The Line of Best Fit's Best Albums of 2021

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

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

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

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

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

Listening to Liz Harris’ music as Grouper, the word that comes to mind is “psychedelic.” Not in the cartoonish sense—if anything, the Astoria, Oregon-based artist feels like a monastic antidote to spectacle of almost any kind—but in the subtle way it distorts space and time. She can sound like a whisper whose words you can’t quite make out (“Pale Interior”) and like a primal call from a distant hillside (“Followed the ocean”). And even when you can understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t sound like she meant to be heard (“The way her hair falls”). The paradox is one of closeness and remove, of the intimacy of singer-songwriters and the neutral, almost oracular quality of great ambient music. That the tracks on *Shade*, her 12th LP, were culled from a 15-year period is fitting not just because it evokes Harris’ machine consistency (she found her creative truth and she’s sticking to it), but because of how the staticky, white-noise quality of her recordings makes you aware of the hum of the fridge and the hiss of the breeze: With Grouper, it’s always right now.

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

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

“My biggest fear with this album is that people consume it like a compilation,” Justin Clarke—better known as Ghetts—tells Apple Music. “Just looking at the tracklist and spotting features, thinking that they can jump the tracks. This is a journey. It makes complete sense when you listen to it the way it’s supposed to be listened to.” For the east London rhymer—whose early story was one of countless pirate radio sets, sticky rave rooms and viral freestyles—the fight to be heard and respected on his own terms is nothing new. *Conflict of Interest* dropped with Ghetts aged 36 and is only his third studio album in a career that burst into life through cult early 2000s DVD series Risky Roadz. But this is one of grime’s most prolific, impactful and interesting artists. The teenage Ghetts (originally performing under “Ghetto”) helped embody the new scene and its infectious, unpredictable energy. A member of two seminal grime collectives (NASTY Crew and The Movement), Ghetts sharpened himself into a supremely versatile rhyming juggernaut, but somehow missed the mainstream acclaim afforded former teammates including Kano and Wretch 32 in the late 2000s. But as controversy, commercial limitation and censorship caught up with grime’s first wave, Ghetts was compelled to reclaim authorship of his story. “Tupac was a conflicted individual,” he says. “I felt that way for so long, too. I didn’t even understand my ting. I’m a black sheep in my family.” On *Conflict Of Interest*, all sides that make the man are laid bare for the first time. It’s an exhaustive-and-exhilarating cycle through the cavernous reaches of the MC’s mind. “Where I’m at now is that everything has to sound amazing,” he says. Whether it’s warm, throwback flows on garage tempos (“Good Hearts”), brutally honest chronicling of a past life in petty crime (“Hop Out”), crossover hits-in-waiting (the Ed Sheeran-starring “10,000 Tears”) or long-awaited reunions with former adversaries (“IC3” with Skepta)), this is the complete record Ghetts has been threatening to pull together for two decades. “I’m not here to compete with people that just want to make microwave music,” he says. “I want to be taken in on a worldwide level.” Below, Ghetts walks us through its story, track by track. **Fine Wine** “Wretch 32 titled this for me, I originally had it as ‘Intro’. I brought him by the studio as I was wrapping up the project: he’s someone whose opinion I rate and he’s got a great ear. This one stood out to him immediately, and at the end he said to me: ‘You know what? Your ting is like just like fine wine...and that should be the title!’” **Mozambique (feat. Jaykae & Moonchild Sanelly)** “This is a little different to the single version—we added some strings on at the beginning here to give a more special feel to the sound, and get some flow to the sequencing. When you listen to this album—particularly the flow and feel of the first few tracks, it’s meant to feel continuous, like a set.” **Fire and Brimstone** “In a way I guess this track is about my PTSD. In some situations it still comes to me, like when I’m in the car and the feds pull in behind me. I’m moving nervous. I’m fully insured and there’s nothing in the car; I have a license, but still, a bit nervous!” **Hop Out** “Writing this track was fun, running through my past life and all of my adventures. I’ve been noticing for a while now that nobody was really talking about other kinds of moves you could do on the roads. It wasn’t all about trapping in my days. Even though it’s all in my past, I’m being *very* real here, I’ll say that.” **IC3 (feat. Skepta)** “The fans have been asking me for this one for years! They really, really wanted me and Skepta to get one off together, after so long. I’m especially happy because we’re talking some real substance on this too. The clip at the end is taken from a set with Kano and Skepta on Logan’s \[Kiss FM\] show back in 2008. We’re all older, and Skepta and I are now fathers—but I always reflect on how we have such a long and deep history in this game together.” **Autobiography** “‘I know you’ve been through hell so I’ve got heaven for you/If you don’t tell your story they gon’ tell it for you.’ One thing about me: when I’m writing, I’ll just go with it and tell the whole story. It’s is the longest track \[on the album\] but the length is never that important to me. I had a lot to say here, so I said it all.” **Good Hearts (feat. Aida Lae)** “I had to have Mighty Moe \[from Heartless Crew\] open this track and he was kind enough to do so. I still remember seeing Heartless shut down Ive Farm—my first festival experience. It was just a tent in Leyton. It wasn’t even massive, but to a 15 year old, it kinda was. I saw Heartless going crazy in this tent in patterned Moschino outfits. They looked great and I remember the vibes in this place was like no other. I had this overwhelming feeling like *this* is what I want to do. Now, whenever I see or hear Heartless Crew—I’m not Ghetts—I’m that little boy.” **Dead To Me** “This song came about from an Insta live session I had. I was messing around at first, trying to get people to understand the levels. I asked someone to throw me a concept and I’d return in an hour, with the song done. People were telling me it was impossible but I came back in an hour with a finished track. The blogs started posting it up and eventually people pressed for it to make the album.” **10,000 Tears (feat. Ed Sheeran)** “Let’s be real: Ed is top three in the world. It’s Drizzy, Beyoncé, Ed. So when I wrote this track, I reached out to him and he turned around a verse in no time for me—that meant a lot. He loved what I was on and, honestly, to have one of the biggest artists in the world singing a chorus that I wrote is no small feat. I’m sure to the average, surface-level listener, they won’t believe it was me that wrote this song at first.” **Sonya (feat. Emeli Sandé)** “I wanted to write a song about escorts, but not from a male, judgmental perspective. I understand that in this life I’ve done things that can be judged harshly, so I’m not sitting here judging anybody. Are some of the things I’ve done for money in my life any better than escorting? In whose eyes? Who’s judging? That’s the perspective; I wanted to touch on subjects people are not speaking about on this album. And this is one of them.” **Proud Family** “When you’re putting together a solid body of work, I feel like you have to paint the *full* picture and that includes my family. This was one of the last tunes made for this album and it was the missing piece to the puzzle. I’m really tight with my family and making them proud means so much to me, on the day of filming this video with my them: my nan died. I had to shoot a block of videos the whole day and that was the hardest day of shooting I’ve had. I’ve never lost somebody as important to me as my nan, and my head was in such a weird space, but I was zoning in and found the strength to pull through. Now that I’m having my own children, I’m thinking about what I can do today that will affect my great-grandchildren—just experiencing a whole new range of feelings about family.” Skengman (feat. Stormzy) “Stormzy and I first worked together on \[2017 album\] *Gang Signs & Prayer* \[for ‘Bad Boys’\] but we also recorded another track for \[2018 album\] *Ghetto Gospel: The New Testament*. It just wasn’t leveling with ‘Bad Boys’ though, and I couldn’t bring myself to release it. It was sub-par. This time, I could feel I had something different. I was writing the track and forming the whole concept of the video in mind. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is crazy. And Stormz owes me a verse. Where’s Big Mike at?’ So, he’s come through, done the verse, and \[album producer\] TJ’s gone to work on post-production. If you listen carefully when Stormzy comes in, there’s a note going through it playing \[2018 freestyle\] ‘WICKEDSKENGMAN’.” **No Mercy (feat. Pa Salieu & BackRoad Gee)** “The studio session on this day was crazy, I’ve not had many sessions like that. The energy was wild. Pa is a lovely soul—he’s just one of those man you want to see win. As soon as I bucked him, it was like something that was meant to be. He told me that his friend was a big fan of mine, and once, when I was doing an open video shoot, they both pulled up. That was maybe three years ago. And that friend has now passed, but that’s something that I wasn’t even aware of and a nice moment for it came back full circle, for me and him.” **Crud (feat. Giggs)** “This was recorded in lockdown and, as soon as I made it, I could hear Giggs on it. He’s a man that loves music as much I do. We’re both so passionate about the art form of MCing. And we both gas our own ting equally! ‘I murdered that’: that energy. This might be our sixth or seventh track together. I’ve been working with the bro for at least 15 years now. And every time, we’ll argue about whose verse won on the riddim. For years and years after.” **Squeeze (feat. Miraa May)** “I’ll be honest. I couldn’t get from ‘Crud’ to ‘Little Bo Peep’ and make it make sense! Sonically, concept wise, I didn’t know how. For all of us involved in this album, we look at ‘Squeeze’ as an interlude—a long interlude—just to paint the picture and get us to the next track.” **Little Bo Peep (feat. Dave, Hamzaa & Wretch 32)** “I went round to my mum’s house and heard something playing from upstairs. It was my brother making a loop. It was kinda crazy and I was impressed. So I ran upstairs, laid down a quick idea and we slept on it for ages. After we made \[Hamzaa’s 2019 single\] ‘Breathing, Pt. 2,’ I knew this was the right track to call on Hamzaa and Wretch 32. I wanted my own version, or something in that vein and they absolutely smashed it. The track’s about being led astray. You might be addicted to something and that’s your Little Bo Peep. You’re a sheep to that, whatever it is.”

K-house, K-pop, hip-hop, electronic: Call it what you want—Hye Jin Park’s debut ignores those boundaries, anyway. The Korea-born, LA-based producer’s debut album, *Before I Die*, is a personal exploration of everything from living overseas and missing her family to sex, the music industry, and childhood nostalgia. It’s sung, rapped, and spoken, in Korean and English, over a sound that takes elements of hip-hop, techno, house, indie, and lo-fi beats, and creates something new, immersive, and totally unique. Below, Park walks us through each track on her self-produced, self-recorded LP. **“Let’s Sing Let’s Dance”** “In my life, when I’m really sad, I just sing and dance. If there are times when others feel sad, too, I want them to just sing and dance and leave everything behind for a while.” **“I Need You”** “Up to this point, I have endured all of this road alone and survived. I just really needed someone who had my back.” **“Before I Die”** “It’s been so long since I left Korea and last saw my family. I couldn’t get in touch with my family properly, because I was moving around the country on my own and dealing with all of these things that were happening to me. Of course, now, the coronavirus and everything that is happening in the US has affected my ability to see them. Words can never, ever, ever express how much I miss my family.” **“Good Morning Good Night”** “At the beginning of the day, I wanted to tell myself to have a good day. At the end of the day, I wanted to tell myself that I had also worked hard today.” **“Me Trust Me”** “I believe in myself and trust myself. But I wanted to protect myself from people who don’t believe in me or in themselves. They try to take me down like they take themselves down.” **“Where Did I Go”** “I’m thinking back to when I was a kid. I used to draw on the walls of my room. I miss that little kid.” **“Never Give Up”** “I left my country when I was 24, because I thought I did everything I could in Korea to pursue my dream. First, I moved to Melbourne, Australia by myself, because I thought easily get a visa for as a Korean. And then I moved from Australia to the UK and then to Los Angeles, California. I’ve gotten fucked over a lot. Twice in a row, I was seriously fucked over in this industry and by its people. They threatened me and were racist towards me. How many crooks I’ve met, country by country. How many times I’ve had to go through creepy guys, country by country. There’s a lot of people who wanted to try and take me down and be disrespectful towards me. I wanted to show them and tell them that I’ll never give up.” **“Can I Get Your Number”** “When you like someone, you ask them, ‘Can I get your number?’” **“Whatchu Doin Later”** “Then, you could text them and say, ‘Whatchu doin later?’” **“Sex With Me (DEFG)”** “And then, you could tell them, ‘Sex with me.’” **“Where Are You Think”** “I was talking to myself, saying, ‘Wake up. You need to make money.’” **“Never Die”** “I’ll never die.” **“Hey, Hey, Hey”** “Try listening to this song when y’all jogging. It’s gonna hit different.” **“Sunday ASAP”** “I wanted Sunday to come as soon as possible. It’s the only time I can let myself be lazy. I usually pressure myself to work harder than anyone else. So, soothing myself is like candy.” **“i jus wanna be happy”** “Originally, this song was called ‘I Hate Myself.’ But then, I deleted all of the ‘I Hate Myself’ parts I recorded. Instead, I rerecorded ‘i jus wanna be happy’ in Korean.”

