can do wonders for distance,” Simpson sings, her voice mirrored by Burgess’s. The outro twinkles like a summer skyline at dusk, violets and grays intermingling with the bright glow of a thousand open windows. “I daydream about playing that one live,” Burgess says. “In bed, I’ll close my eyes before sleep and imagine the drumbeat kicking in.” It’s a craving the members of Yumi Zouma all share, one they hope will be satiated someday soon. Dedicated to an embattled past, Present Tense is the band’s offering to a tenuous future.“To 2020, and the memory of all that was lost,” they write in the album’s liner notes. “Kia Kaha.”

When COVID-19 lockdowns prohibited Welsh Dadaist Cate Le Bon to fly back to the United States from Iceland, she found herself returning to her homeland to create a sixth studio album, *Pompeii*, a collection of avant-garde art pop far removed from the 2000s jangly guitar indie she once hung her hat on. In Cardiff, recording in a house “on a street full of seagulls,” as she tells Apple Music, “I instinctively knew where all the light switches were and I knew all these sounds that the house makes when it breathes in the night.” Created with co-producer Samur Khouja, the album obscures linear nostalgia to confront uncertainty and modern reality, with stacked horns, saxophones, and synths. “For a while I was flitting between despair and optimism,” she says. “I realized that those are two things that don\'t really have or prompt action. So I tried to lean into hope and curiosity instead of that. Then I kept thinking about the idea that we are all forever connected to everything. That’s probably the theme that ties together the record.” Below, Cate Le Bon breaks down *Pompeii*, track by track. **“Dirt on the Bed”** “This song is very set in the house. It\'s being haunted by yourself in a way—this idea of time travel and storing things inside of you that maybe don\'t serve you but you still have these memories inside of you that you\'re unconscious of. It was the first song that we started working on when Samur arrived in Wales. It’s pretty linear, but it blossoms in a way that becomes more frantic, which was in tune with the lockdown in a literal and metaphorical sense.” **“Moderation”** “I was reading an essay by an architect called Lina Bo Bardi. She wrote an essay in 1958 called ‘The Moon’ and it\'s about the demise of mankind, this chasm that\'s opened up between technical and scientific progress and the human capacity to think. All these incremental decisions that man has made that have led to climate disaster and people trying to get to the moon, but completely disregarding that we\'ve got a housing crisis, and all these things that don\'t really make sense. We\'ve lost the ability to account for what matters, and it will ultimately be the demise of man. We know all this, and yet we still crave the things that are feeding into this.” **“French Boys”** “This song definitely started on the bass guitar, of wanting this late-night, smoky, neon escapism. It’s a song about lusting after something that turns into a cliché. It’s this idea of trying to search for something to identify yourself \[with\] and becoming encumbered with something. I really love the saxophone on this one in the instrumental. It is a really beautiful moment between the guitars and the saxophones.” **“Pompeii”** “This is about putting your pain somewhere else, finding a vessel for your pain, removing yourself from the horrors of something, and using it more as a vessel for your own purposes. It’s about sending your pain to Pompeii and putting your pain in a stone.” **“Harbour”** “I made a demo with \[Warpaint’s\] Stella Mozgawa, who plays drums on the record. We spent a month together at her place in Joshua Tree, just jamming out some demos I had, and this was one of them that became a lot more realized. The effortless groove that woman puts behind everything, it\'s just insane to me. She was encouraging me to put down a bassline. That playfulness of the bass is probably a direct product of her infectiousness, but the song is really about \'What do you do in your final moment? What is your final gesture? Where do you run when you know there\'s no point running?\'” **“Running Away”** “‘Running Away’ was another song that I worked on with Stella in Joshua Tree. It\'s about disaffection, I suppose, and trying to figure out whether it\'s a product of aging, where you know how to stop yourself from getting hurt by switching something off, and whether that\'s a useful tool or not. It’s an exploration of knowing where the pitfalls of hurt are, because you have a bit more experience. Is it a useful thing to avoid them or not?” **“Cry Me Old Trouble”** “Searching for your touch songs of faith, when you tap into this idea that you\'re forever connected to anything, there\'s a danger—the guilt that is imposed on people through religion, this idea of being born a sinner. Of separating those two things of feeling like you are forever connected to everything without that self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It’s about being connected to old trouble and leaning into that, and this connection to everything that has come before us. We are all just inheriting the trouble from generations before.” **“Remembering Me”** “It’s really about haunting yourself. When the future\'s dark and you don\'t really know what\'s going to happen, people start thinking about their legacy and their identity, and all those things that become very challenged when everything is taken away from you and all the familiar things that make you feel like yourself are completely removed. \[During the pandemic\] a lot of people had the internet to express themselves and forge an identity, to make them feel validated.” **“Wheel”** “In one sense, it is very much about the time trials of loving someone, and how that can feel like the same loop over and over, but I think the language is a little bit different. It\'s a little more direct than the rest of the record. I was struggling to call people over the pandemic. What do you say? So, I would write to people in a diary, not with any idea that I would send it to them, but just to try and keep this sense of contact in my head. A lot of this was pulled from letters that I would write my friend. Instead of \'Dear Diary\' it was \'Dear Bradford,\' just because I missed him, but couldn\'t pick up the phone.”

Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch. Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged. Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever. To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence. The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

Jake Lenderman lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He plays guitar in the indie band Wednesday, sometimes fishes on the Pigeon River, and creates his own music as MJ Lenderman. His latest solo release with Dear Life Records is titled Boat Songs. Lenderman describes the album as his most “polished” sound to date, built around songs that “chase fulfillment and happiness”—whether that means buying a boat, drinking too much, or watching seeds fall from the bird feeder. Boat Songs is the followup to Lenderman’s 2021 label debut, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, and subsequent release, Knockin’, with Dear Life Records, both of which were critically acclaimed for their off-the-cuff alternative country sound. But with Boat Songs, Lenderman emerges confident as ever, an innovative yet unassuming artist, straightforward and true. Recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun with Alex Farrar and Colin Miller, Boat Songs is the first album Lenderman made in a professional studio. WWE matches and basketball games were silently projected on the studio walls during recording sessions. And you can hear their power in these ten unapologetically lo-fi tracks, each brimming with pent-up energy and the element of surprise. A clavichord honks throughout ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat’ with the playfulness of a live Dylan/Band set. ‘SUV’ screams with My Bloody Valentine distortion. When Xandy Chelmis beautifully bends his steel guitar on ‘TLC Cage Match’ you can't help but think of Gram Parsons. And ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’ howls with the intensity of Crazy Horse era Neil Young. Boat Songs is fearless and it’s exciting. It challenges the perception of what modern day country music is supposed to be and where it can go. But no matter where Boat Songs goes sonically, the album is deeply rooted in Lenderman’s natural gifts as a storyteller. Someone once asked Hank Williams what made country music successful and he said, “One word: sincerity.” Filled with everyday observations ripped straight from his journal, Lenderman’s lyrics are sincere in their absurdities, with the vulnerability and honesty of Jason Molina and Daniel Johnston. There are moments of humor (‘Jackass is funny like the Earth is round’), admission (‘I know why we get so fucked up’), and recognition of beauty others might not stop to see (‘Your laundry looks so pretty...relaxing in the wind’). Read alone on the page, ‘Hangover Game,’ ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat,’ and ‘Dan Marino,’ stand out as perfect little poems, unpretentious and real. Simply said, these songs are unforgettable. Or you could also say it like this: listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch. The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again. But it don’t matter how many times you’ve heard them, because they're from the heart—and in the end they always make you feel alive again. --Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

From his formative days associating with Raider Klan through his revealing solo projects *TA13OO* and *ZUU*, Denzel Curry has never been shy about speaking his mind. For *Melt My Eyez See Your Future*, the Florida native tackles some of the toughest topics of his MC career, sharing his existential notes on being Black and male in these volatile times. The album opens on a bold note with “Melt Session #1,” a vulnerable and emotional cut given further weight by jazz giant Robert Glasper’s plaintive piano. That hefty tone leads into a series of deeply personal and mindfully radical songs that explore modern crises and mental health with both thematic gravity and lyrical dexterity, including “Worst Comes to Worst” and the trap subversion “X-Wing.” Systemic violence leaves him reeling and righteous on “John Wayne,” while “The Smell of Death” skillfully mixes metaphors over a phenomenally fat funk groove. He draws overt and subtle parallels to jazz’s sociopolitical history, imagining himself in Freddie Hubbard’s hard-bop era on “Mental” and tapping into boom bap’s affinity for the genre on “The Ills.” Guests like T-Pain, Rico Nasty, and 6LACK help to fill out his vision, yielding some of the album’s highest highs.

Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date. Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap. To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.

It has nearly become a cliché unto itself for so many albums released in 2021 and 2022: an accomplished work of art that perfectly articulates themes of isolation and desperation and fatalism, only for the artists to reveal that the songs that express these ideas most acutely were written *before* the pandemic. “It was already sort of all in the world,” Arcade Fire’s Win Butler tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “In order to write music, you have to have this antenna up that kind of picks up little signals from the future and signals from the past. And so I think a lot of times we\'re just getting these like aftershocks of things that are about to happen.” *WE* is 10 tracks, but really more like five songs, taking into account various parts and chapters that give the album its epic scope, capturing the joy-in-the-face-of-peril spirit of their beloved 2004 debut *Funeral*, only with the peril a bit heightened. The songs that Butler and his wife Régine Chassagne started in their backyard New Orleans studio prior to March 2020 form a narrative that opens in a state of despair and winds up in an unlikely place of hope and optimism, with all the exuberance that marks the band’s most memorable songs. Like all Arcade Fire albums, *WE* is a family affair, featuring not just Butler, Chassagne, and Butler’s younger brother Will—who has since left the group, amicably—but Butler’s mom, a harpist, as well as guest vocals from Peter Gabriel. Read on as Butler expounds on a few key moments from *WE*. **“End of the Empire I-III”** “It\'s easy to interpret everything as being about the present, and I think there\'s an element of that, but I think you\'re trying to pick up on smoke signals. To me, the end of the empire isn\'t about now, it\'s about the future. It\'s about what\'s coming. I\'m still waiting to wake up and check my phone and see the stock market has finally crashed. I mean, it\'s just an inevitability. This stuff is so cyclical, and it\'s like we\'re just printing money and pretending everything\'s okay. My grandfather lived through the Depression and was a musician in World War II and lived through some pretty intense stuff, and so I think this generation is up to the task as well. We have an eight-year-old, and the tools that he has compared to the tools that I had at that age are incredible.” **“End of the Empire IV (Sagittarius A)”** “‘End of the Empire’ is four parts; we had the first three parts and it was already six and a half minutes. For some reason I just knew that there was a fourth part to it, and I had this index card that said, ‘Sagittarius A,’ which is a black hole in the middle of our solar system. I just had the card on my wall and I would just walk by it. As soon as I was vaccinated and was able to travel, I went with my son to go visit my parents because I hadn\'t seen them in a long time. I went back to their house in Maine and I brought my 4-track and I put it in the basement of their house and ran a bunch of cables up to the top floor. I felt like I was 15. It was exactly like the shit I was doing when I was 15. I was like, \'Mom, I\'m working on this song.\' We would play \'Sagittarius A\' together. There were a couple other songs that I did these 4-track recordings of playing it with her, and it sort of helped me to work through it and to just figure out what it is.” **“The Lightning II”** “What was in my head when I was singing that song was all the Haitians at the border trying to get into the US who had taken a boat from Haiti to Brazil and then walked or taken a train all the way to the Mexican border. Just to find a better life for your family—imagine what it would take, the bravery. The governor of Texas can honestly...I don\'t hate a lot of people, but I hate that motherfucker. I don\'t even believe in hell, but if there\'s a hell, that motherfucker\'s going there. Just to meet people with the absolute absence of compassion, these fake fucking Christians. That\'s not necessarily what the song\'s about, but that was what was in my head: What does it mean to not quit and to reach the end and then to be turned back, and you still can\'t quit because you still have your family, so then you get sent back to where you started and you still can\'t give up because it\'s still your life and it\'s still your family and you\'re still fighting for survival.” **“Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)”** “I was really just thinking about my son and the world that he\'s facing and how I was a very depressed kid, particularly in high school. I was trying to imagine the way that I\'m wired, just chemically, having to deal with that now, not to mention 10 years from now, whenever the fuck he\'s going to be dealing with it. He\'s going to need to have a thick skin and to just really be able to take a hit and have some fortitude. And basically just the idea of unconditional love, which is this impossible thing to achieve. But we do it naturally, somehow. And it\'s something that I think we naturally have with our kids, but I think it\'s something that we\'re supposed to have for people that we\'re not related to as well.” **“WE”** “I think the journey of the record, the first half is: Imagine this character\'s like, \'Get me the F out of here, get me off this planet, get me out of my own skin, get me away from myself. I don\'t want to be here.\' It\'s anxiety and it\'s depression and it\'s heaviness, it\'s the weight of the world. And he looks at this black hole like, \'Well, maybe if I could get through that black hole, that would be far enough away.\' And when he gets there, he finds that it\'s himself and it\'s everyone he ever loved and the lives of his ancestors. There\'s nothing to escape, because it\'s all the same thing anyway. Stories and films are always building towards this big conclusion and then the credits roll. And to me, the sentiment is, \'Let\'s just fucking do it again, with all of it—all the pain, all the loneliness, all the sadness, all the heartbreak. I just want to do it over and over again. Just run it back.”

