The Forty-Five's 45 Best Albums of 2020

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

HAIM only had one rule when they started working on their third album: There would be no rules. “We were just experimenting,” lead singer and middle sibling Danielle Haim tells Apple Music. “We didn’t care about genre or sticking to any sort of script. We have the most fun when nothing is off limits.” As a result, *Women in Music Pt. III* sees the Los Angeles sisters embrace everything from thrillingly heavy guitar to country anthems and self-deprecating R&B. Amid it all, gorgeous saxophone solos waft across the album, transporting you straight to the streets of their hometown on a sunny day. In short, it’s a fittingly diverse effort for a band that\'s always refused, in the words of Este Haim, to be “put in a box.” “I just hope people can hear how much fun we had making it,” adds Danielle, who produced the album alongside Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid—a trio Alana Haim describes as “the Holy Trinity.” “We wanted it to sound fun. Everything about the album was just spontaneous and about not taking ourselves too seriously.” Yet, as fun-filled as they might be, the tracks on *Women in Music Pt. III* are also laced with melancholy, documenting the collective rock bottom the Haim sisters hit in the years leading up to the album’s creation. These songs are about depression, seeking help, grief, failing relationships, and health issues (Este has type 1 diabetes). “A big theme in this album is recognizing your sadness and expelling it with a lot of aggression,” says Danielle, who wanted the album to sound as raw and up close as the subjects it dissects. “It feels good to scream it in song form—to me that’s the most therapeutic thing I can do.” Elsewhere, the band also comes to terms with another hurdle: being consistently underestimated as female musicians. (The album’s title, they say, is a playful “invite” to stop asking them about being women in music.) The album proved to be the release they needed from all of those experiences—and a chance to celebrate the unshakable sibling support system they share. “This is the most personal record we’ve ever put out,” adds Alana. “When we wrote this album, it really did feel like collective therapy. We held up a mirror and took a good look at ourselves. It’s allowed us to move on.” Let HAIM guide you through *Women in Music Pt. III*, one song at a time. **Los Angeles** Danielle Haim: “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. It came out of this feeling when we were growing up that Los Angeles had a bad rep. It was always like, ‘Ew, Los Angeles!’ or ‘Fuck LA!’ Especially in 2001 or so, when all the music was coming out of New York and all of our friends ended up going there for college. And if LA is an eyeroll, the Valley—where we come from—is a constant punchline. But I always had such pride for this city. And then when our first album came out, all of a sudden, the opinion of LA started to change and everyone wanted to move here. It felt a little strange, and it was like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to live here anymore?’ I’m waiting for the next mass exodus out of the city and people being like, ‘This place sucks.’ Anyone can move here, but you’ve got to have LA pride from the jump.” **The Steps** Danielle: “With this album, we were reckoning with a lot of the emotions we were feeling within the business. This album was kind of meant to expel all of that energy and almost be like ‘Fuck it.’ This song kind of encapsulates the whole mood of the record. The album and this song are really guitar-driven \[because\] we just really wanted to drive that home. Unfortunately, I can already hear some macho dude being like, ‘That lick is so easy or simple.’ Sadly, that’s shit we’ve had to deal with. But I think this is the most fun song we’ve ever written. It’s such a live, organic-sounding song. Just playing it feels empowering.” Este Haim: “People have always tried to put us in a box, and they just don’t understand what we do. People are like, ‘You dance and don’t play instruments in your videos, how are you a band?’ It’s very frustrating.” **I Know Alone** Danielle: “We wrote this one around the same time that we wrote ‘Los Angeles,’ just in a room on GarageBand. Este came up with just that simple bassline. And we kind of wrote the melody around that bassline, and then added those 808 drums in the chorus. It’s about coming out of a dark place and feeling like you don\'t really want to deal with the outside world. Sometimes for me, being at home alone is the most comforting. We shout out Joni Mitchell in this song; our mom was such a huge fan of hers and she kind of introduced us to her music when we were really little. I\'d always go into my room and just blast Joni Mitchell super loud. And I kept finding albums of hers as we\'ve gotten older and need it now. I find myself screaming to slow Joni Mitchell songs in my car. This song is very nostalgic for her.” **Up From a Dream** Danielle: “This song literally took five minutes to write, and it was written with Rostam. It’s about waking up to a reality that you just don’t want to face. In a way, I don’t really want to explain it: It can mean so many different things to different people. This is the heaviest song we’ve ever had. It’s really cool, and I think this one will be really fun to play live. The guitar solo alone is really fun.” **Gasoline** Danielle: “This was another really quick one that we wrote with Rostam. The song was a lot slower originally, and then we put that breakbeat-y drumbeat on it and all of a sudden it turned into a funky sort of thing, and it really brought the song to life. I love the way that the drums sound. I feel like we really got that right. I was like literally in a cave of blankets, a fort we created with a really old Camco drum set from the ’70s, to make sure we got that dry, tight drum sound. That slowed-down ending is due to Ariel. He had this crazy EDM filter he stuck on the guitar, and I was like, ‘Yes, that’s fucking perfect.’” Alana Haim: “I think there were parts of that song where we were feeling sexy. I remember I had gone to go get food, and when I came back Danielle had written the bridge. She was like, ‘Look what I wrote!’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Okay!’” **3 AM** Alana: “It’s pretty self-explanatory—it’s about a booty call. There have been around 10 versions of this song. Someone was having a booty call. It was probably me, to be honest. We started out with this beat, and then we wrote the chorus super quickly. But then we couldn’t figure out what to do in the verses. We’d almost given up on it and then we were like, ‘Let’s just try one last time and see if we can get there.’ I think it was close to 3 am when we figured out the verse and we had this idea of having it introduced by a phone call. Because it *is* about a booty call. And we had to audition a bunch of dudes. We basically got all of our friends that were guys to be like, ‘Hey, this is so crazy, but can you just pretend to be calling a girl at 3 am?’ We got five or six of our friends to do it, and they were so nervous and sheepish. They were the worst! I was like, ‘Do you guys even talk to girls?’ I think you can hear the amount of joy and laughs we had making this song.” **Don’t Wanna** Alana: “I think this is classic HAIM. It was one of the earlier songs which we wrote around the same time as ‘Now I’m in It.’ We always really, really loved this song, and it always kind of stuck its head out like, ‘Hey, remember me?’ It just sounded so good being simple. We can tinker around with a song for years, and with this one, every time we added something or changed it, it lost the feeling. And every time we played it, it just kind of felt good. It felt like a warm sweater.” **Another Try** Alana: “I\'ve always wanted to write a song like this, and this is my favorite on the record. The day that we started it, I was thinking that I was going to get back together with the love of my life. I mean, now that I say that, I want to barf, because we\'re not in a good place now, but at that point we were. We had been on and off for almost 10 years and I thought we were going to give it another try. And it turns out, the week after we finished the song, he had gotten engaged. So the song took on a whole new meaning very quickly. It’s really about the fact I’ve always been on and off with the same person, and have only really had one love of my life. It’s kind of dedicated to him. I think Ariel had a lot of fun producing this song. As for the person it’s about? He doesn’t know about it, but I think he can connect the dots. I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to figure out. The end of the song is supposed to feel like a celebration. We wanted it to feel like a dance party. Because even though it has such a weird meaning now, the song has a hopeful message. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure it out. I am still hopeful.” **Leaning on You** Alana: “This is really a song about finding someone that accepts your flaws. That’s such a rare thing in this world—to find someone you love that accepts you as who you are and doesn\'t want to change you. As sisters, we are the CEOs of our company: We have super strong personalities and really strong opinions. And finding someone that\'s okay with that, you would think would be celebrated, but it\'s actually not. It\'s really hard to find someone that accepts you and accepts what you do as a job and accepts everything about you. And I think ‘Leaning on You’ is about when you find that person that really uplifts you and finds everything that you do to be incredible and interesting and supports you. It’s a beautiful thing.” Danielle: “We wrote this song just us sitting around a guitar. And we just wanted to keep it like that, so we played acoustic guitar straight into the computer for a very dry, unique sound that I love.” **I’ve Been Down** Danielle: “This is the last one we wrote on the album. This was super quick with stream-of-consciousness lyrics. I wanted it to sound like you were in the room, like you were right next to me. That chorus—‘I’ve been down, I’ve been down’—feels good to sing. It\'s very therapeutic to just kind of scream it in song form. To me, it’s the most therapeutic thing I can do. The backing vocals on this are like the other side of your brain.” **Man From the Magazine** Este: \"When we were first coming out, I guess it was perplexing for some people that I would make faces when I played, even though men have been doing it for years. When they see men do it, they are just, to quote HAIM, ‘in it.’ But of course, when a woman does it, it\'s unsettling and off-putting and could be misconstrued as something else. We got asked questions about it early on, and there was this one interviewer who asked if I made the faces I made onstage in bed. Obviously he wasn’t asking about when I’m in bed yawning. My defense mechanism when stuff like that happens is just to try to make a joke out of it. So I kind of just threw it back at him and said, ‘Well, there\'s only one way to find out.’ And of course, there was a chuckle and then we moved on. Now, had someone said that to me, I probably would\'ve punched them in the face. But as women, we\'re taught kind of just to always be pleasant and be polite. And I think that was my way of being polite and nice. Thank god things are changing a bit. We\'ve been talking about shit like this forever, but I think now, finally, people are able to listen more intently.” Danielle: “We recorded this song in one take. We got the feeling we wanted in the first take. The first verse is Este\'s super specific story, and then, on the second verse, it feels very universal to any woman who plays music about going into a guitar store or a music shop and immediately either being asked, ‘Oh, do you want to start to play guitar?’ or ‘Are you looking for a guitar for your boyfriend?’ And you\'re like, ‘What the fuck?’ It\'s the worst feeling. And I\'ve talked to so many other women about the same experience. Everyone\'s like, ‘Yeah, it\'s the worst. I hate going in the guitar stores.’ It sucks.” **All That Ever Mattered** Alana: “This is one of the more experimental songs on the record. Whatever felt good on this track, we just put it in. And there’s a million ways you could take this song—it takes on a life of its own and it’s kind of chaotic. The production is bananas and bonkers, but it did really feel good.” Danielle: “It’s definitely a different palette. But to us it was exciting to have that crazy guitar solo and those drums. It also has a really fun scream on it, which I always like—it’s a nice release.” **FUBT** Alana: “This song was one of the ones that was really hard to write. It’s about being in an emotionally abusive relationship, which all three of us have been in. It’s really hard to see when you\'re in something like that. And the song basically explains what it feels like and just not knowing how to get out of it. You\'re just kind of drowning in this relationship, because the highs are high and the lows are extremely low. You’re blind to all these insane red flags because you’re so immersed in this love. And knowing that you\'re so hard on yourself about the littlest things. But your partner can do no wrong. When we wrote this song, we didn’t really know where to put it. But it felt like the end to the chapter of the record—a good break before the next songs, which everyone knew.” **Now I’m in It** Danielle: “This song is about feeling like you\'re in something and almost feeling okay to sit in it, but also just recognizing that you\'re in a dark place. I was definitely in a dark place, and it was just like I had to look at myself in the mirror and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucked up. And you need to get your shit together and you need to look it in the face and know that you\'re here and work on yourself.’ After writing this song I got a therapist, which really helped me.” **Hallelujah** Alana: “This song really did just come from wanting to express how important it is to have the love of your family. We\'re very lucky that we each have two sisters as backup always. We wrote this with our friend Tobias Jesso Jr., and we all just decided to write verses separately, which is rare for us. I think we each wanted to have our own take on the lyric ‘Why me, how\'d I get this hallelujah’ and what it meant to each of us. I wrote about losing a really close friend of mine at such a young age and going through a tragedy that was unexplainable. I still grapple with the meaning of that whole thing. It was one of the hardest times in my life, and it still is, but I was really lucky that I had two siblings that were really supportive during that time and really helped me get through it. If you talk to anybody that loses someone unexpectedly, you really do become a different person. I feel like I\'ve had two chapters of my life at this point: before it happened and after it happened. And I’ve always wanted to thank my sisters at the same time because they were so integral in my healing process going through something so tragic.” **Summer Girl** Alana: This song is collectively like our baby. Putting it out was really fun, but it was also really scary, because we were coming back and we didn’t know how people were going to receive it. We’d played it to people and a lot of them didn’t really like it. But we loved everything about it. You can lose your confidence really quickly, but thankfully, people really liked it. Putting out this song really did give us back our confidence.” Danielle: “I\'ve talked about it a lot, but this song is about my boyfriend getting cancer a couple of years ago, and it was truly the scariest thing that I have ever been through. I just couldn\'t stop thinking about how he was feeling. I get spooked really easily, but I felt like I had to buck the fuck up and be this kind of strong figure for him. I had to be this kind of sunshine, which was hard for me, but I feel like it really helped him. And that’s kind of where this song came from. Being the summer when he was just in this dark, dark place.”