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

“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”

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

“It happened by accident,” Halsey tells Apple Music of their fourth full-length. “I wasn\'t trying to make a political record, or a record that was drowning in its own profundity—I was just writing about how I feel. And I happen to be experiencing something that is very nuanced and very complicated.” Written while they were pregnant with their first child, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* finds the pop superstar sifting through dark thoughts and deep fears, offering a picture of maternity that fully acknowledges its emotional and physical realities—what it might mean for one’s body, one’s sense of purpose and self. “The reason that the album has sort of this horror theme is because this experience, in a way, has its horrors,” Halsey says. “I think everyone who has heard me yearn for motherhood for so long would have expected me to write an album that was full of gratitude. Instead, I was like, ‘No, this shit is so scary and so horrifying. My body\'s changing and I have no control over anything.’ Pregnancy for some women is a dream—and for some people it’s a fucking nightmare. That\'s the thing that nobody else talks about.” To capture a sound that reflected the album’s natural sense of conflict, Halsey reached out to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “I wanted cinematic, really unsettling production,” they say. “They wanted to know if I was willing to take the risk—I was.” A clear departure from the psychedelic softness of 2020’s *Manic*, the album showcases their influence from the start: in the negative space and 10-ton piano notes of “The Tradition,” the smoggy atmospherics of “Bells in Santa Fe,” the howling guitars of “Easier Than Lying,” the feverish synths of “I am not a woman, I’m a god.” Lyrically, Halsey says, it’s like an emptying of her emotional vault—“expressions of guilt or insecurity, stories of sexual promiscuity or self-destruction”—and a coming to terms with who they have been before becoming responsible for someone else; its fury is a response to an ancient dilemma, as they’ve experienced it. “I think being pregnant in the public eye is a really difficult thing, because as a performer, so much of your identity is predicated on being sexually desirable,” they say. “Socially, women have been reduced to two categories: You are the Madonna or the whore. So if you are sexually desirable or a sexual being, you\'re unfit for motherhood. But as soon as you are motherly or maternal and somebody does want you as the mother of their child, you\'re unfuckable. Those are your options; those things are not compatible, and they haven’t been for centuries.” But there are feelings of resolution as well. Recorded in conjunction with the shooting of a companion film, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* is an album that’s meant to document Halsey’s transformation. And at its conclusion is “Ya’aburnee”—Arabic for “you bury me”—a sparse love song to both their baby and partner. Just the sound of their voice and a muted guitar, it’s one of the most powerful songs Halsey has written to date. “I start this journey with ‘Okay, fine—if I can\'t have love, then I want power,’” they say. “If I can\'t have a relationship, I\'m going to work. If I can\'t be loved interpersonally, I\'m going to be loved by millions on the internet, or I\'m going to crave attention elsewhere. I\'m so steadfast with this mentality, and then comes this baby. The irony is that the most power I\'ve ever had is in my agency, being able to choose. You realize, by the end of the record, I chose love.”

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

“Take this opportunity to learn from my mistakes. You don’t have to guess if something is love. Love is shown through actions. Stop making excuses for people who don’t show up for you. Don’t ignore the red flags. And don’t think you have to stay somewhere ’cause you can’t find better—you can and you will. Don’t settle for less—you don’t deserve it and neither does your family.” —Summer Walker, in an exclusive message she provided to Apple Music about her second album

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

Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.

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

For Ashnikko, the title of her debut mixtape, *DEMIDEVIL*, represents what she calls a “duality.” “There’s a side that’s a little bit more vulnerable and human,” the singer and rapper tells Apple Music. “And then there’s a devil side that\'s very tough and doesn\'t give a shit. It’s just confidence and sadness—I can’t do anything else.” It’s a neat summation of what you can expect from the 10 tracks here. There’s all the indestructibility seen on the viral hits that set Ashnikko up as a provocative new pop force—from 2019’s ex-eviscerating TikTok smash “STUPID” to 2020’s just-as-inescapable “Daisy.” But, set against her dizzyingly genre-evasive mash-up of pop, punk, and rap, the North Carolina-born artist also embraces that sadness, as she allows herself to be vulnerable in her music for the first time. “The character I’ve placed at the forefront of my music is very confident and strong, and I’m more confident now because of those songs,” says Ashnikko, real name Ashton Nicole Casey. “But it’s impossible to sustain without lying to yourself. Like all humans, I am flawed and I like to cry.” But if any of that sounds like Ashnikko’s empowering, unfiltered, and sex-positive energy has diminished, think again. On *DEMIDEVIL*, she continues to admonish toxic men and those yet to learn their way around a woman’s body (see the hilarious “Clitoris! The Musical”), all while championing female pleasure in her mission, as she puts it, to create “the opposite of the male gaze.” Buckle up as Ashnikko talks us through *DEMIDEVIL*, track by track. **Daisy** “When \[British producer\] Thomas Slinger and I wrote this, we were like, ‘This is a fucking banger. This is a hit.’ I rarely feel that way about my music. I like to have something visual to go along with the lyrics, like a character that I\'m tapping into. Here I have Daisy, who is a vigilante and who wears latex, blue diamonds, and massive, clear, icy platforms. She smashes the patriarchy and kills horrible men—think the Trump dudes of America. She looks amazing, and she leaves behind a daisy as a calling card.” **Toxic** “As a woman in music, I have definitely encountered a lot of toxic men. I always find it really difficult when people, especially men, are like, ‘I made you who you are.’ It\'s like, ‘No, actually, I worked extremely hard and you helped me with a lot of things, but I made this music.’ The unnamed man this song is about knows who he is—and he should feel bad. There are some songs that are very cathartic, and this is definitely one of them. It’s my power anthem, which is why the bass is extremely heavy. I wanted it to feel like a smack in the face.” **Deal With It (feat. Kelis)** “Kelis’ ‘Caught Out There’ is one of my favorite songs in the entire world, and I’m blown away that we got this cleared, let alone her wanting her name next to it. This is my breakup song—it wouldn’t be an Ashnikko project without one. It’s about choosing yourself, because that’s the best way to get through a breakup. Get some new sex toys, invest in yourself, learn something new, cut all your hair off if you want. Manifest your dreams, baby. This song is quite poppy. I\'m a pop girlie at the end of the day, and that\'s a side to me that I felt was very important to put on this mixtape.” **Slumber Party (feat. Princess Nokia)** “I love Princess Nokia and I\'ve been listening to her since she first started putting out music as Wavy Spice. She\'s just very unapologetically herself, and I really fuck with that. There’s an element of this song that plays on some sapphic tropes in pop music, like the ‘I Kissed a Girl’ tropes. I was kind of poking fun at it a little bit in the chorus, and then completely flipping it on its head in the verses. It’s about a girl who hurt my feelings. I always get in very messy relationship situations with taken women. The lyric is ‘She looks like the type to break it.’ Because I\'m very confident, but also I always get my heart broken.” **Drunk With My Friends** “I had a really wild few months of raving a lot, going to a lot of techno parties, and three-way kissing loads of people. And I remember spending my rent money on pills… I was in Berlin, so can you blame me? I\'m not really into it anymore because I truly can\'t do drugs—I have a mind that already sits on the precipice of disaster on any given day—so I have to sober rave. I wrote this song with \[London-based producer\] Oscar Scheller, who’s one of my best pals. We had a lot of fun writing this song.” **Little Boy** “I was dealing with some very toxic men in the music industry and toxic boys in my life and was just like, ‘I\'m over it. Don\'t treat me like shit anymore. I literally will not tolerate it.’ I was understanding what boundaries were. There’s sadness here, for sure, and I think a real disappointment with men. It\'s less ‘Go fuck yourself’ and more like ‘Please stop placing your emotional trauma onto me and just pay for therapy.’ I think the people who listen to my music will appreciate the vulnerability. It\'s very important to me that people understand that it\'s not all confidence.” **Cry (feat. Grimes)** “The context of this song is that I had a really heartbreaking moment when I was 19, when my best friend and boyfriend got together behind my back. I had just moved to London and they were my two family members. I was so sad—more with her because she was my best friend, and there\'s a certain code in friendship that shouldn’t be breached. With my boyfriend, it was like, ‘You’re a shithead, but that’s to be expected, I guess.’ I recognize that was a very problematic way of dealing with it. But I was so mad at her, to a point where I was just like, ‘We could have fought.’ I was broken. Grimes is a huge inspiration to me. I saw she followed me on Instagram and I just immediately was like, ‘Please feature on this song, I love you so much.’ And she said yes! It all happens over Instagram.” **L8r Boi** “When I was younger, I thought Avril Lavigne was a bad bitch. I knew I wanted to flip an Avril song, and when we looked at the lyrics of ‘Sk8er Boi,’ I was like, ‘Love Avril, love everything about her, but the lyrics are a bit problematic!’ Because it\'s mainly about ‘Fuck this girl. She doesn\'t appreciate my man. Fuck this girl for being into ballet.’ I wanted to update it a little bit and make it about not wanting skater boy. He\'s not the prized object in this song, whereas in the original he is.” **Good While It Lasted** “My serious song. It\'s reflecting on a relationship and being like, ‘I see now that maybe we both acted immature, and maybe I\'m not quite as blameless as I make out.’ I think it\'s a more mature approach. My favorite part is the first verse. It was a day when I was feeling really sad and very broken and it came from a really real place. It’s extremely raw and I just felt like it needed to be included because it meant a lot to me. All of my stuff is a therapy session. I\'m just bringing everyone along for a very public therapy session.” **Clitoris! The Musical”** “Putting this song next to ‘Good While It Lasted’ was a little joke of mine. Because I can’t be serious. It’s like, ‘I\'m serious, I\'m vulnerable, but also JK, I\'m not!’ This song was a skit that I wrote for my YouTube channel where I dressed up as a vagina and my face was the clitoris. I thought it was hilarious. I\'ve written a lot of songs about the cis-het man\'s journey to find the clitoris, because for some reason it’s some elusive mystery land. This song is really my little sex-education tidbit. I’m just trying to pay forward what I’ve learned.”

