Momma’s follow-up to their 2022 breakthrough album, *Household Name*, opens with the pair skewering a freshly abandoned ex with the line “I love you to death/But I’m outside the door.” No emotion is off-limits for Brooklyn-based songwriting duo Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten (now expanded to a quartet including guitarist, composer, and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks), who’ve created a breakup album full of spiky lyrics and sing-along hooks. “It’s written from the perspective of two people we hurt, so it’s kinda looking at ourselves in a critical lens, which was a really interesting exercise,” Friedman tells Apple Music. “I think it captures the turmoil of us moving on, and these people feeling left behind. The inner struggle of, ‘These people are important to us. I love them, but our lives are growing apart, and I’m changing, so I have to move on.’” *Welcome to My Blue Sky* gave Momma a new spark and a deeper songwriting chemistry that naturally evolved from being such close friends. “I definitely think we wanted to not make a *Household Name* round two, so we were trying to push ourselves to find new things that would excite us,” says Friedman. “With Allegra and I writing these songs with just the two of us on acoustic, it actually allowed more room to play.” Weingarten agrees that their close friendship takes away any hint of self-consciousness that could hamper their creativity. “We’re so connected as songwriters and also friends, there’s a lot less time wasted trying to figure something out on the spot,” she says. “It all came together super fast because when it’s just Etta and I, we can try anything. We learned to trust our intuition and followed that.” From the ’90s slacker sing-along of “I Want You (Fever)” to a nostalgic trip to the grungy dance floor on “Last Kiss,” it’s the sound of a band maturing and moving on up.
Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”
What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.
“I try to focus on the present,” Ela Minus tells Apple Music as she explores the songs of *DÍA*. “I’m never thinking about the past or the future. I try not to compare past experiences with anything that followed them. I simply spend my days making new music.” On her previous releases, the singer and multi-instrumentalist born in Bogotá and based in Brooklyn attempted to manifest a safe and comfortable space where people could listen to her songs. Her 2020 breakout debut, *acts of rebellion*, felt like someone communicating electronic pop to you in secret, with warm analog synth squiggles and a delightfully brittle feel, not unlike coldwave’s minimalist steeliness or the punkish, romantic sound of ’80s synth-pop. On *DÍA*, Minus cranks up her stylistic tics to max volume: The synths crash and her voice soars above the music instead of lying in wait in the shadows. The saucer-eyed wobbles of opener “ABRIR MONTE” immediately recall the lush rave waves of Jamie xx’s “Gosh,” while “ONWARDS” conjures peak-era electroclash, right down to Minus’ excellently disaffected and cool-to-the-touch vocal take. “I’m not a simple person,” she admits. “I decided to be honest on this album and paint a more accurate picture of myself. This is why the opening track is titled ‘ABRIR MONTE’ \[‘TO CROSS THE HILL’\]. Recording it felt like opening up a new pathway into my inner world.” Here, she walks us through the album, track by track. **“ABRIR MONTE”** “It’s the first track that I recorded for the album. The first chord progression that seemed interesting enough to define the sound of *DÍA*. It’s like a mantra that envelops you. I’d like it to sound like I’m jumping off the speakers and embracing you, literally. I’m inviting you to step in and follow the road that’s outlined on the rest of the record.” **“BROKEN”** “This song is like a complement to ‘ABRIR MONTE,’ and it appeared in the same order. It’s an anthem that celebrates every person’s current emotional state, because we should accept that every single moment is valid.” **“IDOLS”** “This is my favorite song on the album. The definition of what I’m feeling like these days, and how I would characterize the music industry. I’d love for artists from all disciplines to listen and internalize the lyrics. I hope it inspires people to do whatever they please instead of chasing blindly after the pop idols of the moment.” **“IDK”** “Perhaps I should have left this one out. It’s a little too honest, and it makes me uncomfortable. I attempted to drop it in every possible manner, but the album never felt complete without it. If there’s a song that defines my emotional state at the time—and how thoroughly lost I felt—it’s this one. It’s the heart of the entire record. Something that I cherish in music is the relationship between tension and resolution. ‘IDK’ is the crux of all the tension that percolates in this project.” **“QQQQ”** “A moment of euphoria. I had developed bits of this song for the longest time: pieces of lyrics, beats, and melodies. But I couldn’t quite bring it all together into a cohesive song. I envisioned it as a bonus track, but just as I was wrapping up the album, I felt that it was missing a moment of pure euphoria for the concerts, the clubs, or wherever you experience this project in a live setting. The night before mixing, I revisited this one from scratch. I told myself, ‘I have to make the most joyful song of my career, so that it becomes a symbol of complete liberation.’ That’s what this is, or at least I hope it is.” **“I WANT TO BE BETTER”** “This may well be the only love song I’ve ever written. The lyrics are very literal. I feel relationships force you to question who you really are, and how you interact with the world. I had never examined that, until I fell in love. This song speaks of love as surrender—that moment, like a mirror, when there’s someone else in your life. You can almost see yourself through their eyes, and evidently you strive to become a better person.” **“ONWARDS”** “I don’t know what else to add here—the lyrics say it all. I wrote it when I felt frustrated with my life. The perception that we’re always meant to be wanting more, pursuing our ambitions. As time goes by, the pressure is on to prove your worth, and that feeling makes me desperate. This song is a response to those questions, so that I can get rid of my fears and insecurities. I want to follow my own path, calm and focused. I just need to continue being myself.” **“AND”** “It’s the track that connects ‘ONWARDS’ with ‘UPWARDS,’ but also a very intimate moment on the album. One of my parents had passed away, I was experiencing a massive amount of pain, and I recorded a voice memo where you can hear things falling around the house—a negative ambiance. I thought that brief moment of pain was meant to become something else, and I developed this piece.” **“UPWARDS”** “It marks the resolution of ‘AND.’ It’s the one piece of advice that I’m always expecting from my friends, no matter what the situation. Life has taught me that even though we wish we could change things for other people, the truth of the matter is that we can only be responsible for our own lives, our own wellbeing and goals. I’d like this song to become an anthem about this uncomfortable truth.” **“COMBAT”** “This is a very moving song for me, because it’s the first time that I recorded with instruments other than synths. I wrote an arrangement for a wind quartet, and ‘COMBAT’ signals the resolution of the entire album. It feels like we’re standing on terrain that has burned to the ground, and now the rebuilding begins. It has the spirit of a new life—an invitation to be born again.”
Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”
In following up their 2021 album, *Infinite Granite*, Deafheaven have chased a seismic shift with a melding of strengths. Whereas *Infinite Granite* almost completely abandoned the band’s black-metal roots for clean vocals and a lush shoegaze sound, *Lonely People with Power* combines elements of both. “To me, this is the ultimate Deafheaven album,” vocalist George Clarke tells Apple Music. “I think it harnesses all these disparate ideas that we’ve had over our entire career in the best way that they’ve ever been done. While it does include sonic touchstones from our earlier albums, it also includes some from our more recent material—just done in a way that, I think, is smarter. If we were to stop at this point, I think this is the record that would best explain what it is we do.” Lyrically, *Lonely People with Power* explores exactly what the title implies. “Initially, there was this broad scope that recognized that people who tend to want to amass power, people who tend to seek influence, are also people who tend to lack intimate connections,” Clarke says. “They’re people who are what I keep describing as spiritually vacant. I think there’s a void there that is often wanting to be filled with this sort of ephemeral influence. “As we kept writing and the subject matter got more personal, I was thinking about the idea of what is passed on to us,” he adds. “Life lessons, things that you learn from your parents, things that you learn from your teachers, and how their handicaps and their perspectives shape your own worldview. And how, in a sense, everyone wields a certain amount of power. Everyone, in a sense, is a lonely person with power.” Below, Clarke comments on each track. **“Incidental I”** “The melody in ‘Incidental I’ appears again in ‘Doberman.’ A lot of the incidentals and the way that they function within the album were created by \[guitarist\] Kerry \[McCoy\], who very much likes to conceptualize records by using melodic reprisals. This one of the three is the shortest, but certainly one of the most mood-setting tracks of the record. I really love the way that it came out. It’s quite simple, but effective.” **“Doberman”** “This was the last song we wrote for the album. To me, it was the big single, which we ended up not going with. But in my estimation, it has a lot of our strengths. What I really enjoy about it is that we leaned a little further into Emperor-like qualities in the chorus and used these types of synth textures to enhance the chorus parts. And the bridge is very Aphex Twin-influenced. To me, this is our Emperor/Aphex Twin record, which is fun.” **“Magnolia”** “We decided on this as the first single because we wanted to come out with a haymaker. It’s one of the most to-the-point songs we’ve ever written. I think it’s very interesting and catchy, but in a condensed way that we’ve not yet explored in previous albums. The beginning riff is something that we had been sitting on since 2023; it was our soundcheck riff. Kerry came up with it, and it would often get stuck in our heads. Some of our writing happens on tour in those moments because everyone’s onstage, and we developed it from there.” **“The Garden Route”** “A lot of these songs really benefited from what we had learned on *Infinite Granite* in terms of songwriting and how to structure a song that’s lean and transitions well but still has an emotional punch to it. I think this song is one of those examples. It really couldn’t have been written without having done *Infinite Granite*. And I like that we sometimes do this harsh vocal over a clean guitar, which we first experimented with in 2014 or ’15. At the time, it was almost uncomfortably jarring but has since really become part of our sound.” **“Heathen”** “Again, a song that really could not have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The thing that was interesting with this song is that we had originally thought there would be no clean vocals on this record. But Kerry had this vocal idea for the beginning, and it really stuck with me. It was immediately catchy, and it really fit with the lyrics. After a quick conversation, we decided that the most Deafheaven thing to do is to do what’s natural to us and what we think sounds best. Setting a precedent for ‘no this’ or ‘no that’ was really contradictory to our whole ethos. And I’m glad we did because I think it’s a welcome element once you’ve gotten this far into the record, to hear this variety. It’s one of my favorites lyrically, too.” **“Amethyst”** “As we were writing this, we felt it was going to be the centerpiece of the album. I think it’s the favorite song on the record for a lot of us within the band. It might be my favorite. To me, it’s a fresh take on a very classic Deafheaven sound and structure. It has all the things that I like. And then, lyrically, it’s a centerpiece as well. The album artwork and the photography within the record are based on the lyrics to this song. I think both sonically and thematically, this is maybe the strongest representation of the album.” **“Incidental II” (feat. Jae Matthews)** “This was a lot of fun to put together. We have Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher on the track. We’re big Boy Harsher fans, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I was talking to one of them about what we were working on, and he suggested that we get in touch with Jae. We got on the phone, and I explained the themes of the album, and I sent her a very early version of the song to see if she was interested. She was excited, which I was really happy about. We flew her out to LA and spent a day in the studio. She wrote the lyrics for it after we discussed it. Much like ‘Incidental I,’ it’s such an important mood piece to the album, especially going into ‘Revelator.’ I think the two connect in a really wonderful way.” **“Revelator”** “This song is the bruiser. It’s just a lot of fun, and the credit goes mostly to Kerry. This is where his head was at a lot of the time when we were making this record, just wanting to go fast and write something that was pissed but sort of unhinged. There’s this clean break, and then it goes into this chaos of blast beats, and we layered a thousand guitars. It’s a very high-energy song, and one that I think is really built for our live show as well. A lot of these songs were written with the live show in mind, and I think this one most of all.” **“Body Behavior”** “I love this song. It is, even within our repertoire, a pretty strange one. It was the first song we wrote for the album. The guys were listening to a lot of krautrock, and so the verses come from there. It’s bass- and drum-driven and very cool. Again, that thing happens where this record couldn’t have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The entire bridge section is this *Infinite Granite* by way of \[Radiohead’s\] *In Rainbows* type of beautiful interacting guitars. Overall, I think this song was a little bit of us figuring out what we were going to do next. The first song you write for something new is always a little bit of that.” **“Incidental III” (feat. Paul Banks)** “This was purposely written to go into the next song, ‘Winona.’ They share the same kind of chord and lead structure. We discussed doing a monologue here, and then we agreed that it would be interesting to have someone other than me voice it. Having Jae on ‘Incidental II’ and Paul \[Banks\] from Interpol on this lets our audience more into the broader world of Deafheaven and what we like. To me, it’s obvious that we like Boy Harsher and Interpol, but I don’t think everyone else maybe sees it that way. This gives us an opportunity to show how well-rounded the project is—and to work with people that we really admire.” **“Winona”** “Winona is a 5,000-person town in Mississippi. It’s a town where my grandparents lived. A lot of my family is buried there and is from there. Along with ‘Amethyst,’ this is the other big epic on the record. The coolest thing about this song, for me, is that there’s a choir on it, which repeats throughout the track, and the choir is just a bunch of our friends. It was six men and six women, and Kerry and I conducted them, which we’d never done before. Much of the choir group were producers and musicians with real orchestral experience, so we’d be side-eyeing them, like, ‘Are we doing OK here?’ It was a lot of fun to make.” **“The Marvelous Orange Tree”** “The song is named after a magic trick from the 1830s, and it always felt like the closer. Again, with the clean vocal thing, while we were writing the song, we were just like, ‘This makes sense here. We should embrace this skill set.’ To me, it’s our big Mogwai track or something. It’s a really cool midtempo song that’s focused on density more than anything else. Because of that, it really sets itself apart from the rest of the record. It’s pure heft and no speed. It’s just a nice flavor to round out a record that dabbles in a lot of different things throughout.”
Is there anything Jane Remover *can’t* do? The 21-year-old rapper, singer, and producer’s surprise-released third album, *Revengeseekerz*, arrives just a few months after their striking and contemplative album *Ghostholding* under their Venturing alias. If that album dove deep into the tangled guitars and complex emotions of Midwestern emo, then *Revengeseekerz* finds Jane Remover fully leaving behind the gauzy anti-rock of 2023’s *Census Designated* and blasting off into the realm of rage music. It’s impossible to hear the bitcrushed synths of “Dreamflasher” and the lurching trap beats of “Experimental Skin” without conjuring images of current rage titans like Yeat and Playboi Carti. But nothing is ever that simple in Jane Remover’s world, as their dizzying and flashy approach to production means that even the catchiest *Revengeseekerz* material is densely packed with sonic bells and whistles. Amid a plethora of sonic gestures tilted towards the neon crags of modern rap, Jane Remover still finds the space to execute a few shocking left turns across these 12 tracks. Danny Brown lends his always elastic voice to the endless-ladder electroclash of “Psychoboost,” while “Professional Vengeance” bounces like a pop-punk Super Mario across a landscape of video-game lasers and pummeling bass. *Revengeseekerz* is the strongest statement yet from a true prodigy at the height of their powers.
On the three fearlessly freaky EPs Saya Gray released between 2022 and 2024, no style was off-limits: Hyperpop, folk, jazz, industrial alt-rock, glitchy electronica, even metal were all fair game, sometimes within the span of a single song. You got the sense the Toronto-based artist was coming up with ideas faster than she could commit them to tape. But for her first proper full-length album, she grounds her manic, collagist aesthetic in a more old-school approach. *SAYA* was written primarily on an autumn 2023 retreat to Japan, where she cozied up with an acoustic guitar and reconnected with the music of classic-rock icons like The Beatles and Joni Mitchell. You can feel the difference within the opening seconds of “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE ),” where a sunrise-summoning melody, gritty guitar groove, and a soothingly slack drumbeat meld into a ’90-style alt-pop anthem. But even when working in more conventional singer-songwriter mode, Gray’s idiosyncratic, genre-mashing spirit cuts through loud and clear: The breezy country lullaby “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” is teed up with a brain-bending acoustic arpeggio worthy of a prog-rock record; “H.B.W” is a harmonious fusion of dreamy psych-folk melodies and dark trip-hop textures; while the exquisitely chill closer “LIE DOWN” sounds like a Fleetwood Mac classic given a dub remix.
The secret to Aya Sinclair’s uneasy mix of harsh noise and club music is its intimacy: No matter how blown out or mechanistic it gets, you always feel the presence of a regular old person behind it. The product of a teenage diet of Aphex Twin and Autechre on one hand and screamo and nu metal on the other, *hexed!* is, first and foremost, a therapeutic endeavor, fragile and balladic here (“droplets”), ragey there (“I am the pipe I hit myself with”), beautiful (“peach”) and spooky (“Time at the Bar”), and above all, extreme. And for music Sinclair has said was in some respects about her sobriety, it’s refreshingly funny (“off to the ESSO”). She isn’t reflecting on her nightmarish bad times—she’s bringing them back to life with clarity and power.
