Stereogum's 50 Best Albums Of 2023 So Far

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

CONVR61 is the debut LP from Hattiesburg's MSPAINT, Post-American. While it may be tempting to pin MSPAINT down stylistically, with labels like "synth-punk," these attempts fail to capture a band that transcends the sum of its parts and the hardcore and punk communities it occupies. Most of the records we release critique the world as it is. MSPAINT go a step further. This record is a triumph because it presents us a future of connection and light and allows us all to imagine living Post-American. Canadians - do not order a copy of the LP from our Bandcamp or store - order at northernscene.net PRESSING INFO: FIRST PRESS 100 copies on White with Blue and Purple Splatter (Convulse Exclusive-only available at convulserecords.com) 100 copies on Yellow vinyl (RevHQ exclusive) 100 copies on Orange Vinyl (Northern Scene Exclusive) 200 copies on Purple Vinyl 300 copies on Bubblegum Pink Vinyl

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

제가 지금 누리고 있는 것들이 언제 사라질지, 언제 사람들이 제 곁을 떠날지 항상 두렵습니다. 모든 것들이 잠깐동안 밝게 빛났다가 아무 일도 없었던 것처럼 사라지는 일종의 마법이라고 생각합니다. 2집 발매 이후 제가 꾼 꿈들을 엮어서 만든 앨범입니다. 도움을 주신 전 세계 사람들에게 감사의 말씀을 드립니다. I'm always afraid when what I have now will disappear and when people will leave me. I think these are some kind of magic, that will shine bright for a while and then lights out, like nothing happened. This is an album that I made with my dreams I dreamed after my 2nd album. Thanks to people all over the world for the help.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji. “With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

Part of the appeal of Meg Remy’s music is that you can think and feel with it in almost equal measure. Inspired by her experience as a new mother (she delivered twin boys in 2021), *Bless This Mess* draws from a similar ’80s-pop Petri dish as 2020’s *Heavy Light* and 2018’s *In a Poem Unlimited*, and with the same mix of gut passion and high-concept remove. Do you need to know, for example, that the after-school-special balladry of “Bless This Mess” was inspired by the punishment of the Danaïdes in Greek mythology? Or that the hypnotic funk of “Pump” came from Remy’s reflections on how motherhood turns the female body into a kind of machine? Not to derive pleasure from them, clinically speaking, but there’s no doubt she wants you to be aware of the conditions she’s working with when it comes to gender, history, and economy, and to recognize pop as a viable way to get there. And if the ideas start to feel heavy, you can always dance them off.

The highly anticipated eighth album by U.S. Girls, the nom de plume of North American multi-disciplinary and experimental pop artist Meg Remy, will be released on 24 February entitled Bless This Mess. A dynamic suite of dexterous melodies and a nuanced artistic response to the complexities of motherhood, Bless This Mess was crafted in tandem with the conception and birth of Remy’s twin boys. It expands the sonic and thematic palette of U.S. Girls, fusing the muses of funk, mythology, and the radical disorientation of joy into an electric tapestry of anthems, aches, and awakenings. To celebrate the announcement, today U.S. Girls releases the slow jam gem, ‘Futures Bet’ alongside a music video directed by Alex Kingsmill that explores the visual wonder and resiliency of trash. A combination of traditional 3D animation & composited live action footage was fed into various Stable Diffusion deep learning models. Some images in the video have up to 6 passes of the artificial intelligence reinterpretations at various strengths to create the effect. It co-stars Remy and Carlyn Bezic, who also sings on the track and will open for U.S. Girls’ 2023 tour dates under her moniker Jane Inc. As Remy’s body changed so did her voice; her diaphragm lost breathing room, adjusting to the growing lives inside. Many takes on Bless This Mess were tracked with the babies in utero, or in her arms. (She even samples her breast pump on the album’s poetic closing cut, “Pump”). The resulting performances are suffused by the physicality of this journey: more blood, more feelings, the interwoven wonders, and wounds of procreation. The ten songs on Bless This Mess were pieced together stem by stem with a vast cast of collaborators (Alex Frankel of Holy Ghost!, Marker Starling, Ryland Blackinton of Cobra Starship, Basia Bulat, Roger Manning Jr. of Jellyfish and Beck,) and audio engineers (Neal H Pogue, Ken Sluiter, Steve Chahley, Maximilian Turnbull). Long-time collaborator, husband, and co-parent Turnbull played a key role facilitating these fluid muses. The production throughout is exquisite, warm, and wood-panelled, framing the voice, keys, bass, and rhythms in heightened textural harmony. ***Pre-orders will include a pin-badge***

