The Guardian's 50 Best Albums of 2021

On *Compliments Please*, her 2019 debut as Self Esteem, Rebecca Taylor reintroduced herself to the world in a way that stunned fans of her previous work as one half of Sheffield indie-folk duo Slow Club. Here was Taylor fully realized as an artist—a millennial Madonna delivering personal polemic within a kaleidoscopic blast of bombastic pop. For this follow-up, Taylor has doubled down on that MO, creating a record that is bigger, better, and even more unapologetically true to herself. “On my first album I didn’t know what Self Esteem was, really,” she tells Apple Music. “Back then we were finding out and, now I know what it is, it’s a much more self-assured way to work. I knew I wanted to make *Compliments Please 2*, essentially. I wanted to do similar production but bigger and bolder. If there’s one violin, I want it to be a quartet. If it’s three-part harmony, I want it to be a choir. I just wanted to build it and make it more massive.” Over 13 frank, funny, and vital tracks, *Prioritise Pleasure* finds Taylor exploring sex and sexuality, misogyny, and toxic relationships. “Lyrically, I’ll always reflect where I’m at in my life,” she adds. “A lot of changes have happened between the first record and the second record.” Above all else though, it’s a record that uses skyscraping pop bangers to deliver a triumphant message of self-acceptance. Here, Taylor talks us through it, track by track. **“I’m Fine”** “With that slow beat opening it, me and my producer were like, ‘This would be an amazing first song…’ I’d wanted to write about something that’s happened to me. I wanted to reclaim my independence and my sexuality and my right to live my life however I want after that had been taken in a traumatic way. It has become this sort of mission statement at the top of the record for the thing I’m singing about. But for anyone who feels like they have to live their life because of the way society is—it’s for you.” **“Fucking Wizardry”** “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t put this on because I feel so overwhelmed singing it back. But it was very much where I was at when I was writing. I was in a relationship. I really, really loved him and we could have had a really good relationship, but his ex didn’t leave him alone during it. I had to get a thicker skin and build myself back up and say, ‘Do you know what? I’m not doing this.’ I did feel really hurt. I succumbed to jealousy and fear and I didn’t feel good enough. I’m embarrassed by my spitefulness, but it’s also very human and it’s important for me to show all the sides of myself on the record.” **“Hobbies 2”** “Kate Bush was someone I was thinking about when I was making this. She was an artist first and foremost and created the work. If it happened to be a hit then cool, but she was never going to deviate from just coming out of her head. This feels like a 2021 \[1985 Bush hit\] ‘Running Up That Hill.’ It’s so funny too. I’m basically saying I’ve got time to have this fuck buddy, but only if I’m not busy. I think that’s a very modern thing to have committed to song.” **“Prioritise Pleasure”** “All of my songs link to each other, because I’m always thinking about sex, sense of self, heartbreak, or defiance. They’re always in there. *Prioritise Pleasure* is sexy and it’s about prioritizing yourself in that way, but also it’s about prioritizing just what you want every day. As a woman, I’ve people-pleased and shapeshifted and sort of begged the world to not be mad with me my whole life. The turnaround and the key to my happiness is to not do that anymore.” **“I Do This All The Time”** “I’d wanted to a song that was like \[Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’\]. And a song that’s like ‘Dirrty’ by Christina Aguilera. I did one take. It’s almost like it possessed me. I had to just make it. There was this moment when I was tracking and recording the string line, I walked home, listened to it and thought, ‘I could just stop now.’ There was this part of me that was like, ‘This is it. This is what I’ve always wanted to do. This is always what I wanted to say.’ I’ve not had that feeling before.” **“Moody”** “I loved the keyboard sound and Johan \[Karlberg, producer\] just smashed a loop out. I had the lyric ‘Sexting you at the mental health talk seems counterproductive’ for ages so I put that in and that set the tone of what I wanted to write about. Spelling-out pop choruses are always L-O-V-E or whatever, I’ve always had this idea of spelling out something that has negative connotations. I thought it would be funny to do a song where I’m saying what I’m saying in the form of very sugary pop. It’s a bit of a piss-take really, me being sarcastic about girly pop music.” **“Still Reigning”** “That’s a sister song to ‘She Reigns’ on the first record. I’m obsessed with acceptance at the minute and letting things just be. I’ve always been someone who wants to strong-arm reality into what I need it to be, rather than just letting it happen. I was a very convincing kid. I remember convincing my dad to get a dog by drawing a pamphlet that I pretended was from the RSPCA, where I listed the benefits of having a dog. That was cute, but I was just being a manipulative little shit. I’ve always been like, ‘I want this, why not?’ That’s how I was approaching a relationship that I wanted to continue and they didn’t. Finally, the penny dropped about letting things go with the flow and about acceptance and love.” **“How Can I Help You”** “‘Black Skinhead’ was something we were going for in mood. Everything comes back to Kanye production every time we’re stuck. It’s a weird song but I’m a punk at my core. I love pop but I cut my teeth playing in a lot of punk bands. It’s a little nod to the tapestry of me and my music. Being a woman is hard enough. Being someone who wants to please everyone is very hard. Then being in the music industry has been really hard. So \[the lyrics are about\] all of it.” **“It’s Been A While”** “Me and Johan both really love trap and I requested a very, very deep, dark trap loop. This one is a bit of another timestamp. I’m addicted to my phone and the sort of weariness from it. I’ll be texting someone I’m seeing. Then I’m on Twitter making some sort of joke. Then I’m reading some news report about something awful. Then I’m on Instagram liking some cute woman’s picture. It’s round and round and round and my eyes are consuming so much all day. Also, I was still going out with that guy that was treating me pretty cheap. Again, it comes back to trying to strong-arm the world into doing what I want. It’s about all those things.” **“The 345”** “It’s me singing to me. It’s very on-the-nose. I just wondered what a love song to myself would be. I sing so many love songs to these people that come in and out of my life. I wondered what would happen if I sang to the person that’s not going to go anywhere, which sounds quite sad.” **“John Elton”** “It’s playing on the idea that these people come into your life and you love them and then they go and then that’s it. I’ve always struggled with that. Someone I loved who I had the joke with, and the joke was a really shit joke, but it still makes me laugh. Then you go to chat about it but everyone’s lives have moved on. People get married and have children and I’m just still out here laughing at the stupid joke we had. It’s an interesting little jolt back to reality and all part of the experience. I end the song by saying it’s all for me. No matter what, all of this is mine and all of these experiences are mine and that’s it.” **“You Forever”** “This is coming from a place of deciding whether or not to get back with someone. At one point in time, I really wanted to and I said that, and the other person said, ‘You need to be braver.’ Also an acceptance is creeping in where I’ve been all right on my own and I will be all right on my own. That’s important to hold on to. Modern dating is as much about not wanting to be alone as it is about trying to meet someone you like. To be all right on your own really does mean if you meet someone and they add something to your life, that’s what it should be about.” **“Just Kids”** “With a lot of my songs, when it’s not just romantic relationships, it’s about the frustration and the desire to be loved by someone who just won’t. Deciding to stop trying is what the song is about. Accept it and leave it with love but move forward in your life. It feels like a good place to try and put that to bed before I write the next album.”

