The Independent's Best Albums of 2022

“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy-yet-referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and *Yeezus*-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.\" Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish-yet-austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far.

Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

In sharply differing ways, thoughts of place and identity run through Fontaines D.C.’s music. Where 2019 debut *Dogrel* delivered a rich and raw portrait of the band’s home city, Dublin, 2020 follow-up *A Hero’s Death* was the sound of dislocation, a set of songs drawing on the introspection, exhaustion, and yearning of an anchorless life on the road. When the five-piece moved to London midway through the pandemic, the experiences of being outsiders in a new city, often facing xenophobia and prejudice, provided creative fuel for third album *Skinty Fia*. The music that emerged weaves folk, electronic, and melodic indie pop into their post-punk foundations, while contemplating Irishness and how it transforms in a different country. “That’s the lens through which all of the subjects that we explore are seen through anyway,” singer Grian Chatten tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “There are definitely themes of jealousy, corruption, and stuff like that, but it’s all seen through the eyes of someone who’s at odds with their own identity, culturally speaking.” Recording the album after dark helped breed feelings of discomfort that Chatten says are “necessary to us,” and it continued a nocturnal schedule that had originally countered the claustrophobia of a locked-down city. “We wrote a lot of it at night as well,” says Chatten. “We went into the rehearsal space just as something different to do. When pubs and all that kind of thing were closed, it was a way of us feeling like the world was sort of open.” Here, Chatten and guitarist Carlos O’Connell talk us through a number of *Skinty Fia*’s key moments. **“In ár gCroíthe go deo”** Grian Chatten: “An Irish woman who lived in Coventry \[Margaret Keane\] passed away. Her family wanted the words ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo,’ which means ‘in our hearts forever,’ on her gravestone as a respectful and beautiful ode to her Irishness, but they weren’t allowed without an English translation. Essentially the Church of England decreed that it would be potentially seen as a political slogan. The Irish language is apparently, according to these people, an inflammatory thing in and of itself, which is a very base level of xenophobia. It’s a basic expression of a culture, is the language. If you’re considering that to be related to terrorism, which is what they’re implying, I think. That sounds like it’s something out of the ’70s, but this is two and a half years ago.” Carlos O’Connell: “About a year ago, it got turned around and \[the family\] won this case.” GC: “The family were made aware \[of the song\] and asked if they could listen to it. Apparently they really loved it, and they played it at the gravestone. So, that’s 100,000 Grammys worth of validation.” **“Big Shot”** CO: “When you’ve got used to living with what you have and then all these dreams happen to you, it’s always going to overshadow what you had before. The only impact that \[Fontaines’ success\] was having in my life was that it just made anything that I had before quite meaningless for a while, and I felt quite lost in that. That’s that lyric, ‘I traveled to space and found the moon too small’—it’s like, go up there and actually it’s smaller than the Earth.” GC: “We’ve all experienced it very differently and that’s made us grow in different ways. But that song just sounded like a very true expression of Carlos. Perhaps more honest than he always is with himself or other people. All the honesty was balled up into that tune.” **“Jackie Down the Line”** GC: “It’s an expression of misanthropy. And there’s toxicity there. There’s erosion of each other’s characters. It’s a very un-beneficial, unglamorous relationship that isn’t necessarily about two people. I like the idea of it being about Irishness, fighting to not be eroded as it exists in a different country. The name is Jackie because a Dubliner would be called, in a pejorative sense, a Jackeen by people from other parts of Ireland. That’s probably in reference to the Union Jack as well—it’s like the Pale \[an area of Ireland, including Dublin, that was under English governmental control during the late Middle Ages\]. So it’s this kind of mutation of Irishness or loss of Irishness as it exists, or fails to exist, in a different environment.” **“Roman Holiday”** GC: “The whole thing was colored by my experience in London. I moved to London to be with my fiancée, and as an Irish person living in London, as one of a gang of Irish people, there was that kind of searching energy, there was this excitement, there was a kind of adventure—but also this very, very tight-knit, rigorously upkept group energy. I think that’s what influenced the tune.” **“The Couple Across the Way”** GC: “I lived on Caledonian Road \[in North London\] and our gaff backed onto another house. There was a couple that lived there, they were probably mid-seventies, and they had really loud arguments. The kind of arguments where you’d see London on a map getting further, further away and hear the shout resounding. Something like *The Simpsons*. And the man would come out and take a big breath. He’d stand on his balcony and look left and right and exhale all the drama. And then he’d just turn around and go back in to his gaff to do the same thing the next day. The absurdity of that, of what we put ourselves through, to be in a relationship that causes you such daily pain, to just always turn around and go back in. I couldn’t really help but write about that physical mirror that was there. Am I seeing myself and my girlfriend in these two people, and vice versa? So I tried to tie it in to it being from both perspectives at some point.” **“Skinty Fia”** GC: “The line ‘There is a track beneath the wheel and it’s there ’til we die’ is about being your dad’s son. There are many ways in which we explore doom on this record. One of them is following in the footsteps of your ancestors, or your predecessors, no matter how immediate or far away they might have been. I’m interested in the inescapability of genetics, the idea that your fate is written. I do, on some level, believe in that. That is doom, even if your faith is leading you to a positive place. Freedom is probably the main pursuit of a lot of our music. I think that that is probably a link that ties all of the stuff that we’ve done together—autonomy.” **“I Love You”** GC: “It’s most ostensibly a love letter to Ireland, but has in it the corruption and the sadness and the grief with the ever-changing Dublin and Ireland. The reason that I wanted to call it ‘I Love You’ is because I found its cliché very attractive. It meant that there was a lot of work to be done in order to justify such a basic song and not have it be a clichéd tune. It’s a song with two heads, because you’ve got the slow, melodic verses that are a little bit more straightforward and then the lid is lifted off energetically. I think that the friction between those two things encapsulates the double-edged sword that is love.” **“Nabokov”** GC: “I think there’s a different arc to this album. The first two, I think, achieve a sense of happiness and hope halfway through, and end on a note of hope. I think this one does actually achieve hope halfway through—and then slides back into a hellish, doomy thing with the last track and stuff. I think that was probably one of the more conscious decisions that we made while making this album.”

"2020’s A Hero’s Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London’s iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as “the damnation of the deer”; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer."

