The Guardian's Best Albums of 2023 So Far

A brand new album of unreleased material from Black Country, New Road, recorded at the historic music venue Bush Hall, in London at a series of unique shows at the end of December 2022. Mixed by John Parish and mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, the new album and material marks a new chapter for the band as a six-piece. Fresh from the success of ‘Ants From Up There’ and with a full touring schedule ahead of them in 2022, Black Country, New Road aka Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Georgia Ellery, Luke Mark, Tyler Hyde and Charlie Wayne, wrote an entire new set of material to perform. Playing to swelling crowds at festivals, including triumphant performances at Primavera, Green Man and Fuji Rock, they entered a new musical phase as they navigated and developed songs that were just weeks old. They also toured the US and headlined two sold-out shows in New York. These new performances have seen the band garner widespread support from across the board with Rolling Stone UK describing their Green Man set as "unmissable", and the Guardian going on to say that they were "greeted by something close to rapture." These performances have also attracted a profile from the NY Times, multiple glowing live reviews, and a nomination for Best Live Performer at the AIM Independent Music Awards 2022. NME **** "a marvellous return from one of our greatest bands” Gigwise **** “truly cements them as one of the greats of our generation.”

Brendan Eder is a Los Angeles composer and drummer best-known for his eponymous genre-bending ensemble of woodwinds, drumset, and bass; as well as his film scoring work, most notably on four short films for director Ari Aster. On March 3, 2023 Eder releases his third album, Therapy: a collection of meditative woodwind arrangements recorded primarily at Church of the Good Shepherd in Arcadia, California. Following 2021’s Cape Cod Cottage — Eder’s concept album under the guise of Edward Blankman, a retired dentist in the 1970s, which added elegant, understated jazz to the ensembles' repertoire — on Therapy, Eder drops the alter ego and the drumset (almost entirely) and begins with a new directive: What would ambient mastermind Richard D. James do with a chamber ensemble and a church organ? It was a question Eder had started to ask in 2020 with his cover of “#20 (Lichen).” Listeners responded with over one million streams. Appropriately, Therapy delivers two new Aphex Twin arrangements alongside eight original pieces. The result is a distinctive take on New Age and ambient music subtly interwoven with Eder’s affinity for 20th century classical and jazz. The quest for Therapy came during a period of deep spiritual curiosity. Eder was avidly watching testimonies of near death experience survivors (NDEs), pouring over books of Theosophical artwork and philosophy, and processing experiences of grief, uncertainty and spirituality. He wanted to explore the threshold between the spiritual and physical dimensions, and create music that could evoke its shape and texture — a theme further illustrated in the original album artwork and single covers by Adam Rabinowitz. Eder felt he must be on to something when, on a whim, he looked up the tempo of a piece he was calling “137 Riddle.” Turned out to be “the most important number in the world” in theoretical physics, as well as a provocative number in Jewish mysticism. Maintaining his track record of recording the best musicians Eder can find, Therapy features special guests Nailah Hunter (harp), Henry Solomon (saxophone), and Ethan Haman on The Newberry Memorial Organ at Yale University. - Rebeca Arango

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

In 2021, Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby decamped to Ibiza for two weeks. There, they rented the island’s only Fender Rhodes from one of the local rave crews. John posted it against the plaster walls and concrete floors of their temporary home, which was set into a green hillside overlooking a beach called Siesta. As they worked on Sundown, Pharoah Sanders’s “Greeting to Saud” was a daily listen. Instead of emulating its sound, Eddie absorbed its deeper lesson – that simplicity wins out over virtuosity every time. They wrote the first half of Sundown during that Ibiza stay and finished it at 64 Sound Studios in Los Angeles, where they both live. Joining Eddie on vocals and John on production and keys were Logan Hone (flutes and saxophones) Elizabeth Lea (trombone), Will Logan (drums) and David Leach (percussion). “It feels like we’re building our dream house,” says Eddie. “With Pleasure, Joy, and Happiness, we poured the foundation and now we’re expanding into new rooms.” The two artists have worked together before, on Eddie Chacon’s 2020 album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness. It was in 2019, when he met John Carroll Kirby – a prolific artist in his own right who’s collaborated with Steve Lacy, Frank Ocean, Solange, and many more – that Chacon considered a return to releasing music. Pleasure, Joy and Happiness was meant to bring closure to a music career that began when Eddie was a teenager playing in Bay Area garage bands, and peaked in the 1990s when, as one half of the duo Charles & Eddie, he topped charts internationally with “Would I Lie To You”, before deserting the business. Eddie didn’t expect much from Pleasure’s release, and was amazed to find it resonated widely, gaining him a whole new fanbase and reinvigorating his career. Eddie says that only at his age – 59 – could he have the life experience and quiet confidence to make Sundown. That this new record exists at all is a surprise to its creator. As Eddie says, “Sundown is the follow-up I never thought I would get to make.”