The San Jose slowcore trio formed in 1996 and disappeared five years later, leaving behind a legacy of depressive, dissociative lo-fi rock the band’s since described as sounding like “desperate, purring distress.” Then, nearly 20 years later, Duster returned, as if they’d woken up from a long nap into a world that was even more of a bummer than they’d left it. That signature sense of looking at life as if from outside of it persists on the band’s second album since their 2019 return, as they sing about ghosts and shadows and lost memories over guitars that fuzz out into distorted oblivion. But there’s also a newfound coziness to their arrangements, and a sense that even if we live in hell, at least we’re in hell together. As they sing on the bittersweet “New Directions”: “I’ve lost touch, I’ve said too much, been opposites and such/But I’ll take care of all of us.”

Gather your loved ones, Together is here. Duster’s fourth album is a 13-song exploration of comfortable, interplanetary goth. A sonic vaseline of submerged guitars, solder-burned synths, and over-driven rhythm tracks. “I know people say, ‘Oh Duster music so sad, we've even said it ourselves before,” Clay Parton said. “But it's a lot more like absurdism than nihilism.”

Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, has released five albums in the last decade—and each one is an expansion of and challenge to his indie-folk instrumental palette. From the stark rock/folk contrasts of *Fear Fun*’s ballads and anthems to the mariachi strains of *I Love You, Honeybear*’s love notes to the wry commentary and grand orchestrations of *Pure Comedy* and *God’s Favorite Customer*, Tillman has a penchant for pairing his articulate inner monologue with arrangements that have only grown more eclectic and elaborate. *Chloë and the Next 20th Century* builds on all of the above—the micro-symphonies, the inventive percussion, the swift shift from dusty country-western nostalgia to timeless dirges plunked out on a dive-bar piano. A swooning sax solo in a somber jazz number (“Buddy’s Rendezvous”) is immediately followed by the trill of a psychedelic harpsichord (“Q4”); “Goodbye Mr. Blue” recalls the acoustic inclinations of his early work, and warm strings wash over the record, from its first single, the romantic “Funny Girl,” through “The Next 20th Century,” the album’s sardonic closer, which resurfaces the ever-simmering existential dread of *Pure Comedy*. “If this century’s here to stay,” he sings on the track, “I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the love songs/And the great distance that they came.”

Father John Misty returns with Chloë and The Next 20th Century, his fifth album and first new material since the release of God’s Favorite Customer in 2018. Chloë and the Next 20th Century was written and recorded August through December 2020 and features arrangements by Drew Erickson. The album sees Tillman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson resume their longtime collaboration, as well as Dave Cerminara, returning as engineer and mixer. Basic tracks were recorded at Wilson’s Five Star Studios with strings, brass, and woodwinds recorded at United Recordings in a session featuring Dan Higgins and Wayne Bergeron, among others. Chloë and The Next 20th Century features the singles “Funny Girl,” “Q4,” “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” and “Kiss Me (I Loved You),” and will be available April 8th, 2022 worldwide from Sub Pop and in Europe from Bella Union.

In the context of Nilüfer Yanya’s second album, the word “painless” has a few different meanings. “I was enjoying the process of making the record, and thinking, ‘Why do you have to beat yourself up in order to make something?’” the London singer/guitarist tells Apple Music. “Obviously, you have to work hard, but often the idea of really struggling is something that people inflict on others, just because it\'s the idea they sell to them, like, ‘Oh, you need to go through this.’” Yanya felt that she hadn\'t given herself enough time and space to make her 2019 debut, *Miss Universe*—a record based loosely, and playfully, around the concept of self-help and wellness, and what happens when you get too in your head about things. So, in the thick of the pandemic, she eased into making *PAINLESS*, writing the songs more collaboratively—mostly with producer Will Archer—than she had been used to. “I kind of felt a bit like, ‘Am I cheating?’ Because you\'re sharing the work, it feels lighter,” she says. \"But then because of that, I kind of delved in deeper and it got a bit darker.” (The album title actually comes from the “shameless” lyric “Until you fall, it\'s painless.”) Those depths can be felt both in Yanya\'s vocal dynamics and the sense of urgency that underpins much of the album, particularly on opener “the dealer” and “stabilise,” the first single. “I think the rhythm plays a big part in these songs,” Yanya says. “You feel like there needs to be an escape somewhere.” Here Yanya talks through *PAINLESS*, track by track. **“the dealer”** “It\'s like when someone\'s hiding behind their layers, or not being honest, but then also you\'re not being honest with yourself. My favorite lyric is \'I hope it\'s just the summertime you grew attached to,\' because it\'s like you\'re lying to yourself. You’re not saying, \'Oh, it was this person that made the difference, or it was this person that I miss.\' You\'re just saying, \'I had a great time,\' and you\'re not being honest about why.” **“L/R”** “\[Producer\] Bullion played me this beat, and it had this pitched drum in it. It just made me feel really happy and warm. It had this kind of marching feeling to it, which I really liked. It took us like a year to finish it, but the initial idea came really quickly. I like the almost spoken element to it, because it sounds like you\'re speaking rather than singing, but then the chorus is very much singing—and it took a while to get that right. It\'s kind of about so many things. In my notebook at the time, I\'d written, \'Do less things\'—like, less is more. That was my thinking behind the song: trying to enjoy simple things and not overcomplicate things.” **“shameless”** “It\'s a really intimate song. I felt like it was about someone that\'s trying to run away from stuff in their life, but they kind of don\'t have much hope. The vocals are very celestial—not something I really experimented with in the past. At first, I was going to kind of speak the words, but it needed a lighter touch, like something even more delicate.” **“stabilise”** “That was the first one me and Will did together. All the others kind of grew off that song. It\'s about environments and the way they impact you, and not being able to escape your environment, taking it with you wherever you go. And it kind of becomes your cage or the way you view things. You know when you\'ve been somewhere too long and then it\'s hard to imagine the world another way? Definitely a very lockdown song.” **“chase me”** “I really liked the line \'Through corridors your love will chase me,\' because it was like the safe feeling you can get when you know you are loved, but you don\'t necessarily want it. It\'s almost like an ego song for me. It\'s very confident.” **“midnight sun”** “I was digging into more of an overall feeling and a mood. I feel like it\'s a song about confidence and finding your own voice in order to speak up, whether that\'s about your own feelings or bigger issues: ‘I can\'t keep my mouth shut this time. I can\'t keep my head down. I\'m not going along with this anymore.’” **“trouble”** “That song is so sad—in a beautiful way, if I may say so. It also felt like quite a brave one for me because it\'s very different. When I was writing, I was like, \'Am I doing a straight-up pop song?\' It\'s not. I think it definitely has that take on it. The vocals needed to be more intimate. Like one voice, and it just all keeps spilling out. It\'s quite challenging to sing. ‘Trouble’ is one of those words—I think I heard it in a Cat Stevens song—\'Trouble, set me free\'—and I really loved the way it was being referred to almost like a person. In the lyrics here, it\'s something that\'s quite persistent and it\'s not going away. Something\'s definitely broken that you can\'t fix.” **“try”** “This one is about getting better, and feeling the need to connect on a deeper level, finding new depths and making new connections, but becoming confused, tired, and dejected with the effort it takes.” **“company”** “It\'s about giving up and you\'re not in a happy place. Originally it started out as, like, you\'re in a relationship that you are just really not sure about and you\'re trying to give signs across that you\'re trying to get rid of someone. But I think the song now is definitely about your inner demons, and they\'re not really going away.” **“belong with you”** “I did this with Jazzi Bobbi, who\'s in my band. She does more electronic stuff, so that definitely comes into play. I feel like builds are always my favorite things in songs, and at the beginning we actually tried to overcomplicate the song and there was like a whole other section and it changed tempo and it just wasn\'t working. And I was like, \'We just need to keep building and that\'s it.\' What it\'s about is like you\'re tied into something, but you know you\'re too good for it or you want to leave. I feel like these are all the songs, in a way. It’s like, escape—but you can\'t escape.” **“the mystic”** “It\'s about watching other people get on with their lives and feeling like you\'re being left behind. I spend a lot of time doing music, so that\'s where I put all my energy, and I was like, \'Oh, I thought we were all still doing that.\' Other people have got other plans and you\'re like, \'Oh, you\'re a grown-up. You\'re going to move in with your boyfriend,\' or, \'Oh, you can drive now.\' The verse is really sad, because it\'s about watching that happen, and feeling very insecure and unconfident.” **“anotherlife”** “For me, this has a completely different energy. It\'s kind of like you\'re admitting you\'re lost now, but in a parallel universe or in the future, you won\'t always be lost. It\'s not always bad to be in that kind of lost, super-emotional, flung-out state. I find sometimes when something bad happens and you get really upset, it\'s kind of— I don\'t want to say cleansing, but you see things with this new kind of brilliance and clarity. And that\'s kind of a beautiful moment.”

Nilüfer Yanya runs head first into the depths of emotional vulnerability on her anticipated sophomore record PAINLESS. Recorded between a basement studio in Stoke Newington and Riverfish Music in Penzance, the record is a more sonically direct effort, narrowing her previously broad palette to a handful of robust ideas. Yanya's debut album Miss Universe (2019) earned a Best New Music tag from Pitchfork and saw support tours with Sharon Van Etten, Mitski and The XX.