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

Much of Grimes’ fifth LP is rooted in darkness, a visceral response to the state of the world and the death of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia. “It’s like someone who\'s very core to the project just disappearing,” she tells Apple Music of the loss. “I\'ve known a lot of people who\'ve died, but cancer just feels so demonic. It’s like someone who wants to live, who\'s a good person, and their life is just being taken away by this thing that can\'t be explained. I don\'t know, it just felt like a literal demon.” *Miss Anthropocene* deals heavily in theological ideas, each song meant to represent a new god in what Grimes loosely envisioned as “a super contemporary pantheon”—“Violence,” for example, is the god of video games, “My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)” the god of political apathy, and “Delete Forever” the god of suicide. The album’s title is that of the most “urgent” and potentially destructive of gods: climate change. “It’s about modernity and technology through a spiritual lens,” she says of the album, itself an iridescent display of her ability as a producer, vocalist, and genre-defying experimentalist. “I’ve also just been feeling so much pressure. Everyone\'s like, ‘You gotta be a good role model,’ and I was kind of thinking like, ‘Man, sometimes you just want to actually give in to your worst impulses.’ A lot of the record is just me actually giving in to those negative feelings, which feels irresponsible as a writer sometimes, but it\'s also just so cathartic.” Here she talks through each of the album\'s tracks. **So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Art Mix)** “I think I wanted to make a sort of hard Enya song. I had a vision, a weird dream where I was just sort of falling to the earth, like fighting a Balrog. I woke up and said, ‘I need to make a video for this, or I need to make a song for this.’ It\'s sort of embarrassing, but lyrically, the song is kind of about when you decide to get pregnant or agree to get pregnant. It’s this weird loss of self, or loss of power or something. Because it\'s sort of like a future life in subservience to this new life. It’s about the intense experience deciding to do that, and it\'s a bit of an ego death associated with making that decision.” **Darkseid** “I forget how I met \[Lil\] Uzi \[Vert\]. He probably DMed me or something, just like, ‘Wanna collaborate and hang out and stuff?’ We ended up playing laser tag and I just did terribly. But instrumentally, going into it I was thinking, ‘How do I make like a super kind of goth banger for Uzi?’ When that didn\'t really work out, I hit up my friend Aristophanes, or Pan. Just because I think she\'s fucking great, and I think she\'s a great lyricist and I just love her vocal style, and she kind of sounds good on everything, and it\'s especially dark stuff. Like she would make this song super savage and intense. I should let Pan explain it, but her translation of the lyrics is about a friend of hers who committed suicide.” **Delete Forever** “A lot of people very close to me have been super affected by the opioid crisis, or just addiction to opiates and heroin—it\'s been very present in my life, always. When Lil Peep died, I just got super triggered and just wanted to go make something. It seemed to make sense to keep it super clean sonically and to keep it kind of naked. so it\'s a pretty simple production for me. Normally I just go way harder. The banjo at the end is comped together and Auto-Tuned, but that is my banjo playing. I really felt like Lil Peep was about to make his great work. It\'s hard to see anyone die young, but especially from this, ’cause it hit so close to home.” **Violence** “This sounds sort of bad: In a way it feels like you\'re giving up when you sing on someone else\'s beats. I literally just want to produce a track. But it was sort of nice—there was just so much less pain in that song than I think there usually is. There\'s this freedom to singing on something I\'ve never heard before. I just put the song on for the first time, the demo that \[producer/DJ\] i\_o sent me, and just sang over it. I was like, \'Oh!\' It was just so freeing—I never ever get to do that. Everyone\'s like, ‘What\'s the meaning? What\'s the vibe?’ And honestly, it was just really fucking fun to make. I know that\'s not good, that everyone wants deeper meanings and emotions and things, but sometimes just the joy of music is itself a really beautiful thing.” **4ÆM** “I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called *Bajirao Mastani*—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, ‘Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.’ So I was just sort of making fan art, and I then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this doesn\'t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.’ It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started.” **New Gods** “I really wish I started the record with this song. I just wanted to write the thesis down: It\'s about how the old gods sucked—well, I don\'t want to say they sucked, but how the old gods have definitely let people down a bit. If you look at old polytheistic religions, they\'re sort of pre-technology. I figured it would be a good creative exercise to try to think like, ‘If we were making these gods now, what would they be like?’ So it\'s sort of about the desire for new gods. And with this one, I was trying to give it a movie soundtrack energy.” **My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)** “It\'s sort of written in character, but I was just in a really cranky mood. Like it\'s just sort of me being a whiny little brat in a lot of ways. But it\'s about political apathy—it’s so easy to be like, ‘Everything sucks. I don\'t care.’ But I think that\'s a very dangerous attitude, a very contagious one. You know, democracy is a gift, and it\'s a thing not many people have. It\'s quite a luxury. It seems like such a modern affliction to take that luxury for granted.” **You’ll miss me when I’m not around** “I got this weird bass that was signed by Derek Jeter in a used music place. I don\'t know why—I was just trying to practice the bass and trying to play more instruments. This one feels sort of basic for me, but I just really fell in love with the lyrics. It’s more like ‘Delete Forever,’ where it feels like it\'s almost too simple for Grimes. But it felt really good—I just liked putting it on. Again, you gotta follow the vibe, and it had a good vibe. Ultimately it\'s sort of about an angel who kills herself and then she wakes up and she still made it to heaven. And she\'s like, \'What the fuck? I thought I could kill myself and get out of heaven.’ It\'s sort of about when you\'re just pissed and everyone\'s being a jerk to you.” **Before the Fever** “I wanted this song to represent literal death. Fevers are just kind of scary, but a fever is also sort of poetically imbued with the idea of passion and stuff too. It\'s like it\'s a weirdly loaded word—scary but compelling and beautiful. I wanted this song to represent this trajectory where like it starts sort of threatening but calm, and then it slowly gets sort of more pleading and like emotional and desperate as it goes along. The actual experience of death is so scary that it\'s kind of hard to keep that aloofness or whatever. I wanted it to sort of be like following someone\'s psychological trajectory if they die. Specifically a kind of villain. I was just thinking of the Joffrey death scene in *Game of Thrones*. And it\'s like, he\'s so shitty and such a prick, but then, when he dies, like, you feel bad for him. I kind of just wanted to express that feeling in the song.” **IDORU** “The bird sounds are from the Squamish birdwatching society—their website has lots of bird sounds. But I think this song is sort of like a pure love song. And it just feels sort of heavenly—I feel very enveloped in it, it kind of has this medieval/futurist thing going on. It\'s like if ‘Before the Fever’ is like the climax of the movie, then ‘IDORU’ is the end title. It\'s such a negative energy to put in the world, but it\'s good to finish with something hopeful so it’s not just like this mean album that doesn\'t offer you anything.”

“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”

Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

Looking for a respite from the gloomy cycle that has been 2020? Then Megan Thee Stallion\'s got you covered. “I feel like I had to name my album *Good News* because we\'ve been hearing so much bad news,” she tells Apple Music. “It\'s like, \'Okay, look, Megan Thee Stallion finally coming with the good news.\'” The Houston rapper\'s long-awaited (and, yes, aptly titled) debut album is a distillation of her best qualities punched up for maximum impact. It\'s skillful and clever, but not at the expense of style and levity. Hope you\'ve done your stretches. To start, she wastes no time addressing the controversy that had been trailing her, using the album\'s opening moments to put to rest any discussion about the shooting incident that left her wounded. It\'s brief, fiery, and filled with haymakers, as Megan takes aim at her perpetrator (who remains nameless on wax—“I know you want the clout so I ain\'t saying y\'all name,” she declares) and any naysayers. Never one to wallow, she spends the next 16 songs showcasing exactly why she\'s earned the respect and adoration of peers and fans alike. Songs like “Do It on the Tip” (featuring City Girls) and “Freaky Girls” (featuring SZA) are flirty, twerkable, and emblematic of the \'girls just wanna have fun\' mantra that seems to rule her world, while others like “Movie” and “What\'s New” are all attitude and take-no-prisoners displays of the lyrical dexterity that makes her freestyles so charming. Elsewhere, “Intercourse,” which features Jamaican artist Popcaan, and “Don\'t Rock Me to Sleep” find her outside of her comfort zone, the former a dancehall-inflected romp and the latter a singsongy pop record. And for Meg, that kind of ambition felt right for the current moment. “When I started recording the songs for this album, I knew it sounded like album songs,” she says. “And I\'m like, \'This is it. This is the time. Quarantine is happening, everybody\'s basically in the house. I have everybody\'s attention. Everybody wants new music and you can sit down and actually absorb it.\" By the time the album wraps up with a run of previously released singles (including, of course, her “Savage Remix” with Beyoncé), it feels like we’ve glimpsed past, present, and future. The fan-favorite styles of old are now well-developed and existing alongside the possibilities of what may come next. *Good News* lives up to its name with ease—a tenacious effort that makes room for pleasure, dance, and feeling good (and oneself) despite contrary circumstances. And, really, who among us couldn\'t use just a little more of that?

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”

When it came to crafting her fourth album, Jessie Ware had one word in mind. “Escapism,” the Londoner tells Apple Music of *What’s Your Pleasure?*, a collection of suitably intoxicating soul- and disco-inspired pop songs to transport you out of your everyday and straight onto a crowded dance floor. “I wanted it to be fun. The premise was: Will this make people want to have sex? And will this make people want to dance? I’ve got a family now, so going out and being naughty and debauched doesn’t happen that much.” And yet the singer (and, in her spare time, wildly popular podcaster) could have never foreseen just how much we would *all* be in need of that release by the time *What’s Your Pleasure?* came to be heard—amid a global pandemic and enforced lockdowns in countless countries. “A lot of shit is going on,” says Ware. “As much as I don’t think I’m going to save the world with this record, I do think it provides a bit of escapism. By my standards, this album is pretty joyful.” Indeed, made over two years with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and producers including Clarence Coffee Jr. (Dua Lipa, Lizzo) and Joseph Mount of Metronomy, *What’s Your Pleasure?* is a world away from the heartfelt balladry once synonymous with Ware. Here, pulsating basslines reign supreme, as do whispered vocals, melodramatic melodies, and winking lyrics. At times, it’s a defiant throwback to the dance scene that first made Ware famous (“I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’”); at others, it’s a thrilling window into what might come next (note “Remember Where You Are,” the album’s gorgeous, Minnie Riperton-esque outro). But why the sudden step change? “A low point in music” and \"a shitty time,” says Ware, nodding to a 2018 tour that left her feeling so disillusioned with her day job that her mother suggested she quit singing altogether. “I needed a palate cleanser to shock the system. I needed to test myself. I needed to be reminded that music should be fun.” *What’s Your Pleasure?*, confirms Ware, has more than restored the spring in her step. “I feel like what I can do after this is limitless,” she says. “That’s quite a different situation to how I felt during the last album. Now, I have a newfound drive. I feel incredibly empowered, and it’s an amazing feeling.” Here\_,\_ Let Ware walk you through her joyous fourth record, one song at a time. **Spotlight** “I wrote this in the first writing session. James was playing the piano and we were absolutely crooning. That’s what the first bit of this song is—which really nods to musical theater and jazz. We thought about taking it out, but then I realized that the theatrical aspect is kind of essential. The album had to have that light and shade. It also felt like a perfect entry point because of that intro. It’s like, ‘Come into my world.’ I think it grabs you. It’s also got a bit of the old Jessie in there, with that melancholy. This song felt like a good indicator of where the rest of the album was going to go. That’s why it felt right to start the record with that.” **What’s Your Pleasure?** “We had been writing and writing all day, and nothing was working. We\'d gone for a lunch, and we were like, ‘You know, sometimes this happens.’ Later, we were just messing about, and I was like, ‘I really want to imagine that I\'m in the Berghain and I want to imagine that I\'m dancing with someone and they are so suggestive, and anything goes.’ It\'s sex, it\'s desire, it\'s temptation. We were like, ‘Let’s do this as outrageously as possible.’ So we imagined we were this incredibly confident person who could just say anything. When we wrote it, it just came out—20 minutes and then it was done. James came up with that amazing beat, which almost reminds me of a DJ Shadow song. We were giggling the whole time we were writing it. It\'s quite poppy accidentally, but I think with the darkness of all the synths, it’s just the perfect combination.” **Ooh La La** “This is another very cheeky one. It’s very much innuendo. In my head, there are these prim and proper lovers—it’s all very polite, but actually there’s no politeness about. So it’s quite a naughty number. The song has got an absolute funk to it, but it’s really catchy and it’s still quite quirky. It’s not me letting rip on the vocal. It’s actually quite clipped.” **Soul Control** “I had Janet Jackson in my head in this one. It’s a really energetic number. There is a sense of indulgence in these songs, because I wasn’t trying to play to a radio edit and I was really relishing that. But it’s not self-indulgent, because it’s very much fun. These are the highest tempos I’ve ever done, and I think I surprised myself by doing that. I wanted to keep the energy up—I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’” **Save a Kiss** “It’s funny because I was a bit scared of this song. I remember Ed Sheeran telling me, ‘When you get a bit scared by a song, it usually means that there’s something really good in it.’ My fans like emotion from me, so I wanted to do a really emotive dance song. We just wanted it to feel as bare as possible and really feel like the lyrics and the melody could really like sing out on this one. We had loads of other production in it, and it was very much like a case of James and I stripping everything back. It was the hardest one to get right. But I’m very excited about playing it. It has the yearning and the wanting that I feel my fans want, and I just wanted it to feel a bit over the top. I also wanted this song to have a bit of Kate Bush in there and some of the drama of her music.” **Adore You** “I wrote this when I got pregnant. It was my first session with Joseph Mount and I was a bit awkward and he was a bit awkward. When I\'m really nervous I sing really quietly because I don\'t want people to hear anything. But that actually kind of worked. I love this—it shows a vulnerability and a softness. Actually it was me thinking about my unborn child and thinking about, like, I\'m falling for you and this bump and feeling like it\'s going to be a reality soon. I think Joe did such an amazing job on just making it feel hypnotic and still romantic and tender, but with this kind of mad sound. I think it’s a really beautiful song. It was supposed to be an offering before I went away and had a baby, to tell my fans that I’ll be back. They really loved it and I thought, ‘I can\'t not put this on the record, because it\'s like it\'s an important song for the journey of this album.’ I’m really proud of the fact that this is a pure collaboration, and I have such fond memories of it.” **In Your Eyes** “This was the first song that me and James wrote for this whole album. I think you can feel the darkness in it. And that maybe I was feeling the resentment and torturing myself. I think that the whirring arpeggio and the beats in this song very much suggest that it’s a stream of consciousness. There’s a desperation about it. I think that was very much the time and place that I was in. I’m very proud of this song, and it’s actually one of my favorites. Jules Buckley did such an amazing job on the strings—it makes me feel like we\'re in a Bond film or something. But it was very much coming off the back of having quite a low point in music.” **Step Into My Life** “I made this song with \[London artist\] Kindness \[aka Adam Bainbridge\]. I’ve known them for a long time. In my head I wanted that almost R&B delivery with the verse and for it to feel really intimate and kind of predatory, but with this very disco moment in the chorus. I love that Adam’s voice is in there, in the breakdown. It feels like a conversation—the song is pure groove and attitude. You can’t help but nod your head. It feels like one that you can play at the beginning of a party and get people on the dance floor.” **Read My Lips** “James and I did this one on our own, and it’s supposed to be quite bubblegummy. We were giving a nod to \[Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force song\] ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ The bassline in this song is so good. We also recorded my vocal slower and lower, so that when you turn it back to normal speed, the vocals sound more cutesy because it sounds brighter and higher. I wanted it to sound slightly squeaky. My voice is naturally quite low and melancholic, so I don’t know how I’m going to sing this one live. I’ll have to pinch my nose or something!” **Mirage (Don’t Stop)** “The bassline here is ridiculous! That’s down to Matt Tavares \[of BADBADNOTGOOD\]. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and is just so talented and enthusiastic, and I also wrote this with \[British DJ and producer\] Benji B and \[US producer\] Clarence Coffee Jr. I think it really signified that I had got my confidence and my mojo back when I went into that session. Usually I\'d be like, ‘Oh, my god, I can\'t do this with new people.’ But it just clicked as sometimes it does. I was unsure about whether the lyric ‘Don\'t stop moving’ felt too obvious. But Benji B was very much like, ‘No, man. You want people to dance. It’s the perfect message.’ And I think of Benji B as like the cool-ometer. So I was like, \'Cool, if Benji B thinks it cool, then I\'m okay with that.’” **The Kill** “There’s an almost hypnotic element to this song. It’s very dark, almost like the end of the night when things are potentially getting too loose. It’s also a difficult one to talk about. It’s about someone feeling like they know you well—maybe too well. There are anxieties in there, and it\'s meant to be cinematic. I wanted that relentlessly driving feeling like you\'d be in a car and you just keep going on, like you’re almost running away from something. Again, Jules Buckley did an amazing job with the strings here—I wanted it to sound almost like it was verging on Primal Scream or Massive Attack. And live, it could just build and build and build. There is, though, a lightness at the end of it, and an optimism—like you’re clawing your way out of this darkness.” **Remember Where You Are** “I’m incredibly proud of this song. I wrote it when Boris Johnson had just got into Downing Street and things were miserable. Everything that could be going wrong was going wrong, which is behind the lyric ‘The heart of the city is on fire.’ And it sounds relatively upbeat, but actually, it\'s about me thinking, ‘Remember where you are. Remember that just a cuddle can be okay. Remember who’s around you.’ Also, it was very much a semi-sign-off and about saying, ‘This is where I’m going and this is the most confident I’ve ever been.’ It was a bold statement. I think it stands up as one of the best songs I\'ve ever written.”