Scowl levels up in incredible fashion on their second full-length *Are We All Angels*, a West Coast rock record packed with the type of hooks that most bands only dream of cooking up. The leap achieved by these Santa Cruz screamers is all the more impressive when taking into account the rawness of their breakout debut, *How Flowers Grow* from 2021—a speedy and pummeling hardcore record in which vocalist Kat Moss growled in a bile-spitting low register over songs that rarely made it past the two-minute mark. On *Are We All Angels*, Moss and the gang bolster their ferocious sound with an assist from producer Will Yip (Code Orange, Turnstile) and a newfound sense of tunefulness that recalls fellow Californians The Distillers’ chipped-tooth 2003 classic *Coral Fang*. But even at their most radio-ready moments—the chugging “Celebrity Skin”-recalling guitars of “Fantasy”; “Suffer the Fool (How High Are You?)”’s indelible, miles-long chorus—Scowl never loses an ounce of grit that gained them prominence in the always-crowded hardcore scene, making for a record that transcends mere genre-crossover gestures.
One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting *The Crow* reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). *EUSEXUA*, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, *Caprisongs*), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style. The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from *EUSEXUA*’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.
“That is who Lady Gaga is to me,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of creating *MAYHEM*. “Maybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.” In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album—which she calls her “favorite record in a long time”—its own thing. “*ARTPOP* was a vibe. *Joanne* was a sound. *Chromatica* had a sound. All different. *The Fame Monster* was more chaotic. *The Fame* was theatrical pop. *Born This Way*, to me, had more of a metal/electro New York vibe to it,” she says. “I actually made the effort making *MAYHEM* to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.” Indeed, *MAYHEM* traverses—and oftentimes melds—the various flavors of Mother Monster’s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited “Garden of Eden” follows the trend of what she calls “2000 throwbacks.” With its sparkly synths, “LoveDrug” might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut “LoveGame.” She even specifically admits the “electro-grunge influence” seeps its way in—especially apparent in “Perfect Celebrity,” “Vanish into You,” and “The Beast.” The latter even shows shades of *Joanne*, but “Blade of Grass” and her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile” really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display. It’s also all incredibly personal to her. “The album is a series of gothic dreams,” she says. “I say it’s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.” Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks, in her own words. **“Abracadabra”** “I think I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think ‘Abracadabra’ is very much my sound—something that I honed in \[on\] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me. And it’s the thing that I’m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.” **“Perfect Celebrity”** “It’s super angry: ‘I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.’ It’s almost comical, this idea that any time I’m in the room with anyone, there’s me—Stefani—and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It’s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn’t feel honest to me on *MAYHEM* to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I’m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I’m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.” **“Shadow of a Man”** “That song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.” **“The Beast”** “In that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who’s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about \[my fiancé\] Michael \[Polansky\] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, ‘You can’t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart’s racing, you’re growling, and we both know why.’ It’s like somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.’” **“Blade of Grass”** “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn’t have as much life around me to inspire me.”
The Irish musician wrote her self-released debut album, 2019’s dreamy, reverb-drenched *All My People*, while living in Dublin and pining for her hometown of Connemara on Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Writing its follow-up, Maria Somerville returned to the rural landscapes of her youth, drawing inspiration from its wild terrain, its weather patterns and various bodies of water, and the Irish folk traditions still cherished by the locals. Between a pair of artist residencies on the nearby island of Inis Oírr, long conversations with her fisherman father, and home recording sessions with a small crew of new collaborators (Henry Earnest, Finn Carraher McDonald, Roisin Berkeley) emerged the ethereal songs of *Luster*, Somerville’s sophomore album and her 4AD debut. Wistful dream-pop numbers like “Garden” and “Projections” channel the woozy romance of Grouper, Mazzy Star, or Cocteau Twins, while evoking Somerville’s misty, windswept surroundings.
