The FADER's 50 Best Albums of 2021

Arriving seven years after his explosive debut album *Worlds*—which challenged formulaic, big-tent EDM with sensitive epics rooted in fantasy and escapism—Porter Robinson’s sophomore album *Nurture* turns, surprisingly, inward, reflecting the difficult period that followed. “After I released my first album, panic set in,” the North Carolina producer tells Apple Music. “Things got really dark.” Robinson found the pressure to prove himself overwhelming, and when his little brother was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, he retreated into isolation. “I stopped watching movies, seeing friends, even going outside,” he says. “First I felt guilty doing anything other than trying to break the creative slump. Then, suddenly I couldn’t see the point.” *Nurture* traces his gradual reemergence. “It’s me unraveling all the damage I had done to myself and finding, in its place, an appreciation for everyday things,” he says. Through billowing, earnest dance-lite tracks that relish texture, melody, and atmosphere, Robinson sketches the personal journeys—moving out of his parents’ house, visiting Japan, falling in love, helping his brother recover—that reignited his creative spark. “I didn’t want to keep writing about faraway dreamscapes,” he says. “I wanted the album to be about the beauty of the real world, because that’s what gets us through.” Below, he takes us behind the scenes into the creation of each track. **“Lifelike”** “I am obsessed with the idea of a window into nature, and this song is the window into the worldview of *Nurture*. As an artist, my vantage point into the beauty of the real world is so often, like, sitting in a recording studio, staring out my window, and feeling like I\'m in a forest. That’s what informed the creative direction of this album. To me, establishing a specific worldview was essential. It’s a lot like the process of omission. It’s saying, ‘These are the things that are worth showing here.’ ‘Lifelike’ is what takes you from the black void on the cover into all the things that I felt were worth showing.” **“Look at the Sky”** “My girlfriend Rika and I spent several months in Japan in 2016, and that’s what inspired the art direction for this album. I remember seeing this poster for Nagoya tourism that was a landscape with a blue sky and a white scribble that said something like ‘It’s still here.’ That lyric found its way into the song, and the white scribble found its way into the cover art. As for the chorus, I wanted it to serve as a mantra to myself—a message of hope and perseverance. There’s no shortage of terrible news and reasons to feel discouraged right now, but you have to maintain some sense that things can get meaningfully better.” **“Get Your Wish”** “When I started writing this album, I was wrestling with some heavy questions: Why am I killing myself over this? What do I hope is going to happen that hasn’t happened yet? Why do I need to prove myself again? The answer that I came to, which you can hear in this song, was inspired by Bon Iver’s album *22, A Million*. I found that album when my little brother had cancer. I really wasn’t able to make music at that time. But that album made me feel a few degrees brighter. More hopeful. And when I thought about how much that music meant to me, I realized that all that matters is making music that connects with people, that makes the world slightly less crappy. ‘Get Your Wish’ was the first time I was able to get back into the real state of play.” **“Wind Tempos”** “If there’s one artist who affected my worldview more than any other, it’s this Japanese pianist named Masakatsu Takagi. He’s my hero. He did the score for one of my favorite movies, *Wolf Children*. That helped me understand that all the beauty and emotion I was trying to create through music didn\'t need to come from these otherworldly dreamscapes; it could be intimate. Well, when we were in Japan, he invited me and my girlfriend to stay in his home in Hyogo. He lives in a village of like eight people and his house is covered in pianos. When he played for me, it was hard not to bawl. At the end of the trip, he gave me a disc file of Japanese ambient music from the early 2000s. I hadn’t heard of any of it, but he knew it’d be my thing. Not only did it inspire ‘Wind Tempos’ but I wound up throwing in this tiny sample of him playing a toy piano. It\'s super distorted, almost unrecognizable. I emailed him to see if I could give him credit on the song—just a little way of recognizing how much he’d influenced me. He agreed.” **“Musician”** “‘Musician’ is my favorite song on the album. It’s me when I\'m peaking on inspiration and creativity and I feel invincible. It came from a conflict between my heart and my mind: My mind told me I needed a chopped-up instrumental, kind of like ‘Flicker’ from my previous album, and my heart said it needed to be another big sing-along. At first, I followed my head and wrote the crazy instrumental; it had like ten key changes, no vocals, no repetition. But it didn’t feel right. Then I finally wrote the chorus, this huge, anthemic, vocal moment, and knew I’d hit something. It almost feels like a Justin Bieber moment, it’s so infectious and sugary and pop. But I can\'t think of anything that better captures what it feels like to be on stage. In the end, I wound up blending both versions, and the result is just boundless joy.” **“do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do”** “I wrote this song after listening to this artist Cornelius for the first time. It was one of those situations where people had told me over and over again how much I was going to love him, but it almost got overwhelming, so I sort of avoided it. Then I finally listened, and wrote this song in eight hours. It feels like rollerblading through my neighborhood—just feeling free and in this childlike state.” **“Mother”** “I wanted a song that expressed the love that I feel for my parents—as well as the grief of growing up. I felt like the minute I moved out, my youth would be over and I’d hardly ever see my family or dog again. In reality it wasn’t like that at all, I still see them all the time. But I wanted to capture the sad side of growing up—of realizing your parents aren’t infallible.” **“dullscythe”** “This is by far the most abstract and experimental song on the album, and it’s the one track that doesn’t have a standard tempo. I wanted it to feel really hard and chaotic—something at the midway point to keep people on their toes—and it makes me feel like I\'m getting smacked around in a thousand directions.” **“Sweet Time”** “This song is about being so in love with someone that, for the first time in your life, you’re scared of dying. You realize you aren’t guaranteed an eternity together. In the lyrics, I talk about going to find God to make sure she\'s okay, and it makes me cry every time. I was bawling my eyes out in the studio, I could barely get the words out. In the end, though, it’s also an expression of gratitude, because the world is lucky to have her. Rika and I have been together four years, and honestly it\'s really time for me to propose. But I wanted to wait until after the pandemic.” **“Mirror”** “This song is about my critical inner voice and how much it was affecting me. I realized I had these inner demons that were represented by the nastiest things somebody might say to me on Twitter, or the meanest things music critics might say. And they got in my head. They affected me creatively, because every time I’d write something, it was really easy to imagine someone dissing it. But if you’re just trying to avoid something mean being said about your work, that’s the least vulnerable place you could possibly be in. You’re living in fear and shrinking yourself to avoid getting hurt. ‘Mirror’ is about my confrontation with that inner voice.” **“Something Comforting”** “I wrote the main melody for this song in the back of a cab in New York in 2016. I remember listening to it over and over and over and over, feeling like, ‘All right, I need to make this into something real.’ Emotionally and lyrically, I feel like this song captures the essence of the album. It was the first thing I wrote that became the seed for everything that followed.” **“Blossom”** “I made this ballad for my girlfriend, and I remember bawling as I wrote it. It all came together very quickly and sprang from the idea of well-wishing: How much joy does it fill you with to imagine somebody you love and care about really happy? Getting everything that they want, and being surrounded by loved ones? I was imagining that for my girlfriend and picturing her as happy as she could possibly be.” **“Unfold”** “This is the only true collaboration on the album, and it came about because I’ve always loved TEED’s music. When we got into the studio to write and record, he started telling me how much he loved ‘Sea of Voices’ from my last album, *Worlds*, and how he wished he’d written it, so I started sketching a soundscape that evoked it a little bit. Then, to make the song a good fit for *Nurture*, we decided to have him sing on it—actually we sort of sing together. It was a whirlwind. For a while, I had this song early on in the tracklist because it presented some variety, but as I kept working on it, I was like, ‘No, this is an end-of-album moment. If I’m going to have this epic wall-of-sound thing, it needs to come towards the end.’” **“Trying to Feel Alive”** “This song was me trying to make sense of the whole journey, trying to figure out what has changed. What did I learn? Am I any better? Am I satisfied? It was enormously difficult to write, but ultimately, the answer I came to is that satisfaction isn’t the real goal. If you accomplish everything you’re striving for, you’ll stop looking forward. There\'s nowhere to go. This is another one where I was crying while writing it because I guess it was sort of a personal epiphany. Here I am on the other side of this, still struggling with making music, still not necessarily feeling whole, but beginning to understand that maybe that\'s a good thing. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe making music is my way of trying to feel alive, over and over again.”

There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.