Dig deep enough inside yourself -- start treating your body as your sanctuary rather than your enemy -- and eventually you'll find yourself blooming right back out into the sun. That's the transformation Guerilla Toss trace on their newest album Famously Alive, their effervescent Sub Pop debut. After a decade sprinkling glitter into grit, building a reputation as one of the most ferociously creative art-rock groups working, the upstate New York band have eased fully into their light. This is Guerilla Toss at their most luminescent -- awake, alive, and extending an open invitation to anyone who wants to soak it all up beside them. Singer and lyricist Kassie Carlson, multi-instrumentalist Peter Negroponte and guitarist Arian Shafiee wrote Famously Alive at home in the Catskills during the pervading quiet of the pandemic year. The uncertainty of COVID-19 lockdowns and the total disruption of routine forced Carlson to negotiate with herself in new and challenging ways. "You have to be with yourself all the time during the pandemic," she says. "I had to figure out a way to manage my anxiety. The pandemic was hard, but it helped me get comfortable inside my own body. My peace of mind came out of being thrust into the deepest shit. This album is all about being happy, being alive, and strength. It’s meant to inspire people." The album's title derives from a poem written by a close friend of the band, Jonny Tatelman, who supported Carlson through the early stages of her recovery from opiate addiction. The poem comprises the entirety of the lyrics to the title track, an exuberant ode to loving your own survival and charting a course into unconditional self-acceptance. "The song 'Famously Alive' is about living with purpose and excitement whether you’re famous or not, accepting your strangeness and thriving even if your successes look different than other people’s," notes Carlson. "To me, 'Famously Alive' means flipping the notion of dying famously to living famously," Negroponte adds. "I also like to think of it as a way to describe living through something traumatic and coming out of it a stronger, wiser person." Songs like the expansive, gleaming "Live Exponential" similarly invite the listener to lean into the light. "It’s about loving yourself and finding a way to be comfortable in your own body -- to live life to the fullest and beyond," says Carlson. Throughout the record, Guerilla Toss meet themselves with curiosity, generosity, and acceptance even for the harder parts of being alive. Opener "Cannibal Capital," a song about the exhaustion and dread of social anxiety, came together in a flurry toward the end of the album's sessions. A taut bass groove erupts into competing squalls of guitar and synth that support one of the most immediate and arresting vocal hooks of Guerilla Toss's catalog to date. Together with guitarist Arian Shafiee, Carlson and Negroponte cultivated a sound that spliced together psychedelic texturing and Krautrock syncopation with the gloss and glow of contemporary pop music. "I like to combine as many musical influences as possible," says Negroponte. "We thought the sleekness of current radio pop would make our dense wall-of-sound aesthetic both more bizarre and more accessible and fun at the same time." Carlson was similarly inspired by a wide range of artists from around the world after diving deep into obscure 7-inches for her weekly show on Radio Catskill, Rare Pear Radio. While writing the album, Carlson took voice lessons online for the first time. Though she has been singing since she was four years old, at first with a vocal harmony group in her family's church, she hadn't formally trained her voice since joining Guerilla Toss. The lessons allowed her to deepen and broaden her range, helping her feel more embodied and connected to her voice. Underneath ripples of Auto-Tune, playful, searching vocal melodies suspend lyrics about reaching for yourself and holding fast in your own love. Famously Alive finds Guerilla Toss coming into the fullness of their power, celebrating their prismatic idiosyncrasies from a place of optimism and abundance. "It felt like I didn’t need to force myself into this dark place to create anymore," Carlson says. "For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m finally comfortable inside my body."

To call Conway the Machine’s raps gritty is akin to calling summer in Arizona hot. Take this passage from “Piano Love,” off *God Don’t Make Mistakes*: “We don\'t play fair, drive-bys right in front of the daycare/We spray hairpin triggers, that FN on the waist here/Yeah, garbage bags wrapped around the Ks here/Told you it\'s spooky, my n\*\*\*a, it\'s Camp Crystal Lake here.” He’s long had a way with words, but in 2022, with well over 20 projects to his name, the Buffalo-hailing MC is opening up in a way hasn’t before. Too many lines on *God Don’t Make Mistakes* were likely painful to record. “Not too long after my cousin hung his self/I never told nobody, but I lost a son myself/Imagine bein\' in the hospital, holdin\' your dead baby/And he look just like you, you tryna keep from goin\' crazy,” he raps on “Stressed.” “You don\'t know the feeling of never seein\' your kid again/And it\'s a Russell Wilson-type n\*\*\*a raisin\' your lil\' man/Real shit, I know the feeling, ain\'t seen my son in a minute/BM don\'t answer for me, so fuck her, I\'m in my feelings,” he says on “Tear Gas.” A single like the Daringer- and Kill-produced “John Woo Flick,” with its claims of Conway having “enough shooters on my team to embarrass the Pistons” and a “door on my bedroom thick as a vault,” likely delivered plenty of new ears when it was released in advance of the album. But if it succeeded in bringing listeners all the way through *God Don’t Make Mistakes*, they’ll be leaving knowing as much about the Machine’s life—if not more—as those who’ve heard everything before it.

“Money made me numb,” Vince Staples repeats over and over again on “THE BLUES,” from his fifth full-length studio album. It’s not the song’s chorus and you can picture him saying it in the mirror, attempting to reckon with a truth he clearly understands but also maybe doesn’t quite know what to do with. At the time of *RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART*’s release, the Long Beach, California, MC was more popular and financially successful than he’s ever been. So, he chose—beginning with 2021’s *Vince Staples*—to release some of the most affecting and autobiographical music of his career. The decision sounds, across the album, much less a professional risk than a personal one, Staples utilizing production from Mustard, Cardo, and Coop the Truth, among others, to expose his innermost thoughts about turf politics, romantic relationships, and the ways money may or may not be changing him. More than anything else, he aims to honor those who have in some way contributed to his survival, often calling them out by name, holding especially close the memories of those no longer in his orbit. “Tryna make it to the top, we can’t take everybody with us,” he sings on “THE BEACH.” There are few artists who come off as comfortable as Staples does regarding their contributions to music culture at large, but what *RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART* makes abundantly clear is that few things mean as much to Staples’ art as the neighborhood that made him.

sore thumb was made in February 2021 at Two Worlds Recording Studio Produced by Jade Lilitri, Billy Mannino and Tavish Maloney Mixed by Mike Sapone Mastered by Mike Kalajian Engineered by Billy Mannino Additional production by Daniel Maddalone and Gianni Gambuzza Songs written and composed by oso oso Cover photo taken by Alfred Barzykowski Jade Lilitri – vocals, guitar, bass, drums, aux percussion Tavish Maloney – guitar, aux percussion, vocals on “carousel” Billy Mannion – piano Josh Knowles – violin on “describe you” The making of this record is now a memory of a time that i holder closer to my heart than anything. Regardless of how I feel about these songs in the years to come, I am so happy this exists. Thanks for listening. Be decent. SPE Tavish Sloan Maloney

In the near-decade since LA-based best-friend duo Girlpool, Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad, infiltrated the indie pop-rock scene with their gorgeous harmonies and punky melodies as teenagers, a lot has changed: They instituted additional instrumentalists, they started veering away from their charmingly minimal and diaristic songwriting, and Avery began transitioning before their third LP, *What Chaos Is Imaginary*. *Forgiveness*, the pair’s fourth full-length, is the product of that growth. Their ear for sparse composition has evolved; instead of speaking world-weary truths in the space between spiky guitar riffs, they’ve grounded their sincerity in ethereal production, spacey synth, and songs that interrogate gender, relationships, and everything in between. Once celebrated for their youthful exuberance, Girlpool has never lost their heart, they’ve simply gained wisdom.

When Cave In released their 2019 album, *Final Transmission*, many thought it might be just that. The band’s beloved friend and bassist, Caleb Scofield, had passed suddenly during the recording’s early stages, and it seemed—understandably—that heartbreak might prevent them from carrying on. Instead, vocalist/guitarist Steve Brodsky, drummer J.R. Conners, and guitarist/vocalist Adam McGrath enlisted their old friend and Converge/Old Man Gloom/Doomriders member Nate Newton to help them play benefit shows for Scofield’s family. In doing so, they breathed new life into Cave In and soon wrote an album that combines the band’s killer metallic hardcore and breathtaking space-rock eras with new and exciting musical forays. The result is *Heavy Pendulum*, Cave In’s first album recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou since their 1998 classic, *Until Your Heart Stops*. Below, Brodsky discusses each track. **“New Reality”** “A song about the new reality of Cave In without Caleb on this earthly plane. The verse riff was something he wrote years ago during the *White Silence* days. I always remembered it, and ‘New Reality’ seemed like a good opportunity to give it a home. There’s mention of the Old Man of the Mountain, the face of New Hampshire, \[where Caleb is from\]. Even after its collapse, it’s still part of the state imagery. I thought this was a beautiful way to illustrate how we keep Caleb in our memory.” **“Blood Spiller”** “We’re all fans of Nate‘s band Channel from his pre-Converge days. This one goes there musically—channeling Channel with a member of the band. Lyrically, this relates to the heated political nature of 2020, but it’s not as direct as, for instance, the song ‘Searchers of Hell.’ This song is also a call to action against anyone in your life who throws around their weight in a way that’s disruptive or destructive to your well-being—basically, bullies and assholes who need to be confronted on their bullshit.” **“Floating Skulls”** “Musically, this one had a pretty wild trajectory. It was originally in a different key, different tuning, different time signature, with wildly different lyrics. It took several trial runs before we got into Deep Purple’s *Burn* territory and it finally started to click. Lyrically, this is probably one of the more lighthearted songs on the record. I had a whole concept for a music video using helium balloons printed with skulls attached to headless mannequins...could be a cool stage prop, actually.” **“Heavy Pendulum”** “This is the first song that materialized as a full band demo when writing the album. We demoed it remotely at a time during lockdown when people still didn’t feel comfortable getting together in a room. If AC/DC had jumped on the ’90s grunge bandwagon, they may have pulled this one out of the ether before we got it. Kurt thinks it sounds kinda like ‘Fever Dog,’ which is fine with me because who doesn’t like *Almost Famous*?” **“Pendulambient”** “J.R. took to the song ‘Heavy Pendulum’ so much, he insisted that we make it the title of the record. This Interlude takes the five dominant notes from that song and spins them into a kaleidoscopic foundation created by J.R. in his German synth lab man cave. Most of the overdubs are from the original remote demo recording, either flipped backwards or made into some audio mutation. I think it’s a nice return to the vibe of having segues between songs like we did on the *Until Your Heart Stops* album.” **“Careless Offering”** “I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, which I guess officially makes it a protest song. During the George Floyd protests, I was seeing people with significant reach on social media use these platforms to encourage excess violence, and I felt this was the last thing we needed. Their words were like careless offerings to an already fucked-up situation, just being thrown like raw meat to people for the sole purpose of creating destruction. On a lighter note, one of the bands that Cave In fully embraced as an influence on this album is Into Another, and here it really shows in the whole spacey midsection of the song—that’s totally us worshiping the *Ignaurus* album.” **“Blinded by a Blaze”** “Out of the five or six songs from my initial burst of writing, ‘Blinded by a Blaze’ was the one that got everyone in the band equally hyped. Later on, Nate wrote the heavy, chugging bridge part and Adam came up with the artificial harmonic guitar line that sounds kind of like the music you might hear coming from an ice cream truck on Mars. In just eight lines, I did my best to capture a picture of driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at golden hour several years ago, and what it felt like to share that moment with someone I was in love with at the time.” **“Amaranthine”** “One night at rehearsal, Nate turned on his bass amp and the main parts for this song seemed to just fly out of him. At some point, Caleb’s wife, Jen, gifted us a notebook that belonged to Caleb. It contained lyrics, writings, and drawings that she felt could be of some use to us. Lyrics to a song called ‘Amaranthine’ really stood out, and we didn’t recognize them to be associated with any music that Caleb had written. Combining his lyrics with the first bit of music that Nate ever wrote for the band made a really cool concoction.” **“Searchers of Hell”** “The main riff was inspired by a song from the first *Between or Beyond the Black Forest* compilation, which is a bunch of European off-the-grid jazz-fusion shit recorded in the ’70s. Aside from ‘Amaranthine,’ I think this is the only other song conceived entirely in the full-band stage of making demos for the album. Lyrically, I was inspired by some of the coded language being used by people with power in the world of politics addressing others through the media. The lines ‘You’re dropping a bombshell/You wish each other well’ is a specific example of this. I guess the takeaway here is that we should always question what the media is telling us, but also what the media is selling us.” **“Nightmare Eyes”** “Leading up to the summer of 2019, I was, like most Tool fans, anxious for the release of *Fear Inoculum*. I was so excited for a new album that I literally dreamed I was hearing it one night. I rarely dream about music, so when I woke up, the feeling of this really struck me. I grabbed an acoustic guitar and made a quick recording of the song I heard in my dream, transposed to the best of my ability. It took 10,000 days, but I finally combed through every song on every Tool album, trying to find some likeness to my recording from the night before. Thankfully, I came up empty-handed and realized it was fair game. So, thank you, Tool, for gifting me—in serotonin form—the best song you never wrote.” **“Days of Nothing”** “I think Adam was inspired to create this shortly after the Cave In/Old Man Gloom tour in 2020, which ended about a month before the pandemic hit. He came up with a bunch of cool segues for the band to use. When it came to sequencing the record, I felt that we needed a good palate cleanser after the sonic rubble left by the ending of ‘Nightmare Eyes,’ and this did the trick. It’s also the only track on the album recorded entirely outside of God City \[Studios\] and mixed by someone other than Kurt. If I remember correctly, the song title references the fact that our calendars were essentially wiped clean at the height of the pandemic.” **“Waiting for Love”** “The sound at the beginning of this track spawns from one of my favorite effects pedals ever—the DOD Envelope Filter. The use of this pedal dates back to bands that me and J.R. were in even before the formation of Cave In, so hearing it on a Cave In album is a nice little nostalgic trip for us. Maybe if Van Halen had successfully gone grunge in the ’90s, they would’ve done something like this. The song is meant to be comforting for anyone searching for love and coming up short. Remember that you’re not alone, and it might just be a matter of time.” **“Reckoning”** “I believe this to be one of Adam’s finest moments as both a songwriter and a vocalist. He and I have been doing acoustic/electric duo shows for a number of years, and it’s pretty thoughtful of him to construct a song that works especially well in that setting. The way we recorded the lead guitar part was inspired by ‘Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon,’ a song from what is easily my favorite Earth album. Overall, the production on this song was necessitated by the fact that J.R. was dealing with an issue with one of his wrists, so we had to make do with a drummer functioning at less than 100 percent. In hindsight, I think it’s pretty unique because of it. Lyrically, I think Adam really hit the nail on the head when it comes to accepting grief after losing someone close to you and doing our best to manage it.” **“Wavering Angel”** “We knew this would be the closing track on the record, so we made no bones about song length or pulling any punches when it came to throwing everything into the pot from all songs previous to it in the sequence. Led Zeppelin has ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ so this one’s our ‘Stairway to Methuen,’ the town in Massachusetts where me, J.R., and Adam grew up. I tried my best to be honest about wading through trenches of heartbreak while reaching for a song to guide me along. Sometimes that song has wings, and if you just hold on tightly enough, you can let yourself fly. I hope that feeling inspires others in a time of need.”