“Right now, I’m still very much restless,” Charli XCX tells Apple Music. “Because I know that I would be an excellent humongous pop star. But I also unfortunately know that there’s a vision of who I am in the mainstream’s mind. It’s a constant headfuck, to be honest. While I’m a very defiant person, I’m also a human, and sometimes I do just want to be accepted, and I don’t understand why I’m not totally—even though sometimes I relish in the fact that I’m not.” Charlotte Aitchison is one of pop music’s more self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-examining artists. *CRASH* is her fifth studio album, and the final one to be released as part of a longtime record deal. It’s partly, as Charli says, an experiment. An opportunity to utilize a major label’s resources and dress up her left-leaning pop in something ultra luxe. A bold and refreshingly transparent attempt to move up a few rungs, it’s a considered move also designed to clear up some of Charli’s nagging what-ifs. “I’ve always questioned myself,” she says. “And it’s why I’ve made this entire album, really. I ask myself, am I a likable artist? Am I too opinionated? Do I look too weird? Am I too annoying? If I shut up and put out certain songs and do the right features, will I become more accepted, more liked, more commercial?” Of course, Charli’s notoriously engaged fanbase—with whom she exchanged ideas, including song lyrics, directly online for 2020’s quarantine album *how i’m feeling now*—would argue she doesn’t need any such validation. “It’s a blessing and a curse, to be extremely honest,” she says of her “Angels.” “I’m very lucky to have the fanbase that I have, who are extremely invested in literally every breath I take. They are very vocal and very smart, which draws me to them, because they’ve got great taste and amazing ideas—as I found out when doing *how i’m feeling now*. But you can’t please everyone. I’ve done so many different things that people are always going to gravitate to certain eras. Plus, I think that there’s an element where they like to root for an underdog, or an on-the-fringes personality like mine. Because we feel like we’ve been in it together for a really long time, the online discourse can be so vigorous. So I can’t lie, sometimes it’s a bit of a headfuck, because whilst I absolutely adore them, I don’t make music for them specifically when I’m sat in the studio—I’m making it for me. And I don’t think they would admire me as the artist I am if I just kept giving them what they expected.” It’s time to listen for yourself. Explore Charli’s premium pop with her own track-by-track guide. **“Crash”** “Until maybe a week before I made this song, the album was going to be called *Sorry If I Hurt You*. But one day, I was driving in my car and *CRASH* just came to me, and I called A. G. Cook. Even though he wasn\'t a *huge* part of this record, he\'s still very much my creative confidant. He agreed it made sense with the constant car references in my work—and I like the onomatopoeia, I like how it references \[2014 single\] ‘Boom Clap,’ and I like how it feels much more punchy and in-your-face than *how i’m feeling now*. I felt that the title needed a song, so A. G. and I got in the studio pretty quickly and knew we needed to make it sound extremely ’80s—if you could bottle the album into one song, this is it. We—plus the song’s co-producer George Daniel—had been sending a lot of new jack swing beats back and forth, and I knew I wanted this guitar solo, and to add these crazy Janet-esque stabs.” **“New Shapes” (feat. Caroline Polachek & Christine and the Queens)** “Caroline, Christine, and I had worked together many times in different forms, and it was time for the three of us to come together. And actually, this song was recorded a long time ago—pre-pandemic. I like how it\'s an antihero song. We’re saying to the love figure, ‘I haven\'t got what you need from me, because I am not typical. I don\'t operate in the way that you want me to. I want multiple partners. I want somebody else. I want no convention within sex and love.’ And I like that as a statement right after the sound of a car crash in the previous song. To do that song with them—two artists who I really feel have such a unique, defiant, and topsy-turvy vision of what pop music is—felt really classic and right for us. There’s a true connection between us now, in music and in our personal lives.” **“Good Ones”** “I think this song deserved to be bigger, but I will always think that of my work. But I do think it established the Cliffs Notes version of what the record is—it\'s got a darkness to it, and it\'s very pop. I like how drastic the jump was between coming out of *how i’m feeling now* into this, both sonically and in how they were made. *how i’m feeling now* was obviously my quarantine album made in my living room over five weeks by me and two trusted collaborators. This song is produced by Oscar Holter—an extremely active part of the Max Martin camp—and not really written hugely by myself but by two amazing topliners, Caroline Ailin and Noonie Bao. So it’s the absolute polar opposite.” **“Constant Repeat”** “This song features an imaginary scenario I created in my head, where I fell for somebody but imagined that they didn\'t want me—which turned out to not be the case. But it was this fear that I had, and my prediction of the situation. I think it\'s interesting that you can convince yourself of that. When you are falling for someone, unfortunately, I think human nature just crushes in on you and tells you you\'re not good enough, and fills you with doubt and dread and fear and all of those things. This song really poured out of me quite late in the album process, and it just felt so real and natural.” **“Beg for You” (feat. Rina Sawayama)** “Rina wanted to do something uptempo together, and give our fans a bit more of a moment. So when this song idea bubbled up, I called her immediately. She rewrote the second verse, and sounded incredible on it. It’s a very perfect-storm moment, because we’re two artists operating within the pop sphere, but always challenging it and doing something a little bit more left. She also has that hardcore, diehard fanbase—there’s a lot of crossover. Whilst maybe some of them were expecting something a little bit more experimental from us, I think, in a way, you can\'t deny that this actually is the perfect song for us in that we are paying a homage to a gay anthem \[‘Cry for You’ by September\]. She\'s queer, I\'m a queer ally, we\'re coming together to really just live our best lives and sing an iconic pop song.” **“Move Me”** “This song came from a writing camp that I was invited to by \[US producer and songwriter\] Ian Kirkpatrick. I hadn’t done a very classic camp for a while. Not because I\'m anti them—I actually think I thrive quite well in them and enjoy them. I ended up writing this with \[US songwriter and producer\] Amy Allen. We’re actually polar opposites in terms of our styles, which is why this song ended up being so beautiful—the aggressive parts of the song where I was basically yelling into a mic are very me, then you have the balance of Amy’s gorgeous verses. As we were doing it, everyone kept talking about how it’d be a great song for Halsey. I was like, ‘No, I love Halsey, but this is a great song for me and I’m fucking keeping it.’ People talk about writing-camp songs being fake and constructed in a test tube or whatever. But it’s very real. We write from our reality. That’s why we’re good songwriters.” **“Baby”** “This was one of the first tracks I made for this album, probably pre-pandemic, and with Justin Raisen—who was a very crucial part of my first album, *True Romance* \[2013\]. So it felt really good to be going back and working with him in the same house where we made part of the first album. This was a song that I always felt was so passionate and fiery and sexy. And I think the making of this song helped me feel powerful, and want to explore the sexier side of pop music and my artistry. It’s the song that helped me decide that I wanted to dance for this campaign, because I just couldn\'t stop wanting to move to it whilst we were making it.” **“Lightning”** “It began as one of those half demos that I took away and lived with. I then called up Ariel Rechtshaid, who was also a huge part of the first album, alongside Justin Raisen, and said, ‘OK, I have this song. I want to do *True Romance in 2022* with it.” And while I know he’s not really on that hype currently, I told him he was the king of the ’80s and if he felt it needed to go down that road, I trusted him because he has the most impeccable taste. So he sent it back to me, and there was a question mark over the Spanish guitar moment, which goes into a chorus. I sent it to A. G. to ask his opinion. He was like, ‘It\'s insane. I laughed out loud.’ And I was like, ‘OK, great. We\'re keeping it.’” **“Every Rule”** “It\'s the true story of me meeting my previous partner, and both of us being in relationships but knowing that we were meant to be together. I think that that\'s a story that a lot of my friends have also experienced—and obviously there\'s a lot of controversy that comes with that circumstance. People are afraid to talk about it. People feel shame. But it\'s also, it\'s really real. I think you have to be really brave to admit to yourself that you\'re not in love with maybe the person that you\'re with, and that you are in love with someone else. It\'s cruel on both sides, and I think you can really hear that. It was a song that I really only felt comfortable enough to make with A. G. He would never judge me for saying these things. It’s another pre-pandemic song, and A. G. was living in a place with a studio in his garage. There was a tree outside that was always covered in crickets. You can hear the crickets in the recording, which I think is really sweet and charming. Once we’d lived with the song for about a year, A. G. had the idea of asking Oneohtrix Point Never to add some things to the song, which I loved.” **“Yuck”** “I like the drastic gear change here. I like that it makes you laugh. I like those jarring moments on albums and in live shows where you\'re going from the most intimate, quiet song to the most hilarious or poptastic. That was the reasoning behind putting ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Yuck’ back to back. I really struggle with that feeling of being smothered. It\'s probably an only-child thing, or something. When you\'re like, ‘Get away from me, give me some fucking space’—that is seriously how I feel 50% of the time. It also reminds me of that gang vocal element of ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘Boys.’ Not sonically, but more in terms of the way that I\'m singing. I\'m definitely not the most technical singer ever—if you put me next to Ariana Grande and made us both sing the same song, I would sound absolutely insane, and she would sound absolutely gorgeous—but when it comes to singing like this, I feel pretty confident. That’s really nice for me, just in a technical way. It\'s really fun to be like, ‘Yeah. You know what? I can sing this song.’ Which I know sounds stupid because I am a professional ‘singer.’” **“Used to Know Me”** “I was trying to emulate myself on ‘Fancy’—or get back into that headspace. I really remember searching for the chorus melody to ‘Fancy’ in a way that I hadn\'t really searched for a melody before. Normally I\'m very instinctual and spontaneous when it comes to melodies, but with ‘Fancy,’ I had to really maneuver my brain around different corners to figure it out—to understand the formation of the notes. I wrote this on my own at Stargate’s studios, which probably made me feel like I had to write a really big pop song, and then when I was listening to it on repeat in my car, I just started singing the synth line to ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. So I called a few people and was like, ‘Is this possible?’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, but do you care about publishing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess not.’ It feels to me like a big song—it’s about reshaping who you are after a breakup.” **“Twice”** “I had reservations about making this the last song because it\'s such an obvious choice with the key change and outro. And generally speaking, I\'m anti the obvious choice. But then George Daniel, who is very good with tracklisting, simply said, ‘You\'re an idiot if you don\'t put this song last.’ It’s actually interesting lyrically, because it\'s about the end of the world and that you shouldn\'t think twice about intimate moments, or these off-the-cuff moments. Essentially, YOLO, and enjoy delving into these once-in-a-lifetime situations that everybody ends up in. I was picturing the scene from \[Lars von Trier’s 2011 film\] *Melancholia* where Kirsten Dunst’s character is sat on a hill waiting for the end of the world. It’s a perfect closer, and I also think it’s a very beautiful song.”