After rerecording her 2008 album *Fearless* as part of a sweeping effort to regain control of her master tapes—or at least create new ones—Taylor Swift presents *Red (Taylor’s Version)*, an expanded take on her 2012 blockbuster that features nine never-before-released songs written in the same era as the original. “Musically and lyrically, *Red* resembled a heartbroken person,” she wrote in a letter to fans. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.” The hot-blooded breakup anthems you know and love are still there (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” are two), but the new, full collection paints an even richer portrait of heartbreak. She wrestles with change on “Nothing New,” an alt-rock duet with Phoebe Bridgers; contemplates fate on a wistful pop song produced by Max Martin and Shellback (“Message in a Bottle”); and gets the final, piercing word on “I Bet You Think About Me” featuring Chris Stapleton, penned after a high-profile breakup in 2011. Longtime fans will be especially glad to see an extended cut of “All Too Well,” the project’s emotional centerpiece. It features new production from hitmaker Jack Antonoff, but Swift’s original lyrical genius is still remarkable. “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest,” she sings. It’s the line she’s always said she’s most proud of from this album and era. Ten years on, it still cuts deep.

“Fifth records are actually a lot of people’s best records,” James Blake tells Apple Music. “You’ve had all the practice of making albums, taken a few different directions, and by then have usually reached your thirties where you’ve got a bunch of stuff out of your system. So you finally decide to just be yourself. And suddenly, everyone’s thrilled.” *Friends That Break Your Heart* is Blake’s fifth album. While he’s too coy to personally anoint it his best work, the record does feel invigoratingly apart from the North London-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s first four. There’s the emotional payload of any Blake enterprise, but here he detonates through an earthier and more unguarded sonic arsenal. “It’s the most direct songwriting of anything I’ve done,” he says. “Whether it’s a sad song or an uplifting song, each emotion I’ve gone for is a more raw version of that thing on at least the last two records. I was working stuff out on those records, and I am here, too, but at 32, I’m starting to become more sure of myself in lots of ways. This record is very sure of itself.” The title here suggests a twist on a classic breakup album—a documentation of how we negotiate non-romantic partings. “There doesn’t seem to be a protocol for how to treat someone who’s breaking up with a friend,” he says. “We’re expected to move on pretty quick from deep lifelong friendships. But you can’t make old friends, as they say.” Can the COVID-inspired events of 2020 and 2021 take the blame for the demise of certain relationships? “I think what’s happened partly makes the topic of this album so pertinent,” he says. “We lost some of the parameters that kept friendships together. And it’s been a time for analyzing and reflecting what the qualities in friends that you actually need in your life are—and facing up to your own failings as one. Being an infantilized C-list pop star doesn’t really set you up to be the best friend in the world. But also, when I needed them and help most, I realized that most of those people just didn’t know what to do.” Blake has been candid about requiring that help in the past, and fortunately, the various COVID lockdowns proved beneficial to the creation of this record—which had a positive knock-on effect for his mental health. “I realized that I actually have a lot of control over my mental health,” he says. “What the lockdowns did was force me to say, ‘I can actually do this. I can actually block this out, and actually lift myself out of certain things.’ Previously I’d relied on other means. And I think that allows music to flow easier because being present and overcoming mental ill health is good for creativity.” Below, Blake takes us through his beautiful album, track by track. **“Famous Last Words”** “I don\'t agonize over tracklisting. I think it\'s like a DJ set, and a DJ set needs its peaks and troughs and moments of reflection. I spend so long writing the actual song and producing the song, by the time it comes to sequencing the tracklist, I\'m like, ‘Oh god, just put it in an order, man.’ This isn\'t a love song. But it is kind of a love song. It\'s kind of a breakup song. It\'s weird. I think it blurs the line between friendship and romance. With friendships, it’s not necessarily that the feelings are romantic, but you can genuinely love someone and it hurt like that.” **“Life Is Not the Same”** “You meet some people and they can just have an effect on you. It could be that they just sparkle, and you’ve got no idea why, but you’re doing things differently, or saying different stuff to impress them, and it doesn’t mean you’re weak or easily influenced—well, maybe it means you’re easily influenced a little bit—but it takes a special person to do that. I can take accountability for being willing to bend for someone. Certain people, for example, have taught me that I needed to develop a thicker skin and that I was too ready to give up control to someone else. I clearly needed to have more self-belief, because if I was so easily swayed then maybe I’d miscalculated my own self-worth.” **“Coming Back” (feat. SZA)** “I was doing a session with \[US artist and songwriter\] Starrah, who casually mentioned SZA was going to come by the studio. So I played her a bunch of stuff, she sang over it, and we hit it off straight away. It took a while to figure out how to produce what we landed on, though. Long story short: My production wasn’t hitting. You could hear that SZA and I sounded good together—but I hadn’t figured out how to best support her vocal because it was a song with no chorus. We are used to those structures as a society, so when you start taking apart those structures, you’ve really got to replace it properly. A bit like gluten-free bread. I realized I needed to put a donk on it, essentially. I just had to make it more banger-y. I tried doing the ambient thing, I tried making it really beautiful, and it didn’t work. I have it in my locker, and occasionally that power needs to be drawn upon.” **“Funeral”** “This song is all me, done on a very sunny but slightly miserable day. I was thinking about how it feels not to be heard, and to worry that people have given up on you. During lockdown I specifically felt that. It had been many years since I had really popped up and done forward-facing stuff like interviews.” **“Frozen” (feat. JID & SwaVay)** “Quite a spooky instrumental, and my vocals come in a little off-kilter, a little creepy. JID and SwaVay kill it over a beat I actually originally wrote for JID. It ended up not really fitting his record, which I found very lucky because secretly I wanted it for myself. It felt a bit like when you set someone up to cancel on you—my favorite feeling. Jameela \[Jamil, Blake’s partner and co-producer on the album\] suggested putting SwaVay on it because I’d been working with him for a couple of years. Totally right. Good A&R instincts.” **“I\'m So Blessed You\'re Mine”** “The album is sort of split between these Frankenstein’s monsters that were very exciting to put together and songs that happened very quickly. This was somewhere in the middle, and I got to work with some of my favorite people on it—Khushi, Dominic Maker, Josh Stadlen, Jameela. I want to get out of the way so we end up with the best piece of music we can make. And maybe have a nice chat about something before we start. There was no chatting back on album one, say, because I had way too much social anxiety.” **“Foot Forward”** “Metro Boomin is back! He knows I’m often into his more esoteric stuff so played me this piano sample he’d made on the MPC \[music production center\] that sounded like it was from the ’70s but had this Metro-y bounce on it. I started improvising in the studio, and I remember seeing him dancing in the booth because it sounded so up. It felt very anthemic. Eventually I turned it into a song with Frank Dukes and Ali Tamposi—another genius who wrote the chorus melody.” **“Show Me” (feat. Monica Martin)** “Monica is an incredible singer and incredible person—she’s fucking hilarious, and we’ve become friends. The song felt quite bare without her. It needed someone to step in, and it had to be exactly the right person, otherwise it’s not going to work. Again, Jameela made the suggestion. She came into the studio with Khushi and I, did the take in exactly the way I imagined, and it was glorious. I was just so excited, she was excited, it was a lovely moment.” **“Say What You Will”** “Ah, those those dreamy ’60s vibes. This is my favorite song I’ve written in years. It’s the song that carries the most meaning in terms of my overall life. It’s more representative of my headspace as a whole, and I like songs that have a wider commentary baked into them. I was pleased with the reaction to it because I really tried to communicate where I am right now in an authentic way. At this point in my career, it can’t be any other way. The formula to putting a song out has never changed. A good song will out in every single scenario. It needs to resonate with people, or it will disappear. And I know that feeling—I have released songs that for whatever reason have not resonated with people.” **“Lost Angel Nights”** “It’s about a lot of things, but primarily it’s about worrying that you’ve missed your shot. And *maybe* there’s a little bit of finger-pointing in there as well. The way people take your original essence, copy it and move on, really. I’ve been super lucky in my career, but I think there was a time where there was a lot of looking at what the shiny new thing is, doing that, then moving on. You don’t need them anymore. It happens to a lot of people, but you have to contend with being a permanent person, a permanent artist. I want to be here for as long as I can and be as naturalistic and true to myself as I can be, and what other people do doesn’t affect that.” **“Friends That Break Your Heart”** “Perhaps weirdly, it was album title first, then this song. I wrote the melody in the car on the way to meet \[US songwriter and producer\] Rick Nowels. There were a couple of others that we didn’t put onto the record, but this one was just standout right away. It was a really fun process, because he just played the keys and I was left to singer-songwriter duties for once. The line ‘I have haunted many photographs’ is something we can hopefully all relate to—well, hopefully not, actually, because that would be terrible, but I feel like that’s a common feeling.” **“If I\'m Insecure”** “I like to go out on something either where it’s all harmonies or it just feels huge. This is the latter. It’s an apocalyptic love song—the world is ending, but you’re in love, so it’s all right. Which maybe captures where we are as a society in 2021, so perhaps I’ll come to think of this record as one big externalization of my COVID experience, but that wasn’t the original intention. I make a load of music and then eventually realize, ‘Oh, yes, roughly, it was about this.’”