Thebe Kgositsile emerged in 2010 as the most mysterious member of rap’s weirdest new collective, Odd Future—a gifted teen turned anarchist, spitting shock-rap provocations from his exile in a Samoan reform school. In the 12 years since, he’s repaired his famously fraught relationship with his mother, lost his father, and become a father himself, all the while carving out a solo lane as a serious MC, a student of the game. Earl’s fourth album finds the guy who once titled an album *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside*, well, going outside, and kinda liking it; on opener “Old Friend,” he’s hacking through thickets, camping out in Catskills rainstorms. There’s a sonic clarity here that stands apart from the obscure, sludgy sounds of his recent records, executed in part by Young Guru, JAY-Z’s longtime engineer. Beats from The Alchemist and Black Noi$e snap, crackle, and bounce, buoying Earl’s slippery, open-ended thoughts on family, writing, religion, the pandemic. Is he happy now, the kid we’ve watched become a man? It’s hard to say, but in any case, as he raps on “Fire in the Hole”: “It’s no rewinding/For the umpteenth time, it’s only forward.”

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s third album was born out of lockdown sessions building ideas on GarageBand. With the Melbourne group unable to convene and jam—or tour previous album *Sideways to New Italy*—while COVID ran amok, files were swapped, each bursting with ideas and musical freedom. The result is RBCF’s most expansive album yet, one that came together in a flurry of creative excitement once the quintet were able to meet up and play together. While their trademark acoustic-driven indie pop is still in play (“Saw You at the Eastern Beach,” “The Way It Shatters”), there are new twists, such as the smoky ’70s grooves that permeate “Dive Deep.” Lyrically the group also explores new territory, with environmental concerns (“Tidal River” with the line “Jet ski over the pale reef”) and the horrific bushfires that engulfed Australia’s east coast in 2019 and 2020 (“Bounce Off the Bottom”) adding a discontented edge to the record.

While initial ideas for Endless Rooms were traded online during long spells spent separated by Australia’s strict lockdowns, the album was truly born during small windows of freedom in which the band would decamp to a mud-brick house in the bush around two hours north of Melbourne built by the extended Russo family in the 1970s. There, its 12 tracks took shape, informed to such an extent by the acoustics and ambience of the rambling lakeside house that they decided to record the album there (and put the house on the album cover). For the first time, the band self-produced the record (alongside engineer, collaborator and old friend, Matt Duffy). The result is a collection of songs permeated by the spirit of the place; punctuated by field recordings of rain, fire, birds, and wind. "It's almost an anti-concept album," says the band. "The Endless Rooms of the title reflects our love of creating worlds in our songs. We treat each of them as a bare room to be built up with infinite possibilities."

For all the different forms his music has assumed over the years—glam, chamber-folk, yacht rock, dream-pop—you can readily identify any Destroyer song the instant that Dan Bejar opens his mouth to dispense his cryptic yet deliciously dramatic narratives. And no record in his long, winding career puts that theory to the test as gleefully as *LABYRINTHITIS*, an album that’s essentially the musical manifestation of his famously frizzy, mad-scientist hairdo: It’s bursting with wild sonic ideas that shoot off in every direction, yet it’s always unmistakably him. After luring us in with the warm, shoegazey synth drones and subaquatic bass throb of “It’s in Your Heart Now,” *LABYRINTHITIS* traps us in its maniacal maze and dares us to find a way out: “June” deviously blurs the line between polyrhythmic post-punk and ’80s adult-contemporary pop before free-falling into a bizarre, voice-modulated spoken-word breakdown; “Tintoretto, It’s for You” is part louche cabaret strut, part festival-EDM meltdown. But *LABYRINTHITIS*’s boldness of vision also yields rousing moments of release (“Suffer,” “It Takes a Thief”) that infuse the pop elegance of 2011’s *Kaputt* with a little extra *kapow*. The instrumental title track provides a welcome mid-album reprieve in which the band crafts a Boards of Canada-worthy pastorale, complete with the comforting sounds of chattering children.

Harry Styles’ third solo album, *Harry’s House*, is the product of a chain reaction. Had the pandemic not thrown his world into a tailspin in early 2020, he would’ve continued to tour behind *Fine Line*, his critically adored sophomore album, and played its songs hundreds of times for sold-out crowds around the world. A return to the studio was planned, of course, but when COVID-19 canceled those plans too, Styles faced an empty calendar for the first time in a decade. The singer opted to use this free time carefully, taking a solo road trip through Italy and visiting with family and friends for rare long, drawn-out stretches. It was an important moment of reevaluation. “You miss so many birthdays,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And eventually it\'s just assumed you\'re unable to be at stuff. Finally I was like, ‘I want to balance my life out a bit. Working isn’t who I am, it\'s something I do. I want to be able to put that down.’” His upbeat, lightly electronic third LP riffs on the concept of home, viewing it less as a geographical location and more as a state of mind—his mind. “Imagine it’s a day in my house, a day in my mind,” he said. “What do I go through? I’m playing fun music. I’m playing sad music. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff.” Because of the pandemic, Styles recorded the songs with a small handful of longtime friends and close collaborators who gathered in a single room to drink wine, write, and play. That intimacy is reflected in the songs, which are conversational and casually confessional, as if he’s thinking out loud. Blending vintage folk rock with flickers of disco and a generally more relaxed sensibility, they illustrate a turning point in Styles’ career as he transitions even further towards career singer-songwriter. “For a while it was, how do I play that game of remaining exciting?” he says. “But I finally had a moment where I felt like, ‘Okay, I’m not the young thing, so I would like to really think about who I want to be as a musician.’” Read on for the inside story behind a handful of standout selections from *Harry’s House*. **“Music for a Sushi Restaurant”** “After *Fine Line*, I had an idea of how I thought the next album would open. But there\'s something about ‘Sushi’ that felt like, ‘Nah, *that\'s* how I want to start.’ It becomes really obvious what the first song should be based on what you play for people when they’re like, ‘Oh, can I hear a bit of the music?’ It\'s like, how do you want to set the tone?” **“Daylight”** “We were like, ‘We have to find a way to stay awake and finish this, because if we all go to bed, then this won’t turn out the way it would if we finished tonight.’ So we powered through, finished it, and went down to the beach as the sun was coming up and it was like, ‘Okay. Yeah.’ It felt correct that we\'d finished it in that place. Life, and songs in particular, are so much about moments. In surfing, for example, sometimes you don\'t get the wave and sometimes the wave comes and you haven\'t practiced. But every now and again, the wave comes and you’re ready, you\'ve practiced enough that you can ride it. Sometimes when the songs write themselves like that, it feels like, ‘Okay, there\'s a reason why sometimes I sit out there, falling off the board a bunch. It\'s for this moment.” **“As It Was”** “‘As It Was,’ to me, is bittersweet. It’s devastating. It\'s a death march. It’s about metamorphosis and a perspective change, which are not necessarily things you have time with. People aren’t like, ‘Oh, we\'ll give you a couple more days with this moment and let you say goodbye to your former self,’ or whatever. No. Everyone is changing, and by the time you realize what’s happened, \[the moment\] is already gone. During the pandemic, I think we all at some point realized that it would never be the same as it was before. It was so obvious that it wouldn’t. You can\'t go backwards—we can’t as a society and I can’t in my personal life. But you learn so much in those moments because you’re forced to face things head-on, whether they’re your least favorite things about the world or your least favorite things about yourself, or all of it.” **“Matilda”** “I had an experience with someone where, in getting to know them better, they revealed some stuff to me that was very much like, ‘Oh, that\'s not normal, like I think you should maybe get some help or something.’ This song was inspired by that experience and person, who I kind of disguised as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book. I played it to a couple of friends and all of them cried. So I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something to pay attention to.’ It\'s a weird one, because with something like this, it\'s like, ‘I want to give you something, I want to support you in some way, but it\'s not necessarily my place to make it about me because it\'s not my experience.’ Sometimes it\'s just about listening. I hope that\'s what I did here. If nothing else, it just says, ‘I was listening to you.’” **“Boyfriends”** “‘Boyfriends’ was written right at the end of *Fine Line*. I\'d finished the album and there was an extra week where I wrote ‘Adore You,’ ‘Lights Up,’ and ‘Treat People With Kindness.’ At the end of the session for ‘Lights Up,’ we started writing ‘Boyfriends,’ and it felt like, ‘Okay, there\'s a version of this story where we get this song ready for this album.’ But something about it just felt like, no, it’ll have its time, let\'s not rush it. We did so many versions of it. Vocal. Acoustic. Electric guitar. Harmonies on everything, and then we took them out for chunks and put them back in for chunks. You try not to get ahead of yourself when you write a song, but there was something about this one where I felt like, ‘Okay, when I\'m 50, if I\'m playing a show, maybe there\'s someone who heard me for the first time when they were 15 and this is probably the song they came to see.’ Because I\'m learning so much by singing it. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m hearing you.’ It’s both acknowledging my own behavior and looking at behavior I\'ve witnessed. I grew up with a sister, so I watched her date people, and I watched friends date people, and people don\'t treat each other very nicely sometimes.” **“Cinema”** “I think I just wanted to make something that felt really fun, honestly. I was on a treadmill going, ‘Do-do-do-do-do-do.’ I tend to do so much writing in the studio, but with this one, I did a little bit here and then I went home and added a little bit there, and then kind of left it, and then went into the studio to put it all together. That was a theme across the whole album, actually: We used to book a studio and be like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got it for two months, grind it out.’ But some days you just don\'t want to be there, and eventually you\'ve been in the studio so long, the only thing you can write about is nothing because you haven\'t done anything. So with this album, we’d work for a couple of weeks and then everyone would go off and live their lives.” **“Love of My Life”** “‘Love of My Life’ was the most terrifying song because it\'s so bare. It\'s so sparse. It’s also very much in the spirit of what *Harry\'s House* is about: I wanted to make an acoustic EP, all in my house, and make it really intimate. It’s named after \[the Japanese pop pioneer Haruomi\] Hosono, who had an album in the \'70s called *Hosono House*. I immediately started thinking about what *Harry’s House* might look like. It took time for me to realize that the house wasn\'t a geographical location, it was an internal thing. When I applied that concept to the songs we were making here, everything took on new meaning. Imagine it\'s a day in my house or a day in my mind. What do I go through? I\'m playing fun music. I\'m playing sad music. I\'m playing this, I\'m playing that. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff. And it’s all mine. This is my favorite album at the moment. I love it so much. And because of the circumstances, it was made very intimately; everything was played by a small number of people and made in a room. To me, it\'s everything. It\'s everything I\'ve wanted to make.”

