The FADER's Best Albums of 2019

Ari Lennox is Dreamville’s resident singer-songwriter, rounding out the label\'s hip-hop-heavy lineup with rich, midtempo soul birthed from basslines, melody, wind instruments, and supreme heartbreak. “I never thought I\'d make money off of soul music,” the Washington, DC-based singer told Beats 1’s Ebro. “I always thought I\'d have to be this pop artist or make this super hit, but no.” Lennox was discovered after putting her music up online, signing with Dreamville in 2015. She\'s contributed “Shea Butter Baby” to the *Creed II* soundtrack and released the 2016 EP *Pho*. The positive response to tracks like “Backseat” showed that her retro R&B fits well in contemporary times. “There\'s so many opportunities that come to me,” she said. “And I\'m just like, ‘You guys like soul and R&B that much? That\'s awesome.’ I didn\'t know it could ever happen again, because I knew it was really booming in the ’90s and the early 2000s, and then it felt like people stopped caring.” On her debut full-length, her voice is strengthened and emboldened by both breakup and “u up?” texts. She celebrates independence (“New Apartment”) and processes pain (“Speak to Me,” “I Been,” “Pop”) with equal parts frankness and freedom. Cameos by JID (“Broke”) and J. Cole (“Shea Butter Baby”) and a classy Galt MacDermot “Space” sample on “BMO” give the album its pronounced bump. “It’s soul,” she told Ebro. “There’s no gimmicks. It’s feeling.”

“I have always wanted to release an album, but I never had the opportunity,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music of his long-awaited debut LP. “Now I feel completely free as an artist and as a person. I feel good about showing people something different.” It’s hard to imagine that in a little under three years, Benito Martínez Ocasio went from working in a grocery store to amassing a fervent worldwide following on the back of massive singles and high-profile guest features. On Noche Buena 2018, Bad Bunny finally delivered his much-anticipated full-length debut, *X 100PRE*—an engulfing breakup album that doesn’t merely justify the long wait, but also redefines música urbana. *X 100PRE* has everything you’d expect from the reigning king of Latin trap. The songs seamlessly flow into one another and cross genres freely, creating a narrative fueled by trap, reggaetón, dream-pop, pop-punk/emo, and Dominican dembow. The album opens with “NI BIEN NI MAL,” in which he promises that no matter how tempted he may be, he won’t cave in and call an ex (“Pase lo que pase no te voy a llamar”). His declaration that without his former lover, he’s neither happy nor sad, speaks to a place many have been after a pivotal relationship: stuck in the middle, waiting for closure. “Solo de Mí” goes from emo-perreo to trap-reggaetón heater, and in it Bad Bunny reaffirms his agency as an individual after accepting the dissolution of his relationship. It’s one of the strongest tracks on the album and was recorded just a couple of weeks before its release. “I was going into the studio in Miami to listen to all of the songs and see what was missing,” he says. “I went to take a shower and started singing, ‘No me vuelvas…’ I kept going: ‘No soy tuyo...solo de mí.’ I rushed out of the shower and didn’t even dry myself off. I just laid down some tones with my voice and said, ‘Give me a click track so I can record in time,’ and I recorded the chorus. Everything happened really fast.” The album is surprisingly light on guests, and those who are here highlight Bad Bunny’s own strengths. On “200 MPH,” Diplo offers a minimalist but effective trap number, while the Drake-featuring global smash “MIA” has the Canadian superstar singing in Spanish and Bad Bunny delivering one of his most clever lines to date: “Yo soy tu Romeo pero no Santo” (“I’m your Romeo but I’m no saint”), a reference to bachata star Romeo Santos. “La Romana,” named for the Dominican city where the song was recorded with El Alfa, kicks off with an infectious “trapchata” foundation, before changing gears and clobbering listeners with a full-force Dominican dembow banger. “Otra Noche en Miami” invokes M83-style dream-pop perfect for a night drive, and on “Tenemos Que Hablar,” Bad Bunny and longtime producer Tainy expertly interweave pop-punk with a trap foundation, making this heart-wrenching breakup song a contender for 2018’s emo anthem. The ease with which he navigates these disparate genres while telling a cohesive story shows that we’re in a new era of música urbana; even an anthem like “Estamos Bien,” which was released in June 2018 and has already amassed millions of streams, feels new within the context of the album—it’s about both Puerto Rico’s survival in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and Bad Bunny’s personal survival. For anyone who ever wondered why Bad Bunny took his time releasing a proper album, this is it. So sit back and join him in his hazy quest for answers.

In the lead-up to the release of *The Lion King: The Gift*, a collection of music inspired by the 2019 reboot of the classic Disney film, Beyoncé remarked that the project was meant to be “a love letter to Africa.” As executive producer, Bey made it a point to solicit contributions from artists spanning a number of the continent’s many culturally rich traditions and regions, including Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and South Africa. The album, in fact, is a separate project from the film’s official soundtrack, but that doesn’t stop Beyoncé and a cohort of hand-selected talents from telling that timeless story of the Pride Lands through song. Not unlike the film, *The Gift* chronicles a saga of personal growth, filtered through some of the brightest stars in Afrobeats and Afrofusion. Artists like Mr Eazi, Yemi Alade, Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, and Tekno sing in multiple languages about embracing blessings (“JA ARA E”), staying the path (“DON’T JEALOUS ME”), and rising into your own majesty (“KEYS TO THE KINGDOM”). Family is a constant theme, with Beyoncé singing to her children directly on “BIGGER” and then about her father on “FIND YOUR WAY BACK.\" She’s procured contributions from some of her favorite US-born MCs, like Kendrick Lamar, co-star Childish Gambino, Tierra Whack, and, of course, the man co-captaining her household, JAY-Z. *The Gift*, then, is a compilation of talents both African and Afro-diasporic strong enough to buttress the throne of the woman we’ve come to know as Queen Bey.