“I think the idea of sexiness or being calm and collected is a pretty stifling thing as a musician,” Dijon explains to Apple Music. “I\'ve wrestled with why you\'re supposed to make music if you\'re going to do it, and I think just the longer I\'ve been trying, I\'ve gotten pretty disenchanted with sort of the casualness and the informality.” This is the existential question at the heart of *Absolutely*, his debut album. If the prior EPs—2019\'s *Sci Fi 1* and 2020\'s *How Do You Feel About Getting Married?*—were for figuring out who he was as an artist through collages of ideas, then this is about figuring out who he can be, with regard to the expectations leveled at him from outsiders and those he has for himself. Of course, to hear him tell it, the process of creating this music wasn\'t nearly as deep. At the beginning of the pandemic, he visited a friend in Wyoming, where he began tinkering with bits and pieces of demos. He returned to Los Angeles, his home since he relocated from Maryland in 2016, and wrote one song, “Scratching,” and didn’t make anything else for months. That is, until he met fellow singer-songwriter Mk.gee (Michael Gordon) at a studio session. “He and I developed a bizarre language together that sort of spilled into the rest of the record,” he says. “With the pandemic, I just wasn\'t sure if I was going to make a record, how long it would take, or if it was even useful to make music. The records that we made together just sprang out of boredom and out of this kind of conversation—it was just a conversational way to exist.” *Absolutely* is Dijon’s most collaborative release to date, an exercise in surrendering to his own creative impulses as he also makes room for others’. Out of that comes an album that highlights the intimacy of candor, of offering oneself without dressing the parts up. In many of the songs, there’s ambient room noise—people laughing, talking, and reacting to the music—that positions the listener as a kind of fly on the wall for a private jam session. It’s raw and untouched in a way that runs counter to conventional ideas of what a debut album often is or should be. Life that feels as though it\'s coming apart requires music that is the same—the process of deconstruction and rebuilding animated through sound. Which brings us back to his original question. Over the better part of a decade, he\'s earned fans and a profile, and just as that means other people are asking things of him, he\'s asking new things of himself. *Absolutely* is some version of an answer that reimagines his artistry at a time that required he reimagine his life. “It just seems strange that the moment you get a little platform, people start to tidy up a little bit and they start to perfect their lane,” he says. “I just kind of wanted to destroy it and build a new one.” Below, he explains how each of the songs came to be. **“Big Mike’s”** “‘Big Mike\'s’ is the first song that Mk.gee and I made together. He came to the house, I had a drum loop playing, I had a couple of friends milling about. We\'d met a few times but we didn\'t really talk, and he picked up a guitar and he played a little, and it was so natural for us to build the track together. It was a complete freestyle, lyrically and melodically, and we sort of wrapped everything harmonically around it. I played some bass way after that I\'m pretty sure it\'s not the same key as what Mike was playing. And we just listened back, and we just felt like if this is on an album, I\'d want to hear this first because I can decide if I want to be here or not. We wanted it to be hypnotic, and I wanted to be as confrontational as possible.” **“Scratching”** “‘Scratching’ was the first song I actually ever made for the record, and it was a product of me trying to learn piano. I just played a couple of things and wrote a song around a midi piano part that I was just working on. It was super simple. I thought that there was this Springsteen-y thing to it that was an accident, so I was just like, well, how do I kind of pay homage in that way? Everything to me is post-realization—I never really know what I\'m doing when I\'m doing it.” **“Many Times”** “‘Many Times’ was the first time I\'d ever not controlled or been engineering my own session. I went with a very good friend, somebody I respect a lot named Andrew Sarlo—he works with some people I really love. Andrew has a patented recording technique or an exercise that I won\'t reveal, but we were just trying to get over a hump and trying to be productive. A lot of my records are nocturnal, and this was a bright coffee thing. We just wanted to make something that we thought was quite fun—everything is sort of operating with a little bit of humor, and Mike\'s solo exists relative to the intensity and the mania of the song as potentially a little hat tip.” **“Annie”** “I left to go upstate \[New York\] and brought a few friends, and a person I\'ve collaborated with a lot, Jack Karaszewski, ended up being there. We tried for a few nights just to hang out and make music around this table, and ‘Annie’ ended up being this pretty manic campfire thing. I picked up an acoustic guitar, and it was tuned in some really crazy way. I was just kind of sitting at the table and started mumbling and humming a little thing. Then Mike slotted in, picked up a bass, and we just made the song. The Band was always in the back of everybody\'s head. I had never really heard of them until I went to upstate New York and got extremely obsessed. I was trying to make some sort of demented version of a The Band song or something, and it happened really quickly.” **“Noah’s Highlight Reel”** “This is my favorite song on the record. We were sitting at this long dining room table, and our buddy Noah who\'s from Wyoming was there with us. He\'s played slide and occasional guitar on a couple of the songs and he\'s helped with the general vibe and thrown a couple lyrics in on this record. But Mike and I were cranking through super fast, a bunch of ideas per day, when we were in upstate New York. Things calmed down, we had a few beers, and I believe it was Mike\'s idea—he said, ‘Noah, you should write a song.’ I started playing a guitar part, some chords, and Mike slotted in with some bass and some other things, and my buddy Noah actually wrote a song and we asked him to sing it. We sang backup for him. I also lost the file, so that\'s the only version of the song that exists.” **“The Dress”** “I borrowed a drum machine and just laid down this thing, and a friend of mine named John Keek played some chords. He has a very sort of gospelly touch, and it started off as kind of a little gag, but obviously the chords he played were quite inspiring. I was experimenting a lot with noise on this album, and ‘The Dress’ was a way for me to kind of internally be like, can you actually just write a song? Because I didn\'t know if I could. And yeah, there\'s a little bit of an homage to Bonnie Raitt, but it was really an exercise in me trying to push myself out of a comfort zone. You can get really comfortable around like a wall of sonic trickery and fuzz.” **“God in Wilson”** “‘God in Wilson’ is a tough one, because that was a pretty early one. When I was in Wyoming—it\'s referencing Wilson, Wyoming—there was this attempt to kind of explore guilt and shame, and it was an interesting idea that I had. It was a pretty early demo idea that I never really fleshed out and just thought it could provide some sort of contrast on the record, I guess. I was really fascinated with priests and kind of thought about, I don\'t know, a little priest guy. But yeah, it\'s just an exploration, lyrically, of guilt and shame, and I kept it on there just because I thought it sounded pretty.” **“Did You See It?”** “It\'s a modular, like, Eurorack experiment that I was doing, and I wanted to see if I could write a song around it. It\'s about aliens.” **“Talk Down”** “On hip-hop records, you can kind of quote—like JAY-Z quotes Biggie all the time and stuff like that. I never really understood how to do that in more of a singer-songwriter thing, but ‘Talk Down’ was part two of ‘Annie.’ Same day, same table, same people. I was listening to a lot of Gillian Welch—I think I said her name wrong on the record—but a lot of the imagery that floated around the record was really based on the three-day drive from LA to New York. There\'s tension, there\'s excitement, there\'s anger. There\'s also monotony, it\'s a lot of boredom. I heard a chord that my friend John played. And I started freestyling this thing, and I just kept quoting ‘Look at Miss Ohio,’ and that became the basis of the song. It was me listing off songs I was listening to while driving and trying to contrast a little bit. I wanted to do a little homage to Baltimore club. I tried to do a few Baltimore club songs that failed, and this is the closest that we got.” **“Rodeo Clown”** “I was just kind of playing some chords and we were a little burned out after making ‘Big Mike\'s,’ just me, Mike, and Noah. But in effort of stretching what the performer is supposed to sound like, I just wanted to explore R&B melodic stuff. It\'s part of my DNA, but I just wanted to present it in a way that isn\'t clean. I get very frustrated by how cool everybody is, and I wanted to just see what happens if you try to make a song that\'s very earnest. I sort of blacked out a little bit and let it go and then listened back to it the next day, and I was like, \'Yeah, that sounds pretty good.\' I feel like it\'s very boring to think that just because you have a guitar, that you can\'t try to reinterpret how you\'re supposed to perform. I don\'t know if it was a successful experiment, but yeah.” **“End of Record”** “In an effort of making a debut record, you toss and turn a lot of ideas of how you\'re supposed to make it perfect, and ‘End of Record’ was a personal message to myself. It was done in upstate New York, around the table with a lot of people. I think it was on Halloween of \[2020\]. That song specifically—it\'s for me and the people on the record, like a little postcard from a time and all the emotion that was around that house at the time.” **“Credits!”** “I think that I have the tendency to sort of give off this impression that I\'m hyper-serious all the time and the music is emotionally weighty to people, but there\'s a lot of jokes that I think I\'ve been trying to get a little bit more effective at displaying on my music. And ‘Credits!’ is also just kind of another thing for me on there. I thought it was kind of fun. After you hear a lot of these ups and downs on this record, I couldn\'t think of a funnier and I think more obnoxious way to kind of put a bow on all of this weight. There were a lot of different variations of that energy, and ‘Credits!’ just sounded silly enough to be the one.”

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.

Among the many reasons why Rauw Alejandro has become one of the most sought-after singers in the Latin music world, his restless creativity certainly ranks highly. There were undeniable glimmers of that on his full-length debut *Afrodisíaco*, with more than its fair share of high-profile guests. His disinterest in being pigeonholed or limited to any one lane, as alluded to on that album’s delightful dance-floor outlier “Algo Mágico,” led to some exciting moments of risk-taking on his follow-up *VICE VERSA*. The radical pop pivot of “Todo De Ti” proved a transformational moment in his ascent to stardom, its epic clubby funk and irresistible chorus hook translating to a smash hit throughout the Spanish-speaking world. While he opts not to repeat this specific formula too many times, he shows that single was no fluke with the Tainy-produced “Desenfocao\'” and its hedonistic haze. Elsewhere, he showcases both his range and a willingness to keep evolving via the sentimental R&B of “Aquel Nap ZzZz,” the bilingual tech-house revelations of “Cosa Guapa,” and the surprise junglism of “¿Cuándo Fue?” Of course, those seeking the steamy loverman perreo vibes of his prior album will find plenty of that on offer, from the throbbing online come-ons of “Sexo Virtual” to the *duro* throwback thrills of “La Old Skul.” But above all, *VICE VERSA* truly succeeds by reframing Rauw as an artist operating on a whole other level than the R&B new jacks he came up with.

There’s a liquid, surreal feeling that runs through *Pray for Haiti*, a sense of touching solid ground only to leave it just as fast. Between the bars of Newark rapper Mach-Hommy\'s dusty, fragmented beats (many courtesy of the production regulars of Griselda Records), he glimpses thousand-dollar brunches (“Au Revoir”), bloodshed (“Folie Á Deux”), and the ghosts of his ancestors (“Kriminel”) with spectral detachment—not uncaring so much as stoic, the oracle at the outskirts who moves silently through a crowd. He likes it grimy (“Magnum Band,” “Makrel Jaxon”) and isn’t above materialism or punchlines (“Watch out, I ain’t pulling no punches/So real I make Meghan Markle hop out and get the Dutches”), but is, above all, a spiritualist, driven by history (like a lot of his albums, this one is peppered with Haitian Creole), feel, and a quiet ability to turn street rap into meditation. “It’s crazy what y’all can do with some old Polo and Ebonics,” he raps on “The 26th Letter”—a joke because he knows it’s not that simple, and a flex because, for him, it is.

Pop music is, by design, kaleidoscopic, and Doja Cat\'s third album takes full advantage of its fluidity. *Planet Her* is ushered in on the euphoric Afropop of “Woman” and moves seamlessly into the reggaetón-kissed “Naked,” the hip-hop-meets-hyperpop of “Payday,” and the whimsical ad-lib trap of “Get Into It (Yuh)”—and that\'s just the first four songs. Later, R&B ballads and club-ready anthems also materialize from the ether, encompassing the spectrum of contemporary capital-P Pop and also the multihued sounds that are simply just popular, even if only in their corners of the internet for now. This is Doja\'s strength. She\'s long understood how mainstream sensibility interacts with counterculture (or what\'s left of it anyway, for better and worse), and she\'s nimbly able to translate both. *Planet Her* checks all the right boxes and accentuates her talent for shape-shifting—she sounds just as comfortable rapping next to Young Thug or JID as she does crooning alongside The Weeknd or Ariana Grande—but it\'s so pristine, so in tune with the music of the moment that it almost verges on parody. Is this Doja\'s own reflection or her reflecting her fans back to themselves? Her brilliance lies in the fact that the answer doesn\'t much matter. The best pop music is nothing if not a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, its brightest stars so uniquely themselves and yet whatever else they need to be, too.

