The Line of Best Fit's Best Albums of the Year 2024

At just 25 years old, with four solo studio albums and three as guitarist for North Carolina band Wednesday under his belt, MJ Lenderman already seems like an all-timer. The vivid, arch songwriting, the swaying between reverence and irreverence for his forebears, steeped in modern culture while still sounding timeless—he evokes the easy comfort of a well-worn favorite and the butterflies of a new relationship with someone who is going to have a massive, rich, and argued-about discography for decades. The songs go down easy but are dark around the edges, with down-home strings and lap steel adorning tales of jerking off into showers and the existential loneliness of a smartwatch. But in a fun way. And just as 2021’s “Knockin” both referenced erstwhile golfer John Daly’s cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and lifted its chorus for good measure, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” honors The Band’s classic while rendering it redundant. But album closer “Bark at the Moon” represents Lenderman’s blending of sad-sack character sketches and meta classic-rock references in its final form: “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon.’” Then he punctuates the line with an “Awoo/Bark at the moon,” not to the tune of the Ozzy song, but to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Packing that many jokes into half a verse is impressive enough—more so that the impact is even more heartbreaking than it is funny.

It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”

If there were any remaining doubts as to hip-hop’s MVP, consider the decision stamped: Kendrick Lamar officially won 2024. There were whispers that Compton’s finest was working on an album in the wake of his feud with Drake, a once-in-a-generation beef that kept jaws dropped for months. (Perhaps you’ve heard of a little song called “Not Like Us,” an immediate entry into the canon of all-time great diss tracks.) After a sold-out celebration at the Kia Forum, an armful of Grammy nods and streaming records, and the headlining slot at next year’s Super Bowl, Lamar ties up his biggest year yet with a bow with his sixth album, *GNX*, the most legitimately surprising surprise drop since *BEYONCÉ* in 2013. Named for his beloved classic Buick, *GNX* finds Kendrick wielding a hatchet he’s by no means ready to bury, still channeling this summer’s cranked-to-11 energy. On “wacced out murals,” he’s riding around listening to Anita Baker, plotting on several downfalls: “It used to be fuck that n\*\*\*a, but now it’s plural/Fuck everybody, that’s on my body.” (Yes, there’s a nod to his Super Bowl drama with Lil Wayne.) If you’ve been holding your breath for Jack Antonoff to link with Mustard, wait no more—the seemingly odd couple share production credits on multiple tracks, the explosive “tv off” among them. Still, K.Dot keeps you guessing: It’s not quite 12 tracks of straight venom over world-conquering West Coast beats. SZA helps cool things down on the Luther Vandross-sampling “luther,” while Lamar snatches back a borrowed title on “heart pt. 6” to remember the early days of TDE: “Grinding with my brothers, it was us against them, no one above us/Bless our hearts.” He cycles through past lives over a flip of 2Pac’s “Made N\*\*\*\*z” on “reincarnated” before getting real with his father about war, peace, addiction, and ego death, and on “man at the garden,” he outlines his qualifications for the position of GOAT. Here’s another bullet point to add to that CV: On *GNX*, Lamar still surprises while giving the people exactly what they want.

