It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”
At just 25 years old, with four solo studio albums and three as guitarist for North Carolina band Wednesday under his belt, MJ Lenderman already seems like an all-timer. The vivid, arch songwriting, the swaying between reverence and irreverence for his forebears, steeped in modern culture while still sounding timeless—he evokes the easy comfort of a well-worn favorite and the butterflies of a new relationship with someone who is going to have a massive, rich, and argued-about discography for decades. The songs go down easy but are dark around the edges, with down-home strings and lap steel adorning tales of jerking off into showers and the existential loneliness of a smartwatch. But in a fun way. And just as 2021’s “Knockin” both referenced erstwhile golfer John Daly’s cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and lifted its chorus for good measure, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” honors The Band’s classic while rendering it redundant. But album closer “Bark at the Moon” represents Lenderman’s blending of sad-sack character sketches and meta classic-rock references in its final form: “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon.’” Then he punctuates the line with an “Awoo/Bark at the moon,” not to the tune of the Ozzy song, but to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Packing that many jokes into half a verse is impressive enough—more so that the impact is even more heartbreaking than it is funny.
If there were any remaining doubts as to hip-hop’s MVP, consider the decision stamped: Kendrick Lamar officially won 2024. There were whispers that Compton’s finest was working on an album in the wake of his feud with Drake, a once-in-a-generation beef that kept jaws dropped for months. (Perhaps you’ve heard of a little song called “Not Like Us,” an immediate entry into the canon of all-time great diss tracks.) After a sold-out celebration at the Kia Forum, an armful of Grammy nods and streaming records, and the headlining slot at next year’s Super Bowl, Lamar ties up his biggest year yet with a bow with his sixth album, *GNX*, the most legitimately surprising surprise drop since *BEYONCÉ* in 2013. Named for his beloved classic Buick, *GNX* finds Kendrick wielding a hatchet he’s by no means ready to bury, still channeling this summer’s cranked-to-11 energy. On “wacced out murals,” he’s riding around listening to Anita Baker, plotting on several downfalls: “It used to be fuck that n\*\*\*a, but now it’s plural/Fuck everybody, that’s on my body.” (Yes, there’s a nod to his Super Bowl drama with Lil Wayne.) If you’ve been holding your breath for Jack Antonoff to link with Mustard, wait no more—the seemingly odd couple share production credits on multiple tracks, the explosive “tv off” among them. Still, K.Dot keeps you guessing: It’s not quite 12 tracks of straight venom over world-conquering West Coast beats. SZA helps cool things down on the Luther Vandross-sampling “luther,” while Lamar snatches back a borrowed title on “heart pt. 6” to remember the early days of TDE: “Grinding with my brothers, it was us against them, no one above us/Bless our hearts.” He cycles through past lives over a flip of 2Pac’s “Made N\*\*\*\*z” on “reincarnated” before getting real with his father about war, peace, addiction, and ego death, and on “man at the garden,” he outlines his qualifications for the position of GOAT. Here’s another bullet point to add to that CV: On *GNX*, Lamar still surprises while giving the people exactly what they want.
When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”
The LA-by-way-of-Miami duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin pick up where they left things on their debut, 2021’s *Mercurial World*, and make everything just a bit bigger. Opener “She Looked Like Me!” begins innocently enough, with hushed vocals from Tenenbaum backed by twinkling keys and a buzzing bass synth. Before long, though, massive drum hits give the song an unrelenting pulse, blending the energy of a hyperpop anthem with the rise-and-fall restraint of a classic-rock song. “Image” is a disco-inspired cut that dances around synths that speed up and slow down according to their own whimsy, as Tenenbaum’s voice floats effortlessly above the fray. “What\'s the best you’ve got?/I forgot all my common sense/I need all the common sense/Time to start the clock from the top,” she sings, letting the feel-good vibes of the club-ready instrumental imbue her abstract lyrics with visceral meaning. Even when the duo concoct songs that fear the future or suggest wariness at where the world is headed, the jams suggest that the AI apocalypse will still feature plenty of dancing.
Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.
Forget song of the summer—2024’s undisputed album of the summer (northern hemisphere version) arrived in early June with a slime-green album cover and wall-to-wall bangers that would launch Charli xcx’s career to stratospheric new heights. (Cue news anchors worldwide grappling with the sociopolitical ramifications of “being brat.”) For years, the self-directed English artist enjoyed a reputation buzzier than “cult favorite” yet not quite “main pop girl,” but with the release of her sixth studio album, she hadn’t just captured the zeitgeist—she’d become it. If you didn’t see it coming, well, neither did Charli. “I really was preparing for this album to be for my fanbase only, and not really break outside the walls of that at all,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe with typical candor. Nevertheless, she presented the concept to her label with a manifesto she’d written—things she’d wanted to say since 2016’s paradigm-shifting *Vroom Vroom* EP. “‘On this record there’s going to be no traditional radio songs, because we don’t live in that world now,’” she told them. “This fanbase I have built is so hungry for me and my peers and our slightly-left world of pop/dance music—they’re hungry for us to succeed. That doesn’t mean that we have to do any pandering to any other side of the industry. We just have to do it for them because they’ve championed us for so long, and that’s all we need to light a fire.” Not content to rest while that fire’s still burning, Charli’s also committed to single-handedly keeping the remix industry afloat. You could call the full-length remix album yet another shrewd marketing move, though the project was in the works well before *BRAT* blew up. Here, a cross-generational who’s who of cool kids mingles in the smoking section of fall’s most exclusive party, where NYC garage-rock legends rub elbows with genuine pop divas and mystical Swedish rappers. And for all *BRAT*’s messy rawness regarding the complications of being a woman in the industry, the remix album brings together a slick-talking Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande at her glitchiest, Robyn flexing her ’90s bona fides, Tinashe basking in her own long-awaited shine, and naturally, the Lorde remix that broke the internet. Brat summer is dead. Long live brat summer!