Over the past decade, Toronto’s Mustafa Ahmed has worn many hats: spoken-word poet, community activist, documentarian, member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policy-shaping Youth Advisory Council, and, more recently, a songwriter for pop stars like The Weeknd and Shawn Mendes. All of those accomplishments—not to mention a number of enthusiastic Drake endorsements—have made the long-awaited arrival of Mustafa’s debut release, *When Smoke Rises*, a major event, complete with an A-list guest list that includes James Blake, Sampha, and Jamie xx. But Mustafa has answered those heightened expectations with a set of deeply meditative acoustic-soul hymns that, at times, feel almost too personal and painful to bear. The title and cover shot of *When Smoke Rises* pay tribute to Toronto MC Smoke Dawg, a fellow member of the Halal Gang rap collective who was killed in 2018, and these eight songs reverberate with the trauma of losing loved ones too soon and the crises of faith that result from enduring endless violence. Atop the rumbling rhythms of “The Hearse,” Mustafa preps his slain friend’s body for a traditional Muslim funeral while questioning whether his natural peacemaker instincts can keep his desire for vengeance at bay. “Ali” is even more harrowing, an emotional plea for a friend to leave town to avoid the trouble coming to him, only for the trouble to find him anyway. (“There were no words to stop the bullets,” Mustafa ruefully admits, in a voice that isn’t so much calm as numbed.) But *When Smoke Rises*’ grim subtext is leavened by Mustafa’s natural melodic graces—even when recounting the worst days of his life, his songs summon the strength to carry on. “Just put down that bottle, tell me your sorrows,” he sings on the quiet yet resounding mission statement “Stay Alive,” a reminder that reckoning with the pain is the first step toward healing it.

“I would say music is a fruit of life,” Juls tells Apple Music. “There are many fruits of life that we learn to take in, and help us, in one way or another, to either get by or stay in a good place. Music is definitely one.” On his debut album *Sounds of My World*, the UK-based Ghanaian producer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist recruits a fresh, colorful batch of rising artists and trusted collaborators (including Wizkid, Sauti Sol, Jaz Karis, Fireboy DML, and Niniola). “After \[2019 mixtape\] *Colour*, I started making new beats as soon as it was done,” he says. “I had a studio built from scratch. And that’s my world, where I discover new sounds. This is an expression of all my mind is going through.” The album forms a dazzling love letter to traditional sounds from Africa—from Ghanaian highlife to South African amapiano via silky-smooth Afrobeat—all filtered though innovative global lenses. “I always want it to be different to the next and the next and the next,” he says of his thirst for bold experimentation. “I don\'t want any *particular* sound, because then I’ll feel like I\'ve already done it before.” Here, Juls takes us through his kaleidoscopic album, track by track. **“Close to Me” (feat. Wizkid, Agent Sasco \[Assassin\] & JAEL)** “This is dictating the vibe: We’ll start off slow, and then pick it up. Jaël opens the album; he’s an amazingly diverse artist from the Moluccan Islands, but based in the Netherlands. We met in Amsterdam and connected, in the sense that we\'ve been bouncing ideas via emails and WhatsApp for a year. I wanted to create a song that cuts across lovers rock, dub reggae, and Afrobeat, with some old and new-school elements of those sounds at the same time. With this one, Sasco took the lead with the sound and gives it that bounce—JAEL, too, but he also brings soulful feeling to the song.” **“Summer in the Ends” (feat. Jaz Karis & George the Poet)** “I’ve been wanting to make more house records, because I\'m a fan of Bucie, Black Motion, Black Coffee, and so much Afro-house from South Africa. I feel like this is an early example of the music I’ll be making in the next few years: more uptempo, to get people dancing. I made \[2020 single\] ‘Soweto Blues’ with Jaz Karis, and anytime we link up, it\'s magic.” **“Makossa Riddim” (feat. Haile)** “The title is an indirect tribute to \[Cameroonian musician\] Manu Dibango, who released a song called ‘Soul Makossa’—which is a genre of music from Africa that has this certain *groove*. So my guitarist came in and played a similar groove, I’ve flipped and given it an amapiano sound, then Haile came in, adding a Caribbean vibe. So, if you listen closely, you’ll realize so many cultures that can relate to this song.” **“Love Me” (feat. Niniola)** “It gives a Kuti-family-type vibe—I can definitely see something like this being played live at the \[New Afrika\] Shrine. Niniola is someone I’ve wanted to work with for a very, very long time; I knew she’s the only person that can bring this energy.” **“My Size” (feat. King Promise, DarkoVibes & Joey B)** “These are two of Ghana\'s greatest exports. Joey B has been around for a minute; he\'s one of our most prolific rappers. And DarkoVibes is a part of \[Ghanaian rap group\] La Même Gang. He’s been very experimental in his sound—he’s tried trap \[music\], and the trippy stuff, but he also loves to do traditional stuff and speaks in his dialect, which is also my local dialect, Ga. That\'s the language that people from the capital speak.” **“Intentionally” (feat. Fireboy DML)** “I was trying to do some stuff for Fireboy’s \[*APOLLO*\] album, but we didn\'t get it in on time. Things were swamped then—we met about two years ago, at Wizkid\'s concert at The O2. I made this in a flat with \[Ghanaian DJ and producer\] Guiltybeatz, and his guitarist. We were working on a bunch of beats. And I got to finishing this one for Fireboy, after the guitarist laid some chords and riffs on there.” **“Wish You” (feat. Bas & Mannywellz)** “I’ve noticed, based on stats and numbers, that I have a huge American fanbase. So with this track, I decided to experiment more and tap into a sound that I started listening to quite frequently during the pandemic. I made a project with \[Seattle producer and DJ\] Sango called *Fufu & Grits*. He introduced me to a lot of baile funk and funk carioca, and I introduced him to amapiano and a few other sounds from my side.” **“Wicked” (feat. Knucks, kadiata & Sam Wise)** “This track continues the energy in terms of that uptempo baile funk vibe, but I’ve added some garage elements to it. This track is bouncy, it’s youthful and quirky, and even though a lot of the young kids like it, I didn\'t want to do the whole TikTok thing—that just comes across as forced. In my opinion, these three rappers are the future of rap music in the UK. They’re all about the fashion, having fun and good vibes. That’s what ‘Wicked’ is all about.” **“Alarm” (feat. Prettyboy D-O & Suspect OTB)** “I was working with Prettyboy D-O in the studio and he starts freestyling; everything he says on this record is freestyled. After, I was thinking, ‘Who can I slap on here from the UK that would give a similar energy and spirit?’ It had to be Suspect. But he took forever to send his verse; he wanted to attack it perfectly.” **“Mare” (feat. Sauti Sol)** “I went to Kenya at the beginning of the year for a show. And afterwards, Sauti Sol invited me to their home for such an amazing experience. They’re very animated and fun to work with; their energy was just great throughout. It\'s probably the best session I had making the album. I’ve tried something a little bit different, to give a reggae feel to it, like old-school Shabba Ranks and Super Cat-style.” **“Love Language” (feat. Mayra Andrade)** “A friend in Ghana told me: ‘There\'s this lady from Cape Verde, but stayed in Cuba and Portugal and France—she\'s so eclectic with her sound, and has this amazing voice!’ And that’s how I was introduced to Mayra Andrade’s music. I shot her a couple of ideas, and I don\'t think they pushed her. But when I sent this, she was like, ‘Yeah, this is it!’” **“Say You Love Me” (feat. A2, Karun & Xenia Manasseh)** “This track started with just the girls, Xenia Manasseh and Karun, from Kenya. Even before my session with Sauti Sol, I was intent on making a connection with East Africa on this album. I was really inspired by Sade at the time, trying to get into a zone by playing with some loops and drums, and sent this song over. We ended up forming a group chat to work over ideas, and I was expecting them to send back separate verses. They surprised me with a duet and their vocals bouncing off each other.” **“Melly Melly” (feat. Oxlade)** “Oxlade is my little bro. I’m very proud of where he’s at right now. He\'s a champion. He was on *Colour*, and ‘Angelina’ did so well, I really wanted him again. I was looking for a bit of a highlife bounce but not with an artist from Ghana; the Ghanaian song had to be the perfect song—and that’s ‘My Size.’ But Oxlade ended up adding a bounce to this that’s reminiscent of \[traditional\] Igbo music, in a way.” **“M.O.O.D” (feat. Kojo Funds)** “For this song I had to stick it on Kojo: ‘This is the beat I’m working on, there’s no excuse,’ because he\'d been ducking me for a while. I love making songs for the ladies, and I think Kojo should make more, too, because the music lives forever when it’s on in the dance.” **“Chance” (feat. Projexx & Tay Iwar)** “Tay Iwar and I have *loads* of songs, hopefully you’ll be hearing more soon. He\'s an incredible artist, writer, and producer, one of Nigeria\'s best-kept secrets, and he needs to be celebrated more. He dictated the road for the classic we made, ‘True Love,’ for Wizkid’s \[*Made in Lagos*\] album. This track was actually made before ‘True Love,’ or at the same time as I was making records back-to-back with both Tay Iwar and Projexx. Our first together in 2016 is a record called ‘December’—it’s a fan favorite—and we\'ve been friends and in touch ever since.”