As frontman James Smith and bassist Ryan Needham were holed up in Leeds, writing the songs that make up Yard Act’s debut album, the pair weren’t thinking about a record until they almost had one in front of them. Instead, they were caught up in the sort of heady, creative whirl you get from a new group flexing their songwriting chops. “We knew we were writing a lot, but there was no form or structure to it; it was just loads of ideas,” Smith tells Apple Music. “It was when we started to realize how much material we had that we said, ‘All right, now is probably the time to go in and have a go at the album.’” That spirit of artistic delirium runs right through *The Overload*, where wiry post-punk grooves and buoyant indie anthems-in-waiting frame Smith’s wry, cutting observations on life in modern Britain. “We realized there was a theme running through the songs,” recalls Smith, “an anti-capitalist slant to the whole thing. We came up with this idea of an arc about this person’s journey trying to become a success and how that pans out.” *The Overload* is a thrilling snapshot of pre- and post-pandemic life, less a black mirror to the early 2020s and more a vivid, full-color one. Here, Smith and Needham guide us through it, track by track. **“The Overload”** James Smith: “The song was originally a really pounding house track that Ryan had sent, but I heard the beat differently and put this sped-up drum-and-bass loop over the top of Ryan’s bassline. As soon as I put that on it, the energy made more sense. There’s a chopped sample break running underneath the whole thing that really completed it and gave it that manic feel.” **“Dead Horse”** JS: “I was always pretty keen on this being early on in the album. It feels like the culmination of all the early singles, finally figuring out how to write in our own style.” Ryan Needham: “I think, lyrically, James had a little bit of extreme anger around the time of the Dominic Cummings \[a former Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister caught breaking public health restrictions during the first UK lockdown\] stuff.” JS: “Yeah, it did come from that little month of anger. The bass was on groove; it was really good. And the lyrics played well—there were some good lines in there. It represented where we had got to up until that point.” **“Payday”** JS: “This was written to fit in on the album to coax the narrative along. Originally, it was a really lo-fi demo and then we lost it. When we redid it, we built in all these 909 electronic drums and then Sam \[Shjipstone\] put this really mad funk guitar on it that was exactly what it needed. It is just one of the more straight-up songs, a vehicle to get onto some of the more creative stuff. I tried to be more abstract with the lyrics—didn’t want to do the overly talky thing, so I left a lot more space in the verses so that chorus can come through a bit.” **“Rich”** JS: “It’s a really simple bassline that I was hypnotized by. It was written when Yard Act had just started doing OK. As some of these crazier offers were coming in, I could see it maybe reaching a level where we became part of the culture and made a living off it. I pondered on this idea that music is one of those things where, if it *goes*, you don’t really have control over how much money you suddenly earn out of nowhere. For so long, you are on the bottom rung and money is tight, and then, all of a sudden, the floodgates open and you can make loads of money really easy. That was it, but applied to the narrative of anyone that has an idea that becomes popular.” **“The Incident”** RN: “This was loads of fun. It’s a bit of an outlier on the record—it’s what sounds most like us live. I had been listening to loads of stuff like Omni and stuff like Elastica—this wave of what everyone was calling post-punk bands at the time. I wrote guitars for this one, everything, I got carried away.” JS: “I think you came up with some really interesting, busy basslines for this one.” **“Witness (Can I Get A?)”** JS: “This predates this lineup and lockdown in terms of the lyrics and the bassline. It was sounding quite generic, a post-punk sort of tune from the really early days where we had a couple of jams in late 2019.” RN: “Then, we tried it like the Beastie Boys.” JS: “We wanted to do a hardcore song, but that wasn’t really working either. Then, we did that sort of Suicide drum thing with it. As soon as it went like that, it always reminded me of the start of ‘Doorman’ by slowthai \[and Mura Masa\]. We just wanted a really fun song to close the first side. There’s something about one-minute songs—they are underrated.” **“Land of the Blind”** JS: “Ryan sent this drum-and-bass groove, and I was instantly really smitten with it, and I wrote the lyrics really fast. It’s one which has most of the demo vocals on it. We were in lockdown and Ryan got his girlfriend—who clearly can sing, but she doesn’t consider herself a singer and doesn’t perform or anything—to do all the backing vocals. They just come out so human. If a proper singer had done them, it wouldn’t have sounded right. It really shaped the song.” **“Quarantine the Sticks”** JS: “This was one of the last songs written for the record, another one that joins the narrative. The basslines are really good on this—they dance between different keys, which makes it really unnerving, and it’s got Billy Nomates \[post-punk singer-songwriter Tor Maries\] doing backing vocals on it as well. It’s quite melodic and quite a strange melody, and my voice wasn’t really holding it on \[its\] own. But there was a hint of something there, so we asked Tor to sing on it.” **“Tall Poppies”** RN: “It started with that simple bassline and then it just went on—I looped that bassline. I would send James a loop and then, about an hour later, I would get back something fucking epic, like ‘Tall Poppies.’ There was no craftsmanship on my part; it was basically like handing James a trowel and some bricks and he comes back with a finished wall.” JS: “There was something about the motor of the bassline. The first thing I got from it was that it felt quite reflective and suspensive. Off the back of that, I had that spark for telling the story of this person’s whole life, from cradle to grave.” **“Pour Another”** JS: “This was one of the harder ones. Ali \[Chant, producer\] didn’t really like this one. He kept pushing it away, but we were adamant it was good and there was something in it. ” RN: “I wanted to have a bit of a Happy Mondays sort of thing. The lyrics are funny, and the humor carried it in that way.” **“100% Endurance”** JS: “We thought the album was probably going to end on ‘Tall Poppies,’ and then, at the last-minute, Ryan sent this new demo over and it became ‘100% Endurance.’ I wrote all the lyrics to a WhatsApp video loop of it playing on Ryan’s speaker in the studio. That is the audio we used on the recording. The first take I recorded on my computer that I sent to Ryan. It felt like we had finally figured out the album, which was interesting because when we went in that first week, we thought we might come away with four or five tracks and then see where we were at later in the year. We didn’t expect to finish the album in a week.”

Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

“I don’t know if anyone else has the kind of ride-or-die support that I have,” Jamie Treays tells Apple Music. “The support can be a double-edged sword, but it’s just wonderful. It’s pretty much set in stone by this stage that it takes me a long time to make an album, so luckily everyone gives me a break on that.” Treays is perhaps being a bit tough on himself. The 13 songs on *The Theory of Whatever*—the South Londoner’s fifth studio album—were carefully trimmed down from “probably 175, maybe more” across the five or so years since the release of *Trick* (which came relatively hot on the heels of 2014’s *Carry On the Grudge*). But thanks to his aversion to social media, some unflinching testimonies on battles with anxiety, and a devout following that becomes even more fervent during his extended absences, we’re conditioned to treat new music from Jamie T as an event—a moment to savor in case there’s another lengthy wait. Fortunately, there’s a lot to savor here. Treays has channeled what he calls “troubled” periods through the pandemic (“like everyone had, I think”) with a “look after your neighbor” spirit to create something both joyfully fan-delighting and relevant. “I want hope and positivity to be the takeaways here,” he says. \"That ride-or-die spirit I think gets even stronger when you get older. It’s still something I’m obsessed with. It’s still something I adore. It’s really my friends that have inspired me to write the songs. I know that sounds a bit silly, but it’s true.” Certain friends also helped Traeys focus the project here. Matt Maltese, Willie J Healey, Tom Dinsdale (formerly of Audio Bullys), and Foals’ Yannis Philippakis all mucked in, as did, most significantly, Hugo White—guitarist from fellow 2000s indie icons The Maccabees. “He galvanized the whole thing,” Treays says. “He went off to listen to 100+ songs I’d been working on, and came back looking exhausted. We then decided on the songs to work on, and Hugo went into the studio by himself and took it off my hands for a while. He went into the studio and put extra life into the songs.” Which is for the best, since Treays is an artist who needs someone to come in and grab an album by the scruff of the neck. “It’s always been the case,” he says. “I’m a producer myself, but I’m not good at beefing things up and making them really jam. I was fine making things bigger, but I didn’t want to lose what I had here. He was very good at toeing the line. He told me a story the other day that I don’t actually remember happening. I walked into the studio, did a 10-minute rant, told him what I wanted him to do, and left to not return for a day and a half. I came back in, listened to what he’d worked on, and said, ‘That’s amazing.’ He called me a bleeding lunatic and we were absolutely fine. That was the working relationship.” This union (and the “very healthy, slightly older, slightly less ego-driven community around me”) has sparked some of the best music of Traeys’ career. “90s Cars”—one of the three Tom Dinsdale collaborations—exquisitely retools This Mortal Coil’s version of “Kangaroo” by Big Star for one of 2022’s more impactful (or “weird and wonky” as Treays describes) album openers; indie mosh pits will explode to the supercharged “British Hell,” “A Million & One New Ways to Die,” and “Between the Rocks,” while there’s gold to be found in the record’s quieter moments (“St. George Wharf Tower,” “Thank You,” “Talk Is Cheap,” “50,000 Unmarked Bullets”). “It\'s taken me a long time to learn how to do that kind of stuff,” Treays says of his more vulnerable music. “And I’m not sure if I’ll ever do it any better than I’ve done on this album.” So, will there be another six years before we can enjoy more Jamie T? \"People understand that I will not always be around,” he says. “People will always ask, ‘Where has he gone?’ but I’ve gone nowhere. I’m just hanging out, and rightly so. But you have to wait. To be constantly putting stuff out and in your face would not work with my nerves and my ability to feel real. People have to remember it’s my job. I have no want to be famous. But I do enjoy the music, I enjoy the playing. But being disconnected from everything is a godsend. Luckily, it seems being 36 is old now.”

