The Guardian's Best Albums of 2025 So Far

Introduced to the world as a bubbly TikTok influencer, the singer/dancer/actor spent 2024 pulling off what looked like a total reinvention—screaming over the remix of mentor Charli xcx’s “Von dutch” remix, then releasing the steamy “Diet Pepsi,” a single charming enough to seduce even the doubters. In fact, Addison Rae was just reintroducing herself. “I always knew that I wanted to make music, I knew I wanted to perform,” Rae tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “That was something that was really obvious to me since I was a little girl.” And TikTok was the best way for a teenager from Lafayette, Louisiana, to catapult herself into the seemingly inaccessible world of showbiz. Pursuing her pop-star dreams in LA studio sessions to write the songs that would become her first EP (2023’s polarizing *AR*), Rae found herself deferring to the professionals. “When I moved here and started doing sessions, I was like, ‘I need as much guidance as possible,’” she says. “Then, over time, I really started to lean on myself. I really started to lean on my abilities.” In February 2024, Rae met songwriter/producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (both part of the publishing camp of Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin) and wrote the effervescent hook of “Diet Pepsi” that same day. “\[‘Diet Pepsi’\] was such a natural beginning to all of this,” says Rae. “I think it was a perfect introduction in so many ways.” Cue a string of curveball singles, each one presenting an unexpected new facet, from the moody, minor-key “High Fashion” to the Björk-inspired “Headphones On.” It feels apt, then, that her debut album drops the “Rae” and simply goes by *Addison*—a collection of dreamy, intense pop songs that sound like self-discovery, tied together less by genre than by mood. Tracks like “Fame Is a Gun” and “Money Is Everything” expertly straddle camp and sincerity: “You’ve got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life!” she winks on the former, a dizzy synth-pop number on the perils of hitting the big time. The songs on *Addison* are not exactly club bangers, though they’re informed by Rae’s childhood as a dancer; nor are any of them obvious hits. But Rae relished the opportunity to let her creative instincts run wild. “Once you start playing it safe, feeling like, ‘Okay, I’m going to respond with what people want,’ you lose all your freedom,” she says. “You lose all desire for the whole purpose of starting it, and feeling like it’s a form of expression and a reflection. It’s more scary to let that go and give people exactly what they think they want.” As for what Rae learned in the process of writing the album? “Let yourself play. Let yourself have fun, let yourself mess up,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘All right, this is the real me now.’ No—it’s always been the real me, and those experiences have completely guided and shaped me to where I am now. It is about arrival—arrival to who I feel like I’ve become, and who has experienced all these ups and downs, to now land here, in this person that I am now.”