On Doechii’s 2024 release, the Tampa-born rapper showcases the blend of clever rhymes with deep, philosophical musings that have punctuated early releases like 2020’s *Oh the Places You\'ll Go* mixtape and 2022’s *she / her / black bitch* EP. Lead cut “STANKA POOH” finds the Top Dawg Entertainment artist wrestling with her artistic mortality and role as a Black woman in music. She raps: “Let’s start the story backwards/I’m dead, she’s dead, just another Black Lives Mattered/And if I die today I die a bastard/TikTok rapper, part-time YouTube actor.” Obviously, Doechii aims to be bigger than viral clips and TV shows so small they can fit on your computer screen. On *Alligator Bites Never Heal*, Doechii asserts herself as one of rap’s most impressive bar-for-bar MCs. “DENIAL IS A RIVER” is a classic narrative cut in the style of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” while “NISSAN ALTIMA” is an electro-rap thriller designed to keep the dance floor hot and heart rates up. She sums it up simply enough when she raps: “All beef gets smoked/I’m a real fly bitch, you in coach.”
As someone who invited fame and courted infamy, first with inflammatory albums like *Wolf* and later with his flamboyant fashion sense via GOLF WANG, Tyler Okonma is less knowable than most stars in the music world. While most celebrities of his caliber and notoriety either curate their public lives to near-plasticized extremes or become defined by tabloid exploits, the erstwhile Odd Futurian chiefly shares what he cares to via his art and the occasional yet ever-quotable interview. As his Tyler, The Creator albums pivoted away from persona-building and toward personal narrative, as on the acclaimed *IGOR* and *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, his mystique grew grandiose, with the undesirable side effect of greater speculation. The impact of fan fixation plays no small part on *CHROMAKOPIA*, his seventh studio album and first in more than three years. Reacting to the weirdness, opening track “St. Chroma” finds Tyler literally whispering the details of his upbringing, while lead single “Noid” more directly rages against outsiders who overstep both online and offline. As on his prior efforts, character work plays its part, particularly on “I Killed You” and the two-hander “Hey Jane.” Yet the veil between truth and fiction feels thinner than ever on family-oriented cuts like “Like Him” and “Tomorrow.” Lest things get too damn serious, Tyler provocatively leans into sexual proclivities on “Judge Judy” and “Rah Tah Tah,” both of which should satisfy those who’ve been around since the *Goblin* days. When monologue no longer suits, he calls upon others in the greater hip-hop pantheon. GloRilla, Lil Wayne, and Sexyy Red all bring their star power to “Sticky,” a bombastic number that evolves into a Young Buck interpolation. A kindred spirit, it seems, Doechii does the most on “Balloon,” amplifying Tyler’s energy with her boisterous and profane bars. Its title essentially distillable to “an abundance of color,” *CHROMAKOPIA* showcases several variants of Tyler’s artistry. Generally disinclined to cede the producer’s chair to anyone else, he and longtime studio cohort Vic Wainstein execute a musical vision that encompasses sounds as wide-ranging as jazz fusion and Zamrock. His influences worn on stylishly cuffed sleeves, Neptunes echoes ring loudly on the introspective “Darling, I” while retro R&B vibes swaddle the soapbox on “Take Your Mask Off.”
It’s not easy being ahead of your time: You have to wait years for the world to catch up. Such was the case when an 18-year-old Chief Keef followed up his anthemic major-label debut (2012’s *Finally Rich*) with a pair of self-released 2013 mixtapes (August’s *Bang, Pt. 2* and October’s *Almighty So*) that sounded obscure in comparison, prompting many a claim that he’d fallen off as quickly as he’d gotten on. These days, you can hear echoes of both projects everywhere, in particular *Almighty So*, the better of the two. You might argue that the slurry, intuitive style which has dominated the past decade of rap began here. Eleven long years later, the project’s sequel arrives after a half decade of teasing. (Keef previewed *Almighty So 2*’s initial cover art way back in 2019.) Hip-hop’s reinvented itself a dozen times over in that time span, perhaps the only constant being Keef’s enduring influence. On *Almighty So 2*, the 28-year-old veteran sounds as if he’s well aware of just how tall his legacy looms. “I done been through so much smoke to where I couldn’t even see myself,” he raps in his oft-copied swing on “Treat Myself” before busting out a classic Sosa-ism: “Diamonds shining off my charm, I think I Christmas tree’d myself!” He spits fire and brimstone over sinister church choirs on “Jesus,” puffs out his chest on the soulful “Runner,” and offers up the most demented Scarface impression since Future circa 2011 on “Tony Montana Flow.” And on “Believe,” the former teenage phenom is now a man who’s done some soul-searching in his time off from shaping the sound of modern rap.