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

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

Over the course of her first four albums as The Weather Station, Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman has seen her project gradually blossom from a low-key indie-folk oddity into a robust roots-rock outfit powered by motorik rhythms and cinematic strings. But all that feels like mere baby steps compared to the great leap she takes with *Ignorance*, a record where Lindeman soundly promotes herself from singer-songwriter to art-rock auteur (with a dazzling, Bowie-worthy suit made of tiny mirrors to complete the transformation). It’s a move partly inspired by the bigger rooms she found herself playing in support of her 2017 self-titled release, but also by the creative stasis she was feeling after a decade spent in acoustic-strummer mode. “Whenever I picked up the guitar, I just felt like I was repeating myself,” Lindeman tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was making the same decisions and the same chord changes, and it just felt a little stale. I just really wanted to embrace some of this other music that I like.” To that end, Lindeman built *Ignorance* around a dream-team band, pitting pop-schooled players like keyboardist John Spence (of Tegan and Sara’s live band) and drummer Kieran Adams (of indie electro act DIANA) against veterans of Toronto’s improv-jazz scene, like saxophonist Brodie West and flautist Ryan Driver. The results are as rhythmically vigorous as they are texturally scrambled, with Lindeman’s pristine Christine McVie-like melodies mediating between the two. Throughout the record, Lindeman distills the biggest, most urgent issues of the early 2020s—climate change, social injustice, unchecked capitalism—into intimate yet enigmatic vignettes that convey the heavy mental toll of living in a world that seems to be slowly caving in from all sides. “With a lot of the songs on the record, it could be a personal song or it could be an environmental song,” Lindeman explains. “But I don\'t think it matters if it\'s either, because it\'s all the same feelings.” Here, Lindeman provides us with a track-by-track survey of *Ignorance*’s treacherous psychic terrain. **Robber** “It\'s a very strange thing to be the recipient of something that\'s stolen, which is what it means to be a non-Indigenous Canadian. We\'re all trying to grapple with the question of: What does it mean to even be here at all? We\'re the beneficiaries of this long-ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history—so to sing \'I never believed in the robber\' sort of feels like how we all were taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is: ‘People lived here.’ And then the next 265 pages are all about the victors—the takers.” **Atlantic** “I was thinking about the weight of the climate crisis—like, how can you look out the window and love the world when you know that it is so threatened, and how that threat and that grief gets in the way of loving the world and being able to engage with it.” **Tried to Tell You** “Something I thought about a lot when I was making the album was how strange our society is—like, how we’ve built a society on a total lack of regard for biological life, when we are biological. Our value system is so odd—it\'s ahuman in this funny way. We\'re actually very soft, vulnerable creatures—we fall in love easily and our hearts are so big. And yet, so much of the way that we try to be is to turn away from everything that\'s soft and mysterious and instinctual about the way that we actually are. There\'s a distinct lack of humility in the way that we try to be, and it doesn\'t do us any good. So this just started out as a song about a friend who was turning away from someone that they were very clearly deeply in love with, but at the same time, I felt like I was writing about everyone, because everyone is turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.” **Parking Lot** “What\'s beautiful about birds is that they\'re everywhere, and they show up in our big, shitty cities, and they\'re just this constant reminder of the nonhuman perspective—like when you really watch a bird, and you try to imagine how it\'s perceiving the world around it and why it\'s doing what it does. For me, there\'s such a beauty in encountering the nonhuman, but also a sadness, and those two ideas are connected in the song.” **Loss** “This song started with that chord change and that repetition of \'loss is loss is loss is loss.\' So I stitched in a snapshot of a person—I don\'t know who—having this moment where they realize that the pain of trying to avoid the pain is not as bad as the pain itself. The deeper feeling beneath that avoidance is loss and sadness and grief, so when you can actually see it, and acknowledge that loss is loss and that it\'s real, you also acknowledge the importance of things. I took a quote from a friend of mine who was talking about her journey into climate activism, and she said, ‘At some point, you have to live as if the truth is true.’ I just loved that, so I quoted her in the song, and I think about that line a lot.\" **Separated** “With some of these songs, I\'m almost terrified by some of the lyrics that I chose to include—I\'m like, \'What? I said that?\' To be frank, I wrote this song in response to the way that people communicate on social media. There\'s so much commitment: We commit to disagree, we commit to one-upping each other and misunderstanding each other on purpose, and it\'s not dissimilar to a broken relationship. Like, there\'s a genuine choice being made to perpetuate the conflict, and I feel like that\'s not really something we like to talk about.” **Wear** “This one\'s a slightly older song. I think I wrote it when I was still out on the road touring a lot. And it just seemed like the most perfect, deep metaphor: ‘I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.’ I\'m always really happy when I can hit a metaphor that has many layers to it, and many threads that I can pull out over the course of the song—like, the world is this garment that doesn\'t fit and doesn\'t keep you warm and you can\'t move in. And you just want to be naked, and you want to take it off and you want to connect, and yet you have to wear it. I think it speaks to a desire to understand the world and understand other people—like, \'Is everyone else comfortable in this garment, or is it just me that feels uncomfortable?\'” **Trust** “This song was written in a really short time, and that doesn\'t usually happen to me, because I usually am this very neurotic writer and I usually edit a lot and overthink. It\'s a very heavy song. And it\'s about that thing that\'s so hard to wrap your head around when you\'re an empathetic person: You want to understand why some people actively choose conflict, why they choose to destroy. I wasn\'t actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song; I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it\'s not cool.” **Heart** “Along with \'Robber,\' this was one of my favorite recording moments. It had a pretty loose shape, and there\'s this weird thing that I was obsessed with where the one chord is played through the whole song, and everything is constantly tying back to this base. I just loved what the band did and how they took it in so many different directions. This song really freaked me out \[lyrically\]. I was not comfortable with it. But I was talked into keeping it, and all for the better, because obviously, I do believe that the sentiments shared on the song—though they are so, so fucking soft!—are the best things that you can share.” **Subdivisions** “This was one of the first songs written before the record took shape in my mind and before it structurally came together. I think we recorded it in, like, an hour, and everyone\'s performance was just perfect. I like these big, soft, emotional songs, and from a craft perspective, I think it\'s one of my better songs. I\'ve never really written a chorus like that. I don\'t even feel like it\'s my song. I don\'t feel like I wrote it or sang it, but it just feels like falling deeper and deeper into some very soft place—which is, I think, the right way to end the record.”

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

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

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

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

In spring 2020, Sam Fender had nowhere to go. When the first lockdown descended, an existing health condition required him to isolate and shield inside his home for three months. It was a frustrating turn for a BRIT Award-winning singer-songwriter who’d drawn inspiration for his debut album, 2019’s *Hypersonic Missiles*, from lives and conversations around him in his home of North Shields on England’s northeast coast. When you can’t go out, you eventually look in, and Fender’s songwriting began to dig through memories of his childhood, analyzing his internal wiring and reflecting on behaviors and insecurities that troubled him. “Writing was therapy before I got therapy,” he tells Apple Music. “That was always my starting point. A lot of things that you pass off as insignificant parts of your life end up becoming very significant parts of your character. Therapy gave me the tools to articulate what was going on in my life as a kid and to understand how that has affected me and why I am the way I am in certain situations.” Fender has too much empathy for *Seventeen Going Under* to be entirely introspective, though. The pandemic also exposed the struggles and poverty faced in towns such as North Shields, and his ire at the government’s handling of COVID and Brexit—as well as his dismay at an opposition party that seemed to have abandoned working-class communities—burns through “Aye” and “Long Way Off.” Forthright in message and poetic in delivery, his words are set to a sound that continues to explore Americana and indie rock, funneling everything through big-hearted choruses. “I feel like it is a celebratory record,” he says. “It’s a triumph over adversity. Celebrate the loves and friendships that you have over the journey of your life and celebrate those who aren’t here anymore.” Read on as he talks us through all of the album’s tracks. **“Seventeen Going Under”** “It’s completely autobiographical. When I was 17, my mother was being hounded by the DWP \[Department for Work and Pensions\]. She had fibromyalgia and she was suffering from other ailments and mental health issues. But she got sent to court three times to prove that she wasn’t fit to work. This is a woman who’s worked for 40 years of her life as a nurse. She’s not a liar and she’s not a benefit cheat. She was a hard-working, fantastic, empathetic, incredible woman. And they dragged her through the mud and made her ill. I saw how the government was treating good, honest working-class people who have fallen on their back. They ripped apart every safety net for people in that position. I was old enough to understand what was going on, but I wasn’t old enough to be able to do anything about it.” **“Getting Started”** “I had my outside life as a kid, and then I’d go back home and see my mother in turmoil. ‘Getting Started’ is about a conversation between us, me going like, ‘This is shit, but I need to just be a kid, to go out and live my life. I’ve just turned 18. I want to go out to the pub, to see my mates.’ I needed my escapism. These stories, they’re mine, but that frustration with the DWP—how you’re trapped as a person who’s fallen on a hard time by your government—is a unanimous story for so many millions of people in this country.” **“Aye”** “On the first album, I talked about politics as if I knew what I was talking about, but I realized I don’t. This record, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I fucking hate those bastards over there who’ve got the hedge funds—whose taxes I’m paying, who come after my mum, who come after the disabled, who come after all of these people, plunging them into poverty and plunging kids out onto the streets. Yet they’re getting away with that tax-dodging.’” **“Get You Down”** “It’s about insecurities, how jealousy and feelings of emasculation and low self-worth can really, really destroy a relationship—and had done with my relationships. The worst thing about it was I could see the way I was acting, and I knew why, but I couldn’t stop it. That’s why I started doing therapy. I was coming back home after being started on by a bunch of lads but not doing anything about it because I was on my own. So I’d punch walls and stuff. I used to do that all the time in my early twenties. It’s toxic behavior. You can’t do that. I’m on a path of self-discovery and trying to heal a lot of that.” **“Long Way Off”** “This is about political polarity and how the working classes feel, or how I felt, abandoned by a lot of the left wing. There’s a sect of snooty liberalism in the media world that completely alienates working-class people. Blyth Valley \[a constituency a few miles from North Shields\] went Tory \[in the 2019 general election\]; it’s been a Labour seat since its inception. That’s not good, but we’re in a dangerous, dangerous place, politically. It was the arrogance and incompetence of politicians thinking that they could sail through \[Brexit\]. They’ve fucked the country completely. There should be trials—for the lies, for the deception of a nation. My family members who voted for it voted for it because they thought that they were going to get money for the NHS. They’d seen their mothers pass away in the arms of people who worked for the NHS. They’d seen their family members on wards suffering. And they thought, ‘I’m going to vote for that.’ **“Spit of You”** “It’s about my dad. It’s about our inability to communicate about emotions because of the way we were raised. Our inability to have an argument without wanting to kill each other. It’s toxic masculinity at its finest. But it’s also about how much I love him, how I saw him as a son. My grandmother was a really small woman, and when she was dying, she looked like a child. He kissed her. I was reminded that I’m going to be that person one day—saying goodbye to him, potentially with another young kid behind me looking at me thinking the same thing.” **“Last to Make It Home”** “At the beginning, I’m talking to the Virgin Mary, a Mary pendant. I’m realizing I need to get ahold of myself. In the second half, Mary becomes personified. She becomes just some girl on Instagram. It’s that like desperate, horrible shit line of ‘Hit the ‘like’/In the hopes I’d coax you out of my derelict fantasy.’ In the hopes that I’d be noticed. It’s really an anthem for losers—because we’ve all been a loser once. I’ve been a loser hundreds of times.” **“The Leveller”** “This is about depression and rising out of it. It’s a fighting song. But the leveler is the lockdown itself. It leveled everything.” **“Mantra”** “You find yourself in the company of sociopaths in this business. And you sometimes worry that maybe that means you are too. And I don’t think I’m a sociopath. Got too much empathy for that one. I think I’m a vulnerable narcissist at worst. This song’s about figuring out that you can’t pay so much attention to these people who genuinely don’t care about you and they’re only there to bolster themselves. I’ve had low self-esteem for a long time. I’ve always tried to seek validation from people that aren’t actually that nice.\" **“Paradigms”** “It’s a roundup of all of the things that I’ve thought about in the album. So it’s a self-esteem rock song. People shouldn’t live miserably, they shouldn’t have to. I lost another friend to suicide last year. And I got all of my friends from home, some of them who knew him as well, to sing that last line, ‘No one should feel like this.’ It’s a choir of people from Shields. I think it’s a really powerful moment.” **“The Dying Light”** “This is a sequel to ‘Dead Boys’ \[2018 track examining male suicide\]. It’s in the perspective of somebody who’s actually thinking that they might take their own life. I wanted it to be the triumph over it—in the moment when you decide, ‘No, I’m not going to do this, or I can’t leave those behind.’”