In early 2021, Tom and Ed Russell were working on a mix for the iconic London club fabric. They knew they wanted a particular tune included, but simply couldn’t find the track anywhere or remember its name. Faced with a deadline and an endless dig through disc logs, the pair changed their approach: They would themselves write the song they could hear. The track became June 2021 single “So U Kno”—an insidious, addictive banger that’s a cornerstone of the Russells’ debut album as Overmono. It’s an anecdote that reveals a great deal about the brothers’ practical mindset and prodigious abilities. Veterans of the UK dance scene (Tom, the elder Russell, released techno as Truss, while Ed put out drum ’n’ bass as Tessela), the Welsh-raised producers combine for something special here. *Good Lies* is an extraordinary electronic record: a genre-defying set glistening with purpose, poise, and dance-floor delirium. “The main anchor for the album isn’t genre-based, it’s an emotional place,” Ed tells Apple Music. “It’s a particular emotional sense that we try and achieve with a lot of our music—depending on what mood you’re in on that day, you could interpret that state in a few different ways.” Tom is able to pinpoint the origins to that “emotional ambiguity.” “I think our formative experiences of partying in the Welsh countryside had a massive impact on us,” he says. “When you have the sun going down and the sun coming up, and those emotions of somewhere between euphoria, slight sadness that the night’s coming an end but a real sense of optimism that you’re going into a new day. These sorts of weird crossover points are what we try and find in how we put our music together.” Read on for the brothers’ track-by-track guide. **“Feelings Plain”** Ed Russell: “It was originally going to close the album. We wanted to see if we could make a sort of plainsong piece of music—13th-century church music, where someone would be singing one note over and over and then someone else joins in, and everyone’s singing these cyclical things. But when it all comes together, they start cycling differently and you get this big wash of voices. But we wanted to try and do a sort of R&B take on plainsong—it was one of the songs that had a more conceptual start to it.” Tom Russell: “It was the furthest we’d gotten in terms of direct new avenues that we might explore. It’s a bold statement of intent to start.” **“Arla Fearn”** ER: “When did you first write this bassline, Tom?” TR: “About 1976. No, I think it was about 15 years ago.” ER: “I would tell Tom it’s the best thing he’d ever written. It’s got so much mood and character and just sounds so satisfying to me.” TR: “I know Ed meant it as a compliment but I kept on taking it as a bit of a diss really. But I finally gave in.” ER: “We spent ages processing the drums and then Tom sampled the Geovarn vocal and came up with the insane outro. The track is at 135 BPM, and by the end it’s at 170 BPM, but you never really notice it’s changed—it just flips the vocal into a different spot. We really wanted the album to be a place where tracks would often morph into something completely different. That it’s bubbling over with ideas.” **“Good Lies”** ER: “We went through a phase of trying not to sample every Smerz song because they just had so many good hooks. They’re incredible at writing these top lines that sound straight off early-2000s garage records, but not in a pastiche way. We had the vocal from \[2018 Smerz track\] “No harm” and spent a lot of time chopping it into the phrasing we wanted and creating a hook out of this little section that had jumped out at us. The demo for the instrumental then came together in a day, but there was an 18-month, almost two-year period from writing the demo to coming back and starting to really chip away at it.” **“Good Lies (Outro)”** TR: “When we were writing the ‘Good Lies’ instrumental, we thought we’d see if we could flip it and turn the vibe on its head into something moodier. It’s always going back to that ambiguity with us. There’s something of that in the *Good Lies* title. What constitutes a good lie?” **“Walk Thru Water” (feat. St. Panther)** TR: “Ed was at my studio in February \[2022\], and we were battening down the hatches for Storm Eunice.” ER: “It was this quite nice feeling of, ‘All right, there’s a storm coming, we’ve got loads of snacks and a few drinks, the place to ourselves, and we can’t go anywhere.’ Tom had written these really beautiful chords and I’d kept saying I wanted to do something with them. We got really stoned while the rain was coming down, listening to these chords, and we came across the St. Panther vocal.” TR: “I then started doing the beat on the Pulsar—which is a drum machine that’s quite difficult to tame but on certain things it just works beautifully.” **“Cold Blooded”** TR: “This started out as something quite different. It dawned on us that we’d written this massive IDM tune.” ER: “It was a bit too nice, wasn’t it?” TR: “It was this late-’90s breakdance thing—not really the vibe we should be going for.” ER: “I had this Kindora sample that I’d wanted to use for ages, and then Tom sent me this slowed-down version of ‘Cold Blooded’ with the new drums and I realized it’d be fucking killer. It then became a month of last-minute adjustments, which we sometimes get ourselves into a bit of a hole with. Tweaking everything until the last.” **“Skulled”** ER: “We had the Kelly Erez sample put away into our sample folder. And then we built a drum machine—a copy of a ’70s drum machine called the Syncussion, made by Pearl, the drum kit manufacturer. It \[the Syncussion\] was meant to sound like a normal drum kit, and it sounds so far away from real drums it’s insane. We spent a couple of weeks trying to make our version sound like we’d soldered it not quite right. It has this weird, sort of dry, alien, ’80s vibe to it. Like with all our stuff, it’s processed so heavily.” TR: “Ed has come up with this mad compression chain, which you can basically put any sort of drums into and you get this massive wall of noise.” ER: “I said earlier the best thing Tom has written was the bassline on ‘Arla Fearn,’ but I’ve changed my mind now: It’s the piano outro to ‘Skulled.’ We both loved the idea of the song ending like a classic ballad—a Céline Dion tune.” **“Sugarushhh”** TR: “We liked the idea of trying to shoehorn in a screaming 303 to the album somewhere.” ER: “Tom’s good at doing these quite irregular things that you don’t immediately notice. This, if you actually count it out, is in some weird time signature and it’s cycling every nine bars. It was also really important that we had this abrasive, aggressive 303 line being offset completely with a really beautiful vocal.” **“Calon”** ER: “Tom played me the first iteration of this in the back of a van on the way to a festival in Minehead. We’ve sampled Joe Trufant a few times before and we liked the idea of there being a few familiar voices on the album.” TR: “We then hired a studio in Ibiza and Ed had the idea of making the beat much slower. It became this big, slowed-down house tune—it dropped to something like 110 BPM.” ER: “We were in a US club sound-checking and played through some tunes from the album. Hearing it on the club system we were like, ‘Fuck me!’ It’s this sneaky banger.” **“Is U”** ER: “We’ve both been massive Tirzah fans since the start, and one day the ‘All I want is you’ line from ‘Gladly’ just jumped out of the speaker at us. We then spent ages trying to make the beat on this mono machine we have, which has all these really shit ’80s drum samples. We just mangled them until we had the beat, and then chopped up the vocal to get what we felt was a really strong and more confrontational delivery. Tom then put these lush chords in the breakdown and it opens the track up, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.” TR: “It’s amazing when a track starts to take on a life of its own. Playing this out and seeing the reaction gives me goosebumps every time.” **“Vermonly”** ER: “A lot of our tracks will be written on just one piece of gear and we see what you can do with it. I had bought Tom a synth for his birthday, but when I gave it to him he said he wasn’t going to be in the studio for a few days, so I asked if I could take the synth I had just given him. I sent him a really rough 16-bar loop with the main melodic ideas, and he did the rest, really.” TR: “Tracks like this are really important to us. They might get lost on an EP. It’s not always about writing dance-floor bangers.” **“So U Kno”** ER: “We were doing this mix for fabric and we both knew we wanted a very particular tune in the mix but couldn’t find it. So we basically just thought, ‘Fuck it, it’ll be quicker to write something ourselves.’ I had a chopped-up vocal and a rough beat going, played it to Tom, who went straight over to a Jupiter-6 synth and immediately played the bassline before doing the same with the chords.” **“Calling Out”** TR: “Ed had suggested to try and sample something by slowthai and I managed to find this little \[section\] I really liked from quite an obscure track called ‘Dead Leaves.’ I loved the line ‘I’m like the sun, I rise up and then gone.’ Then we combined it with a CASISDEAD and d’Eon sample and it really started to make sense. I have a tendency to overcomplicate things, but Ed is often able to say, ‘We don’t need that,’ or ‘Change a snare from there to there.’ A tiny idea or decision can make such a huge difference.” ER: “I remember when Tom sent me the chords for the end and I felt like it reminded me of old Radiohead—the perfect way to close the album.”