The musician born Josh Tillman chose the title for his sixth album in a decidedly Father John Misty kind of way: He found the Sanskrit word in a novel by Bruce Wagner, who shares with the musician a certain impish LA mysticism. Mahāśmaśāna translates to “great cremation ground,” so it’s no surprise to find the singer-songwriter in “what’s it all mean?” mode, trawling tragicomic corners of the American Southwest in search of answers about life, death, and humanity. After trying his hand at big-band jazz on 2022’s *Chloë and the Next 20th Century*, Tillman returns to the big, sweeping ’70s-style pop rock that’s earned him a place among his generation’s most intriguing songwriters. He channels Leonard Cohen’s *Death of a Ladies’ Man* on the sprawling title track, whose swooning orchestration and ambitious lyrics take stock of, well, everything. “She Cleans Up” tells a rollicking tale involving female aliens, high-dollar kimonos, and rabbits with guns, and on dystopian power ballad “Screamland,” he offers an all-American refrain: “Stay young/Get numb/Keep dreaming.”
Listening to Adrianne Lenker’s music can feel like finding an old love letter in a library book: somehow both painfully direct and totally mysterious at the same time, filled with gaps in logic and narrative that only confirm how intimate the connection between writer and reader is. Made with a small group in what one imagines is a warm and secluded room, *Bright Future* captures the same folksy wonder and open-hearted intensity of Big Thief but with a slightly quieter approach, conjuring visions of creeks and twilights, dead dogs (“Real House”) and doomed relationships (“Vampire Empire”) so vivid you can feel the humidity pouring in through the screen door. She’s vulnerable enough to let her voice warble and crack and confident enough to linger there for as long as it takes to get her often devastating emotional point across. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more,” she sings on “Free Treasure.” Believe her.
Chat Pile’s sludgy mix of nu metal and ’90s underground rock isn’t anything new, but it’s hard to imagine it existing so comfortably at any other time. Part of it’s their willingness to traverse what in another era would’ve been uncrossable cultural lines: Pledging your allegiance to the funny, post-punk surrealism of a band like Pere Ubu (“Camcorder”) at the same time as the single-entendre misery of Korn (“Funny Man”), for example. If metal is, on some level, guitar-country, Chat Pile is firmly set in its rhythm section, which is as rumbling and inescapable as the power lines and strip-mined hills of the Middle America outside their window, leaving the guitars primarily to peel paint. Where guys this misanthropic might’ve been considered social liabilities in their past (or at least dangers to their parents and church youth group), now they sound content to stay in their rooms and pig out on memes about the world they’ve always known was in ruin. “Tape” is the peak here not because it’s the hardest but because it’s the funkiest, whatever funk means to bands like this. Forget alienation—they’re laughing.
The idea of method acting is that you “become” the character you’re playing and the lines between self and acting dissolve. On Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, she’s been considering how that relates to her own work. “There’s a parallel between not acting anymore and my relationship with music and writing and performing,” the London singer-songwriter says. “I don’t really feel like I do a performance, so I don’t really feel like I’m trying to be someone else. That’s why I find performing quite challenging sometimes because I just have to be myself on stage; there’s no costume or masks that I put on.” Maybe that’s why on *My Method Actor* things are getting a bit existential. The excitement of her debut—2019’s *Miss Universe*—and the desire to push against it by doing something totally different with 2022 follow-up *PAINLESS* had left her in a jarring place when she and her collaborator, producer Wilma Archer, got into the studio. Writing music was not glamorous, it was simply her job and her life. “It’s a weird one making a third album, because it’s like: ‘What is pushing me to do this?’” she says. “Where is that desire coming from? Where am I going with this? Where am I going to be on the other side of this?” But this is an album that revels in ruminating on these heavy questions, and we hear an artist—and a person—growing as a result. Teeming with beautiful, accomplished melodies, the album waxes and wanes between scuzzier sounds of frustration and something far more polished and freeing. “It’s a journey, but you don’t really know where it’s going,” she says. “But it’s about not worrying too much about the outcome; it’s learning to trust myself, to really listen to myself.” Across *My Method Actor*, Yanya dredges through all the feelings and upheavals, realizing that there might not be a linear, clear-cut happy ending. “Maybe it’s about letting go. Maybe there’ll never be a point where I feel totally comfortable on stage—or even being a person,” she says, laughing. “These transformations and realizations will happen so often you can’t let it upturn your whole world every time. You have to take it as it comes.” Read on as she guides us through that journey, track by track. **“Keep on Dancing”** “It feels like an introduction. It nearly didn’t make it to the album—it was going really well but it kind of hit a wall towards the end where it wasn’t leveling up the way some of the other songs were, so we restructured it. It starts by asking lots of questions, it sets up the tone of the record. There’s a bit of anger, a bit of resentment. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to be clever, it’s more like a natural flow of ideas. It’s an energy.” **“Like I Say (I runaway)”** “I had a really fun time writing over the initial idea that Will \[Archer\] had sent me, making all the bits fall in the right place, picking up on the instinctive harmonies and the rhythm of it. The chorus took us both by surprise—it took a while, it felt like it was gonna be really instant but it kept falling on its face. It’s quite a simple structure but the phrasing of it makes it interesting.” **“Method Actor”** “I felt like I was definitely constructing a character in my head, imagining I was in someone else’s life. It was like you’re a flower on the wall, but you’re the narrator at the same time. Feelings of anxiety, social anxiety…it also feels a bit violent to me. There’s a lot of violent imagery and it sounds a bit aggressive. It’s kind of like a dance in the first verse and then the chorus hits you, the guitar wakes you up. It’s quite visceral. There’s always a kind of release that comes with writing something a bit more aggressive. I try not to be an aggressive person, so maybe this is a nice way of letting it out. It feels a bit cathartic.” **“Binding”** “It started with the guitar loop which you hear first. ‘Binding’ was actually the demo name for this, but it really stuck with us because it sounds like a constant loop, constant binding, something twisting and turning. It was really instantly very pretty, and it was enjoyable trying to come up with melodies. It feels like you’re needing something more, wanting something more—something strong to numb the pain, or something stronger to feel. Like you’re numbing yourself on this weird journey. I always imagine it like you’re in a car, and the road’s going on and on and on—and it’s not necessarily an enjoyable journey.” **“Mutations”** “This one, I always imagine a siren—there’s kind of a warning going out. You’re being told to take cover or escape. There’s an urgency in the music and the message. Before the sunset, before the end of the day, before the lights, you need to find a way to disappear or to hide. It’s dark, but in the song you’re either receiving or sending the message—so you’re trying to help somebody, or they’re trying to help you. So there’s something nice about that. But there’s something sinister about the reality the song is set in—it’s very rhythmic, there’s not very many breaks, it’s tight and enclosed.” **“Ready for Sun (touch)”** “The song itself is quite cinematic—it’s sonically quite different to what’s come before, it’s a bit more modern, less grungy. It’s about being ready to step outside again, ready to be less concealed, more exposed. You wanna feel sun on your skin when you’ve been in the shade too long. I say ‘exposed,’ but also it’s about feeling safe enough to come out into the open. It’s wanting to feel touch again, wanting to feel things again. It’s raw feeling, raw emotion.” **“Call It Love”** “I was thinking about a phoenix bursting into flames. Metamorphosis. There’s a lot of talk about flames and fire in this album, but this one definitely fits with the journey themes of the record too. There’s a deep knowing that it’s OK to trust yourself and what you know to be true. It’s being your own guide. You have a sense of self and, even if it’s blurry, you have a center. The overlap of desire and shame, too—how we sometimes feel ashamed of acting on our desires. So the phoenix comes to mind because it’s about allowing your calling to guide you somewhere, to let that consume you and destroy you so you are born out from the ashes. It’s a bit dramatic. But sonically, it’s a lot more chilled out, there’s a groove to the way the guitars intertwine.” **“Faith’s Late”** “I feel like a lot of the questions I ask are quite intense, so I almost want to avoid it. This one is talking about identity. Even the word ‘faith’ feels quite loaded. It’s about belonging, or not belonging, to somewhere—never feeling like you belong somewhere. Always feeling like you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s also about being disappointed in the state of the world, and sort of wanting to give up. But the string arrangement at the end is particularly beautiful, I think. In contrast to the themes, you’re trying to make something beautiful out of something you’d prefer to avoid. And so there’s still life, there’s still beauty, even continuing out of the mess.” **“Made Out of Memory”** “This has a lighter touch. It has an ’80s pop kind of feel production-wise, but the core lyric is based off someone saying how humans are just made up of memories of other people. So when you’re trying to leave somebody behind or breaking up with somebody, if you’re not seeing someone anymore—even a friend or a family member—it’s kind of hacking off a piece of yourself each time. How do you break up with somebody without breaking up with yourself? There’s an art to that.” **“Just a Western”** “I remember Will sent me the guitar ages ago and I really liked it, but nothing was automatically clicking. But I liked the unusual chord pattern. I was thinking of the old Western movies that would come on daytime TV when I was younger. They’d be black-and-white films, cowboys riding off into the sunset. This song has that imagery in it for me; the sunset, something ending. One of the lyrics that jumps out for me is ‘I won’t call in a favour/Won’t do it for free anymore.’ It’s saying you’re not going to do somebody else’s dirty work for them, you’re stating your own new boundaries.” **“Wingspan”** “We were originally trying to make a full song, and it wasn’t really working in a long-form way. Realizing that the song was maybe a condensed version makes it more impactful. I don’t really write short songs like this. A lot of the lyrics are based on this poetry attempt from a couple years ago—so it was like a puzzle coming together, finally having a place for these words to go. It’s about realizing that you’ve ended up somewhere but it’s a port for another place to take off—are arrivals and departures the same thing?”