To call *Fuse* Everything But the Girl’s first album in 24 years is to downplay everything the husband-and-wife duo of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have been busy with since—the partial sum of which includes seven solo albums, three children, five memoirs, and three record labels. “We were very much on our separate tracks until the pandemic,” Watt tells Apple Music. “When things started getting back to normal, we both realized we had been changed a lot by the whole experience, and wondered if a change and a new direction could be a good idea.” But for as much of a contextual shift as the project might’ve been for Watt and Thorn personally, their music has always been both of its time and slightly out of it in ways that make *Fuse* feel as singular and natural as anything they’ve done before. Certain tracks bear obvious markers of the 2020s, whether it’s the 2-step beat of “Nothing Left to Lose” or Thorn’s duet with her eerily Auto-Tuned self on “When You Mess Up.” But others—like the quiet desperation of “Run a Red Light” or the after-hours bliss of “No One Knows We’re Dancing”—tap into the same small, oblique sophistications that have driven their music since before they discovered drum machines. “We had more time on our hands and more with each other,” Watt says of making their first record together since 1999’s *Temperamental*. “Tracey just said, ‘Maybe now is the time; if not now, then when?’ When we began—after the first tentative steps—we realized we still had so much in common. A common language. A love of economy, direct emotion, space.” Here Watt and Thorn talk through the album, track by track. **“Nothing Left to Lose”** Tracey Thorn: “This was the last track we wrote and recorded. I think we could only do it once we had got our confidence levels up. We were buzzing off the tracks we had already done, and thought we just needed one more to really nail it. When Ben put the backing track together, with that beat and the heavy tremolo bass and loads of space for my vocal, it felt like a nod to our past but fresh. It was so atmospheric and it inspired this really raw, heartfelt lyric.” **“Run a Red Light”** Ben Watt: “We were a few songs into recording when one evening I played Tracey some songs I’d demoed a few years back. This was one of them, and Tracey picked it out immediately, saying, ‘That is a killer song, you must let me sing it.’ The ‘run a red light’ lines only appeared once, as a coda at the end, but we turned it into the chorus instead and sang the lines together, with my vocal heavily Auto-Tuned so that it has a bit of what Mark Ronson calls that ‘sad robot’ quality. The lyric is a portrait of the kind of guy I often met at the end of the night during my DJ days, the guy who thinks he just needs one break and he could turn everything around.” **“Caution to the Wind”** TT: “It’s quite an unusual track for us in that it’s house tempo but almost euphoric. Usually we inject sadness into this musical mood, but this one has a proper celebratory lyric: the stars, the sky like a cathedral, the idea of a person coming home, and throwing caution to the wind, demanding to get close to someone. The ‘caution to the wind’ lines made me think of Stevie Nicks while I was singing them. It’s got a slight ravey Fleetwood Mac vibe to it—big tom fills and floaty scarves.” **“When You Mess Up”** BW: “This was the first song we wrote together since 1999. I had recorded a series of piano improvisations on my iPhone—just playing, without imagining I was writing a song, trying to free myself from any pressures and expectations. And using slightly unusual chord voicings, 4ths and 6ths, etc. Tracey wrote this lyric about how that transitional stage between middle age and the future reminds you of all the tension and uncertainty of being young. But she’s trying to be forgiving of herself, saying, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, we all mess up, life is difficult.’ We messed around a bit with Tracey’s vocal on some of the lines, pitching it higher, bending its tone, so it sounds like a little devil on her shoulder, or some internal voice digging at her.” **“Time and Time Again”** TT: “This is the kind of song where you can’t quite tell which is the verse and which is the chorus, it’s more circular than linear. The lyrics are about someone looking at a friend who can’t get out of a relationship, imagining that at some point they’re gonna have to come and save them. Ben and I are singing together on the verses, really nice downbeat kind of vocals. And then my voice is sped up again and used as a kind of effect in the middle section. The feel reminds us a bit of our earliest forays into electronic music in the ’80s, where some tracks on *Idlewild* were inspired by Jam & Lewis productions, that pop/R&B vibe of the time.” **\"No One Knows We’re Dancing”** BW: “The lyric is a kind of homage to Lazy Dog, the club night I ran in Notting Hill with Jay Hannan for several years from the late ’90s onwards. It took place on Sundays, starting in the afternoon and ending at midnight, and the song captures—with a bit of added color—some of the regulars who turned up or people who worked there. It’s about that secret, self-enclosed world of the club, magnified by this sense that you’re down in the dark basement dancing at 5 pm, while outside in the street normal life is just going on, and the sun is blazing. Ewan Pearson added some extra synth and drum programming, and it turned into a real dubby Italo-disco vibe.” **“Lost”** TT: “This was an early piece of music that Ben had created, recording it at home during lockdown. A hypnotic, arpeggiated repetitive cycle of a song. He had typed the words ‘I lost…’ into Google and followed all the suggestions which came up to create the lyric: I lost my mind, I lost my bags, I lost my perfect job. It seems quite random and almost detached, but then you are hit by the line ‘I lost my mother’ and you realize that it is about loss of all kinds, and how it hits you. I then improvised singing another set of lyrics as a kind of counterpoint in the background, and they are exhortations not to give up in the face of loss, to keep going, and not to call yourself a loser.” **“Forever”** BW: “This was the first track on this project where I added a four-on-the-floor beat, and I remember Tracey running into the room going, ‘I like this!’ But it isn’t really a dance track, and we quite like that. It’s got quite a dark, pulsing arpeggiator going through it, and a kind of intense mood. The lyrics are about trying to work out what’s important—letting go of game playing and time wasting, trying to work out who’d be there for you in a crisis…as the lyric says, ‘When everything burns down.’” **“Interior Space”** TT: “This started as another one of Ben’s piano improvisations, and is layered up with a sonic landscape of drones and swooshes and a field recording our engineer Bruno had made of a beach in Wales while on holiday with his family. It also features some of the only guitar on the album from Ben. My vocal is heavily treated so it sounds like the inside of my head, woozy and psychedelic, a little bit out of it. The lyric is about not understanding yourself, feeling unknowable, and the arrangement tries to dramatize that feeling, make it vivid and real.” **“Karaoke”** BW: “A slow empty groove to end the album—distorted organ, CS-80, West Coast Moog. The verse lyrics are about a trip I made to a karaoke bar in San Francisco some years ago. The early evening was fairly humdrum, then the regulars arrived and a woman sang Jennifer Hudson’s ‘Spotlight’ and brought the house down. It inspired Tracey to add the chorus lyrics, which introduce another idea into the song, asking, ‘What is singing for? Do you sing to heal the brokenhearted or get the party started?’ Both, is the obvious answer.”