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

By Devi and Rook Song assembled between April 2018 and July 2019 STATIC music video with vfx by maddi dataerase twitter.com/DataErase www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpmcuKb4QDw HERTZ music video produced by EXPENSIVEHOE.COM youtu.be/CcHn51njzWs CARTOON NETWORK music video animated by Jonni Phillips www.jonniphillips.com www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR748MzP9uA Devi McCallion blacksquares.bandcamp.com @dei_genetrix Ada Rook adarook.bandcamp.com @adarook666 Check out our merch store! teespring.com/stores/black-dresses-merch-store rares on patreon www.patreon.com/blackdresses

If nothing else, Burial helped dispel some basic myths about dance music: that its funkiness would always be at odds with its viability for home (and/or solo) use, that it doesn’t lend itself to narrative, that as a delivery system for profound human emotion it could never quite measure up to more old-fashioned models of music-making. Collecting singles, EPs, and various collaborations made in the wake of 2007’s *Untrue*, *Tunes 2011-2019* is stunning not just for how well it balances creature comforts with the genuinely avant-garde, but for how diverse it is, especially considering how easily he could have made *Untrue II* before the world had a chance to catch up. That these haunted landscapes of beat-free ambience (“State Forest,” “Beachfires,” “Subtemple”), extraterrestrial bangers (“Claustro,” “Rival Dealer”), and rain-streaked ballads for the apocalypse (“Come Down to Us”) are gestures of the same mind is a demonstration of creative bravery. That they fit together so beautifully and cinematically—over two and a half hours, no less—is just another example of his artistic prowess.

Exclusive Logo Sticker with every CD order. Topping off Hyperdub's 15th year, Burial selects 'tunes’ from the last eight years of his EP releases on the label for this very welcome two CD collection. The collection, sequenced by Burial, shows the depth and brilliance of his post-Untrue development; from long, twisting, collage works, which travel through unexpected zones, to his more pointed, poppier side and back to the haunted, open horizons of beatless pieces. We hope this collection of Burial's work is familiar, yet unfamiliar to each listener.

After releasing 2016’s *The Colour in Anything*, James Blake moved from London to Los Angeles, where he found himself busier than ever. “I’ve been doing a lot of production work, a lot of writing for other people and projects,” he tells Apple Music. “I think the constant process of having a mirror held up to your music in the form of other people’s music, and other people, helped me cross something. A shiny new thing.” That thing—his fourth album, *Assume Form*—is his least abstract and most grounded, revealing and romantic album to date. Here, Blake pulls back the curtain and explains the themes, stories and collaborations behind each track. **“Assume Form”** “I\'m saying, ‘The plan is to become reachable, to assume material form, to leave my head and join the world.’ It seems like quite a modern, Western idea that you just get lost. These slight feelings of repression lead to this feeling of *I’m not in my body, I’m not really experiencing life through first-person. It’s like I’m looking at it from above*. Which is a phenomenon a lot of people describe when they talk about depression.” **“Mile High” (feat. Metro Boomin & Travis Scott)** “Travis is just exceptionally talented at melodies; the ones he wrote on that track are brilliant. And it was made possible by Metro—the beat is a huge part of why that track feels the way it does.” **“Tell Them” (feat. Metro Boomin & Moses Sumney)** “Moses came on tour with me a couple years ago. I watched him get a standing ovation every night, and that was when he was a support act. For me, it’s a monologue on a one-night stand: There’s fear, there’s not wanting to be too close to anybody. Just sort of a self-analysis, really.” **“Into the Red”** “‘Into the Red’ is about a woman in my life who was very giving—someone who put me before themselves, and spent the last of their money on something for me. It was just a really beautiful sentiment—especially the antithesis of the idea that the man pays. I just liked that idea of equal footing.” **“Barefoot in the Park” (feat. ROSALÍA)** “My manager played me \[ROSALÍA’s 2017 debut\] *Los Ángeles*, and I honestly hadn’t heard anything so vulnerable and raw and devastating in quite a while. She came to the studio, and within a day we’d made two or three things. I loved the sound of our voices together.” **“Can’t Believe the Way We Flow”** “It’s a pure love song, really. It’s just about the ease of coexisting that I feel with my girlfriend. It’s fairly simple in its message and in its delivery, hopefully. Romance is a very commercialized subject, but sometimes it can just be a peaceful moment of ease and something even mundane—just the flow between days and somebody making it feel like the days are just going by, and that’s a great thing.” **“Are You in Love?”** “I like the idea of that moment where neither of you know whether you’re in love yet, but there’s this need for someone to just say they are: ‘Give me assurance that this is good and that we’re good, and that you’re in love with me. I’m in love with you.’ The words might mean more in that moment, but that’s not necessarily gonna make it okay.” **“Where’s the Catch?” (feat. André 3000)** “I was, and remain, inspired by Outkast. Catching him now is maybe even *more* special to me, because the way he writes is just so good! I love the way he balances slight abstraction with this feeling of paranoia. The line ‘Like I know I’m eight, and I know I ain’t’—anxiety bringing you back to being a child, but knowing that you’re supposed to feel strong and stable because you’re an adult now. That’s just so beautifully put.” **“I’ll Come Too”** “It’s a real story: When you fall in love, the practical things go out the window, a little bit. And you just want to go to wherever they are.” **“Power On”** “It’s about being in a relationship, and being someone who gets something wrong. If you can swallow your ego a little bit and accept that you aren’t always to know everything, that this person can actually teach you a lot, the better it is for everyone. Once I’ve taken accountability, it’s time to power on—that’s the only way I can be worthy of somebody’s love and affection and time.” **“Don’t Miss It”** “Coming at the end of the album was a choice. I think it kind of sums up the mission statement in some ways: Yes, there are millions of things that I could fixate on, and I have lost years and years and years to anxiety. There are big chunks of my life I can’t remember—moments I didn’t enjoy when I should have. Loves I wasn’t a part of. Heroes I met that I can’t really remember the feeling of meeting. Because I was so wrapped up in myself. And I think that’s what this is—the inner monologue of an egomaniac.” **“Lullaby for My Insomniac”** “I literally wrote it to help someone sleep. This is just me trying to calm the waters so you can just drift off. It does what it says on the tin.”