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”

As The Killers began work on their sixth full-length, Brandon Flowers had a single visual in mind: the album’s eventual cover art, illustrator Thomas Blackshear’s *Dance of the Wind and Storm*. “We wanted to make sure that the songs fit underneath the banner of what that image was saying,” Flowers tells Apple Music of the drawing, which he hung on the wall of the studio. “Blackshear typically does Western landscapes, or he does spiritual art. But on this particular one he combined them, and that\'s exactly what I wanted to capture. Songs that didn\'t fit, they had to get cut. We’d never done anything like that, but it ended up being a real beacon for us.” As intended, *Imploding the Mirage* evokes the scale and natural majesty of the American West, like The E Street Band playing Monument Valley. And at its heart are a series of synth-lined, often Springsteenian tales of love and salvation, inspired by Flowers’ recent move from Las Vegas to Utah—and the effect it had on his wife’s mental health. (“Las Vegas is a tainted and haunted place,” he says. “Talk about a clean slate.”) It’s the band’s first LP without founding guitarist Dave Keuning, whose departure made space for a list of collaborators that includes k.d. lang, Weyes Blood, The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s also meant to be a companion to 2017’s unabashedly grand *Wonderful Wonderful*. “I\'m very interested in the optimistic side of things,” Flowers says. “I was brought up to have that kind of a perspective, and I think you hear it in the songs: It feels triumphant, like there are angels present.” Here, Flowers details a few of its key tracks. **My Own Soul’s Warning** “It\'s strange to write a song about repentance. It\'s not a typical subject in a pop or a rock song. And I felt like, to be able to go into that territory and write something that was meaningful to myself and that felt like it was going to transcend and resonate with a lot of people in a stadium or inside their headphones—that’s kind of the Holy Grail. It\'s just one of those songs for me.” **Blowback** “The producer of the record, Shawn Everett, he\'s producing the new War on Drugs, and he produced the last one. I think Adam \[Granduciel\] and I share a lot of the same musical landmarks and touchstones—we just follow along through our own experiences, usually Las Vegas. It just kind of happened pretty organically.” **Dying Breed** “Shawn, he’s a wizard in the studio, kind of a mad scientist. And he just will throw things at a song that you were just not envisioning at all. The song was already good, and then Shawn disappeared into a B room for about an hour and came back all excited, and played us that \[Can and Neu!\] loop over the song. And it was like, ‘Yeah.’ It\'s frustrating that it wasn\'t our loop in the beginning, but then we just embraced it and got permission. And when Ronnie \[Vannucci, drummer\] and the full band come in halfway through the song, it just goes to this other level. Now I love that song.” **Caution** “Sometimes they talk. That’s what you hear about, when you hear about great guitar solos—how they speak, how they’re singable. And, man, Lindsey just delivered in a big way, and I love that. I love that you can kind of memorize that solo and sing along.” **Imploding the Mirage** “In \[1977’s\] ‘Solsbury Hill,’ Peter Gabriel talks about walking out of the machinery—and I think he\'s talking about Genesis. It’s kind of like that. It\'s like getting out from underneath the weight of what it is to be in The Killers and what is expected of you, and just doing what you love. That\'s a huge part of it, for sure. I mean, I can\'t pretend like everything\'s just hunky-dory and that we\'re firing on all cylinders. It\'s just not. I\'m obviously using the imagery of Las Vegas—we implode things, we have a casino called The Mirage—and just the idea of this facade that we can put on and how stressful that can be. I think getting rid of it and replacing it with what\'s real can be such a relief and can be something that we could all strive to do.”

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

“I don’t know where it went, really,” Lianne La Havas tells Apple Music of the time between the release of her stunning second album *Blood*, in 2015, and her self-titled third record, delivered in 2020. “Lots was happening—and nothing.” In 2016 she toured with Coldplay (“Something I couldn’t not do”) and Leon Bridges (“extremely fun”), after which La Havas thought she’d settle down to write album number three. Two years later, she was still drawing a blank. “I was trying really hard, but I realized I couldn’t force it,” she says. “I just had to live my life a bit.” The inspiration came, at last, in 2019, in the form of a series of “big life changes—stuff in my personal life, family, relationships.” *Lianne La Havas* was finished before the year’s end. “Once I made those changes, it was the catalyst for the clarity of what I needed to write and how I needed to do it. Once I knew what to do, the process was quick.” The result is a record that harnesses the power of the bold, bass-imbued sounds of *Blood*—and then takes it up a level. The beats are heavier and the influences wider-ranging, from R&B (“my musical upbringing”) to Brazilian music (La Havas has been an avid fan for the last decade) and Radiohead, whose song “Weird Fishes” the singer gives her powerful take on midway through the album. “I feel like this is the first time my influences are more defined,” says La Havas. “But the album still sounds like me. It’s maybe the most me I’ve ever sounded, which is what I want.” *Lianne La Havas* is, too, a moving exploration of those seismic shifts that prompted the record’s inception and, in particular, the life cycle of a relationship. There’s the heady infatuation of those early days (“Read My Mind”), the devastating moment cracks begin to show (“Paper Thin”), and, finally, the slow, precarious process of putting yourself back together after a painful end (see “Sour Flower,” the album’s gorgeous, sprawling, jazz-imbibed outro). “This is my first album that is actually a full story where you can hear a beginning, middle, and an end,” says La Havas. She adds, as reassurance, “I’m all right now. Get to the last song on this album and you will know that I am totally fine!” More than that, this is the most self-assured the singer has ever sounded. “I’d lost a bit of confidence and got insecure about everything,” she says. “As I completed each piece of the story on this album, it made me a bit stronger. With each song, I realized that I could do it—that I could finish something I was proud of.” Let La Havas guide you through her triumphant album, track by track. **Bittersweet** “I started this song a long time ago and it was actually one of the contenders for my second album. This album is plotting a timeline, and lyrically this song is an overview of what’s to come. And the entire album is bittersweet—if it wasn’t self-titled, it would be called *Bittersweet*. Sonically, it’s also quite a statement. There’s nothing else really like it on the album, and it felt appropriate to start with this. As for the repetition of lyrics in this song: I really like poetry, and I was influenced by some of the poetry I was reading at the time and the idea of repeating a word to give it this whole different meaning.” **Read My Mind** “When I made this song, it made me feel slightly intoxicated. I wanted it to be reminiscent of that—like a night out where you meet someone and there\'s this hazy, wondrous, excited feeling that you can\'t quite describe. I worked with \[British songwriter and producer\] Bruno Major on this. He\'s just the most amazing guitarist, and when I heard the music, it just made me feel like I was on a date. So it had to be about what it\'s about. It’s got humor and lightness, but I wanted to be very literal in the right way about the overwhelming urge to give yourself away.” **Green Papaya** “A love letter, basically. You’ve got one another now and you want to make it a thing—to solidify the commitment in some way. It’s not really about physical love—it’s about making a home and doing all those things that come after the flirtatious infatuation. It\'s like, ‘Actually this could be a really great thing. And I want you to know that I believe it could be that.’ The whole track is very vulnerable—it’s hard to say those things for real at the best of times. That’s why sonically it felt best not to have any drums. I gave all the types of production that you can do a fair shot, but it just wasn’t the same.” **Can’t Fight** “There’s a little bit more humor here. It’s like when your conscience is talking to you. And because of the sound of the lilting guitar, it always felt like a cartoon conscience to me. It feels very animated, but with some quite serious themes at the center of it. I just wasn’t done being happy yet in this song. I was still very optimistic and everything is still pretty good. The music makes you bound a bit. I like how the ending came together—I don’t really do a lot of strings, and I’ve never been a string person. But with this one, because it’s so light-sounding with that quite serious content in the lyrics, I thought the strings brought that serious element to it. I think it ended up being the perfect balance.” **Paper Thin** “The very first song written for this album, but one of the last to be finished. I was falling asleep four years ago and I just heard that guitar part. It was like, ‘Should I get up? Should I record this? Should I just sleep on it?’ But I got up and thought about the lyric ‘paper thin.’ I heard all the chords for each section of the song, and I had the first line. It stayed that way for a long time. Anytime I would get a moment alone—say on a plane or something—the lyrics would start to make themselves apparent for the song. I think this one is maybe the most intimate and most vulnerable that I get, because the person is talking really candidly with the other person in the song. The pain is starting to show about how hard it can be when the person you\'re trying to love is maybe not in the same space as you, or maybe hasn\'t dealt with some things that they might need to deal with. I\'m not saying I\'m perfect. I\'m not saying the narrator is perfect. But it\'s recognizing the pain of somebody you really care about and wanting to help them, but not knowing how. Again, I thought sonically it would be appropriate to just have barely anything on it. And it\'s really all about the lyrics and the groove.” **Out of Your Mind (Interlude)** “This is the descent. When you go, ‘You know what? This isn’t for me.’ It doesn’t really have any words, it’s just sounds, but they’re murmurings of trying to work it out and then something sort of clicks. It’s the moment you flip. I wanted there to be a definite line under the first section of the album. When I first made an album, I had no idea how you would pick the order. How do you put your first album together? How do you know what to say first and last? And a piece of advice that I was given was, just think of it like it\'s a vinyl. Side A and side B. So every album now, I\'ve always just thought of side A and side B. And this one is the first one that is actually a full story that you can have a beginning, middle, and end. And for me, that is the middle, the absolute middle.” **Weird Fishes** “I sat and the looked at the lyrics to this song—which I love—and they felt really appropriate to what was happening in my life. Even the final lyric—‘I’ll hit the bottom and escape’—felt totally where I was at. The first time I played this song was at Glastonbury back in 2013 with my band. Somebody put it on YouTube, and I just loved this version. I was so happy with our arrangement. We’re not the same anymore, but we’re all still mates, so it was a lovely memento of that time we had together. I recorded this with a new band, and from that day I was like, ‘This is obviously how I’ve got to do the rest of the album: with my band, all in a room.’ We all get on, they\'re all sick musicians. So that\'s how it happened really. It just sort of all clicked in my head and everything felt right lyrically and with the personnel.” **Please Don’t Make Me Cry** “This is a loop and it\'s nice, because I got to explore that hip-hop way of writing, that R&B, which I just love. I grew up on all of that stuff. I love how it makes me sing too. I did it with a dear friend of mine, \[US musician\] Nick Hakim. He’s an incredible, humble guy with an incredible voice, and he’s maybe one of the best songwriters out there. I could spend days with him. I was getting frustrated with my lack of output and thought, ‘F\*\*k it. I’m going to New York and I’m going to see Nick.’ I was there for three weeks or so and did a bunch of songs. This one felt special and just said everything it needed to. He has amazing instruments available, amazing textures. And he\'s just such a brilliant producer. I just love every single choice of sound he had. I was just like, yeah, that\'s great. So this song has ended up quite thick in texture, but I love that, because it\'s quite contrasting with the rest of it and I really love that style. I was able to just chuck loads of stuff at it, and it never felt crowded.” **Seven Times** “My Blu Cantrell moment. Again, it’s that R&B which was a really big part of my musical upbringing. I was on a bit of a journey, I think, at this point, and I was finding my confidence and finding my own voice again. I was having an okay time. I was feeling very free and feeling like I’d come home to something or from somewhere and then just dancing in my house to all the music I listened to when I was 12. And then at the same time, again, I was listening to loads of Brazilian music. For me, this song is all my favorite R&B and all my favorite Brazilian music merged. And then I also got to give a piece of my mind in the lyrics. Once the demo was made, my band did their thing on it. I just love the groove, I love the chords, I love the melody. I love the lyrics. I love everything about it. I love the flute solo. I wanted to say that even though this thing has happened, it doesn’t mean that I’m completely out of the woods. It’s an ongoing process of self-care and getting yourself back on your feet after a bad thing.” **Courage** “Milton Nascimento, one of my favorite Brazilian artists, has an album called *Courage*. And during one of my darker times over the last few years, a friend of mine recommended that album to me. And then I wrote this song, and it wasn\'t going to be called that for a while. But then that word is just such a good word. I guess the song takes you to the most vulnerable point of just admitting that you\'re lonely and it\'s really hard and it feels like the pain is never going to end—even if it might\'ve been your decision. It was a particularly confusing type of pain. The music was written with a friend of mine, Joe Harrison, who played bass on ‘Paper Thin’ too. He\'s just an amazing guitarist and songwriter. During those five years where everything and nothing was happening, I was doing a writing camp—I think, basically, my label panicked and wanted to give me the tools to try and make music. I ended up in the studio with lots of incredible musicians, but not much of it was right. One day, I remember I was feeling particularly alone in this process and I called Joe. I was like, ‘Hey, are you in LA right now? Please will you come to the studio?’ And I made everyone get out of the room so that me and Joe could just be in the studio together. And we just wrote that thing in about 10 minutes. That was my piece of beautiful treasure from that weird time creatively that I was having.” **Sour Flower** “‘Sour flower’ is a phrase my great-grandmother used to say. Meaning ‘That\'s your sour flower, that\'s your problem, you deal with it.’ She was Jamaican and would say stuff like that, and I’d be like, ‘What does that mean?’ Later on, I was talking to Matt Hales, who I write a lot with, about her old phrases. We always wanted to get one of them onto a song. And that one just seemed appropriate. It\'s your journey, it\'s your issue, your cross to bear. For me, this song is all about the self-love and the self-care to restore yourself after whatever monumental derailment. I think it\'s ultimately a positive ending. But also, I wanted to have that long outro as well, to represent the ongoing work that the person is doing on themselves to improve things. The song is fully live—we all were playing together in the room, and it just feels like I should have done that earlier in my career. Of course there were some changes and then I was like, ‘No, we have to have that very first version, please.’ I\'m glad that it ended up as it was on the day that we did it.”