Towards the end of “Serotonin,” the opening track on girl in red’s debut album, some Norwegian dialogue emerges through the bracing alloy of indie rock and hip-hop. “That recording is where I’m talking to the doctor,” the singer-songwriter born Marie Ulven tells Apple Music. “My friend had to carry me out from a lobby in Bergen while I was making the album because I woke up, thought I had a blood clot in my brain, and was like, ‘I’m about to die.’ I’m like, ‘OK, it felt like my heart stopped beating.’” It’s a moment that exemplifies the album’s remarkable openness—manifested by Ulven’s emotional honesty and her anything-goes approach to making music. “Serotonin” details the Norwegian’s experiences with intrusive thoughts, and across the subsequent 10 tracks, she performs an unflinching internal audit, processing her feelings, anxieties, and behaviors and their effects on herself and her loved ones. It’s all cast in a free-spirited brand of alt-pop that dissolves genre boundaries and shreds the “bedroom indie” tag that accompanied her early DIY EPs. The result is something that she hopes will offer help to anyone who listens. “It would be really cool if I was able to say some shit about their lives, not just mine,” she says. “The best thing about music is when you hear a song where someone is explaining what you felt but you’re not able to say because you haven’t dared to try and figure it out, or haven’t had the time.” Let girl in red take you through the album, track by track. **“Serotonin”** “\[Intrusive thoughts\] can be really scary and make you feel really crazy if you don’t know what they are, where they’re coming from, and how to deal with them. It was so liberating, knowing that I’m not crazy and that I don’t want to do these things, and then I just felt like I was over it almost. Then I wrote the song. It was just a weird journey figuring out the rap parts, but they came really quick. It was not a hard time writing those lyrics. They poured out of me.” **“Did You Come?”** “There’s no proper chorus there. The entire thing is just like a vibe. It’s hooky, and that’s all you need. I started out with the lyrics first: ‘You should know better now to fuck it up and fuck around.’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is cheating. Someone is really fucking angry here, and this is a great way to get out this aggression.’ I started making really fast-paced drums and this guitar and this piano thing. It really made me see a lot of stuff in my head.” **“Body and Mind”** “I’ve experienced a lot of self-hatred this past year, which I’ve never really understood. Realizing that you are a person is really fucking weird. I think a lot of people struggle with accepting mortality. People fixing up their bodies, changing themselves because they just want to avoid the inevitable, which is dying and aging. This is me trying to comfort myself: ‘I’ve had my deepest cries for now/My heart’s out, my guard’s down.’ I’m accepting this shit, and I don’t want to beat myself up for being a person. I think aging as a concept is really beautiful because it just means that you’re alive still.” **“hornylovesickmess”** “It’s a fun, self-aware track about how my life led me to be a jerk to someone a little bit and also being really sad that touring had its toll on my relationship with this person. My favorite line is ‘Maybe on a bus for months straight, shit’s fun but I’m going insane/Like it’s been months since I’ve had sex, I’m just a horny little lovesick mess.’ Just this fun image of me being with 10 sweaty guys on the tour bus, and being in a bunk bed thinking about this one person that I just want to call right now.” **“midnight love”** “I had a friend that would always get a guy over late at night. Then he would leave in the morning and they would never hang out during daytime. It was really getting to her. I was like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of someone.’ I was that dude who would just call someone when I felt like ‘I need this and I know that you are able to give it to me, so therefore I will call you.’ I’d never had any bad intentions. But I was able to realize a few things about myself.” **“You Stupid Bitch”** “The story here is that I had to go and comfort someone because of their broken relationships with other people. But really: ‘I’m here, I could be yours right now and you wouldn’t be going through all of this if you just saw how present I am and how much I want to be with you.’ It’s about being so angry but still comforting someone: ‘I love you but you’re fucking stupid.’ It is a really intense song, but it’s going to go hard live.” **“Rue”** “I’m singing to my sister. I had to sleep in her bed for weeks straight because I’ve just been so scared. Every time I was about to fall asleep, I felt like my heart stopped beating, so I’d want to be in her bed in case I died. I’ve just been completely all over the place. This is singing to my family and loved ones that I want to get better. I’m trying to leave it all behind. I don’t want to make it worse for you guys. It’s also about realizing that you have to do the work. If you want to get better mentally, or if you struggle with depression or anxiety, it’s such a heavy realization figuring out that it’s you who has to do it.” **“Apartment 402”** “I live in Apartment 402. I’m imagining myself lying on the floor because I’ve lost every will to do anything. I’m singing about how shitty things have been for so long; I have a sense of hopelessness. But then I’m seeing the sun come in. You know when you see the sunlight hit dust? The room is opening up for me. I’m turning this place that I’ve had so many bad feelings towards into something beautiful and into a safe place and a good place—not just a place I could die in and nobody would know.” **“.”** “There’s something about the vocal performance that’s just like, ‘Oh, Marie, you really, really know what you’re saying right now.’ That song is really sad and I always want to cry thinking about it. It’s about the one that got away, really. A result of touring and being away a bit too long and not giving enough while being away. And how that can seem like you don’t care, but in reality, in my bubble, I was like, ‘I have absolutely no emotional capacity to be in another country and to give you what I think you need from me right now.’ It just ended up disappearing, and there wasn’t really anything more to say than to just have a full stop.” **“I’ll Call You Mine”** “It’s such a catchy, summery, driving song. It’s about letting someone in and hoping for the best, even though you’ve been fucked over a few times. I’ve had a tendency to think that nothing good could ever last. You know how sometimes you have fun but then we’re like, ‘Oh, something bad is going to happen.’ Two or three years ago, I’d have fun with my friends, and I’d be driving and I’d be like, ‘One of us is going to die first.’ That always happens, a real death element coming in, or ‘someone is going to get hurt’ element.” **“it would feel like this”** “\[The title\] *if i could make it go quiet* is all about the mental noise, all the feelings and thoughts that are so big they just take up your entire mental capacity and take over your entire body. This song feels like ‘If I could make it go quiet, it would feel like this.’ This place of quietness, this beautiful place where I’m able to be OK. I’m taking it all in. It feels like the credits to a movie because the album is so full, you could get to like, ‘Holy cow, what did I just listen to?’ There’s no words. You don’t need any. I’ve just poured my heart out in all of these songs.”

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

Since appearing on *American Idol* in 2014 and realizing a life of conventionality was not for her, LA pop singer-songwriter Remi Wolf has graduated from USC Thornton School of Music, released a series of EPs (2019’s *You’re a Dog!*, 2020’s *I’m Allergic to Dogs!*, and 2021’s *We Love Dogs!*), scored a viral hit on TikTok (“Photo ID”), and signed a deal with Island Records. *Juno*—which, not surprisingly, is named after her dog—is her first full-length. “I raised him during the pandemic,” Wolf tells Apple Music of the album’s namesake. “He was with me for the writing of every song. He was my partner.” *Juno* mixes chaotic funk, maximalist melodies, psychedelic synths, and absurdist lyrics for an album that’s as ebullient as that new pup. But making it was a different story. “There was this week where I wrote ‘Liquor Store,’ ‘Anthony Kiedis,’ ‘wyd,’ and ‘Grumpy Old Man,’” she says. “I wrote all of those in three days. I was bursting at the seams. Mental-health-wise, it was one of the worst \[states\] I\'d ever been \[in\]. I was so completely and utterly miserable, and then we made some of my favorite songs on the album,” she says of her work with coproducer Jared Solomon. Here she goes deeper into how they all came together. **“Liquor Store”** “I wrote this song about having gotten recently sober, this big fear of abandonment that I have, and this codependency issue that I\'ve been dealing with for a long time. It’s one of my most vulnerable songs on the record. It was very cleansing for me. I said exactly what I was feeling. In my writing, I tend to do a lot of abstraction and surrealist imagery, just a lot of crazy shit. But that song is \'This is how it feels to be in my head right now.\' I also wrote that song really, really fast. We probably finished it in four hours. I was crying. I was in and out of absolute breakdown, sobbing tears the entire time we were writing that song. The sacrifices we make out here.” **“Anthony Kiedis”** “I love the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anthony Kiedis doesn\'t have that much to do with the song other than I was reading his memoir at the time, and he talked a lot about his relationship with his dad. I was inspired by that. The song is really about everything that I was going through in COVID and the way I was viewing myself at the time.” **“wyd”** “This is my funk song. This is like if Carlos Santana liked playing funk. But this song was also written in that big week of depression. I love my team, but at the time I was in such a tough spot and people were constantly wanting me to work. I was like, \'Hey, can you leave me alone?\' So the line \'Little bitches telling me what to do\' were my team, but that was just a moment in time. I was angry. Nobody tells me really what to do creatively, thank god. I have a lot of independence on that level.” **“Guerrilla”** “It is such an anxious-horny anthem. I started writing that in the beginning of the pandemic. We didn\'t really know what COVID was, so I was still going to hang out with some people, but it was a very anxious time in my life. But I was still horny. I named it \'Guerrilla\' because when I would go to a party, it felt like guerrilla warfare. My own brain was attacking itself. I can be way too perceptive and care about other people\'s energy and let that affect me, and that just causes this crazy anxiety.” **“Quiet on Set”** “I made that song with my friend Jared \[Solomon\] and my friend Elie \[Jay Rizk\]. It was the first session that we had together with Elie. It was one of my most fun times I\'ve ever had making music. The Chuck E. Cheese line came out of Elie being like, \'Guys, let\'s get some lunch.\' He was like, \'Oh my god, should we Postmates Chuck E. Cheese?\' I was like, \'Okay, that\'s going in the song right now.\'” **“Volkiano”** “Jared had a session with this producer, Y2K \[Ari David Starace\]. He was like, \'Remi, we don\'t have anybody to write a song for right now. Would you want to come through?\' They had these chords down, and as soon as I heard the chords, I was like, \'I can write something to this.\' We decided to keep the verses way more stripped down because I am speaking so fast and I want you to hear those words. It\'s definitely more of a dark pop sound. I\'m super down for the variance. I want every song to be its own statement.” **“Front Tooth”** “I wrote this song with Jared and Kenny Beats at his studio in the Valley. Kenny played all the drums on the songs, and he put them through this crazy analog gear to make them sound so huge. I wrote this song about how my career was going super well, the momentum was moving, but I felt like shit. It didn\'t feel how I wanted it to feel, and it didn\'t feel how everybody was telling me it should feel.” **“Grumpy Old Man”** “I feel like an old man, old woman, really weird person a lot of the time. I wrote this song about feeling like I was so unpleasant to be around. I was going through such a hard time, and that\'s such a thing that people with anxiety and depression often feel. They just want to isolate and not be around people because they feel like they\'re not very fun. I was in that state: \'Oh, I fucking suck.\' It\'s pretty much a song about me hating myself, but we put it in this beautiful little danceable package.” **“Buttermilk”** “I wrote the song about a tumultuous relationship. Buttermilk is when you whip up cream, and you whip it to the point where it\'s butter, and the fat separates from the liquid. It happens very quickly. You\'ll have a big lump of butter in the bowl, but then you\'ll have all this buttermilk around it. I\'m referring to my relationship, where one minute we\'re okay, but then the next minute we\'re fighting so much, like the process of making butter. It\'s about this relationship that is sometimes absolutely amusing and then sometimes it\'s just toxic and sour.” **“Sally”** “I actually wrote ‘Sally’ before any song on my second EP. I initially wrote it on acoustic guitar with my friend Julian McClanahan, who I went to college with. He is a great songwriter. We went to San Diego on this party/writing trip and did it there. Jared sometimes likes to name our project files weird things. So for a long time, it was just \'Sally Four.\' Once it came down to like putting it on the album, everybody was like, \'Okay, do you want to just call this “Sally”?\'” **“Sexy Villain”** “‘Sexy Villain’ I wrote with my power trio of my girly songwriters—Mary Weitz and Olivia Waithe. I wrote \[2020’s\] ‘Disco Man’ with them, and ‘Buzz Me In.’ I trust them a lot; they understand me, and they understand where I like going lyrically. At the time, I was watching and listening to a lot of true crime. I was in a relationship, and I was constantly feeling like the bad guy—even though I wasn\'t, but that\'s where my anxiety takes me a lot of the time. The sexy villain is my alter ego, in a sense—or it was that day.” **“Buzz Me In”** “We had so much champagne during that session. I remember I played guitar and came up with those chords, but I honestly can\'t really tell you anything about that song. It’s the classic booty call: \'Let me in, like, will you make me cum?\' But the mental state I was in when I was writing that song was just absolutely drunk.” **“Street You Live On”** “I love this song. I made it with my friend Ethan Gruska, who I had just met for the first time the day that we started writing this. I had been a fan of him for six years. I think he\'s a genius. This is the closest I\'ve gotten to a ballad thus far in my career, which is cool because I think that I need that. I believe it\'s one of my most well-written songs on the record. We kept joking that it sounds like the Bee Gees meets like Alex G. When you listen to this song, you feel really sad, but you also feel happy. There\'s like this undeniable nostalgia to it.”