Variz 018Den.

*Digital download includes pdf booklet of Jorge Velez illustrations (available exclusively via Bandcamp)* “I wanted this to be my most open record, uncynical, naive, unguarded, the record teenage me wanted to make,” says electronic explorer James Holden of his generically unconstrained new album of rave music for a parallel universe 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities'. “I used to balance my clock-radio on a wardrobe to catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a New Age traveller. So it’s like a dream of rave, a fantasy about a transformative music culture that would make the world better. I guess it’s also a dialogue with that teenage me.” The New Age traveller lifestyle may have ultimately eluded Holden, as by the time he was old enough to actually go to raves the UK’s infamous Criminal Justice Bill of 1994 had long since clamped down on the traveller free party circuit, and instead in 1999, when he was just nineteen years old, he fell into a professional career in the more commercialised end of dance music after an early 12” ('Horizons') was picked up by a Sony Music-backed trance imprint. But here and now, with this latest album offering that tops off a musical career spanning over twenty years, Holden is seeking to recapture that feeling of hope, freedom and possibility (both musical and otherwise) that characterised those venerated earliest days of dance music, when the boundaries of the distinct genres as we now know them had yet to crystallise, and a starry-eyed teenage Holden was still dreaming in the bedroom of his Leicestershire village. Standing in contrast to the expanded band and live take recordings of its predecessor 'The Animal Spirits' (“Dramatic, colourful and Holden’s fullest-sounding work yet” 9/10 Loud And Quiet), Holden’s fourth solo artist album is more of a continuous sound collage, artfully juxtaposing audio worlds in his own inimitable manner, with a respectful hat tip to the pastoral classics of his early nineties youth (notable mentions to The KLF’s timeless 'Chill Out', and the sprawling radio soundscapes of Future Sound of London). But where his first wave forebears pilfered freely from the history of recorded music to date, Holden’s sample sources are custom generated, drawn from recordings of his own performances on the modular synth, keyboard, organ and piano plus the lesser explored drones of his childhood violin, cut-up bass guitar, overblown recorder, all manner of percussive trinkets and the serendipity of the odd field recording, as well as guest contributions from various members of the wider Animal Spirits live family: long-time touring companion drummer Tom Page, tabla-championing percussionist Camilo Tirado, multi-instrumentalist for hire Marcus Hamblett (here, on double bass and guitar) and saxophonist Christopher Duffin (on loan from Xam Duo and Virginia Wing). Some of the references here undeniably draw from the past: 'Trust Your Feet' is dominated by the most unashamedly ravey stabs Holden has ever played, yet by the end has seamlessly unfurled into a hand-drum-and-flute campfire singalong, whilst the more Balearic 'Common Land'’s pairing of percussive bird samples with the evocative reverberating saxophone of Christopher Duffin casts it as a distant cousin of 808 State’s 'Pacific State'. But this anything goes approach also welcomes contributions from the left of field: the bold piano flourishes and trembling violin which emerge seamlessly in the middle of jolly Sabres of Paradise-esque tabla jamboree 'Contains Multitudes'; an unexpected dalliance with the slap bass on the fantasy alliance between John Cale and Simple Minds that is the audacious 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form'; the overblown recorder that heralds beatific mellotron, squealing synths and soaring guitars on ceremonial march in the style of Popol Vuh 'The Answer Is Yes'; and to close proceedings, the expressive pitched tabla motifs which punctuate melancholy outro 'You Can Never Go Back', as played by Camilo Tirado. Holden is an artist who has traditionally found it difficult to settle, no sooner finding himself momentarily aligned with one musical milieu before he is off onto the next thing. But 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities' also seems to represent a coming-to-terms with his own musical past, with subtle nods and callbacks to notable moments in Holden’s twenty year long sonic history: the undulating dancefloor melancholy of 'In The End You’ll Know' and the spiralling kinetic pixie arpeggios and hazy vocals of 'Trust Your Feet' and 'Continuous Revolution' awaken the distant memory of his erstwhile career as an international DJ and remixer to the stars, whilst the driving synth and drum, pagan thud, synthesized strings and woozy shimmering nostalgia of his landmark 'The Inheritors' era (Resident Advisor ‘Album of the Year’) remains omnipresent ('Continuous Revolution', 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form', 'The Answer Is Yes', 'Infinite Fadeout'), albeit with a somewhat lighter and brighter sheen. “It’s full of things I’ve come to terms with – I’ve always hated the call of a woodpigeon, synonymous with unending suburban weekend boredom for me, but they’re in there ['Four Ways Down The Valley']. Or, despite learning both piano and violin I never used either on my records, ashamed of my playing and turned off by their connotations but I’m happy they’re both in there too ['Contains Multitudes']. And for a while in the mid 2010s I couldn’t hear dance music anymore, a single kick drum had me lunging for the skip button, but I’ve found my way back to that – reclaiming the bits I liked (the hypnotism, the utopianism, the wide ranging cross cultural freedom) and leaving behind what I don’t need.” And as if to prove he means business, after a prolonged absence of almost ten years Holden has recently dipped his toe back into the remixing culture where he built his name, with XAM Duo (Sonic Cathedral), GoGo Penguin (Blue Note) and Lost Souls of Saturn (R&S) the latest blessed recipients of a Holden rework. The hefty album title ('Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities') meanwhile is suitably suggestive of the utopian sense of hope, freedom and transformative potential that resonated throughout early rave culture, but it was actually discovered scrawled in Holden’s own notebook after a long night of delirious hyper-focussed coding, as a message to his future self. Holden is a long-time advocate of Cycling74’s Max/MSP programming language, and most recently he has used it to build an ambitious custom modular sequencing and synthesis environment to facilitate his live performances, which he also (in keeping with his collectivist impulses) plans to make available to other budding music makers via his website. “A song isn’t the recording that starts at 0:00 and finishes at 4:32 or whatever,” he explains. “It’s the system, the rules, the limits, the relationships contained in it, and it could’ve turned out so many other ways. If a song had only two midi controls to play the whole thing you could map it to a walk around a 2D map, but a real song is a journey in some kind of high dimensional space, and also the knowledge of all the other journeys it could’ve been. Probably a metaphor for life, I dunno.” 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities' will be released via Holden’s own proudly DIY Border Community label on 31st March 2023, on double vinyl, CD, digital download and streaming. For the album’s distinctive hand drawn artwork and accompanying twelve page comic booklet insert, Holden called upon Amsterdam-based illustrator and musician Jorge Velez to help flesh out the visual component of the immersive fantasy world that is conjured up in 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities'. The result is a twelve panel storyboard (one per track) documenting the rave rituals of an alternative reality populated by magical creatures, which owes much to the pair’s shared love of the soothing retro-futurist colour palettes of the late and truly great French cartoonist Moebius (included in pdf form exclusively with Bandcamp downloads).