Perhaps more so than any other Irish band of their generation, Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums were intrinsically linked to their homeland. Their debut, 2019’s *Dogrel*, was a bolshy, drizzle-soaked love letter to the streets of Dublin, while Brendan Behan-name-checking follow-up *A Hero’s Death* detailed the group’s on-the-road alienation and estrangement from home. And 2022’s *Skinty Fia* viewed Ireland from the complicated perspective of no longer actually being there. On their fourth album, however, Fontaines D.C. have shifted their attention elsewhere. *Romance* finds the five-piece wandering in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Japanese manga classic *Akira*, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film *La Grande Bellezza*, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s *Pusher* films. “We didn’t set out to make a trilogy of albums but that’s sort of what happened,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music of those first three records. “They were such a tight world, and this time we wanted to step outside of it and change it up. A big inspiration for this record was going to Tokyo for the first time. It’s such a visual, neon-filled, supermodern city. It was so inspiring. It brought in all these new visual references to the creative process for the first time.” Recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford (their previous three albums were all made with Dan Carey), *Romance* also brings in a whole new palette of sounds and colors to the band’s work. From the clanking apocalyptic dread of the opening title track, hip-hop-inspired first single “Starburster,” and the warped grunge and shoegaze hybrids of “Here’s the Thing” and “Sundowner,” it opens a whole new chapter for Fontaines D.C., while still finding time for classic indie rock anthems such as “Favourite”’s wistful volley of guitars or the Nirvana-like “Death Kink.” “Every album we do feels like a huge step in one direction for us, but *Romance* is probably a little bit more outside of our previous records,” says Coll. “It’s exciting to surprise people.” Read on as he dissects *Romance*, one track at a time. **“Romance”** “This is one that we wrote really late at night in the studio. It just fell out of us. It was one of those real moments of feeling, ‘Right, that’s the first track on the album.’ It’s kind of like a palate cleanser for everything that’s come before. It’s like the opening scene. I feel like every time we’ve done a record there’s been one tune that’s always stuck out like, ‘This is our opening gambit...’” **“Starburster”** “Grian \[Chatten, singer\] wrote most of this tune on his laptop, so there were lots of chopped-up strings and stuff—it was quite a hip-hop creative process. It’s probably the song that is furthest away from the old us on this album. This tune was the first single and we always try and shock people a bit. It’s fun to do that.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “This was written in the last hour of being in the studio. We had maybe 12 or 13 tracks ready to go and just started jamming, and it presented itself in an hour. \[Guitarist Conor\] Curley had this really gnarly, ’90s, piercing tone, and it just went from there.” **“Desire”** “This has been knocking around for ages. It was one of those tunes that took so many goes to get to where it was meant to sit. It started as a band setup and then we went really electronic with it. Then in the studio, we took it all back. It took a while for it to sit properly. Grian did 20 or 30 vocal layers on that, he really arranged it in an amazing way. Carlos \[O’Connell, guitarist\] and Grian were the main string arrangers on this record. This was the first record where we actually got a string quartet in—before, people would just send it over. So being able to sit in the room and watch a string quartet take center stage on a song was amazing.” **“In the Modern World”** “Grian wrote this song when he was in LA. He was really inspired by Lana Del Rey and stuff like that. Hollywood and the glitz and the glamour, but it’s actually this decrepit place. It’s that whole idea of faded glamour.” **“Bug”** “This felt like a really easy song for us to write. That kind of buzzy, all-of-us-in-the-same-room tune. I really fought for this one to be on the record. I feel like, with songs like that, trying to skew them and put a spin on them that they don’t need is overwriting. If it feels right then there’s no point in laboring over it. That song is what it is and it’s great. It’s going to be amazing live.” **“Motorcycle Boy”** “This one is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins a bit. We actually recorded it six months before the rest of the album. This tune was the real genesis of the record and us finding a path and being like, ‘OK, we can explore down here...’ That was one that really set the wheels in motion for the album. It really informed where we were going.” **“Sundowner”** “On this album, we were probably coming from more singular points than we have before. A lot of the lads brought in tunes that were pretty much there. I was sharing a room with Curley in London, and he was working on this really shoegaze-inspired tune for ages. I think he always thought that Grian would sing it, but when he put down the guide vocals in the studio it sounded great. We were all like, ‘You are singing this now.’” **“Horseness Is the Whatness”** “Carlos sent me a demo of that tune ages and ages ago. It was just him on an acoustic, and it was such a powerful lyric. I think it’s amazing. We had to kind of deconstruct it and build it back up again in terms of making it fit for this record. Carlos had made three or four drum loops for me and it was a really fun experience to try and recreate that. I don’t know how we’re going to play it live but we’ll sort it out!” **“Death Kink”** “Again, this came from one of the jams of us setting up for a studio session. It’s another one of those band-in-a-room-jamming-out kind of tunes. On tour in America, we really honed where everything should sit in the set. This is going to be such a fun tune to play live. We’ve started playing it already and it’s been so sick.” **“Favourite”** “‘Favourite’ was another one we wrote when we were rehearsing. It happened pretty much as it is now. We were kind of nervous about touching it again for the album because that first recording was so good. That’s the song that hung around in our camp for the longest. When we write songs on tour, often we end up getting bored of them over time but ‘Favourite’ really stuck. We had a lot of conversations about the order on this album and I felt it was really important to move from ‘Romance’ to ‘Favourite.’ It feels like a journey from darkness into light, and finishing on ‘Favourite’ leaves it in a good spot.”