A successful child actor turned indie-rock sweetheart with Rilo Kiley, a solo artist beloved by the famed and famous, Jenny Lewis would appear to have led a gilded life. But her truth—and there have been intimations both in song lyrics and occasionally in interviews—is of a far darker inheritance. “I come from working-class showbiz people who ended up in jail, on drugs, both, or worse,” Lewis tells Apple Music. “I grew up in a pretty crazy, unhealthy environment, but I somehow managed to survive.” The death of her mother in 2017 (with whom she had reconnected after a 20-year estrangement) and the end of her 12-year relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice set the stage for Lewis’ fourth solo album, where she finally reconciles her public and private self. A bountiful pop record about sex, drugs, death, and regret, with references to everyone from Elliott Smith to Meryl Streep, *On the Line* is the Lewis aesthetic writ large: an autobiographical picaresque burnished by her dark sense of humor. Here, Lewis takes us through the album track by track. **“Heads Gonna Roll”** “I’m a big boxing fan, and I basically wanted to write a boxing ballad. There’s a line about ‘the nuns of Harlem\'—that’s for real. I met a priest backstage at a Dead & Company show in a cloud of pot smoke. He was a fan of my music, and we struck up a conversation and a correspondence. I’d just moved to New York at the time and was looking to do some service work. And so this priest hooked me up with the nuns in Harlem. I would go up there and get really stoned and hang out with theses nuns, who were the purest, most lovely people, and help them put together meal packages. The nuns of Harlem really helped me out.” **“Wasted Youth”** “For me, the thing that really brings this song, and the whole record, together is the people playing on it. \[Drummer\] Jim Keltner especially. He’s played on so many incredible records, he’s the heartbeat of rock and roll and you don’t even realize it. Jim and Don Was were there for so much of this record, and they were the ones that brought Ringo Starr into the sessions—playing with him was just surreal. Benmont Tench is someone I’d worked with before—he’s just so good at referencing things from the past but playing something that sounds modern and new at the same time. He created these sounds that were so melodic and weird, using the Hammond organ and a bunch of pedals. We call that ‘the fog’—Benmont adds the fog.” **“Red Bull & Hennessy”** “I was writing this song, almost predicting the breakup with my longtime partner, while he was in the room. I originally wanted to call it ‘Spark,’ ’cause when that spark goes out in a relationship it’s really hard to get it back.” **“Hollywood Lawn”** “I had this for years and recorded three or four different versions; I did a version with three female vocalists a cappella. Then I went to Jamaica with Savannah and Jimmy Buffett—I actually wrote some songs with Jimmy for the *Escape to Margaritaville* musical that didn’t get used. We didn’t use that version, but I really arranged the s\*\*\* out of it there, and some of the lyrics are about that experience.” **“Do Si Do”** “Wrote this for a friend who went off his psych meds abruptly, which is so dangerous—you have to taper off. I asked Beck to produce it for a reason: He gets in there and wants to add and change chords. And whatever he suggests is always right, of course. That’s a good thing to remember in life: Beck is always right.” “Dogwood” “This is my favorite song on the record. I wrote it on the piano even though I don’t think I’m a very good piano player. I probably should learn more, but I’m just using the instrument as a way to get the song out. This was a live vocal, too. When I’m playing and singing at the same time, I’m approaching the material more as a songwriter rather than a singer, and that changes the whole dynamic in a good way.” **“Party Clown”** “I’d have to describe this as a Faustian love song set at South by Southwest. There’s a line in there where I say, ‘Can you be my puzzle piece, baby?/When I cry like Meryl Streep?’ It’s funny, because Meryl actually did a song of mine, ‘Cold One,’ in *Ricki and the Flash*.” **“Little White Dove”** “Toward the end of the record, I would write songs at home and then visit my mom in the hospital when she was sick. I started this on bass, had the chord structure down, and wrote it at the pace it took to walk from the hospital elevator to the end of the hall. I was able to sing my mom the chorus before she passed.” **“Taffy”** “That one started out as a poem I’d written on an airplane, then it turned into a song. It’s a very specific account of a weekend spent in Wisconsin, and there are some deep Wisconsin references in there. I’m not interested in platitudes, either as a writer or especially as a listener. I want to hear details. That’s why I like hip-hop so much. All those details, names that I haven’t heard, words that have meanings that I don’t understand and have to look up later. I’m interested in those kinds of specifics. That’s also what I love about Bob Dylan songs, too—they’re very, very specific. You can paint an incredibly vivid picture or set a scene or really project a feeling that way.” **“On the Line”** “This is an important song for me. If you read the credits on this record, it says, ‘All songs by Jenny Lewis.’ Being in a band like Rilo Kiley was all about surrendering yourself to the group. And then working with Johnathan for so long, I might have lost a little bit of myself in being a collaborator. It’s nice to know I can create something that’s totally my own. I feel like this got me back to that place.” **“Rabbit Hole”** “The record was supposed to end with ‘On the Line’—the dial tone that closes the song was supposed to be the last thing you hear. But I needed to write ‘Rabbit Hole,’ almost as a mantra for myself: ‘I’m not gonna go/Down the rabbit hole with you.’ I figured the song would be for my next project, but I played it for Beck and he insisted that we put it on this record. It almost feels like a perfect postscript to this whole period of my life.”