“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

On his third studio project, Prettyboy D-O trades the all-out rage of 2020’s *Wildfire* for a more observational tone. A bold fusion of rap, punk, and pop interspersed with African rhythms, *Love Is War* oscillates between telling a modern romantic story and portraying “love” as self-preservation—both for the individual and a nation. “My plan was to not fight. We were going to make a love album,” D-O (real name: Donald Ofik) tells Apple Music. “But the way the country was—after the End SARS protests \[in late 2020\]—it was like I was still fighting. My people were still fighting. It rains in my house where I live in Nigeria. It floods. No matter how much money I make, my house is going to be flooded out. We have to walk through that water in the streets. This album was going to be straight-up political, like I’m shouting like Fela \[Kuti\] for my country and for my people—but I found a way to make everything in that world be in love.” Here, he gives us an inside look into each track. **“1996”** “MKO Abiola day \[June 12, 1996\] was the day when Abiola won the elections. This was our first democratic election, but \[the former military president, Ibrahim Babangida\] came and said, ‘No. It’s a lie. You didn’t do any election.’ They locked \[Abiola\] up. During the political protests \[in 2020\], I wrote this song, because I was like, ‘Is this 1996?’ It feels like it’s those days when it was the dictators in power. I’m not Fela \[Kuti\]—he spent his whole career fighting politics and stuff—but the bullshit is too much. It starts with rock ’n’ roll, guitars. I even ended the song with a woman’s voice—Aisha Yesufu; she’s a very prominent female activist. I used something very powerful she said during the protests.” **“Falling” \[Prettyboy D-O & IAMDDB\]** “I was trying to do something in the same nature as ‘It Wasn’t Me’ by Shaggy. I just told a story where the girl has a boyfriend, and I want the girl, and she doesn’t want \[me\] because she doesn’t trust me. But ultimately, we get each other. All the love stories connect, and it’s the same story: You’re in a relationship, but you could be happier with me. Why? Because me, I’m a fighter. Love is war. I’ll fight for culture; I’ll fight for your love and all that. It’s the intro to the love aspects of the album.” **“Rodman Style / Dre’s Interlude”** “This is about all the politicians—from when I was young, it’s the same politicians we’ve had in my country. I’m tired of it. I’m telling them why people like me: Because I’m so real about all this stuff. We’re going to keep doing what we do—keep making our money. But I don’t like \[the politicians’\] style. They should do it like me. They should be free; be real. I wanted to do it in two ways: Afrobeats, and then the interlude is straight hip-hop. It opens with a clip from a Nollywood movie called *Games Women Play*.” **“Hanky Panky”** “This is \[about\] love again. But this time, the girl who I met in ‘Falling,’ she’s messing with me. I’m telling her, ‘Let’s vibe, let’s chill, let’s do some hanky panky—whatever us youngins do to enjoy ourselves.’” **“Belly of the Beast” \[Prettyboy D-O & Nissi\]** “Nissi and I come from Port Harcourt, from Rivers State. We all come from the south, the southeast. We come from the belly of the beast, where all these big oil companies rob our land, but they take all the money from our land. It’s a homage to where we come from, but it’s still about war and the oppression that we faced.” **“Living in Bondage”** “This one is just for the energy. I got the title from a classic Nigerian movie that came out in 1992, where the guy sold his soul to the Devil for money, and for stuff, just to make it out of Nigeria. So, the whole movie, he’s just trying to be good and he’s trying to be a good man, even though he’s sold his soul to the Devil. It’s very spiritual.” **“Kumbaye / Sideman Interlude”** “This time I wanted to come from a different angle. With all the love songs, the girl has a boyfriend, so I try to woo her. It’s still a fight, because at the end of the day, fights are love. I didn’t want to make it look like the woman is chasing me—let me do it the old way, like a gentleman. I’m chasing the woman. It’s Afrobeat, and the interlude is R&B. I need this woman to love me—yet I’m playing on the side. I can’t lie, it’s kind of like a toxic album from a male perspective, but yes, it’s like I’m a side man. It’s for the side men.” **“If They Send U”** “I love all my brothers and sisters, but I’m giving them advice. ‘If they send me’ is a popular Nigerian saying. It’s like, if someone is fighting you or troubling you, you ask the person, ‘Did the Devil send you? Why are you disturbing me? Who sent you?’” **“Lord Protect My Steppings” \[Prettyboy D-O & Pa Salieu\]** “I was praying—‘Lord, protect my steppings’—and I put it on my Snapchat and my Instagram. It went viral—Nigerian artists, British artists, all artists were \[saying it\]. So, we went to studio. I was using drill—UK drill, Naija drill, Ghana drill. Pa Salieu comes from Gambia. He spat so hard! He’s an African rebel, and I’m a rebel by heart. So, we didn’t even need to talk–we both just understood.” **“Too Many Gyal”** “It’s a love song too. It’s for anybody who has a girlfriend or who is in a relationship, who is finding it hard to be faithful in that relationship.” **“Broke Boy Fc” \[Prettyboy D-O & MOJO AF\]** “It’s like street gospel—the hustler’s gospel. We don’t belong to ‘Broke Boy Fc \[football club\].’ We used to play \[for\] Broke Boy Fc, but now life has changed. It’s motivational speaking. We came here to win. I’m playing for Chop Life Fc. The contract I signed with my new team, I hope it’s long. It’s satirical. It gets the people going.” **“Toyin Tomato”** “This is real love. I’m speaking to my girlfriend because I’ve done all the playing before that. I’m singing about faithfulness. It’s a modern-day wedding banger. The name comes from a popular Nollywood actress \[Sola Sobowale\]. They used to call her Toyin Tomato \[on TV drama series *Super Story*\].” **“Trust Issues”** “This one is advice. A lot of the ‘fight’ tracks on this album are more me just talking, or me giving advice. I got trust issues because of the industry, the politics of stuff within the industry. I’m not trying to be a fighter; I’m just trying to give my observations of everything that we’ve gone through. The most important thing, at the end of the day, is we have to eat. We can make as many friends as we want, but I got trust issues. I’d rather just eat. I make sure my mother is eating.” **“Police n Teef” (Bonus)** “I’ve not recorded as much music as I recorded the week of Nigeria\'s End SARS protest. I would record several songs a day. And the first two days, all the songs were serious. Then my boys were like, ‘Yo, all these songs are serious. Everything is the same.’ So, I thought of the game I used to play as a kid. In America, they call it Cops and Robbers. In Nigeria, we call it Police and Teef. It’s like you’re being chased. But why are they chasing me? I’m not a criminal. So, they can’t chase me for being a criminal. So, what can \[they chase me for\] that’ll be funny? What if I got a girl, and her boyfriend wants to fight me? Like Jerry Springer. It’s crazy. Because I remember Jerry Springer—somebody, when they want to fight, they’ll be chasing the person around the stage. So, I wrote the whole thing about how boyfriends are chasing me like Police n Teef.”

Lil Nas X is nothing if not a testament to the power of being true to yourself. His breakthrough single, “Old Town Road,” forced the industry to revisit old conversations about the limitations of genre, race, and who is kept out (or locked in) by the definitions we use to talk about music. The Georgia-born singer-rapper responded in kind with a remix and remixes to that remix that rocketed him up the charts and simultaneously highlighted the fickleness of the entire endeavor—did Billy Ray Cyrus suddenly prove his country bona fides any more than the addition of Young Thug proved his trap ones or Diplo his electronic? But that\'s the magic of Lil Nas X and of his debut album *MONTERO*: He knows that pop music is whatever the artist creating it wants it to be, an exercise of vulnerable imagination packaged as unyielding, larger-than-life confidence. “I feel like with this album, I know what I wanted,” he tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I know what I want. I know where I want to be in life. And I know that\'s going to take me being more open and bringing it out of myself no matter how much it hurts or feels uncomfortable to say things that I need to say.” But any such ambivalence doesn\'t explicitly manifest in the songs here, as Lil Nas X roams his interior spaces as openly as he does assorted styles—which span everything from emo and grunge to indie pop and pop punk. On “DEAD RIGHT NOW,” a thunderous track complete with choral flourishes, he recaps the journey to this moment, how it almost didn\'t happen, and the ways his personal relationships have changed since. “If I didn’t blow up, I would\'ve died tryna be here/If it didn’t go, suicide, wouldn’t be here,” he sings, adding, “Now they all come around like they been here/When you get this rich and famous everybody come up to you singing, \'Hallelujah, how’d you do it?\'” All throughout—on songs like “SUN GOES DOWN” or “DONT WANT IT”—the weight of his burdens exists in contrast to the levity of his sound, a particular kind of Black and queer disposition that insists on a joy that is far more profound than any pain. And make no mistake, there is plenty of joy here. On “SCOOP,” he finds an effervescent kindred spirit in Doja Cat, while “DOLLA SIGN SLIME,” which features Megan Thee Stallion, is a trapped-out victory lap. Elsewhere, the dark riffs on the outstanding “LIFE AFTER SALEM” bring him to new creative lands altogether. The album brims with surprises that continuously reveal him anew, offering a peek into the mind of an artist who is unafraid of himself or his impulses, even with the knowledge that he\'s still a work in progress. “Don\'t look at me as this perfect hero who\'s not going to make mistakes and should be the voice for everybody,” he says. “You\'re the voice for you.” And to that effect, *MONTERO* is a staggering triumph that suggests not just who Lil Nas X is but the infinite possibilities of who he may be in the future, whether that falls within the scope of our imaginations or not.