“Right then, I’m ready,” Adele says quietly at the close of *30*’s opening track, “Strangers By Nature.” It feels like a moment of gentle—but firm—self-encouragement. This album is something that clearly required a few deep breaths for Tottenham’s most celebrated export. “There were moments when I was writing these songs, and even when I was mixing them and stuff like that, where I was like, ‘Maybe I don\'t need to put this album out,’” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Like, ‘Maybe I should write another.’ Just because music is my therapy. I\'m never going into the studio to be like, ‘Right, I need another hit.’ It\'s not like that for me. When something is more powerful and overwhelming \[to\] me, I like to go to a studio, because it\'s normally a basement and there\'s no fucking windows and no reception, so no one can get ahold of me. So I\'m basically running away. And no one would\'ve known I\'d written that record. Maybe I just had to get it out of my system.” But, almost two years after much of it was completed, Adele did release *30*. And remarkably, considering the world has been using her back catalog to channel its rawest emotions since 2008, this is easily Adele’s most vulnerable record. It concerns itself with Big Things Only—crippling guilt over her 2019 divorce, motherhood, daring to date as one of the world’s most famous people, falling in love—capturing perfectly the wobbly resolve of a broken heart in repair. Its songs often feel sentimental in a way that’s unusually warm and inviting, very California, and crucially: *earned*. “The album is for my son, for Angelo,” she says. “I knew I had to tell his story in a song because it was very clear he was feeling it, even though I thought I was doing a very good job of being like, ‘Everything’s fine.’ But I also knew I wasn’t being as present. I was just so consumed by so many different feelings. And he plucked up the courage to very articulately say to me, ‘You’re basically a ghost. You might as well not be here.’ What kind of poet is that? For him to be little and say ‘I can’t see you’ to my face broke my heart.” This is also Adele’s most confident album sonically. She fancied paying tribute to Judy Garland with Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (“Strangers By Nature”), so she did. “I’d watched the Judy Garland biopic,” she says. “And I remember thinking, ‘Why did everyone stop writing such incredible melodies and cadences and harmonies?’” She felt comfortable working heartbreaking bedside chats with her young son and a voice memo documenting her own fragile mental state into her music on “My Little Love.” “While I was writing it, I just remember thinking of any child that’s been through divorce or any person that has been though a divorce themselves, or anyone that wants to leave a relationship and never will,” she says. “I thought about all of them, because my divorce really humanized my parents for me.” The album does not steep in sorrow and regret, however: There’s a Max Martin blockbuster with a whistled chorus (“Can I Get It”), a twinkling interlude sampling iconic jazz pianist Erroll Garner (“All Night Parking”), and the fruits of a new creative partnership with Dean Josiah Cover—aka Michael Kiwanuka, Sault, and Little Simz producer Inflo. “The minute I realized he \[Inflo\] was from North London, I wouldn’t stop talking to him,” she says. “We got no work done. It was only a couple of months after I’d left my marriage, and we got on so well, but he could feel that something was wrong. He knew that something dark was happening in me. I just opened up. I was dying for someone to ask me how I was.” One of the Inflo tracks, “Hold On,” is the album’s centerpiece. Rolling through self-loathing (“I swear to god, I am such a mess/The harder that I try, I regress”) into instantly quotable revelations (“Sometimes loneliness is the only rest we get”) before reaching show-stopping defiance (“Let time be patient, let pain be gracious/Love will soon come, if you just hold on”), the song accesses something like final-form Adele. It’s a rainbow of emotions, it’s got a choir (“I got my friends to come and sing,” she tells Apple Music), and she hits notes we’ll all only dare tackle in cars, solo. “I definitely lost hope a number of times that I’d ever find my joy again,” she says. “I remember I didn’t barely laugh for about a year. But I didn’t realize I was making progress until I wrote ‘Hold On’ and listened to it back. Later, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I’ve really learned a lot. I’ve really come a long way.’” So, after all this, is Adele happy that *30* found its way to the world? “It really helped me, this album,” she says. “I really think that some of the songs on this album could really help people, really change people’s lives. A song like ‘Hold On’ could actually save a few lives.” It’s also an album she feels could support fellow artists. “I think it’s an important record for them to hear,” she says. “The ones that I feel are being encouraged not to value their own art, and that everything should be massive and everything should be ‘get it while you can’… I just wanted to remind them that you don’t need to be in everyone’s faces all the time. And also, you can really write from your stomach, if you want.”

Some songs find their place in the world instantly and others take a while. Joy Crookes has been hanging on to some of the tracks on her debut album, *Skin*, since she was a teenager, waiting for the right moment for them to shine. This collection paints a portrait of a young woman of 23, finding her place in the world and understanding herself through her family—for better and worse—mixed in with songs that deal with social injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement. There’s also casual sex (“I Don’t Mind”) and the winding ancestral journeys that bring a family to London (“19th Floor”), as the South Londoner, of Bangladeshi and Irish heritage, pays tribute to the people and places that made her. “Biologically, our skin is one of the strongest organs in our body, but socially and externally, in terms of our identity, it can be used against us,” Crookes tells Apple Music of the album title. “And it’s not just a racial thing; it’s who we are that is used against us.” Read on as the singer-songwriter guides us through the powerful *Skin*, track by track. **“I Don’t Mind”** “I was in a casual relationship, or a casual situation-ship, at that time, and I kind of had to let the person know that it wasn\'t going to be anything more than what it was. I played the track to him and he didn\'t really get the picture. He was like, ‘I don’t really like this one.’ When I produced it, I was listening to Kanye’s *808s & Heartbreak* and Solange. I was really interested in how sonically there\'s a lot of grit and beauty in both of their production styles, so that was the inspiration.” **“19th Floor”** “The spoken bit at the beginning is me saying goodbye to my grandma on the 19th floor of her building in London. This is what I do every time I say goodbye to her, and she always gives me that beautiful ‘Okay, I love you.’ The strings were recorded in Abbey Road in Studio Two, which is The Beatles’ room and is also where Massive Attack recorded ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ And the song is about how far my family’s come to give me the life that I have.” **“Poison”** “I wrote ‘Poison’ when I was 15. I was very angry—I think it was the angriest I\'d been in a very long time and one of the most angry points in my life. I had bought The Clash\'s box set, and there was a blank notebook in it that said ‘The future is unwritten’ on the cover. One of the lines I wrote in there was ‘You’re scared of snakes.’ I looked at that and wrote ‘Poison’ in like 10 minutes.” **“Trouble”** “It was kind of inspired by Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry.’ You know, when you love someone, you\'re so close to them, but you hurt the ones you love. The syncopation and beats in Bollywood music can sometimes kind of be reminiscent of Caribbean kind of syncopation.” **“When You Were Mine”** “I was writing a happy song but about a weird subject, as is usual with me. It\'s about my first love becoming gay after our relationship. The song is about being jealous of their love, but also celebrating the fact that my ex is who he is. The brass was inspired by \[legendary Ghanaian musician\] Ebo Taylor, who has an amazing way of making brass sound kind of drunk.” **“To Lose Someone”** “The conversation at the start of this song was recorded in a nail shop in Brixton. It was two days after my ex and I broke up, and my mum was giving me advice. There\'s a cello interlude there by \[arranger, composer, and cellist\] Amy Langley. And the song is about when you enter a relationship, you have to compromise or remove some of your baggage in order to be together. But at the same time knowing that when you do love someone, you are inevitably going to lose them at some point.” **“Unlearn You”** “There’s a line in this song: ‘Got a plate of pink cupcakes to sugarcoat the aftertaste.’ When I came out about something that happened to me to do with abuse, I was taken to a cupcake shop. The cupcakes were literally to sugarcoat the aftertaste. The scariest line is ‘I didn\'t ever wear a dress in case he thought I was asking for it.’ It’s a really difficult song to sing, not just in terms of the content, but the notes. It helped to write a song about my experiences. It gave me perspective and actually helped me heal.” **“Kingdom”** “I love post-punk music and bands like ESG and Young Marble Giants. I wrote it the day after the December 2019 election, when the Tory party were reelected. I think the whole of London was pissed off. And I was fucking pissed off. It\'s talking about my experience as someone that voted and didn\'t get the result I wanted, and what that meant for the future of our next few generations. I was fucking vexed.” **“Feet Don’t Fail Me Now”** “It\'s about a character that finds it easier to be complicit or performative in fear of actually speaking up about how they feel. And it was in light of the Black Lives Matter protests last year and the movement. I didn\'t have any answers, so I kind of just wanted to write a song that gave a little bit of the sign of the times, and also one that held myself accountable. Because I think we were all guilty of being complacent and performative because of fear, and the fear of cancel culture.” **“Wild Jasmine”** “‘Wild Jasmine’ is inspired by Tony Allen. There\'s kind of something South Asian about the way the guitar moves in that song. It’s about me telling my mom not to trust a man, or love him. Her name is Jasmine, and she is just like the plant—the plant naturally has to grow wild and it grows however it wants to. It felt like this man was not letting her do that. Are you going to accept wholefully, or wholesomely, who that person is? And it felt like he wasn’t.” **“Skin”** “This is kind of inspired by Frank Sinatra and his classic ballad-type songs. I wrote it the day after one of my friends was very much on the brink, and who felt like they weren\'t needed on this planet anymore. It was my way of telling them that they were, and that they have a life worth living—that’s literally what I said to them. And then I went in the next day. I was crying in the studio and I wrote them that song.” **“Power”** “It\'s about the abuse of power. And I think Boris Johnson is guilty of abusing power, as is Trump, as is Nigel Farage, as are all the arseholes, Priti Patel. People think it\'s a feminism song, but it\'s just about the abuse of power in general. Musically, I was inspired by Nina Simone and that kind of messiness and up-front vocal.” **“Theek Ache”** “Everyone always pronounces this wrong. ‘Theek ache’ is translated in the song; it means it’s okay. It’s a big warm hug at the end of the album after you\'ve listened to all these fucking heavy songs. I wrote it after drinking with Jodie Comer. It\'s just saying, ‘Sure, I\'m going to make mistakes, and I\'m going to be a human being, and I\'m going to make fuck-ups, and then I\'m going to go through this, that, and the other. But you know, it’s OK—I’ll have my kitten heels, cigarettes, and a mattress at the end of the night.’”