DIIV has always been a musical shape-shifter—subtly mutating into new forms that are deeply felt by those who pay close attention to its sonic textures. The band’s debut album, 2012’s *Oshin*, was double-dipped in the chiming guitars of classic indie pop and post-punk’s intense persistence; *Is the Is Are*, from 2016, stretched lush dream-pop weavings across its wide canvas, while 2019’s *Deceiver* dove headlong into shoegaze’s bottomless bliss. For its first album in five years, the quartet led by Zachary Cole Smith takes its catalog into several thrilling new turns: At various points, *Frog in Boiling Water* conjures the sweeping drama of goth à la *Seventeen Seconds*-era The Cure, slowcore’s crushing and hypnotic beauty, and the metallic textures of vintage grunge. DIIV has never sounded so devastating, so ominous, and so utterly pristine as it does on *Frog in Boiling Water*—a triumph in fidelity that’s owed as much to veteran indie-rock producer Chris Coady (Beach House, Future Islands) as it is to the band’s locked-in interplay. Smith and Andrew Bailey’s guitars drip like melted candles over the vast expanse of “Soul-net,” while “Brown Paper Bag” stomps and splashes with every cymbal crash, courtesy of drummer Ben Newman. This might be the heaviest music DIIV has ever put to tape, and its doomy sound perfectly matches the album’s foreboding themes. Borrowing its title from a central metaphor in Daniel Quinn’s 1996 novel *The Story of B*, *Frog in Boiling Water* takes aim at what the band refers to as “the slow, sick, and overwhelmingly banal collapse of society under end-stage capitalism,” and a close read of Smith’s lyrics indeed reveals a sense of wide-scale distrust, as well as general societal malaise. But even at its most despairing, DIIV never forgets that retaining a sense of humanity is key to surviving what lies ahead: “The worst of times/Leave them behind,” Smith implores over the soaring riffs of “Reflected.” “But keep that lump in your throat.”
Sam Shepherd’s not-quite-techno is the 21st-century equivalent of good progressive rock or jazz fusion: sophisticated, intelligent music whose outward sense of exploration mirrors an almost psychedelic journey within. Inspired by his teenage epiphanies with techno in Manchester in the late ’90s and early 2000s, *Cascade* is easily his most immediate album: “club bangers” (“Key103”), acid bass (“Afflecks Palace”), even a little Giorgio Moroder-style Eurodisco for good historical measure (“Birth4000”). The beats are nakedly 4/4 and the surrounding ambience the kind of moody, infinitely cascading synth tapestries you might find on a psytrance mix, rendered with a grace that makes them feel paradoxically subtle. Having done complicated, Shepherd makes it simple.
“I’m a bit of a disgrace,” Mabe Fratti tells Apple Music. “People see me performing and they think that I’m a very solemn person, but I’m not elegant at all in real life. You may find me wiping the snot off my nose in the street.” The Guatamala-born, Mexico City-based singer and cellist recorded *Sentir Que No Sabes* in collaboration with her romantic partner, producer and guitarist Héctor Tosta, combining passages of dissonance and experimentation with avant-pop, all inspired by Brian Eno, Talk Talk, and the modern jazz albums released by the ECM label. Lead single “Kravitz” pays loving tribute to Lenny Kravitz with a hallucinogenic mood enriched by brass instrumentation and jazz accents. Fratti talked with Apple Music about the album and the emotional risks involved in her artistic process. **Her songwriting process** “We tried many different processes on this album. Normally I start playing something, searching for ideas, then a melody develops and I build up an arrangement for it. On ‘Kravitz,’ for instance, Héctor took care of the guitar and keyboards, and he asked me to play on top of the beat. We were on a Lenny Kravitz kick at the time, and we became rabid fans. Héctor told me to think of Peter Gabriel, the *Scratch My Back* album, and I ended up playing a riff with an awesome modal richness to it. There were so many pizzicato songs on this record that I wanted to play the cello with a bow on one and add a delay, an echo. Finding the melody for that one was hard—and the lyrics, even worse. It’s part of my creative exorcism. Every song has its own process.” **The role of dissonance on the album** “I love to generate feelings of tension and release. I’m going to share my formula here—even though I hope to expand it as I grow in life. I’m very melodic with my voice, and consequently employ the cello as an agent to get those melodies a bit dirtier—to build up tension, stretch the sounds that listeners may identify with or not. I play with the limits of what is acceptable. I push in order to see how far I can expand myself in that respect.” **Her singing voice** “That technique is used in pop music, having the voice really up front. I want to reach a point where my vocals sound raw, because that’s what makes me happy. When you hear yourself singing or talking, you start paying attention to your flaws. As you make more records, the sound tends to become cleaner, with less reverb. I love seeing rawness and imperfection everywhere—in art, the streets, and people’s faces. Those are the things that I’m attracted to, and this album was an intense dive into that world. Héctor has the same vision, a common aesthetic that we share.” **Taking risks and experimenting with new sounds** “I see this as one of the most accessible things I’ve ever done. There’s a lot of groove in these songs. I listen to tons of new music that’s really amazing and highly adventurous. Clearly, those bands are being brave to put their music out there, because they run the risk of being misunderstood, or ignored. It’s abstract music, requiring so much sensitivity that many listeners won’t connect with it. So, from my personal perspective, my reaction would be: Are you kidding me? I made a record steeped in grooves. At least in the realm of my imagination.”