On his first two EPs—2019’s *Play Me Something Nice* and *Does It Make You Feel Good?* (2020)—Glasgow songwriter Joesef cooked up an intoxicating blend of DIY pop, heart-bruised soul, and twinkling electronica. When it came time to record his debut album with co-producer Barney Lister, however, Joesef felt he needed to create something with a richer palette, a record that would pack even more of an emotional punch than the ones he’d landed on those deeply confessional EPs. “I definitely wanted it to feel darker,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted it to feel like it was at night, at three in the morning.” As the sampled voice that opens the liquid, Tame Impala-like groove of “It’s Been a Little Heavy Lately” attests, *Permanent Damage* came from a very real place of darkness and turmoil, with Joesef wrenching himself away from an intense but toxic relationship. “Before I got into the album, it felt like I was at the bottom of a really big hole,” he says. “But it gave me a positive outlet to channel my feelings. I used to think it was a bit wanky when people said making music was cathartic, but it really does give you clarity over the situations you’re discussing.” Moving from the stark, rain-soaked snapshots of “East End Coast” to the strings-and-’70s-soul defiance of “Last Orders” and “All Good,” these songs are candid postcards from harder times. Ultimately, though, as the tracks work through myriad sounds and styles, *Permanent Damage* is a story about pulling yourself through the pain and sadness to emerge stronger and wiser. “When I listen to it, it sounds like a different person to me now,” he says. “I don’t feel like that boy anymore. I’ve come out the other side of it.” Let Joesef take you through that journey, track by track. **“Permanent Damage”** “This is the overture for the album. I wanted it to feel like the album was picking you up and holding you close then putting you back down at the end. This sets the scene. The strings are minor and dissonant and it’s open-ended. Before the strings went on this, it had a totally different vibe; the strings just brought it to life in a way that I never thought possible.” **“It’s Been a Little Heavy Lately”** “It’s quite conversational but this whole record is quite conversational. There’s the sample at the start which says, ‘I guess you could say I’m totally fucked up.’ It’s from a \[US director\] Gregg Araki film called *Totally F\*\*\*ed Up* that really influenced the aesthetics of the album. Basically, I’m telling everybody: ‘Sit down, you’re in for a wild ride.’ This track was the first breakthrough for me. I love the texture of it. It’s got a Tame Impala kind of feel.” **“East End Coast”** “I’d moved to London and felt so isolated without my family and friends. I’d met this person and I was trying to capture the idea of this tempestuous relationship that was so up in the air and unpredictable, but at least we had each other. It felt like the world was ending around us, and I felt so disconnected from my hometown. The song is a homage to that relationship and this emotional, invisible tether that I have with my hometown. That’s my mum’s voice at the end of the recording, she sent me a voicemail after I’d called her up crying and she just said, ‘Remember that I love you and you can always come home.’” **“Just Come Home with Me Tonight”** “This was the first song that I wrote for the album, before I even knew I was going to make an album. It’s about meeting my ex at a party after a couple of months of not seeing them. I feel like when you meet your ex there’s always a bit of an unspoken connection. I always felt that between me and him—and then when I met him, it just felt like that wasn’t there anymore and he just didn’t care. I found that so devastating. But I wanted us to have one last night together. I’m on my hands and knees on that song.” **“Borderline”** “‘Borderline’ was the last song that I wrote for the album. The situation in that song is that I met somebody new and they were so unconditionally loving, like I’d never experienced before, and I just didn’t know how to take it. I realized I’d been indefinitely affected by this relationship that had come before, this idea of permanent damage and being changed forever. It was like a lightbulb moment of thinking, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve been so fucked up by this person that I cannot even handle anything that’s good for me.’” **“Didn’t Know How (to Love You)”** “I’d done something bad—I can’t say what—and I felt so guilty for such a long time. This song is me saying, ‘There’s only so long you can feel guilty for something.’ Most of the album, I feel like I’m on my hands and knees trying to make sense of things. But this song is when I stand up and I’m like, ‘Hmm, I don’t think this is working for me anymore.’ There’s definitely an element of defiance. I don’t want to slag anybody off or cause any drama but this song is just basically like, T-shirts off, me and you outside now!” **“Apt 22”** “‘Apt 22’ is like a song I’ve always wanted to make—I grew up listening to The Mamas & The Papas and stuff like that. Guy Garvey of Elbow is singing on this. He does his radio show in the same studio we were in. We became like a big family. We’d drink wine and have a curry while he’d tell us so many stories. One day, we finished that song and Barney went, ‘Go on, ask him.’ He just goes up to the mic, clears his throat and then this angelic voice comes out of this big man. That was an amazing experience.” **“Shower”** “There’s a lot of mad production in this song. The bass is a Moog and the guitars are detuned so it has this kind of spacey, ethereal vibe. At the end, the ‘choir’ on it is just me and Barney trying to make ourselves sound like as many people as possible. We burst out laughing because of how ridiculous we sounded. Lyrically, the song is about the mundane reminders of the fact that someone isn’t there. Me and my ex-partner used to have sex in the shower and I’d be getting in the shower realizing I couldn’t even have a shower without noticing they weren’t there.” **“Joe”** “A lot of the album is about someone else, but this song is about me. I’ve struggled mentally since I was younger and this song is basically me calling out that voice, that voice that tells you that you aren’t good or you could have done better. Barney said, ‘Let’s put these big Fleetwood Mac drums behind it…’ and we weren’t shying away from the fact that the harmonies were very major. I was saying, ‘This sounds like the fucking Eagles, I can’t put this on the album!’ But it just made it better.” **“Blue Car”** “This is definitely the bleakest moment on the album. It had dawned on me how much of my relationship revolved around partying and alcohol. There was this kind of toxic co-dependency between each other. I love how the production sounds like a bad trip until you get to the end and there’s this big release. I wanted the production to swirl and dissipate in and out around the chorus. When I say, ‘Pick up the speed and cut the brakes,’ you hear a car moving behind your head. The way it’s all panned, it feels like you have a Range Rover reversing over your head.” **“Moment”** “This is about how me and my ex went back to try to make it work. It just felt like everything had changed. The way we were speaking to each other felt so hollow; everything was different, even the way he smelled. So much time had passed that I had romanticized this person to the point that they didn’t exist anymore. I think that’s the danger of nostalgia. It’s like a terminal illness. It’s going to kill you in the end. Sometimes it’s not worth going back to because it doesn’t exist anymore. Or maybe it never existed.” **“Last Orders”** “This song is me emotionally checking out of that relationship in the context of leaving them at the bar when I said that I would meet them. Just walking away. The sky is falling over you and I’m walking away. It’s the point in the album where I’m out the door. It was one of the last songs that we made, and I started to think, ‘Oh God, it seems like there’s a story here.’ I had a lot of fun making that tune. It’s a song I’ve always wanted to make.” **“All Good”** “It’s like the end credits are rolling. This song feels like it would keep going by itself. It’s got a Northern soul vibe to it—I can imagine people in Fred Perry tops and big flares dancing to it. The verses talk about how difficult life can be but it doesn’t matter because nothing’s ever easy, but I promise you it’ll be all good. I feel like I needed to end the album in that way—for myself, first and foremost—because I’d been through this very traumatic, devastating experience. I’d been with this person to the point that I didn’t recognize myself. In the end, change doesn’t always have to be a negative thing. It always makes you a better person, regardless of whether you feel that at the time. Time passes and you eventually find yourself feeling better. It’s always worth making it through the other side.”

