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.”
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.
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.
When MGMT emerged in 2007 with “Time to Pretend”—a euphoric shooting star of a song that soundtracked every house party and HBO show for the next several years—the synth-pop duo, just out of college, became rock stars overnight. They were big in every sense: a major-label deal, a tour with Radiohead, a reputation for rock shows that felt like raves. But Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser never seemed wholly comfortable with their popularity, and their subsequent albums were far more eccentric and experimental. Then, during the pandemic, the band found themselves back in the spotlight for a reason nobody saw coming: One of their tracks blew up on TikTok. The sudden, explosive virality of “Little Dark Age,” a foreboding, vaguely political track from their 2018 album of the same name, took both men, now in their forties, by total surprise. And yet, when they began writing their fifth album a few months later, they found themselves circling themes of reinvention and rebirth. *Loss of Life* is, despite its title, openhearted and hopeful, and sheds some of the fussy self-seriousness that weighed down their recent records. The arrangements are streamlined. The melodies can breathe. The hooks stick. It isn’t that the band has reverted back to its high-flying, imperious roots; these songs have an emotional sincerity that you just didn’t get on “Electric Feel.” Rather, it feels like a weight has been lifted. Certain moments, like the Christine and the Queens duet “Dancing in Babylon,” even sound like surrender. The album was co-produced by longtime collaborators Patrick Wimberly and Dave Fridmann with additional support from Oneohtrix Point Never. The latter is often cited as someone who takes a curatorial approach to production, and *Loss of Life* asks a lot of big questions about what, ultimately, makes art good. Does it need to be serious to be taken seriously? Is optimism allowed? Tender lullabies like “Phradie’s Song,” the Simon & Garfunkel-esque “Nothing to Declare,” and the twinkling title track—one of those sweeping, distorted psychedelic numbers that feels designed for exploring spiritual frontiers—suggest that MGMT’s answers have softened with age. “Who knows how the painting will look in the morning/When the day is born and life is ending?” VanWyngarden sings on “Loss of Life.” The subtext, if we may: Our time here is short. What matters is that you paint.
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.
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.”
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.
“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.
“It’s quite a strange album,” Nia Archives tells Apple Music about her debut, *Silence Is Loud*. The award-winning artist, producer, and DJ—credited with spearheading a mainstream revival of jungle music—is the first to acknowledge that the sonic landscape of the album is an eclectic departure from her early sound. While elements of the production will be familiar to fans of Archives—including jungle pioneer Goldie and global superstar Beyoncé—*Silence Is Loud* rings with Britpop, Motown, and alternative rock influences, resulting in a wholly original listening experience that exposes the unconventional edge to her artistry. Co-produced with rising talent Ethan P. Flynn, whose credits include FKA twigs and slowthai, the record is beholden to the late-’90s/early-2000s era of organic, experimental pop dominated by William Orbit—albeit charged with the frenetic energy of drum patterns still firmly rooted in jungle. While tracks like “Cards on the Table,” “Crowded Roomz,” and “F.A.M.I.L.Y” see Archives explore recurring themes of loneliness, self-acceptance, parental estrangement, and love—both unconditional and unrequited—with her characteristic lyrical candor, *Silence Is Loud* leaves fewer places for the intensity of her words to hide behind. This reality is most clearly evidenced on the reprise of the title track, which strips away her typical percussive camouflage. “Jungle is so chaotic and intense that nobody really pays attention to the lyrics that much,” says Archives. “The drums take up a lot of space in the music—they’re like the heart, and when you take that away, it’s like the brain. Which is a bit much sometimes.” For all the risk Archives has taken in releasing a body of work that resists the urge to chase trends in favor of presenting a true reflection of her own journey, *Silence Is Loud* succeeds in alchemizing its disparate parts into audio gold. “I played in a pub in London the other day and the people were singing along so loudly it made me think this isn’t just a viral-TikTok-moment album. It’s an album that people have to listen to, and then listen to again to take it in…\[because\] it’s something weird and new,” she says. “But I think I’ve got good taste in music, so that gives me a little bit of confidence in myself.” Read on to find out more about each track in Archives’ own words. **“Silence Is Loud”** “I wrote this song about my little brother, who is my little baby. He’s getting older and our relationship has changed so much. He’s changed so much, I’ve changed so much. I wanted to write about how I love him no matter what, and that is what unconditional