“It feels quite sinister,” Kano tells Apple Music about the title of his exceptional sixth album, *Hoodies All Summer*. “But a hoodie’s also like a defense mechanism—a coat of armor, protection from the rain. It’s like we always get rained on but don’t worry, we’re resilient, we wear hoodies all summer. We’re prepared for whatever.” That description is fitting for 10 songs that tear down stereotypes and assumptions to reveal the humanity and bigger picture of life in London’s toughest quarters. On “Trouble” that means reflecting with nuance and empathy on the lives being lost to postcode wars and knife and gun crime. “People become so used to the fact that these situations happen that they are almost numb to it,” he says. “Young kids dying on the street—it gets to a point where it’s like you lose count, and you just move on really quickly and forget a person’s name two minutes after hearing about it.” Like 2016’s *Made in the Manor*, this is an album rooted in his experiences of living in East London. This time, though, the focus is less introspective, with Kano, as he says, “reversing the lens” toward the communities he grew up in. “I just wanted to speak about it in a way where it\'s like, ‘I understand, I get it.’ I\'ll get into the psyche of why people do what they do. It’s about remembering that these unfortunate situations come about because of circumstances that are out of the hands of people involved. Not everyone’s this gang-sign, picture-taking, hoodie-wearing gang member. That’s the way they put us across in the media. Yes, some people are involved in crime, and some people are *not*—they just live in these areas, and it’s a fucked-up situation.” Kano’s at his poetic and potent best here. Lines such as “All our mothers worry when we touch the road/\'Cause they know it’s touch-and-go whether we’re coming home” (“Trouble”) impact fast and deep, but he also spotlights hope amid hard times. “I feel like we’re resilient people and there’s always room for a smile and to celebrate the small wins, and the big wins,” he says. “That’s when you hear \[tracks\] like \'Pan-Fried\' and \'Can\'t Hold We Down\'—you can\'t hold us down, no matter what you do to us, you can\'t stop us. We’re a force, you can\'t stop us creatively. I want more for you: I’ve made it through, I want you to see what I’ve seen. It’s about everyone having the opportunity to see more, so they’ll want more, to feel like they are more.” If the wisdom of Kano’s bars positions him as an elder statesman of UK rap, the album as a whole confirms that he’s an undisputed great of the genre. Musically, it sets new standards in vision and ambition, complementing visceral electronic beats with strings and choirs as it moves through exhilarating left turns and dizzying switches of pace and intensity. “I wanted it to be an exciting listen,” he says. “Like the beat that comes in from nowhere in ‘Teardrops’—it’s like a slap in the face. This ain’t the album that you just put on in the background. I didn\'t want it to be that. You need to dedicate time out of your day to listen to this.”

Kelsey Waldon works in the country, folk, and bluegrass songwriting tradition of depicting rural life—but has zero interest in romanticizing or simplifying her subject matter. On her third full-length—and first for John Prine’s Oh Boy Records—the Nashville singer conjures the rustic places and resourceful people of her upbringing in all their complexity. “Kentucky, 1988” and “Black Patch” are tales of stubborn self-reliance—one autobiographical, the other historical. In the title track, “Anyhow,” and “Lived and Let Go,” she locates enlightenment in plainspoken country wisdom, and in “Sunday’s Children,” she draws a connection between many kinds of people dwelling at the social margins. The album’s sinewy, down-home, occasionally rocking folk-country arrangements revolve around the vinegary stoicism of Waldon’s singing and the plaintive potency of Brett Resnick’s steel guitar playing.

“The Lamb was written during a time of intense paranoia after a home invasion, deaths of loved ones and general violence around me and my friends,” says Lillie West, the Chicago-based songwriter behind Lala Lala. “I started to frequently and vividly imagine the end of the world, often becoming too frightened to leave my house. This led me to spend a lot of time examining my relationships and the choices I’d made, often wondering if they were correct and/or kind.” West initially started Lala Lala as a way to communicate things that she felt she could never say out loud. But on The Lamb, her sophomore LP and debut for Hardly Art, she has found strength in vulnerability. Through bracing hooks and sharp lyrics, the 24-year-old songwriter and guitarist illustrates a nuanced look on her own adulthood -- her fraught insecurity, struggles with addiction, and the loss of several people close to her. Originally from London, West moved with her family to Los Angeles, where she spent her teenage years, and later to Chicago, where she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Inspired by those cities’ DIY music communities, she started Lala Lala as an outlet where she could process her new experiences, which often involved toxic relationships and partying around the city with beloved friends. The turbulence in West’s life throughout that period resulted in an abrasive but tender debut album, Sleepyhead (self-released, 2016). West decided to quit drinking, and she began booking her own DIY tours across the country. Sobriety provided her with a newfound sense of self and clarity, and she began writing the songs for The Lamb while also starting the process of re-learning how to live her life. Across the album’s 12 tracks, West carefully examines the skeletons in her closet for the first time, hoping to capture honest snapshots of her past selves. Many of the songs show West asking herself agonizing questions about her life with a clever and hopeful curiosity. On the album’s first single and opening track, “Destroyer,” she reflects on feeling self-destructive and the delayed realization something in the past has irrevocably hurt you. In “Water Over Sex,” West laments her old precarious lifestyle, while trying to readjust to her newfound sobriety, and ”Copycat” confronts her feelings of alienation and boredom. “Some of this album is about being frustrated that everything is always repeating itself and being bored with your own feelings,” she explains. “‘Copycat’ in particular is about how everyone talks exactly the same on the Internet and how it sometimes feels futile to try and be yourself.” The catalyst for the starkly titled “When You Die” came when West’s friend Jilian Medford of IAN SWEET texted about the band getting into a car accident. In the song, she grapples with her lack of control over certain things and the inevitable regrets that come with it. Though that experience served as the song’s initial inspiration, “When You Die” also reflects on a string of three months in 2017 when West experienced several close deaths. The spare and stunning album highlight “Dove” further explores this tragic string of events; West explains, “It is very plainly about the death of someone I loved a lot and the guilt I had, and still have, afterwards.” After testing a handful of the new songs while on the road, The Lamb’s final form came together while recording at Rose Raft Studio in rural Illinois. Performed by West with Emily Kempf on bass/backup vocals and Ben Leach on drums, the musical arrangements of the album -- blending post punk with dream pop influences that incorporate vibrant synths, a drum machine, and even saxophone -- find a balance between light and dark, reinforcing these dynamic and intimate songs that will surely resonate.

Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

Houston\'s status as a fertile and influential rap mecca is still thriving as the rest of the world continues to catch up with the city\'s historically insular greatness. So consider Megan Thee Stallion an ambassador of what’s happening there now. From the blaxploitation vibes of its cover art to its loaded contents, her proper debut album builds upon the filthy flows that made her preceding *Tina Snow* project and its breakout single “Big Ole Freak” such an essential listen. Over live-wire beats informed less by purple drank and slab cars than by Cash Money and Hypnotize Minds, she doles out sex positivity and hustles wisdom about female empowerment in anthems like \"Dance\" and \"Money Good.\" Boasting a rare and deadly approach both lyrical and diabolical, she clowns hopeless imitators on “Realer” and provides ample ratchet motivation on the bassbin ruiner “Shake That.” Academy Award winner Juicy J, who produced three of *Fever*\'s cuts, doles out his legendary cosign with Southern pride, dropping a few raw bars himself on “Simon Says” alongside Megan’s characteristically raw ones.