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

Physical copies at Convulserecords.com

The usual boom-and-bust cycles of growing up -- breaking down, gathering the strength to get up, fumbling hard, doing it all over again - can feel unmooring, to say the least, but, and according to DEBBY FRIDAY, its tragedies and glories need savoring. Losing illusions, gaining expectations; getting deep into the private, soupy kaleidoscope of what’s possible and what’s futile -- GOOD LUCK, her debut, and supernovic, full-length album, is built on welcoming the journey’s complicated drops and mountain highs with something more like grace. Nigerian-born, then an emigré to bits of Canada - from Montreal to Vancouver to Toronto - DEBBY FRIDAY’s roamings through space and time really began when the sun fell. Nightlife was her emancipation from the toughness of home life, and she fell into it, body and soul, totally seduced. Raves til sunrise; house music in unknown basements and warehouses -- the lure of the party was the perfect escape. “I was like a little club rat,” she laughs. Her adoration of the world that it opened for her came in “almost in a sensual way.” Things that feel good sometimes do fall apart, though. In 2017, after DJing for less than a year, her life just sort of imploded. Parties started getting less functional. Nothing was going the way that she wanted it to go. So she gathered her things and embarked on what would turn out to be the first of a few of her coming-of-age stories -- a wave of bildungsromans. “Personal issues: mental health stuff, substance abuse stuff, stupid love;” she lists, but the way DEBBY says it, it seems as if she’s grateful for the valleys she had to walk through in order to see the version of herself we get today. After making the decision to stop herself in her tracks, she pulverized new paths for herself forward. Late-night YouTube tutorials on music production led to an EP, BITCHPUNK, and BITCHPUNK led to her first public performances, and all that gave way to a second EP, DEATH DRIVE. Her art endowed her with the strength she needed to move on. “This is what I was born to do,” she goes. “It came to me so naturally and instinctively. I felt just so clear, focused, and in my power in a way that I’d never felt before up until that point.” So what does it take to hone that power? Discipline - routines, rituals; an MFA, practices of writing and filmmaking, and music-making that guide a person from one day to the next - but something close to mysticism, too. DEBBY’S serious, long-term relationships to the study of astrology, psychology, and philosophy allow her to move through the world, relate to others, and get closer to what’s inside her. She believes in what emerges. She believes in making the unconscious, conscious. She wants to be in dialogue with the darkness. It’s why GOOD LUCK works like such a study in entropy. On the surface, you’ll hear hints of Santigold’s dub dazzle, the MIDI-crush of Death Grips, but less obviously the plaintiveness of directors like Eric Rohmer, or the grotesque decadence of later-era Sylvia Plath. (Juno Award and Polaris Prize-nominated composer Graham Walsh adds a sort of heft and pull to the genre-flexibility on parade here: think of it a little like Sevdaliza meets FKA Twigs.) Few do it like her, though. If lucid, acid housey, high-BPM tracks like “I GOT IT” - accompanied by Chris Vargas of Pelada / Uñas - has her cocksure and vainglorious about her “big ol ego” and “red blood libido,” a crushing track like “LET U DOWN” (“I been your Brutus, your Judas / I’ve been so wrecked and so ruthless”) doesn’t hesitate to explore the lower ends of the emotional register. She’s drawn to certain keys and moods (the brooding D and F minors, for instance, are all over this album) to suggest melancholia and darkness. However, the lead single, “SO HARD TO TELL,” sees FRIDAY totally shed all of her signature industrial tropes, to deliver a completely out-of-pocket, yet totally assured, falsetto pop song. Sounding like little that has come before in her catalog, this track is a crucial signifier in FRIDAY’S essential development. The album GOOD LUCK is being co-released with a short film of the same name, co-directed by FRIDAY and Nathan De Paz Habib (past work includes Eroica, based on Chino Amobi's novel of the same name). It’s a story of individuation. It’s a love story about a woman and her masked beloved, but outside of the accompanying-but-stand-alone visual, it’s all a willing, yearning investigation into what goes on behind the veil of sadness, of cruelty. Because knowing the darkness is the only way to understand the light, but also the greys and the blues and the in-between states. FRIDAY’s explorations in GOOD LUCK -- delving down into the muck of nuance - are a kind of courage.