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

After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”

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

On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.

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

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

It’s perhaps fitting that Dave’s second album opens with the familiar flicker and countdown of a movie projector sequence. Its title was handed to him by iconic film composer Hans Zimmer in a FaceTime chat, and *We’re All Alone in This Together* sets evocative scenes that laud the power of being able to determine your future. On his 2019 debut *PSYCHODRAMA*, the Streatham rapper revealed himself to be an exhilarating, genre-defying artist attempting to extricate himself from the hazy whirlwind of his own mind. Two years on, Dave’s work feels more ambitious, more widescreen, and doubles down on his superpower—that ability to absorb perspectives around him within his otherworldly rhymes and ideas. He’s addressing deeply personal themes from a sharp, shifting lens. “My life’s full of plot holes,” he declares on “We’re All Alone.” “And I’m filling them up.” As it has been since his emergence, Dave is skilled, mature, and honest enough to both lay bare and uplift the Black British experience. “In the Fire” recruits four sons of immigrant UK families—Fredo, Meekz, Giggs, and Ghetts (all uncredited, all lending incendiary bars)—and closes on a spirited Dave verse touching on early threats of deportation and homelessness. With these moments in the can, the earned boasts of rare kicks and timepieces alongside Stormzy for “Clash” are justified moments of relief from past struggles. And these loose threads tie together on “Three Rivers”—a somber, piano-led track that salutes the contributions of Britain’s Windrush generation and survivors of war-torn scenarios, from the Middle East to Africa. In exploring migration—and the questions it asks of us—Dave is inevitably led to his Nigerian heritage. Lagos newcomer Boj puts down a spirited, instructional hook in Yoruba for “Lazarus,” while Wizkid steps in to form a smooth double act on “System.” “Twenty to One,” meanwhile, is “Toosie Slide” catchy and precedes “Heart Attack”—arguably the showstopper at 10 minutes and loaded with blistering home truths on youth violence. On *PSYCHODRAMA* Dave showed how music was his private sanctuary from a life studded by tragedy. *We’re All Alone in This Together* suggests that relationship might have changed. Dave is now using his platform to share past pains and unique stories of migration in times of growing isolation. This music keeps him—and us—connected.

The Pakistani musician began writing her second album, and then her younger brother died. And so, instead of the dark, edgy dance record she’d intended on making, Aftab turned to the Urdu ghazals she grew up with—an ancient form of lyric poetry centered around loss and longing. On *Vulture Prince*, Aftab makes the art form her own, trading the traditional percussion-heavy instrumentation for heavenly string arrangements (harp, violin, upright bass); she even ventures into reggae territory on “Last Night,” a slinky rendition of a Rumi poem. She translates another poem, this time by Mirza Ghalib, on “Diya Hai,” the last song she performed for her brother Maher, and a haunting expression of all-encompassing grief.

*Pink Noise*, Laura Mvula’s third full-length project, is a sexy album. “It really is,” Mvula tells Apple Music. “And I wanted it to be. I needed it to be.” Having felt boxed in by the success of her first two records, what she calls the “serious music” of 2013 debut *Sing to the Moon* and 2016’s *The Dreaming Room*, the UK singer-songwriter allowed herself to “paint using more colors than perhaps I let myself use before,” resulting in a vibrant, ’80s-influenced soundscape, shot through with rediscovered confidence and unabashed desire. Indebted to the era of MTV icons—Michael and Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Prince—this is sophisticated, luxurious, kinetic pop music. It demands that you dance. Mvula is deeply respected as an artist—classically trained, nominated twice for the Mercury Prize, the recipient of an Ivor Novello award—but *Pink Noise*, by deliberate design, presents her as not just a talent, but a superstar. “I had gotten so comfortable with everything being so focused on the music as its own thing, and somehow I was sort of separate from that,” she says. “This time I wanted to be front and center.” Here, Mvula walks us through *Pink Noise*, track by track. **“Safe Passage”** “\'Safe Passage\' was the first song I made that felt like the beginning of something. There’s a \[1988\] song by BeBe & CeCe Winans called ‘Heaven.’ And I knew I just needed to capture that sound, because that song was always played on a Sunday after church. And if I hear it now, I can smell Sunday dinner. I can go back there. I was creating the palette that this was going to be nostalgia. This body of work was going to be nostalgia, but brought into the present moment. It needed to make me and us feel good and safe and celebrated.” **“Conditional”** “I instinctively knew that ‘Conditional\' was going to be the most far-left thing that I\'d written or put out to that point. I didn’t grow up with hip-hop, so discovering it now in my own world, in my own way, since I started listening to Kanye, I\'ve just been floored by his level of creativity. A lot of what he does sounds like symphonies to me. The idea that you can make something so hypnotic and rich from the simplicity of a cyclical beat. There\'s so many thousands and millions of versions of how you can manipulate just one frequency. I remember messing around with that beat and then Dann Hume, who co-produced the album, took it to another level with the sounds that we were using.” **“Church Girl”** “Chris Martin FaceTimed me to tell me that this was his standout song. I\'d done it randomly on the train. And then I wrote the chorus chords like six months later, but didn\'t really have a melody or a verse for it. But the fact that the verse and the chorus lived in two different tonalities was always going to be the thing. The shifting gears is really important to me for the story of this song and letting go of the devils, so to speak, and figuring out how to dance. It\'s like looking back as well as looking forward all at the same time.” **“Remedy”** “I wanted to offer something direct to the struggle. It was during the time where people were taking to the streets and protesting. It needed to kick the way it did, it needed to slap the way it did, because I was pissed and tired and confused. I think that\'s all in that song. It was a direct point to Janet Jackson\'s *Rhythm Nation* and that whole era. The militant-ness of it was important for me. There\'s only so many times we can have the same conversation. My people are tired.” **“Magical”** “I only used to have a verse and chorus chords for this song for so long. I hated it. I rewrote the chorus, and once the chorus came, that’s when we knew it was a game-changer. My brother, my sister, my adopted brother from another mother came through, played guitar and sang on it. And we just basically put the song to bed. I can\'t describe to you the feeling when something becomes what it is: the mystery of music-making.” **“Pink Noise”** “The simplicity of this being a dance moment meant that I needed to draw, access things, tools I hadn\'t used before. I had to chip away at it slowly. It\'s not the kind of music where you play nine notes in a chord and it sounds lush. This is the kind of thing where if you put a few too many grains of whatever seasoning, it fucks the whole thing up. But you put it on and instantly you move, which is different for me. This is where the word ‘bop’ actually truly shines, because it is an actual bop.” **“Golden Ashes”** “My cry for help for anyone that feels like they suffer in silence. Which is unfortunately a universal truth, a very universal reality. I’ve always been good at crying and I’ve always been good at expressing my woes. I needed, in the midst of all this triumph, a space to do that on this record. Just towards the end where it peters out and you have this very strange dissonant harmony and the pulsating sort of circular breathing, it’s supposed to feel hypnotic, like \'Are we still here? Are we still in this moment?\' I\'m super proud of this song.” **“What Matters” (feat. Simon Neil)** “I don\'t think I\'ve said this before, but for me, this wasn\'t really going on the album. This was truly just for me, the Laura who doesn’t know what radio is, what streaming is—they don’t exist to me. It was like an afterthought, but then it became this lullaby anthem. Simon \[Neil, of Biffy Clyro\] is one of the most special humans I think I\'ll probably ever meet or work with, so reverent for music and the art of collaboration.” **“Got Me”** “I\'d been trying to pander to this picture of innocence and purity—all things that I do value on some level, but unfortunately, at a cost to ignoring a large part of who I am. I just needed a moment and an outlet to put into that. I feel like it serves a different purpose to any other song on the record. I don’t have to hide anymore in that way, and it’s really liberating.” **“Before the Dawn”** “When you are at a point where you\'re struggling and you feel like you\'re going through a moment in life where it\'s like, how on earth do you navigate this crisis? And you go back to the simple truths. My best friend said it to me first: ‘The night comes before the dawn.’ Which we all know, but it\'s just being reminded and reminding myself and singing to myself. Once I\'m in that and I reflect or meditate on that and it seeps more deeply into my subconscious, I find that I move with way more purpose and with less baggage.”

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

“It wasn\'t forced, it wasn\'t pressured, it wasn\'t scary,” Billie Eilish tells Apple Music of making *Happier Than Ever*. “It was nice.” Once again written and recorded entirely with her brother FINNEAS, Eilish’s second LP finds the 19-year-old singer-songwriter in a deeply reflective state, using the first year of the pandemic to process the many ways her life has changed and she’s evolved since so quickly becoming one of the world’s most famous and influential teenagers. “I feel like everything I\'ve created before this, as much as I love it, was kind of a battle with myself,” she says. “I\'ve actually talked to artists that are now going through the rise and what I\'ve said to them is, ‘I know what it\'s like, but I also don\'t know what it\'s like for you.’ Because everybody goes through something completely different.” A noticeable departure from the genre-averse, slightly sinister edge of 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*, much of the production and arrangements here feel open and airy by comparison, inspired in large part by the placid mid-century pop and jazz of torch singer Julie London. And whether she’s sharing new perspective on age (“Getting Older”), sensuality (“Oxytocin”), or the absurdity of fame (“NDA”), there’s a sense of genuine freedom—if not peace—in Eilish’s singing, her voice able to change shape and size as she sees fit, an instrument under her control and no one else\'s. “I started to feel like a parody of myself, which is super weird,” she says. “I just tried to listen to myself and figure out what I actually liked versus what I thought I would have liked in the past. I had to really evaluate myself and be like, \'What the hell do I want with myself right now?\'” It’s a sign of growth, most striking in the clear skies of “my future” and the emotional clarity of the album’s towering title cut, which starts as a gentle ballad and blossoms, quite naturally and unexpectedly, into a growing wave of distorted guitars and distant screams. Both sound like breakthroughs. “There was no thought of, ‘What\'s this going to be? What track is this?’” she says of the writing process. “We just started writing and we kept writing. Over time, it just literally created itself. It just happened. It was easy.”