Around the time of her big break with 2022’s *Preacher’s Daughter*, Ethel Cain was dubbed a pop star, though it was often hard to tell from her songs. Aside from “American Teenager,” a Springsteen-esque anthem that laundered sneakily unpatriotic sentiments through arena-ready melodies, that album’s songs were largely dirges (gorgeous ones, at that) preoccupied by ideas of doomed love, faith, and fate. Written and produced almost entirely by Cain (the stage name and alter ego of Hayden Anhedönia), the project’s lore was nearly as compelling as the music itself, launching Anhedönia into something like stardom. Since then, Anhedönia’s spoken freely about the pitfalls of popularity; she penned a Tumblr post last year identifying an irony epidemic within online fan culture: an aversion to approaching art with sincerity rather than memes. You could be tempted to view *Perverts*, Cain’s first release since *Preacher’s Daughter*, as a provocation—an often-challenging 90-minute work that seems designed to scare off a stan or two. Songs like “Pulldrone” and “Housofpsychoticwomn” are noise experiments that stretch well past the 10-minute mark, full of eerie drone, depersonalized spoken word, and terrifying imagery regarding sex and sin. The moments of hard-earned beauty feel all the more rewarding: the fuzzy, sultry “Vacillator,” or “Etienne” and “Thatorchia,” a pair of elegiac instrumentals that sound like beams of heavenly light piercing through the darkness.
What’s in a name? In the case of Yung Lean, what initially registered as a sardonic take on post-ironic internet rap tropes was, in fact, a riff on the Swedish rapper’s given name: Jonatan Leandoer Håstad. In the decade-plus since he broke through with 2013’s “Ginseng Strip 2002,” Lean has evolved past his position as Scandinavia’s foremost cloud-rap interpreter, embracing sincerity, transparency, and, more recently, post-punk. (On 2024’s *Psykos*, his first full-length collaboration with Drain Gang CEO Bladee, they channeled Joy Division and The Cure for songs about psychosis and ego death.) The title of his fifth solo album says it all: *Jonatan* is Lean at his rawest, a homecoming after a long, dark night of the soul. Lead single “Forever Yung” plays out like a funeral for his former self: Phoenixes rise from the ashes, masks are taken off, a rickety one-note bassline rattles ahead. A handful of bruised love songs crackle with manic energy and magical-realist details: On “Paranoid Paparazzi,” he raps about pills and lullabies in a voice that sounds like he’s just rolled out of bed, and “Babyface Maniacs” could be the theme song of a future *Badlands* remake: “Infamous murderous couple ridin’ through the drylands/Sugarcane kisses and shotguns, candy cane violence.” But at the emotional crux of *Jonatan* are heavy yet hopeful ballads that put chaos in the rearview—like “Swan Song,” on which Lean singsongs, “I wanna know what it feels like to come down from the trip of a lifetime.”
Playboi Carti has hardly been absent in the roughly four years since *Whole Lotta Red*, appearing alongside the likes of Future, Latto, and Trippie Redd in the interim. Still, that didn’t keep his enormous fanbase from persistently clamoring over the prospect of *I AM MUSIC*, ultimately released with the truncated title of, simply, *MUSIC*. Its substantial length seems to acknowledge the wait, opening with a flurry of rage-rap tracks like “POP OUT” and “CRUSH” that herald the raconteur’s welcome arrival. Over its 30-track, 77-minute runtime, his sonics shift between the aggressively blown-out, synth-heavy post-trap he became infamous for and something markedly poppier, yet all of it undeniably within his stylistic range. Carti initially kept his choice of guests close to the vest, as has become custom for high-profile album drops. Yet it would be impossible not to recognize Kendrick Lamar spitting on “GOOD CREDIT,” Future emoting over “TRIM,” or collaborative career mainstay Lil Uzi Vert gliding triumphantly through “TWIN TRIM.” The Weeknd’s prominent feature on “RATHER LIE” makes for perhaps the most overt example of his envelope-pushing here, though appearances by Travis Scott on “PHILLY” and the tag team of Young Thug and Ty Dolla $ign on “WE NEED ALL DA VIBES” make the pivot even more plausible. Even with friends like these, Carti shines brighter on his own, his breathy near-falsetto vocal booming through the escalating video game arpeggios of “I SEEEEEE YOU BABY BOI” and his raspy snarl swerving around the cinematic noise of “COCAINE NOSE.” Not exclusively looking towards the future, there’s an almost nostalgic appreciation for Atlanta’s early 2010s sound evoked on “RADAR,” its beat reminiscent of classic 1017 Brick Squad tapes.