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

“I\'ve always written from a place of fiction,” Andy Shauf tells Apple Music. “When I was making \[2016’s\] *The Party*, I was going to a lot of parties. When I was writing \[2020’s\] *The Neon Skyline*, I was drinking at a bar called the Skyline. It feels now like it was a bit unimaginative, but I think I was trying to do the thing that people tell you to do, which is write what you know. I came to this realization that if I want to take a step forward, I need to write something that\'s outside of writing what I know.” Like its forebears, *Norm*, the Toronto singer-songwriter\'s eighth solo LP, takes a magnifying glass to its central character, but its stories are told through a series of narrators. That’s partly because when Shauf started writing it, there wasn’t a concept at all. “I was going to call the album *Norm*, and it was just going to be a normal album—like a normal batch of songs,” he says. But once he wrote “Telephone,” the seed for a storyline was planted. “It was about someone longing to be on the phone,” he says. “Then it flips to show the perspective of this person looking in the window while they\'re calling, and it has this stalker vibe to it. I just made a mental note that this could be a character and I could call them Norm.” With the help of a friend—Shauf writes, plays all the instruments, and records on his own—he sewed the narrative together, coloring in the detail of Norm’s increasing creepiness while constantly in God’s presence. (Shauf was raised Christian in small-town Saskatchewan, but doesn’t consider himself religious now.) “I think Norm is a pretty normal guy,” he says. “He\'s a bit of a fuck-up, and he has a side of him that\'s really disconnected from reality. And he\'s got some pretty serious problems. He\'s introduced very relatably, but at a certain point there\'s a shift that can change your perspective on everything that\'s happened before.” Here Shauf talks through how Norm’s story takes shape, track by track. **“Wasted on You”** “I was reading the Old Testament and looking for stories where I could flip the perspective so that God was narrating them, so that you heard this sort of imperfect God explaining his side of it. I was picturing this conversation between God and Jesus. My familiarity with Christianity—or just cartoon Christianity—made me feel like this was the most spoon-fed, \'Here\'s God as a narrator’ story, but I like that it\'s a little bit vague.” **“Catch Your Eye”** “This is the first introduction to Norm. We\'re in his head, and we are just getting a picture of that longing. It\'s a gentle introduction. I think by the end of the song, you\'re going to realize that something is a little bit off with what he\'s doing.” **“Telephone”** “I wrote it kind of as a joke, where it was the pandemic and I was trying to connect with someone and we were talking on the telephone a lot. And there was a lot of running out of things to talk about. I was starting to dread it. I decided I would write a song that at first seemed like I really loved the telephone, and by the end of it, it just had a lot of questions or it just turned on its side. I think you could still read that song as a love song—maybe if you aren\'t paying attention for the second half.” **“You Didn\'t See”** “I needed to have a point where the relationship between Norm and God was explained. You get a glimpse into why Norm is getting away with what he\'s doing, to a certain extent, while he\'s under the eye of God—so this is a song from God\'s perspective.” **“Paradise Cinema”** “You go from God\'s perspective of Norm standing behind a tree and God\'s just continuing to keep an eye on him to this. It\'s a lazy…maybe it\'s a Sunday afternoon stroll to the cinema—for more than one person.” **“Norm”** “Originally I wrote it about Norm standing in line to buy a sandwich, and then I realized that the story in that song sucked. But it was also because in any story involving God, I think there\'s the need for a divine intervention of sorts, or God needs to make himself known. So on one instance, he helped Norm, and on this instance, he needs to tell Norm that he\'s no longer okay with what he is doing. And at the same time, it\'s just Norm grazing around, watching some *Price Is Right*.” **“Halloween Store”** “I thought that my next record was going to be a disco record. At a certain point, I just realized that I was making—I don\'t know—like cartoon music. It was like I was becoming a caricature of myself making this weird, throwback...cartoon music is the best way I can say it. But this song, I wrote it with those songs and it\'s got this super-fast triangle and like a four-on-the-floor, dancy beat. I had the first two verses of it for a long time, and it just stuck around until I found a place for it in the Norm universe. This is the point in the story where the thing that Norm has been waiting for is finally happening, and he\'s not even sure if it\'s happening.” **“Sunset”** “It’s the furthering of the event in ‘Halloween Store’—it\'s too good to be true, and it\'s too easy. I wanted it to be so simple that you\'re wondering why it\'s even possible, or it\'s a terrible thing that\'s happening and it\'s the result of something that was not intended to be terrible or was not intended to have any weight at all, which is what happens in the next song—the flipped perspective of it.” **“Daylight Dreaming”** “This was the hardest part of the record for me. This is essentially someone just trying to play a joke on someone else, and there\'s history between these people, and there\'s a history of this joke specifically. But this time it turns into something that\'s completely unintended and gives Norm his opportunity.” **“Long Throw”** “We\'re sticking with the same perspective. I struggled with this story in how to tie it together, and I had this weird thing happen where I was watching *Mulholland Drive*, looking for some inspiration, and a certain scene in the movie froze. I watched it for about five minutes thinking that I was watching an insane creative choice, and I took a lot of meaning from it in the plot of the movie. It made me realize that this story has an ending that doesn\'t really need to be in the lyrics or in the story at all. And it\'s a very simple story, and this song is the ending of it, where the third perspective is just not getting a phone call.” **“Don\'t Let It Get to You”** “I was writing a lot with the synthesizer, and just trying to use atmosphere as much as possible. This song is a summary of the story, where there\'s a lot of chance happenings, certain decisions affecting other decisions. This is the sentiment of a cruel God just saying, \'All these things happen and you just can\'t let it get to you.\' But something that I was trying to do with this record a little bit more was to let almost an improvisation guide melodies. I would play a line and then that would be the line, instead of writing a melody. I would just play it until the moment was gone, and then I\'d recreate that and maybe harmonize to it.” **“All of My Love”** “This is kind of all three perspectives on the record. If there\'s a theme to the story, it\'s this idea of a really flawed love or a really flawed perspective of what love is or what love could be. Each of these perspectives are asking the same question. It\'s essentially the same structure as the first song, musically, but it\'s shifted to a very dark version of that. If the story of Norm is showed to you in a gradually darkening way, the music is doing the same thing—where at first, it sounds really nice, and probably by the second half of the second side, the music has also gone a bit sideways—it\'s got a sinister element to it.”

Anyone who’s liked Avalon Emerson’s club music should find the sparkling indie pop of *& the Charm* appealing. The beats are light, the feel is dreamy, and her writing and vocal performance capture the conversational directness that makes great indie pop so casually disarming (“Tell me I got more time/When all my friends are having daughters/Beautiful just like them, of course,” she sings on “Sandrail Silhouette”). But the album’s deeper strength is her ability to explore airy moods through music planted firmly on the ground, whether it’s the midtempo disco of “Astrology Poisoning” or the jazzy swirl of “A Dam Will Always Divide.” Sweet, oxygenating, and genuine.