Madvillain superfans will no doubt recall the Four Tet 2005 remix EP stuffed with inventive versions of cuts from the now-certified classic rap album *Madvillainy*. Coming a decade and a half later, *Sound Ancestors* sees Kieran Hebden link once again with iconic hip-hop producer Madlib, this time for a set of all-new material, the product of a years-long and largely remote collaboration process. With source material arranged, edited, and recontextualized by the UK-born artist, the album represents a truly unique shared vision, exemplified by the reggae-tinged boom-bap of “Theme De Crabtree” and the neo-soul-infused clatter of “Dirtknock.” Such genre blends turn these 16 tracks into an excitingly twisty journey through both men’s seemingly boundless creativity, leading to the lithe jazz-hop of “Road of the Lonely Ones” and the rugged B-boy business of “Riddim Chant.”

Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.

In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”

“I think that there is always reward in choosing to be the most vulnerable,” Kacey Musgraves tells Apple Music. “I have to remind myself that that\'s one of the strongest things you can do, is to be witness to being vulnerable. So I’m just trying to lean into that, and all the emotions that come with that. The whole point of it is human connection.” With 2018’s crossover breakthrough *Golden Hour*, Musgraves guided listeners through a Technicolor vision of falling in love, documenting the early stages of a romantic relationship and the blissed-out, dreamy feelings that often come with them. But the rose-colored glasses are off on *star-crossed*, which chronicles the eventual dissolution of that same relationship and the ensuing fallout. Presented as a tragedy in three acts, *star-crossed* moves through sadness, anger, and, eventually, hopeful redemption, with Musgraves and collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk broadening the already spacey soundscape of *Golden Hour* into something truly deserving of the descriptors “lush” and “cinematic.” (To boot, the album releases in tandem with an accompanying film.) Below, Musgraves shares insight into several of *star-crossed*’s key tracks. **“star-crossed”** \"\[Guided psychedelic trips\] are incredible. At the beginning of this year, I was like, \'I want the chance to transform my trauma into something else, and I want to give myself that opportunity, even if it\'s painful.\' And man, it was completely life-changing in so many ways, but it also triggered this whole big bang of not only the album title, but the song \'star-crossed,\' the concept, me looking into the structure of tragedies themselves as an art form throughout time. It brought me closer to myself, the living thread that moves through all living things, to my creativity, the muse.\" **“if this was a movie..”** \"I remember being in the house, things had just completely fallen apart in the relationship. And I remember thinking, \'Man, if this was a movie, it wouldn\'t be like this at all.\' Like, I\'d hear his car, he\'d be running up the stairs and grabbing my face and say we\'re being stupid and we\'d just go back to normal. And it\'s just not like that. I think I can be an idealist, like an optimist in relationships, but I also love logic. I do well with someone who can also recognize common sense and logic, and doesn\'t get, like, lost in like these lofty emotions.\" **“camera roll”** \"I thought I was fine. I was on an upswing of confidence. I\'m feeling good about these life changes, where I\'m at; I made the right decision and we\'re moving forward. And then, in a moment of, I don\'t know, I guess boredom and weakness, I found myself just way back in the camera roll, just one night alone in my bedroom. Now I\'m back in 2018, now I\'m in 2017. And what\'s crazy is that we never take pictures of the bad times. There\'s no documentation of the fight that you had where, I don\'t know, you just pushed it a little too far.\" **“hookup scene”** \"So it was actually on Thanksgiving Day, and I had been let down by someone who was going to come visit me. And it was kind of my first few steps into exploring being a single 30-something-year-old person, after a marriage and after a huge point in my career, more notoriety. It was a really naked place. We live in this hookup culture; I\'m for it. I\'m for whatever makes you feel happy, as long as it\'s safe, doesn\'t hurt other people, fine. But I\'ve just never experienced that, the dating app culture and all that. It was a little shocking. And it made me just think that we all have flaws.\" **“gracias a la vida”** \"It was written by Violeta Parra, and I just think it\'s kind of astounding that she wrote that song. It was on her last release, and then she committed suicide. And this was basically, in a sense, her suicide note to the world, saying, \'Thank you, life. You have given me so much. You\'ve given me the beautiful and the terrible, and that has made up my song.\' Then you have Mercedes Sosa, who rerecords the song. Rereleases it. It finds new life. And then here I am. I\'m this random Texan girl. I\'m in Nashville. I\'m out in outer space. I\'m on a mushroom trip. And this song finds me in that state and inspires me to record it. It keeps reaching through time and living on, and I wanted to apply that sonically to the song, too.\"

The origins of Clairo (born Claire Cottrill) hold their own modern mythos: 2017’s lo-fi bedroom pop track “Pretty Girl” went viral, and a major-label record deal with Fader/Republic followed. Then came her debut LP, *Immunity*, and its sardonic indie pop punctuated by jazzy instrumentation, soft-rock harmonies, and diaristic revelations. On her sophomore album, *Sling*, produced by Jack Antonoff in a remote and rural part of upstate New York, Clairo has mined deeper into her well of self-possessed folk. The outdoors seems to have grounded her; even moments of ornate orchestration are stripped down to their emotional core, like in the fluttery horns and xylophone of “Wade,” the herd of violins on “Just for Today” and “Management,” or their psychic opposite—the heartbreaking piano ballad intro on “Harbor,” and the campfire stopper “Reaper.” Standout first single “Blouse” features backing vocals from Lorde, and borrows a familiarly devastating chord progression (think Big Star’s “Thirteen”). Everywhere you turn on *Sling*, there are careful, restrained, and wise observations on the human condition.

“I would definitely say that 2020 pushed me over the edge, to the point that I needed to express myself more than I ever had,” Greentea Peng tells Apple Music. Recordings for *MAN MADE*—her debut album—first took shape in the early months of 2020, coinciding with a pandemic-induced lockdown and shortly after some sad family news. It led her to use the work as both a means of rumination on the pains of modern life and an ode to his memory. Creating a makeshift studio out of a friend’s house (nicknamed “the woods” from its location in the greenery of Surrey), she spent time alongside longtime friends and collaborators including her band, The Seng Seng Family, and executive producer Earbuds, diving into eclectic genres—ska, soul, trip-hop, dub—to “deliberate my inner workings, and inner conflicts,” she says. But there’s also an underlying effort to weather that conflict through messages of oneness and healing. The bulk of the project is deliberately mixed in 432 Hz (a frequency below industry standard) by legendary engineer Gordon \"Commissioner Gordon\" Williams, inspired by Wells’ research into the power of vibrations to provide comfort and restoration. “We\'re living in a very conflicting time,” she says. “Amidst the huge paradigm shift globally, physically, and spiritually, things are intense. I always want to help uplift and bring people into the spirit, ignite a little self-belief and sovereignty inside.” Explore *MAN MADE* with her track-by-track guide. **“Make Noise”** “This is a manifesto for the album. The song started from a beat that SAMO and Josh \[Kiko, UK music producers\] brought to the woods. We were listening to it, the band started jamming it. It ended up turning out really different to the original. I was in a very free state of expression, channeling like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. It\'s not meant to be an easily digested piece of work; it\'s meant to be somewhat niche and provoking.” **“This Sound”** “My band and I were in a perfect environment—very comfortable, there was a heat wave—and we got very trippy. We were making an untold amount of music and things would just happen, the boys started playing, and again, it just came. When we were making it, I wasn\'t thinking of any influences, but when I listen back, I think Fatboy Slim, or Quentin Tarantino movies. But that\'s just it—no song on the album really sounds like the song before, but in a way they all do.” **“Free My People” (feat. Simmy and Kid Cruise)** “Simmy \[UK musician\] and Cam \[Toman, UK musician known as Kid Cruise\] are my bredrins, they\'ve been my bredrins for years. Before the lockdown I\'d always ask them to open up my shows; we\'re almost in a similar kind of vibe the way we mix up the genres. I invited them through to the woods and we actually wrote that song together on the spot.” **“Be Careful”** “Swindle \[UK musician and music producer\] came with the beat and then we recreated it with the musicians. ‘Be Careful’ was cool because it\'s probably the most different tune on the album; it\'s quite modern-sounding, almost trappy type. And in terms of the lyrics, I feel like it\'s one of the simpler songs—it\'s straight to the point.” **“Nah It Ain’t the Same”** “When I say ‘being a man today,’ I\'m talking about how being human today is just not the same; when you read scriptures, the word ‘man’ is what human is referred to, like, ‘We are all man at the end of the day.’ I guess I was playing devil\'s advocate a little bit because I knew people were gonna be like, ‘What about women?’ But I\'m going beyond that, beyond all of these ideas of man and woman. For me, I think everyone should be actively seeking to try and balance both their masculine and feminine energy; it doesn\'t matter what people identify with.” **“Earnest”** “The words just came to me—I think I just was waiting for the opportunity to be able to purge and release all of this shit. I\'m kind of channeling Barrington Levy and other kinds of reggae, but also just exploring my journey with faith and my connection with God, exploring that in there. It’s very honest.” **“Suffer”** “I originally started writing this about my man—he lost his dad basically the year I started going out with him. Initially I started writing about seeing him upset all the time and feeling his pain. I\'m very sensitive, and very much an empath. When I then also experienced loss, it gave ‘Suffer’ a new lease of life. I touch on the topic of inherited trauma as well; it\'s such a massive thing that people just don\'t realize or know about.” **“Mataji Freestyle”** “That was one of the ones we made at like five in the morning—we jammed that song for about two hours straight. Me and the boys were in altered states of consciousness a lot of the time. Obviously we\'re making music in 432 Hz as well, so that definitely added to the energy of the house. It was very meditative and intense, like I was crying whilst recording that song. It\'s also quite a complex song if you break it down in terms of technicals; everyone is on a different time.” **“Kali V2”** “It’s controversial; I knew certain heads were not gonna like it. But at the end of the day, the album isn\'t for everyone. I guess it was kind of like a battle tune, a kind of rebel tune—the whole album is, to be honest.” **“Satta”** “I got the term ‘satta vibrations’ from \[UK singer-songwriter\] Finley Quaye. I wrote it one morning outside Highbury & Islington tube station on my way back from a party, still kind of buzzing. Just sat on a bench watching my surroundings—seeing a woman cry, bare feds everywhere, pigeons. ‘Satta’ was also produced by Commissioner Gordon, too.” **“Party Hard Interlude”** “I referenced \[UK musician\] Donae’o on this. It was essential to have on there, like a nice little break. I knew I wanted the album to have interludes, skits, to go in and out, I wanted it to be a journey. We were all on copious amounts of mushrooms when we made this, so I felt it would be rude not to have a little ode to mycelium on there.” **“Dingaling”** “We all went to Anish’s \[Bhatt, UK producer known as Earbuds\] studio after being back from the woods; we met up and were going through the album. Anish showed us that tune and we all ended up just getting a bit waved and being there all night with our instruments out. Before we knew it we’d recreated \[his beat\]. Again, it’s a re-lick of Blak Twang \[2002 single ‘So Rotton’\] and 2Face’s \[Idibia, now known as 2Baba\] ‘African Queen,’ with my own little bit in the middle.” **“Maya”** “‘Maya’ for me is a mad one, because I\'ve never sung like that before, especially at the end where I\'m proper wailing. This was a time where I really just expressed myself freely. I don\'t do that often and am not able to do that often yet.” **“Man Made”** “This is probably the most overtly political tune, but to me it’s more spiritual. You can take the song literally, but also metaphorically: how these man-made seeds are being planted in society and in the collective. Materialism, consumerism, individualism—it\'s only once you’re able to shed these accessories that you actually start remembering what it is to be human.” **“Meditation”** “This song literally was a meditation. This track could have been like 15 minutes long; initially we recorded for over an hour. It’s meant to take you inside yourself. And with the 432 Hz as well, it\'s tranquil, to say the least. When you can actually submit to the sound and the frequency, and you\'re not distracted by anything else, you can actually just listen to it.” **“Poor Man Skit”** “I’m questioning the idea of what it is to be rich, to be successful in the modern world, and what it is we should be striving for. Concepts of happiness have kind of gotten distorted. This is really just delving into that—like what does ‘poor’ even mean? Is it the person with no money, or the person with no empathy, compassion, or connection?” **“Sinner”** “This one came from a slightly darker place. I played the bass on this one, which was sick; I came up with the bassline first and just built the tune around that. I was feeling quite sinful at the time, I guess—just questioning myself, my intentions, faith, morals—questioning everything, really.” **“Jimtastic Blues”** “This is a sentimental one. It\'s funny because it probably has the saddest lyrics, meaning, and sentiment on the album, but is maybe the most upbeat tune. It\'s one with Swindle; we’d made it in the woods, then Swindle took it away and added the brass elements at the end, which kind of took it up a notch. It seemed like the perfect way to end the album.\"