love is to me. There’s no ifs or buts, it’s just pure love. I wrote it in bed and then I took it to Ethan. It’s the first song we made together. One of my favorite albums is *Aha Shake Heartbreak* by Kings of Leon, I’m so inspired by the lo-fi \[sound\] in their music. I really wanted a Kings of Leon-meets-Radiohead moment because *In Rainbows* is also one of my favorite albums.” **“Cards on the Table”** “I wanted to make a really hardcore Britpop jungle tune. It’s quite stripped-back breaks. I was hugely inspired by Blur, Pulp, Oasis, all that kind of vibe. I love Damon Albarn. If there’s anyone I would love to listen to the album, it would probably be him. Again, I wrote this in bed—I had a bit of a situationship with an Irish boy I met after a show in Dublin last year, so it’s a real story and my first time writing a song like this. I don’t really write love songs, but I was trying to have a bit of a Natasha Bedingfield moment. I’ve really tried to think of all the best songwriters to come out of the UK and focused on studying a lot of people. This was the first time I wrote a song and I felt like it was a ‘proper’ song.” **“Unfinished Business”** “This is the only song I’m worried about having to sing live because I’d just come back from a festival and I’d lost my voice, which is why it sounds so hoarse and rock ’n’ roll—I don’t know if I can re-sing it like that. I wrote it about realizing that everybody else has their own life before they’ve met you. Before you even say hello, they’ve already had so many experiences that have shaped them as a person. That’s actually quite positive. The production is quite four-four because I’ve been making loads of four-four music recently. And I also really wanted to make a Foo Fighters-inspired jungle tune because I loved the Foo Fighters when I was 14.” **“Crowded Roomz”** “We made this in the studio and it was a bit overwhelming. I was talking about loneliness—chronic loneliness. I feel like a lot of people my age experience loneliness. For me, with what I do—where it’s really high or low—it’s so heightened and you experience that a little bit more. And it was like, ‘Oh my god, this is actually a bit much, I can’t listen,’ because we listen to the same song on loop for four hours and it’s an intense one to listen to over and over again. The next day, we were like, ‘Oh, this is actually really good.’ I’ve been playing this one out and everyone screams the words, so I’m hoping that will be the vibe across the album. More of my sets have turned from hardcore jungle to a pop concert, which is cool.” **“Forbidden Feelingz”** “I feel like there’ll be a lot of people discovering me \[through this new sound\] and I really want them to hear where I’ve come from and how I got to this point. This is a nice moment for a switch-up, to be like, ‘I do this as well and, if you want, you can go back and discover all that stuff.’ I can never recreate this song, it’s one of my favorite songs I’ve ever made, so I didn’t want it to not be a part of an album that will hopefully shape the next few years of my life.” **“Blind Devotion”** “This is the longest project I’ve made in my life. I’m usually a 20-minute person, max. Towards the end I was like, ‘Oh my god, for an album to be an album it has to be 35 minutes, I need three \[more\] minutes to complete this thing, let’s make one more song.’ It’s one of the only new songs with the ‘old me’ sound, where it’s really clubby. We were going for that Massive Attack kind of vibe. We made this one at my studio and mine’s not got a lot of equipment. I try not to spend money on too much stuff. I’ve got 10 plug-ins, which is really weird as a producer, but I’d rather be the master of what I’ve got than have everything and not know how to use any of it. As a creative, you want a challenge and to feel like, ‘I’ve only got this, how do I make it sound interesting?’” **“Tell Me What It’s Like?”** “I said to Ethan that I wanted to make a song a bit like The Cranberries. The middle section, which is so happy, comes from another beat—the only song that didn’t make it on to the album. The rest of the song is quite dark and it was Ethan’s idea to put the two together. It’s about unrequited love, but not necessarily in a relationship sense, more related to my own life, but I guess people will take it however they want to take it. When I wrote it, I was inspired by Natalie Imbruglia’s kind of vibe. I sampled this voice note that Goldie sent me, because he sends me voice notes every week. He’s been a great listening ear and a real supporter. He’s someone I’m so inspired by and look up to—not just as a musician but as a person. He was quite gassed about it when I sent it to him.” **“Nightmares”** “I had my heart broken in Tokyo, which is hilarious and random. It’s like something out of a film. I came back from Asia and I was really sad, and the only way I can process my emotions is by making music. I wrote this song at home and then Ethan’s label let us use their spare studio, and he brought his guitar. I’d been listening to loads of Fleetwood Mac to get over my upset and I wanted to make something with that vibe. I thought ‘Nightmares don’t just happen when you’re sleeping’ was quite a funny play on words because what was happening felt like a real-life nightmare, which is so dramatic. This is the only song I kind of regret. I’ve never been really mean on a song in my life and the person I wrote about hasn’t heard it. I hope they don’t hate me because we’re kind of friends again now. But it’s a good song, so what can you do?” **“F.A.M.I.L.Y”** “I wrote this about my personal experience and my relationship with my family. This song is the end of that era, for me. I’m 25 this year, I feel like there’s only so many times you can be so caught up in things that cause you stress or upset you, so I really just wanted to say my piece and that’s it. There’s a little bit of acceptance within the song, understanding this is just the way things are and that’s OK, I guess. It was quite therapeutic. We recorded it in Ethan’s flat with me screaming and Ethan’s friend Felix \[Stephens\] playing the viola. My main inspiration was Estelle, ‘1980.’ There’s just a feeling I get when I listen to that song…I don’t know how to explain it. Even the video, where she’s sat on the stairs. It’s just a whole vibe I really wanted to capture with this song. It’s quite theatrical and I feel like the production reflects the drama.” **“Out of Options”** “I’d just been to the Motown Museum in Detroit for the first time and it was amazing. I love Motown. All the productions they made, just with what they had in those times, is actually crazy. It was such a booming Black industry that I’ve always been so inspired by. And I love The Ronettes, one of my favorite girl groups of all time. So I was really intensely listening to that kind of music and wanted to explore that sound. It was the only song I wrote on the spot and didn’t really have much that I wanted to say, but it was really fun recording how they would have recorded—standing in different spots in the room to create that big sound.” **“Silence Is Loud (Reprise)”** “Ethan suggested we do a reprise and I was kind of like, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. Feels a little bit weird.’ But I trusted his gut. This was the only song we didn’t make in the UK. I was in L.A. on tour, and I hate making music in L.A., but we were at Sound Factory and we had all kinds of equipment and he was really having fun with the sound design. Throughout this album, I wanted to have loads of voice notes and anecdotes from people who mean something to me. So the voice talking at the start is my brother. In the middle, it’s loads of different voice notes from my friends, my friends’ parents who have become a really big part of my life, and my manager Tom, who’s my best friend. At the end is a sample of a video of all my friends from my birthday dinner. It’s quite emotional actually.” **“Killjoy !”** “I had a really nasty interaction with somebody who was quite close to me and this was me expressing that. It was the first time I was trying to think about how to make the words interesting and I love the way I wrote it. I made it at home and took it to Ethan, and what he brought to it was so cool—Massive Attack vibes with a bit of old-school IDM and jungle.” **“So Tell Me…”** “Another moment from a previous project. If I didn’t make \[2023 EP\] *Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall*, this song would have been on the album anyway—it felt like a good end.”
Vince Staples knows his songs aren’t soundtracking too many wild Friday night parties; they sound way better on the long, contemplative walk home. “I’ve always been aware of where I fit within the ecosystem of this whole thing, and that allows me to create freely,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “No one’s coming to me from a fan standpoint looking for a single, or looking for a party record. But I do know the people who listen to my music are probably looking for thoughtfulness or creativity.” Since breaking through a decade ago with his debut EP *Hell Can Wait*, the Long Beach rapper has been the go-to guy for heady West Coast rap: songs that may not make you dance, but always make you think. Still, his sixth studio album (and the last one on his Def Jam contract) isn’t quite the downer that the title suggests. Where its predecessor, 2022’s *RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART*, looked back at his bittersweet youth, *Dark Times* is a snapshot of Staples right now: on top of the world on paper, but the reality is trickier. (“I think I’m losing it,” he raps on the bass-heavy “Black&Blue.” “Hope you’re along for the ride.”) On “Government Cheese” he grapples with survivor’s guilt, mourning his brother and lying that all’s well to his friend in prison who saw him on TV. Still, light enters through the cracks with breezy, soulful beats from frequent collaborators Michael Uzowuru and LeKen Taylor, not to mention Staples’ trademark dry wit: “Don’t be no crab in the bucket, be a Crip at the Ritz,” he quips on “Freeman.” There’s even a few tracks you could bump at the function: “Étouffée,” a love letter to New Orleans rap, and “Little Homies,” a lo-fi house jam on whose hook Staples crows, “Life hard, but I go harder.” And no matter how heavy things get, Staples is realistic about what his work means in the grand scheme of things. “They\'re just songs, man,” he says. “It doesn\'t need to go past that point. I know everybody values things differently—but for me at least, put it out, people listen to it, they like it or they don\'t. And then if you get to do it the next time, that\'s the gift that you get is the ability to do it the next time, because most people don\'t get that.”