Two decades into their career, UK metalcore stars Architects know that name recognition isn’t always an asset. “We’re aware that it takes a lot more to get people’s attention on your 11th album,” songwriter and drummer Dan Searle tells Apple Music. “We recognized that we had to aim really, really high if we wanted to grab people’s attention.” The result is *The Sky, the Earth & All Between*, an album that explodes with punishing breakdowns, bubbling electronics, and Sam Carter’s impressive scream/sing/scream acrobatics. “We felt strongly that there was another gear we had uncovered,” Searle says. “We experimented a lot on the last couple albums, and that had opened a lot of doors. Suddenly, I could see this world for us to head into. There was this prophecy in our heads about what we could achieve.” With kinetic singles that take on tribalism (“Whiplash”), mortality (“Blackhole”), and disgruntled fans (“Seeing Red”), Searle realized early on that the record didn’t have a unifying lyrical theme. “I spent five months trying to think of an album title that would put a nice little bow on it, that was memorable and poetic, so I ended up using a lyrical reference,” he says. “I just felt like it suited the mood and aesthetic of the album.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Elegy”** “I don’t think we’ve ever had a song like this before. Thematically, it’s about defiance. It’s about overcoming obstacles, overcoming doubt—other people’s doubt. I think this might not even have existed in reality, but we had created this mindset where people doubted us. So, it just felt like the right thing to open the album with a statement of defiance: ‘Fuck you if you doubted us. We’re still here.’ It’s complete bravado—a bit of a chest-out, standing-tall statement of belief and intent.” **“Whiplash”** “This song is about tribalism, the world we live in today. I don’t really gravitate towards writing songs that are political statements these days. Looking back at our previous work, we’ve become different people. So, I try not to do that anymore because I just don’t know how I’m going to feel next year. This song is a bit broader: It’s such a divided world right now, and there’s so many forces contributing towards that. So, it’s a bit of a cynical commentary on how we’re incapable of treating each other with respect when we have a difference of opinion and see the world a different way.” **“Blackhole”** “This one revisits some themes from our older stuff a little bit. It’s pondering mortality and the battles that we face day to day—and how those battles look when they’re silhouetted by the backdrop of dying, by how insignificant so much of our suffering is in the face of inevitability. Obviously, all of us see friends or family get sick, and this stirs up all sorts of thoughts and feelings within us. When we wrote that song, that had come up in our lives. I was asking myself, ‘What’s this all about? And why am I wasting my time suffering over nothing?’” **“Everything Ends”** “This is about acknowledging that no matter how much I’m suffering in a particular moment, that suffering will end. That could be dying, but it could also be when you’re in a bad space and it feels like it’s forever. And then you wake up one day, like, ‘Oh, I feel kind of better. And I don’t know when that started happening.’ A lot of it is conversational in the sense that I’m almost communicating with my partner in the song. There’s a little bit of excuse-making and apology. I’m aware that when I’m suffering, the person that has to bear the brunt of that is my wife. And that’s probably the same for everyone—their partner gets the worst of it. So, the song is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, the sun will rise again.” **“Brain Dead”** “This is a collaboration with House of Protection, and I feel like this is probably the most fun song on the record. It was definitely written in that spirit. I had this idea for a song called ‘Brain Dead’ for a while, and it suited this hardcore punk aesthetic that we delved into on this song. I was thinking about modern life and the way we anaesthetize ourselves, whether it’s through phone addiction or alcohol or weed or brainwashing ourselves with news media or whatever. So many of us are unconsciously just giving up our lives, and we kind of yearn to be numbed and not have to feel too much. Would we rather just be dumb and ignorant? There’s a part of me that would. So, it’s a tongue-in-cheek hardcore anthem for stupidity.” **“Evil Eyes”** “On this song, I’m anthropomorphizing my own inner dialogue of anxiety as something that’s outside of me. It’s sort of like me saying, ‘I’m going to overcome this; I’m overcoming this.’ But the verses are about me just being furious at the anxiety and trying to attack it and venting my frustration at dealing with these feelings all the time. But ultimately, the song is quite a positive one. There is some defiance, but it’s more about me overcoming myself and overcoming the self-destructive qualities that I have, so I can live another day.” **“Landmines”** “This is about me knowing that I need to do things to be a better person, a better husband, a better dad, a better human being—but ignoring those things, setting them aside, making excuses, and carrying on living in a less-than-desirable way. It’s about being self-destructive, and it’s about knowing you’re doing it and carrying on anyway. I feel as though I see that everywhere. It’s like when we know we’ve got to do something, but we don’t do it. And we all experience that. We know what’s good for us, but we so often don’t do it. And we make excuses all the time. We justify our apathy. It’s part of being human.” **“Judgement Day” (feat. Amira Elfeky)** “I think this is a bit of an old-man song in a way. It’s about digitally induced dread, this experience of living under the cloud of what the internet shows me and the way that it distills all the terrible things that are happening in the world into a neat little package for me every day. So, I’m asking, ‘How natural is that? Are we really wired to deal with that?’ I really feel for young people, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up under that cloud. I’ve got young kids, and I wonder what it’s doing to them. I’m not sure it’s a good thing.” **“Broken Mirror”** “I suppose this is a little bit like ‘Everything Ends’ in the sense that I think the song is me getting mad at myself about being a bad partner. I’m probably a little bit hard on myself at times, and when I feel that I’ve gone too far lyrically and I’m being too brutal on myself, Sam usually reads the lyrics and says, ‘No, that’s exactly what it should be like.’ So, I guess Sam probably experiences this maybe even more than me. But I was just trying to examine who I am and how I operate within the framework of a human relationship and how much I ask another person to tolerate.” **“Curse”** “Our producer told me, ‘You can only have one old-man song on this album,’ but I was freaking out about getting old. I’m going gray. I’m reaching that point in my life where the signs of aging are very clear. We can laugh about it, and we ought to just accept it, of course. But it’s weird because my brother died when he was 28, and for a long time, that fueled this total acceptance of aging. I had about eight years of not caring that I’m another year older because Tom died when he was 28. So, every year beyond that is a gift. And then, suddenly, that fuel just ran out. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. I’m going to be 40, 50, 60…’ But I know I should just make the best of it and enjoy the ride.” **“Seeing Red”** “Before this record, we did a couple of albums that were less heavy. The internet gave us a bit of a hard time about it, and we took it personally. So, I had this idea that we should write a heavy song about fans wanting us to be heavy, but we should make it fun and a bit of a joke. I think it’s probably one of the first songs we’ve ever written where I had lyrics before anything else. One of the first lines is, ‘I felt it when they said, “We only ever love you when you’re seeing red.”’ That very much set the tone. For all the heavy themes on this record, a lot of it was made in the spirit of fun—especially this song.” **“Chandelier”** “It’s hard to know how to end an album, but this was very much a purpose-built album-closer. It’s got a little bit of the same DNA as ‘Elegy,’ so it felt like a good way to bookend the album. At first, it felt like quite a bleak song lyrically, but after we finished it, I just had this complete 180 where, suddenly, the lyrics were speaking more of how beautiful life is and how it’ll still be beautiful without us. The world continues to evolve after our light goes out, so we’re just here to enjoy it as best we can and witness it and try to understand it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And that’s OK.”