Perhaps more so than any other Irish band of their generation, Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums were intrinsically linked to their homeland. Their debut, 2019’s *Dogrel*, was a bolshy, drizzle-soaked love letter to the streets of Dublin, while Brendan Behan-name-checking follow-up *A Hero’s Death* detailed the group’s on-the-road alienation and estrangement from home. And 2022’s *Skinty Fia* viewed Ireland from the complicated perspective of no longer actually being there. On their fourth album, however, Fontaines D.C. have shifted their attention elsewhere. *Romance* finds the five-piece wandering in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Japanese manga classic *Akira*, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film *La Grande Bellezza*, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s *Pusher* films. “We didn’t set out to make a trilogy of albums but that’s sort of what happened,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music of those first three records. “They were such a tight world, and this time we wanted to step outside of it and change it up. A big inspiration for this record was going to Tokyo for the first time. It’s such a visual, neon-filled, supermodern city. It was so inspiring. It brought in all these new visual references to the creative process for the first time.” Recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford (their previous three albums were all made with Dan Carey), *Romance* also brings in a whole new palette of sounds and colors to the band’s work. From the clanking apocalyptic dread of the opening title track, hip-hop-inspired first single “Starburster,” and the warped grunge and shoegaze hybrids of “Here’s the Thing” and “Sundowner,” it opens a whole new chapter for Fontaines D.C., while still finding time for classic indie rock anthems such as “Favourite”’s wistful volley of guitars or the Nirvana-like “Death Kink.” “Every album we do feels like a huge step in one direction for us, but *Romance* is probably a little bit more outside of our previous records,” says Coll. “It’s exciting to surprise people.” Read on as he dissects *Romance*, one track at a time. **“Romance”** “This is one that we wrote really late at night in the studio. It just fell out of us. It was one of those real moments of feeling, ‘Right, that’s the first track on the album.’ It’s kind of like a palate cleanser for everything that’s come before. It’s like the opening scene. I feel like every time we’ve done a record there’s been one tune that’s always stuck out like, ‘This is our opening gambit...’” **“Starburster”** “Grian \[Chatten, singer\] wrote most of this tune on his laptop, so there were lots of chopped-up strings and stuff—it was quite a hip-hop creative process. It’s probably the song that is furthest away from the old us on this album. This tune was the first single and we always try and shock people a bit. It’s fun to do that.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “This was written in the last hour of being in the studio. We had maybe 12 or 13 tracks ready to go and just started jamming, and it presented itself in an hour. \[Guitarist Conor\] Curley had this really gnarly, ’90s, piercing tone, and it just went from there.” **“Desire”** “This has been knocking around for ages. It was one of those tunes that took so many goes to get to where it was meant to sit. It started as a band setup and then we went really electronic with it. Then in the studio, we took it all back. It took a while for it to sit properly. Grian did 20 or 30 vocal layers on that, he really arranged it in an amazing way. Carlos \[O’Connell, guitarist\] and Grian were the main string arrangers on this record. This was the first record where we actually got a string quartet in—before, people would just send it over. So being able to sit in the room and watch a string quartet take center stage on a song was amazing.” **“In the Modern World”** “Grian wrote this song when he was in LA. He was really inspired by Lana Del Rey and stuff like that. Hollywood and the glitz and the glamour, but it’s actually this decrepit place. It’s that whole idea of faded glamour.” **“Bug”** “This felt like a really easy song for us to write. That kind of buzzy, all-of-us-in-the-same-room tune. I really fought for this one to be on the record. I feel like, with songs like that, trying to skew them and put a spin on them that they don’t need is overwriting. If it feels right then there’s no point in laboring over it. That song is what it is and it’s great. It’s going to be amazing live.” **“Motorcycle Boy”** “This one is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins a bit. We actually recorded it six months before the rest of the album. This tune was the real genesis of the record and us finding a path and being like, ‘OK, we can explore down here...’ That was one that really set the wheels in motion for the album. It really informed where we were going.” **“Sundowner”** “On this album, we were probably coming from more singular points than we have before. A lot of the lads brought in tunes that were pretty much there. I was sharing a room with Curley in London, and he was working on this really shoegaze-inspired tune for ages. I think he always thought that Grian would sing it, but when he put down the guide vocals in the studio it sounded great. We were all like, ‘You are singing this now.’” **“Horseness Is the Whatness”** “Carlos sent me a demo of that tune ages and ages ago. It was just him on an acoustic, and it was such a powerful lyric. I think it’s amazing. We had to kind of deconstruct it and build it back up again in terms of making it fit for this record. Carlos had made three or four drum loops for me and it was a really fun experience to try and recreate that. I don’t know how we’re going to play it live but we’ll sort it out!” **“Death Kink”** “Again, this came from one of the jams of us setting up for a studio session. It’s another one of those band-in-a-room-jamming-out kind of tunes. On tour in America, we really honed where everything should sit in the set. This is going to be such a fun tune to play live. We’ve started playing it already and it’s been so sick.” **“Favourite”** “‘Favourite’ was another one we wrote when we were rehearsing. It happened pretty much as it is now. We were kind of nervous about touching it again for the album because that first recording was so good. That’s the song that hung around in our camp for the longest. When we write songs on tour, often we end up getting bored of them over time but ‘Favourite’ really stuck. We had a lot of conversations about the order on this album and I felt it was really important to move from ‘Romance’ to ‘Favourite.’ It feels like a journey from darkness into light, and finishing on ‘Favourite’ leaves it in a good spot.”