When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.

In August 2019, New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins thought she had the rest of her year fully mapped out, starting with a tour of North America as a guitarist in David Berman’s newly launched project Purple Mountains. But when Berman took his own life that month, everything changed. “All of a sudden, I was just unmoored and in shock,” she tells Apple Music. “I really only spent four days with David. But those four days really knocked me off my feet.” For the next few months, she wrote as she reflected, obsessively collecting ideas and lyrics, as well as recordings of conversations with friends and strangers—cab drivers and art museum security guards among them. The result is her sophomore LP, a set of iridescent folk rock that came together almost entirely over the course of one week, with multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman in his Brooklyn studio. “I was trying to articulate this feeling of getting comfortable with chaos,” she says. “And learning how to be comfortable with the idea that things are going to fall apart and they\'re going to come back together. I had shed a lot of skin very quickly.” Here, Jenkins tells us the story of each song on the album. **Michelangelo** “I think sequencing the record was an interesting challenge because, to me, the songs feel really different from one another. ‘Michelangelo’ is the only one that I came in with that was written—I had a melody that I wanted to use and I thought, ‘Okay, Josh, let’s make this into a little rock song and take the guitar solo in the middle.’ That was the first song we recorded, so it was just our way of getting into the groove of recording, with what sounds like a familiar version of what I\'ve done in the past.” **New Bikini** “I was worried when I was writing it that it sounded too starry-eyed and a little bit naive, saying, ‘The water cures everything.’ I think it was this tension between that advice—from a lot of people with good intentions—and me being like, ‘Well, it\'s not going to bring this person back from the dead and it\'s not going to change my DNA and it\'s not going to make this person better.’” **Hard Drive** “I just love talking to people, to strangers. The heart of the song is people talking about the nature of things, but often, what they\'re doing is actually talking about themselves and expressing something about themselves. I think that every person that I meet has wisdom to give and it\'s just a matter of turning that key with people. Because when you turn it and you open that door, you can be given so much more than you ever expected. Really listening, being more of a journalist in my own just day-to-day life—rather than trying to influence my surroundings, just letting them hit me.” **Crosshairs** “You could look at this as a kind of role-playing song, which isn\'t explicitly sexual, but that\'s definitely one aspect of it. It’s the idea that when you\'re assuming a different role within yourself, it actually can open up chambers within you that are otherwise not seeing the light of day. I was looking at the parts of me that are more masculine, the parts of me that are explicitly feminine, and seeing where everything is in between, while also trying to do the same for someone else in my life.” **Ambiguous Norway** “The song is titled after one of David\'s cartoons, a drawing of a house with a little pinwheel on the top. It\'s about that moment where I was experiencing this grief of David passing away, where I was really saturated in it. I threw myself onto this island in Norway—Lyngør—thinking I could sort of leave that behind to a certain extent, and just realizing that it really didn\'t matter what corner of the planet I found myself on, I was still interacting with the impression of David\'s death and finding that there was all of these coincidences everywhere I went. I felt like I was in this wide-eyed part of the grieving process where it becomes almost psychedelic, like I was seeing meaning in everything and not able at all to just put it into words because it was too big and too expansive.” **Hailey** “It\'s challenging to write a platonic love song—it doesn\'t have all the ingredients of heartbreak or lust or drama that I think a lot of those songs have. It\'s much more simple than that. I just wanted to celebrate her and also celebrate someone who\'s alive now, who\'s making me feel motivated to keep going when things get tough, and to have confidence in myself, because that\'s a really beautiful thing and it\'s rare to behold. I think a lot of the record is mourning, and this was kind of the opposite.” **The Ramble** “I made these binaural recordings as I walked around and birdwatched in the morning, in April \[2020\], when it was pretty much empty. I was a stone\'s throw away from all the hospitals that were cropping up in Central Park, while simultaneously watching nature flourish in this incredible way. I recorded a guitar part and then I sent that to all of my friends around the country and said, ‘Just write something, send it back to me. Don\'t spend a lot of time on it.’ I wanted to capture the feeling that things change, but it’s nature\'s course to find its way through. Just to go out with my binoculars and be in nature and observe birds is my way of really dissolving and letting go of a lot of my fears and anxieties—and I wanted to give that to other people.”