There’s a track on *Chemtrails Over the Country Club*—Lana Del Rey’s sixth full-length album and the follow-up to 2019’s *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!*—that should have been heard earlier. “Yosemite” was originally written for 2017’s *Lust for Life*, but, in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that year, Del Rey revealed the song was “too happy” to make the cut. Its appearance is a neat summation of where you can expect to find the singer here. Total serenity might not have been achieved just yet, but across these 11 tracks, Del Rey, along with returning producer Jack Antonoff, finds something close to peace of mind, reflected in a softer, more intimate and pared-back sound. “Wild at Heart,” “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” and “Yosemite,” for example, all brim with (self-)acceptance. Returning to ”Yosemite” hints at something else, too: an artist looking back to make her next step forward. *Chemtrails* is scattered with references to its predecessors, from the “Venice Bitch”-reminiscent outro of the title track to “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” which might be seen as a companion piece to 2012 single “Ride.” Then there are the tracks that could easily have appeared on previous albums (“Tulsa Jesus Freak” wouldn’t be out of place on 2014’s dark-edged *Ultraviolence*) and lyrics we’ve heard before (“Dance Till We Die,” for example, references “Off to the Races” from her debut album *Born to Die*, while “Yosemite” calls back to the “candle in the wind” of *NFR!*\'s “Mariners Apartment Complex”). Del Rey’s MO has always been to tweak and refine—rather than reinvent—her sound, bringing her ever closer to where she wants to be. *Chemtrails*, however, is the first time she’s brought so much of her past into that process. As for where this album takes her? Somewhat unexpectedly towards country and folk inspired by the Midwest, rather than Del Rey’s beloved California; on “Tulsa Jesus Freak,” Del Rey pines after Arkansas. *Chemtrails Over the Country Club* makes no reference to the global pandemic in which it was partly created and released. And yet, amid a year of isolation, it was perhaps logical that one of this generation’s best songwriters would look inward. Here, Del Rey’s panoramic examination of America is replaced with something altogether more personal. On opener “White Dress,” she reflects on “a simpler time” when she was “only 19… Listening to White Stripes/When they were white hot/Listening to rock all day long.” It’s a time, more specifically, before she was famous. Nostalgia for it ebbs and flows as Del Rey’s vocals crack and strain, but any regret is short-lived. “I would still go back/If I could do it all again… Because it made me feel/Made me feel like a god.” Fame—and its pitfalls—are things Del Rey is more intimately acquainted with than most, and are a constant source of conflict on *Chemtrails*. But, as on “White Dress,” disillusionment most often turns to defiance. This reaches its peak by the album’s midpoint, “Dark but Just a Game,” an outstanding exploration of just how dangerous fame can be—if you let it. Where Del Rey was once accused of glamorizing the deaths of young artists who came before her, here, she emancipates herself from that melancholic mythology. “We keep changing all the time/The best ones lost their minds/So I’m not gonna change/I’ll stay the same,” she sings in an uplifting major-chord chorus that seems to look ahead to a better future. That sunnier disposition doesn’t dispel Del Rey’s unease with fame altogether, but she’s only too aware of what it’s brought her. For starters, the women she’s met along the way—paid tribute on the album’s final three, country-inspired tracks. “Breaking Up Slowly,” a meditation on the tempestuous relationship between Tammy Wynette and George Jones, was written with country singer-songwriter Nikki Lane (who toured with Del Rey in 2019), and Weyes Blood and Zella Day join Del Rey on the final track to cover Joni Mitchell’s “For Free.” On “Dance Till We Die,” meanwhile, the singer celebrates women in music who have come before her—and acted as guiding lights. “I’m covering Joni and I’m dancing with Joan,” she sings. “Stevie’s calling on the telephone/Court almost burned down my home/But god, it feels good not to be alone.” That same track may see her revisit her woes (“Troubled by my circumstance/Burdened by the weight of fame”), but it also finds her returning to an old coping mechanism. Just as on *Lust for Life*’s “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing” and *NFR!*’s “Happiness is a butterfly,” it’s time to dance those woes away. “I\'ll keep walking on the sunny side/And we won\'t stop dancin\' till we die.”

Ahead of its release, Vince Staples told Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe that his eponymous album was a more personal work than those that came before. The Long Beach rapper has never shied away from bringing the fullness of his personality to his music—it\'s what makes him such a consistently entertaining listen—but *Vince Staples*, aided by Kenny Beats, who produced the project, is more clear-eyed than ever. Opener “ARE YOU WITH THAT?” is immediate: “Whenever I miss those days/Visit my Crips that lay/Under the ground, runnin\' around, we was them kids that played/All in the street, followin\' leads of n\*\*\*as who lost they ways,” he muses in the second verse, assessing the misguided aspirations that marked his childhood even as the threat of violence and death loomed. It\'s not that Staples hasn\'t broached these topics before—it\'s that he\'s rarely been this explicit regarding his own feelings about them. His sharp matter-of-factness and acerbic humor have often masked criticism in piercing barbs and commentary in unflinching bravado. Here, he\'s direct. The songs, like a series of vignettes that don\'t even reach the three-minute mark, feel intimately autobiographical. “SUNDOWN TOWN” reflects on the distrustful mentality that comes with taking losses and having the rug pulled out from under you one too many times (“When I see my fans, I\'m too paranoid to shake their hands”); “TAKE ME HOME” illuminates how the pull of the past, of “home,” can still linger even after you\'ve escaped it (“Been all across this atlas but keep coming back to this place \'cause it trapped us”). Some might call this an album of maturation, but it ultimately seems more like an invitation—Staples finally allowing his fans to know him just a bit more.

As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”

“Hopefully this is the start of something new—no more five-year gaps,” Isaiah Rashad tells Apple Music of his long-awaited third album. It’s been that long between *The House Is Burning* and 2016’s *The Sun’s Tirade*, but the Chattanooga rapper easily proves why he’s worth waiting for. The songs here are kinetic even in their nocturnal wooziness and precise even in their unpretentiousness. Many of them, he says, were born from “scratches” or songs he just made on a whim with a minimal amount of time invested alongside Dallas producer Kal Banx, who’s credited on most of the tracks. True to Rashad’s geographic background, there’s a decidedly Southern and soulful aura that informs the album’s momentum and references. Tucked beneath the layers of syrupy melodies are nods to Pimp C, Goodie Mob, Three 6 Mafia, and Anthony Hamilton. Within the sounds and lyrics, he lights up a map to his musical roots and the proud Dirty South lineage in which he operates. “I tried to hone in on the energy of all the types of music I grew up listening to—Texas bounce, Louisiana bounce, a little bit of neo-soul in there,” he says. “I tried to update it, flip it, and make it apply to how I be feeling nowadays.” Below, he shares a bit of background about a handful of the album’s standouts. **“From the Garden”** “Originally, the beat was something else. I\'d made it at my mom\'s crib about four years ago, and we just switched the beat because it still sounded cool. We were like, \'Why waste it? Why have it just sitting to the side?\' So we put Uzi on it. He said he was going to do some s\*\*t for me if I asked him, so we asked him, and he did it.” **“Lay Wit Ya”** “‘Lay Wit Ya’ came from a lockout that we had had like last January. Again, it was just a scratch—a scratch idea that we turned full once we had listened to it a couple of times. Hollywood Cole threw us the beat. Made it in about 10 minutes. That was it. I just liked it.” **“Claymore”** “I made that song for Smino. And if I didn\'t use it, I was going to try to give it to him. And then he finally got on it, but I think his album was about done and he didn\'t really need it, so we used it. Most everybody on my album I listen to, so most of the tracks were made like \'oh, this would be a tight Smino song\' or that type of s\*\*t if it\'s fitting. I be having that type of stuff in mind.” **“Headshots”** “People say \[this reminds them of\] Outkast, but I was doing an Anthony Hamilton impression more than anything else. The verses is just— maybe I can get how they get some Outkast in that, but that was a whole bunch of Zay right there. But the inspiration behind the track was really Anthony Hamilton, honestly.” **“All Herb”** “\[Amindi and I\] got a nice little chemistry. We got a couple of songs on the project—she did the intro with me too, and another one, ‘True Story.’ But yeah, we made that on the spot. Me and Devin \[Malik\] made the beat. It was like a simple loop. We added a drum, and then I started like mumbling the hook. Once I came up with the hook, the cadence for the verses was easy. But I didn\'t really want to finish the verses, because I was like, \'It sounds like a whole bunch of me.\' So I called Amindi, and she came and she wrote. It\'s pretty quick when we\'re in a zone.” **“Hey Mista”** “Me and Kal \[Banx\] were at his house, and our whole plan was to freestyle—just make a beat and whatever comes to mind. It\'s like trusting the whole idea of \'I don\'t really make nothing bad. I\'m incapable of making something bad, so let me just trust in this.\' We went into it with that type of mentality, and we freestyled that whole motherf\*\*king thing. Like the whole track, it\'s really a big-ass joke. The second verse is a whole joke—every line is some s\*\*t that made me laugh and it just sounded funny.” **“Wat U Sed”** “‘Wat U Sed’ is another homage to the South—I\'m just now realizing that I do those a lot. I didn\'t want to do a whole bunch of tracks with cowbells, but that was one that was like, hell yeah. This sounds like some of that—there\'s this producer named ICYTWAT who has this very specific type of sound. And it kind of gave me some of that old *Kush & Orange Juice* vibes from Wiz, too, like \'Mezmorized\' and s\*\*t.” **“Score”** “For me ‘Score’ is probably one of my favorite songs out the whole album, just because of how f\*\*king different it is. I think I really got off an R&B song, and I hadn\'t got one off for real on the other ones. So I think I\'m probably most proud of that one.” **“THIB”** “That was probably the first track I made for my album. Towards the end of the whole s\*\*t, I was thinking about changing the title to something else, but it was like, nah, we can’t leave that off. It was definitely like the inspiration behind just about the whole soundscape of the album. I wanted it to be like dark and winding, sounds like two or three in the morning. That\'s a pretty constant theme with my music anyway. I like to listen to s\*\*t at night—when all my obligations are done, I\'m a night person. When I\'m in the mix, I\'m an early riser, but when I\'m just enjoying music on some vacay s\*\*t, definitely nighttime. So that\'s the type of stuff I like to make.”

“It happened by accident,” Halsey tells Apple Music of their fourth full-length. “I wasn\'t trying to make a political record, or a record that was drowning in its own profundity—I was just writing about how I feel. And I happen to be experiencing something that is very nuanced and very complicated.” Written while they were pregnant with their first child, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* finds the pop superstar sifting through dark thoughts and deep fears, offering a picture of maternity that fully acknowledges its emotional and physical realities—what it might mean for one’s body, one’s sense of purpose and self. “The reason that the album has sort of this horror theme is because this experience, in a way, has its horrors,” Halsey says. “I think everyone who has heard me yearn for motherhood for so long would have expected me to write an album that was full of gratitude. Instead, I was like, ‘No, this shit is so scary and so horrifying. My body\'s changing and I have no control over anything.’ Pregnancy for some women is a dream—and for some people it’s a fucking nightmare. That\'s the thing that nobody else talks about.” To capture a sound that reflected the album’s natural sense of conflict, Halsey reached out to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “I wanted cinematic, really unsettling production,” they say. “They wanted to know if I was willing to take the risk—I was.” A clear departure from the psychedelic softness of 2020’s *Manic*, the album showcases their influence from the start: in the negative space and 10-ton piano notes of “The Tradition,” the smoggy atmospherics of “Bells in Santa Fe,” the howling guitars of “Easier Than Lying,” the feverish synths of “I am not a woman, I’m a god.” Lyrically, Halsey says, it’s like an emptying of her emotional vault—“expressions of guilt or insecurity, stories of sexual promiscuity or self-destruction”—and a coming to terms with who they have been before becoming responsible for someone else; its fury is a response to an ancient dilemma, as they’ve experienced it. “I think being pregnant in the public eye is a really difficult thing, because as a performer, so much of your identity is predicated on being sexually desirable,” they say. “Socially, women have been reduced to two categories: You are the Madonna or the whore. So if you are sexually desirable or a sexual being, you\'re unfit for motherhood. But as soon as you are motherly or maternal and somebody does want you as the mother of their child, you\'re unfuckable. Those are your options; those things are not compatible, and they haven’t been for centuries.” But there are feelings of resolution as well. Recorded in conjunction with the shooting of a companion film, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* is an album that’s meant to document Halsey’s transformation. And at its conclusion is “Ya’aburnee”—Arabic for “you bury me”—a sparse love song to both their baby and partner. Just the sound of their voice and a muted guitar, it’s one of the most powerful songs Halsey has written to date. “I start this journey with ‘Okay, fine—if I can\'t have love, then I want power,’” they say. “If I can\'t have a relationship, I\'m going to work. If I can\'t be loved interpersonally, I\'m going to be loved by millions on the internet, or I\'m going to crave attention elsewhere. I\'m so steadfast with this mentality, and then comes this baby. The irony is that the most power I\'ve ever had is in my agency, being able to choose. You realize, by the end of the record, I chose love.”