Oli XL — Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer Bloom 01 Release Date: July 22nd, 2019 Format: CD / Digital Drawing by Roberto Ronzani “Can you be my ringtone... I Feel liquid Love!”. Debut album by Oli XL. Artwork drawn by Roberto Ronzani. 386 uncleared samples, twisted and patchworked into emotions (132 songs, 53 video games, 14 movies, 187 misc. found clips). Assembled in Johanneshov, Stockholm - from 2017 to 2019. ♔ Special thanks to Emilie, Zak, Lisa, Anton, Emilio & Robin. credits

“Members of the LGBT+ community that wouldn’t necessarily be at a country show. Mega-fans in Orville Peck masks. Couples in their 80s who are huge country fans. Drag queens. Five-year-olds!” Orville Peck is describing his average audience for Apple Music. “Maybe there are a million reasons for these people to be a room together,” he says. “But it’s lovely that I’m one of the reasons for them to be together.” It’s unsurprising that the fringe-masked, pseudonymous Toronto-based cowboy crooner’s debut album has attracted a broad church. *Pony* offers a very modern subversive spin on expertly informed country, tender torch songs of homoerotic desire and raw rock ’n’ roll decorated with his rich, sonorous voice. Peck may not want to show you his face, but here he’s happy to take you through his extraordinary debut, track by track. **Dead of Night** “This is a song about unrequited love. It\'s about being with somebody you know ultimately cannot give you what you want, and is only going to break your heart. But even just that is better than being without them, so you torture yourself with the inevitable demise. It was the first song I wrote for the album, and I wanted it to sound like something familiar, but something completely new as well. I wanted to provoke the kind of sensation of torturous nostalgia. I think we all go through somewhere where you remember a moment and you think that thinking about it is going to torture you, but you do it anyway, because we have this weird human nature of putting ourselves through emotional pain. That\'s kind of why I wanted the lonely guitar sound, and I wanted to go from very low to very high. I just wanted to give that same feeling sonically that the emotion is about in the song.” **Winds Change** “‘Winds Change’ is a song about traveling around not letting too much moss on your stone. I\'ve lived in many, many different countries, and I\'ve just felt like a drifter my entire life. The song is also about the things that you give up when you live that lifestyle. The benefits are adventure and freedom, but there are things—important things—that you have to leave behind.” **Turn to Hate** “I wrote the lyrics for this song about seven years ago when I was in a really low place. It\'s one of my favorite songs on the album. It\'s about the struggle I\'ve had feeling like an outsider and an outlaw my whole life and not letting that turn into resentment. Like I say in the song, ‘Don\'t let my sorrow turn to hate.’ Anyone who\'s ever felt like a weirdo should remember that is your power, and that\'s what makes you powerful and unique. This song is a mantra to remind myself not to let it go dark.” **Buffalo Run** “I’m not a very skilled technical musician, because I just teach myself everything I play. So I write all my music from a visual or emotive place. Here, I wanted to have my version of a driving train beat: I wanted it to feel like a stampede, essentially, so it needed to start peaceful and calm and slowly build and finally you get that release. I wanted it to feel cinematic. There’s a place in Alberta, Canada, I was thinking about called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which is this huge canyon where they would do buffalo runs. Canada’s indigenous people would essentially herd the buffalo off cliffs and then gather them. Every time we play it, I genuinely am picturing buffalo stampeding.” **Queen of the Rodeo** “This is about a Canadian drag queen friend of mine called Thanks Jem. It’s funny, because when we first met, we did not get along. But interestingly, she really taught me a lot about myself. She’s from a small town in Canada and moved to Vancouver to pursue her drag artistry. I wouldn’t want to speak on her behalf about her stories, but the general theme of the song is around pursuing something you love, and even if it’s maybe not as fruitful as you’d hoped, it’s the act of chasing what you love in the face of adversity that’s important.” **Kansas (Remembers Me Now)** “This is a tricky song to talk about, as it’s the only song on the record that isn’t connected to my own life. I don’t want to give it away because I’m always proud when someone figures it out and tells me their version. But I’ll give a couple hints: It’s a song about something pretty dastardly. It’s my murder ballad. They have a very long history in country music. It’s about a real-life murder story which also involves a very interesting kind of homoerotic romance. This is my ode to that.” **Old River** “I wrote this very shortly after the death of a family member. It’s a cathartic song for me that I wrote literally driving through the mountains in winter on the way to the studio. I wanted sonically for it to be what is known in Appalachian country as a field holler, which is a mix of the old haunting Appalachian mountain music with a gospel influence. The Carter Family would do it really well. I also wanted it to be just short enough to annoy people. It’s an uncomfortable song for me, and I wanted everyone listening to it to feel uncomfortable too.” **Big Sky** “I grew up a very chatty, outgoing person and I was always performing. I’ve never felt insecure, socially. But the older I’ve gotten, I’ve realized I’m a very closed person with regards to sharing things about myself—real things about myself. I never knew how closed I was for a long time. The song is about three relationships I’ve had, and the funny thing is people tend to think it’s about those people. It is, sort of, but all of the lyrics are actually me exposing my own shortcomings, exposing myself and my role in those relationships, rather than holding anyone else at fault. The second verse deals with a pretty tumultuous relationship that I was pretty fearful of and had never even talked to anybody about before. It’s a really liberating song, as somebody who internalizes a lot.” **Roses Are Falling** “A song about loving somebody so much that they drive you crazy. You know that being with them is not good for you, but at the same time maybe that’s what we all need every now and again. I wanted to give a nod to the era of Santo & Johnny—that pedal-steel Hawaiian influence which moved into country—with a cheeky twist.” **Take You Back (The Iron Hoof Cattle Call)** “There is a classic trope in country music that used to be known as hokum. It\'s funny, because I think it\'s—for people that don\'t really know country today—almost what gave country a stigma for being shallow. But there’s a long tradition in country to incorporate humor, wit, and Southern charm into the music. Dolly Parton is very famous for that, of course, and I love the very famous George Strait song called ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas.’ So this is my hokum song with gunshots, whip cracks, and yeehaws. It’s a rootin’-tootin’ song about leaving somebody and that great feeling of telling them you’ll never take that back.” **Hope to Die** “Although I sing a lot about relationships, this is the only song on the album that’s about true heartbreak. It took a long time to record and I kept making revisions lyrically and to the production because I really wanted to capture a feeling within it. It was that feeling when you’re so at a loss that something fell apart. For me, it was that I was so heartbroken and spent months walking in slow motion. So I wanted to capture that sensation of feeling numb and watching the world pass you but all you can do is think about whatever it may be. It’s strange, because it’s almost a divine, serene feeling, but it’s so negative. It’s very still and peaceful, but it’s so very lonely. That serene unhappiness is something that I imagine people could probably get stuck in.” **Nothing Fades Like the Light** “This song is about the feeling of knowing something is coming to an end, and how that feeling can be more painful than when it does actually end. Embarrassingly, I still really choke up and cry in this song when I perform it. Which sounds conceited, but it’s not because I’m so moved by my performance. It’s very funny, as like I said earlier, I didn’t realize how closed I was emotionally for a very long time. A friend of mine passed away when I was quite young, and I remember being at the funeral and being incapable of crying. It dawned on me, ‘You know, I don’t cry very often. What makes me cry? Should I be crying? Do I feel things? Am I crazy?’ It’s nuts, because after that moment something clicked in my brain and I didn’t cry for about five or six years, at all. I think it became a compulsion where I just could not seem to cry. I eventually did, and it was actually a moment of bliss. Now I cry all the time.”