While crafting Anxious’ new album, Little Green House, the Connecticut five-piece were afforded a luxury so few bands are when making their debut album: time. With extensive touring plans halted and regular life on pause, the band—vocalist Grady Allen, guitarists Dante Melucci and Ryan Savitski, bassist Sam Allen, and drummer Jonny Camner—headed into Allen’s mom’s basement and reflected on each part of the material that would turn into their first record over and over again. The result is an artistic leap that, had the band’s plans to spend much of 2020 on the road actually been feasible, maybe wouldn’t have happened. Formed in 2016 while members were still in high school, Anxious’ early releases were indebted to the urgent freneticism and heart-on-sleeve lyrics of post-hardcore acts like Texas Is The Reason, Samiam, and Turning Point, allowing Anxious to immediately grab the attention of the hardcore scene. The band’s DIY roots and dedication to craft were equally as essential to their rising profile—early releases were accompanied with band-dubbed cassettes, made-to-order zines, and even self-dyed shirts—each part of Anxious was laid out in meticulous detail from day one. Having almost immediately surpassed Allen’s modest ambitions of “playing a couple of shows,” Anxious quickly found a home on Triple B Records, gaining the attention and adulation of both the hardcore and emo scenes on the back of two seven-inch EPs and a pair of demos, getting them coveted spots on tours with genre-bending acts like Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, before landing on Run For Cover. Named after the space in which the material was written, Little Green House sees Allen and Melucci exploring what it feels like to enter adulthood in unflinching detail. The pair unpack their struggles, joys, and hard-earned realizations in a way that makes them each feel wise beyond their years. “I think a lot of the record is a coming-to-terms, interpretive record about relationships with people and thinking introspectively,” says Allen. “I’m sure it’ll be a cliché very soon to say, ‘With all the time spent away, I was able to really think about things,’ but having that time ot sit and be introspective really does give you perspective on yourself, the relationships you have with other people, and that recognition that while you might all be interconnected—whether it’s your parents, your friends from high school, people you know through music—it’s bound to happen that you all have deeply individual and separate paths, and that’s okay.” Recorded and produced by Chris Teti at Silver Bullet Studios, the diversity of perspectives on Little Green House is matched by the album’s ability to jump between sounds without ever feeling disjointed. The band’s commitment to their creative vision and exacting attention to detail is apparent, with Anxious going so far as to completely re-record the vocals until Little Green House was exactly the statement they wanted to make. That devotion is clear from the very first notes of opener, “Your One Way Street.” Anxious sounds more deliberate than ever, with each riff pounding like a powerful declaration as Allen works through the emotions of watching one of his oldest friendships breaking apart, “I beg you, one last time as a friend / How did we get here and why does this have to end?” On “More Than A Letter” the band explores what it was like to watch a potential romantic relationship fall away because of outside pressures, and the energetic “Let Me” is a show of support from a child to a parent while watching them go through a painful divorce and features guest vocals from Pat Flynn of Fiddlehead. “I guess the idea behind the record is that coming to terms with who you are and accepting that,” says Allen. “Struggle, sadness, and pain aren’t necessarily negative things, but they are necessary things. There’s no shame or sadness put onto these feelings that you’re already experiencing. But there are positive, triumphant elements running through the album, too,” a feeling that’s best exemplified by the triumphant, and aptly titled, “Growing Up Song.” While fans are used to Anxious’ infectious energy spilling into every song, the closing track “You When You’re Gone” shows a totally new side of the band. Where the raucous parts of the album recall Lifetime and Sense Field, this one’s pure dream pop bliss. Joined by vocalist Stella Branstool on the track, it gives Little Green House an expanded scope, one that showcases a band taking big swings and landing every single one of them. “The goal wasn’t to create something that perfectly replicates a sound or an era,” says Allen. “It was just about us wholeheartedly trying to create something that felt distinctly like us and not worry for a second if it feels unfamiliar—we just wanted to create something that was unabashedly us.” On Little Green House, that’s exactly what Anxious did. They’ve made a record that captures the bittersweet feeling of returning to a place you grew up and realizing how the passing of time has changed you - a musical snapshot of who they were in an exact moment, and who they want to become now that they’re ready to move on.

Before becoming a progenitor in the microgenre chillwave—defined by a 2000s indie rock culture obsessed with 1980s electro-synth sounds and nostalgic, dreamy bedroom pop—Toro y Moi (Chazwick Bradley “Chaz Bear” Bundick) was known for his experimental production, leading to a long run of widely lauded albums. *MAHAL* is his seventh, its title taken from the Tagalog word for “expensive.” It\'s also a good time in 13 songs, from the Parliament funk of “Postman” and the psychedelic percussion of “Clarity” to the garage-psych of “The Medium” featuring New Zealand band Unknown Mortal Orchestra and the smoky “Mississippi.” If chillwave was a flash-in-the-pan moment, Toro Y Moi has long since survived it.

The 13-track project marks the seventh studio album from Bear under the Toro y Moi moniker. To celebrate the announcement, Toro y Moi shares two singles from the forthcoming record "Postman" b/w "Magazine." Each of the new singles arrives with accompanying visuals. "Postman," directed by Kid. Studio, sees Toro and friends riding around the colorful San Francisco landscape in his Filipino jeepney, seen on the cover of MAHAL. "Magazine," directed by Arlington Lowell, sees Toro and Salami Rose Joe Louis, who supplies vocals on the track, dressed vibrantly in a photo studio spliced with various colorful graphics and playful edits. MAHAL's announcement and singles arrive on the heels of Toro's highly celebrated 2019 album Outer Peace, which Pitchfork described as "one of his best albums in years" along with his Grammy-nominated 2020 collaboration with Flume, "The Difference," which was also featured in a global campaign for Apple's Airpods. Today's releases mark the first from Toro y Moi since signing to Secretly Group label Dead Oceans. Dead Oceans is an independent record label established in 2007 featuring luminaries like Japanese Breakfast, Khruangbin, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, Mitski, Slowdive and more. Toro y Moi is the 12+ year project of South Carolina-reared, Bay Area-based Chaz Bear. In the wake 2008’s global economic collapse, Toro y Moi emerged as a figurehead of the beloved sub-genre widely known as chillwave, the sparkling fumes of which still heavily influence musicians all over today. Over the subsequent decade, his music and graphic design has far, far surpassed that particular designation. Across 9 albums (6 studio as Toro y Moi along with a live album, compilation and mixtape) with the great Carpark label, he has explored psych-rock, deep house, UK hip-hop; R&B and well-beyond without losing that rather iconic, bright and shimmering Toro y Moi fingerprint. As a graphic designer, Bear has collaborated with brands like Nike, Dublab and Van’s. And as a songwriter and producer, he’s collaborated with other artists like Tyler, The Creator, Flume, Travis Scott, HAIM, and Caroline Polachek.

Miranda Lambert hits the road on *Palomino*, her eighth solo album and the follow-up to her 2019 Grammy-winning LP *Wildcard*. Across 15 tracks, Lambert treks all over the United States, spinning colorful yarns of a rambling life out on the road. “We go to 36 different locations in this record and meet all kinds of characters that we made up,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “Or it might have been characters we have all met in our travels, put into these songs. I\'ve never written with that much purpose.” Lambert sets the freewheeling tone with opener “Actin’ Up,” a swampy ode to bad behavior. Tracks like “Scenes” and “Tourist” are some of Lambert’s most image-rich material yet, while “Music City Queen”—a collaboration with pioneering New Wavers The B-52’s—is easily one of her most fun. Some songs, like standout “Geraldene,” previously appeared in demo form on Lambert’s critically acclaimed *The Marfa Tapes*, a 2021 collaborative LP with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, and take on new life thanks to thoughtful production from Lambert, Randall, and frequent collaborator Luke Dick. Below, Lambert shares insight into a handful of tracks on *Palomino*. **“Geraldene”** “She\'s everyone. I feel like we\'ve all known one or been one at one point or the other. I just had that title because I was watching *Heartworn Highways* like a million times, and in that movie, Townes’ dog is named Geraldine. And Geraldine\'s this German shepherd, and I was like, ‘That\'s a cool name.’” **“Country Money”** “Aaron Raitiere pulls me in on a write one day. He\'s like, ‘Hey, come write with me and Mikey Reaves.’ I had never written with him before, and I was like, ‘Okay, cool, that\'d be different,’ and we wrote ‘Country Money.’ It fit right into the vibe of this road trip we were taking. So it all just happened easily, which makes me a little nervous because I\'m like, ‘Okay, when\'s the other shoe going to drop?’” **“Carousel”** “That is a real feeling. We joined the circus in one way or another, and we\'re so lucky to be part of it. I mean, I\'m like, ‘If I ever lived before, I think I was either best friends with Calamity Jane or riding an elephant somewhere.’ Truly, that\'s what I was doing, because this is as close as I could get to those two things, what I do for a living. I miss so many weddings and funerals and baby showers and important moments of people that are important to me, and of my own, just because I\'m rolling. But I think ‘Carousel’ puts this romantic spin on it where it\'s like, ‘It\'s okay. There\'s this whole other life that can happen, too.’”