There’s a sense of optimism that comes through Vampire Weekend’s fifth album that makes it float, a sense of hope—a little worn down, a little roughed up, a little tired and in need of a shave, maybe—but hope nonetheless. “By the time you’re pushing 40, you’ve hit the end of a few roads, and you’re probably looking for something—I don’t know what to say—a little bit deeper,” Ezra Koenig tells Apple Music. “And you’re thinking about these ideas. Maybe they’re corny when you’re younger. Gratitude. Acceptance. All that stuff. And I think that’s infused in the album.” Take something like “Mary Boone,” whose worries and reflections (“We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same”) give way to an old R&B loop (Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”). Or the way the piano runs on “Connect”—like your friend fumbling through a Gershwin tune on a busted upright in the next room—bring the song’s manic energy back to earth. Musically, they’ve never sounded more sophisticated, but they’ve also never sounded sloppier or more direct (“Prep-School Gangsters”). They’re a tuxedo with ripped Converse or a garage band with a full orchestra (“Ice Cream Piano”). And while you can trainspot the micro-references and little details of their indie-band sound (produced brilliantly by Koenig and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid), what you remember most is the big picture of their songs, which are as broad and comforting as great pop (“Classical”). “Sometimes I talk about it with the guys,” Koenig says. “We always need to have an amateur quality to really be us. There needs to be a slight awkward quality. There needs to be confidence and awkwardness at the same time.” Next to the sprawl of *Father of the Bride*, *OGWAU* (“og-wow”—try it) feels almost like a summary of the incredible 2007-2013 run that made them who they are. But they’re older now, and you can hear that, too, mostly in how playful and relaxed the album is. Listen to the jazzy bass and prime-time saxophone on “Classical” or the messy drums on “Prep-School Gangsters” (courtesy of Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes), or the way “Hope” keeps repeating itself like a school-assembly sing-along. It’s not cool music, which is of course what makes it so inimitably cool. Not that they seem to worry about that stuff anymore. “I think a huge element for that is time, which is a weird concept,” Koenig says. ”Some people call it a construct. I’ve heard it’s not real. That’s above my pay grade, but I will say, in my experience, time is great because when you’re bashing your head against the wall, trying to figure out how to use your brain to solve a problem, and when you learn how to let go a little bit, time sometimes just does its thing.” For a band that once announced themselves as the preppiest, most ambitious guys in the indie-rock room, letting go is big.
In dance music, few boundaries are as powerful as the wall between the mainstream and the underground. Four Tet is the rare artist who has managed to knock it down. The endlessly curious English producer Kieran Hebden—who has been bridging gaps between far-apart sounds like spiritual jazz, indie rock, R&B, and techno since the late ’90s—surprised fans in 2023 when he teamed up with main-stage party boys Skrillex and Fred again.., transforming Coachella and Madison Square Garden into pop-up raves. What had become of their underground darling? But Hebden isn’t one to unpack. Here, on his 12th full-length, he veers back into the cerebral sounds he’s known for: lush, patient, radiant soundscapes that verge on meditations. “Daydream Repeat,” a clear standout, is twinkling and weightless, the sort of flow-state reverie that can lift you outside of yourself. “31 Bloom” has similarly club-friendly grooves but feels fully rooted, with synths and drums that rub together like sneakers across a dance floor. But no track stretches quite like the mystical, New Age-y “Three Drums,” an eight-minute panorama of birdsong flutes, rainfall textures, and pulsing synths that echo Moby’s 1999 hit “Porcelain.” As the song unfolds into an ambient canvas of sound waves and sighs, it begins to feel less like music and more like breath—a blissful sanctuary to slip into and get lost in. As a destination, it isn’t too far from that of his big-tent contemporaries; dance music, in essence, is about freedom and release. In that way, *Three* finds Hebden doing what he does best: finding clever, unexpected ways to bring disparate listeners into the same space.
Expansive, cinematic, adventurous: These are the intentions saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia decided to channel when it came to creating *Odyssey*. “I wanted to make a record that felt bigger, something that delivers unexpected emotions,” she tells Apple Music. Bursting onto the London jazz scene in 2017 with the release of her debut EP, *Nubya’s 5ive*, Garcia became a key proponent of a new group of young improvisers who were drawing on jazz traditions as much as their diaspora heritages in their music. Following 2020’s full-length debut *SOURCE*, Garcia now develops her Afrobeat- and dub-influenced sound further to encompass everything from the sweeping string arrangements of “Clarity” to the weighty soundsystem basslines of “Triumphance” and the ’90s R&B references of “Set It Free.” Largely written during extended trips to Brazil, away from her typically hectic touring schedule, *Odyssey* is Garcia soaking up new atmospheres to create an instinctual and intricately articulate music. “This is me growing through joy and practice,” she says. “It’s the fullest, freest vision of myself.” Read on for her in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Dawn” (feat. Esperanza Spalding)** “I wrote this track when I was in Brazil for six weeks at the end of 2022. I was staying right by the ocean and would wake up for the sunrise every day. It was such a beautiful, poignant way to start the day and this melody just came to me in that environment. I’ve always loved Esperanza’s work and she felt like the perfect addition to the song—I was so happy when she agreed to it. I only gave her the title and let her run free otherwise with these beautiful lyrics drawing on the Icarus myth.” **“Odyssey”** “‘Odyssey’ is the epic adventure of the record. I didn’t know the album would center on this composition but I had a feeling that it was going to be cinematic and journeying. Every section of this tune keeps building and turning in unexpected ways, from the keys to the string section producing a huge range of light to darkness. The melody wanders and feels like a beautiful marriage between my love of modal jazz and my love of classical textures. It all flowed really quickly since I had so many ideas for it, all sparking on from one another.” **“Solstice”** “This is one of the oldest tracks on the album. I wanted it to have a busy, erratic beat with a slower melody