Combining the lulling ambiance of shoegaze with the iconic melodies and vocal prowess of classic American country music, outlaw cowboy, Orville Peck croons about love and loss from the badlands of North America. The resulting sound is entirely his own. He takes the listener down desert highways, through a world where worn out gamblers, road-dogs, and lovesick hustlers drift in and out of his masked gaze. Orville’s debut album, Pony, delivers a diverse collection of stories that sing of heartbreak, revenge and the unrelenting tug of the cowboy ethos. Warm lap steel guitars and echoing drums move through dreamy ballads and sometimes near frantic buzzsaw tunes - all the while paying homage to his country music roots. Pony’s lead single “Dead of Night” is a torch song about two hustlers traveling through Nevada desert. Their whirlwind romance takes us on a dusty trail of memories - racing down canyon highways, hitchhiking through casino towns and ultimately, ending in tragedy. Orville recalls the adventures of his young love, as he watches the boys silently pass him on the strip, haunted by the happy memories of his past. On the campfire lullaby, “Big Sky,” Orville sings about his past lovers - an aloof biker, an abusive boxer and an overly protective jailor in the Florida Keys - and the inevitable demise of each one, as he leaves them for the wide open, big sky. Meanwhile “Turn To Hate” finds Orville struggling to keep his resentment from building into hatred. A continuous battle between embracing the strength and freedom of being an outsider, and the inevitable struggle of wanting normalcy and familiarity. It encapsulates Orville's dilemma as a cowboy. He sings about having to constantly repair situations in his wake, and fighting with himself over his decision making. To stay or go; to cry or not; whether to leave without saying goodbye in order to soften the blow; All the while wishing someone would tell him that they "can't stay," and to make the decision for him. And “Buffalo Run” acts as a warning, a song built around the imagery of stampeding buffalo in the badlands of the Northern Plains. It’s one that begins peacefully enough but soon transcends into a kinetic charge that crescendos as the buffalo are headed off the cliffside. Pony was produced by Orville Peck, recorded and mixed by Jordan Koop at The Noise Floor on Gabriola Island, British Columbia and mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering in Montreal, Quebec.

When Prince died in 2016, he left behind a huge amount of unreleased music—a literal steel vault so private and tightly guarded it had to be drilled open. Following on the heels of 2018’s unprecedentedly intimate *Piano & a Microphone 1983*, *Originals* is a collection of highly polished demos for songs ultimately gifted to other artists. As exciting as it is to hear Prince\'s initial vision for now-ubiquitous hits like “Manic Monday” and “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the most revelatory tracks here tend to be the raunchy ones: “Sex Shooter,” originally for Apollonia 6 (“Come on, kiss the gun”); “Jungle Love,” originally for The Time (and complete with monkey-howl backing vocals); the sex-doll synth-pop of “Make-Up,” for Vanity 6. Not that it *isn’t* exciting to hear him sing “Manic Monday” (adopted by The Bangles) and “Nothing Compares 2 U” (reportedly inspired by a departed housekeeper before being rendered immortal by Sinéad O’Connor)—it is. But what better testament to Prince’s genius than his ability to lay our nastiest, basest impulses over a funk beat and elevate them to high art?

The most punk moment of 2019 is Rico Nasty screaming “Kennyyyyyy!” in a voice like a revved-up chainsaw. The DMV rapper reestablished her signature sound with producer Kenny Beats in 2018 through an alter ego called Trap Lavigne, recalibrating the “sugar trap” style of her early hits into devil-horns missives shouted over heavy metal beats. *Anger Management* is Rico and Kenny’s first full-length collaboration, and it begins in sheer chaos: “Cold” and “Cheat Code” sound like primal screams from the soul. But the mood mellows out over the course of nine bite-sized tracks—a conceptual journey of catharsis from two of the most inventive names in rap right now. It’s like a therapy session, if your therapist was prone to hollering, “I got bitches on my dick and I ain’t even got a dick!” over JAY-Z samples.