Traditionally, a band releases their debut album and heads out for an extended stretch on the road, honing their live chops, twisting their songs into new shapes. But when Black Country, New Road released *For the First Time* in February 2021, that route was blocked off by the pandemic. Instead, the London-based band set out to tweak and tamper with their experimental post-rock sound for a transformative second album. They might not have been able to travel, but their music could. “By the time the first album came out, those songs had existed for so long that we were very keen to change the way we wrote music,” bassist Tyler Hyde tells Apple Music. The material that makes up their second record, *Ants From Up There*, soon came to life, the group using the labyrinthine “Basketball Shoes,” which had been around before their debut, as a springboard. “We wanted to explore the themes we’d created on that song,” says Hyde. “It’s essentially three songs within one, all of which relatively cover the emotions and moods that are on the album. It’s hopeful and light, but still looks at some of the darker sides that the first album showed.” The resultant record sees the band hit hypnotic new peaks. *Ants From Up There*, recorded before the departure of singer Isaac Wood in January 2022, is less reliant on jerky, rhythmic U-turns than their debut (although there is some of that), with expansive, Godspeed You! Black Emperor-ish atmospherics emerging in their place. “Fundamentally, we relearned an entirely new style of playing with each other,” says drummer Charlie Wayne. “We learned a lot about how to express ourselves just for each other rather than for anything else going on externally.” Here Hyde, Wayne, and saxophonist Lewis Evans take us through it, track by track. **“Intro”** Lewis Evans: “This uses the theme from ’Basketball Shoes,’ compressed into these little micro cells and repeated over and over again. It’s just a straight-up, impactful welcome to the album.” **“Chaos Space Marine”** Tyler Hyde: “In this song, we allowed ourselves to get out all the stupid, funny joke style of playing. It was just our way of saying yes to everything. There are many things across the album—and in previous songs from the last album—that are seemingly good ideas, but they’ve come about through a joke. I think the rest of the album is much more considered than that. It’s our silly song. It’s a voyage. It’s a sea shanty. It’s a space trip.” **“Concorde”** Charlie Wayne: “I love how it follows the same chord progression the whole way through, and it’s driven but very soft. It’s got real moments of delicacy, and it’s a song that we all thought quite a lot about when we were getting it together. When you’re restricted to that one-chord sequence, you want it to feel as though it’s going somewhere and progressing, so the peaks and troughs have to be considered.” **“Bread Song”** LE: “It’s like two different songs in one. You’ve got this really quite flowing and free track in a melodic and conventional harmonic way, but rhythmically free and flowing accompaniment to Isaac’s vocals. It feels quite orchestral, and the way that we all play together on this recording is so in sync with each other. We were listening to each other so much, so the swells that one person starts making, people start responding to, and everybody is swelling at the same time and getting quieter at the same time. Then it turns into this almost Soweto, kind of township-style pop tune at the end. It’s a really fun ending to an intense, emotional tune.” **“Good Will Hunting”** LE: “This is another slightly silly one, and it’s got a really silly ending which actually never made the cut on the album, but it’s heavily driven by the riff on the guitars. I think at the time we were listening to quite a bit of Kurt Vile, especially rhythmically. I can remember a conversation about when we wanted the drums to come in and to be super straight, super driven. Then for the choruses, rhythmically, to completely flip and not feel like they were big at all. So for both the choruses, the drums are just tiny.” **“Haldern”** TH: “We were playing at Haldern Pop Festival in north Germany during lockdown. We’d just been allowed to fly for work purposes, and we were doing this session. We did two performances there, and the second one was a livestream, and we weren’t allowed to play songs that weren’t released. At the time, that left us with not very much that we weren’t already bored with, so we decided to do some improv. It was a very lucky day where we were all very in sync with one another. So ‘Haldern’ was totally from improv, which is not how we write ever.” **“Mark’s Theme”** LE: “This is a tune written kind of for my uncle who passed away from COVID in 2021. I wrote it on my tenor saxophone as soon as I found out. I just started playing and wrote that. It’s a reflection on him and my feelings towards him passing away and everything being really bleak. He was a massive fan and supporter of the band, so it felt right to put that on the album and to have his name remembered with our music.” **“The Place Where He Inserted the Blade”** CW: “For me, this is about as far away as we went from the first album. Aesthetically, where the first album has moments of real dissonance and apathy, ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’ is very warm and rich and quite uplifting. I think it strikes right to the heart of what the album is for me, which is fundamentally being in the room, making music with my friends.” **“Snow Globes”** LE: “This is another tune where we really thought about what we wanted from it before we wrote it. We had examples of things we liked, and one of them was Frank Ocean’s ‘White Ferrari.’ We liked the idea of it almost being like two different bands \[playing\] at the same time. So you’ve got this quite simple but quite heart-wrenching, fugal-sounding arrangement of all the instruments with a drum solo that is just crazy and doesn’t really relate too much to what is going on in the other instruments. We react to the drum solo, but he doesn’t react to us. It’s that kind of idea.” **“Basketball Shoes”** TH: “It’s essentially a medley of the whole album. It’s got literal musical motifs that are repeated on different songs in the album. It touches on all the themes that we’ve been exploring, and it’s the most climactic song on the album. It wouldn’t really make sense to not finish with it, it’s so exhausting. It’s such a journey. I think you just wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to anything that followed it because you’d be so wiped out after listening to it.”

Black Country, New Road return with the news that their second album, “Ants From Up There”, will land on February 4th on Ninja Tune. Following on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of their acclaimed debut “For the first time”, the band have harnessed the momentum from that record and run full pelt into their second, with “Ants From Up There” managing to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before, as well as a natural progression. Released alongside the announcement the band (Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Charlie Wayne, Luke Mark, Isaac Wood, Tyler Hyde and Georgia Ellery) have also today shared the first single from the album, ‘Chaos Space Marine’, a track that has already become a live favourite with fans since its first public airings earlier this year - combining sprightly violin, rhythmic piano, and stabs of saxophone to create something infectiously fluid that builds to a rousing crescendo. It’s a track that frontman Isaac Wood calls “the best song we’ve ever written.” It’s a chaotic yet coherent creation that ricochets around unpredictably but also seamlessly. “We threw in every idea anyone had with that song,” says Wood. “So the making of it was a really fast, whimsical approach - like throwing all the shit at the wall and just letting everything stick.” Their debut “For the first time” is a certain 2021 Album of the Year, having received ecstatic reviews from critics and fans alike as well as being shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Released in February to extensive, global, critical support - perhaps best summed up by The Times who wrote in their 5/5 review that they were "the most exciting band of 2021" and The Observer who called their record "one of the best albums of the year" - the album made a significant dent on the UK Albums Chart where it landed at #4 in its first week, a remarkable achievement for a largely experimental debut record. The album also reached #1 on Any Decent Music, #2 at Album Of The Year and sat at #1 on Rate Your Music for several weeks, remaining the record to generate the most fan reviews and site discussion there this year. Black Country, New Road were also declared Artist Of The Week and Album Of The Week by The Observer, The Line Of Best Fit and Stereogum, and saw features, including covers and reviews, from the likes of Mojo, NPR, CRACK, Uncut, The Quietus, Pitchfork, The FADER, Loud & Quiet, The Face, Paste, The Needle Drop, DIY, NME, CLASH, So Young, Dork and more. With “For the first time” the band melded klezmer, post-rock, indie and an often intense spoken word delivery. On “Ants From Up There” they have expanded on this unique concoction to create a singular sonic middle ground that traverses classical minimalism, indie-folk, pop, alt rock and a distinct tone that is already unique to the band. Recorded at Chale Abbey Studios, Isle Of Wight, across the summer with the band’s long-term live engineer Sergio Maschetzko, it’s also an album that comes loaded with a deep-rooted conviction in the end result. “We were just so hyped the whole time,” says Hyde. “It was such a pleasure to make. I've kind of accepted that this might be the best thing that I'm ever part of for the rest of my life. And that's fine.” Black Country, New Road's live performances have already gained legendary status from fans and has seen them labelled "one of the UK's best live bands" by The Guardian. After the success of their livestream direct from London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, stand-out performances at SXSW and the BBC 6 Music Festival, and following a sold-out UK tour this summer, high-profile festival appearances, and a 43 date UK & EU tour to follow in the Autumn with sold out US dates next year, the London-based seven-piece today announce further UK & IE dates in support of the album for April 2022, preceded by their biggest London headliner to date at The Roundhouse in February. Black Country, New Road Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, will be available as part of the Deluxe LP and CD versions of ‘Ants From Up There’. Fans who pre-order any format of ‘Ants From Up There’ from the Black Country, New Road store, their Bandcamp page and the Ninja Tune shop, will be able to gain access to the pre-sale for the 2022 UK headline tour dates. The full set of dates are as follows: 22/10/2021 - Rotondes, Luxembourg 23/10/2021 - Bumann & Sohn, Cologne – DE (SOLD OUT) 24/10/2021 - Botanique Orangerie, Belgium – BE (SOLD OUT) 25/10/2021 - Le Trabendo, Paris - FR 27/10/2021 - Le Grand Mix, Tourcoing - FR 28/10/2021 - Lieu Unique, Nantes - FR 29/10/2021 - Rockschool Barbey, Bordeaux - FR 1/11/2021 - Teatro Duse, Bologna - IT 2/11/2021 - Auditorium Della Mole, Ancona - IT 05/11/2021 - Circolo della Musica, Turin - IT 06/11/2021 - Bogen F, Zürich - CH (SOLD OUT) 08/11/2021 - Underdogs', Prague - CZ (SOLD OUT) 09/11/2021 - Frannz Club, Berlin - DE (SOLD OUT) 10/11/2021 - Hydrozagadka, Warsaw - PL (SOLD OUT) 11/11/2021 - Transcentury Update Warm Up @ UT Connewitz Leipzig - DE 12/11/2021 - Bahnhof Pauli, Hamburg - DE 14/11/2021 - Le Guess Who? Festival, Utrecht - NL 16/11/2021 - Paradiso Noord, Amsterdam - NL (SOLD OUT) 20/11/2021 - Super Bock En Stock, Lisbon - PT 21/11/2021 - ZDB, Lisbon - PT (SOLD OUT) 29/11/2021 - Chalk, Brighton - UK (SOLD OUT) * 30/11/2021 - Junction 1, Cambridge - UK (SOLD OUT) * 01/12/2021 - 1865, Southampton - UK * 03/12/2021 - Arts Club, Liverpool - UK (SOLD OUT) * 04/12/2021 - Irish Centre, Leeds - UK (SOLD OUT) * 06/12/2021 - O2 Ritz Manchester, Manchester – UK * (SOLD OUT) 07/12/2021 - Newcastle University Student Union, Newcastle Upon Tyne - UK * 08/12/2021 - SWG3, Glasgow - UK * 09/12/2021 - The Mill, Birmingham - UK * (SOLD OUT) 10/12/2021 - The Waterfront, Norwich - UK * 12/12/2021 – Marble Factory, Bristol – UK (SOLD OUT) * 13/12/2021 - Y Plas, Cardiff - UK * 15/12/2021 - Whelan's, Dublin - IE (SOLD OUT) * 08/02/2022 - Roundhouse, London - UK 18/02/2022 – DC9 Nightclub, Washington, DC – US (SOLD OUT) 19/02/2022 – The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA – US (SOLD OUT) 22/02/2022 – Sultan Room, Turk’s Inn, Brooklyn, NY – US (SOLD OUT) 23/02/2022 – Elsewhere, Brooklyn, NY – US 25/02/2022 – Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia, PA – US (SOLD OUT) 26/02/2022 – Bar Le Ritz, Montreal, QC – CAN 28/02/2022 – Third Man Records, Detroit, MI – US 01/03/2022 – Lincoln Hall, Chicago, IL – US 03/03/2022 – Barboza, Seattle, WA – US (SOLD OUT) 04/03/2022 – Polaris Hall, Portland, OR – US 05/03/2022 – The Miniplex, Richard’s Goat Tavern, Arcata, CA – US 06/03/2022 – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – US 08/03/2022 – Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA – US (SOLD OUT) 09/03/2022 – Regent Theater, Los Angeles, CA – US 06/04/2022 - The Foundry, Sheffield - UK 07/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Oxford - UK 09/04/2022 - Liquid Room, Edinburgh - UK 10/04/2022 - The Empire, Belfast - UK 11/04/2022 - 3Olympia, Dublin - IE 13/04/2022 - Albert Hall, Manchester - UK 14/04/2022 - Rock City, Nottingham - UK 16/04/2022 - Concorde 2, Brighton - UK 17/04/2022 - O2 Academy, Bristol - UK 02/06/2022 – Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona - ES 08/07/2022 - Pohoda Festival, Trencin – SK * - with Ethan P. Flynn Pre-sale to The Roundhouse show and April 2022 UK / IE dates available from Tuesday 19th October at 9am BST. Tickets go on general sale on Friday 22nd October at 9am BST.