Back in the early aughts, when most Melbourne bands were making party-rock anthems, HTRK (that’s “hate rock”) were the cool kids in the corner, with icy post-punk jams that might soundtrack an evening at the *Twin Peaks* Roadhouse. The band’s seen its share of loss in the years since, including the death of founding member Sean Stewart in 2010. But the duo wears its sorrows elegantly on *Rhinestones*, an album that refracts its gothic country inspirations through a blurred prism. “Kiss Kiss and Rhinestones” is Western folk at its most windswept and dreamy, whispered poetry over reverb-drowned acoustic guitar, like a fever dream set in the Wild West.

“I always say ‘Tusa’ changed my life,” KAROL G tells Apple Music. “I will always be grateful to this song and Nicki Minaj.” After outdoing herself with that outstanding 2019 international smash hit, the Colombian star transcends expectations on her new album as she bends contemporary pop music to her will. As previewed via her popular singles “Ay, DiOs Mío!” and “LOCATION,” she continues to astound as one of modern music’s biggest stars, Latin or otherwise. Her commitment to performing in Spanish speaks to how far global artistry such as hers has come since the so-called crossover days. “This has made a huge impact culturally,” she says, “and it makes us so proud that we can sing in Spanish and still reach a massive audience.” Though the album’s title explicitly refers to the date in 2006 when her parents signed her first record contract, itself a subtle nod to her endurance and longevity as an artist, she considers *KG0516* to be about much more than just a particular moment in time. “I wanted to take my fans on a flight through my musical journey,” she explains. “Each song takes you to a different place.” Indeed, the diversity of sound on *KG0516* goes further than that of its fairly eclectic predecessor *OCEAN*, building on that multi-genre affair’s strength by expanding her sonic palette. She dives headfirst into the contemporary corridos scene with “200 COPAS,” embraces reggae vibrations on the empowering “BICHOTA,” and brings it back to a summertime R&B classic with the bilingual “BEAUTIFUL BOY.” Befitting her superstar status, she’s curated an impressive set of features, from Latin power players Anuel AA and J Balvin to hip-hop legend Ludacris. She makes room for rising star Nathy Peluso on the popwise “GATO MALO” and goes toe to toe with no less than Ozuna on the ethereal “ODISEA.” Perhaps the most notable of these guests is the inimitable reggaetonera Ivy Queen, who features prominently on the stacked album closer “LEYENDAS” alongside Nicky Jam and Wisin & Yandel. “She opened the path for future female artists like me in the culture,” Karol says. “She proved that we are not limited, and we can be just as successful as the men.” In turn, she lifts up a young woman from the next generation, Miami sensation Mariah Angeliq, for the thumping “EL MAKINÓN.”

It’s likely that only diehard Boldy James fans understand how perfect a complement he is to the Griselda Records roster. The Detroit MC’s focus has always been lyrically proficient street rap, but in 2020 alone, his ear for production would manifest collaborative tapes with beloved Mobb Deep collaborator The Alchemist (*The Price of Tea in China*), jazz musician Sterling Toles (*Manger on McNichols*), social media content creator Jay Versace (*The Versace Tape*), and fashion label/production collective Real Bad Man. The man likes to rap. And if there’s one thing Griselda doesn’t do, it’s hold back projects where their MCs go off. James’ first release of 2021, *Bo Jackson*, clearly fits the mold. Look no further than the album opener “Double Hockey Sticks” for Donald Goines-vivid streetlife scenarios unfurled in James’ signature deadpan: “My bitch scored and hit a game-changer/I made her transport the work in her Keyshia Ka\'oir waist trainer/Say she gon\' leave me and I can’t blame her/’Cause I was cutting up my side bitch raw with the same razor,” he raps. The Alchemist is, here, who he was for *The Price of Tea in China* and the James/Alc collaborative project that preceded that, 2019’s *Boldface*: a producer whose one-of-a-kind loops bring the best out of an MC who never really needed the help.

The season has changed. Chris Jusell, Chaz Prymek, Matthew Sage, and Patrick Shiroishi continue forward with what follows 2020’s Fuubutsushi. Here, it is a new year, and it is time to shake the demons off and make a fresh start. Setsubun is the Winter chapter in the cycle (yes, Spring and Summer will come one day), but don’t conflate this “winter music” with the holidays; this is music for the stretch between January and the first peals of spring. The days in this chasm that may be getting longer, however slowly, but the nights are still long. The air is crisp. The natural world lays dormant, but the imagination flutters. These four players have learned more about each other since the amber nostalgia of Fuubutsushi and here they are more comfortable taking risks, ramping up, and pulling back. Prymek’s guitar and bass lines offer a fundamental structure on many of the tunes, in his distinct style that is both uniquely folky but patiently soulful. He more often opts for electric guitar, slide, shimmering fingerpicking, and those touches feel like frost in an empty tree canopy. Shiroishi’s crystalline voice sets a tone on the first track, but from there, he spends his time painting scenes with his saxophones and clarinet. The departure from his more oblique solo works into harmonious melody in this combination showcases the incredible range and skill he possesses over his instruments. He is your breath on the air. Sage shifts from piano onto rhodes for this album, where he continues to split the difference between ambient minimalism and cool jazz vamping. His drumming takes a new presence here, with more pronounced rhythms, deceptive stutters, playful push and pull dynamics. He is the ice under your feet. Sometimes you almost have to catch yourself from slipping. Jusell’s violin continues to soar in the combination, often in conversation with Shiroishi’s horn. His playing is ornate but never flowery, expressive but never maudlin, sweet but never saccharine. He is that warmth we carry inside of us on those cold days. Setsubun is the Japanese new year. February 2nd. Traditionally people celebrate by screaming in the streets, shooting off fireworks, making a collective ruckus to scare the demons of the year past away. If there aren’t demons to shake off… you must be from a different timeline. So, here is something for you and something for your demons too. Something to keep you warm until Spring arrives. Something warm, familiar, friendly, but fresh and full of possibilities. Happy New Year.

The increasing success of drill music in the UK has raised some questions for Unknown T, an early adopter of the sound imported from Chicago’s South Side. “At the start it was like Bitcoin,” he tells Apple Music. “But around the time it started to explode, from 2016 to ’18, everyone was jumping on it. And me? A person that loves music, but also thinks like a businessman, I’m thinking to myself, ‘How can I adapt my product?’” On *Adolescence*, features including M1llionz, Potter Payper, and M Huncho ensure a rhyme-heavy affair, but carefully selected moments allow the Hackney MC to explore growth. “GLEE” serves a warm, oxymoronic jam; “Tugman Vacation” employs a sweet sample-flip of Tyrese’s 1998 R&B hit “Sweet Lady”; and “Sweet Lies” offers a soulful guitar ballad. “As a child, I grew with positivity and light, and built up a passion for music,” he says. “But then you go through real shit. And faced with many different emotions as I was growing up, I just wanted to rap it out. It’s still the same, but I’m going back to the origin.” Here, Unknown T guides you across his second mixtape track by track. **“22 double 0”** “This one is a reminder of my flows, style, and technique. Something to get the blood pumping for the fans that have been with me from the beginning—and haven\'t heard this sound in a little while.” **“Driller sh!t”** “Recording this track with \[UK producer\] AXL Beats was probably the most interesting session I had. When I was in jail, I missed out on the main part of Pop Smoke’s career; from ‘Welcome to the Party’ to his death—that year was my jail time. Everyone compared me to him, with my voice and style, but the only person that really knew him over here was AXL. So that whole day was dedicated to Pop. We spoke about his legacy, but also how we can continue to revolutionize drill in the UK and the US. So you’ll notice my flow here reflects \[Chicago rapper\] G Herbo’s, but I’m representing in my way.” **“Trenches” (feat. Potter Payper)** “This is the UK streets, the trenches, you know? This is that sound we’ve been missing for a while, that authentic rap sound.” **“WW2”** “My fans on Twitter were screaming at the fact that I wasn’t nominated for some awards in 2020. It left me feeling like I had something to prove, but I kept quiet for the rest of the year—and when I came back with this \[in January 2021\], it left everyone gobsmacked. The flows, bars, and just the overall conviction—I put every element of me as an artist into this.” **“EAST”** “This one is for my side of London. In this game, everyone represents where they’re from, and I wanted to bring attention back to the East, and keep the energy up.” **“VIN DIESEL” (feat. M1llionz)** “I wanna big up \[UK producer\] Ghosty for this. We were discussing how to introduce new sounds to drill, and he pitched Turkish vocals. And we listened to some together; they’re really good singers. The sample through the beat is from one of those Turkish songs. I like to paint pictures, so with the energy of the beat, it gave me the feeling of the \[movie franchise\] *Fast & Furious*.” **“Sweet Lies”** “I would always say how it’s too early in the journey to show this side of me as an artist. But my guys would ask, ‘When is too early, or too late?’ They helped me realize that the only time you have is what you make of it.” **“Tugman Vacation”** “This life is a journey, and the way it’s panned out with my music, it’s a story that I reflect back on it like, ‘Wow.’ Somehow it all ended up making sense.” **“Goodums”** “This track was inspired by 2pac’s \[1996 song\] ‘Me and My Girlfriend.’ All the imagery and lyrics about his girl were a metaphor, and I’ve put my spin on that here.” **“Grandma Prayer”** “I thought it would be nice to have my grandma say the Holy Commandment, to better understand my growth spiritually, and also lead into the next song.” **“Bible Love”** “As a Christian, I’ve never really spoken about my faith, but now I’m growing as an artist and a man, I wanna try and touch on some real shit.” **“No Forgiveness” (feat. Nafe Smallz)** “This is the perfect drill-meets-rap wave; it gives a UK version to that Gunna and Lil Baby vibe. Nafe and I have our elements on lock, so when we get together it’s smooth like a relay.” **“Wonderland” (feat. M Huncho)** “My first track with M Huncho was ‘Addicts’ on \[2020 mixtape\] *Rise Above Hate*, a much darker track. So I have to give him the credit here, he suggested a more uplifting, triumphant vibe—or we’d just be doing ‘Addicts’ again. He was right.” **“Louis Bloom”** “Louis Bloom is the head of Island Records. I met him when I came home \[from prison in February 2020\] and he listened to my vision. This is a way for me to talk shit; I’m making noise on the man’s label, so why not?” **“GLEE” (feat. Digga D)** “On this track we wanted to make something for everyone—men, women, kids, parents—but still make it certy. With the structure and melodies, it’s just perfect. It was leaked onto TikTok a few weeks ago and the reaction was crazy. I know how much they’re waiting for this.”