“I don’t know if anyone else has the kind of ride-or-die support that I have,” Jamie Treays tells Apple Music. “The support can be a double-edged sword, but it’s just wonderful. It’s pretty much set in stone by this stage that it takes me a long time to make an album, so luckily everyone gives me a break on that.” Treays is perhaps being a bit tough on himself. The 13 songs on The Theory of Whatever—the South Londoner’s fifth studio album—were carefully trimmed down from “probably 175, maybe more” across the five or so years since the release of Trick (which came relatively hot on the heels of 2014’s Carry On the Grudge). But thanks to his aversion to social media, some unflinching testimonies on battles with anxiety, and a devout following that becomes even more fervent during his extended absences, we’re conditioned to treat new music from Jamie T as an event—a moment to savor in case there’s another lengthy wait. Fortunately, there’s a lot to savor here. Treays has channeled what he calls “troubled” periods through the pandemic (“like everyone had, I think”) with a “look after your neighbor” spirit to create something both joyfully fan-delighting and relevant. “I want hope and positivity to be the takeaways here,” he says. "That ride-or-die spirit I think gets even stronger when you get older. It’s still something I’m obsessed with. It’s still something I adore. It’s really my friends that have inspired me to write the songs. I know that sounds a bit silly, but it’s true.” Certain friends also helped Traeys focus the project here. Matt Maltese, Willie J Healey, Tom Dinsdale (formerly of Audio Bullys), and Foals’ Yannis Philippakis all mucked in, as did, most significantly, Hugo White—guitarist from fellow 2000s indie icons The Maccabees. “He galvanized the whole thing,” Treays says. “He went off to listen to 100+ songs I’d been working on, and came back looking exhausted. We then decided on the songs to work on, and Hugo went into the studio by himself and took it off my hands for a while. He went into the studio and put extra life into the songs.” Which is for the best, since Treays is an artist who needs someone to come in and grab an album by the scruff of the neck. “It’s always been the case,” he says. “I’m a producer myself, but I’m not good at beefing things up and making them really jam. I was fine making things bigger, but I didn’t want to lose what I had here. He was very good at toeing the line. He told me a story the other day that I don’t actually remember happening. I walked into the studio, did a 10-minute rant, told him what I wanted him to do, and left to not return for a day and a half. I came back in, listened to what he’d worked on, and said, ‘That’s amazing.’ He called me a bleeding lunatic and we were absolutely fine. That was the working relationship.” This union (and the “very healthy, slightly older, slightly less ego-driven community around me”) has sparked some of the best music of Traeys’ career. “90s Cars”—one of the three Tom Dinsdale collaborations—exquisitely retools This Mortal Coil’s version of “Kangaroo” by Big Star for one of 2022’s more impactful (or “weird and wonky” as Treays describes) album openers; indie mosh pits will explode to the supercharged “British Hell,” “A Million & One New Ways to Die,” and “Between the Rocks,” while there’s gold to be found in the record’s quieter moments (“St. George Wharf Tower,” “Thank You,” “Talk Is Cheap,” “50,000 Unmarked Bullets”). “It's taken me a long time to learn how to do that kind of stuff,” Treays says of his more vulnerable music. “And I’m not sure if I’ll ever do it any better than I’ve done on this album.” So, will there be another six years before we can enjoy more Jamie T? "People understand that I will not always be around,” he says. “People will always ask, ‘Where has he gone?’ but I’ve gone nowhere. I’m just hanging out, and rightly so. But you have to wait. To be constantly putting stuff out and in your face would not work with my nerves and my ability to feel real. People have to remember it’s my job. I have no want to be famous. But I do enjoy the music, I enjoy the playing. But being disconnected from everything is a godsend. Luckily, it seems being 36 is old now.”

Anyone encountering the gorgeous, ’70s-style orchestral pop of *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* might be surprised to learn that Natalie Mering started her journey as an experimental-noise musician. Listen closer, though, and you’ll hear an album whose beauty isn’t just tempered by visions of almost apocalyptic despair, but one that also turns beauty itself into a kind of weapon against the deadness and cynicism of modern life. After all, what could be more rebellious in 2022 than being as relentlessly and unapologetically beautiful as possible? Stylistically, the album draws influence from the gold-toned sounds of California artists like Harry Nilsson, Judee Sill, and even the Carpenters. Its mood evokes the strange mix of cheerfulness and violent intimations that makes late-’60s Los Angeles so captivating to the cultural imagination. And like, say, The Beach Boys circa *Pet Sounds* or *Smiley Smile*, the sophistication of Mering’s arrangements—the mix of strings, synthesizer touches, soft-focus ambience, and bone-dry intimacy—is more evocative of childhood innocence than adult mastery. Where her 2019 breakthrough, *Titanic Rising*, emphasized doom, *Hearts Aglow*—the second installment of a stated trilogy—emphasizes hope. She writes about alienation in a way that feels both compassionate and angst-free (“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”), and of romance so total, it could make you as sick as a faceful of roses (“Hearts Aglow,” “Grapevine”). And when the hard times come, she prays not for thicker armor, but to be made so soft that the next touch might crush her completely (“God Turn Me Into a Flower”). All told, *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* is the feather that knocks you over.

August 25th, 2022 Los Angeles, CA Hello Listener, Well, here we are! Still making it all happen in our very own, fully functional shit show. My heart, like a glow stick that’s been cracked, lights up my chest in a little explosion of earnestness. And when your heart's on fire, smoke gets in your eyes. Titanic Rising was the first album of three in a special trilogy. It was an observation of things to come, the feelings of impending doom. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is about entering the next phase, the one in which we all find ourselves today — we are literally in the thick of it. Feeling around in the dark for meaning in a time of instability and irrevocable change. Looking for embers where fire used to be. Seeking freedom from algorithms and a destiny of repetitive loops. Information is abundant, and yet so abstract in its use and ability to provoke tangible actions. Our mediums of communication are fraught with caveats. Our pain, an ironic joke born from a gridlocked panopticon of our own making, swirling on into infinity. I was asking a lot of questions while writing these songs, and hyper isolation kept coming up for me. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” is a Buddhist anthem, ensconced in the interconnectivity of all beings, and the fraying of our social fabric. Our culture relies less and less on people. This breeds a new, unprecedented level of isolation. The promise we can buy our way out of that emptiness offers little comfort in the face of fear we all now live with – the fear of becoming obsolete. Something is off, and even though the feeling appears differently for each individual, it is universal. Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain. Being in love doesn’t necessarily mean being together. Why else do so many love songs yearn for a connection? Could it be narcissism? We encourage each other to aspire – to reach for the external to quell our desires, thinking goals of wellness and bliss will alleviate the baseline anxiety of living in a time like ours. We think the answer is outside ourselves, through technology, imaginary frontiers that will magically absolve us of all our problems. We look everywhere but in ourselves for a salve. In “God Turn Me into a Flower,” I relay the myth of Narcissus, whose obsession with a reflection in a pool leads him to starve and lose all perception outside his infatuation. In a state of great hubris, he doesn’t recognize that the thing he so passionately desired was ultimately just himself. God turns him into a pliable flower who sways with the universe. The pliable softness of a flower has become my mantra as we barrel on towards an uncertain fate. I see the heart as a guide, with an emanation of hope, shining through in this dark age. Somewhere along the line, we lost the plot on who we are. Chaos is natural. But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order. These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment. And maybe that’s the beginning of the nuanced journey towards understanding the natural cycles of life and death, all over again. Thoughts and Prayers, Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood)