*Forever, Ya Girl*, the debut album from Chicago-born, New York-based producer and singer-songwriter KeiyaA, is equal parts aural collage and healing meditation. Its expansive soundscape hinges on warped loops, improvisational textures, and sampled voices—from Nina Simone to Paula Moss in Ntozake Shange’s *for colored girls...*. The beats, most of which are of her own making, offer a compelling contrast to her vocals, which brim with gentle soul and resolve. In her deconstruction of traditional notions of genre and song, she erects a monument to radical self-love. On the stunning “Hvnli (Reprise),” she wraps her voice around itself to form a montage of affirmations: “I can barely afford to eat/But my love is heavenly.” It\'s a project that seeks to challenge its listeners not just sonically but spiritually. The mantras that emerge throughout—“I predicate my consciousness and state of well-being/On my own feelings” (“Rectifya”) or “Who\'s supposed to ride or die for me, if not I?” (“Negus Poem 1 & 2”)—are universal affirmations, but KeiyaA funnels them through a lens of black liberation. Her messages of vulnerability, love, and freedom are the sole constant atop a wavering sea of production that is as dynamic as it is unpredictable. Still, each song seamlessly flows into the next as if the album was intended as a single track, or dialogue, to be consumed—or, perhaps, meant to consume you—all at once, every time.

It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”

Modern Dread is the third latest studio album which was released on July 3, 2020.

Since her days fronting Moloko beginning in the mid-’90s, Róisín Murphy has been dancing around the edges of the club, and occasionally—for instance, on the 2012 single “Simulation” or 2015’s “Jealousy”—she has waded into the thick of the dance floor. But on *Róisín Machine*, the Irish singer-songwriter declares her unconditional love for the discotheque. Working with her longtime collaborator DJ Parrot—a Sheffield producer who once recorded primitive house music alongside Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk in the duo Sweet Exorcist—she summons a sound that is both classic and expansive, swirling together diverse styles and eras into an enveloping embrace of a groove. “We Got Together” invokes 1988’s Second Summer of Love in its bluesy, raving-in-a-muddy-field stomp; “Shellfish Mademoiselle” sneaks a squirrelly acid bassline under cover of Hammond-kissed R&B; “Kingdom of Ends” is part Pink Floyd, part “French Kiss.” The crisply stepping funk of “Incapable”—a dead ringer for classic Matthew Herbert, another of her onetime collaborators—is as timeless as house music gets. So are the pumping “Simulation” and “Jealousy,” which bookend the album, and which haven’t aged a day since they first burned up nightclubs as white-label 12-inches.

“This album was so many albums before it was this one,” Kehlani tells Apple Music of *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t*. Yet her second proper studio album arrives perfectly suited for this moment that is filled with uncertainty—when so many are taking stock of the things we often take for granted and yearning for closeness we can\'t have, whether due to physical or emotional separation. As she aptly sums up in the initial seconds of “Toxic,” the slick opening track, “I get real accountable when I\'m alone.” A central and familiar theme emerges early: the eternal war between need and want, between the sentimental and the carnal. Songs like “Can I,” a lurid come-on, and “Water,” an astrological seduction, smolder with sexual appetite that masquerades as control and confidence. But she offsets the posture in turns—“Hate the Club,” gilded by Masego\'s golden saxophone lines, is passive-aggressive; “Can You Blame Me” reflects the push-pull of desire at odds with pride, and “Open (Passionate)” portrays the insecurity of emotional nakedness. Taken together, it\'s a revelation about how easily, as she proclaims on “F&MU,” “\'I hate you\' turns into \'I love you\' in the bedroom.” But the whole picture isn\'t one that is so neat or simple; the album\'s real feat is its depiction of how we are all many things at once, often contradictory but sincere nonetheless. Kehlani\'s rendering of the personal as universal is a matter of course, but it\'s when she mines her experiences with unblinking specificity that she becomes transcendent. “I\'m kind of in a relationship that has put me in a space of almost processing my parents a little bit,” the Oakland-born singer says, adding that her father passed away from a “gang-related situation” when she was young. “I started diving into \[that\] headspace with the music I was making.” That link emerges most explicitly on “Bad News,” one of the album\'s most poignant performances, which finds her pleading with a lover to choose her over a lifestyle which threatens to pull them apart. Kehlani has always been powerful when she\'s vulnerable—the essence and through line of her music is in the way she allows that which makes her weak to make her strong again. *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t* arrives in May 2020 as many people remain under orders to stay at home and practice social distancing, but this music can be a vehicle to another place, even if that place is your own head. Kehlani shrewdly captures the tangled intricacies of connection in a time defined by disconnect—a hurdle not just to relationships but to productivity as well. “The biggest thing about this whole quarantine was that I impressed myself,” she says. “That\'s why no matter what happens with this album, this might be my favorite project I\'ve ever put out.”

“I was fresh from a war but it was internal/Every day I encounter another hurdle,” J Hus spits as he closes *Big Conspiracy* on the piano-led “Deeper Than Rap”. That war, and the highs and lows of Momodou Jallow’s life, make for a mesmerising second album. Lyrics address his incarceration, street life, God, violence, his African roots and colonialism. From others those themes would feel heavy, but delivered in J Hus’ effortless voice, with a flow that switches frequently, they stun. The references are playful, too—Mick Jagger and Woody Woodpecker are mentioned on “Fortune Teller” and Destiny’s Child get a recurrent role in the standout “Fight for Your Right”. Hus is backed by inventive instrumentation encompassing delicate strings, Afrobeats, reggae and hip-hop and nods to garage and Dr. Dre’s work with 50 Cent, while Koffee and Burna Boy contribute to the celebratory feel on “Repeat” and “Play Play”. This is a record as diverse, smart and vibrant as anything coming from the UK right now.

Bully\'s third album came together once Alicia Bognanno began practicing better mental health exercises. *SUGAREGG* captures that energy throughout the record\'s 38-minute runtime. After producing Bully\'s first two records, Bognanno split those duties with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton—together they highlight the vivid harmonies within Bully\'s exhilarating and often untamed brand of alternative rock. From the initial rush of opener \"Add It On\" to the breakneck \"Not Ashamed,\" Bognanno barely takes a breath, her voice burning towards the edge of combustion. When she does slow down, *SUGAREGG* reveals its softer side with the grungy balladry \"Prism,\" while \"Come Down\" conjures up dreamy \'90s alt reminiscent of Blue-era Weezer. Now a solo endeavor, this is the most confident Bognanno has been on a Bully record. Below the Nashville-based singer-songwriter takes us behind *SUGAREGG*\'s 12 tracks. **Add It On** “So ‘Add It On’ was during the writing process of the second record, I found myself catering to censoring my writing from what I was going to be asked in interviews to not write about things that I didn\'t want to explain. Which I thought just very crazy and not the way that I should approach music. So ‘Add It On’ was a song that I just decided I didn\'t want to talk about, but I really wanted to write. And that was a big one for me that I decided while writing it that I was going to draw that line.” **Every Tradition** “‘Every Tradition’ is pretty much just about being okay with how you want to live your life regardless of people’s commentary and expectations of you.” **Where to Start** “This is a product of going back to the drawing board, and it was when I got done with what I thought would be the first record and came back, decided to write more, and ‘Where to Start’ was a product of that. I wrote it on bass and I went to Toronto and recorded it, and then it ended up being the single, which was unexpected. But it addresses the frustration that comes along with love having the ability to fully control your mood and mental state for better or worse. It was therapeutic to funnel some lightheartedness into what can be an otherwise draining state of mind.” **Prism** “‘Prism’ is about the process of letting go and realizing what aspects continue to resonate as time passes, reflecting on that.” **You** “‘You’ is about a dysfunctional relationship, but you\'re still not learning any lessons from it. And it’s highlighted by this line: ‘If it feels right, it doesn\'t matter how bad it sounds/The pleasure\'s all mine, the pain is all mine when you\'re around.’” **Let You** “This was also one of the tracks that was written in the second round of writing and recording at Palace Sound in Toronto. I think ‘Where to Start’ and ‘Let You’ have some similarities, but it\'s basically about insecurity and trust issues that will challenge your ability to maintain a relationship. I think we can all relate to that.” **Like Fire** “‘Like Fire’ is about the ups and downs and ins and outs of all the places that my head goes. This isn\'t a song about faith; I\'m not religious. It was just a way for me to express my frustration with the idea that everything happens for a reason or stuff like someone’s always there saying it\'ll all work out, because it just really doesn\'t seem that way when you\'re stuck in a bad place. You feel like you can\'t get out and feel like you\'re not in control of it. It\'s a very lonely feeling. That one\'s specifically about being type 2 bipolar for sure.” **Stuck in Your Head** “Can I just be honest with you? I\'ve never seen *Lord of the Rings* or *Game of Thrones*. But I feel like the chord to ‘Stuck in Your Head’ sounds like it would be *Lord of the Rings*. But it is just inner dialogue and the back-and-forth between the positive side of your brain and the negative side of your brain. The battle of trying to be fully present and remember what really matters and trying to realize infant things you\'re manifesting on or that are taking control of your life have any real meaning or not.” **Come Down** “This was actually one of the first songs that I wrote for the third record. ‘Come Down’ and ‘Prism’ were the only two from that first draft that ended up being on the record. I wrote 32 demos total, and it\'s really cool to me that that one ended up making it on the record. Originally when I wrote that, I had voicemails playing through the whole thing. And I don\'t know if it was my manager or Tony from Sub Pop were like, \'What\'s happening here?\' And I was like, \'I don\'t know. I\'m going to take them all out.\' But that was actually the first song on *SUGAREGG* that I started experimenting with sound bites and little things that I thought were fun and adding character. And I always put way too much in, and then it\'s just stripping down all the unnecessary ones.” **Not Ashamed** “‘Not Ashamed’ is pretty much just about walking the walk and not just talking the talk: ‘If you never speak up and you never act out, which are half of the reasons you figure it out/You\'re lying to yourself, you\'re not standing for me/If I stay regulated, did you walk away free?’ So that\'s about women, the fight for control over our bodies and not feeling like men take as much responsibility of something that they should. So fight the fight with us and actually go in and vote.” **Hours and Hours** “It was actually never supposed to be on the record. It was pretty much just a side-project song for me, for fun. When I would get done working on the songs, I would open ‘Hours and Hours’ and add little things to it each time, and all my other songs, I have videos of every part that I played so that I don\'t forget when I have to go to record them. And I never kept track of anything. And then of course it ended up being a single. I was like, \'Great. Now I need to learn what I did.\' I have a lot of noise stuff in there, and I did some crazy vocal stuff with amps and pedals. And I think it\'s a pretty good representation of the writing from the third record—just taking a step up a little bit.” **What I Wanted** “‘What I Wanted’ is just about always wanting to have done music and thinking it was so unreachable and just working my whole life to be where I\'m at now. And now that I\'m here, just still fighting to be more, and not being able to really sit and be like, \'Oh yeah, this is great. I can\'t believe what I\'ve done.\' My brain is just like, \'What\'s next? What can I do better?\' And when I say I\'m here now, I\'m very aware I\'m a relatively small independent artist, not saying that I\'m some superstar. But to me, even playing in a band for a living was such a dream. I have a lot of friends from Nashville who move away, and it makes you feel like you\'re behind for some reason. But then you realize you\'re doing exactly what you want and have a reason to be there and they\'re moving because they\'re not quite where they want to be and they\'re still trying to find that. But for some reason, it still leaves you feeling like you\'re missing out on something. And that\'s a very funny thing to me, because I find myself feeling that way often. And then remember I\'m doing exactly what I wanted to do.”