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”

The second album from Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek asks the big questions in slippery ways, with poetic ripples of mantra-like vocals, or field recordings that take on a mystical significance (a roommate singing, a hand-clapping game). The layered, nonlinear soundscapes on *Fatigue* feel totally uncategorizable yet inexplicably comforting as Cheek—who plays bass, guitar, piano, synth, and percussion here, in addition to her vocals and personal recordings—guides herself down a winding path of discovery. “Make a way out of no way,” she repeats on the kaleidoscopic “Find It”; the wondrous almost-songs that follow use that sentiment as a guiding light.

“We’d made two very sample-heavy records in a row,” Avalanches founding member Robbie Chater tells Apple Music. “We just felt very liberated to make a left turn and to go anywhere and do anything.” The Melbourne group’s third album is still rich with endless samples—the trademark that made them crate-digging heroes with their 2000 debut *Since I Left You* and 2016’s *Wildflower*—but this time their focus is more on live collaboration. Guest artists abound, including Jamie xx, Karen O, Rivers Cuomo, Perry Farrell, Denzel Curry, Sampa the Great, Leon Bridges, and Johnny Marr. Each was tasked with putting their slant on the big ideas characterizing the album: life, God, spirituality, the human voice, mortality. The Avalanches also took inspiration from the Golden Record, a 1977 collection of music and terrestrial sounds compiled by astronomer-scientist Carl Sagan and writer-producer-director Ann Druyan (whose image is on the cover of this album) to be carried into space as part of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. “It all came from a personal inward journey that expanded throughout the whole universe,” says keyboardist Tony Di Blasi on the chosen themes. “There’s a saying: ‘So within, so without.’ What is here is also out there. So it all expanded just from our own personal journeys.” For all its grand subject matter, however, *We Will Always Love You* is a warm, gentle listen, and The Avalanches’ most reflective work to date. “It’s a bit of a shining light in dark times,” says Di Blasi. “And that’s the mood we were trying to set, for it to be light.” Below, Di Blasi and Chater talk through 10 of the album’s 25 tracks. **We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)** Robbie Chater: “That vocal sample by The Roches \[‘Hammond Song’\] is absolutely incredible. With *Since I Left You*, those samples were from junk-store records and were forgotten pieces of flotsam and jetsam that we would turn into something new. But The Roches’ song was already so beautiful. We were exploring different kinds of devotional music, gospel music and Christian music, and although that’s not what The Roches do, it has those massed voices of the sisters singing together. And we were reading about Ann Druyan’s story in compiling the Golden Record, and the way the sound of her heartbeat and brainwaves are the sound of a young woman in love and are captured on that record and are forever floating out there. And then you have these sisters singing ‘we will always love you’ and it’s like, you can build an album around that.” **The Divine Chord (feat. MGMT & Johnny Marr)** RC: “I have a sneaking suspicion it’s about heartbreak from \[MGMT vocalist\] Andrew VanWyngarden’s point of view, although we’ve never spoken about it directly. I think I was just drawn to the very first line when he sings, ‘I still remember you.’ To me that said so much. Because sampling plays with time and remembering voices from the past, and when he sung that line I thought, ‘This is going to work.’ We were lucky enough Johnny Marr wanted to contribute. The Smiths are a huge part of my childhood and my youth. The day Johnny Marr’s guitar part came through with a note saying, ‘Guys, this is a brilliant track,’ it was just like, okay, I can die happy.” **Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)** RC: “It came about through spending a lot of time in LA. Leon was there, I was there, and then we got to work at Sunset Sound studios in the same room Prince had recorded, so of course Leon and me were both freaking out about that. It was an incredible experience, and I’m just so grateful that people came to this record so open. They’re big themes, and I don’t think just anyone could have walked in and embraced that and tapped into something very personal and sincere in their own lives. It’s pretty incredible that people are prepared to be so intimate. The vocals definitely aren’t just dialed in and plonked on top of the track.” **Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell)** Tony Di Blasi: “That was one of those really surreal events where we’re in the taxi on the way to Perry Farrell’s house in Santa Monica and we get a text saying, ‘Do you guys like Indian food and is there anything you don’t eat?’ And we arrive and there’s Perry Farrell and just his look and his voice are so unique. It’s just one of those things where you’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually happening.’ Before we even started, we just sat there for an hour and got to know each other and ate this wonderful food and this amazing ice cream. And then we ended up going down to record the vocals, and he’s just so open and creative. He was making up lines as he was walking around the house and singing them out really loud and I was just sitting there and I looked at Robbie like, ‘That’s Perry Farrell up there making up these melodies to one of our songs, and we’re in his home.’ Moments like that hit you.” **We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy & Mick Jones)** TDB: “It’s a bit of an oddball one. And the cast of characters in it is Karen Carpenter, Cola Boyy, and Mick Jones’ voices all together. It’s wild, but it’s also so beautiful, the way it’s sung. It’s hitting that spot between the happiness and the sadness, which is a beautiful feeling.” RC: “Even though it’s one of the least Avalanchesy-sounding ones, I just love it. It works on different levels. Karen’s voice is so beautiful and her story’s so sad and there’s all that history and meaning, and then there’s Mick Jones and Cola Boyy, who’s one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, and a great friend, a true anarchist, but it’s great the way it ties in around Karen’s voice. ‘We go on hurting each other’ says so much, especially the way the world is today. That line makes me quite sad.” **Take Care in Your Dreaming (Denzel Curry, Tricky & Sampa the Great)** RC: “It’s kind of a melancholy song. Sometimes it sounds upbeat to me and sometimes it doesn’t. It was an incredible moment in the studio from Denzel Curry. We spoke quite deeply about my personal journey and what the song meant to me and unfulfilled dreams and a journey from darkness to light. And to see someone around strangers be open and vulnerable and really tell a story from the heart was really moving to watch him do that.” TDB: “And he just wrote that on the spot too. There are these moments where you go, ‘Wow, this guy from nothing has created that.’ And it wasn’t until quite later, when we really listened to the lyrics, that we realized how much he’d opened himself up in that song and talked about all these really personal, horrible things that had happened to him.” **Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile)** RC: “Kurt is one in a million. I remember listening to some of his records back in dark times and they sort of got me through. I had a few paragraphs written down in an email about what this record is about, and some people would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe we should work together in the future.’ But he was just one of those people who said, ‘I’ve got it,’ and then gave his own slant on it. It’s got this rambling preacher spoken-word vibe. I didn’t expect to get that back from him.” TDB: “I remember going over to Robbie’s place and he said, ‘I’ve got this vocal from Kurt Vile, let me know what you think of it,’ and he played it and I just remember going, ‘This is one of the best things I’ve ever heard.’ It sounded perfect from the get-go. I was so blown away and just said, ‘Play it again.’” **Dial D for Devotion (feat. Karen O)** RC: “That was lovely. That was done remotely. They’re some of \[late Silver Jews frontman\] David Berman’s words. She was kind enough to go out on a limb with words that weren’t her own. It was lovely getting the recording back because it’s almost like I could hear someone doing the dishes in the background and then I could hear a dog barking outside. And not anyone could have done that.” **Running Red Lights (feat. Rivers Cuomo & Pink Siifu)** TDB: “We got a spreadsheet, I think Rivers’ assistant had sent it, with three different lyrical ideas. And we were like, ‘We’d love to hear the melodies that go along with them,’ so he ended up singing all three melodies and was like, ‘Let us know which ones you want.’ And we said, ‘Can we have them all?’ We got to meet Rivers when he was in Australia; Weezer were playing with Foo Fighters. We were googling all these amazing bars to take him to, cool places Melbourne has to offer, and we had a list of things we were going to do with him. It ended up raining, so we just took some umbrellas out of the hotel he was staying in and all he wanted to do was walk around in the rain. And then we went to a Starbucks and drank coffee for an hour and walked back and that was it. And that ended up being heaps cooler than anything we could have planned.” **Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry & CLYPSO)** RC: “Our friend Jamie xx worked on that track with us, which was such a wonderful experience. We have a common love of working with samples, so it was a dream come true. I would send him lots and lots of demos for fun, and he used to call that track the banger; he was always like, ‘I love the banger. Send me the banger, I want to work on the banger.’ And he must have heard something in it, because it was quite slow before he got his hands on it. You can hear it speeding up as he’s trying to put some more energy into it. And of course working with CLYPSO from Sydney, it feels like we’ve made a great new friend.” TDB: “And of course there’s Neneh Cherry, who we met maybe six months before she recorded with us. It was backstage after her show, and there’s always lots of people there. We know what it’s like: Everyone’s trying to talk to you, and you can be like, ‘I just want to relax, I just played a show.’ But to everyone she was so welcoming and kind. They’re the type of people we want to work with.”