Stormzy’s third studio album finds the Merky rapper in a whole new headspace. “I started in LA, trying to record the album there, but the pandemic hit, and a few other things,” he tells Apple Music. “Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling the energy of the music I was making—so I came back home with a new plan: to get all of the producers in one place, and record this album there.” Sanctuary was eventually found on Osea Island—an enchanting and secluded haven in Essex—gifting the Londoner fertile ground to plot his third record with handpicked musicians and writers. The result is his most mature—and consciously soulful—offering to date. “This album is also testament to producer Stormz, the kind of Stormzy that people don’t really know,” he says. “One of my skills is being able to produce from an executive view, guiding other musicians towards my vision. I’ve always had the ethos where the best idea wins. So I might want to \[record\] something, but if there’s someone better for it, I’ll always allow them to do it.” In many ways, the gentle, soul-searching sound of this LP should come as no surprise—after all, Stormzy records often attempt to integrate R&B and gospel. But *This Is What I Mean* has a far more explicit through line: a desire to interrogate the experience of losing love. Speaking from the heart—aided by a string of songwriters (Jacob Collier, Tems) and top production talent (P2J, PRGRSHN)—Stormzy finds the words for heartfelt ballads (“Firebabe”) and poignant duets (“Holy Spirit”), while he employs Sampha as an emotional conduit on a spirited intermission (“Sampha’s Plea”). By the time we reach the stunning closer (“Give It to the Water”), it becomes clear the opportunity to reshape and remold himself in the face of such pain was simply too important to pass up. “I think back to what \[co-president of 0207 Def Jam\] Twin B told me before \[headlining\] Glastonbury \[in 2019\]: ‘As much as it’s Glasto, it’s another show in a park, and you’ve done hundreds of them,’” he says. “And it’s true: Once you kill the size, or the magnitude, of the task, that’s when you allow people to be at their most real and honest.” Below, he takes us through the story of *This Is What I Mean*, track by track. **“Fire + Water”** “This track came from my first session with PRGRSHN on my return to London. And it was quite spiritual. The first half is what he made that day—and everything you hear me sing, even the structure of my verse, was put down right at that moment. From here, this song went on a two-year journey. Tendai came along and helped on the transition part, and then we got to Osea Island—where Debbie made ‘Pour Me Water.’ Later I was on tour, listening to the song for ages, and eventually had a lightbulb moment: I realized I needed a transition to get from the beginning of the song to ‘Pour Me Water.’ Even that took six months to figure out the drums and the tempo, but, we got there in the end.” **“This is What I Mean”** “I made this with Knox Brown and P2J, and it started extremely different to how it ended up. The only thing that’s the same, I guess, is the sparse intro—leading to the drop. P2J had this wicked idea to sample Jacob Collier, and make an insane rhythm out of \[layering\] his vocals. I’ve always thought that Ms Banks is one of the coldest rappers, I’ve said this to her, I just love her tone. So she killed her bit, and Amaarae sang the melody on it. There\'s also something in her voice, her style and attitude that’s so sick. Lastly, I wanted a second verse from another rapper, but we went around in circles and it never really moved along. Until Twin went to Ghana and I think he had an idea for Black Sherif to ad-lib me, but Black Sherif heard the riddim, went into the booth, and laid this fucking insane outro.” **“Firebabe”** This is the second song I made with Debbie—and it started out with George Moore playing some chords. They’re currently making a track that’s one of my favorite songs of all time, I heard it and knew I needed to get with them both. After fiddling with the chords, Debbie and I got down to writing and we came up with this.” **“Please”** “During this process, I became fascinated with the word ‘please,’ its many meanings and the sincerity of it. It’s a word we use all the time, but I’d never heard it isolated and repeated before. Please is painful, please is desperate…so many things, and it just made me think of what *my* please would be.” **“Need You”** “This is probably the only song we had the intention to make before the album. Between myself, Twin, \[#Merky A&R\] Jermaine Agyako, and Kassa \[PRGRSHN\], there was this excitement to be making a song that encapsulates the three words we had up on the whiteboard: ‘Afro,’ ‘expensive,’ and ‘royal.’” **“Hide & Seek”** “Yes, that’s \[Nigerian singer\] Teni \[The Entertainer\] on the intro, but it was actually PRGRSHN that came up with that harmony. One of his God-given gifts, as well as being an incredible producer, is he’s an amazing songwriter and melody man.” **“My Presidents Are Black”** “I had the instrumental for maybe a year and a half. And for ages, I only had the first eight bars down. Everyone would ask when I was writing to it, and it just wasn’t the right time. Because of those bars, it started very intentionally, and I knew, ‘This ain’t the time to chat rubbish.’ Not even being purposely profound or deep, but what that piece of music was telling my spirit: ‘Rap your arse off, but say *something*.’” **“Sampha’s Plea”** “In terms of a voice with truth, emotion, and pain—you\'ll be hard-pressed to find one with more *feeling* than Sampha’s. I made ‘Please,’ and every time I heard it, I’d think, ‘How amazing would it be to hear Sampha sing this?’ I feel like it would be interesting to see what the word means to other artists, and Sampha is the first artist that I thought of. ‘Please’ feels like a confession booth, or an altar, that you’re just going to with your version. And Sampha came in and did that. It was just beautiful and breathtaking.” **“Holy Spirit”** “I was in the studio at the time with Dion Wardle \[aka ‘Chord Lord’\], and I was feeling really, really close to God. All my career, I’ve known Dion, he’s been on all of my albums, and has been the foundation on which I’ve built my songwriting and my melodies—I would sit in a room with him and a mic, he would play chords, and I would just sing to them. I’ve got loads of demos with Dion, beautiful, unfinished songs. So ‘Holy Spirit’ was probably a defining moment in my time working with him. The whole track is just one take of his chords and my melodies, and then I came back in and added lyrics.” **“Bad Blood”** “This is the only track we created outside of the bubble we created on Osea Island. It’s probably the song I was the most drawn to in a spiritual way. I saw the vision for this and felt it in my spirit, even if a lot of people on my team felt like it was the one \[track\] that didn’t need to exist on the album.” **“I Got My Smile Back”** “This is the last track I made for this album. So, at the camp, I asked Jacob \[Collier\] for two samples, a beautiful R&B one and a dark rap one, and he came back with this a cappella—so beautifully arranged. I didn’t even know what to do at first. I tried to sing, I tried to rap, but it was such a stunning piece of music that I wanted to tread lightly. For this one, I asked the amazing India.Arie to come and sing it. I’ve never worked with such a respected and phenomenal artist, but she approached it with class, grace, and so much service to the music. It was such a pleasure to work with her.” **“Give It to the Water”** “The only way to end this is by giving it to the water. I’ve bared my whole soul on this album—in terms of doing the work, accountability, forgiving myself and just allowing God to do the rest. I had just returned from Jamaica, which was a very extremely spiritual trip for me. And before we left, we went to the side of the ocean and we gave things away, our fears, our stresses, saying: ‘We’re not taking things back home, we leave those things here.’ In my first session back with Debbie, we got to the hook, trying to figure it out, and I was like, ‘Just give it to the water.’ Debbie asked me what it meant, so I explained that it’s just a beautiful way of saying, ‘Give it to God.’”

Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years –both in and out of lockdown –these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.

Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was.   The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.  All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”  The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. 

Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

Picture the most Phoenix place imaginable to record an album. Now make that place a little *more* Phoenix and you’re probably in the right ballpark. “As a teenager, I thought one day we’d be there,” Thomas Mars tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson of the Louvre Palace in Paris—where his band’s seventh album would be born. “They wanted to have an artist residency for the first time, so they built a studio for us and we’d work from 10 am to 7 pm every day.” The band was able to keep “bank hours” in such an extraordinary location thanks to the extraordinary times in which the album was harvested. “This was the pandemic,” Mars says. “So we could enter the building by one entrance and choose which floor to work on. It was so enjoyable but also sad. We knew it wouldn’t last forever, but with the pandemic we stayed about two years. I roller skated on the perfect marble one day.” That freewheeling vibe is calcified across *Alpha Zulu*’s 10 songs—the majority written within 10 days of setting up at the Louvre. “We felt lucky,” guitarist/keyboardist Laurent Brancowitz says. “Thomas was stuck in the US for a long time, so when we were back together in between lockdowns, those little moments of work were really joyful. You can hear the joyfulness, I hope.” The band describes the album as possessing the same “weird Frankenstein” spirit as their debut LP, 2000’s *United*, and its vivacity is irresistible. The title track is a reminder that few bands conjure more fun from unshowy pop-rock ingredients; Ezra Koenig collab “Tonight” is the best kind of fan servicing; and “The Only One” and “Season 2” are the type of gorgeous, velvety mid-pacers Phoenix excels in. But, as ever, this isn’t just stylish, calorie-free indie. The French band has always managed to smuggle introspection and darkness into even their most melodic work, and here the influence of Philippe Zdar—the Cassius musician who produced multiple Phoenix records and died in 2019—casts an imposing shadow. The band’s 2020 single “Identical” is the album’s emotional centerpiece and a taut, disarming love letter to Zdar. “He didn’t hear any of this record,” Mars says. “‘Identical’ was recorded three days after his funeral. We got back into the studio and instead of talking to each other, we made music. He was just so instrumental and so charismatic that every song we would think with his language. We still do.” “Philippe and the Louvre,” Brancowitz says. “That’s a good combo. For sure.”