sauntering and winding over it. It’s about the fast and slow being in conversation. It’s called ‘Solstice’ because the first time I played it with the band was on the summer solstice in 2023. We’d all been away and not done a gig for a while but it just felt right and went down really well.” **“Set It Free” (feat. Richie)** “As soon as I began trying out ideas for this track, I knew I wanted it to have a chill but energetic backbeat, one you could walk down the street to. Richie’s vocals add a stunning sound and lyricism and establish the theme of the song being about promoting confidence in women who are so often raised in society to continually apologize for themselves. It also features a cheeky nine-bar loop, rather than the usual eight, which always surprises me when it comes around!” **“The Seer”** “‘The Seer’ is about wishing you could catch a glimpse of yourself in the future to know you’re on the right track and be confident about your choices. Sonically, it’s a nod to modal jazz with classic voicings and then shifts into my love of broken beats and energetic drums. That switch feels a bit like the ’90s R&B interludes where you hear a snippet of another section or song coming in.” **“Odyssey (Outerlude)”** “I wanted outerludes on the album to give the listener a reprieve and remind them of what they have just listened to before, as well as melting into a different energy for the rest of the record. This switches it from a very high-energy beginning to something much softer and quieter for the halfway point. I love it because it has an eerie vibe full of shimmering strings.” **“We Walk in Gold” (feat. Georgia Anne Muldrow)** “The melody for this composition feels like a lament but the intentions of the tune are joyous. It’s full of energies of hope, purpose, and direction, all informed by the color gold, which represents a light that releases darkness for me. I’ve always loved Georgia Anne Muldrow’s work and was elated when she agreed to feature on this track with me—she fully embodied the track’s uplifting intentions.” **“Water’s Path”** “This was the only tune on the album written in one go with no edits, which is something I haven’t done before. It’s one of my favorites because I’ve never written for strings before this album and I’m really proud of how this song embodies both happiness and sadness, as well as the qualities of water always finding its way through, which is reflected in the ostinato that just keeps ticking along. It’s super melodic and romantic.” **“Clarity”** “The vision for this song became clearer—no pun intended—as I wrote it and it became really enjoyable seeing it morph into the final version where the harmony is upward-reaching and always building. The intention behind the song is about the importance of clarity and transparency in relationships and how freeing that can be when we have it.” **“In Other Words, Living”** “Like ‘Clarity,’ this song always feels like it’s reaching upwards, pushing for peace and excitement in life. It’s a song about being intentionally present and living the balancing act between happiness and sadness that so often constitutes our existence as humans. That’s living as I know it, anyway.” **“Clarity (Outerlude)”** “I wanted one more reprise before we end, something to shift the listeners’ energy back to what’s been before and to show how far we’ve come over the course of the record. It’s a small offering to the journey we’ve traveled on together.” **“Triumphance”** “We’ve been playing this track for a few years to close the live shows and it always leaves people with such joy, since they can’t help but move when it drops. I wasn’t going to record it for the album but it ultimately felt like the only way we could end. I wanted a speech over the dub while the band cooked, something to sum up the triumphant themes of the record and to leave people feeling self-confident as they go out into the world. Except, the person I wanted to do the speech couldn’t and we were running out of time, so I ended up recording it myself, which was a first! I guess I had to find my own self-confidence here to say my piece.”
Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.” It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album *Short n’ Sweet*. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.” With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.” Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”
Sporting one of the most outsized personalities in all of hip-hop history, LL COOL J made rap braggadocio into an art form. During his mid-’80s emergence, the Queens-bred MC used his inherently aggressive delivery to prove himself bigger and deffer than the competition. In the ’90s, he channeled that tenacity even more effectively on the seminal *Mama Said Knock You Out* and its gritty successor *14 Shots to the Dome* while increasingly amplifying his libidinous loverman side to great commercial effect. It worked so well that, by the time he popularized the term “GOAT” on his sexually charged 2000 album of the same name, few could argue he wasn’t a contender for that prestigious title. Yet those who arrived during James Todd Smith’s R&B crossover era, or the many more who’ve come to know him primarily as an actor on television and in film, may not know what a tremendous rapper he was—and remains. His first studio album in some 11 years, *THE FORCE* shows his microphone prowess has in no way waned over the past decade. There’s a core combativeness to his contemporary approach, unquestionably bolstered by the distressing and galvanizing events of recent years. Out the gate, on the Snoop Dogg-assisted “Spirit of Cyrus,” he conjures a vivid Black vigilante fantasy where racists receive their comeuppances in brutal fashion. With a similarly vibrant Busta Rhymes in his corner, he outlines a revolutionary mindset on the thunderous “Huey in the Chair.” As should be expected with an artist with his tenure, he also reveals a sentimentally nostalgic streak in a number of instances here, calling back to his come-up on “Basquiat Energy” and realizing that the you-can’t-go-home-again axiom rings truer than expected on “30 Decembers.” “Black Code Suite” synthesizes his tendencies quite beautifully, its Afrocentric bent mixing memory with militancy. Part of what makes *THE FORCE* such a tremendous record comes from producer Q-Tip. Rather than chase trends, the Natives Tongues veteran gives LL a series of instrumentals (and, on more than one occasion, hooks) that veer far from legacy-act stagnation and instead towards a mature yet rugged vibe. This translates to the laidback synth slap of the Saweetie duet “Proclivities” as much as the far squirmier funk of his Eminem collab “Murdergram Deux.” From the reconfigured throwbacks of “Passion” and “Post Modern” to the timeless grooves of “Runnit Back” and “Saturday Night Special,” their robust artist pairing ensures that *THE FORCE* is an album to reckon with.