*** OUT WORLDWIDE ON JANUARY 27th, 2023! *** London group The Tubs return to Trouble In Mind with their hotly anticipated full-length album entitled “Dead Meat”. The band were formed in 2018 from the ashes of beloved UK post-punk band Joanna Gruesome by former members Owen 'O' Williams and George 'GN' Nicholls. By incorporating elements of post-punk, traditional British folk, and guitar jangle seasoned by nonchalant Cleaners From Venus-influenced pop hooks and contemporary antipodean indie bands (Twerps/Goon Sax, et al). “Dead Meat” is resplendent in hi-fidelity strum & thrum, incorporating fleeting elements of post-punk and indie jangle, but the group’s penchant for trad British folk & Canterbury folk-rock takes a noticeable, caffeinated step forward. Echoes of Fairport Convention’s decidedly English chime cross swords with singer Owen Williams’ lyrics directing Bryan Ferry’s “thinking man’s libertine” persona into a more dolorous outlook. Many songs (like “Round The Bend” and “Duped”) soar with an urgent strum under Williams’ acerbic lyrics, recalling a younger fiery Richard Thompson. They languish in an aching, bitter resignation (of both the situations described & the protagonist’s place in it), particularly near the album’s second half. Others like the previously released “I Don’t Know How It Works”, “Two Person Love” and “Illusion” (re-presented here as “Illusion Pt. II” and all rerecorded from their original 7-inch versions) up the urgency, implying that the journey for the person described in each tune is not over & may be even more desperate than before. The band has never been tighter & more dynamic, often imperceptibly ratcheting up the tension, an extra guitar strum overdubbed, a barely audible organ/synth cranking under a chorus or bridge, or unexpected backups from current Ex-Vöid (and ex-Joanna Gruesome) vocalist Lan McArdle. The Tubs are poised to take over your stereo - there’s no point in resisting. “Dead Meat” is released on CD, cassette & LP (a limited “British Steel” silver vinyl version is available while supplies last) on January 13th, 2023.

In an interview about his 2023 album of melancholy synth-pop, *Fantasy*, Anthony Gonzalez (aka M83) said he didn’t want to talk about modern life so much as he wanted to avoid it. The irony is that since the release of 2011’s *Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming*, few artists have had as big of an impact on indie electronic music’s passage into the mainstream. Where 2016’s *Junk* explored the playful side of his ’80s obsessions and 2019’s *Knife + Heart* soundtracked the erotic, threatening side, the anthems of *Fantasy* tap into the heroism that has made his narrow vision so broadly appealing, from the tight New Wave vibe of “Amnesia” to the unsettling grandeur of “Dismemberment Bureau.” His nostalgia is escape, yes—but it’s also rebellion.

A brand new album of unreleased material from Black Country, New Road, recorded at the historic music venue Bush Hall, in London at a series of unique shows at the end of December 2022. Mixed by John Parish and mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, the new album and material marks a new chapter for the band as a six-piece. Fresh from the success of ‘Ants From Up There’ and with a full touring schedule ahead of them in 2022, Black Country, New Road aka Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Georgia Ellery, Luke Mark, Tyler Hyde and Charlie Wayne, wrote an entire new set of material to perform. Playing to swelling crowds at festivals, including triumphant performances at Primavera, Green Man and Fuji Rock, they entered a new musical phase as they navigated and developed songs that were just weeks old. They also toured the US and headlined two sold-out shows in New York. These new performances have seen the band garner widespread support from across the board with Rolling Stone UK describing their Green Man set as "unmissable", and the Guardian going on to say that they were "greeted by something close to rapture." These performances have also attracted a profile from the NY Times, multiple glowing live reviews, and a nomination for Best Live Performer at the AIM Independent Music Awards 2022. NME **** "a marvellous return from one of our greatest bands” Gigwise **** “truly cements them as one of the greats of our generation.”