Rina Sawayama thought she was done with trauma. Her debut album, *SAWAYAMA*, which was released to widespread critical acclaim under the isolating restrictions of the global pandemic, was a deceptively bombastic pop record, the production serving as a disguise for the heavy, existential lyrical content. Had it not been for the paradigm-shifting events of 2020, which left Sawayama experiencing her breakthrough success through screens, the electrifying follow up, *Hold the Girl*, would probably have been a very different record. “The thought I was really confronted with during lockdown was that I just did not feel connected to myself or my body,” Sawayama tells Apple Music. “I was constantly running on adrenaline because so many exciting things were happening, the album was doing better than I ever imagined, but I was so mentally unwell and completely numb to any real emotion.” *Hold the Girl* is the result of two years’ worth of forced self-reflection and “brutal” therapy, or what Sawayama calls a “‘can you be alone with your thoughts for two years?’ experiment.” Musically rooted in country and western—inspired by what she calls the “beautiful” writing on Kacey Musgraves\' *Golden Hour* and Dolly Parton’s appearance in the film *Dumplin’*—the album was intended to be recorded in Nashville to ground the songs in the culture she was referencing, but closed borders made travel impossible. Despite the unavoidable limitations, Sawayama has succeeded in capturing the spirit of the genre, tipping a Stetson to Shania Twain on the irreverent lead single “This Hell,” tapping into the atmosphere of a saloon at closing time with “Forgiveness,” and stitching mismatched elements of other genres like industrial metal and electronica into tracks like “Your Age” and “To Be Alive.” “I really connect with the storytelling aspect of country,” says Sawayama. “It’s very authentic, and grounded in reality, and that’s what I needed to tell the story of this record.” Here, she takes us through that story, track by track. **“Minor Feelings”** “The title of this song is kind of the secondary title of the record. It was inspired by a collection of essays called *Minor Feelings* by Cathy Park Hong. It’s the name she gives to this collective feeling that a lot of Asian Americans have about racial microaggressions, and I really connected with that, because for me it was a collection of all these minor feelings that has now led to a pretty major shutdown of emotions. In the music I wanted to play with the minor and the major chords, so in the chorus when I say ‘minor feelings’ it’s minor and then major when I say ‘majorly getting me down.’” **“Hold the Girl”** “I wrote this with Barney Lister and Jonny Lattimer in the first session I ever did with Barney. He was producing the song and I was throwing out all these ideas, like: ‘So, I want it to be country, and I want the beginning to sound like Bon Jovi, and I really also want to then do a garage drop.’ Luckily he agreed! It was a very, very hard song to balance: I think we must have gone back and forth about 20 times on the production, and then another 20 times on the mix. I was trying to make it really big and orchestral, but also a pop song. ‘Hold the Girl’ was the song that really unblocked me and made me excited to write again. It reminded me of how much fun you can have with production.” **“This Hell”** “On first listen, ‘This Hell’ could be a romantic love song, and I love that. It sort of has a double meaning—during lockdown there were certain people that I really held on to and it truly felt like ‘this hell is better with you’—but I’m specifically talking about my friends’ experiences of being shut out of religious communities for being queer. I wanted the music to channel the confidence Shania Twain has and tell the story like a country song, a bit tongue-in-cheek. I worked on it with Vic Jamieson, Lauren Aquilina, and Paul Epworth, who is one of my ultimate production idols. We were in Church Studios, which felt really apt, and I just remember ‘line dancing’ and lighting the whole studio up in red. It was one of the best moments.” **“Catch Me in the Air”** “One of the first in-person sessions I did for this album was with GRACEY in Oscar Scheller’s flat, and we couldn’t come up with anything. I just wasn’t feeling it. Halfway through, GRACEY was like, ‘Oh my god, Gwen Stefani is coming out with new music!’ As a writing exercise, we pretended we were going to be pitching to Gwen, and then the first melody flowed out. The song is about getting to a certain point in my relationship with my mum, and being able to see things from her perspective now I’m around the same age she was when she had me.” **“Forgiveness”** “I had to write this song over Zoom because I had just come into contact with someone who had COVID, so Jonny Lattimer and Rich Cooper were in one room and I was at home. The lyrics are about forgiving people in my past, and things I couldn’t control. It’s quite stripped back, as if I was in a grunge band, but doing pop. I asked Freddy Sheed to play the drums like he was exhausted and hungover, a little bit behind the beat. I wanted this feeling of dragging your feet down this path that you’re walking to get to forgiveness. I remember that I came out with the chorus melody pretty much straight away, but I hate using GarageBand and Logic so I was having to record it to my voice notes, then AirDrop it to myself, then send to Rich to put it in the song. It’s great when you have those moments where it just flows out, but actually getting the idea down on paper was so boring!” **“Holy (Til You Let Me Go)”** “This is where the record starts to get dark. The previous track talks about the idea that forgiveness is a winding road, and now we’re going off the beaten path for the next four or five songs. ‘Holy (Til You Let Me Go)’ is like the counterpart to ‘This Hell.’ I went to a Church of England school and I grew up hearing so much about religion and spirituality, but there was some dark stuff that went on there that was not handled very well, and I’m alluding to it in these songs. I think going to Christian girls’ schools can be very confusing. There’s this idea that girls are holy until a certain point in their life, and then they’re not. So I’m asking: ‘What does youth mean in that situation? What is good and bad?’ You can hear my friends Louis \[a school friend\] and Lauren Aquilina at the end, talking about what happened, and they’re just in shock about how the adults were behaving.” **“Your Age”** “‘Your Age’ started off with a banjo riff, but it’s massively inspired by Nine Inch Nails. The song is about the anger I had towards the adults that were around me when I was younger. Now that I’m an adult myself, I think I can legitimately be quite angry towards the adults of my youth, because I just never would have done things that way. I think when you get older, you look back at certain things you’ve experienced and the way the adults handled it, and you kind of can’t believe it. This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album; I wanted it to have this really dark moment. It’s a pretty direct message.” **“Imagining”** “So much of the confusion around so many mental health issues is that you don’t know if it’s real, and you assume that everyone else is feeling this way, so you minimize what you’re experiencing. It\'s like being in a club and feeling completely lost, which is the energy I wanted to have in the production. It’s very repetitive, the chorus is really shouty, and the lyrics don’t make the most sense. It’s sensory overload.” **“Frankenstein”** “I had two days in the studio with Paul Epworth, and we wrote ‘Frankenstein’ on the first day and ‘This Hell’ on the second. I was writing about realizing that it’s not okay to give one person in your life all this baggage to deal with—whether it\'s a lover or a best friend or someone else close to you—and asking them to put you back together when that’s not their job. I love Paul’s pop production, but for me it’s about the work he did with Bloc Party. It’s actually Matt Tong playing drums on this track, which is insane. I grew up going to gigs around my area in Camden, and it was one of the best, most hedonistic and chaotic times of my life, and I wanted to reference that frantic energy. I might incite a mosh when I perform it live.” **“Hurricanes”** “A little pop-rock moment: It’s about self-sabotage and running into situations that aren’t good for you. I originally wrote this with Clarence Clarity, and the production sounded a bit like The Cardigans, a bit ’60s surf, and it just wasn’t working. I needed it to sound more driving, like being propelled forward throughout the song, like a hurricane. When Stuart Price came on board later on, he was also working with The Killers, and he suggested listening to them as a reference for the drums. Once we rerecorded the drums, it all fell into place. ‘Hurricanes’ is probably my favorite track on the album right now. It ends on that nice major chord, and it’s like this resolve. The end of the chaos. It’s such a fun song to sing.” **“Send My Love to John”** “One of my really good friends has quite actively homophobic parents, and they’ve had a very difficult time because their parents have never been supportive of their queerness. Then one day my friend was on the phone with their mum and at the end of the call she said, ‘OK, I’ll speak to you soon, and send my love to John,’ meaning my friend’s long-term boyfriend. It was a breakthrough. And it’s insane because the mum is never going to say sorry, but this is something they can hold on to. A lot of people need to hear the word ‘sorry’ from their parents and they’re never going to get it, so I wanted to write from the perspective of a parent who regrets not supporting their child to the fullest extent.” **“Phantom”** “I can’t quite remember how this song came about, but I think I had written ‘phantom’ in my notes and I was like, ‘Let’s just try things and see how it sounds.’ We were having quite a free session, just coming up with ideas. It’s a proper rock ballad, almost a love song, about losing yourself and wanting that person back because you don’t like the person that you are now. I wanted it to have a real Aerosmith vibe.” **“To Be Alive”** “The production on ‘To Be Alive’ is inspired by ‘Ray of Light’ by Madonna. It’s got those propulsive breakbeats. I wanted to make an extremely euphoric last song, about the really pure realization that simple things can give us joy if we want them to. The last line of the song, and of the whole album, ‘Flowers are still pretty when they’re dying,’ is actually a lyric Lauren Aquilina suggested. It ends on a hopeful note, but it’s sad at the same time.”

Following on from her critically acclaimed debut “SAWAYAMA”, Rina Sawayama’s highly anticipated new record “Hold The Girl” sees Rina once again juxtapose intimate storytelling with arena-sized songs, creating another ambitious and original album to excite fans and critics alike. Written and recorded over the last ​​year and a half, Rina once again teamed up with longterm collaborators Clarence Clarity and Lauren Aquilina as well as enlisting help from the likes of the legendary Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence & the Machine), Stuart Price (Dua Lipa, The Killers, Madonna) and Marcus Andersson (Demi Lovato, Ashnikko) for their magic touch. The product of Rina and these collective minds coming together is an album which melds influences from across the pop spectrum and is a bold and honest statement of Rina’s personal evolution; coming to terms with her own past and the jubilation of turning to the future.

Plastic Mermaids announce their second full-length album ‘It’s Not Comfortable to Grow’, due for release by Sunday Best on the 30th September. The remarkable album is a profound and emotional exploration of the many facets of heartbreak, seen through the eyes of frontman and lyricist Douglas Richards. The sun-bleached, sauntering ‘Disposable Love’ is the first official single to be revealed from the album and one of the moments that finds Douglas exploring moments of passing relief, as he explains “it’s about wanting to get back to a younger place, a freer place; a feeling of not having much worth, but being nostalgic for that.” Tracks were written from the start of the first lockdown in March 2020 and recorded in the band’s self-built studio at Douglas and Jamie’s father’s house in Gurnard (Doug, Chris and Jamie live nearby in Cowes, bassist Tom is in Newport and drummer Chris in freshwater).