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

As The War on Drugs has grown in size and stature from bedroom recording project to sprawling, festival-headlining rock outfit, Adam Granduciel’s role has remained constant: It’s his band, his vision. But when the pandemic forced recording sessions for their fifth LP *I Don’t Live Here Anymore* to go remote in 2020, Granduciel began encouraging his bandmates to take ownership of their roles within each song—to leave their mark. “Once we got into a groove of sending each other sessions, it was this really cool thing where everyone had a way of working on their own time that really helped,” he tells Apple Music. “I think being friends with the guys now and collaborative for so many years, each time we work together, it\'s like everyone\'s more confident in their role and I’m more confident in my desire for them to step up and bring something real. I was all about giving up control.” That shift, Granduciel adds, opened up “new sonic territory” that he couldn’t have seen by himself. And the sense of peace and perspective that came with it was mirrored—if not made possible—by changes in his personal life, namely the birth of his first child. A decade ago, Granduciel would have likely obsessed and fretted over every detail, making himself unwell in the process, “but I wasn\'t really scared to turn in this record,” he says. “I was excited for it to be out in the world, because it\'s not so much that you don\'t care about your work, but it’s just not the most important thing all the time. I was happy with whatever I could contribute, as long as I felt that I had given it my all.” Here, Granduciel guides us through the entire record, track by track. **“Living Proof”** “It felt like a complete statement, a complete thought. It felt like the solo was kind of composed and was there for a reason, and it all just felt buttoned up perfectly, where it could open a record in kind of a tender way. Just very deliberate and right.” **“Harmonia’s Dream”** “It’s mostly inspired by the band Harmonia and this thing that \[keyboardist\] Robbie \[Bennett\] had done that was blowing my mind in real time. I started playing those two chords, and in the spur of the moment he wrote that whole synth line. We went on for about nine minutes, and I remember, when we were doing it, I was like, ‘Don\'t hit a wrong note.’ Because it was so perfect what he was just feeling out in the moment, at 2 am, at some studio in Brooklyn. I was so lucky that I got to witness him doing that.” **“Change”** “I had started it at the end of 2017’s *Deeper Understanding* and it was like this piano ballad in half-time. Years later, we’re in upstate New York, and I\'m showing it to \[bassist\] Dave \[Hartley\] and \[guitarist\] Anthony \[LaMarca\]. I\'m on piano and they\'re on bass and drums and it\'s not really gelling. At some point Anthony just picks up the drumsticks and he shifts it to the backbeat, this straight-ahead pop-rock four-on-the-floor thing. It immediately had this really cool ‘I\'m on Fire’ vibe.’” **“I Don’t Wanna Wait”** “\[Producer-engineer\] Shawn \[Everett\], for the most part, puts the vocal very front and center on a lot of songs, very pop-like. I think as you get more confident in your songs it\'s okay to have the vocals there. But for this one I was thinking about Radiohead, like it would be cool if we just processed the vocals in this really weird way. I wanted to have fun with them, because we’ve already got so many alien sounds happening with those Prophet keyboards and the moodiness of the drum machine. I wanted to give it something that felt like you were sucked into some weird little world.” **“Victim”** “Ten years ago if we had had this song, we wouldn\'t have a chorus on it—it would just be like a verse over and over. Now I feel like we\'ve progressed to where you have this hypnotic thing but it actually goes somewhere. We’d had it done, but the vocals were a little weird. I told Shawn I wasn’t sure about them, because this song had such a vibe. When he asked me to describe it in one word, I was like, ‘back alley,’ like steam coming out of a fucking manhole cover or something. And then he puts his headphones on and I see him work in some gear for like 30 minutes—and then he turns the speakers on. I was like, ‘Oh, dude. That\'s it.’” **“I Don’t Live Here Anymore”** “I\'ll be the first to say it has that \'80s thing going, but we kind of pushed it in that way. At one point Shawn and I ran everything on the song—drums, the girls, bass, everything—through a JC-120 Roland amplifier, which is like the sound of the \'80s, essentially. I saw it just sitting there at Sound City \[Studios in Los Angeles\]. We spent like a day doing that, and it just gave it this sound that was a familiar heartbeat or something. It sounds huge but it also felt real—in my mind it was basically just a bedroom recording, because everything was done in my tiny little room, directly into my computer.” **“Old Skin”** “I demoed it in one afternoon, in like 30 minutes. Then I showed it to the band, and from the minute we started playing, it was just so fucking boring. But I knew that there was something in the song I really liked, and we kept building it up and building it up, and then one day, I asked Shawn to mute everything except the two things I liked most: the organ and the single note I was playing on the Juno. I brought the drums in at the right moment and it was like, \'Oh, that\'s the fucking song.’ Lyrically, I felt like it was about the concept of pushing back against everything that tries to hold you down—and having a song about that and then having it be as dynamic as it is, with these drums coming out of nowhere, it just feels like a really special moment. It’s my favorite song on the record, I think.” **“Wasted”** “This song was actually a really early one that I kind of abandoned—I sent it to \[drummer\] Pat \[Berkery\] because I knew there was a song there but the drums were just very stale. I didn\'t know any of this, but the day that he was working out of my studio in Philly was the day that his personal life had kind of all come to a head: He was getting divorced from his wife of 15 years. He did the song and he sent it back to me and it was fucking ferocious. It just gave new life to it. Springsteen always talks about Max Weinberg on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and how it’s Max\'s greatest recorded performance. I said the same thing when I heard this: ‘It’s Pat’s greatest recorded performance.’” **“Rings Around My Father’s Eyes”** “I\'d been strumming those open chords for a couple years—I had the melody and I had that opening line. I wanted to express something, but I wasn\'t 100% sure how I was going to go about doing it—part of the journey was to not be embarrassed by a line or not think that something is too obvious and too sentimental. As time went on with this record, I became a dad, and I started seeing it from the other side. It’s not so much a reflection on my relationship with my own dad, but starting to think about being a dad, being a protector.” **“Occasional Rain”** “As a songwriter I just love it because it\'s really concise. Lyrically, I was able to wrap up some of the scenes that I wanted to try and talk about, knowing where it was going to go on the record. I just think it\'s one of those songs that\'s a perfect closer. It\'s the last song in our fifth album. It\'s like, if this was the last album we ever made and that was the last song, I\'d be like, ‘That\'s a good way to go out.’”

Long gone are the days of “Potential Breakup Song.” On their first full-length LP in 14 years, sisters Aly & AJ Michalka, beloved in the mid-2000s for their Disney-brand teenage pop-rock, have grown up. First came the EPs: 2017’s *Ten Years* and 2019’s *Sanctuary*, a new era for the duo defined by a masterful understanding of ’80s-indebted synth-pop. Now they’ve looked back even further, pulling from ’60s and ’70s rock to craft their own kind of modern classics. “We set out to make a West Coast album—this California energy,” Aly tells Apple Music. “Hopefully it gets people feeling good about the state of the world again.” “This is a self-help record,” adds AJ. “We love it.” There are pleasures to be found, from the Americana road-trip opener “Pretty Places” and the big pop drum fills of “Paradise” to the romanticism of “Slow Dancing” and the album’s surprising collaborations, including Heart’s Nancy Wilson and Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum on the sunny-sounding “Listen!!!” and Melissa Etheridge on closer “Hold Out.” Below, Aly & AJ break down their album, track by track. **“Pretty Places”** AJ: “It’s an anthem for the open road. It\'s one of the first songs that helped steer the direction of this album, and I really feel like this is a song that we\'ll look back on for many years to come and feel very proud that we wrote this. You don\'t feel that way all the time with your own music. It’s nice to feel that confidence.” **“Lost Cause”** Aly: “The thing that I really love about this song is AJ’s stacked harmonies on the verses. And then that breakdown bridge lyric is really moving to me: ‘Maybe it\'s just come to an end/Don\'t need to bring us back from the dead/Maybe it just ran its course/And trying too hard only makes it worse.’ It feels so true to those moments when you know you\'ve given it your all, but it\'s dead. It\'s over.” **“Break Yourself”** AJ: “The drums were layered three times over, so everything you hear is stacked. And we promised each other there\'s got to be a horn section at the end, and extended it out. That became one of my favorite parts on the entire record.” **“Slow Dancing”** AJ: “It\'s one of the older ones, along with \'Pretty Places.\' Originally, it was an ’80s-inspired synth-pop tune. Then we flipped it upside down. It\'s midtempo—the pandemic love song of the record.” Aly: “We knew we were going to release a lot of singles, because we felt like there were so many good songs that we wanted them to have their moment. By choosing \'Slow Dancing,\' it felt like, \'We\'re going to ease you into this, and make you slow-dance in your living room.\'” **“Paradise”** Aly: “There\'s this fantastic quote from Henry Miller\'s book *Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch* that inspired the meaning of this song. Basically, it is about the yearning of wanting paradise, but not being brave enough to stay once you\'ve actually reached it. It’s based on how visitors coming out to Big Sur don\'t really have the courage to live out a life of paradise. They go back to their own life once they\'ve been out there for a few days—where paradise is actually achievable. Paradise is tangible, we just are never brave enough to actually live it.” **“Symptom of Your Touch”** AJ: “The combination of analog synths, guitars, live drums, cello, violin, electric violin—the song has a classic feeling, but it still feels like a modern pop song. It is really hard to achieve that balance.” Aly: “This song is a great pairing with ‘Paradise.’ I also like the subject matter of it: It\'s like knowing that you\'re just doomed if you meet up and see this person, because every single time you better fall back in with them. It is toxic.” **“Lucky to Get Him”** AJ: “It’s hard to convey advice in a song, because it can come out cheesy. I like to think that this song is a character piece, because it\'s about guiding a friend. We joke that this song feels like Dolly Parton speaking to a young version of herself about what she would do differently, romantically, if she could go back in time. And so this is our Dolly Parton advice song.” **“Listen!!!”** Aly: “We’ve known Nancy \[Wilson\] for over 10 years. We’re huge fans. We sent her this song and a couple of others. She came back with these great parts, and we were super honored that she could be a part of this. And then with Jack \[Tatum\], he made the song a little bit weirder and off-sounding, which I loved.” **“Don’t Need Nothing”** Aly: “This song was written in Denver in the winter of 2019. We took the album title from the chorus lyrics. It felt like this was the pinnacle song of the record. It sums up the message, too: It’s a song with a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a response to anguish and the fact that we feel like we need so many things in life. We need our friends, our family, and the things that truly make us happy, which usually aren\'t physical possessions. It\'s usually experiences.” **“Stomach”** AJ: “We, miraculously, wrote this song entirely over Zoom in May of 2020, when the pandemic was at its peak, with our really good friend Olen Kittelsen from a band called Armors. This song hurts when you listen to it, because I think the lyrics are devastating. But funnily enough, Aly\'s husband wrote the line \'I just can’t stomach being your ex-wife,\' and they have a great relationship. It’s not reflective of them, but we\'re children of divorce. The song weaves in and out, but it doesn\'t just put you in this horrible rut. There’s hope around the corner.” **“Personal Cathedrals”** AJ: “We wanted to write a song that completely captured the feeling of Aly and I having to go to an event that we don\'t want to be at. We tend to become two wallflowers at parties in Hollywood, even though we\'re very outgoing people. We end up ordering a drink and standing in a corner with each other. That first chord you hear immediately brings you into that uncomfortable space.” **“Hold Out”** Aly: “It’s the one true ballad on the album. AJ and I are not big ballad writers, and I don\'t tend to gravitate towards straight-up ballads either, so we set out to write a ballad that we were really proud of. To me, \'Hold Out\' really encapsulates the importance of asking for help when you need it the most, and not being ashamed of that. Melissa Etheridge etched the final notes of this outro with her incredible guitar playing, just adding that perfect element to the song.”