“It was very easy to do,” Joanna Sternberg tells Apple Music of making their second full-length. “I was having fun and as comfortable as could be. It felt like the right thing.” Recorded over five days in the cartoonist/singer-songwriter’s native New York—with indie guitar hero Matt Sweeney producing—*I’ve Got Me* certainly sounds like it came easy. But Sternberg—a virtuoso musician who studied jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music—has a way of making difficult things sound simple and obvious, whether it’s self-acceptance (the huglike title track), resilience (“Mountains High”), or playing every instrument here. Yet, somehow, every line feels like it might weigh a ton, too. “It’s hard for me to get up the courage to show people one of my songs,” Sternberg says. “I have to really, really, really, really consider if I show people. I haven’t shown people a lot of them, but I have, like, 200.” **“I’ve Got Me”** “It’s kind of just about what it says it’s about—being very isolated and not having any friends. I think it’s kind of the theme of the whole album, because writing songs and stuff is what got me to have people wanting to be my friend. I mean, the song is about not feeling lonely—like I stopped being upset about being alone.” **“I Will Be With You”** “I just wrote the song while I was waiting for an orchestra rehearsal to start. I was at the piano, just having fun. I was trying to write an Irish love ballad. I wrote it in, like, three minutes; it was fine.” **“Mountains High”** “I was listening to lots of Cajun music with accordion in it, where they’re repeating accordion patterns. In my building, there’s a practice room in the basement because it’s artist housing. And after 11, you could go in as long as you want, so I would just go in and try to write songs. And I wrote this song in one of the rooms—just came up with the melody, and it kind of just wrote itself very fast.” **“I’ll Make You Mine”** “My mom wanted me to put that on the record, so I did. But that was one of the first songs I wrote, because I just kind of made it up on the piano. I don’t really like the song very much because it’s cheesy, but she said I had to put it on the record.” **“Stockholm Syndrome”** “I thought it kind of sounded like something that reminds me of middle school and the music everyone liked in middle school, and I didn’t like it. So, I didn’t think it was even good. But then all my friends were loving it. So, then I just forced myself to get used to it, and now I like it. I’m very lucky to play my songs, and I love to do it, but that song took a while to write because I thought it was really, really annoying and embarrassing. Then I just kind of accepted it.” **“The Love I Give”** “Sometimes, when I’m walking around, I come up with melodies. My producer Matt Sweeney really encourages me to take walks, so I can come up with melodies. So, that’s really, really helpful that he does that, because I forget to do it. I wrote that song while I was just walking to the train, and I just wrote it really fast. It was just about being around people who are hurtful to you, but you don’t want to change who you are.” **“She Dreams”** “I wrote that song when I was asleep. I wrote it in a dream, and I woke up, and it was all written. It was the only time that’s ever happened. And I think it was the first song I ever wrote. It’s pretty.” **“The Song”** “I kind of wrote it based on the first melody in Dvořák’s *New World Symphony*, of the English horn solo. It was a really nice melody, and then I just went off of that. That was all I needed to just write the whole thing.”

Margo Price’s fourth album is a record born from journeys. There’s the physical one, in which the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and her husband/collaborator, the musician Jeremy Ivey, traveled first to South Carolina to focus on writing new material, much of which made it onto *Strays*, then to California’s Topanga Canyon to record the final LP. And, perhaps more consequently, there’s the spiritual journey, as Price and Ivey spent part of their writing retreat taking intentional, exploratory psilocybin trips in an effort to tap more deeply into their own creative wells. Accordingly, *Strays* is Price’s most expansive, adventurous LP yet, employing an intricate, far-reaching soundscape of rock, psychedelia, ’70s pop, and subtle flourishes of her earlier brand of left-of-center country. The shift in sound didn’t shift Price’s focus, though, which is, as always, crafting songs that stand the test of time. “Sonically, it’s a little bit different,” she tells Apple Music. “But if you strip away all the instruments, what you have left at the end of the day is still a song that’s great that you can play on the piano or guitar and it’ll stand up on its own.” Opener “Been to the Mountain” is part origin story, part battle cry, as Price chronicles the many roles she’s played—a mother, a child, a waitress, and a consumer, among others—before defiantly declaring, “I’ve been called every name in the book, honey/Go on, take your best shot.” The Sharon Van Etten collaboration “Radio” is Price at her poppiest, pairing melodic hooks with frank observations on womanhood and motherhood. “County Road” grapples with mortality and pays tribute to late drummer Ben Eyestone, envisioning the afterlife as an escape from earthly troubles. And closer “Landfill” opens with a gut punch of a lyric—“I could build a landfill of dreams I deserted”—before ultimately ending the LP on a hopeful note. Below, Price shares insight into several key tracks on *Strays*. **“Been to the Mountain”** “This was one of the very first songs that flowed out the next day after we came down from our mushroom trip. I just really wanted to incorporate poetry. I wanted it to be really psychedelic, and I wanted this album to be able to serve as a record that people could put on if they were going to maybe dabble in psychedelics. I think it can be a companion piece in that regard. I feel like whenever I have taken a psilocybin trip, there’s always that moment right before everything starts happening in your brain and your body, and you feel like you’re about to go on a roller coaster. That’s what I wanted—to capture that feeling.” **“Radio” (feat. Sharon Van Etten)** “The melody to the song came to me when I was walking in the woods. I just started singing the melody and the words into my phone and made a little voice memo. I got back home, picked up the guitar, and I was really proud of what I had, but I really wanted the label to be excited and to trust in my ability to write a pop song. So, I said that it was written with somebody I had planned to co-write with, and it just didn’t happen. But I did send it to Sharon Van Etten, and I was like, ‘Does this need a bridge? Do you like this song?’ And she’s like, ‘I absolutely love this song. It’s incredible. I don’t think it needs a bridge, but I would change these lines.’ She began co-writing on it and then put all those incredible harmonies and just added her touch to it. I think she’s one of the greatest writers that’s currently out there right now. I love her and I think everything she touches gets this beautiful, I don’t know, chrome feeling to it. There’s just a little bit of magic in everything that she worked on.” **“County Road”** “This is a song \[for late drummer Ben Eyestone\] that means a lot to me and my band collectively. We truthfully all have to hold back tears when we play it; we just miss him so much. But we know that he is still around, and sometimes we’ll feel his energy when we’re playing that song. It was just really tragic how he passed. A lot of things were at play. I think the American healthcare system and a lot of things just worked against him. He died \[from cancer\] so tragically and so suddenly. But at the same time, it was pre-pandemic. It was before everything changed in our world in so many ways during that year of 2020. It’s a dark song. We say things like, ‘Maybe I’m lucky I’m already dead.’ But really, I think that there is this freedom that has to come with death. You’re not suffering here and going through all these incredibly difficult life lessons.” **“Lydia”** “It’s strange sometimes how you have this premonition that you don’t want to come true, or you don’t think it’s going to go this way. I never saw this *Handmaid’s Tale* future. I thought things were fucked up, but they weren’t this bad. That song was written after walking around Vancouver and seeing a lot of people there that were struggling with opioid addictions. They all seemed like they had this vacant, ghostly quality, and so did the city and the area of town that we were in. There was a methadone clinic really close by, and the venue owners literally told us, ‘Be really careful. There’s a lot of needles out the back door. You guys go that way.’ It was just a really heavy mood. While it has pieces of me and little vignettes of who I’ve been at times in my life, I think this is definitely a character study. It was a person that I created, something that was fictional but that is ultimately a portrait of what it might be to be living in the lower class and struggling in America right now.” **“Landfill”** “I think we go through such wild territory throughout the album, and we’re definitely getting some high highs and some low lows. I really just wanted to end the album with a little bit of clarity and a little bit of peace. I wanted the last word that I say on this album to be ‘love.’ I wrote that song also in South Carolina, and it was at the very end of our trip, after we’d been there for seven or eight days. We were trying to find this abandoned lighthouse and passed a landfill on the way. I just started thinking about the metaphor of how your mind can be that way; you have so many memories and difficult things that you bury and push down. But I wanted it to still be hopeful.”