On her fifth proper full-length album, Sharon Van Etten pushes beyond vocals-and-guitar indie rock and dives headlong into spooky maximalism. With production help from John Congleton (St. Vincent), she layers haunting drones with heavy, percussive textures, giving songs like “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen” explosive urgency. Drawing from Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, and fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, *Remind Me Tomorrow* is full of electrifying anthems, with Van Etten voicing confessions of reckless, lost, and sentimental characters. The album challenges the popular image of Van Etten as *just* a singer-songwriter and illuminates her significant talent as composer and producer, as an artist making records that feel like a world of their own.

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

Summer Walker doesn’t look the way she sounds. The Atlanta singer’s face tattoos are more in line with the aesthetic of her hometown’s many hip-hop superstars than that of ’90s golden-era R&B acts like Mary J. Blige, Xscape, and SWV, but the makeover feels right for the moment. On Walker’s heavily anticipated *Over It*, which follows her 2018 breakout mixtape *Last Day of Summer*—as well as the *CLEAR* EP—the singer recontextualizes some familiar-sounding frustrations and reckonings about hard-earned romantic truths by way of throwback sounds and contemporary real talk (all of which sounds even richer thanks to Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos). “Did I ever ask you to take me to go shopping in Paris?/Or go sailing overseas and just drape me in Gucci?” she asks on the Bryson Tiller duet “Playing Games.” “No, I never had an issue, go to the club with your boys, baby/I never wanted you to stay too long, just wanted you to show me off.” Later in the song she borrows a few bars from “Say My Name,” Destiny’s Child’s eternally catchy ballad of the underappreciated lover. *Over It* is indeed peppered with references to the R&B of Walker’s childhood: Producer London On Da Track utilizes a vintage 702 sample for “Body” and builds the beat for “Come Thru,” which features Usher, on the keyboard line of the ATL icon’s 1997 “You Make Me Wanna...” The album also boasts guest spots from Drake, 6LACK, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, and long-dormant moody-R&B hero PARTYNEXTDOOR. The vantage point of *Over It*, though, is wholly the singer’s own. The exchanges in Walker’s verses sound like they could have been grafted directly from text messages or pulled from a FaceTime conversation. “Am I really that much to handle?” she opines on the title track. “You wanna be a good friend to me/Why don’t you pour up that Hennessy/Light up a few blunts so we can get high,” she sings on “Tonight.” “Too much Patrón will have you calling his phone/Have you wanting some more,” she advises on “Drunk Dialing…LODT.” Walker’s words are so relatable they seem destined to become social media captions. *Over It*, then, is a project whose title betrays its maker’s constitution, one certain only to leave fans wanting more.

There’s a reason Taylor Swift sounds so confident and cool on *Lover*, her seventh album and the most free-spirited yet. She’s in *love*—pure, steady, starry-eyed, shout-it-from-the-rooftops love. Arriving 13 years after her eponymous debut album—and following a string of songs that sometimes felt like battle scars from public breakups and celebrity feuds—this project comes off clear-eyed, thick-skinned, and grown-up. It may be a sign that the 29-year-old has entered a new phase of her life: She’s now impressively private (she and her long-term boyfriend are rarely seen together in public), politically fired up (this album finds her fighting for queer and women’s rights), and eager to see the big picture (fans have speculated that the gut-wrenching “Soon You’ll Get Better” is about her mother’s battles with cancer). As a result, she’s never sounded stronger or more in control. She calls out dark-age bigots on the Pride anthem “You Need to Calm Down,” sends up the patriarchy on “The Man,” perfects flippant indifference on “I Forgot That You Existed,” and dares to sing her own praises on “ME!,” a duet with Brendon Urie of Panic! At the Disco. Tonally, these songs couldn’t be more different than 2017’s vengeful and self-conscious *Reputation*. Most of the album is baked in the atmospheric synths and ’80s drums favored by collaborator Jack Antonoff (“The Archer,” “Lover”). And yet some of the best moments are also the most surprising. “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” is daydreamy and delicate, illuminated with laidback strumming, twinkling trumpet, and high-pitched *ooh-ooh*s. And the percussive, playful “I Think He Knows” is a rollercoaster of a song, spiking and dipping from chatty whispers to breathy shout-singing in a matter of seconds.