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

Brimming with astrological fervor and unbridled emotionality, *Red Moon in Venus* finds the Colombian American sensation zeroing in on love. From the proud promises behind “Endlessly” to the sweet little profundities of “Love Between...,” the album plays with genre without losing cohesion or connection. On the guest front, Don Toliver matches her R&B potency amid the polyrhythmic blur of “Fantasy,” while Omar Apollo brings his own certain charm to the sumptuous duet “Worth the Wait.” Yet most of the album keeps the spotlight rightfully on her, leading to breathtaking moments like “I Wish You Roses” and the Sade-esque “Blue.” And while *Red Moon in Venus* returns the artist to a primarily English-language mode, she hasn’t dispatched entirely with the approach taken on 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞*. She brings bilingual lyricism alongside orchestral accents for “Como Te Quiero Yo” and retro grooves for “Hasta Cuando.”

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

It's been a long long time coming, but we are delighted to finally announce the release of our new album False Lankum, along with the premiere of the first single, Go Dig My Grave.  The album was recorded across 2021 & 2022 by our longtime producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy in Hellfire Studio and Guerilla Studios in Ireland. The cover was shot by Steve Gullick, famed for photographing Nirvana amongst many greats, with a Gustav Doré illustration featured in the lower third, designed and laid out by Alison Fielding. It is our most ambitious record to date and we are very proud to finally unleash it upon the world. As well as the standard black vinyl, we will be releasing a Limited Edition Burnt Orange Transparent Double LP & CD. There will be an opportunity to obtain four limited edition prints, by legendary photographer Steve Gullick. The individual prints will be available across the world, with a signed edition available from Bandcamp.

The first song on Lil Yachty’s *Let’s Start Here.* is nearly seven minutes long and features breathy singing from Yachty, a freewheeling guitar solo, and a mostly instrumental second half that calls to mind TV depictions of astral projecting. “the BLACK seminole.” is an extremely fulfilling listen, but is this the same guy who just a few months earlier delivered the beautifully off-kilter and instantly viral “Poland”? Better yet, is this the guy who not long before that embedded himself with Detroit hip-hop culture to the point of a soft rebrand as *Michigan Boy Boat*? Sure is. It’s just that, as he puts it on “the BLACK seminole.,” he’s got “No time to joke around/The kid is now a man/And the silence is filled with remarkable sounds.” We could call the silence he’s referring to the years since his last studio album, 2020’s *Lil Boat 3*, but he’s only been slightly less visible than we’re used to, having released the aforementioned *Michigan Boy Boat* mixtape while also lending his discerning production ear to Drake and 21 Savage’s ground-shaking album *Her Loss*. Collaboration, though, is the name of the game across *Let’s Start Here.*, an album deeply indebted to some as yet undisclosed psych-rock influences, with repeated production contributions from onetime blog-rock darlings Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and Patrick Wimberly, as well as multiple appearances from Diana Gordon, a Queens, New York-hailing singer who made a noise during the earliest parts of her career as Wynter Gordon. Also present are R&B singer Fousheé and Beaumont, Texas, rap weirdo Teezo Touchdown, though rapping is infrequent. In fact, none of what Yachty presents here—which includes dalliances with Parliament-indebted acid funk (“running out of time”), ’80s synthwave (“sAy sOMETHINg,” “paint THE sky”), disco (“drive ME crazy!”), symphonic prog rock (“REACH THE SUNSHINE.”), and a heady monologue called “:(failure(:”—is in any way reflective of any of Yachty’s previous output. Which begs the question, where did all of this come from? You needn’t worry about that, says Yachty on the “the ride-,” singing sternly: “Don’t ask no questions on the ride.”