The LA-by-way-of-Miami duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin pick up where they left things on their debut, 2021’s *Mercurial World*, and make everything just a bit bigger. Opener “She Looked Like Me!” begins innocently enough, with hushed vocals from Tenenbaum backed by twinkling keys and a buzzing bass synth. Before long, though, massive drum hits give the song an unrelenting pulse, blending the energy of a hyperpop anthem with the rise-and-fall restraint of a classic-rock song. “Image” is a disco-inspired cut that dances around synths that speed up and slow down according to their own whimsy, as Tenenbaum’s voice floats effortlessly above the fray. “What\'s the best you’ve got?/I forgot all my common sense/I need all the common sense/Time to start the clock from the top,” she sings, letting the feel-good vibes of the club-ready instrumental imbue her abstract lyrics with visceral meaning. Even when the duo concoct songs that fear the future or suggest wariness at where the world is headed, the jams suggest that the AI apocalypse will still feature plenty of dancing.

Expansive, cinematic, adventurous: These are the intentions saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia decided to channel when it came to creating *Odyssey*. “I wanted to make a record that felt bigger, something that delivers unexpected emotions,” she tells Apple Music. Bursting onto the London jazz scene in 2017 with the release of her debut EP, *Nubya’s 5ive*, Garcia became a key proponent of a new group of young improvisers who were drawing on jazz traditions as much as their diaspora heritages in their music. Following 2020’s full-length debut *SOURCE*, Garcia now develops her Afrobeat- and dub-influenced sound further to encompass everything from the sweeping string arrangements of “Clarity” to the weighty soundsystem basslines of “Triumphance” and the ’90s R&B references of “Set It Free.” Largely written during extended trips to Brazil, away from her typically hectic touring schedule, *Odyssey* is Garcia soaking up new atmospheres to create an instinctual and intricately articulate music. “This is me growing through joy and practice,” she says. “It’s the fullest, freest vision of myself.” Read on for her in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Dawn” (feat. Esperanza Spalding)** “I wrote this track when I was in Brazil for six weeks at the end of 2022. I was staying right by the ocean and would wake up for the sunrise every day. It was such a beautiful, poignant way to start the day and this melody just came to me in that environment. I’ve always loved Esperanza’s work and she felt like the perfect addition to the song—I was so happy when she agreed to it. I only gave her the title and let her run free otherwise with these beautiful lyrics drawing on the Icarus myth.” **“Odyssey”** “‘Odyssey’ is the epic adventure of the record. I didn’t know the album would center on this composition but I had a feeling that it was going to be cinematic and journeying. Every section of this tune keeps building and turning in unexpected ways, from the keys to the string section producing a huge range of light to darkness. The melody wanders and feels like a beautiful marriage between my love of modal jazz and my love of classical textures. It all flowed really quickly since I had so many ideas for it, all sparking on from one another.” **“Solstice”** “This is one of the oldest tracks on the album. I wanted it to have a busy, erratic beat with a slower melody sauntering and winding over it. It’s about the fast and slow being in conversation. It’s called ‘Solstice’ because the first time I played it with the band was on the summer solstice in 2023. We’d all been away and not done a gig for a while but it just felt right and went down really well.” **“Set It Free” (feat. Richie)** “As soon as I began trying out ideas for this track, I knew I wanted it to have a chill but energetic backbeat, one you could walk down the street to. Richie’s vocals add a stunning sound and lyricism and establish the theme of the song being about promoting confidence in women who are so often raised in society to continually apologize for