With her incisive lyrics and gift for harnessing classic UK garage samples, PinkPantheress very quickly became one of 2021’s breakout stars. Her debut mixtape, *to hell with it*, is a bite-size collection of moreish pop songs and a small slice of the 20-year-old singer and producer’s creative output over the nine months since her first viral TikTok moment. “I basically put together the songs that I put out this year that I felt were strongest,” she tells Apple Music. “I sat in the studio with my manager and a good friend from home whose ear I trust, and I said, ‘Does this sound cohesive to you? Are the songs in a similar world?’” The world of *to hell with it* is one of sharp contrasts existing together in perfect balance: sweet, singsong vocals paired with frenetic breakbeats, floor-filler samples through a bedroom pop filter, confessional lyrics about mostly fictionalized experiences, and light, bright production with a solidly emo core. “They’re all vividly sad,” PinkPantheress says of the 10 tracks that made the cut. “I think I\'ve had a tendency, even on a particularly happy beat, to sing the saddest lyrics I can. I paint a picture of the actual scenarios where someone would be sad.” Here, the Bath-born, London-based artist takes us through her mixtape, track by track. **“Pain”** “In my early days on TikTok I was creating a song a day. Some of them got a good reception, but ‘Pain’ was the first one where people responded really well and the first one where the sound ended up traveling a little bit. It didn\'t go crazy, but the sound was being used by 30 people, and that got me quite excited. A lot of people haven’t really heard garage that much before, and I think that for them, the sample \[Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 single ‘Flowers’\] is a very palatable way to ease into garage breakbeats, very British-sounding synths, and all those influences.” **“I must apologise”** “This track was produced by Oscar Scheller \[Rina Sawayama, Ashnikko\]. I was trying to stay away from a sample at this point, but there’s something about this beat \[from Crystal Waters’ 1991 single ‘Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)’\] which drugged me. When we started writing it, Oscar gave me the idea for one of the melodies and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this actually is probably going to end up being one of my favorite songs just based off of this great melody that he\'s just come up with.’” **“Last valentines”** “My older cousin introduced me to LINKIN PARK; *Hybrid Theory* is one of my favorite albums ever. I went through the whole thing thinking, ‘Could I sample any of this?’ and when I listened to ‘Forgotten’ I just thought: ‘This guitar in the back is amazing. I can\'t believe no one\'s ever sampled it before!’ I looped it, recorded to it, mixed it, put it out. This was my first track where it took a darker turn, sonically. It really is emo through and through, from the sample to the lyrics.” **“Passion”** “To me, a lack of passion is just really not enjoying things like you used to—not having the same fun with your friends, finding things boring. I haven’t experienced depression myself, but I know people that have and I can attempt to draw comparisons of what I see in real life. Like it says in the lyrics, ‘You don’t see the light.’ I think I got a lot more emotional than I needed to get, but I\'m still glad that I went there. The instruments are so happy, I feel like there needed to be something to contradict it and make it a bit more three-dimensional.” **“Just for me”** “I made this song with \[UK artist and producer\] Mura Masa. I was sat with him, just going through references, and he started making the loop. I’ve never said this before, but I remember being like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write anything good to this,’ and then it just came, after 20 minutes of sitting there wondering what I could do. The line ‘When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?’ just slipped off the tongue.” **“Noticed I cried”** “This is another track with Oscar Scheller and the first song I made without my own production. I held back a lot from working with producers, because I like working by myself, but Oscar is really good, so it ended up just being an easy process. He understood the assignment. I think it’s my favorite song I’ve ever released. It’s the top line, I’m just a big fan of the way it flows. I hope that people like it as much as I do.” **“Reason”** “Zach Nahome produced this track. He used to make a lot of garage, drum ’n’ bass, jungle, but his sound is quite different to that nowadays. So this was a bit of a different vibe for him. We made the beat together. I told him what kind of drums I wanted, what kind of sound and space I wanted, and he came up with that. With garage music, I just enjoy the breakbeats of it, the drums. It’s also quintessentially British. We birthed it. I think it’s always nice to go back to your roots.” **“All my friends know”** “I wanted to try something a bit different, and there were a few moments with this one where I wasn’t sure if I really liked it or not. After I stopped debating with myself it got a lot easier to enjoy it and I ended up feeling like it could actually be a lot of people’s favorite. The instrumental part of it is really beautiful; both producers—my friends Dill and Kairos—did a good job. It’s sentimental in a musical sense, and it’s sentimental in a personal sense as well.” **“Nineteen”** “This is a song that stems from personal experience, and kind of the first time in any of my songs where I’m like, ‘I’m actually speaking the truth here, this actually happened to me.’ Nineteen was a year of confusion, emotional confusion. I didn’t want to do my uni course, I wanted to do music. I didn\'t want people to laugh at me. I didn\'t want to tell myself out loud and then have it not happen. Internally, I was very sure and certain that it was going to happen, just because I\'m a big believer in manifestation. So 19 was that transition year. Once I\'d settled down and started doing what I loved, I felt a lot more comfortable, and actually, a lot more safe.” **“Break It Off”** “‘Break It Off’ was, I guess, my breakthrough track. It was the first time my name was being chucked around a fair bit. I fell in love with the original \[Adam F’s 1997 single ‘Circles’\] and I just wanted to hear what a top line would sound like on the track. So I found the instrumental, played around with it a little bit, and then sang on top. I think it got 100,000 likes on TikTok when I wasn’t really getting likes in that number before. The lyric is really tongue-in-cheek, and I think a lot of people on TikTok like tongue-in-cheek.”

Deafheaven’s fifth album might seem like a drastic departure from the blackgaze sound they helped pioneer, but to anyone paying attention, it shouldn’t be. The foundation for *Infinite Granite*’s more traditional song structures, nearly metal-free shoegaze, and clean vocals was laid—or at least hinted strongly at—on the band’s 2018 album *Ordinary Corrupt Human Love*. The lyrics also reveal a new level of poetic nuance from frontman George Clarke, as he weaves a narrative marked both by family history and the time the songs were written in. “*Infinite Granite* was originally centered in my relationship with extended family, but because it was written during various social and environmental anxieties of 2020, more immediate reflections were included,” he tells Apple Music. “Throughout the album there is a double narrative: one that highlights familial issues and one that reflects the current world at large.” Below, he comments on each track that contains vocals. **“Shellstar”** “‘Shellstar’ deals with questioning one’s objective feelings toward emotional situations. That idea is coupled with allusions to California fires and Gulf floods.” **“In Blur”** “A song about futility. A nonbeliever, in the wake of having lost a child, reaches out to God for solace knowing nothing’s there.” **“Great Mass of Color”** “‘Great Mass of Color’ describes insomnia during the early-morning blue hour. The lyrics also reflect thoughts on boyhood—what it means to be a man, looking up to other men for a path and the constrictions and conflicts in that experience.” **“Lament for Wasps”** “A love song filled with direct references to insomnia. Blue represented a warm, safe feeling while making this album. It is also the favorite color of my partner, who I use as a character in this song—someone that represents benevolence. I exemplify this benevolence using wasps, as they\'re an irrational phobia of mine.” **“Villain”** “I thought about my family’s history with alcoholism and abuse, how that past affects future generations and what it means to share blood with cruel and violent people.” **“The Gnashing”** “‘The Gnashing’ looks at new parents, state violence, and an idea of taking care of who takes care of you. Like ‘In Blur,’ this song references losing a child, but focuses on a mother figure instead of a father.” **“Other Language”** “While recording ‘Mombasa,’ we were told a friend of ours had died. We stopped the session and went home. That night he was in my dream. We were in a large passenger van and I was sitting on a bench behind him as he told a story to people around us. I put my arm around the front of his chest, holding him by the shoulder while we laughed. When I woke up, I saw thick smoke from the wildfires had come in through the open windows. I laid until I had to leave for the day’s session, writing most of the lyrics in bed.” **“Mombasa”** “My grandfather lived with me for a few years while I helped take care of him. When it became too difficult, my father and I worked to get him into an assisted care hospital. He would speak about how he’d become a burden. He would apologize for having not died. This song is about the kindness and freedom of death, one in which an afterlife reveals itself to be aloneness in cosmic love.”

In the two years following the August 2018 announcement of Playboi Carti’s *Whole Lotta Red*, you could have gauged any given Carti fan’s investment in the project by which song leak they claimed to have liked the most. One the internet took to calling “Kid Cudi” had a unique sort of staying power. That song does not appear on *Whole Lotta Red*, but Kid Cudi himself does, on “M3tamorphosis.” Of the project’s 24 songs, Cudi is one of three featured guests, appearing alongside likewise stylistic innovators Kanye West and Future. And so goes the story of the project: *Whole Lotta Red* is likely pretty close to what fans were expecting, but better. The production—provided by names like Pi’erre Bourne, Art Dealer, F1lthy, Juberlee, Richie Souf, Maaly Raw, and Wheezy—is consistently forward-thinking, toeing the line between 808-heavy post-trap rumble and the perpetually weird and increasingly popular avant-pop sound known as PC Music. There is less “baby voice” here than fans of *Die Lit* may have wanted, but the rapping (and singing) is some of Carti’s most impassioned and sharpest. Fans hung up on those early leaks might do well to consider them accidental gifts, because when it was time to deliver the album, Carti made sure we got the best of him. He just needed us to be patient.

Listening to Liz Harris’ music as Grouper, the word that comes to mind is “psychedelic.” Not in the cartoonish sense—if anything, the Astoria, Oregon-based artist feels like a monastic antidote to spectacle of almost any kind—but in the subtle way it distorts space and time. She can sound like a whisper whose words you can’t quite make out (“Pale Interior”) and like a primal call from a distant hillside (“Followed the ocean”). And even when you can understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t sound like she meant to be heard (“The way her hair falls”). The paradox is one of closeness and remove, of the intimacy of singer-songwriters and the neutral, almost oracular quality of great ambient music. That the tracks on *Shade*, her 12th LP, were culled from a 15-year period is fitting not just because it evokes Harris’ machine consistency (she found her creative truth and she’s sticking to it), but because of how the staticky, white-noise quality of her recordings makes you aware of the hum of the fridge and the hiss of the breeze: With Grouper, it’s always right now.

Written after the birth of her first child (and just before the arrival of her second), *Colourgrade* finds London’s Tirzah Mastin taking a more experimental approach, wrapping moments of unadorned beauty in sheets of distortion, noise, woozy synthesizers, and listing guitars. It’s decidedly lo-fi—not the sort of album that actively invites you in. And yet, like its predecessor—her acclaimed 2018 debut LP, *Devotion*—this is naturally intimate music, alt-R&B that offers brief meditations on the coming together of both bodies (“Tectonic”) and collaborators (“Hive Mind,” which, in addition to seal-like background effects, features vocals from touring bandmate and South London artist Coby Sey). Working again alongside longtime friend and collaborator Mica Levi, Mastin sounds free here, at ease even as she obfuscates. On “Beating,” as she sings to her partner over a skittering drum machine and a layer of gaseous hiss, she stops for a moment to clear her throat, as if in quiet conversation late at night. “You got me/I got you,” she sings. “We made life/It’s beating.”