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

Originally, Ruban Nielson thought his fifth album under the Unknown Mortal Orchestra name would be a “really happy, really cheesy” one, an “Eye of the Tiger”-inspired break from the nocturnal, often introspective psych and funk for which he’s become known. “I was worried that the music that I made before the pandemic was so weird and reflective that the pandemic could push me too far,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted to create something that wasn’t so much an expression of the time as it was an antidote for it—music that would help you escape.” But in navigating a series of family-related traumas—including a terminal diagnosis for his maternal uncle in his mother’s native Hawaii—Nielson was reminded that life is rarely that simple. In further connecting with his family heritage and history—and working alongside his brother and former Mint Chicks bandmate, Kody—he realized that everything he was writing couldn’t help but braid together elements both happy and sad. It resulted in his first double album, recorded, in large part, in a new home studio he built in Palm Springs. “The reality is that I was feeling extremely reflective about my family, thinking about the way we grew up,” he says. “Being ultra nostalgic and realizing that everything our family’s gone through has culminated in where we are now, which is a mixture of really tragic things and really beautiful things. I was just thinking that if I could make the record somehow feel that way, then that would be a good record.” Here, Nielson takes us inside a few of the album’s songs. **“Meshuggah”** “As I write more songs, there’s more and more territory that I haven’t explored, so I sometimes find myself in these little songwriting challenges. I think the original idea here was trying to think of a way to make a love song that used sugar as imagery, because after so many songs have been written, the history of pop music is so broad and so clichéd. So, I thought, what if the metaphor wasn’t sweetness? What if the metaphor was actually energy? Because sugar is a source of metabolic energy. I don’t think anyone’s written a love song that’s this cold, scientific assessment of the way that sugar—or love, or somebody’s love, or the way somebody is—somehow infuses you with power, and almost in a scary way.” **“That Life”** “‘That Life’ had a lot to do with the first six months or so of living and working in Palm Springs. It’s an interesting place because almost every day, it’s peaceful and sunny. But most of the Coachella Valley is really windy and noisy and spooky at night. So, it’s quite creepy—it feels kind of haunted, and I think that’s the thing that makes me like it so much, that it’s a mix between something really pleasant and something that seems to be hiding something dark. ‘That Life’ was taking impressions of all kinds of things that were going on around me—or things that I imagined were going on—and piecing them together in a kind of panorama. I was thinking about Palm Springs as Hieronymus Bosch’s *The Garden of Earthly Delights*. There’s all these kinds of hideous stories all around.” **“Layla”** “’Layla’ is me imagining the mindset of my mother when she was young, and my uncle when he was a young boy—thinking about how they both wanted to escape. I’ve always felt kind of weird about how one of my uncles came to Portland, and my mom went to New Zealand. I just was always like, ‘Why would you want to leave paradise?’ But for Hawaiians, Hawaii isn’t paradise—it’s just home. And sometimes, home is heavy. At the beginning, the idea was almost like, let’s write a reggae song, like one that my uncle would have written. But it’s not a reggae song—there’s not really that many reggae elements to it. You can just hear that somebody had reggae in mind when they were writing it.” **“Weekend Run”** “My family never had any money, and a lot of my family, they just do regular jobs—anything from working for a moving company, being a house painter or builder, or scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. I think ‘Weekend Run’ is just an ode to the weekend, to the idea that the weekend is really special, and it didn’t just appear out of nature. The weekend was won by the labor movement, and a lot of people take something like that for granted. People actually came up with it and made it happen, and people could still come up with ideas like that. People could still fight for things like that.” **“Nadja”** “I think it’s a bit of a collage, of a few specific experiences that I feel like, because I’ve experienced them multiple times, it just can’t be a coincidence. There is this part in the song where I sing about being in a bed where someone you love has been sleeping. You miss them so much, and then you find one of their hairs, a strand of hair on the pillow, and then you just feel so dysfunctionally kind of obsessed with the person, just not knowing what to do with the hair. You can’t throw it away, or do you just leave it there? I remember finding a strand of hair from someone that I was in love with, and I tied the string around my finger, coiled it up and then just ate it, just thinking where else is it going to go? I have to put this hair inside me because I don\'t know what else to do. It’s something strangely, slightly creepy. But also, I don’t know—it’s true.” **“Keaukaha”** “Keaukaha is almost like an emotional landscape. We got back from Hawaii, me and my brother, and during the time when we were mixing the record, we did a bunch of jamming and recording. Keaukaha is part of Hilo. It’s the place where my mom grew up as a little kid. This is really exactly the way I felt coming back that time, so we called it Keaukaha because that\'s where we’d been spending time, and that’s where Mom took us to show us where she grew up, in the house she was in. It’s a heavy place for me because there’s just so many things that happened there. I wouldn’t say bittersweet, but it’s just that some things are just so heavy that it’s impossible to enjoy them 100 percent. There’s just so much weight and history.” **“I Killed Captain Cook”** “I suppose I was in some way looking for approval from my mom because my mom loves that story so much. Over the pandemic, I had some time on my hands, and I was teaching myself photography. So, I went to Hawaii and took my daughter, and then I asked my mom if she would want to dance to the song, and I would try and film it on this camera I’d bought, and maybe that could be a little project. I kind of started to see how all these things all fit together into one project. I just had to kind of look at it through the lens of where I was now, not where I originally thought the album was going to end up. It’s a Hawaiian song to me, my interpretation of slack-key and hapa haole music.” **“Drag”** “Kody and I were working in Palm Springs with \[bassist\] Jake \[Portrait\], and we kind of just started riffing. It was a really nice day, and we captured the way the afternoon felt. Before we start making music, one of my favorite things to do is to try to cultivate a mood. Try to find something special, try to have a day that feels special, and then right in the middle of experiencing that day, try and make some music. Hopefully, that translates and captures the moment, so you can revisit it whenever you want. That’s ‘Drag.’”