The hip-hop polymath built a reputation on witty freestyles that befitted her Philadelphia roots, then broke through in 2017 with “MUMBO JUMBO,” a purposefully unintelligible trap ditty that brought new resonance to the term “mumble rap” with a Grammy-nominated video that should come with a warning for those with dentophobia. Her debut album, 2018’s *Whack World*, crammed an LP’s worth of ideas into the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee: 15 sharp, surrealist minute-long tracks that veered from slapstick vocal hijinks to straight-ahead spitting, each accompanied by its own micro music video. The world Whack built was carnival-esque, all funhouse mirrors and sensory overload, with a darkness lingering at the edges. Aside from a trio of three-song EPs (the tentatively titled *Rap?*, *Pop?*, and *R&B?*) released in 2021, Whack kept a puzzlingly low profile in the years that followed. The colorful critical darling who’d had so much to say in so little time had more or less gone quiet. Then, six years after *Whack World*, she announced *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, billed as the rapper’s real full-length debut. Early videos continued the high-concept ideas and cartoonish costumes, but listen awhile and you heard something new: naked vulnerability, almost shocking in its rawness. “I can show you how it feels when you lose what you love,” Whack sing-songs on the twinkling “27 CLUB,” looking like a cross between Pierrot the clown and Bootsy Collins. The hook was one word, drawn out into a wistful melody: “Suiciiiiide…” In other words, there’s more to Whack’s world than you might expect. (“Might look familiar, but I promise you don’t know me,” she reminds you on the minute-and-change “MOOD SWING.”) Over the 15 songs of *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, the rapper grapples with real life, where echoes of abandonment and instances of suicidal ideation coexist with bursts of cockiness, uncertainty, lust, loneliness. The constant is her voice, thoughtful and brimming with ideas as ever. “BURNING BRAINS” is an expression of depressive thinking filtered through Whack’s imagistic lens: “Soup too hot, ice too cold, grass too green, sky too blue.” And there’s a great deal of whimsy, too, as on “SHOWER SONG,” a space-funk bop on the joys of singing in the bathroom.
Queens MC Heems made waves with rap group Das Racist in 2008 and he’s been in and out of the spotlight ever since. Projects like Swet Shop Boys with Riz MC and producer Redinho have been well received, but it’s been eight full years since the Punjabi American hip-hop star released a full-length solo effort. *LAFANDAR*—crafted with Indian American producer Lapgan—is worth the wait, as its 12 tracks adeptly balance underground influences with diaspora aesthetics. Irreverent and sharp, tracks like “Stupid Dumb Illiterate” and soulful “Accent” are packed with stories of South Asian community life.
LA-based alt-pop quartet The Marías explore pain, isolation, and the strength it takes to get better on their 2024 LP *Submarine*. The album, which follows their 2021 breakthrough debut *CINEMA*, finds the band expanding their sound to include underground dance music, disco, jazz, and more—all while pursuing melodic gold thanks to singer María Zardoya. Take the album’s second track, “Hamptons,” which blends garage drum grooves with whimsical synths and a textural tension that recalls trip-hop pioneers Portishead. Or, on “Real Life,” the group conjures up lounge jazz, managing to practically capture the heavy smoke that often fills those ambiance-heavy rooms. It’s sleek and sexy, a glowing encapsulation of the band’s mission to achieve mood with subtly complex compositions. On “Paranoia,” many of the album’s lyrical themes cohere. Zardoya takes aim at an untrusting lover, illustrating how a communication breakdown can result in total isolation: “Why do you think I have another/When you have always been the one/Your paranoia is annoying/Now all I wanna do is run away.”
Card-carrying members of the #FutureHive remember where they were on the two consecutive weekends of February 2017 when rap’s reigning king of gorgeously toxic masculinity dropped a pair of albums that nailed the yin and yang of the whole Future thing. The first one, simply titled *FUTURE*, exemplified his singular breed of haunted club crushers, like “Mask Off,” a Metro Boomin joint that became his highest-charting single at the time. Hot on its heels was *HNDRXX*, named for his softer, trippier side, a buoyant return to the romance of his *Pluto*-era hits. Both albums debuted at No. 1 and felt like a return to form for a rapper who’s had more thrilling returns to form than just about any other rap star of the past 15 years. A similar feeling floats on the breeze with the release of *WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU*, Future’s second collaborative album with Metro Boomin in less than a month. From the spacey and vaguely French disco pulse of the Weeknd-featuring title track, you get the sense that *WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU* is the *HNDRXX* to *WE DON’T TRUST YOU*’s *FUTURE*—a balmy sunrise after a dark night of the soul. That feeling is confirmed by the shimmering bacchanalia of “Drink N Dance” and the Brownstone-sampling “Luv Bad Bitches,” an instant addition to the canon of Future’s best love songs (“I like good girls, but I love, love, love bad bitches!”). Metro’s productions have rarely sounded prettier, and Future Hendrix fires on all cylinders, reminding you that for all his red-eyed “fuck love” bangers, at his core he’s a romantic. Kendrick Lamar’s surprise verse on *WE DON’T TRUST YOU* reopened the “Big Three” debate floor; with *WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU*, it’s time to start seriously considering the idea of the “Big Four.”