A couple of years before she became known as one half of Wet Leg, Rhian Teasdale left her home on the Isle of Wight, where a long-term relationship had been faltering, to live with friends in London. Every Tuesday, their evening would be interrupted by the sound of people screaming in the property below. “We were so worried the first time we heard it,” Teasdale tells Apple Music. Eventually, their investigations revealed that scream therapy sessions were being held downstairs. “There’s this big scream in the song ‘Ur Mum,’” says Teasdale. “I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” That mix of humor and emotional candor is typical of *Wet Leg*. Crafting tightly sprung post-punk and melodic psych-pop and indie rock, Teasdale and bandmate Hester Chambers explore the existential anxieties thrown up by breakups, partying, dating apps, and doomscrolling—while also celebrating the fun to be had in supermarkets. “It’s my own experience as a twentysomething girl from the Isle of Wight moving to London,” says Teasdale. The strains of disenchantment and frustration are leavened by droll, acerbic wit (“You’re like a piece of shit, you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat,” she chides an ex on “Piece of shit”), and humor has helped counter the dizzying speed of Wet Leg’s ascent. On the strength of debut single “Chaise Longue,” Teasdale and Chambers were instantly cast by many—including Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Florence Welch—as one of Britain’s most exciting new bands. But the pair have remained committed to why they formed Wet Leg in the first place. “It’s such a shame when you see bands but they’re habitually in their band—they’re not enjoying it,” says Teasdale. “I don’t want us to ever lose sight of having fun. Having silly songs obviously helps.” Here, she takes us through each of the songs—silly or otherwise—on *Wet Leg*. **“Being in Love”** “People always say, ‘Oh, romantic love is everything. It’s what every person should have in this life.’ But actually, it’s not really conducive to getting on with what you want to do in life. I read somewhere that the kind of chemical storm that is produced in your brain, if you look at a scan, it’s similar to someone with OCD. I just wanted to kind of make that comparison.” **“Chaise Longue”** “It came out of a silly impromptu late-night jam. I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I stay over, she always makes up the chaise longue for me. It was a song that never really was supposed to see the light of day. So it’s really funny to me that so many people are into it and have connected with it. It’s cool. I was as an assistant stylist \[on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ video\]. Online, a newspaper \[*The New York Times*\] was doing the top 10 videos out this week, and it was funny to see ‘Chaise Longue’ next to this video I’d been working on. Being on set, you have an idea of the budget that goes into getting all these people together to make this big pop-star video. And then you scroll down and it’s our little video that we spent about £50 on. Hester had a camera and she set up all the shots. Then I edited it using a free trial version of Final Cut.” **“Angelica”** “The song is set at a party that you no longer want to be at. Other people are feeling the same, but you are all just fervently, aggressively trying to force yourself to have a good time. And actually, it’s not always possible to have good times all the time. Angelica is the name of my oldest friend, so we’ve been to a lot of rubbish parties together. We’ve also been to a lot of good parties together, but I thought it would be fun to put her name in the song and have her running around as the main character.” **“I Don’t Wanna Go Out”** “It’s kind of similar to ‘Angelica’—it’s that disenchantment of getting fucked up at parties, and you’re gradually edging into your late twenties, early thirties, and you’re still working your shitty waitressing job. I was trying to convince myself that I was working these shitty jobs so that I could do music on the side. But actually, you’re kind of kidding yourself and you’re seeing all of your friends starting to get real jobs and they’re able to buy themselves nice shampoo. You’re trying to distract yourself from not achieving the things that you want to achieve in life by going to these parties. But you can’t keep kidding yourself, and I think it’s that realization that I’ve tried to inject into the lyrics of this song.” **“Wet Dream”** “The chorus is ‘Beam me up.’ There’s this Instagram account called beam\_me\_up\_softboi. It’s posts of screenshots of people’s texts and DMs and dating-app goings-on with this term ‘softboi,’ which to put it quite simply is someone in the dating scene who’s presenting themselves as super, super in touch with their feelings and really into art and culture. And they use that as currency to try and pick up girls. It’s not just men that are softbois; women can totally be softbois, too. The character in the song is that, basically. It’s got a little bit of my own personal breakup injected into it. This particular person would message me since we’d broken up being like, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you. I dreamt that we were married,’ even though it was definitely over. So I guess that’s why I decided to set it within a dream: It was kind of making fun of this particular message that would keep coming through to me.” **“Convincing”** “I was really pleased when we came to recording this one, because for the bulk of the album, it is mainly me taking lead vocals, which is fine, but Hester has just the most beautiful voice. I hope she won’t mind me saying, but she kind of struggles to see that herself. So it felt like a big win when she was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to sing. I’m going to do this song.’ It’s such a cool song and she sounds so great on it.” **“Loving You”** “I met this guy when I was 20, so I was pretty young. We were together for six or seven years or something, and he was a bit older, and I just fell so hard. I fell so, so hard in love with him. And then it got pretty toxic towards the end, and I guess I was a bit angry at how things had gone. So it’s just a pretty angry song, without dobbing him in too much. I feel better now, though. Don’t worry. It’s all good.” **“Ur Mum”** “It’s about giving up on a relationship that isn’t serving you anymore, either of you, and being able to put that down and walk away from it. I was living with this guy on the Isle of Wight, living the small-town life. I was trying to move to London or Bristol or Brighton and then I’d move back to be with this person. Eventually, we managed to put the relationship down and I moved in with some friends in London. Every Tuesday, it’d get to 7 pm and you’d hear that massive group scream. We learned that downstairs was home to the Psychedelic Society and eventually realized that it was scream therapy. I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” **“Oh No”** “The amount of time and energy that I lose by doomscrolling is not OK. It’s not big and it’s not clever. This song is acknowledging that and also acknowledging this other world that you live in when you’re lost in your phone. When we first wrote this, it was just to fill enough time to play a festival that we’d been booked for when we didn’t have a full half-hour set. It used to be even more repetitive, and the lyrics used to be all the same the whole way through. When it came to recording it, we’re like, ‘We should probably write a few more lyrics,’ because when you’re playing stuff live, I think you can definitely get away with not having actual lyrics.” **“Piece of shit”** “When I’m writing the lyrics for all the songs with Wet Leg, I am quite careful to lean towards using quite straightforward, unfussy language and I avoid, at all costs, using similes. But this song is the one song on the album that uses simile—‘like a piece of shit.’ Pretty poetic. I think writing this song kind of helped me move on from that \[breakup\]. It sounds like I’m pretty wound up. But actually, it’s OK now, I feel a lot better.” **“Supermarket”** “It was written just as we were coming out of lockdown and there was that time where the highlight of your week would be going to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, because that was literally all you could do. I remember queuing for Aldi and feeling like I was queuing for a nightclub.” **“Too Late Now”** “It’s about arriving in adulthood and things maybe not being how you thought they would be. Getting to a certain age, when it’s time to get a real job, and you’re a bit lost, trying to navigate through this world of dating apps and social media. So much is out of our control in this life, and ‘Too late now, lost track somehow,’ it’s just being like, ‘Everything’s turned to shit right now, but that’s OK because it’s unavoidable.’ It sounds very depressing, but you know sometimes how you can just take comfort in the fact that no matter what you do, you’re going to die anyway, so don’t worry about it too much, because you can’t control everything? I guess there’s a little bit of that in ‘Too Late Now.’”