The secret to Aya Sinclair’s uneasy mix of harsh noise and club music is its intimacy: No matter how blown out or mechanistic it gets, you always feel the presence of a regular old person behind it. The product of a teenage diet of Aphex Twin and Autechre on one hand and screamo and nu metal on the other, *hexed!* is, first and foremost, a therapeutic endeavor, fragile and balladic here (“droplets”), ragey there (“I am the pipe I hit myself with”), beautiful (“peach”) and spooky (“Time at the Bar”), and above all, extreme. And for music Sinclair has said was in some respects about her sobriety, it’s refreshingly funny (“off to the ESSO”). She isn’t reflecting on her nightmarish bad times—she’s bringing them back to life with clarity and power.

Scores of Puerto Rican artists have used their music to express love and pride in their island, but few do so with the same purposeful vigor as Bad Bunny. The superstar from Vega Baja is responsible for numerous songs that center his homeland, from unofficial national anthems like “Estamos Bien” and “El Apagón” to powerful posse cuts like “ACHO PR” with veteran reggaetón luminaries Arcángel, De La Ghetto, and Ñengo Flow. More recently, he’s been decidedly direct about his passions and concerns, expressed in vivid detail on 2024’s standalone single “Una Velita.” Positioned as his sixth proper studio album, *DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS* centers Puerto Rico in his work more so than before, celebrating various musical styles within its legacy. While 2023’s *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* validated his trapero past with a more modern take on the sound he emerged with in the 2010s, this follow-up largely diverges from hip-hop, demonstrating his apparent aversion to repeating himself from album to album. Instead, house music morphs into plena on “EL CLúB,” the latter genre resurfacing later in splendorous fashion on “CAFé CON RON” with Los Pleneros de la Cresta. Befitting its title, “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR” is set to a sleek reggaetón rhythm for prime-time perreo vibes, as is also the case for “KETU TeCRÉ” and the relatively more rugged “EoO.” A bold salsa statement, “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” pays apparent homage to some seminal Fania releases by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, with traces of the instrumental interplay of “Juanito Alimaña” and an irresistible coda reminiscent to that of “Periódico de Ayer.” Regardless of style, the political and the personal thematically blur throughout the album, a new year’s gloom hanging over “PIToRRO DE COCO” and a metaphorical wound left open after the poignant “TURISTA.” As before, Bad Bunny remains an excellent and inventive collaborator, linking here primarily with other Puerto Ricans as more than a mere symbolic gesture. Sociopolitically minded indie group Chuwi join for the eclectic and vibrant “WELTiTA,” its members providing melodic vocals that both complement and magnify those of their host. Carolina natives Dei V and Omar Courtz form a formidable trio for the thumping dancehall retrofuturism of “VeLDÁ,” while RaiNao proves an exceedingly worthy duet partner on “PERFuMITO NUEVO.”