The title of Conan Gray’s debut LP could also be the 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s superhero name. “My friends have always joked that if I were an animal I would be a crow,” Gray tells Apple Music. “All of my friends and my fans know that I\'m a cynical person. I had a dark enough past as a kid, and so in my teen years and adult years, I just kind of laugh at the things that go wrong in my life.” Gray’s personality is on full display throughout *Kid Krow*, a set of post-genre bedroom pop that has all the candor and content of a good diary. “I feel like I write in a way that\'s very conversational,” Gray says. “It sounds the same way that I speak normally. These are all songs that I wrote completely by myself in my room, and I feel like anyone who listens to the record can hear my voice in every one. I think what binds them all together in my head is just that they\'re all me.” Here, Gray tells us the stories behind every song on the album. **Comfort Crowd** “I\'m from a small town in Texas called Georgetown, like an hour away from Austin. And then I moved to LA to go to UCLA. To go from this small town to a massive city with tons of people from all across the world: It was a total realignment of who I was, everything that I wasn\'t used to. I was so homesick and I missed my friends back home so much. They\'re the ones who keep me sane, so I just wanted to be with them and hang out with them the way we used to. We would just sit around on the couch and show each other stupid things on our phones and enjoy each other\'s company without even having to talk at all. The second I wrote it, I was like, this feels so much like me as a person, so that\'s also why it\'s the first track on the album and it\'s the oldest one that I\'ve written that\'s on the album.” **Wish You Were Sober** “It\'s a song that I ended up sticking on the album last minute ’cause it was so much fun when I was making it. I wrote it about this person who I really, really liked and I wrote a lot of songs on my album about them and they just wouldn\'t tell me that they liked me back or would never tell me their true feelings unless they were blackout drunk. It was a weird, bittersweet feeling, because on one side you\'re thinking, ‘Yay, they like me and they have feelings for me and they like me back.’ On the other side you\'re thinking, ‘Why can\'t you tell me this when you\'re sober? Why can\'t you tell me this in daylight?’ I think the song is about all those mixed emotions and all the craziness behind being young and getting super drunk and calling someone and telling them that you love them.” **Maniac** “‘Maniac’ is a song that I wrote in the shower. I was in New York. I had just gotten this crazy text from someone that I hadn\'t talked to in months. It was like, ‘Oh, Conan, you\'re so manipulative and crazy and you\'ve been telling all my friends this and you\'ve been saying this and this and that.’ I was just so confused. Like, ‘What’s going on in your head? I don\'t know what you\'re talking about, and you\'re calling me insane, but let\'s get this clear: You are the crazy one in the situation. Like, you\'re the maniac, you\'re insane.’ I\'ve had a few people think that it\'s about me, and I\'m like, ‘No.’ For once in my life, I am not being the insane one.” **(Online Love)** “I was really raised by the internet, and so a lot of those relationships that I built and have built in the past few years have happened solely over the internet. There was someone that I really liked—I was always curious what would have happened to us if we weren\'t just an online love. What would have happened if you lived next door and we actually got to go to cafes and see each other? Would we have worked out? Because it\'s never worked out. I\'ve never dated anyone before, and I think anyone from my generation, any one of me and my friends can relate to love these days just fully happens online and that\'s just how it is.” **Checkmate** “The stage of grief where you\'re just angry, like pure rage: That was when I wrote ‘Checkmate.’ I was just like, ‘Oh man, fuck you.’ It’s a song that I wrote in a moment of pure seething anger. ‘I want to rip your head off, you are the worst person I\'ve ever met.’ It was this person who was always playing games with me all the time, always playing games with my heart, and I figured if you want to play games with me, if you\'re going to play games with my heart and if you\'re going to treat love like it\'s some kind of game, then I\'m going to win the game and I\'m going to ruin your life.” **The Cut That Always Bleeds** “I was at a point in this relationship where there was no point in being in the relationship and I was trying so hard to get over this person, but every single time, the second that I was just about to get over it, the second I was just starting to feel good and normal again, they would pop back in my life and just tear my heart into a million pieces again and then disappear. It was like no matter what I did, I was just trapped. They were this cut on my body that I was trying so hard to let heal over and they would just come back in and it would just bleed and bleed and bleed. I wrote it in a stage of misery, in Chicago. I was sitting in my hotel room and I was actually supposed to see the person, but instead I got this insane flu and I was just sitting in bed with a really high fever and I sang the first line of the song to my phone and that\'s how the whole entire song came out.” **Fight or Flight** “‘Fight or Flight’ is the one that I kind of wanted to have a bit of fun with. I wanted it to be this super chaotic, melodramatic song about finding out that someone has cheated on you, or finding out that someone has multiple people in their lives that you just didn\'t know about. It was my response to getting put in that situation, and also meeting someone and finding out that maybe they\'re not the person that you think they are. Like you\'re definitely talking to a bit of a player.” **Affluenza** “I grew up with financial ups and downs my whole entire life. We didn\'t know how we were going to survive, and I was so used to not having money that when I was young, I always thought that money would solve all of my issues. Then I moved to LA and I discovered this whole other side of the world where there\'s these kids who grew up insanely rich. I started hanging out with them and going to their parties and seeing this other side of the world, and I discovered that even these people who grew up with tons of money are absolutely miserable. I figured out that it doesn\'t matter who you are, doesn\'t matter how much money you have. We all have a lot of the same problems.” **(Can We Be Friends?)** “Both of the interludes I wrote just for the fans, for the people who listen to the album from top to bottom. It was another way of talking to the listener and being like, ‘Hey, thank you for listening to my album. This is everything you ever need to know about me. These are all of my deepest, darkest secrets, and I would love to be your best friend. Just thank you for caring.’ It\'s also a song that I wrote from the perspective of what I would say to my best friends back home, a love letter towards platonic friendship. I feel like friendship is something that is never really talked about in music ever. It\'s always love, and there\'s no one on earth that I love more than my friends.” **Heather** “‘Heather’ is the song on the album that I always cry to. I think it\'s the most honest recount of my love life at the moment. It’s about a girl named Heather—I think everyone has a Heather in their life. The person that I really, really liked was in love with Heather. They were not in love with me, and because of that, I fucking hated Heather. I hated Heather with all of my heart and soul. I had no reason to hate Heather. Heather is a perfectly nice girl. She\'s sweet and she\'s pure and she smells like daisies—she’s perfect, but I hate her. It\'s this humiliating thing to admit, but it\'s just true. I\'m scared to see how people are going to react, because it isn\'t a good thing to think something like that, but I also think it\'s something that I\'ve never really heard anyone admit. I\'m sorry, Heather. You’re a wonderful person.” **Little League** “I wasn\'t a Little League player at all. I think for me, Little League was always a signifier of my youth. We would go to see my friends’ Little League games and we\'d all buy popsicles from the concession stand and watch it and cheer and get super sunburned. When you\'re young and then you get older and then all of a sudden you\'re in the big leagues and you\'re like, ‘How the hell do I handle anything that\'s going on ever?’ It\'s so scary to get older. ‘Little League’ is my song talking about the fear of growing up, and it\'s also just about my best friend back home. I miss her all the time, and her name\'s Ashley. I wear a necklace with her name on it every single day, and it\'s me just missing her and missing times when life was so much simpler.” **The Story** “The album is so chaotic, and it can be pretty sad and dark at times in the middle. I wanted to end on a more hopeful note. I had a pretty rough childhood; a lot of it was just really unsafe. There were times as a kid that I wished so badly that I just didn\'t exist anymore. I wanted so badly for my pain to stop, and I wanted to just stop existing. Every single time that I would hit those rock-bottom moments, something would just tell me to keep going. I wanted to write a song talking about all those moments in my life and all the things that happened to me and my friends growing up where we thought that life was just going to stop, but with the smallest amount of courage—and with people who can show you that they love you—you can keep going and it\'s never really the end.”

“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

Unlike Ariana Grande’s last album, the contemplative and mournful *thank u, next*, which was released shortly after, and partly in response to, the tragic death of her ex Mac Miller, *Positions* is lighthearted and playful—a flirty wave from the other side. Her joy is deserved. During a grueling stretch that would have broken most musicians (a deadly terrorist attack at her own concert, Miller’s overdose, and her public breakup with then-fiancé Pete Davidson), Grande delivered two of the best albums—and one of the highest-grossing tours—of 2018 and 2019. That she might finally be experiencing some release, which is what these songs sound like, is a reminder to all of us that time and reflection can heal. So let’s move forward, shall we? Grande doesn’t waste a single second changing the tone. “All them demons helped me see shit differently/So don’t be sad for me,” she coos on “shut up,” the album’s sweeping, orchestral opener that puts trolls on mute. Strength and self-assuredness are themes throughout the album, and she gracefully takes credit for positive changes. She’s meditating and minding her karma (“just like magic”), blissing out on healthy habits and sexual vim (“nasty,” “34+35”), and diving into new romances without worrying too much about getting hurt (“safety net” featuring Ty Dolla $ign, “off the table” featuring The Weeknd). The implication is less about casual detachment and more about living in the moment: Pain and loss are a part of life, but so are pleasure and love. She seems acutely aware that we have little control over any of it. Accompanied by longtime collaborators like singer-songwriters Tayla Parx and Victoria Monét and producer Tommy Brown, Grande deftly explores new rhythms and moods—breathy retro-funk (“love language”), low-slung R&B (“west side”)—without drifting too far from soaring pop. “motive,” a duet with Doja Cat, tastefully shuffles between lurching trap and four-on-the-floor club beats. And the staggering “my hair,” easily an album highlight, feels like a late-’90s girl-group power ballad on which Grande effortlessly carries each part. Importantly, it never feels like she’s trying sounds on for size; she is the rare singer with a voice so powerful and an aesthetic so self-assured that subgenres, collaborators, rules, and trends all bend to her.

In July 2018, Glass Animals drummer Joe Seaward was riding his bicycle in Dublin when he was hit by a truck and nearly died. After spending weeks in the hospital unable to speak or move, he learned how to walk, talk, and read again while his body healed. For his bandmates, the experience was excruciating and profound, the kind that made frontman Dave Bayley “zoom out” and ask existential questions about trauma, art, and mortality. “I started thinking back to stories from my childhood in Texas before my family moved to England,” he tells Apple Music. The experience wasn’t necessarily pleasant. “Your brain goes to weird places.” Bayley doesn’t particularly enjoy writing about himself, but wound up circling his own memories for the band’s introspective third album—specifically, those emotionally charged moments when innocence is lost. Strung together by interludes ripped from his family’s home videos and production inspired by early-aughts hip-hop (the soundtrack of his youth), *Dreamland* is a deeply personal account of Bayley’s journey into adulthood that chases an ever-looming question: “How did I get here?” Below, the London-based musician opens up about the stories behind a few standout songs. **Space Ghost Coast to Coast** “I’ve tried to tell this story somewhat vaguely because I hate the idea of revealing someone\'s identity, and this person in particular has rebuilt themselves, which is an incredible thing. This song is about a very good friend I had growing up, back in those formative years when I was first discovering hip-hop—Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, all of whom I tried to channel in the production—and also discovering myself. We went to camp together, we got into trouble together, but we were both always nervous and shy about everything. There was gentleness to it all. When my family moved to England, we fell out of touch, and a couple of years later I found out that he’d brought a gun to school and tried to do a shooting. He got caught on the way in, no one died, but it affected me. It didn\'t add up in my head. He was the person I watched cartoons with and played kickball with... I couldn’t understand it. It was the first time I really understood how much things can change, that people you love can do things that you won\'t understand. It was a breaking of innocence.” **It\'s All So Incredibly Loud** “This song is about saying something that you know is going to really hurt somebody—something they\'ll never forgive you for and that will probably make them hate you—and the three seconds right after you say those words. That silence that feels like the loudest fucking thing ever. I began with a particular moment in mind, but then I just started thinking back on all the times I\'ve been...well, maybe not a dick, but close. All the times I\'ve hurt somebody, and sitting with what that felt like. It’s quite abstract compared to the rest of the songs on the record because I wanted it to apply to a lot of situations.” **Domestic Bliss** “This song was sparked by one of my very first memories—the first where I can trace the whole sequence of events. I was maybe six. I went to my friend’s house after school one day, and it was a weird place. There were dogs in cages, wild cats in cages; I didn\'t really understand it. We weren’t allowed in the house—we always played in this woodsy area nearby—but sometimes there’d be loud shouting from inside. My friend would turn to me and be like, \'Oh god, she\'s going to come out crying.\' And his mom would come out of the house in tears with blood on her nose and things like that. I remember it hitting me, just that it was so bad. And then we\'d all get back in the truck and she\'d take me home. I guess the song is about the helplessness you feel in situations like that. When you know it’s bad but also that you’re too young to really get it.” **Heat Waves** “It began with a personal experience that everyone has had: A friend starts dating someone and slowly, they change the way they dress. And then the way they talk. And then everything. Eventually it gets to the point where you’re like, ‘Who is that? Where did my friend go?’ Well, this song is about realizing that it’s happened to you, that it\'s *you* that\'s changed. You\'ve become someone that you aren\'t. I was trying to figure out whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but ultimately I think it\'s about hitting a wall—a point where you can\'t change anymore or you’ll lose the foundation of who you are. You’ll become an attachment for this other person. It’s happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to so many friends. And there’s a moment when you see your reflection and you\'re like, ‘Oh, fuck.’ All of the lyrics play into that—mirages, hallucinations, things like that.” **Helium** “This is the only song that gets at any resolution and isn’t groundbreaking. It basically says that we have to accept that we\'re all doing the best we can. We\'re doing it on top of tattered foundations with all these rocky cracks—because it’s never perfect, right?—but we’re trying. We build what we can, we make a life, we do our best. And that’s just fine. By this point in the writing process, I had become more comfortable being confused about everything. I had stopped searching for answers or wishing I’d done everything differently. It was a relief to get to that point. There are plenty of times when you look back and realize you got it wrong, but you have to forgive yourself, because you’ve probably, hopefully, become a better person for it. People spend so much time trying to be a kid forever or go back to their youth, but the whole reason these memories even matter to us is because of the wisdom we’ve gained from them. Even if we could go back, we probably wouldn’t, because they’ve made us who we are.”