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

On her sixth LP, Dawn Richard wanted to celebrate the Black DJs and producers who played an instrumental role in developing the early sounds of electronic music. “Dance music has always been culturally from a Black culture,” Richard tells Apple Music. “It’s Detroit house, Chicago footwork, the New Jersey sound, D.C. go-go, and it goes on.” Dismayed by their lack of representation in festivals and playlists, most notably female artists, the New Orleans artist felt the need to speak louder through her art in order to break the glass ceiling. “I have always been a warrior, this Black woman fighting in a space where I didn\'t think I needed to fight,” she adds. “Conceptually, this album became bigger than just a sonic experience—it became an intention.” Also driven by a desire to bring her hometown to the fore, Richard wanted to tell the story of New Orleans filtered through a post-apocalyptic lens—an idea that started from some sketches she drew while working as a creative consultant for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Centered around an android alter ego she created called King Creole, *Second Line* is a futurist, dance-driven voyage intended to narrate her evolution from girl-group reality star to independent artist. “I had to figure out how to stand on my own in a system that didn\'t look at me as belonging in the genre that I was trying to tackle,” she says. “The android was the mainstream journey. Then the independent hustle comes, and you get to see King Creole as the human.” Read on as Richard guides you on her journey through self-discovery. **“King Creole (Intro)”** “It is a call to arms saying, if you thought you knew what this genre or what this electronic idea was, I\'m going to show you what it really is. And I\'m going to add New Orleans all over it right out the gate. So you know it\'s going to drip with soul and presence, and electronic is not just going to be an algorithm—it\'s going to be a soulful experience.” **“Nostalgia”** “I wanted to make sure that I paid homage to those who created and started a genre that is usually not recognized. Larry Heard was one of those incredible DJs and producers that I actually loved. I wanted to say, ‘Let\'s go back to Black, because this genre was started and developed by a culture that is Black.\' I\'m also introducing the mechanics of King Creole and her build—the first half of the album is the machine version of King Creole. It\'s the android—so that\'s why the beats per minute is fast and why we\'re dealing with a more processed sound.” **“Boomerang”** “Now we\'re playing with the vocals as the instrumentation to bring us through. So out the gate, we\'re hearing the vocoder, the harmonization between the vocals. And again, paying homage to a sound that was curated by Blacks. So again, disco becomes the next one. We\'re still in the future, but we\'re paying homage to the root. And with \'Boomerang,\' there are all these messages saying that the love comes back. If you give love out, it\'ll come back tenfold. So it\'s the idea that within this space, each record pays homage to the things that came before.” **“Bussifame”** “The word itself comes from New Orleans. We talk fast so everything we do is bled together. So really, it generally was ‘bust it for me’—like ‘bust a move’—but in New Orleans that sounds like ‘Bussifame.’ I was paying respects to the accent. I wanted to try to take it to the next level, bring New Orleans to the future. We don\'t hear New Orleans in this kind of sound, and that was the fun part—to create something that doesn\'t exist yet.” **“Pressure”** “To me, ‘Pressure’ was taking a traditional pop record and completely de-structuring it—adding bits of Chicago footwork, adding bits of go-go, adding bits of drum and bass, like really playing with movement within the bass and the sound. The record constantly moves. By the end of it, it goes into hip-hop. I\'m just spitting at that point. Like the cockiness to say that, \'I\'m going to give you a record that has four different transitions, and you will never know what to expect.\'” **“Pilot (A Lude)”** “It\'s a bounce record. It\'s an ode to Freedia, Katey Red, and Messy Mya, and I got to show love to my city. If I\'m going to talk about dance, I got to show love to where I grew up in. And again, calling the record \'Pilot,\' saying that we are the flyers of this. We steer this. Call us the pilots, because we are the connoisseurs of this thing that we do.” **“Jacuzzi”** “I always love juxtapositions, like applying something as catchy and melodic to the raunchiest of records. I\'ve always felt like Black women have been severely disrespected within us owning our sexuality. And on every album, I\'ve always had one song that best speaks to that. I really wanted to connect the relationship of one\'s body when you think about the intertwining of android to human; what that physically looks like sexually to the body, and how machine can make sense to human skin.” **“FiveOhFour (A Lude)”** “504 is an area code in New Orleans. You fight very hard to have that 504. The 504 legitimizes you as you\'re legit New Orleans. I produced it myself, showing that I didn\'t need a collaborator for this. It is purposely gritty, it is purposely pitched low. You\'re starting to see the shift in where I\'m getting out of android and going into human. But more importantly, I\'m showing how culturally important New Orleans is as the narrator of this process.” **“Voodoo (Intermission)”** “This is all *Blade Runner* at this point, the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. So King Creole comes out, and she’s telling everyone that she\'s on a mission to give you more. This is the human in her that wants that acceptance and love. She\'s having the vulnerability to say, \'All I want is your love. If you can just see me, I can give you all of this.\'” **“Mornin Streetlights”** “‘Mornin Streetlights’ starts with my mom speaking about how the only person she\'s ever loved is my father. They met when they were 15 and they\'ve been together ever since. I love music, and the reason why I\'ve been so tenacious at it is because I\'ve only known love like that. I\'ve only been taught to love the way my mom and dad have loved. That\'s what I grew up in, but it also makes sense as to the way I love my art. I love it with a tenacity that I can\'t give up.” **“Le Petit Morte (A Lude)”** “I wanted something that was honest. Even just start with the comment ‘This is the last time I\'m going to write a song about you.\' It\'s like going from talking about how I love this music to then saying, \'But I\'m tired of talking about my relationship with art and music.\' It is my purest and most honest moment and I\'m at my most vulnerable. And I freestyled that entire record. I did that as soon as I walked in. My dad played the piano on it and I just wailed. I didn\'t even know what was coming out.” **“Radio Free”** “You see the album now start to transition into hope, because I never sit in that dark place too long. So with ‘Le Petit Morte,’ it felt a little like death. It\'s acknowledging the death, whereas \'Radio Free\' is acknowledging the loss but understanding that you can play your freedom loud.” **“The Potter”** “‘The Potter’ is seeing the loss of worthiness but exposing it and saying, ‘Okay. But how do I see myself as worthy?’ It came to me when I was in church. What happens when you rust, rot, and you sit on the shelf? Will you be loved then? Who am I now? They let you go, and then how do you go on? How do you go on knowing you are this sculpted thing that once was so beautiful that is now worthless to those? And how do you find your worth within that place?” **“Perfect Storm”** “It’s literally being in a storm—having lost everything and being in Katrina and recognizing that we were homeless. It was beautiful the day before. It was hell the day it happened. And then, the next day, it was beautiful again, as if it didn\'t happen, and everything in its path was gone. My biggest theme and aim was to make the record as close to an actual storm as I possibly could—and that breath of fresh air that you feel when you realize that you\'ve lost everything and that you\'re still alive.” **“Voodoo (Outermission)”** “So now we\'re out of it, and now I\'m bringing you to what will be the next album in the trilogy. Because we\'re on album two after *new breed*. I\'m taking myself and removing it out of the art and the music industry, and now it is me as myself. And so I\'m trying to maneuver you guys out of that journey, and I\'m bringing you into what will be the next phase.” **“SELFish (Outro)”** “When people think of selfish, they think of it negatively, and I totally threw that out the window. I\'ve always loved to mess with interludes and make these hidden gems where people are like, \'Why wasn\'t this song longer?\' With this one, I thought it would be really cool to make an outro eight minutes. Black women, especially, we are punished for wanting more for ourselves. And I just want to encourage artists that it\'s okay to put yourself first in the process.”

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

The second album from Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek asks the big questions in slippery ways, with poetic ripples of mantra-like vocals, or field recordings that take on a mystical significance (a roommate singing, a hand-clapping game). The layered, nonlinear soundscapes on *Fatigue* feel totally uncategorizable yet inexplicably comforting as Cheek—who plays bass, guitar, piano, synth, and percussion here, in addition to her vocals and personal recordings—guides herself down a winding path of discovery. “Make a way out of no way,” she repeats on the kaleidoscopic “Find It”; the wondrous almost-songs that follow use that sentiment as a guiding light.

“I really wanted to make a whole cohesive project,” Genesis Owusu tells Apple Music of his debut album. “I wanted to make something akin to *To Pimp a Butterfly* and *Food and Liquor* and all the awesome concept albums that I grew up listening to.” The Ghanaian Australian artist named Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s debut LP is a powerful concept album that tackles depression and racism in equal measure, characterized here as two black dogs. “‘Black dog’ is a known euphemism for depression, but I’ve also been called a black dog as a racial slur. So I thought it was an interesting, all-encompassing term for what I wanted to talk about.” The music itself is vibrant and boundaryless, with elements of soul, hip-hop, post-punk, pop, and beyond, showcasing not only Genesis Owusu’s remarkable talent and creativity, but the influence of each band member he worked with to write and record, including Kirin J Callinan on guitar, Touch Sensitive (Michael Di Francesco) on bass, Julian Sudek on drums, and Andrew Klippel on keys—all of whom brought their backgrounds and influences to the table. “The album’s eclectic sound is a reflection of all of us as human beings, and also their interpretation of me from their own musical backgrounds,” he says. *Smiling With No Teeth* is split into two thematic halves, each focusing on one of the two black dogs. Owusu-Ansah talks through the entire concept in the track-by-track breakdown below. **On the Move!** “Up to this point in my career, I feel like I\'ve been categorized as ‘the funk guy,’ but a lot of those songs were created within the same two-week span. After those two weeks I was on to other stuff, but because the process of releasing music is so slow, that perception lingered about. So I wanted the intro to shatter that as soon as you press play. It’s explosive. You know something is coming.” **The Other Black Dog** “This song introduces the internal black dog character. Instrumentally, it feels like a movie chase scene. The internal black dog is chasing me through cracks and alleys, trying to be everywhere at once, reaching out, trying to engulf and embrace me. It was a very intentional, conceptual choice to have these songs sound upbeat, dancy, and sexy. But it\'s all a facade, it\'s all a fake smile when you really delve into it.” **Centrefold** “It’s told from the perspective of the black dog, as a sort of distorted love song from the place of an abuser. It doesn\'t respect you at all. It wants to consume you and use you for its own pleasure. And it manifests itself in this distorted love song that sounds groovy and sexy and alluring.” **Waitin’ on Ya** “It’s a sister track to ‘Centrefold.’ The through line has the same story.” **Don\'t Need You** “It’s back from the Genesis Owusu perspective, where the black dog has tried to lure you in, but you reach a point where you realize you can live without it. You don\'t need it, you can break free of those chains. It’s like an independence anthem: You’re breaking free from its clutches for the first time.” **Drown (feat. Kirin J Callinan)** “It continues on from ‘Don\'t Need You,’ analyzing the relationship from a more detached aspect, where you\'re realizing the black dog’s mannerisms. You can separate yourself from it so you\'re two individual beings. You can realize it’s a part of you that you have to let go. You are not your depression. You can make changes and separate yourself. Which leads to the chorus line, ‘You\'ve got to let me drown.’” **Gold Chains** “As an artist, I feel like I\'m just starting to turn some heads and break out, but I\'ve been touring and playing for years. Going from city to city in a van. Playing to no one. But so many people are like, ‘Oh, you\'re a rapper, right? Where\'s your gold chain? How much money do you have?’ So the song plays into the perception versus the reality—‘It looks so gold, but it can feel so cold in these chains.’ The music industry can exacerbate mental health issues and stuff like that, when you\'re overworked or commodified. Instead of an artist creating a product, you become the product.” **Smiling With No Teeth** “This is the center point. It’s encompassing the themes of the album from the narrator’s perspective rather than the black dog. It’s an intermission between Act One and Act Two.” **I Don\'t See Colour** “So much of Act One had honey and sweetness and upbeat tracks, but now we rip all that away. It showcases the personality of the next black dog, which is much more direct and brutal. They\'ve faced the brunt of racism and there’s no more sugarcoating. The extremely minimal instrumental is intentional, so you can completely focus on the lyrics, which are much more scathing. Being a Black person in white society and having to experience the brunt of racism, I\'m often also expected to be the bigger person and the educator. So this arc is validating the emotions and the venting that should be allowed. It’s therapeutic when you\'re faced with those circumstances.” **Black Dogs!** “It was produced by Matt Corby. This one and ‘Easy’ were the only two not produced by the band. It’s a straight-to-the-point song encompassing a day in the life of me, or just any Black person in Australia. It’s not that I\'m getting abused by police every day, but it\'s all the little microaggressions. Sonically speaking, it plays into how I feel every day, going into white spaces and feeling a bit paranoid.” **Whip Cracker** “It’s the ‘I\'ve had enough’ moment. The lyrics—‘Spit up on your grave/Hope my thoughts behave/We\'re so depraved’—play into the bogeymen that people want to see, but obviously as a satirical guise. And then it goes into bigots of all facets, essentially saying enough is enough, times have changed, it\'s over. And musically speaking, halfway through, it just explodes into this funk-rock section. It was very ‘What would Prince do?’” **Easy** “This one was produced by Harvey Sutherland. I was in Melbourne with him doing sessions, and I\'d just gone to the Invasion Day protest, so it was sparked from that. It’s about the relationship between Indigenous or native communities or just people of color, and the colonized country they\'re living in. One partner—the person of color—is fighting their way through a relationship with the very abusive partner that says they care about them and that they\'ll do things for them, but it\'s all lip service.” **A Song About Fishing** “This song started out as a jokey freestyle in the studio, but it turned into this weird parable about perseverance in dire circumstances. I feel like these last three songs are like Act Three of the album. They’re about both of the black dogs. Even though the circumstances seem so dire in the realms of depression and racism, I’m still getting up every day, trying my best and going to this lake where I can never catch any fish, but hoping that one day I\'ll snag something.” **No Looking Back** “It’s a pop ballad about how I\'ve gone through this journey and now I\'m finally ready to put these things behind me, enter a new phase of my life, and be a bigger and better person. It\'s like the transcendental conclusion of the album. And it\'s kind of a mantra: There’s no looking back. Like we\'ve gone through this and we\'re done, we\'re ready to move on.” **Bye Bye** “‘No Looking Back’ was going to be the final track of the album. It was going to end on a very positive note, but it was too much of a Hollywood ending for me. It felt unrealistic. I\'ve learnt a lot throughout my journey, but there’s no point where you can dust your hands off and be like, okay, racism over, depression over. So with ‘Bye Bye,’ the themes are crawling back to you. It signifies that this is an ongoing journey I\'m going to have to face. I had to be clear and real about it.”