At this point, Lizzo needs no introduction. The endlessly witty, playfully braggadocious, and proudly plus-size powerhouse has been pocketing Grammys and flying private for a minute now, and in many ways, her celebratory fourth album *Special* is a snapshot from her view at the top. “I felt a lot of pressure to follow up *Cuz I Love You* with more bangers,” she tells Apple Music. “Or to capture this post-‘Truth Hurts’-single-girl-era Lizzo. But concepts have never really been my bag. It feels like I’m lying. Instead, I just wrote honestly about where I’ve been for the last few years, and who I’ve become.” Given these tumultuous times, the tone of the album shifted a bit. In its early phases, *Special* was a political project of angry, protest-oriented rock songs—a way to “address the injustices I see in the world,” she says. But her songwriting led her into brighter, more positive territory. “I started writing from a place of gratitude rather than fear, and that’s always where I wanted to be,” she says. “Whether I have everything in the world or it’s all taken away from me, I always want my base level to be gratitude. These songs are a celebration of who I am right now.” Laced with campy one-liners (“It’s bad bitch o’clock/Yeah, it’s thick thirty”), hard-to-get clearances (Beastie Boys, Coldplay, Lauryn Hill), and chunky disco-funk beats designed to make you move, these spirited, charismatic anthems are her most adventurous yet. They also detail Lizzo’s keys to happiness: counting your blessings and loving yourself first. **“The Sign”** “This was originally track two. The first track I had was a sad song about love and loss, because I wanted to catch people by surprise. Like a traditional Lizzo album starts with a big fanfare, it\'s very in-your-face. As this album evolved and I made peace with not putting a lot of those darker notes on here, it became clear to me that the right way to start this was by being my honest self. That meant: ‘Hi, motherfucker!’ That in-your-face fanfare. I think it works great as a tone-setter, too, because honestly, where else would this song go? It can\'t go at the end. It can\'t be in the middle. It\'s definitely not track three. It’s a kick-off. It’s saying, ‘We\'re about to have fun. This is about to be a musical journey.’” **“About Damn Time”** “I have been making feel-good music for a long fucking time now—as early as ‘Good as Hell’ for people who\'ve known about me. So when I made a song like ‘Juice’ that had this funky disco feel to it, I didn\'t really realize what I was doing. I was just letting the song happen. It was the complete opposite with ‘About Damn Time.’ For this record, I was like, ‘We are making a disco record.’ I wanted a song that would be emblematic and reflective of the times. And I associate disco with resilience; it helped so many people stomp out of a dark era in this country. So I hoped that a contemporary disco song would have a similar effect. Now, I don\'t know what we\'re walking into. Things have gotten crazy. But I do know that we\'re always moving. I wanted this song to be a marching song \[that would help\] us move forward.” **“Grrrls”** “benny blanco and I had never worked together before this album. We’d eaten together, but we\'d never worked together. Then one day I heard he wanted to get in the studio and I was like, ‘Oh shit, okay, let\'s make it happen.’ He came with one track and it was this. So I sat with it for a while. Eventually I was like, ‘Listen, this is either going to be the greatest song ever or the biggest waste of our time.’ Because Beastie Boys were one of the greatest copyrights of all time. No one, and I mean no one, has done this. Until now. Dude, Beastie Boys cleared ‘Girls’ for yours truly. It’s an honor.” **“2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)”** “This is the first record I made with Max Martin, and it’s a dream record. As someone who\'s been writing songs since I was 9, who studied music since I was 12, and who dreamed of being a performer, Max Martin is the dream collaborator. Recording it was like watching a legend in action. He’s an extremely collaborative, open, creative soul. The song is a callback to when pop records had key changes—that golden era of late-’80s and early-’90s pop when singers had massive records that were vocally impressive but also danceable, and the production quality was very intentional. I think it\'s a work of art. It’s a masterpiece.” **“I Love You Bitch”** “‘I Love You Bitch’ came from a tweet, and it\'s not the same as ‘Truth Hurts,’ so don\'t come at me for royalties, Twitter. Shortly after ‘Rumors’ with Cardi B dropped, Cardi tweeted that she wanted to hear a love song from me next. And I was like, ‘Okay, if Lizzo did a love song, what would it be? I love you, bitch?’ It was one of those rare times where I had the title before the song. I got in the studio with Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin and told them about my idea. Omer started playing the guitar, and I started freestyling to it. I\'m from Houston, and there\'s this Houston rapper named Z-Ro who has a song called ‘I Hate U Bitch.’ Suddenly I was like, hold up, what if I sang the ‘I Hate U Bitch’ melody but said ‘I Love You Bitch’ instead? It just came out, and it might be the greatest thing we’ve ever done. As I was writing the lyrics, I realized that I wanted to write a universal love song—one you could sing to the person you\'re fucking and your best friend, to your family or to someone you just met at a bar.” **“Special”** “After ‘Rumors,’ I received a lot of backlash. I think it was because people hadn\'t heard from me since *Cuz I Love You* and this was their opportunity to attack me because I was visible, you know? But I turn my pain into music. I turn my pain into profit. I make it work for me. So I went into the studio to write a song for myself that would remind me how special I am. In the second verse, I say, ‘Could you imagine a world where everybody\'s the same? And you could cancel a girl ’cause she just wanted to change? How could you throw fucking stones if you ain\'t been through her pain? That\'s why we feel so alone, that\'s why we feel so much shame.’ I was trying to flip the mirror on people, that same mirror that I check myself with. It’s me saying, ‘You attack people like they\'re the monster, but you\'ve become the monster.’ No one\'s giving anyone the space to be themselves, to show their specialness, and to grow.” **“Break Up Twice”** “This is my second dream collab: Mark Ronson. And let me tell you, this is quintessential Mark. His style and swag is inescapable. Working with him made me feel like a kid again, because you just jam. And I used to be in a rock band, so that’s my bread and butter. When I first heard the guitar part, I was like, ‘This is classic shit right here.’ And when I heard those Lauryn Hill ‘Doo Wop’ chords, I was like, ‘Do we run from this or lean into it?’ You’ve got to lean into it. She cleared it in a day and I was beside myself. The story behind it is like, I’d had a barbecue and one of my friends threatened the guy I invited. She was like, ‘If you fuck with her, I\'m gonna slash your tires.’ I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’ I took it into the studio and Mark thought it was brilliant. The idea is: I don\'t break up twice. We\'re only going to do this once, and we\'re going to do it right.” **“Everybody\'s Gay”** “I wanted to write a fantasy song, like one of those Hollywood songs where you\'re taken away to a picture that I\'m painting, a dream sequence kind of thing. It\'s very cinematic. I wanted to write about this wild costume party where everybody gets together and has a good time. And no, when I sing ‘Take your mask off,’ I didn\'t mean your N95. I meant like the mask of the person that you have to uphold when you\'re out in the world, the mask that protects your true self. Take that off, because we accept you for who you are in this space. This high-key is the centerpiece of the album, musically, for me. It\'s a cornucopia of sound.” **“Naked”** “Goddammit, where do I even start? Pop Wansel made this beautiful track, and I was like, ‘If I don\'t use this track, I\'m going to think about this for the rest of my life. If I don\'t use this beat, I\'m going to think about this beat for the rest of my life.’ Initially, I wanted to write a song about how comfortable I\'ve become with myself, but then I evolved as a person. And as I’ve evolved, ‘Naked’ has undergone a lot of rewriting. It has evolved with me. So now it’s like, ‘How accepting are you of me?’ It’s very intimate. I saw Solange perform a couple years ago now at the Lovebox Festival in London, and I was in awe of her set because she had so much nuance. Meanwhile, I\'m all bravado. I\'m in-your-face, loud-loud-loud, full-throttle. I was like, ‘Man, on my next album, I want nuance.’ Because there\'s nothing like the control that she has, the power she has in the quiet. So on ‘Naked,’ I\'m in a half-falsetto for most of the song. I’m ad-libbing here and there. I’m having a little chat. It’s under your breath. Also, I had a sinus infection when I sang this, and frankly I give the best vocals with a sinus infection.” **“Birthday Girl”** “I did this with \[production duo\] Monsters & Strangerz, and it all came from a freestyle. I was like, ‘Is it your birthday, girl? ’Cause you lookin\' like a present.’ I literally think I freestyled that. And they were like, ‘Whoa.’ Mind you, the song wasn\'t about birthdays. I thought it was going to be like the first line of the first verse but then I’d go on to talk about how fine my friends are and whatever. And they were like, ‘No, no, this is the song.’ I felt tied to the song’s initial concept, which was to celebrate my friends and how much I love and appreciate them, but then I realized that birthdays symbolize that. Birthdays are a big deal for me. Every friend that I have, I try to make their birthday the biggest blowout every year. Helicopters, Omarion. Lizards. Three-tiered cakes. Like I say in the song, ‘When you\'ve been through the most/You got to do the most.’ That\'s an Instagram caption for life.” **“If You Love Me”** “This was the first song I wrote for the album, and it was something I needed to get off my chest. It’s about all of the times I go onstage and talk to the crowd and am like, ‘You guys show me so much love, so much support, and I want to thank you for supporting a woman who looks like me—a big Black woman from Houston, Texas. If you could show this same energy to people who look like me but who aren’t Lizzo, who aren’t dancing onstage and entertaining you... If you could show it to a woman on the street, show her some love and respect...’ Because historically, that hasn\'t been the case. It’s asking: How do we take the time to be kind to ourselves and kind to the person next to us, no matter what they look like or where they come from? How can we take this respect that we give to entertainers and apply it to people in the real world? This is a record that fans who\'ve been following me for a long time will get it as soon as they hear it.” **“Coldplay”** “This song was literally created from a 45-minute freestyle to a piano loop. Ricky Reed had me sit in the booth and just talk, so I started romanticizing about this trip I’d just taken to Tulum, about the experiences I’d had and how I was singing Coldplay and crying. A few weeks later, he was like, ‘Hey, you remember that freestyle you said in the booth? I wrote a song using your words.’ He played me a track that sampled Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy.’ Ricky was like, ‘We should call this “My Love Is You.”’ And I was like, ‘Nah, we should call it “Coldplay.”’ Because I\'m going to tell you: Black people call people the name of their band. We call Adam Levine ‘Maroon 5.’ ‘Oh, there goes Maroon 5.’ I thought there was something funny and real about calling a song that samples Coldplay ‘Coldplay.’ Their songwriting is so simple and poetic. So I was like, ‘Let\'s honor them. Let\'s not run from it.’ On this album, I didn\'t run from anything. If there’s a thesis to this album, it’s that. Embracing myself.”