What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.

Justin Vernon has never been shy about bearing the weight of his instantly mythical origin story and his fast, unlikely trajectory into global stardom. Four albums and 18 years after *For Emma, Forever Ago*, *SABLE, fABLE* is a document of finding peace—joy, even—and a testament to the work it’s taken to get there. “This record, as much as that first record, if not more, was really just a keystone for healing and growing away from this time period where I felt trapped,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Once COVID wiped out the tour plans for 2019’s *i,i*, Vernon, like pretty much everyone, used the time to take stock, and he came to understand, among other things, that touring might not be the healthiest thing for him. So he made songs. “It really was like, ‘Okay, I’m not well and I won\'t make it if I don\'t do something to change this pretty drastically and stop the whole touring engine,” Vernon says. “There was a sense of relief and an incredible grief to say goodbye to the team that we built. I was like, ‘Let me just get these songs done and just sneak them out there so I can just get them off my chest,’ because that’s what I really needed: to finish them, to learn what was inside them.” The first of these songs, written at the beginning of lockdown, “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is a snapshot of that lonely, uncertain time, but it feels bigger and more hopeful than that to Vernon with five years of hindsight. “In the short term, it makes you feel better, but it’s also a way to lean into your grief and lean into your pain and lean into your guilt,” he says. “I think eventually when I hear that song now, I feel clean from everything that I was dealing with when I had to write it and after I wrote it. But it takes years for things to take shape and for internal things to budge.” From there, the album begins to let more light in with songs like the evidently more hopeful “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (“It’s just all about celebrating this moment right here and just sort of trying to express that heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest feeling”) and “If Only I Could Wait,” featuring vocals from Danielle Haim of HAIM, which Vernon considers nothing less than his favorite American rock band. The album splits the difference between the immediacy of *For Emma* and the often inscrutable maximalism of *22, A Million* and *i,i*. It was during the album’s long gestation that Vernon’s profile was boosted by his work with Taylor Swift, even as his own project remained in the shadows, Vernon exercising a patience and restraint and creating a healthier perspective that was nothing less than career-saving, if not life-saving. “We are insanely beautiful creatures,” he says. “And so I think where I’ve got to with the simplicity of this music, it was just like, I just want to give it to you. I just want to have it be my version of Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’—just boom, here it is. We’re not going to hide, we’re not going to put it behind any drapery. We’re going to just give it to you as much as humanly possible.”

Even listeners familiar with Dan Bejar’s trip can find first encounters with a new album forbidding, a door slammed in your face when you’d shown up looking for a good time. A misty buffet of variety-show pop (“Dan’s Boogie”), Bowie-style glam (“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”), and fake tropical jazz (“Cataract Time”), *Dan’s Boogie* is—like a lot of his albums since 2011’s *Kaputt*—both featherlight and impenetrably dense, filled with chintzy musical touches (the maudlin piano runs on “The Same Thing as Nothing at All”) and lyrical asides so flatly stated that the words strain against their meaning (“The Ignoramus of Love”: “I remix horses”). He’s funny, he’s surprising, he’s (ugh) “literate,” but most of all, you get the sense that he’s always nudging himself toward the unknown—a quality that commands respect when a lazier man would settle for a like.

There has always been something deeply old-fashioned about DJ Koze’s music, a sense of wonder and invention more closely related to the rush of a Bugs Bunny cartoon or the moony romance of a prewar pop song than anything from the modern era per se. *Music Can Hear Us* is only his fourth album in 20 years—DJ work keeps him busy, and in general he does not seem like one to hurry—and builds on the pan-electronic style he developed on *Amygdala* and *Knock Knock*. The songs shuffle between tropical pop (the Damon Albarn-featuring “Pure Love”), melancholy ambience (“A Dónde Vas?”), lightly psychedelic club tracks (“Aruna,” “Buschtaxi”), and doo-wop sweetness (“Unbelievable,” “Umaoi”) with a fluidity that can feel both playful and dizzying. Music for tickling your third eye.