“I think the idea of sexiness or being calm and collected is a pretty stifling thing as a musician,” Dijon explains to Apple Music. “I\'ve wrestled with why you\'re supposed to make music if you\'re going to do it, and I think just the longer I\'ve been trying, I\'ve gotten pretty disenchanted with sort of the casualness and the informality.” This is the existential question at the heart of *Absolutely*, his debut album. If the prior EPs—2019\'s *Sci Fi 1* and 2020\'s *How Do You Feel About Getting Married?*—were for figuring out who he was as an artist through collages of ideas, then this is about figuring out who he can be, with regard to the expectations leveled at him from outsiders and those he has for himself. Of course, to hear him tell it, the process of creating this music wasn\'t nearly as deep. At the beginning of the pandemic, he visited a friend in Wyoming, where he began tinkering with bits and pieces of demos. He returned to Los Angeles, his home since he relocated from Maryland in 2016, and wrote one song, “Scratching,” and didn’t make anything else for months. That is, until he met fellow singer-songwriter Mk.gee (Michael Gordon) at a studio session. “He and I developed a bizarre language together that sort of spilled into the rest of the record,” he says. “With the pandemic, I just wasn\'t sure if I was going to make a record, how long it would take, or if it was even useful to make music. The records that we made together just sprang out of boredom and out of this kind of conversation—it was just a conversational way to exist.” *Absolutely* is Dijon’s most collaborative release to date, an exercise in surrendering to his own creative impulses as he also makes room for others’. Out of that comes an album that highlights the intimacy of candor, of offering oneself without dressing the parts up. In many of the songs, there’s ambient room noise—people laughing, talking, and reacting to the music—that positions the listener as a kind of fly on the wall for a private jam session. It’s raw and untouched in a way that runs counter to conventional ideas of what a debut album often is or should be. Life that feels as though it\'s coming apart requires music that is the same—the process of deconstruction and rebuilding animated through sound. Which brings us back to his original question. Over the better part of a decade, he\'s earned fans and a profile, and just as that means other people are asking things of him, he\'s asking new things of himself. *Absolutely* is some version of an answer that reimagines his artistry at a time that required he reimagine his life. “It just seems strange that the moment you get a little platform, people start to tidy up a little bit and they start to perfect their lane,” he says. “I just kind of wanted to destroy it and build a new one.” Below, he explains how each of the songs came to be. **“Big Mike’s”** “‘Big Mike\'s’ is the first song that Mk.gee and I made together. He came to the house, I had a drum loop playing, I had a couple of friends milling about. We\'d met a few times but we didn\'t really talk, and he picked up a guitar and he played a little, and it was so natural for us to build the track together. It was a complete freestyle, lyrically and melodically, and we sort of wrapped everything harmonically around it. I played some bass way after that I\'m pretty sure it\'s not the same key as what Mike was playing. And we just listened back, and we just felt like if this is on an album, I\'d want to hear this first because I can decide if I want to be here or not. We wanted it to be hypnotic, and I wanted to be as confrontational as possible.” **“Scratching”** “‘Scratching’ was the first song I actually ever made for the record, and it was a product of me trying to learn piano. I just played a couple of things and wrote a song around a midi piano part that I was just working on. It was super simple. I thought that there was this Springsteen-y thing to it that was an accident, so I was just like, well, how do I kind of pay homage in that way? Everything to me is post-realization—I never really know what I\'m doing when I\'m doing it.” **“Many Times”** “‘Many Times’ was the first time I\'d ever not controlled or been engineering my own session. I went with a very good friend, somebody I respect a lot named Andrew Sarlo—he works with some people I really love. Andrew has a patented recording technique or an exercise that I won\'t reveal, but we were just trying to get over a hump and trying to be productive. A lot of my records are nocturnal, and this was a bright coffee thing. We just wanted to make something that we thought was quite fun—everything is sort of operating with a little bit of humor, and Mike\'s solo exists relative to the intensity and the mania of the song as potentially a little hat tip.” **“Annie”** “I left to go upstate \[New York\] and brought a few friends, and a person I\'ve collaborated with a lot, Jack Karaszewski, ended up being there. We tried for a few nights just to hang out and make music around this table, and ‘Annie’ ended up being this pretty manic campfire thing. I picked up an acoustic guitar, and it was tuned in some really crazy way. I was just kind of sitting at the table and started mumbling and humming a little thing. Then Mike slotted in, picked up a bass, and we just made the song. The Band was always in the back of everybody\'s head. I had never really heard of them until I went to upstate New York and got extremely obsessed. I was trying to make some sort of demented version of a The Band song or something, and it happened really quickly.” **“Noah’s Highlight Reel”** “This is my favorite song on the record. We were sitting at this long dining room table, and our buddy Noah who\'s from Wyoming was there with us. He\'s played slide and occasional guitar on a couple of the songs and he\'s helped with the general vibe and thrown a couple lyrics in on this record. But Mike and I were cranking through super fast, a bunch of ideas per day, when we were in upstate New York. Things calmed down, we had a few beers, and I believe it was Mike\'s idea—he said, ‘Noah, you should write a song.’ I started playing a guitar part, some chords, and Mike slotted in with some bass and some other things, and my buddy Noah actually wrote a song and we asked him to sing it. We sang backup for him. I also lost the file, so that\'s the only version of the song that exists.” **“The Dress”** “I borrowed a drum machine and just laid down this thing, and a friend of mine named John Keek played some chords. He has a very sort of gospelly touch, and it started off as kind of a little gag, but obviously the chords he played were quite inspiring. I was experimenting a lot with noise on this album, and ‘The Dress’ was a way for me to kind of internally be like, can you actually just write a song? Because I didn\'t know if I could. And yeah, there\'s a little bit of an homage to Bonnie Raitt, but it was really an exercise in me trying to push myself out of a comfort zone. You can get really comfortable around like a wall of sonic trickery and fuzz.” **“God in Wilson”** “‘God in Wilson’ is a tough one, because that was a pretty early one. When I was in Wyoming—it\'s referencing Wilson, Wyoming—there was this attempt to kind of explore guilt and shame, and it was an interesting idea that I had. It was a pretty early demo idea that I never really fleshed out and just thought it could provide some sort of contrast on the record, I guess. I was really fascinated with priests and kind of thought about, I don\'t know, a little priest guy. But yeah, it\'s just an exploration, lyrically, of guilt and shame, and I kept it on there just because I thought it sounded pretty.” **“Did You See It?”** “It\'s a modular, like, Eurorack experiment that I was doing, and I wanted to see if I could write a song around it. It\'s about aliens.” **“Talk Down”** “On hip-hop records, you can kind of quote—like JAY-Z quotes Biggie all the time and stuff like that. I never really understood how to do that in more of a singer-songwriter thing, but ‘Talk Down’ was part two of ‘Annie.’ Same day, same table, same people. I was listening to a lot of Gillian Welch—I think I said her name wrong on the record—but a lot of the imagery that floated around the record was really based on the three-day drive from LA to New York. There\'s tension, there\'s excitement, there\'s anger. There\'s also monotony, it\'s a lot of boredom. I heard a chord that my friend John played. And I started freestyling this thing, and I just kept quoting ‘Look at Miss Ohio,’ and that became the basis of the song. It was me listing off songs I was listening to while driving and trying to contrast a little bit. I wanted to do a little homage to Baltimore club. I tried to do a few Baltimore club songs that failed, and this is the closest that we got.” **“Rodeo Clown”** “I was just kind of playing some chords and we were a little burned out after making ‘Big Mike\'s,’ just me, Mike, and Noah. But in effort of stretching what the performer is supposed to sound like, I just wanted to explore R&B melodic stuff. It\'s part of my DNA, but I just wanted to present it in a way that isn\'t clean. I get very frustrated by how cool everybody is, and I wanted to just see what happens if you try to make a song that\'s very earnest. I sort of blacked out a little bit and let it go and then listened back to it the next day, and I was like, \'Yeah, that sounds pretty good.\' I feel like it\'s very boring to think that just because you have a guitar, that you can\'t try to reinterpret how you\'re supposed to perform. I don\'t know if it was a successful experiment, but yeah.” **“End of Record”** “In an effort of making a debut record, you toss and turn a lot of ideas of how you\'re supposed to make it perfect, and ‘End of Record’ was a personal message to myself. It was done in upstate New York, around the table with a lot of people. I think it was on Halloween of \[2020\]. That song specifically—it\'s for me and the people on the record, like a little postcard from a time and all the emotion that was around that house at the time.” **“Credits!”** “I think that I have the tendency to sort of give off this impression that I\'m hyper-serious all the time and the music is emotionally weighty to people, but there\'s a lot of jokes that I think I\'ve been trying to get a little bit more effective at displaying on my music. And ‘Credits!’ is also just kind of another thing for me on there. I thought it was kind of fun. After you hear a lot of these ups and downs on this record, I couldn\'t think of a funnier and I think more obnoxious way to kind of put a bow on all of this weight. There were a lot of different variations of that energy, and ‘Credits!’ just sounded silly enough to be the one.”