The Big Moon’s debut album, *Love in the 4th Dimension*, was an ebullient account of falling in love that earned the London band a Mercury nomination in 2017. By the time singer/guitarist Juliette Jackson began to write songs for the follow-up, she was coming back down to an earth in turmoil. Heavy political, social, and environmental turbulence accompanied personal changes as she watched friends’ lives suddenly shift in new directions. “A lot of this album is about feeling lost and unstable, like there’s this constant feeling that anything could happen,” she tells Apple Music. “I’d love to tell you that we made an album to distract you from the scary things in the real world, but it’s more about facing up to them and finding your strength in turbulent times.” While retaining their gift for crisp melodies, the band enriched their indie rock by plugging in synths and samplers and picking up flutes and trumpets. “We didn’t go full Pet Shop Boys, though,” Jackson says. “I’d just been to a couple of raves and had decided sub-bass and straight-up 4/4 beats were the best and purest thing in the world. You can do a lot with a guitar, but you can\'t get the same sonic depth and width that you can from some electronic sounds. Especially bass. We wanted to be bold.” Here, she guides us through the album, track by track. **It’s Easy Then** “This last couple of years, I feel like I’ve been always looking for ways to find strength. We are living through strange times—we work too much, we think too much, we know too much, so we all worry too much. Our anxieties are stoked every day. Music has this incredible way of helping us see with a new perspective and ties up your feelings in a way that language by itself never could. I wanted to write a song that made me feel better—something that captured the frustrations but also the hope and joy all at the same time.” **Your Light** “I was thinking about how hard it is to tell if things are worse now or if they have always been this way and I just grew up and started paying attention. It feels like we are at this unprecedented tipping point, but then it occurred to me that every generation before us probably had a moment when they thought they were going to be the last generation on earth. This song is about freeing yourself from all of it, just for a moment. It’s a thanks to the one person or thing in your life that knows how to come in and open your curtains and light up the darkness—and restore your strength so that when you clatter back down into the real world, you have the strength to fight your battles, whatever they are.” **Dog Eat Dog** “I wrote this song a couple of days after the fire at Grenfell. I think that what happened really affected London for a long time and we are still grieving and trying to process it. It still stands there as a reminder. It became such a devastating symbol for the huge divisions between rich and poor in our country. There’s a line: ‘I guess tailored suits don’t grow on trees, but tragedies eventually turn into memes.’ I wrote that after reading an article that talked about how much Theresa May\'s election wardrobe cost—it was in the thousands—and later reading how much it would have cost to install fireproof cladding on Grenfell Tower. I think it was literally something like £2. This whole thing could so easily have been avoided, but nobody cared or listened enough to fix it before it happened. Theresa May came out in a nice suit and apologized, and the next day that\'s a shareable video that exists in the same format as cute cat memes and it all gets swept along in the tide of the internet.” **Why** “A lot of this album ended up being about growing up and moving on. This song came about after I met up with an old friend who’d moved to the coast and I suddenly realized how much they’d moved on. I saw my friends’ trainers on the sand on the beach before I saw her, and it just felt like such a poignant image of the loss I felt.” **Don’t Think** “I go to a lot of festivals, and I wanted to capture that magical feeling of running around a field at night with your mates. The flashing lights, the dancing round a pile of bags, the elbowed drinks, the way coincidences seem to happen more often. Something special happens when a lot of people go to one place just to be silly and have fun. It’s like playtime. We turn into kids again. I met my partner at a festival, and I’d always wanted to write a song about taking your chances with a stranger and not always letting your brain talk you out of doing something that seems foolish.” **Waves** “It’s so easy to not notice the signs of a relationship failing, or to ignore them when you do. Sometimes all you have to go on are those signs and little clues around you, and how can you ever tell when they add up to something bigger? It can be a change that’s imperceptible to the human eye, just like the tide coming in. This song was such a pleasure to record. We were all a bit hung over and it was just a whole day of making fuzz and drones on guitar and everyone sat with their hoods up in a trance.” **Holy Roller** “I’ve always been jealous of the devoutly religious: Imagine believing so truly in something so huge, so expansive, that explained everything you couldn’t and gave you a reason for everything that happened, good or bad. I was sick of hearing about the millennial limbo we are all stuck in—yeah, maybe we’ll never own a house, maybe AI will make our jobs redundant, maybe we are all struggling with our mental health...but hey, why don’t we start our own religion where we drink Coke instead of wine and worship our own idols. Like contour kits and payday loans and porn. I love singing this song—it’s simultaneously so dark and so funny, it just makes me laugh.” **Take a Piece** “I initially wrote this song for someone else, speculatively—for a pop star. I’d already written an album’s worth of songs, but a lot of them felt similar to our first album and I wanted to try something different. I’d just watched a documentary about this pop star and seen how insane their life was and their intense relationship with their fans. I was blown away by how much of themselves they’d had to give up to have the life they had. It was a bit of a turning point in the writing process: Sometimes you have to pretend to be someone else to change things up and say things in ways you didn’t know you could. This mega pop star’s life was literally nothing like mine, but I could really identify with the vulnerability of being a performer and feeling the eyes of an audience, which can feel grounding and unifying or—occasionally—scary and isolating. It also has a lot to do with how it felt to write this second album: trying to get out of your head, figuring out which voices to listen to and which to ignore, and ultimately wanting to pour yourself into the thing you’re creating and make something honest and meaningful that might connect with someone else and mean something to them as well.” **Barcelona** “There’s a moment in your twenties where suddenly everything changes, and this last couple of years I’ve really hit that moment—my friends are moving on, moving away, starting to have babies and buy houses and go on new adventures. In a band you can kind of get a bit stuck: You go away on tour for long periods, and each time you come home you find things have changed again. You start to feel left behind. I feel like an overgrown teenager. You’re simultaneously happy for them but also a bit sad that they left you behind—it’s bittersweet.” **A Hundred Ways to Land** “This is about finding confidence in the face of what feels like endless uncertainty—standing tall in your boots even if you\'re completely lost. Things feel unstable these days, and it’s easy to feel powerless. But we aren’t. We all have the ability to make a difference in our own space, our own neighborhood. I guess I wanted to remind myself of my own strength, of the powers we do have.” **ADHD** “This is a song for a close friend who was late-diagnosed with ADHD. We had a late-night conversation and she told me all about her past regrets and things she thought she’d done wrong in her life because of it. I was trying to tell her that she’s always been wonderful and she doesn’t need to regret, she doesn’t have to worry about what other people think. *Is It You, Is It Me, Is It ADHD?* is the name of a book she said she saw on the shelf in a therapist’s office, and for some reason it really stuck with me.”

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

“I needed to change things in my personal life, but also in the way that I was working,” Jehnny Beth tells Apple Music of her debut solo LP. “It was exhilarating for me to begin from a clean slate, starting something new and feeling that fear of the unknown again.” Best known as the lead singer and co-writer for UK post-punk band Savages, Beth was repeatedly told that it was too much of a risk to branch out on her own and that she should build on what she had done before. She followed her instinct instead, relying on her own resources and several collaborators to bring her project to life, including British producers/audio engineers Flood and Atticus Ross and longtime creative partner Johnny Hostile. *TO LOVE IS TO LIVE* is a natural display of Beth’s experimental curiosity—unleashing unsettling synths and industrial percussive elements as she gets in touch with feelings of self-doubt and her sexuality. “It was an inner voice, something that was calling me to do this—otherwise, there’s the danger of losing myself completely,” Beth says. “I didn\'t want to be enslaved to one genre of music, and I didn\'t want to be one of those singers who are slaves to their dance.” Here, Beth walks us through the album, one song at a time. **I Am** “When I heard Atticus Ross’ production, I knew it was going to be the opener. With Savages, my voice was connected to the intensity of the guitars and the drums with that classic punk-rock band scenario. And he was creating the same intensity but with strings, and instruments that were different. I love that it creates a sense of suspense and wonder. When you finish the track, you\'re left with questions like \'What is coming next?\' The song was written by me and Johnny Hostile, and it was during the very early stages of exploration. During one of our lab experiments, we tried to pitch my voice in different styles and tonologies, and we found one that was really pitched down. There\'s a multiplicity of voices on the record. And I think the purpose is to unlock the forbidden thoughts and intimate thoughts that we believe are shameful. I think that we push them down. But as humans, we have contradictory thoughts—and we battle with the idea of identity and the idea of good and bad all the time. There is danger in trying to repress those hidden voices and not giving the space for them. So that\'s why it was important to open with that voice and not my voice.” **Innocence** “It was produced by Flood in his studio in London. He has this capacity of getting obsessed with details and muting all the important parts. You don\'t understand what he\'s listening to or why he\'s even listening to that. So I got frustrated, and he kicked me out of the studio and asked me to come back an hour later. And then I was very frustrated and angry. I came back and heard the mix, and then came this moment where I was hearing myself in a way that I had never heard myself before. It brought me to tears. I wrote the lyrics early on in the process of making the record; I placed it as the starting point of the journey—the same way a novelist would start with the shameful thoughts for his novel, and start from there to grow. Not trying to avoid it, but put it at the center—and I asked myself what is the thought that keeps you up at night that you never reveal to anyone. And it was the idea of lost innocence, in the sense of feeling isolated and not being able to connect with the rest of humanity. It\'s about the reality of living in busy cities as well. The more you close your eyes to people, the more walled up you become. You see the reality of a city which doesn\'t treat everybody equally or the same way, and the anger that it creates.” **Flower** “It\'s a classic scenario of distance being sexier than the touch, and celebrating female nudity in a hypnotic way. I was inspired by all the girls in Jumbo\'s, which is an LA pole-dancing club I go to when I\'m in LA. I really love the atmosphere of the club and how freeing it is, and how exciting and frightening it is at the same time. I love that tension. Hostile composed it for me, and when it was finished, I felt it wasn\'t for me. I wasn\'t sure, so I sent it to my friend Romy Madley Croft \[The xx vocalist/guitarist\], and she replied in capital letters that I have to have this song on the record and that it was great to hear me in a different context. I decided that I was going to check with myself if I was feeling uncomfortable. And if I was feeling uncomfortable, it was a good sign that I was going in the right direction.” **We Will Sin Together** “It’s an invitation to do bad things together and the realization that love is part of that. That there\'s no right or wrong; there\'s only in and out. If you decide to break a sweat and participate in life, you are going to make mistakes. So for me, it\'s what I call a post-romantic love song. It tries to reach beyond the ancestral codes of romanticism, because they too often generate frustration. Romy sang backing vocals on it. We were working on the song in LA and I asked her to sit behind the mic. I love her voice. I think it naturally carries a lot of emotion and never sounds fabricated, and it also suits the song perfectly. It\'s one of my favorite tracks of the record.” **A Place Above (feat. Cillian Murphy)** “I had written the texts and I wondered if \[Irish actor\] Cillian could read it. Because, again, I wanted this multiplicity of voices on the record. I knew he was a fan of Savages, and I was a fan of his; I think he has one of the best voices in modern cinema. He did it without hearing any music, which I think was great and perfect. I remember what Cillian wrote to me when he wrote the text. He said, ‘It\'s big stuff.’ And then he said, \'It should be done in a slow way, a quiet way.\' He made it personal, as if you were hearing someone\'s personal thoughts that you suddenly had access to. It’s a little bit like in *Wings of Desire* \[German film director Wim Wenders’ 1987 film\]. The angels have access to people\'s thoughts and minds, and they can hear their secret thoughts.” **I’m the Man** “What I wanted to say with this song is that the root of evil isn\'t just on the other side—it lives inside of each of us. It\'s implanted in our core by generations of parents or grandparents in society, and we must stay strong and aware to overcome the aggressive power to control us. It\'s about facing my own responsibility for the evil of this world. It\'s important for arts, in general, to show our own complexities to our faces. I wanted to portray the evil of this world and put it on me, wear the mask of people. Because it\'s impossible for me, as an artist, to draw a line between good and bad and just pretend that I\'m always standing on the right side of the fence. Sometimes it\'s about looking on the other side, trying to understand your own thoughts and your own darkness and your own violence.” **The Rooms** “It’s a resolution moment, kind of a resting in contrast to ‘I’m the Man.’ I wrote and recorded hours of piano and vocals on my own in the studio. It\'s a calm description of an orgy where women have all the power. It comes from a line by Francis Bacon, who said something like, ‘When I went into the rooms of pleasure, I didn\'t stay in the rooms where they celebrate acceptable modes of loving, I went into the rooms which are kept secret.’ It\'s a beautiful way to describe desire and exploration.” **Heroine** “I think ‘Heroine’ is a cry to be free. I have had quite a journey with this song, because it was originally called ‘Heroism.’ Because I wanted to talk about the idea of freedom and role models and the fact that freedom is, in fact, frightening. I was told I should play the heroine in ‘Heroine.’ I couldn\'t really step into the shoes of that big character that way, that was positive in a way. You need to be able to embody positive characters as much as you embody frightening and contradictory characters. So that was the realization for me. Sometimes you look for role models around, but you have to also be able to see what\'s within you. And for me to hold the people around me to get there, to take me there.” **How Could You (feat. Joe Talbot)** “One of my favorite songs about jealousy is ‘Why’d Ya Do It?’ by Marianne Faithfull from *Broken English*, and I always wanted to write something about jealousy. I\'ve had to work very hard to conquer jealousy in order to live, and it wasn\'t easy. I had to fight against all my conditioning and invent new rules for myself. I\'ve learned so much from the process, but it\'s something you constantly need to check yourself with. Because jealous people always think they\'re right. Which I think is my main problem with it; when I was jealous, I was tempted to think I was right, because jealousy makes you think that there isn\'t a greater pain than yours. I couldn\'t imagine a better person as Joe \[Talbot, IDLES vocalist\] to be a jealous man on this song. Because he knows, and he understands, what it means to take control of this human instinct. And he\'s been jealous. He\'s been a bad guy; he knows what it\'s like. When I discovered IDLES, I thought they were shining a light into what it means to be a man in a band. I knew Joe was going to write something brilliant about anger and jealousy, and he did.” **French Countryside** “I wrote it as if I was writing a soundtrack for *Call Me by Your Name*. That\'s what I had in mind: the summer, the countryside, and the promise of love. I wrote the lyrics much before that. I wrote them in a plane when I thought we were going to crash, and I was making a list of promises of what I would do better if I survived. And obviously when the plane landed safely, I forgot about my list of promises. When I revisited the idea I realized, oh god, we forget about the urgency of life. I was suddenly facing those ideas again, and I really wanted to make something before I go too. It contrasts so much with the rest of the record, but that\'s really on purpose.” **Human** “I knew I wanted to make a record that would give a sense of the journey, holding a narrative from start to finish. It was part of my early discussions with Atticus. I didn\'t want to make a collection of songs. I wanted the record to be a world you can live in. He had this idea of reintroducing the dark voice at that point with the same lyrics. And again, bringing in those orchestral strings, and that sort of drama and intensity and suspense. So we\'re going back to the beginning, but we\'ve evolved. The idea of the lyrics came to me when I was reading about people who go to digital rehab, because they\'ve lost the sense of self and connection to their life. It felt that it was interesting to finish the album by saying I used to be a human being and now I live in the web. Because I think we can relate to that more and more.”

Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

The first time that Mac Miller and Jon Brion formally met, Miller was already hard at work on what would become 2018’s *Swimming*, an album that Brion would sign on to produce. “He comes in and he plays five or six things,” Brion tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was more hip-hop-leaning stuff, and it was great and funny and personal—the tracks were already pointing someplace interesting. After a couple of those, he goes, ‘I’ve got these other things I\'m not sure what to do with.’” Those “other things” were the beginning of *Circles*, a now posthumous LP that Miller had envisioned as a counterpart to *Swimming*—one that finds him exploring levels of musicality, melody, and vulnerability he’d only hinted at before. It feels more akin to Harry Nilsson than hip-hop, and the breadth of Brion’s CV (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Janelle Monáe) made him the perfect collaborator. With the support of Miller’s family, Brion completed *Circles* based on conversations the two had shared before Miller’s death in September 2018, adding elements of live percussion, strings, and various overdubs. Here, Brion takes us inside the making of some of *Circles*’ key songs and offers insights on what it was like to work so closely with Miller on something so personal. **Circles** “That\'s what he played me. I added a brush on a cymbal, and a vibraphone. Throughout all of his lyrics, his self-reflection is much more interesting than some other people’s. ‘Circles’ and a few other songs on this record: You hear him acknowledging aspects of himself, either that he doesn\'t feel capable of changing or things he thinks are questionable. Things you\'ll hear in the lyrics directly—‘I’m this way, and I think other people might not understand how I think, but actually I\'m okay with that.’ It\'s so pointed. I was just a hundred percent in from the get-go.” **Complicated** “I think that vocal was done, if I recall correctly. He\'d play me things in various states, and the whole batch, meaning both albums’ worth of songs. He\'d play things, and I might just go, ‘That\'s great. All it needs is for the low end to be a little better.’ Almost every time I\'d make a suggestion like that, he\'d go, \'Oh, I\'m so glad you said that. I just didn\'t know how to do it with this type of thing.\' Other times, I might listen to something and go, ‘I love it. I love what you\'re saying. I like that vocal. I like the rhythm. In this case, about halfway through, my mind wanders, and I don\'t want the listener\'s mind to do that, because what you\'re saying is great.’” **Good News** “It was him singing over a very minimal track. The lyrics were incredible. It didn\'t have the chorus. He said, ‘I just think you should play a bunch of stuff on it.’ I gingerly asked, ‘Do you like the chords that are there?’ He\'s like, ‘No.’ I\'m like, ‘Okay. Well, I\'m going to play, and every time you hear something you like, let me know.’ I did with him what I\'ve done with a bunch of directors, which is watch the body language, when somebody\'s happy or not. He came into the control room, and he was really excited. He started singing over it in the control room, and he sang the chorus. I’m in the middle of the keyboard over top and I look up and go, ‘That\'s great. Go run onto the mic.’ After he first did it, he came in and he was still a little unsure, like, ‘Yeah, I don\'t know, maybe that\'s a different song.’ And thank god he lived with it and saw the sense in it. Again, that\'s not something I created—that\'s something he was doing. I think I did say to him when he was walking around in front of the speakers and he was singing that, like, \'Look, there\'s a reason that came to you right now.\'” **I Can See** “It’s not fair to give words to the heaviness of it, but I can tell you that the week I had to listen through stuff was a torture and a delight. Torture because of the loss. And then ‘I Can See’ would come up and I\'d be beyond delighted because I\'m like, ‘This is good by anybody\'s standards, in any genre, this human being expressing themselves well.’ It would turn back to a torture because you\'re like, ‘Oh my god, you were capable of that. I didn\'t even get to hear that one yet.’ I could sit there and wonder, would I have? Was it something he was nervous about, or because it was already so complete, did he not feel a need? No idea. You can ascribe all sorts of things to his sense of knowing. But people are going to have that experience because he was already self-aware and was unafraid of expressing it. But beyond that lyrical wonder of honesty, the melody just made me cry.” **That’s on Me** “He had come back from Hawaii. I was sideswiped by the song and the feeling of it. He usually said, ‘Oh, you should just play everything.’ I\'m like, ‘No, you\'re already great, I\'ll play along with that.’ Inevitably, he\'d finish a take and say, ‘Was that all right?’ And all I could do is honestly go, ‘Yeah, it was great. I\'m having a blast.’\" **Hands** “He wanted it big and expansive and cinematic, had no idea how he had one keyboard pad implying that. I said, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this notion of Dr. Dre-influenced eighth notes like he would have on a piano sample. Instead of it being piano or a piano sample, let\'s take the influence of that era, but I want to do it on orchestral percussion but a lot of different ones. So it\'s sort of subtly changing across the thing.’ And he was like, ‘Just put everything you want on it.’ So that\'s one where I went to town. He was really excited but had no idea how one would even go about that.” **Once a Day** “He came over, played two or three things—that was one of them, and it had a little mini piano or something. I couldn\'t believe the songwriting. I looked forward to his visits so much because every time, there was this new discovery of, ‘You\'re hiding this?’ Honestly. I don\'t know what else he\'s got undercover, but this thing is fully fleshed out. It\'s personal. It\'s heartbreaking. I went through the rigmarole to get him to play it and I did what I thought was the right production decision. I left the room, but I didn\'t close the door. I didn\'t leave, not even slightly. I stood in the door, basically a room and a half away from the control room with the door open. And he started playing and the vocal was coming out and I wasn\'t having to be in the room and he did a pass and I could hear there was something on the keyboard needing adjustment. It needed to be brighter or darker, and I just sort of came running in like, ‘Oh, sorry, just one thing.’ And I went back out and I stood in the hallway and I listened to a couple of takes. And this is how I can tell you I\'m not looking at it with the loss goggles: I bawled my eyes out. Heard it twice in a row. I kind of poked my head around the door and said, ‘Oh, I heard a little bit of that. That sounds good. Just do a double of that keyboard just right now while the sound’s up. Okay, cool.’ Boom. Ran out into the hallway and cried again and dried my eyes out and went back in and sat through the usual ‘Was that good? Are you sure you shouldn\'t just play it?’ Maybe it\'s something the rest of the world wouldn\'t see and I will be blinded by personal experience, but I don\'t fucking care. It\'s what happened. It\'s what I saw, and I just think it\'s great and doesn\'t need any qualifiers, personally. So there.”

By the time Declan McKenna finished touring his first album *What Do You Think About the Car?*, there was nothing left in the tank. “We did this really long tour in America,” the North London singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “And it pretty much put me and my whole band in therapy. We’d been working so hard for so long.” McKenna’s 2017 debut revealed a songwriter who, on tracks such as “Brazil” and “Paracetamol,” could fuse complex, topical issues with easygoing indie-pop. But as he began to write the follow-up, he found himself reflecting on matters closer to home. “I feel like I was talking about the stuff I’d learned about myself,” he says. “The stuff that I struggle with, the stuff that I do that can negatively impact me, the patterns of behavior you get into where you let yourself down.” The resultant record, *Zeros*, is a reflection of the scope and imagination of its creator. It is bombastic (the careening classic rock of opener “You Better Believe!!!” and Bowie-style balladeering of “Be an Astronaut”) while feeling confessional; expansive (the ’70s-style stomp of “Twice Your Size”) but still tethered to the ground. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Carrie Underwood, Little Big Town), these songs take in themes of space, the future, the environment, and the dread of modern life and document how McKenna found his way out of the abyss. “The story of the record is this young character becoming lost in the world, seeing people falling into dark corners,” he says. “In a way, it’s a dramatized version of what I was going through at the time. I did start beginning to feel lost, but also this sense of discovery helped me to understand it all.” All aboard Starship McKenna for a journey through *Zeros*, his cosmic odyssey. **You Better Believe!!!** “I wrote this and I was like, ‘I want it to be the start of the album.’ It felt like it was describing a world. I had a vague idea of a few different concepts and ideas I was thinking about. I was reading *Homo Deus*, the book by Yuval Noah Harari, and there was a lot of ideas of the future and stuff that I\'d been thinking about. I just thought it kind of thrust you into this world. It’s this damaging world; it\'s foreboding in a sense, where it\'s like you\'re going to get yourself killed. It is the start of someone being pushed away, and I think that is the story of the album. I wrote it with my friend Jake Passmore. He came up with the line ‘Fastest gun in the solar system,’ which is one of my favorite lines on the record.” **Be an Astronaut** “This was when I was really deep into making things as big and extended as they could be. I was obsessed with *The Age of Adz* by Sufjan Stevens, where it\'s just these huge songs. I also knew this would be the second song on the album. After that thrust in, it\'s this throwback and it\'s recalling something, recalling thoughts of a childhood, thoughts of growing up and experiencing hardships and experiencing grief. It became quite central to giving the album its spaciness, or at least an aspiration to go to space. I think the album maybe exists in a world not far from our own, but definitely dreams of something bigger. And I think that the whole thing in ‘Be an Astronaut’ is that dreams can be damaging and can often be unattainable, and I think that\'s the thing.” **The Key to Life on Earth** “I came up with this when I was on the train. I was on the way back from Hertfordshire, where I\'m from and where my family is, and getting the train into Finsbury Park, London, where I lived at the time. When I was growing up, the juxtapositions between those places weren’t apparent, it was just life and normal, but now the conflict of ideas between working-class people or people living in suburban areas is amplified. Everyone thinks they know what is right, but really they just don\'t understand each other. I wrote two of the key melodies on a xylophone. I think that’s the first time that a xylophone has been used as a writing tool. It\'s weird playing an instrument that you\'re so not comfortable or used to playing—the first thing you play is often the best thing you\'ll even play on that instrument.” **Beautiful Faces** “I had to build this song around the chorus. I was living in West London—I lived there for two months while I was writing the album. I was writing with \[UK producer\] Max Marlow, and I got the melodies and the chorus together and then the verses took so, so long. I was writing about spending an awful lot of time on my phone and thinking about the futuristic stuff I\'d been reading about—where social media, technology is going and the future of inequality, how technology is going to impact that. It\'s kind of this weird Big Brother thing, the feeling of being watched. I didn\'t really finish writing the verses until I was in the studio, and I had a verse that was actually loads better than the one that\'s in the actual song, but it didn\'t serve the chorus. I\'ll probably use that for a different song.” **Daniel, You’re Still a Child** “I think of it in a similar vein to ‘The Key to Life on Earth.’ I think it\'s fairly simple in that it tells the story of the album—someone being pushed away and someone becoming lost or being thought to be something they\'re not. It ties into the stuff that I felt like I was observing all around the world. People being misunderstood, people becoming flat-earthers, or anti-vaxxers, or anti-maskers. Just people finding a dark corner for themselves, but oftentimes being pushed into it. I guess this is understanding what\'s behind the human being and what is behind their actions.” **Emily** “‘Emily’ is like a letter or a conversation. It was one of those strange moments where I literally sat down and knew what I wanted to do. I listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac and wanted to do a Lindsey Buckingham-style guitar part, something really muted and acoustic and but very simple. I think the character of Emily represents the toxicity on a personal level—where it\'s not the big world anymore, it\'s actually quite direct.” **Twice Your Size** “This is an environmentalist jam. I talk directly about this quite grim end-of-days thing, where it\'s this stuff melting and turning to dust, and all of that imagery was based around setting the tone for the end of the world. At one point, I thought I was writing an album for each way the world could end, like each song would be a way the world could end. And the last few songs are that, so ‘Twice Your Size’ seems to be some kind of environmental collapse, or like the sun has gotten too big and everyone\'s trying to get off Earth. It also represents the way that discourse happens now. Like, it only means half as much when you say it twice, and that relates to so many things right now, where whoever\'s talking the loudest gets heard, but it doesn\'t mean as much if you keep repeating yourself.” **Rapture** “This was one I sat down and wrote very quickly. It leads in from that end-of-days thing, and it\'s a bit more direct than ‘Twice Your Size.’ It\'s a similar vein, but a bit more scary, but also more danceable. It’s talking about fear of the future, because it\'s this torment and being told that stuff isn\'t real by some and that\'s it\'s an ever-present threat by others, and it\'s like the rapture\'s in your head. It\'s both this dread for the future but also this personal torment and personal struggle. It all ties in, all the stresses of going through all of this stuff and worrying so much about it.” **Sagittarius A\*** “I\'d just read that Sagittarius A\* was the name of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, so it\'s like this big massive thing that\'s just pulling everything in and downward. And unless some other crazy shit in the universe happens, it\'s inevitable that one day we\'re going to be sucked into it. I guess the simplest way of describing it is like, ‘I\'m Sagittarius, I\'m a star, I am this thing that is going to pull you all down with me.’ I was seeing a lot of people in very powerful positions ignore the concerns of people who were in much less powerful positions, worried about the environment and worried about injustices and worried about things, and it\'s just almost like, ‘I am bigger than the world, even though we are limited to our resources and we know we\'re limited to our world. I don\'t care, and I\'m going to pull you down with me.’” **Eventually, Darling** “I guess, in a way, this is the song that sparked the album. I wrote it not long after I released the first album. Even though I didn\'t really have a concept at that point, there were certain things that were once normal becoming lost, and certain things changing so much. The song itself is this big transition, and it made sense once I\'d recorded the album to fit on the end, because the story ends up at loss. That was the simplest thing I was talking about, that change can be brutal, and it fits into the narrative of the album. It\'s just a very simple idea that life is always changing and the modern world is changing at a faster rate than we can keep up with. All of that change was really, really affecting me. My life was changing, and in some ways it was better, some ways it was worse. It\'s complicated, I guess. That\'s why you write songs about things, because they are complicated and you\'re trying to kind of make sense of them.”