The Oxford-based musician was a virtuoso DJ before he became a producer, pulling off risky transitions of genre and tempo in vinyl-only sets known to flit from hip-hop to drum ’n’ bass to free jazz. Before that, though, the artist born Felix Manuel was something of a child prodigy as a pianist and harpist. On *Under Tangled Silence*, the first Djrum full-length since 2018’s *Portrait with Firewood*, Manuel’s talents as an instrumentalist (piano, harp, and percussion) are foregrounded as much as his electronic production. On “A Tune for Us,” cascading piano gradually gives way to jungle breaks; elsewhere, heady acid house and futuristic dancehall wash up against a blissful, piano-guided ambient meditation. Manuel began the record during the pandemic lockdowns, then rebuilt it from scratch after a catastrophic hard-drive meltdown; the result is a striking, holistic portrait of an artist fully inhabiting himself.

Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”

The indie-pop band fronted by Michelle Zauner released their third album, 2021’s *Jubilee*, to massive critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. After spending five years writing *Crying in H Mart*, her best-selling memoir about grief, Zauner devoted the record to joy and catharsis, all triumphant horns and swooning synths. But for its follow-up, the ambitious polymath found herself drawn to darker, knottier themes—loneliness, desire, contemporary masculinity. She also gravitated to the indie-rock sounds of her past, recruiting producer and guitarist Blake Mills, known for his work with artists like Fiona Apple, Feist, and Weyes Blood. “\[For *Jubilee*\] we wanted to have bombastic, big instrumentation with lots of strings and horns; I wanted this to come back to a more guitar-oriented record,” Zauner tells Apple Music. “I think I’m going back to my roots a little bit more.” When she began to write the band’s fourth record in 2022, Zauner found inspiration in an unlikely literary juxtaposition: Greek mythology, gothic romance classics, and works that she wryly deemed as part of the “incel canon” à la Bret Easton Ellis’ *American Psycho*. From such seemingly disparate sources emerged the gorgeously bleak songs of *For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)*, whose title is presented with an implied wink, acknowledging the many women songwriters whose work is reduced to “sad girl music.” Indeed, the atmosphere on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is less straightforwardly sad, and more…well, it’s complicated. On “Leda,” the story of a strained relationship unfolds by way of Greek myths in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. “Little Girl,” a deceptively sweet-sounding ballad about a father estranged from his daughter, opens with a spectacularly abject image: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite.” And on the fascinatingly eerie “Mega Circuit,” on which legendary drummer Jim Keltner lays down a mean shuffle, Zauner paints a twisted tableau of modern manhood—muddy ATVs, back-alley blowjobs, “incel eunuchs”—somehow managing to make it all sound achingly poetic with lines like, “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded/Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths.” The universe Zauner conveys on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is sordid and strange, though not without beauty in the form of sublime guitar sounds or striking turns of phrase. (“I never knew I’d find my way into the arms/Of men in bars,” she sings on the wistful “Men in Bars,” which includes the album’s only feature from…Jeff Bridges?!) As for the title’s bone-dry humor—sardonically zesty castanet and tambourine add extra irony to “Winter in LA,” on which Zauner imagines herself as a happier woman, writing sweet love songs instead of…these.