“Right now, I’m still very much restless,” Charli XCX tells Apple Music. “Because I know that I would be an excellent humongous pop star. But I also unfortunately know that there’s a vision of who I am in the mainstream’s mind. It’s a constant headfuck, to be honest. While I’m a very defiant person, I’m also a human, and sometimes I do just want to be accepted, and I don’t understand why I’m not totally—even though sometimes I relish in the fact that I’m not.” Charlotte Aitchison is one of pop music’s more self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-examining artists. *CRASH* is her fifth studio album, and the final one to be released as part of a longtime record deal. It’s partly, as Charli says, an experiment. An opportunity to utilize a major label’s resources and dress up her left-leaning pop in something ultra luxe. A bold and refreshingly transparent attempt to move up a few rungs, it’s a considered move also designed to clear up some of Charli’s nagging what-ifs. “I’ve always questioned myself,” she says. “And it’s why I’ve made this entire album, really. I ask myself, am I a likable artist? Am I too opinionated? Do I look too weird? Am I too annoying? If I shut up and put out certain songs and do the right features, will I become more accepted, more liked, more commercial?” Of course, Charli’s notoriously engaged fanbase—with whom she exchanged ideas, including song lyrics, directly online for 2020’s quarantine album *how i’m feeling now*—would argue she doesn’t need any such validation. “It’s a blessing and a curse, to be extremely honest,” she says of her “Angels.” “I’m very lucky to have the fanbase that I have, who are extremely invested in literally every breath I take. They are very vocal and very smart, which draws me to them, because they’ve got great taste and amazing ideas—as I found out when doing *how i’m feeling now*. But you can’t please everyone. I’ve done so many different things that people are always going to gravitate to certain eras. Plus, I think that there’s an element where they like to root for an underdog, or an on-the-fringes personality like mine. Because we feel like we’ve been in it together for a really long time, the online discourse can be so vigorous. So I can’t lie, sometimes it’s a bit of a headfuck, because whilst I absolutely adore them, I don’t make music for them specifically when I’m sat in the studio—I’m making it for me. And I don’t think they would admire me as the artist I am if I just kept giving them what they expected.” It’s time to listen for yourself. Explore Charli’s premium pop with her own track-by-track guide. **“Crash”** “Until maybe a week before I made this song, the album was going to be called *Sorry If I Hurt You*. But one day, I was driving in my car and *CRASH* just came to me, and I called A. G. Cook. Even though he wasn\'t a *huge* part of this record, he\'s still very much my creative confidant. He agreed it made sense with the constant car references in my work—and I like the onomatopoeia, I like how it references \[2014 single\] ‘Boom Clap,’ and I like how it feels much more punchy and in-your-face than *how i’m feeling now*. I felt that the title needed a song, so A. G. and I got in the studio pretty quickly and knew we needed to make it sound extremely ’80s—if you could bottle the album into one song, this is it. We—plus the song’s co-producer George Daniel—had been sending a lot of new jack swing beats back and forth, and I knew I wanted this guitar solo, and to add these crazy Janet-esque stabs.” **“New Shapes” (feat. Caroline Polachek & Christine and the Queens)** “Caroline, Christine, and I had worked together many times in different forms, and it was time for the three of us to come together. And actually, this song was recorded a long time ago—pre-pandemic. I like how it\'s an antihero song. We’re saying to the love figure, ‘I haven\'t got what you need from me, because I am not typical. I don\'t operate in the way that you want me to. I want multiple partners. I want somebody else. I want no convention within sex and love.’ And I like that as a statement right after the sound of a car crash in the previous song. To do that song with them—two artists who I really feel have such a unique, defiant, and topsy-turvy vision of what pop music is—felt really classic and right for us. There’s a true connection between us now, in music and in our personal lives.” **“Good Ones”** “I think this song deserved to be bigger, but I will always think that of my work. But I do think it established the Cliffs Notes version of what the record is—it\'s got a darkness to it, and it\'s very pop. I like how drastic the jump was between coming out of *how i’m feeling now* into this, both sonically and in how they were made. *how i’m feeling now* was obviously my quarantine album made in my living room over five weeks by me and two trusted collaborators. This song is produced by Oscar Holter—an extremely active part of the Max Martin camp—and not really written hugely by myself but by two amazing topliners, Caroline Ailin and Noonie Bao. So it’s the absolute polar opposite.” **“Constant Repeat”** “This song features an imaginary scenario I created in my head, where I fell for somebody but imagined that they didn\'t want me—which turned out to not be the case. But it was this fear that I had, and my prediction of the situation. I think it\'s interesting that you can convince yourself of that. When you are falling for someone, unfortunately, I think human nature just crushes in on you and tells you you\'re not good enough, and fills you with doubt and dread and fear and all of those things. This song really poured out of me quite late in the album process, and it just felt so real and natural.” **“Beg for You” (feat. Rina Sawayama)** “Rina wanted to do something uptempo together, and give our fans a bit more of a moment. So when this song idea bubbled up, I called her immediately. She rewrote the second verse, and sounded incredible on it. It’s a very perfect-storm moment, because we’re two artists operating within the pop sphere, but always challenging it and doing something a little bit more left. She also has that hardcore, diehard fanbase—there’s a lot of crossover. Whilst maybe some of them were expecting something a little bit more experimental from us, I think, in a way, you can\'t deny that this actually is the perfect song for us in that we are paying a homage to a gay anthem \[‘Cry for You’ by September\]. She\'s queer, I\'m a queer ally, we\'re coming together to really just live our best lives and sing an iconic pop song.” **“Move Me”** “This song came from a writing camp that I was invited to by \[US producer and songwriter\] Ian Kirkpatrick. I hadn’t done a very classic camp for a while. Not because I\'m anti them—I actually think I thrive quite well in them and enjoy them. I ended up writing this with \[US songwriter and producer\] Amy Allen. We’re actually polar opposites in terms of our styles, which is why this song ended up being so beautiful—the aggressive parts of the song where I was basically yelling into a mic are very me, then you have the balance of Amy’s gorgeous verses. As we were doing it, everyone kept talking about how it’d be a great song for Halsey. I was like, ‘No, I love Halsey, but this is a great song for me and I’m fucking keeping it.’ People talk about writing-camp songs being fake and constructed in a test tube or whatever. But it’s very real. We write from our reality. That’s why we’re good songwriters.” **“Baby”** “This was one of the first tracks I made for this album, probably pre-pandemic, and with Justin Raisen—who was a very crucial part of my first album, *True Romance* \[2013\]. So it felt really good to be going back and working with him in the same house where we made part of the first album. This was a song that I always felt was so passionate and fiery and sexy. And I think the making of this song helped me feel powerful, and want to explore the sexier side of pop music and my artistry. It’s the song that helped me decide that I wanted to dance for this campaign, because I just couldn\'t stop wanting to move to it whilst we were making it.” **“Lightning”** “It began as one of those half demos that I took away and lived with. I then called up Ariel Rechtshaid, who was also a huge part of the first album, alongside Justin Raisen, and said, ‘OK, I have this song. I want to do *True Romance in 2022* with it.” And while I know he’s not really on that hype currently, I told him he was the king of the ’80s and if he felt it needed to go down that road, I trusted him because he has the most impeccable taste. So he sent it back to me, and there was a question mark over the Spanish guitar moment, which goes into a chorus. I sent it to A. G. to ask his opinion. He was like, ‘It\'s insane. I laughed out loud.’ And I was like, ‘OK, great. We\'re keeping it.’” **“Every Rule”** “It\'s the true story of me meeting my previous partner, and both of us being in relationships but knowing that we were meant to be together. I think that that\'s a story that a lot of my friends have also experienced—and obviously there\'s a lot of controversy that comes with that circumstance. People are afraid to talk about it. People feel shame. But it\'s also, it\'s really real. I think you have to be really brave to admit to yourself that you\'re not in love with maybe the person that you\'re with, and that you are in love with someone else. It\'s cruel on both sides, and I think you can really hear that. It was a song that I really only felt comfortable enough to make with A. G. He would never judge me for saying these things. It’s another pre-pandemic song, and A. G. was living in a place with a studio in his garage. There was a tree outside that was always covered in crickets. You can hear the crickets in the recording, which I think is really sweet and charming. Once we’d lived with the song for about a year, A. G. had the idea of asking Oneohtrix Point Never to add some things to the song, which I loved.” **“Yuck”** “I like the drastic gear change here. I like that it makes you laugh. I like those jarring moments on albums and in live shows where you\'re going from the most intimate, quiet song to the most hilarious or poptastic. That was the reasoning behind putting ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Yuck’ back to back. I really struggle with that feeling of being smothered. It\'s probably an only-child thing, or something. When you\'re like, ‘Get away from me, give me some fucking space’—that is seriously how I feel 50% of the time. It also reminds me of that gang vocal element of ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘Boys.’ Not sonically, but more in terms of the way that I\'m singing. I\'m definitely not the most technical singer ever—if you put me next to Ariana Grande and made us both sing the same song, I would sound absolutely insane, and she would sound absolutely gorgeous—but when it comes to singing like this, I feel pretty confident. That’s really nice for me, just in a technical way. It\'s really fun to be like, ‘Yeah. You know what? I can sing this song.’ Which I know sounds stupid because I am a professional ‘singer.’” **“Used to Know Me”** “I was trying to emulate myself on ‘Fancy’—or get back into that headspace. I really remember searching for the chorus melody to ‘Fancy’ in a way that I hadn\'t really searched for a melody before. Normally I\'m very instinctual and spontaneous when it comes to melodies, but with ‘Fancy,’ I had to really maneuver my brain around different corners to figure it out—to understand the formation of the notes. I wrote this on my own at Stargate’s studios, which probably made me feel like I had to write a really big pop song, and then when I was listening to it on repeat in my car, I just started singing the synth line to ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. So I called a few people and was like, ‘Is this possible?’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, but do you care about publishing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess not.’ It feels to me like a big song—it’s about reshaping who you are after a breakup.” **“Twice”** “I had reservations about making this the last song because it\'s such an obvious choice with the key change and outro. And generally speaking, I\'m anti the obvious choice. But then George Daniel, who is very good with tracklisting, simply said, ‘You\'re an idiot if you don\'t put this song last.’ It’s actually interesting lyrically, because it\'s about the end of the world and that you shouldn\'t think twice about intimate moments, or these off-the-cuff moments. Essentially, YOLO, and enjoy delving into these once-in-a-lifetime situations that everybody ends up in. I was picturing the scene from \[Lars von Trier’s 2011 film\] *Melancholia* where Kirsten Dunst’s character is sat on a hill waiting for the end of the world. It’s a perfect closer, and I also think it’s a very beautiful song.”

Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe’s life was turned upside down in 2018 when his beloved father, Tattersall, passed away. Dealing with his dad’s loss was one thing—uncovering the secrets that came to light in the wake of his passing was another. His father was born in Samoa in 1938, not New Zealand in 1948, as Le’aupepe had believed. Tattersall also had two sons in New Zealand before faking his death and moving to Australia—half-brothers that Le’aupepe was, until his father’s passing, unaware he had. “\[These\] were things that my dad hid or made sure that we didn’t find out about because, I think, there was a lot of guilt and sadness and scandal around his life before he came to Australia,” Le’aupepe tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. The singer wasn’t, however, angry when these revelations came to light. “My dad was amazing, but he was a complicated man,” says Le’aupepe. “He was my hero. And naturally, when you find out more about your hero, you get excited. Also, I wanted big brothers growing up, and I just supplemented them with the band and people from church and stuff like that. So, I was actually able to claim a part of myself, a part of my heritage, a part of all this stuff, while also simultaneously reconnecting with these two blokes who I just loved instantly. It was a really, really cool thing.” Tattersall’s passing is a lyrical theme that binds Gang of Youths’ third album together (“I prayed the day you passed/But the heavens didn’t listen,” begins Le’aupepe on opener “you in everything”), but the events of his life and death are captured most concisely in the sparse, poetic piano ballad “brothers.” “There’s a sense of the storytelling traditions of old,” says Le’aupepe of the song. “I listen to a lot of Paul Kelly, Archie Roach—the greatest songwriters who wrote and told stories. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Cactus Tree’ is another one. I love a cinematic slow reveal of what the story’s about. And obviously, cinema’s played a huge role in influencing where this album’s gone visually and sonically.” So, too, has the singer’s Polynesian heritage. While songs such as “the angel of 8th ave.” and “the man himself” merge the band’s penchant for big-tent indie rock with a distinct hint of Britpop (“spirit boy”), and “the kingdom is within you” flirts with UK garage, the album is rich with a mélange of Polynesian musical influences. Witness the presence of Cook Islands drum group the Nuanua Drummers and the Auckland Gospel Choir on “in the wake of your leave,” or the spoken-word verse in “spirit boy,” delivered in the Māori language te reo. “the man himself,” meanwhile, features samples of Pacific Island hymns, captured by British composer David Fanshawe. “There was a sense of wanting to make the record feel like it wasn’t just us mining my people’s past or our people’s collective past for inspiration,” says Le’aupepe, “but that we were in a mode of wanting to move forward and \[take\] what’s happening now in terms of a creative direction.” That the London-based, Sydney-born band managed to largely self-produce (with occasional coproduction from Peter Katis and Peter Hutchings) such an expansive album in their rehearsal room in the East London suburb of Hackney is nothing short of remarkable. “It felt like this anarchic confluence of values,” says Le’aupepe. “It was really, really interesting seeing how together we are, and working in that close, confined space has given us a unity of opinion, or a unity of ‘this is where we’re going to go with it.’ And I think that was all cultivated in the sessions for *angel in realtime.*”

Gang of Youths David Le'aupepe – lead vocals, production, engineering (all tracks); guitar (1, 2, 5, 6); backing vocals, piano (2, 6); bass (3), keyboards (3, 5, 6), synthesizer (6) Donnie Borzestowski – drums, production, engineering (all tracks); percussion (1, 5, 6), piano (1), backing vocals (2, 4, 6–13) Max Dunn – production, engineering (all tracks); bass (1, 2, 4–13), banjo (1, 5), piano (1, 6), backing vocals (2), guitar (3); autoharp, keyboards (5), Tom Hobden – production, engineering (all tracks); backing vocals (2, 5), viola (2, 4–6, 11), violin (2–6, 11), piano (4, 7, 9–13) Jung Kim – guitar, production, engineering (all tracks);, backing vocals (2), piano (3, 8) Additional musicians Daniel Ricciardo – backing vocals (2, 11) Auckland Gospel Choir – backing vocals (2, 11) Seumanu Simon Matāfai – music direction (2), piano (6) Anuanua Drummers – percussion (2, 6) Ian Burdge – cello (5, 11) Johnny Griffiths – clarinet, flute, saxophone (5) Ilid Jones – cor anglais, oboe (5) Nick Etwell – flugelhorn, trumpet (5, 11) Matt Gunner – French horn (5, 11) Dave Williamson – trombone (5, 11) Indiana Dunn – backing vocals, percussion (6) James Larter – marimba (6) Kaumātua – spoken voice (6) Tony Gibbs – spoken voice (6) Aemon Beech - percussion (1) Anna Pamin – percussion (11) Blake Friend – percussion (11) Peter Hutchings – synthesizer (11) Technical Peter Hutchings – production (2, 11), engineering (2, 3, 6, 11), mixing (11) Peter Katis – production (2), mixing (5) Count – mastering (1, 2, 5, 6), mixing (1, 2, 6) Joe LaPorta – mastering (3) Craig Silvey – mixing (3, 11) Richard Woodcraft – engineering (1, 5, 6, 11) Gergő Láposi – orchestral engineering (1) Péter Barabás – orchestral engineering (1) Dani Bennett Spragg – mixing assistance (11) Emily Wheatcroft Snape – engineering assistance (2, 11) Jamie Sprosen – engineering assistance (2, 11) Luke O'Dea – engineering assistance (3) Tess Dunn – engineering assistance (6)

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

On the cover of her second album, LA indie polymath Sasami Ashworth—aka SASAMI—appears in the form of the Nure-onna, a mythical half-woman/half-serpent creature from Japanese folklore. It’s more than just a badass image: On *Squeeze*, SASAMI re-emerges utterly transformed and all-powerful. With the untamed opener, “Skin a Rat,” she unleashes a torrent of moshable nu-metal that obliterates any trace of the dream-pop artisan heard on her 2019 self-titled debut. “I feel a little bit like a sci-fi or fantasy novelist this time,” SASAMI tells Apple Music. “And in a lot of ways, this album is my first book, whereas my last album was more like my diary entries being leaked.” But the skull-crushing heaviness of “Skin a Rat” is just the first steep drop on a thrill ride that sends you careening through aesthetic shifts—a volatile mood-ring reflection of her existence as a queer woman of color and a working musician entering her thirties. “The songs are much less about explicit experiences and much more about feelings,” she says. “Narratively, this album is inspired by movies like *Parasite*, where there’s a lot of different genres—one second it’s a dark comedy, one second it’s a thriller, the next second it’s romantic, and then it’s a horror. It keeps you on your toes, and I wanted to make an album that has that same dynamic range.” Here, SASAMI guides us through *Squeeze*, one scene at a time. **“Skin a Rat”** “Making art during the pandemic, you’re not having experiences—you’re just drawing from memories of experiences. And so, knowing that I wanted to make these angsty, aggressive tracks, it’s natural that I went back to middle school and high school, when you’re at your most angsty and emotional and rageful. And so, nu-metal creates an emotional portal to that time for me. This song is basically about systemic oppression and reclaiming some of this violent discourse that’s usually aimed towards femmes and using sonic elements that are usually used by cis men. I also wanted to be very clear about who the album was for: Patti Harrison and Laetitia Tamko from Vagabon are screaming the lyrics with me, and I really wanted it to be an anthem for my community.” **“The Greatest”** “‘The Greatest’ was really influenced by power ballads—like Bonnie Tyler and Heart and Aerosmith. I wanted to touch on a lot of different types of emotions and sounds on the album, and I wanted to stretch out as far as I could in each direction. So, the syrupy schmaltziness of power ballads was really inspiring for this one. But because there’s this mission statement of anti-toxic positivity on the album, I wanted this to be kind of an un-love ballad. You can’t take dirty laundry and put it directly into the dryer without first putting it into the washing machine—you can’t skip straight to healing and brightness and happiness without processing the dark shit that’s going on. A lot of power ballads are about the absence of love, but this song is basically my grungy power ballad about how the absence of love can sometimes be a bigger force than love itself.” **“Say It”** “This song and a couple of other ones are basically about the pain of someone not communicating with you. I feel like it’s a very in-my-early-thirties sentiment—it’s basically saying, ‘I don’t even need you to apologize or tell me what I want to hear; I just want to communicate. Just tell me how you’re actually feeling and release the toxicity of not being honest with people.’ It’s kind of a communication jam.” **“Call Me Home”** “This song is about synthesizing that feeling of nothing being wrong, but you still blow everything up just to feel something, and how numbness and a lack of feeling emotion can be just as heavy and dark as feeling something outright. This song is an ode to the wanderer—it’s an ode to someone who has restless legs and needs to be on the move and needs to be feeling things in extremes.” **“Need It to Work”** “This is another song about a lack of communication and a lack of connection and how that can kind of fester, and how we can obsess over not getting that attention or getting that reciprocation of feelings. Making yourself vulnerable to someone and then not having that be returned can make you feel fucking crazy. I’m a Cancer, so when people don’t respond to my texts, I completely freak out.” **“Tried to Understand”** “I really wanted to make a heavy album, but at the same time, songs are kind of like children: No matter how much you want them to be something, you just have to support them and let them be whatever they want to be. I’ve made so many different versions of ‘Tried to Understand,’ and, at the end of the day, she just wanted to be like a folk-pop song. ‘Tried to Understand’ is kind of like turning the lights on for a second before something dark happens again.” **“Make It Right”** “I wanted to put together something that was snappy and punk but also had this kind of pop sensibility. This song bridges the gap between the lightness of ‘Tried to Understand’ and ‘Sorry Entertainer,’ so it kind of feeds both beasts in that way.” **“Sorry Entertainer”** \"Honestly, if you listen to the \[Daniel Johnston\] original, my version doesn’t deviate too much from that guitar part. I just heard the original and I immediately heard the metal version in my head. It’s like I read the screenplay of the scene and imagined the big-budget action movie of it. Of course, I couldn’t get explicit permission from Daniel Johnston, so I hope he’s not rolling in his grave over this one. I liked having this kind of pathetic-loner vibe with this really aggressive sound. I think that’s a feeling a lot of musicians are familiar with: ‘I have all this power in my instrument, but I also still kind of feel like a loser.’” **“Squeeze” (feat. No Home)** “I was a fan of No Home’s first record, *F\*\*\*\*\*g Hell*. When I heard it, I was like, ‘She is completely pushing the bounds of genre. She has total pop chops, but is also down to make the weirdest, freakiest aggressive music too.’ And so, I felt like she was a kindred spirit. When I make music, I usually create all the menus and touch every piece of food before it goes out in the restaurant, whereas with this one I wanted to kind of let go and see what happens when I bring someone in to collaborate in a deeper way. She wrote all the verses and, as a black femme in the UK, she has a different experience and perspective. I really connect to a lot of metal and heavy rock songs where the imagery and the lyrics are really violent, but oftentimes they’re objectifying women. So, I wanted to reclaim some of that language and create something on my terms, but with the aggression and rawness of the lyricism that we bring.” **“Feminine Water Turmoil”/“Not a Love Song”** “I feel like the first three-quarters of the record kind of deals with these concepts of human nature—like systemic oppression and unrequited love and desperation and rage and anger. And I wanted to end the album by floating into a more existential place. I feel like an instrumental track \[‘Feminine Water Turmoil’\] can help us to detach from the human language and these human ideas. And then ‘Not a Love Song’ is really a lot more about humans’ relationship with nature and questioning why we always center ourselves in everything, and maybe posing the idea to the listener that we could be in more humility and harmony with nature. I just wanted to end the movie with a more philosophical ending, as opposed to hitting a raw nerve. The song is like aftercare—it’s a respectful way to end an arduous, whiplashing album. I wanted to end it in a way that someone might actually want to listen to it again.”

Squeeze, the second full length from Sasami, surveys the raw aggression of nu-metal, tender plainspokeness of country-pop and folk rock, and dramatic romanticism of classical music.