Created between the dry freeways of Palm Springs, California and lush coastlines and Hilo, Hawai’i, V is the definitive Unknown Mortal Orchestra record. Led by Hawaiian-New Zealand artist Ruban Nielson, V draws from the rich traditions of West Coast AOR, classic hits, weirdo pop and Hawaiian Hapa-haole music. With his sharpest-ever ear for “making it UMO”, Ruban evokes blue skies, beachside cocktail bars and hotel pools without ever turning a blind eye to the darkness that lurks below perfect, pristine surfaces. The road to V began in April 2019 when UMO headed to Indio, California, to perform at Coachella. For that fortnight, Ruban booked an Airbnb in nearby Palm Springs and brought his family along. Between performances, he realized the desert resort city’s palm tree-lined streets reminded him of a childhood spent playing by white hotel swimming pools with his siblings while their entertainer parents performed in showbands across the Pacific and East Asia. A year later, Ruban started thinking about Palm Springs again as the COVID-19 pandemic loomed on the horizon. After contemplating spending lockdown at home in Portland, he purchased a house in Palm Springs. Having spent a decade touring, Ruban knew he had health issues and burnout to address. As America went into lockdown, he settled in for enforced downtime. Under the palm trees, he had the space to reflect. He felt a sense of gratitude for the lifestyle music had afforded him. The warm, dry weather cleared up his lifelong asthma issues, he found himself singing better than ever before, and new songs began to flow out of him in his home studio. When he recorded his third album Multi-Love, Ruban incorporated disco elements into the lo-fi funk-rock dreamscapes of his first two records. Coming from a punk background where the slogan “disco sucks” had been casually thrown around, he found a subversive glee in flipping the script. On V, you can hear a continuation of this impulse in the arid disco-funk of ‘Meshuggah’. “There are two kinds of musical taste, constructed and instinctual,” Ruban said. “Taste as clout is dangerous to art, in my opinion. Then, there’s music that will send a shiver down your spine. You didn’t ask for that shiver. It just happens.” During the pandemic’s early days, Ruban’s brother Kody had flown from New Zealand to Palm Springs to help him with his recordings. When they talked about records that moved them in that spine-shivering manner, Ruban started thinking about the ubiquitous 70s AM radio rock and 80s pop songs he remembered hearing as a child while their parents were working as entertainers. He wanted to write his version of those records, leading to the two glorious uptempo singles UMO released in 2021, ‘Weekend Run’ and ‘That Life’. However, the golden good times never last forever. As health issues began to plague one of his Hawaiian uncles, Ruban realized he was coming face to face with a sharper, more acute sense of mortality looming. Putting his recordings aside, he helped his mother and another of her brothers move home from New Zealand and Portland to Hawai’i to be with him. As they settled in, Ruban began dividing his time between Palm Springs and Hilo on the northeastern side of the big island. He knew that part of his connection with Palm Springs came from how it evoked aspects of his childhood. For Ruban, Hawai’i had a similar association, but it also brought back faded memories of the darker side of his parents' lifestyle. On those trips, he heard those classic AM radio rock records he’d talked about with Kody everywhere. They were inextricably intertwined with the palm trees, swimming pools, and glamorized hedonism he’d internalized since childhood. There's a type of music in Hawai'i called Hapa-haole (Half white). You can hear it expressed in signature UMO style through the humid guitar-led atmosphere of V's penultimate song, ‘I Killed Captain Cook’. Although the songs are presented in a traditional Hawaiian manner, they're mostly sung in English. Having been influenced by Hawaiian music since UMO’s first album, Ruban saw a space for himself within the tradition. When he reflected on his success, he realized he had the responsibility and platform to represent Hapa-haole music on the global stage. After reuniting with Kody at a cousin’s wedding in Hawai’i, the brothers traveled to Palm Springs. There, with assistance from their father, Chris Nielson (saxophone/flute) and longstanding UMO member Jake Portrait, they brought everything Ruban had been mulling over about together through the fourteen singalong anthems, cinematic instrumentals and mischievous pop songs that make up V. “In Hawaii, everything shifted off of me and my music,” Ruban said. “Suddenly, I was spending more time figuring out what others need and what my role is within my family. I also learned that things I thought were true of myself are bigger than I thought. My way of making mischief - that’s not just me - that’s my whole Polynesian side. I thought I was walking away from music to focus on family, but the two ended up connecting.” The first double album in the UMO discography, V, makes a strong case for itself as Ruban’s sunbleached masterpiece while simultaneously recontextualizing and enriching the journey that led him to this moment. Alongside Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Pulp’s Different Class, and Prince’s 1999, it’s a breakthrough work from a mid-career artist in full control of his creative powers. Most of all, V is about having fun while making music and art that transcends clout and currency. In the process, Ruban effortlessly reclaims taste as a personal part of selfhood; in that reclamation, he propels UMO to breathtaking new creative heights.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji. “With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.