During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”

While 2020\'s solo debut *Petals for Armor* indulged in R&B, funk, and pop, the Paramore singer\'s latest collection deconstructs her loneliest and darkest feelings with a heavy dose of acoustic compositions, melancholy piano melodies, and well-placed electric guitar flourishes. Williams wrote and performed the entirety of *FLOWERS for VASES / descansos* and recorded it in her Nashville home, and it serves as an ode to the suffering that precluded *Petals for Armor*\'s arc of self-discovery. Williams\' voice once again takes center stage, intertwined within the record\'s pensive compositions, varying from barely a whisper (\"First Thing to Go\") to a simmering rage (\"Trigger\"). \"My Limb\" dabbles in the macabre (\"If you gotta amputate/Don\'t give me the tourniquet\"), the delicate \"Asystole\" compares a past relationship to the most fatal form of cardiac arrest, and the folk-tinged \"Good Grief\" focuses on how love slowly dissolves. This 14-track postmortem adds another chapter of honest reflection to Williams\' ever-growing repertoire, laying her past demons to rest.

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

“Quivering in Time” is the debut album by DJ and producer Eris Drew on T4T LUV NRG, the label she runs with partner Octo Octa. In 2020, after the release of Trans Love Vibration (NAIVE, 2018) and Transcendental Access Point (Interdimensional Transmissions, 2020), Eris moved from her hometown of Chicago to rural New Hampshire and recorded the nine beautiful songs featured here. Her first album feels something like her DJ sets, with stacked layers of vinyl samples and turntable manipulations serving as a fast-moving foundation for hand-played keyboard riffs, walls of percussion and sampled, scratched and strummed guitar tones. On each song for the album Eris expresses the anxiety and hope of her present. She wrote, recorded, and mixed the album as she stared into the forest through her studio window, collapsing present and past into future, her memories and body literally quivering in time. The songs are cast with Eris’s experiences and intentions. The plucky progressive Loving Clav is in the form of an evocation (“good times come to me now....”), while the tracks Time to Move Close and Show U LUV express Eris’s longing for togetherness. The hardcore Pick ‘Em Up (“...and it might be a different story”) and organ-heavy Ride Free are funky odes to psychedelics, hard dancing and the subjectivity of real lived experience. The twinkling house of Howling Wind and the tempo-shifting bop of Sensation capture the mystery of the forest cabin where Eris spent most of the last 15 months. Two booming hip house dubs round out the album, Baby and Quivering in Time, each an itchy track about hope and personal resilience. As with her prior work, Eris’s approach to music making is unique and genre-dissolving. Ultimately, her special sound is a metaphor for her main message, which is that every person deserves to be themself.

On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”

“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

“I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about people dancing to my own sadness,” David Balfe tells Apple Music. “When I was writing this at first, it was never meant for the public. I pressed 25 copies and gave them to my friends, who this record is about.” *For Those I Love* is about one of the Dublin artist’s friends in particular: his closest friend, collaborator and bandmate, the poet and musician Paul Curran—who died by suicide in February 2018. This extraordinary album is a love letter to that friendship. A self-produced, spoken-word masterpiece set to tenderly curated samples and exhilarating house beats, breaks and synths (“our youth was set to a backdrop of listening to house music in s\*\*t cars, so it made perfect sense to retell those stories with an electronic palette”), it’s also a tribute to working-class communities, art, grief and survival. “Growing up where we did in Dublin, my friends and I learned very young that life is a very fragile and temporary thing,” Balfe says. “We first navigated the world in survival mode, but we soon realized that you have to express love. Because it haunts you as a regret if you don’t. An expression of love could be the difference between somebody’s being here or not being here. For us, that’s where being that vocal about love came from. I hope that’s not rare.” Read on for Balfe’s track-by-track guide to his important, thrilling record. **I Have a Love** “I wrote 75 or 76 songs for this album—this was the 15th, and it was also the first one that actually made it onto the record. It set the tone for how I wanted it all to feel and sound and flow, with the density and the texture that I wanted. The vast majority of samples that made it on had a very weighted significance to myself and my friends—they were very complementary to or important within the singular relationships that I was writing about. Here, the opening piano chords are from Sampha’s \'(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano.\' It’s is a very important song for myself and Paul. It dominated so much of the soundtrack to our intimate moments. I had written the instrumental before Paul had passed away and it was already going to be a track about my relationship with him. I was very lucky that I got to play that instrumental for him before he passed, and I got to share some of the lyrics. They very much had to do with this endless love that we both had. After Paul passed, the weight of the song and the samples themselves took on quite a different life me, and allowed me to reframe how I was writing the lyrics. I revisited \'(No One Knows Me),\' and I revisited \[the song’s other sample\] \'Let Love Flow On\' by Sonya Spence. Despite having this disco heart, I’ve always found that to be a warm safety blanket of a song. A gorgeous reassurance of hope and love against the difficulties of live and tragedy. The main refrain—\'I have a love, and it never fades\' was written long before Paul passed, and I was very lucky to have been able to share with him. I think a lot of people have the impression that it was something I had written in response to his death, but it wasn’t. It was a response to our friendship and 13 years of being inseparable. It’s quite curious and tragic that it held so much more weight in the aftermath. So I rewrote the whole history of that song and the whole history of our life around that refrain afterwards. It’s a strange song for me.” **You Stayed / To Live** “This is a song that’s very much rooted in storytelling. So many of my relationships with my friends involved fields and barren wasteland—hanging out and spending time just being together, discussing and planning our ideas. It was rare to walk into these areas without there being a fire of some kind. I’m still entranced by it—I find even the visual of fire to be very intoxicating. Anyway, most of the record was made in the shed at my ma’s—but this was made up in the box bedroom. It was a Thursday night after training, and I was laying on the bed writing about this time that myself and Paul stole a couch and walked it over the motorway to this field at three in the morning, intending to set it on fire the next day and film it. We woke up the next morning and the couch had already been set on fire. There’s something magic about that field—time does not work in a linear fashion there. As I was writing the song, one of the cars across the road got set on fire—over a debt, I found out. There are so many things about the recording of this album that has made me rethink how I engage with the world in regard to fate, or observations of spirituality. And I get it: everything holds this other significance when you’ve gone through that kind of tragedy, and you read into things as a source of comfort more than anything. And you allow yourself to be enchanted by it. Really, of course, it’s all just chance.” **To Have You** “This is built around ‘Everything I Own’ by Barbara Mason. The start of the track also has this audio clip from when the band I was in with Paul \[Burnt Out\] were filming the video for a track called ‘Dear James,’ and the song continues from there. We wanted to have this atmospheric smoke bellowing out of our bins in the lane behind my house. One of my best mates, Robbie, was like, ‘I can make a smoke bomb out of tin foil and ping pong balls.’ And we did it. For us, it was just this moment of such monumental success. It was like this really traditional, hands-on success of our labor. I wanted to bring a reminder for myself and my friends of the things that we had done together and felt so much collective beauty for. We’re never going to lose that memory now. This is also the only song on the album that includes my harp playing, which has allowed me to not feel guilty about buying a harp in the first place and not following through with learning how to play it. Paul was always like, ‘You’re a f\*\*king lunatic for buying that. But deadly, cool. Go for it.’” **Top Scheme** “The synth patch that I used is something I built years and years ago for a project that I did with one of my best mates, Pamela \[Connolly\], who’s now in a great band called Pillow Queens. We made music together in my ma’s shed for years for a project called Mothers and Fathers, and I wanted to bring a nod to that—it was important to me that I acknowledge so many of the different parts of my shared musical history with my friends for this album. Myself and Paul also had plans to start a separate project called Top Scheme, which was going to involve biting social commentary over some electronic, very aggressive, off-grid punk. We’d started making demos, but kept putting it off to focus on Burnt Out. I wanted to write a spiritual successor to that project and was very conscious where it would fit into the record. The song starts the curve from speaking very much about the love that we all shared together, into capturing about the worlds we grew up in—with this song speaking very specifically about the economic and social inequality that we faced being in a 1990s’ working-class community. It also speaks about the worlds we started to move into—when the geography of your world opens and suddenly you feel that sense of alienation that you once felt as a young child. You might be experiencing an economic disparity or a social divide that you’re unable to bridge. You hear people absolutely dehumanize others and reduce people down to scumbags based on their economic standing or, particularly as this song speaks about, really punishing people verbally for being addicts. Stripping them of their humanity, not caring about the sickness that ails them and seeing them as a plague. Just seeing them as a plague. This song speaks to that anger and disassociation—but there’s also supposed to be a very dark humor across it.” **The Myth / I Don’t** “This is the darkest moment on the record, and it’s the most difficult one to revisit because I am very much walking back into a mental and physical space that I’ve fortunately recovered from. It talks about where I was at before I had access to therapy and medication, then when I did and was trying to justify the exorbitant cost of dealing both those things—trying to value your own health over economic stability. It was very important that the music was sonically intoxicating. It spirals and I tried to make its density change and shift over time—with the shape of each sound morphing slowly and sometimes frantically towards its peak. I wanted it to feel like the same chaos, discomfort, and internal fear I felt during that period, but also capture the same drive toward this one singular end point. It needed to move towards this sonic oblivion at the end, because that’s what I was seeking at that point in my life. It’s also worth noting that for all the darkness that that song does bring, the times where I’ve gotten to perform it have probably been the most giving and actually traditionally cathartic things that I’ve been able to experience.” **The Shape of You** “Some of the samples took months to clear, but the Smokey Robinson one here went through like clockwork, overnight. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask why, I don’t need to know why. It’s a defining moment on the record for me—I listened to ‘The Tracks of My Tears’ when everything was going to s\*\*t and I felt heard in somebody else’s music, and suddenly understood that within my own music I could have somebody speak for me with an elegance that I would never be able to get. The beauty of sampling is being able to be intelligent enough to recognize when the choice to use other people who have walked that ground before is the right one. The lyrics cover me breaking my leg at a Belgian punk festival in 2007 and experiencing this terrifying, very chaotic time—before the relief and beauty and safety I felt when I saw my best friend arrive at the hospital. Everything that could possibly go wrong had gone wrong, but your best mate is there beside you, and you suddenly feel like it’s all going to be OK—and that you might even find some value in the chaos of it all.” **Birthday / The Pain** “One of the important things about this track is the juxtaposition of its make-up. It was quite a methodical choice. I understood that if I was to write about something like a dead body on bricks being found on my street while I was six years old with the sonic palette you would usually anticipate, then it would never have the comfort level for people to engage with that story. It’s a little bit of a cheat in order to allow people to find an entry point into the reality of that kind of world. The song’s built around a sample from ‘She Won’t be Gone Long’ by The Sentiments. It’s a slow dance, that song, and I find it to be quite a comfort to fall into the rhythm of it. The other special part of the song is the inclusion of crowd chanting at the start—from a specific game at Tolka Park, where our \[soccer\] team, Shelbourne FC, play. It was the first match of the season after Paul had passed and we were scattering his ashes that night on the pitch after the game. It was one of those games where you channel everything you have left in your life into those 90 minutes, into that jersey. It was 3-2 Shels in the end, with a 93rd minute penno. It’s all of us and the fans chanting, recorded on my phone. It was important to be able to bring the importance of that audio, that team, those friends and those strangers onto the record.” **You Live / No One Like You** “I think this is the best song, musically. It has all the warmth and texture that I want in a piece of music. I wasn’t trying to write pop anthems here—and that’s nothing against great pop anthems at all—because you can get so much into the weeds, the maths and the make-up of a song that way. But really it’s my favorite because it’s a song where I get to most clearly speak about my greatest love: my friends, and the survival that we’ve had together. It’s the song I get to most directly speak about them by name and channel years and years of friendship into this one moment. It’s therefore the song that gives me the most hope. And it gave me the most hope when I recorded it, too. It’s a lot easier to feel affected by something when you observe it than when you live it, I think, and to see my friends so emotionally invested and elated when they see and hear themselves immortalized, that’s where the value lies for me. It’s also nice to be able to revisit and revel in so many of monoliths of Irish culture—stemming back to people like John B. Keane and Brendan Behan. The song is very much a place of warmth, where I can go to remember what’s good, what’s left and what I value still.” **Leave Me Not Love** “I felt it was important to me to be able to close the book on this record and bring the listener back around to its inception. To really focus on that eternal return to the same, coming back to the original notes and scale that open the album. Where this track moves in quite a different direction to the others is at the end. It’s perhaps the only time where I unapologetically express something without hope. I turn back to the reality that I lived at the time, which was something explicitly void of hope and embedded in pain. I felt it would have been disingenuous of me not to bring the album back to the really graphic darkness that’s still there. I think I’m responsible enough to offer pockets and avenues that I have found to escape it, while stripping away any pretense and present the reality of that grief. What follows is ‘Cryin’ Like a Baby’ by Jackson C. Frank, which is a song that was very important to Paul and I, and speaks very directly, with a finesse I couldn’t have found by myself, to the days directly after Paul’s passing. It was the only way to end the record.”