Nao released her debut album, 2016’s *For All We Know*, to universal acclaim, but it was her 2018 follow-up effort, *Saturn*, that saw the stars truly align for the Nottingham-born, East London-raised singer-songwriter. Drawing inspiration from the tumult of her first Saturn return—a concept astrologers explain as a transitional life stage that recurs every 27 years or so—the record was a Mercury Prize- and Grammy Award-nominated triumph. *Jupiter*, the de facto sequel to *Saturn*, picks up with Nao seven years, two children, and one life-changing diagnosis later. Much has changed. “When I wrote *Saturn* I was in my Saturn return and going through a difficult time because I had gone through a breakup, and then I got an autoimmune condition called chronic fatigue syndrome,” she tells Apple Music. “I became a mother in that time, so that seven- or eight-year period was really difficult because I was ill for most of it. I went on a big healing journey and mostly recovered. And I felt like when I came to make this album and I saw that Jupiter was the planet of joy, growth, and good fortune, I was like, ‘You know what? I feel like after everything I’ve been through and come out the other end, I feel like Jupiter is the perfect way to symbolize that.’ So it is the sister album to *Saturn*, I would say.” Nao first felt the “itch” to get back in the studio two years after the release of her third album, *And Then Life Was Beautiful* (2021). By her own admission, “the tunes were basically not very good,” and it took another year for her to find her rhythm again. “I was just out of practice,” she says. “I didn’t know what the theme was when I started writing, but I knew I was ready to start trying. That’s a really important part of creativity—you don’t need to have the full plan, you just follow your ideas through and see what happens, and usually it all falls into place. Once the engine got going, all these records were written in quite a short space of time.” *Jupiter* may owe its thematic identity to the cosmos, but the radiant, sun-drenched energy infused in every beat and harmony comes from a purely terrestrial source. “I was recovering from my autoimmune condition when this record finally started coming together, and being in the sun was a really important part of that,” Nao says. “I moved to LA with my partner and my kids for six months, and I ended up doing a lot of the work there. I created the vibe with LOXE and Stint, who I’ve worked with before on all my previous records, and I would just invite musicians and songwriters to come in throughout the days.” Weaving those cohesive threads into contributions from a host of new collaborators—among them Toby Gad, the songwriter behind hits for superstars including Beyoncé and John Legend—has resulted in Nao’s most self-assured body of work to date. Effervescent pop songs like “Happy People” and the cool, sparkling groove of “Poolside” blend seamlessly with the open-hearted lyricism of “30 Something” or the exquisitely minimal balladry of “Light Years.” Even “Elevate,” which leans more towards the neo-soul/R&B soundscape of previous records, has been spiked with something fresh—an electrifying guitar solo that marks the track as a highlight in an album packed full of them. The unifying factor tying this “eclectic, but consistent” package together, of course, is Jupiter itself. As Nao explains: “\[I want\] this album to find anybody that wants hope at the end of struggle. Something really cool about Jupiter is that it’s usually the planet you can see when you look up to the moon—it’s visible, so it’s always kind of hovering around us. I like the idea that we can just look up and know that good things are quite close by—we just have to keep going.” **“Wildflowers”** “I sort of imagined the program *Euphoria* when I was creating ‘Wildflowers.’ It’s this ode to time running out and fuck it, let’s just live. Let’s fall in love 100% and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t, but we lived life fully and we loved deeply. There’s this idea that we’re always getting older and older and it’s so important to be present and to live 100% of every day. We touched briefly on anxiety as well—I feel like it’s come on in the last few years, I’ve never had it before. Definitely something I need to spend time working through, but I don’t believe I’ll have it forever. And I think that idea is also a way of helping me get out of my head a little bit and stop overthinking things, which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to.” **“Elevate”** “This was written from a place similar to ‘Wildflowers.’ That moment where you do find someone and you fall in love and the rush of that early stage of a relationship when everything’s just amazing and even basic tasks, just like walking to the shop, feel so much fun. It does feel like a bit of a drug or whatever, and I know that that stage wears off for a lot of us, but it’s just trying to capture that moment in a song.” **“Happy People”** “‘Happy People’ is about finding your tribe, no matter how small it is. I think that when you get older you kind of shed a lot of things: friends or community or family that you don’t necessarily connect with anymore. The kind of people that are in my tribe are quite eccentric personalities. I feel like if I was to put them all together in the room, it would be like, ‘What is going on here?’ But they are friends that feel like family to me. My social world is quite small, and just finding contentment in that—it might be small, but it’s meaningful.” **“Light Years”** “I wrote ‘Light Years’ and I was like, ‘Oh, it feels like a really beautiful song. It feels really reminiscent of another lifetime or like an orbit.’ That was the moment where I was like, ‘I love this song. I think it’s fantastic.’ It’s this big song about love and meeting someone and knowing that you would wait for them in any realm, in any time and place. And obviously it’s got this nod to space within the song—that led me to Jupiter, which is where I found the concept and the theme. That was the real beginning of the album.” **“We All Win”** “If ‘Happy People’ is about finding your tribe, ‘We All Win’ is also about trying to bring each other up as well. How can we help and do things for each other that mean something? It’s this idea that if I win, you win too, so it’s about bringing each other up, leaving no one behind. A lot of my friends are musicians, so I feel like when someone’s making it, you feel a sense of guilt. I felt almost uncomfortable with making it, and I felt like a way of combatting that is to include people.” **“Poolside”** “This is supposed to be pure joy. Just pure fun. It’s probably the most pop-sounding record I’ve ever done. I studied jazz for four years and the culture of that was anti anything commercial, so I think I carried that with me for quite a long time. But I love commercial music. When I started ‘Poolside,’ it wasn’t my intention for it to come out that way, but it did, and I made peace with it and I was like, ‘This is kind of fire, actually.’ So in the spirit of Jupiter and joy, ‘Poolside’ made it on the record because that’s what I feel it brings.” **“30 Something”** “Coming into my thirties and not being well for a lot of it was an interesting transition. I love this song because I feel like it’s telling the story really clearly. And obviously before I was 30, I was healthy and well and living life in a way that I could absolutely do, so there was this nostalgia of holding on to being in my twenties or younger. This song is about acceptance of where I am at the moment and making peace with that… and I think I’ve definitely got there.” **“Just Dive”** “I’m in a place where I’m working on trying to find as much joy in everything that I’m doing, so ‘Just Dive’ is about taking a risk, taking the plunge, doing things in life that scare you, but doing it anyway. It’s a promise to myself in the future. I’d like to take a year out to travel with my kids. I know that might not sound risky, but I do rely a lot on \[my\] community to help me, especially with my health condition, so going at it, just my kids and my partner for a year, with no community, that’s risky for me. It sounds so small, but I\'m hoping just to do it anyway.” **“Jupiter”** “Perhaps ‘Jupiter’ has a similar message to ‘Elevate’: Finding someone that you love and who loves you and feeling like it’s taking you to another ether, and you want to stay there and not come down from it… but we always do.” **“All Of Me”** “Every album needs a sexy number. A late-night number. ‘All Of Me’ is that song. Once you hear the chorus and the bassline come together and it invokes that particular mood, you can’t help but go with it. It could be this deeply sad, heartbreaking song, it doesn’t matter who’s in the room, if the song calls for that, I’m happy to explore it. So it’s the same for a sexy number as well—if the song calls for it, I’m happy to go there.” **“Better Days”** “For me, ‘Better Days’ is a song about someone that I was close to or that I have a fractured relationship with. The chorus says it all—that I’m just waiting for a better day when it’s not so fractious and things settle themselves. I’m sure a lot of listeners can relate to that. I rarely imagine that people don’t have a fractious relationship with a sibling or a father or a cousin or a friend, but at least want it to be better. So it’s a hopeful song that this relationship can finally heal at some point.”