Graham Johnson’s music as quickly, quickly has always retained an intimacy even as the project has grown in scope. His homespun brand of psych-infused bedroom pop began evolving with 2021’s *The Long and Short of It*, remixing the DIY spirit of his catchy lo-fi tunes to include technicolor instrumental bursts and some of his clearest vocals to date. On its follow-up, 2025’s *I Heard That Noise*, Johnson imbues these vast soundscapes with moments of spontaneity and experimentation. His voice is more powerful than ever before, and he mirrors the whimsy of his instrumentals with his unpredictable melodic inclinations. Take “Enything,” a guitar-driven, folk-leaning track with spindly guitar melodies and a propulsive drum part. Johnson’s vocals build alongside the groove, which hints at a resolution that never comes. His ability to conjure and resolve tension is effortless and seamless. “Raven,” on the other hand, is an acoustic campfire jam, a track unlike anything else on the album. Here, Johnson performs the role of storyteller, his voice raw and vulnerable, matching the gravitas of the moment—whatever it may call for.
The buzzing New York band (lead vocalist Cole Haden, drummer Ruben Radlauer, guitarist Jack Wetmore, and bassist Aaron Shapiro) formed in 2016, but broke through with their 2023 full-length debut, *Dogsbody*—a blast of haunted, hedonistic noise-rock that embellished the cool chaos of early aughts dance-punk with musical-theater melodrama. On its follow-up, *Pirouette*, Model/Actriz lean all the way in on those rococo tendencies and embrace their inner prima donnas without losing their grit. “Living in America, while trapped in the body of an operatic diva,” Haden laments in a campy stage whisper on “Diva” between tales of one-night stands in far-flung European locales. The pendulum swings wildly between abandon and control, but there’s a gonzo sensuality that ties it all together. Hence, an eerie acoustic ballad about being jealous of hummingbirds (“Acid Rain”) followed by a throbbing dance-punk jam (“Departures”) that relishes in the beauty of three-syllable words—parasol, silhouette, matinee, vagabond.
For more than a decade, the musician born Nat Ćmiel has been exploring what it means to be a 21st-century human (or post-human): On 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, yeule probed the limits of the flesh by way of modulated vocals and decaying Danny L Harle beats; on 2023’s *softscars*, the artist who once identified as a cyborg tiptoed into the corporeal world, inspired by the fuzzy rock music of the late ’90s. Their fourth album, *Evangelic Girl Is a Gun*, takes their glitchy avant-pop even further out of the matrix, eschewing Auto-Tune entirely to showcase their vocals at their rawest and most visceral. Enchantingly abject vignettes about doomed love and ego death play out over sexy-sad soundscapes that draw from ’90s trip-hop and alt-rock, with production from Mura Masa, A. G. Cook, and Clams Casino. Imagine the most morose possible version of a Charli xcx song and you’ve got the title track, on which yeule purrs dispassionately: “Nosebleed on the Sunset Strip/He picks me up in a fast whip/He laces up my leather boots/He wears a blood-stained velvet suit.”
There has always been something deeply old-fashioned about DJ Koze’s music, a sense of wonder and invention more closely related to the rush of a Bugs Bunny cartoon or the moony romance of a prewar pop song than anything from the modern era per se. *Music Can Hear Us* is only his fourth album in 20 years—DJ work keeps him busy, and in general he does not seem like one to hurry—and builds on the pan-electronic style he developed on *Amygdala* and *Knock Knock*. The songs shuffle between tropical pop (the Damon Albarn-featuring “Pure Love”), melancholy ambience (“A Dónde Vas?”), lightly psychedelic club tracks (“Aruna,” “Buschtaxi”), and doo-wop sweetness (“Unbelievable,” “Umaoi”) with a fluidity that can feel both playful and dizzying. Music for tickling your third eye.