Lucy Dacus’ favorite songs are “the ones that take 15 minutes to write,” she tells Apple Music. “I\'m easily convinced that the song is like a unit when it comes out in one burst. In many ways, I feel out of control, like it\'s not my decision what I write.” On her third LP, the Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter surrenders to autobiography with a set of spare and intimate indie rock that combines her memory of growing up in Richmond, Virginia, with details she pulled from journals she’s kept since she was 7, much of it shaped by her religious upbringing. It’s as much about what we remember as how and why we remember it. “The record was me looking at my past, but now when I hear them it\'s almost like the songs are a part of the past, like a memory about memory,” she says. “This must be what I was ready to do, and I have to trust that. There\'s probably stuff that has happened to me that I\'m still not ready to look at and I just have to wait for the day that I am.” Here, she tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“Hot & Heavy”** “My first big tour in 2016—after my first record came out—was two and a half months, and at the very end of it, I broke up with my partner at the time. I came back to Richmond after being gone for the longest I\'d ever been away and everything felt different: people’s perception of me; my friend group; my living situation. I was, for the first time, not comfortable in Richmond, and I felt really sad about that because I had planned on being here my whole life. This song is about returning to where you grew up—or where you spent any of your past—and being hit with an onslaught of memories. I think of my past self as a separate person, so the song is me speaking to me. It’s realizing that at one point in my life, everything was ahead of me and my life could\'ve ended up however. It still can, but it\'s like now I know the secret.” **“Christine”** “It starts with a scene that really happened. Me and my friend were sitting in the backseat and she\'s asleep on my shoulder. We’re coming home from a sermon that was about how humans are evil and children especially need to be guided or else they\'ll fall into the hands of the devil. She was dating this guy who at the time was just not treating her right, and I played her the song. I was like, ‘I just want you to hear this once. I\'ll put it away, but you should know that I would not support you if you get married. I don\'t think that this is the best you could do.’ She took it to heart, but she didn\'t actually break up with the guy. They\'re still together and he\'s changed and they\'ve changed and I don\'t feel that way anymore. I feel like they\'re in a better place, but at the time it felt very urgent to me that she get out of that situation.” **“First Time”** “I was on a kind of fast-paced walk and I started singing to myself, which is how I write most of my songs. I had all this energy and I started jogging for no reason, which, if you know me, is super not me—I would not electively jog. I started writing about that feeling when you\'re in love for the first time and all you think about is the one person and how you find access to yourself through them. I paused for a second because I was like, ‘Do I really want to talk about early sexual experiences? No, just do it. If you don\'t like it, don\'t share it.’ It’s about discovery: your body and your emotional capacity and how you\'re never going to feel it that way you did the first time again. At the time, I was very worried that I\'d never feel that way again. The truth was, I haven’t—but I have felt other wonderful things.” **“VBS”** “I don\'t want my identity to be that I used to believe in God because I didn\'t even choose that, but it\'s inextricable to who I am and my upbringing. I like that in the song, the setting is \[Vacation Bible School\], but the core of the song is about a relationship. My first boyfriend, who I met at VBS, used to snort nutmeg. He was a Slayer fan and it was contentious in our relationship because he loved Slayer even more than God and I got into Slayer thinking, ‘Oh, maybe he\'ll get into God.’ He was one of the kids that went to church but wasn\'t super into it, whereas I was defining my whole life by it. But I’ve got to thank him for introducing me to Slayer and The Cure, which had the biggest impact on me.” **“Cartwheel”** “I was taking a walk with \[producer\] Collin \[Pastore\] and as we passed by his school, I remembered all of the times that I was forced to play dodgeball, and how the heat in Richmond would get so bad that it would melt your shoes. That memory ended up turning into this song, about how all my girlfriends at that age were starting to get into boys before I wanted to and I felt so panicked. Why are we sneaking boys into the sleepover? They\'re not even talking. We were having fun and now no one is playing with me anymore. When my best friend told me when she had sex for the first time, I felt so betrayed. I blamed it on God, but really it was personal, because I knew that our friendship was over as I knew it, and it was.” **“Thumbs”** “I was in the car on the way to dinner in Nashville. We were going to a Thai restaurant, meeting up with some friends, and I just had my notepad out. Didn\'t notice it was happening, and then wrote the last line, ‘You don\'t owe him shit,’ and then I wrote it down a second time because I needed to hear it for myself. My birth father is somebody that doesn\'t really understand boundaries, and I guess I didn\'t know that I believed that, that I didn\'t owe him anything, until I said it out loud. When we got to the restaurant, I felt like I was going to throw up, and so they all went into the restaurant, got a table, and I just sat there and cried. Then I gathered myself and had some pad thai.” **“Going Going Gone”** “I stayed up until like 1:00 am writing this cute little song on the little travel guitar that I bring on tour. I thought for sure I\'d never put it on a record because it\'s so campfire-ish. I never thought that it would fit tonally on anything, but I like the meaning of it. It\'s about the cycle of boys and girls, then men and women, and then fathers and daughters, and how fathers are protective of their daughters potentially because as young men they either witnessed or perpetrated abuse. Or just that men who would casually assault women know that their daughters are in danger of that, and that\'s maybe why they\'re so protective. I like it right after ‘Thumbs’ because it\'s like a reprieve after the heaviest point on the record.” **“Partner in Crime”** “I tried to sing a regular take and I was just sounding bad that day. We did Auto-Tune temporarily, but then we loved it so much we just kept it. I liked that it was a choice. The meaning of the song is about this relationship I had when I was a teenager with somebody who was older than me, and how I tried to act really adult in order to relate or get that person\'s respect. So Auto-Tune fits because it falsifies your voice in order to be technically more perfect or maybe more attractive.” **“Brando”** “I really started to know about older movies in high school, when I met this one friend who the song is about. I feel like he was attracted to anything that could give him superiority—he was a self-proclaimed anarchist punk, which just meant that he knew more and knew better than everyone. He used to tell me that he knew me better than everyone else, but really that could not have been true because I hardly ever talked about myself and he was never satisfied with who I was.” **“Please Stay”** “I wrote it in September of 2019, after we recorded most of the record. I had been circling around this role that I have played throughout my life, where I am trying to convince somebody that I love very much that their life is worth living. The song is about me just feeling helpless but trying to do anything I can to offer any sort of way in to life, instead of a way out. One day at a time is the right pace to aim for.” **“Triple Dog Dare”** “In high school I was friends with this girl and we would spend all our time together. Neither of us were out, but I think that her mom saw that there was romantic potential, even though I wouldn\'t come out to myself for many years later. The first verses of the song are true: Her mom kept us apart, our friendship didn\'t last. But the ending of the song is this fictitious alternative where the characters actually do prioritize each other and get out from under the thumbs of their parents and they steal a boat and they run away and it\'s sort of left to anyone\'s interpretation whether or not they succeed at that or if they die at sea. There’s no such thing as nonfiction. I felt empowered by finding out that I could just do that, like no one was making me tell the truth in that scenario. Songwriting doesn\'t have to be reporting.”

Recorded, mixed and mastered by Tue Madsen at Antfarm Studios in November 2020.