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

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

It’s hard to think of a better title for Griff’s 2021 mixtape than *One Foot in Front of the Other*. On the heels of the Hertfordshire-born singer-songwriter receiving the year’s Rising Star Brit Award, it\'s as fitting for Griff’s cusp-of-superstardom status as it is for this EP\'s exploration of moving on from heartbreak. “It felt like how I feel towards everything, whether that’s my relationships with my family, with myself, with my love life, or with my music career,” the singer, real name Sarah Griffiths, tells Apple Music. “There’s this sense of vulnerability and the unknown, and all you can really do is just put one foot in front of the other.” The tracks here were largely written, recorded, and produced by Griff during the 2020 lockdown, which brings raw edges to her open-hearted music: ’80s-style pop inspired by HAIM, Lorde, and Taylor Swift, among others. “It was just me experimenting, messing about in my room and seeing what comes of that,” she says. “I was trying to write honest, reflective lyrics. I think a lot of it is quite rough and ready, but that’s what I love about it.” But while the singer deals with some tough topics on *One Foot in Front of the Other*—from allowing yourself to trust again after heartbreak (“Heart of Gold”) to pleading with a loved one to get their priorities in order (“Earl Grey Tea”)—by its end, she’s ready to stand tall (see the uplifting “Walk”). Read on as Griff talks us through the mixtape, one track at a time. **“Black Hole”** “This was written in my last session before COVID happened. I was writing with \[UK songwriter\] Lostboy and \[producer\] SIBA. We landed on there being this big black hole. On one side, there’s a real honesty and ruthlessness about talking about the emptiness we can all feel. But then the production brings lightness and humor to that. The lyrics are so melodramatic, and it’s almost trying to create that sense of dancing through your heartbreak. It’s about owning that feeling.” **“One Foot in Front of the Other”** “I guess this song is a bit of a part two to ‘Black Hole.’ ‘Black Hole’ is all minor, and then you hit ‘One Foot in Front of the Other,’ which is very major. It’s about someone talking about how it feels to suddenly and slowly make progress out of this dark place. No one else realizes that you’re making progress, but it’s in those small things where suddenly it feels like there’s light at the end of the tunnel. It’s that vulnerable feeling of walking a tightrope. It’s scary, but you’re getting there.” **“Shade of Yellow”** “A song that’s about escape. There were many times in my childhood where, because it was either chaotic or not that great at home, I’d find refuge in my best friend\'s house or something. The lamp in this song is a metaphor for always coming back to a person, and it’s good to admit that you’re coming back for them. But the beat is quite tumultuous all the way through. For me, I was picturing driving at nighttime. Which, I guess, is kind of what this song is about. It’s about just trying to find safety and home in different places.” **“Heart of Gold”** “This is very sparse in its production. It was quite inspired by ‘Royals’ by Lorde, in the sense that the song is just drums and vocals. It’s about being a cautious lover and being a bit broken with someone that’s almost this perfect person. It’s about not wanting to be hurt again and about not really knowing how to open up again. There’s a contrast in this fragile girl who has a heart of stone.” **“Remembering My Dreams”** “It’s about the fact that, in the daytime, we can be busy and fine, and then suddenly, the moment you’re asleep, things come back—whether it’s your ex or your fears or anxieties. It’s about the frustration of thinking you’re fine, yet these things always seem to find a way back.” **“Earl Grey Tea”** “This song is about priorities. In this case, it’s about someone who’s really obsessive about their health, and about how you can be so focused on that, whilst all the important stuff around you is falling apart. But you could replace health with a career or whatever—it’s just about being too focused on one thing and how, by the end of it all, the most important people around you won’t be there. The Earl Grey tea thing specifically came from the fact that my dad started to drink lots of it because he heard it was really good for you.” **“Walk”** “I’m not going to leave you on a downer, so this was a bit of a release. It’s a love song, but it’s more platonic than anything. It’s just about anyone in your life who does’t realize how much potential they have or how great they are. The song is happy and encouraging, and it has all my main influences in it. It’s a fun one to end on.”

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

When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”

“When I listen to it, it’s sort of a reminder that I am lovable,” Claud tells Apple Music of their sparkling debut LP, the first release on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label. “I deserve to feel love. Sometimes people forget that they\'re capable of giving and receiving it.” Deeply melodic and deeply felt, *Super Monster* is a set of genre-agnostic bedroom pop that surveys the entire spectrum of romantic feeling. “I wrote this record to be very visible, in the sense that I am a multifaceted human being and my story is not shown in coming-of-age movies or these huge shows that are always about straight cis couples,” the Brooklyn singer-songwriter says. “I\'ll write music for the rest of my life, but I don\'t have to put it out. The only reason why I want to put it out is because there\'s so little representation of queer and trans and nonbinary people falling in love and having well-rounded lives that don\'t just revolve around the hardships of being queer.” Here, they guide us through the album track by track. **Overnight** “I liked the idea of a warning as a first song. Like, ‘Here\'s a heads-up: A lot of these songs are love songs, and I tend to jump into things.’ It\'s about any time that I felt I was falling in love or starting something new.” **Gold** “I was really angry when I wrote this song. I felt super betrayed, not just by one person, but by a series of things that had happened. It’s almost recognizing and sort of breaking the news to myself that this person was not there for you when you needed them, or these people were not there for you when you need them. Sometimes I just need to get the anger out and then I can move on.” **Soft Spot** “I was at a party and I was thinking a lot about one specific person, and everywhere I looked, it felt like I was seeing them. But it wasn\'t them, and anytime somebody brought them up it felt I got all mushy and soft and I would blush. I approached the song as ‘This is sad and this sucks.’ But one thing that I came to terms with as the song was developing was that maybe it doesn’t suck—maybe it\'s nice to be able to just smile whenever you want because you can think of somebody.” **In or In-Between** “I\'m so bad at reading social cues, and I never believe that somebody is into me, just because I feel like I\'m conditioned to assume that they\'re not. It\'s a song about unachievable or unrequited love. Feeling like you\'re never going to know what this person is thinking, you\'re never going to know if they actually are into you the way that you\'re into them.” **Cuff Your Jeans** “I had a dream where I was trying to get on a train to go see a friend and the train kept getting delayed or the train wasn\'t showing up or my ticket would blow away in the wind. It felt like I would never be able to see this person again. Which was a real feeling that I was feeling in real life—like, what if I never get to see this person again? What if, by the time I see them again, they\'ve moved on or something?” **Ana (feat. Nick Hakim)** “I was at a point in my writing where I was getting sort of sick of writing about my own life. So I imagined myself as this 40-year-old man who decides that he needs to leave his wife to go find himself. The whole story is like a letter to his wife, who I named Ana. I think I was trying to say that if you really love somebody then you will work on yourself. Because if you love somebody then you know that they deserve the best.” **Guard Down** “When I get in a nervous situation or when I get protective of myself or my feelings, there\'s a voice in my head that says, ‘Don’t let your guard down, don\'t make yourself vulnerable.’ And this song is about that feeling, and confessing, ‘Holy shit, I’m going to be an adult in a few months. I\'m going to be turning 21, and what do I have figured out? And what do I not have figured out? And I\'ve been spending all this time alone—is isolating myself really helping me? Or is it just making it worse?’” **This Town** “I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and it felt like a small town because generations of the same families stay there. I think for the longest time I really wanted to leave, and I did it, and that was the best feeling ever. But this song isn’t talking about any town in particular—it’s more alluding to the fact that I want to run away from a problem, and right now.” **Jordan** “Growing up, my grandparents lived in the same town as I did and I lived in their house a few different times throughout my childhood. But the house behind theirs was Michael Jordan\'s, and it had 23 on the gate. My grandpa and I used to always walk the dog past and he’d always point out the gate because he thought it was so cool, but Michael Jordan was never there—the house always seemed empty. I think it turned into some type of love song, not for Michael Jordan, but for someone else. I don\'t want any headlines being like, ‘Claud writes a love song for Michael Jordan.’ It\'s just not true.” **That’s Mr. Bitch to You (feat. Melanie Faye)** “Somebody called me a bitch, and I was so offended that I responded, ‘That\'s Mr. Bitch to you.’ And then my friend overheard the conversation and he just jumped in to say, ‘Hi, sorry to interrupt this argument, but Claud, did you write that down? That\'s a really great song title.’ I just feel like one of the most offensive words that a man could call somebody who\'s essentially not a man is a bitch. So the song sort of turned into a fuck-the-patriarchy-type song.” **Pepsi** “It\'s pretty straightforward: I told somebody that I had feelings for them and she just responded in a really rude way. It was brutal. I think she was half joking, but we never talked about it ever again, so I\'m not really sure. I feel like I wrote so many songs about that person, but it wasn\'t capturing what actually happened, so I just decided to say it. I thought it was such a hilariously tragic thing that I had to write about it. Because it\'s just so ridiculous. I\'m hoping that she hears the song.” **Rocks at Your Window** “Maybe it was \[John Cusack\] with the boombox standing at somebody\'s window like, ‘I love you, come down here.’ I was thinking about that and how big and beautiful a romantic gesture that is, but also how annoying and invasive it is as well. It\'s like, \'Okay, get out of here. You\'re embarrassing me.’ I\'ve never actually thrown rocks at anybody\'s window, but I am the type of person to do that.” **Falling With the Rain (feat. Shelly)** “My mom was really sick last year. I found out that she had to get a big surgery, and it really scared me and I was just really, really, really sad. I was going through a really dark period. I wanted it to conclude the record because I like that sentiment: I’m feeling down right now, but I\'m going to bounce back.”

A decade after Willow Smith taught us how to whip our hair back and forth, the genre-bending artist is still just getting started. Her sound has evolved from bubblegum pop hits to alt-R&B to, now, a full pop-punk album. However, her transition into the genre shouldn’t be surprising, since rock runs in her blood: Her first introduction to the medium was from being on the road with her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom in the early 2000s. Then the multi-hyphenate talent experimented with rock-adjacent sounds on tracks like “Human Leech” from her 2017 album *The 1st*, and more prominently on her 2020 album *THE ANXIETY*. All of these moments set the groundwork for the singer’s fifth studio album. Created and recorded during quarantine, *lately I feel EVERYTHING* is an homage to the touchstones of 2000s pop-punk, such as blink-182, Avril Lavigne, and Fefe Dobson. The opening track “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” is an upbeat, energetic, angst-ridden anthem with a mix of clean and distorted guitars backed by booming drums courtesy of blink-182’s drummer Travis Barker, who assists on two other tracks on the album. For every angsty pop-punk like “Gaslight” and “G R O W”—which features none other than Lavigne herself—there’s a heavier metal-influenced track like “Lipstick,” “don’t SAVE ME,” or “Come Home,” showing WILLOW’s growth not only as a singer but as a songwriter.