Amber Bain is ready to open up. The British singer-songwriter’s stunning early EPs of ethereal pop built intrigue, critical acclaim, and—released as The Japanese House—an air of mystery. Her debut album is gorgeous and dreamy, but also extraordinarily vulnerable. “The whole point of the album is me being really honest,” she tells Apple Music. “Not really intentionally. But just for the hell of it.” Join Bain for a track-by-track guide to the album. **“went to meet her”** “It’s an intense way to start an album. I think the chaos of the drums definitely reflects the chaos of the situation. It sounds like I\'m talking about going to meet a girl in Ibiza, but the lyrics are really dark. My friend was badly attacked by this horrible man. I had to fly out to be with her because she was in the hospital. It’s quite a weird one for me to play live because it puts me back in that place.” **“Maybe You’re the Reason”** “There’s a lyric, ‘I\'ve looked within and I\'ve read but instead I keep focusing on just how thin I can get.’ It’s me asking, ‘How can I be so clever and read philosophy but actually care about how thin I am?’ Not that I think I have an eating disorder now, but I definitely did when I was younger. That was when I started to realize I\'m writing some quite personal things, and I went with it.” **“We Talk all the Time”** “This song is about lack of sex in a relationship. I think a lot of gay or queer relationships are oversexualized. People assume that if you\'re not straight you\'re having sex all the time, but it\'s definitely a massive thing—especially in lesbian relationships—to stop having sex after a couple of years. It just stops because you\'re so close with that person, it almost feels like yourself in a weird way.” **“Wild”** “I wrote this when I was 17. I used to get really angry and have tantrums—but the teenage version. I’d smash stuff up and then think, ‘Oh, everyone hates me.’ I’d come out of my body and feel that wasn\'t me. The song is about feeling detachment from a side of myself that was really destructive.” **“You Seemed so Happy”** “Death, or someone dying, used to feel very in the distance. Then my friend passed away. It’s really jarring in terms of your own concept of mortality, because you\'re suddenly aware that at any point you could die. I was taking a blood pressure monitor with me everywhere and taking my temperature 10 times a day. I felt depressed but presented myself as a very light, happy human. This song sounds happy and it\'s a metaphor for my music, because if I go somewhere in Europe on tour, they don\'t understand, they\'re not listening to the lyrics, and they think my songs are really happy.” **“Follow My Girl”** “I wrote the lyrics for this track in Wisconsin, where I was recording the album \[at Bon Iver’s Fall Creek studio\]. I was there for two months. It was just me and BJ Burton—the producer—in the middle of nowhere. Didn\'t really leave or speak to anyone for two months, and I would go to this small house down the road from the studio and write lyrics on my own.” **“somethingfartoogoodtofeel”** “This was recorded in my bedroom. We added some strings, live drums, and rerecorded the vocal, but everything else is from the demo. It was written in a couple of hours, and after I finished it I found out my friend died. It’s a really old song but I didn\'t work on it because it reminded me of that day too much. Now I love the song, but it\'s the one I\'ve listened to least.” **“Lilo”** “My friend Gemma called me and said, ‘I\'ve met someone that you\'re gonna fall in love with.’ I was really heartbroken at the time, so I thought, ‘It\'s not going to happen.’ Then I went to her gig, she was really funny onstage, and I thought, ‘F\*\*k.’ The chorus was written when we first met. The whole thing about her ‘floating like a lilo’ \[pool float\] is because it really did feel like she was just drifting around. She felt like a very singular object.” **“Everybody Hates Me”** “This song is about me being really hung over for two, three years. Every day waking up with that feeling of ‘everyone hates me and I\'ve ruined my life.’ Looking back at the time, I thought—almost jokingly—it\'s a hangover anthem. Now it\'s really sad for me to look back knowing I spent so much time hating myself because I couldn\'t stop drinking. I felt alone for that entire period of time. I stopped drinking for a while after I wrote that song. I need to stop drinking again.” **“Marika Is Sleeping”** “My girlfriend was asleep, she was really ill, and I was napping next to her. I dreamt this string arrangement, got my laptop and programmed the strings. When I saved it I was like, ‘Oh, what do I call the project?’ I find it really hard to name things. The production’s all done on a Mellotron with weird harps and me doing a choral voice because I wanted it to sound like an old Disney soundtrack.” **“Worms”** “I love working with George \[Daniel, of The 1975\]. He\'s really organized, and that\'s handy because I\'m really disorganized. A friend was dating one of the band \[The 1975\], then Matty \[Healy\] and George heard my music and wanted to produce it. Then I spent two years touring with them. It\'s weird to me that they\'re so big, because they’re just my friends. Then I see them at The O2 and I\'m like, ‘Oh, okay. You guys are huge.’” **“f a r a w a y”** “He’s \[Matt Healy\] singing on ‘f a r a w a y.’ He\'s always one of my favorite people to play songs to because he gets so excited and he\'ll openly be like, ‘That makes me jealous.’ When I listened to one of his songs I was like, ‘F\*\*k, I wish I had written that.’ I think either a lot of admiration is jealousy or a lot of jealousy is admiration. I don\'t know which way it is.” **“i saw you in a dream”** “It\'s my favorite song I\'ve ever written. My voice doesn\'t sound perfect, but it\'s a really emotional song. It\'s two live takes, and I think I was crying on one of them. It’s about my friend who passed away. I find it difficult to think of writing music as therapy because it\'s not therapeutic for me to confront certain things. I have to play this song every night on tour and sometimes I don\'t want to think about her being dead. Maybe it\'s really nice that I get to think about her every day. It\'s therapy but it\'s also emotional torture.”

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.

Thanks to his multitude of hits for Playboi Carti, Pi’erre Bourne sports one of the most instantly recognizable producer tags in the rap game. Fans of Young Nudy boast even more familiarity with that *Jamie Foxx Show*-referencing snippet, seeing as their fruitful partnership touches all of the Atlanta rapper’s *SlimeBall* mixtapes and the creepily compelling *Nudy Land*. The joint effort *Sli’merre* displays everything right about their pairing—the warbly trap beats and slightly askew flows of cuts like “Dispatch” and “Gas Station” cooking up with narcotic ease. 21 Savage and Lil Uzi Vert come through with memorable features on “Mister” and “Extendo,” adding their juice to an already overflowing spiked punchbowl.

“Things fade into obscurity when a populace has no interest” - Meitei / 冥丁 Meitei considers himself an old soul, often preoccupied with the customs and rituals of the past. Recently Meitei lost his beloved 99-year-old grandmother, a woman who he considered to be one of the last remaining people to have experience and understanding of traditional Japanese ambience. His music and art is driven by a desire to cast light on an era and aesthetic that he believes is drifting out of the collective Japanese consciousness with each passing generation, what he calls "the lost Japanese mood". He chose to dedicate Komachi to his late Grandmother. “I want to revive the soul of Japan that still sleeps in the darkness” - Meitei / 冥丁 Haunting and delicate, distant and timeless, Komachi is awash with white noise, complex field recordings and the hypnotic sounds of flowing water. Though confidently contemporary, like a bucolic J-Dilla, Komachi’s lineage can be traced back to the floating worlds of Ukiyo-e and Gagaku via the prism of 80s Japanese ambient pioneers, and 90s pastoral sample-based artists such as Susumu Yokota and Nobukazu Takemura. Composed as individual sonic dioramas, each of the twelve tracks have been crafted to not only evoke feelings of nostalgia but to also explore the dichotomy of ancient and new in modern Japanese society. This pervasive narrative runs throughout, calling to mind the work of authors Yasunari Kawabata and Natsume Soseki, as well as the films of Yasujirō Ozu and Hayao Miyazaki, artists similarly fascinated by the reflective tranquillity that permeated traditional Japanese domestic life. The limited vinyl release, produced in collaboration with label and distributor Séance Centre, includes a super limited special edition complete with beautiful twelve-page booklet featuring a number of prints in the Ukiyo-e style, a traditional style of woodblock print that dates back to 17th century Japan. The images were chosen by Meitei to showcase the old style Japanese sentiments that form a core inspiration to his musical output.