Produced by Margo Price and Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty), Strays was primarily recorded in the summer of 2021, during a week spent at Fivestar Studio in California’s Topanga Canyon. While the songwriting began the summer prior – during a six-day, mushroom-filled trip that Price and her husband Jeremy Ivey took to South Carolina – it was amongst the hallucinatory hills of western Los Angeles that Price experienced the best recording sessions of her career. Instilled with a newfound confidence and comfortability to experiment and explore like never before, Margo Price and her longtime band of Pricetags channeled their telepathic abilities into songs that span rock n roll, psychedelic country, rhythm & blues, and glistening, iridescent pop. Having been together since the days before Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, her 2016 debut that Rolling Stone named one of the Greatest Country Albums of All Time, Price and her band tracked live in the same room, simultaneously expanding upon and completely exploding the notions of every other album they have made together. With additional vocals from Sharon Van Etten and Lucius, plus guitar from Mike Campbell, strings, synthesizers and a breadth of previously untapped sounds, Strays is also Price’s most collaborative record yet. “I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating,” says Margo Price. “You get stuck in the same patterns of thinking, the same loops of addiction. But there comes a point where you just have to say, ‘I'm going to be here, I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm not going to put so much stock into checking the boxes for everyone else.’ I feel more mature in the way that I write now, I’m on more than just a search for large crowds and accolades. I’m trying to find what my soul needs.”

LA-based, Dallas-raised artist Liv.e, announces her sophomore album 'Girl In The Half Pearl' due February 10th via In Real Life. 'Girl In The Half Pearl' seizes on both the creative and personal liberation Liv.e has experienced in the time since her 2020 debut album 'Couldn't Wait To Tell You...'. The album's 17 tracks are a document of self-examination, as she works through realizations prompted by grief and grapples with the dynamics of her role in the relationships in her life. Building upon the foundation she laid with CWTTY, 'Girl In The Half Pearl' bares her process of growth, forgiveness and reclamation of her sense of womanhood across an immersive soundscape. The album's artistic shifts developed during her time experimenting with live performance in London earlier this year while under residency at London's Laylow. The 24-year-old artist first garnered attention with her 2017 EP, FRANK, and 2018's Hoopdreams EP. Over the past year, Liv.e shared the standalone Mndsgn-produced single "Bout It," along with a COLORS performance and released 'CWTTY+', the deluxe version of her 2020 critically-acclaimed debut album. She's since performed alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ravyn Lenae. Liv.e's unique sensibilities have also caught the eye of the fashion world, marked by an appearance in a Miu Miu ad campaign photographed by Tyrone Lebon. Most recently, she was featured on the new Mount Kimbie single titled "a deities encore."

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.