Jarvis Cocker’s band Pulp might have been one of the defining groups of the mid-’90s Britpop era, but there was something distinctly different about them. In a sea of bands fixated on the past, Pulp’s landmark 1995 album *Different Class* was, musically and lyrically, a step forward. They weren’t the only band taking a critical look at British society, but Cocker was constantly turning his gaze inward. In his songwriting, relationships were messy, memories weren’t always to be trusted, the drugs often had the opposite of their intended effect, and even the losers got lucky—more than just sometimes. On two albums to follow, the Sheffield group would cut further left—and Cocker would go on to explore many more avenues of expression. Two solo albums in 2006 and 2009 (as well as writing most of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s beautiful *5:55*) only further showcased his range—and that’s before he occupied himself as a book editor, a BBC radio host, and, during the COVID-19 shutdown, a housebound orator of great literary works. (Google “Jarvis Cocker’s Bedtime Stories” to hear his soothing baritone recite Brautigan and Salinger.) On the heels of his collaborative project with Chilly Gonzales, 2017’s *Room 29*, Cocker was invited by Sigur Rós to perform at a festival in Reykjavík. He quickly assembled an entirely new London-based group of musicians to work through song sketches he’d developed over the last few years, which became the band-in-progress JARV IS…—emphasis on those three trailing dots. “Usually you put that into a sentence when you are implying that something isn\'t quite finished,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “The whole point of this band was to finish off these ideas for songs that I\'d had for quite a long time but wasn\'t able to bring to fruition on my own.” At a trim seven songs, *Beyond the Pale* still manages to explore a range of themes, most of which revolve around the modern human condition—from aging to FOMO and self-doubt to living in the wake of a bygone era. Evolution plays a big part, too—not just in the subject matter, but in how the music took shape: “Because we were doing this experiment of trying to finish off a record by playing it to people, it seemed logical that we should record the shows so we could see how we were getting on,” he says of what would become “Must I Evolve?”, which was recorded live in an actual cave in Castleton, Derbyshire. “A light bulb went off in my head then, because that\'s every artist\'s dream, really—to make a record without even realizing it. To not go through that self-conscious phase where you go into a studio and start questioning things and the song gets away from you.” Here, Cocker tells us how the rest of the songs came together. **Save the Whale** \"You\'re not the first person to say there\'s a similarity to Leonard Cohen, which I take as a massive compliment, because he\'s really been an artistic touchstone for me, all through my career. There are some artists that show you different ideas of what a song can be, and open up your perceptions of what a song can be. Especially for someone like me, who was basically brought up on pop radio, which lyrically isn\'t very adventurous. So what Leonard Cohen did with words in songs was something that really had an effect on me. But what\'s exciting for me was all the time that I was in Pulp, I was the only person in the band who sang. And in this band, basically everybody sings, especially Serafina \[Steer, harpist\] and Emma \[Smith, violinist/guitarist\]. Rather than it being a monologue, I can tie in other viewpoints with what they say. And sometimes it will reinforce it, sometimes it will undercut it, sometimes it will just comment on it. And it\'s a lot of fun writing that way, because suddenly you\'re writing a dialogue or conversation rather than just me, me, me all the time.\" **Must I Evolve?** \"The starting point for it was me thinking about the development of a relationship, from meeting someone to moving in with them and stuff like that. You could draw a parallel with evolution itself, of two cells splitting and then those cells divide more and then you start to get organisms and eventually you\'ve got some fish and then the fish grows legs and somehow comes out... I guess I was just remembering biology textbooks from school. The idea of the ascendant man, stuff like that. The Big Bang. That was a bit of a joke I had with myself, with the meanings of \'bang.\' Banging, like \'Who\'ve been banging lately,\' and the Big Bang that started the whole of human creation off. Two of the longest songs on the record are questions: \'Must I Evolve?\' and \'Am I Missing Something?\' I guess I\'m at an age where I ask myself those kind of questions, and the songs were some type of attempt on my part to answer those questions. But this really was the key song because it was the first one that we finished and released, and also the call-and-response theme came from this song, because I\'d already written the \'Must I evolve? Must I change? Must I develop?\' But there was no answer to that. We were just rehearsing and I think it was Serafina started going, \'Yes, yes, yes,\' I think as a bit of a joke. And then I thought, \'That\'s such a great idea, let\'s just do that.\' That totally added a new dimension to the song.\" **Am I Missing Something?** \"It\'s in that tradition, I suppose, of those long songs where it very directly addresses the listener. This is the oldest song on the record; the lyrics were written pretty much eight years ago. I wanted to try a bit of a different approach, and so the lyrics aren\'t so much a through narrative; it\'s not just one story. It jumps around a bit. And that seemed appropriate because it\'s about this idea of \'Am I missing something?\' It could mean there\'s something really interesting going on but I don\'t know about it, which is like a modern disease: Too many entertainment and information options to choose from. It can also be like, \'Do I lack something? Is there something missing in me? Do I need to fill some gaping psychological hole within myself or whatever?\' Or actually, ‘Am I overlooking something, am I not getting something?’ That\'s a really important part of a song, that you have to leave some space in it for the person listening to do what they want with it.” **House Music All Night Long** \"People have said, ‘Yes, it\'s a COVID anthem,’ but it wasn\'t conceived in that way at all. For a start, it was written two years ago before anybody was really thinking about any pandemic. It was really just one weekend where I was stuck in London. It was a very hot weekend and everyone I knew had left town. I was in this house on my own and some friends had gone to a house music festival in Wales and I was jealous of that. I was having—people call it FOMO, don\'t they? I just thought to myself, \'Don\'t just sit here feeling sorry for yourself, do something to get yourself out of this trough you\'ve found yourself in.\' So I remembered that there was a secondhand keyboard that I\'d bought from a street market just a few weeks before and it was down in the basement of this house. So I went and found it, brought it up, plugged it in, put it through an amp, and just started trying to write bits of music. I came up with the chord pattern that the song starts off with, and because this keyboard—it\'s an old string machine, so it\'s got a quite naive sound to it, which reminded me of some of those early house records where they would use big, almost symphonic-sounding things but on really crap keyboards. The first chord change really reminded me of something like \'Promised Land\' by Joe Smooth or something like that. So maybe it was because I was thinking about my friends who were having a good time at a rave. Again, once I\'ve got that idea of the two meanings of \'house\'—like, house music and then \'house\' as in a building that you live in. I was stuck in a house feeling sorry for myself whilst my friends were out dancing to house, probably having a great time, as far as I was imagining. And so then the song had already half written itself once I got those basic ideas down.\" **Sometimes I Am Pharaoh** \"I developed a fascination with these street entertainers—human statues. You tend to get them outside famous buildings or in tourist hotspots. So you either get somebody dressed up as Charlie Chaplin—that\'s why it\'s \'Sometimes I\'m Pharaoh/Sometimes I\'m Chaplin.\' And they stand still and then a crowd gathers and eventually they move and everybody screams and hopefully gives them some money. It died out a little bit in more recent years. They’ve been superseded slightly by those levitating guys—have you seen those ones? Where it\'s like Yoda floating, and he\'s holding a stick but obviously the stick—there\'s some kind of platform under him. And I feel sorry for the statue guys, because the levitating Yoda, it\'s just like, anybody could do that. You just go and buy the weird frame—which has obviously got some kind of really heavy base so that it doesn\'t topple over—and you\'re in business. Whereas to actually stand still for hours on end must be really difficult. I was just showing some respect and love to the people that were doing that.\" **Swanky Modes** \"My son \[who lives in France\] goes to this once-a-week rock school. It\'s run by a guy from Brooklyn who moved over to Paris. I\'ve become friendly with him, and he asked me if I would come to the class and help the kids write a song in the space of an hour or something. So we met to talk about how that could work, and then we\'re jamming around and he was playing the piano and I was messing around on the bass and then we started playing what became \'Swanky Modes,\' which is really not a kids\' song at all. The piano that you hear on the record is him, Jason Domnarski. And the first half of the song has got my bass playing on it. So it\'s almost like a field recording. This is probably the most narrative-driven song on the record. Somehow all these events that happened to me at very specific periods of time, which was when I was living in Camden in London, just towards the end of my time at Saint Martins art college, so we\'re talking about 1991. I was only living there for maybe eight months, and all these images from my time of living there suddenly came into my mind really, really clearly. The title of the song, \'Swanky Modes,\' it\'s the name of the shop. It was a women\'s clothes shop that was near where I was living at the time. Again, that\'s one of the mysteries of songwriting—why suddenly, almost 30 years later, these words would come to me that summed up a fairly minor chapter in my life. But it came back in really minute detail and I\'m really glad it did, because now I\'ll never forget that period on my life, because I\'ve got a souvenir of it.\" **Children of the Echo** \"A few years ago I was asked to write a review of a book called *The John Lennon Letters*. I\'m a Beatles fan, and particularly of John Lennon, so I thought if John Lennon wrote lots of letters, I\'d really like to see them. So I was sent an advance copy of the book, and it was just weird. They weren\'t letters. Some of them were just \'Tell Dave to get lasagna from supermarket. Walk dog.\' They were just to-do notes, like a Post-it note that you would put on your refrigerator to remind you to do something. They weren\'t letters. So I was really, really disappointed with this book, so I tried to express this in the review. And this phrase \'children of the echo\' came into my mind, which in the context of the article was talking about how someone in my position—I can\'t really remember The Beatles, because I was a kid. I was born in 1963, when they first broke through, and then they broke up in 1970 when I was seven. They were there, but I couldn\'t really be actively a fan or anything like that. But they left such a mark and they made such an impact that the ripples obviously were coming out and affected everybody a lot. And this made me think of this idea of an echo, of a sound which would be like The Beatles, this amazing sound that changed everything. And then I consider myself to be a child of the echo because I was brought up in the aftermath of that. And I was thinking, \'Well, we\'ve got to get beyond that,\' because that was the problem with that thing that got called Britpop in the UK—that it was so in thrall to the \'60s and The Beatles in particular that it killed it. It stopped it from being what could\'ve been a really forward-thinking and exciting and innovative thing into a retro thing. And you can\'t make another period of history happen again, it\'s just impossible. It seemed like it was exciting, and \'here we come, here\'s the revolution, the world\'s going to change.\' And then it just went into this horrible nostalgic morass of nothing. That\'s when I jumped ship. I think now it\'s so long ago that there is a chance now to do something new, because we have to transcend the echo now, we have to make another thing happen. We can\'t keep living on this echo that gets fainter and fainter and fainter and fainter. Because there\'s nothing to live on anymore.\"