The remarkable thing about Mike Hadreas’ music is how he manages to fit such big feelings into such small, confined spaces. Like 2020’s *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately*, 2025’s *Glory* (also produced by the ever-subtle but ever-engaging Blake Mills) channels the kind of gothic Americana that might soundtrack a David Lynch diner or the atmospheric opening credits of a show about hot werewolves: a little campy, a little dark, a lot of passions deeply felt. The bold moments here are easy to grasp (“It’s a Mirror,” “Me & Angel”), but it’s the quieter ones that make you sit up and listen (“Capezio,” “In a Row”). Once he found beauty in letting go, now he finds it in restraint.

Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”

The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP *Okey*, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On *Big city life*, their second studio album (following 2021’s *Believer*), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen. On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.

William Tyler spent the first 15 years of his solo career bridging the fingerpicky intricacy of post-folk guitarists like John Fahey with the mellow, expansive qualities of ambient and New Age. *Time Indefinite* is both none of that and more. Built on loops made using an old cassette deck rescued from his late grandfather’s office in Jackson, Mississippi, the music here retains all the vernacular Americanness that made Tyler’s early albums feel approachable, but foregrounds texture instead of technique: the crumbling hymn of “Star of Hope,” the pastoral washes of “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” the creaking, almost horror-movie suspense of “Cabin Six” and “A Dream, a Flood.” The sum is music that has more in common with the sound manipulations of Jim O’Rourke or the late-’60s work of a composer like Gavin Bryars, whose stately, droning pieces captured the comfort of folk music within the frame of the avant-garde. He shifted gears—and he pulled it off.