themselves. It also features a cheeky nine-bar loop, rather than the usual eight, which always surprises me when it comes around!” **“The Seer”** “‘The Seer’ is about wishing you could catch a glimpse of yourself in the future to know you’re on the right track and be confident about your choices. Sonically, it’s a nod to modal jazz with classic voicings and then shifts into my love of broken beats and energetic drums. That switch feels a bit like the ’90s R&B interludes where you hear a snippet of another section or song coming in.” **“Odyssey (Outerlude)”** “I wanted outerludes on the album to give the listener a reprieve and remind them of what they have just listened to before, as well as melting into a different energy for the rest of the record. This switches it from a very high-energy beginning to something much softer and quieter for the halfway point. I love it because it has an eerie vibe full of shimmering strings.” **“We Walk in Gold” (feat. Georgia Anne Muldrow)** “The melody for this composition feels like a lament but the intentions of the tune are joyous. It’s full of energies of hope, purpose, and direction, all informed by the color gold, which represents a light that releases darkness for me. I’ve always loved Georgia Anne Muldrow’s work and was elated when she agreed to feature on this track with me—she fully embodied the track’s uplifting intentions.” **“Water’s Path”** “This was the only tune on the album written in one go with no edits, which is something I haven’t done before. It’s one of my favorites because I’ve never written for strings before this album and I’m really proud of how this song embodies both happiness and sadness, as well as the qualities of water always finding its way through, which is reflected in the ostinato that just keeps ticking along. It’s super melodic and romantic.” **“Clarity”** “The vision for this song became clearer—no pun intended—as I wrote it and it became really enjoyable seeing it morph into the final version where the harmony is upward-reaching and always building. The intention behind the song is about the importance of clarity and transparency in relationships and how freeing that can be when we have it.” **“In Other Words, Living”** “Like ‘Clarity,’ this song always feels like it’s reaching upwards, pushing for peace and excitement in life. It’s a song about being intentionally present and living the balancing act between happiness and sadness that so often constitutes our existence as humans. That’s living as I know it, anyway.” **“Clarity (Outerlude)”** “I wanted one more reprise before we end, something to shift the listeners’ energy back to what’s been before and to show how far we’ve come over the course of the record. It’s a small offering to the journey we’ve traveled on together.” **“Triumphance”** “We’ve been playing this track for a few years to close the live shows and it always leaves people with such joy, since they can’t help but move when it drops. I wasn’t going to record it for the album but it ultimately felt like the only way we could end. I wanted a speech over the dub while the band cooked, something to sum up the triumphant themes of the record and to leave people feeling self-confident as they go out into the world. Except, the person I wanted to do the speech couldn’t and we were running out of time, so I ended up recording it myself, which was a first! I guess I had to find my own self-confidence here to say my piece.”

The first sign that a new era had arrived was Camila Cabello’s platinum blonde locks. Then came “I LUV IT,” the shake-up of a lead single for the Miami native’s fourth studio album—loud, brash, and diamond-hard, with a hook that interpolates a 2009 Gucci Mane classic (“Lemonade”) and an expressionistic verse from Playboi Carti. Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, the 27-year-old singer emphasizes *C,XOXO*’s most crucial evolution: For the first time in her career, the songwriting feels like her own. “Letting go of the safety net of other co-writers in the room allowed for there to be more space for me to hear my own voice,” she tells Lowe. “When you are younger, you feel like you are looking for other people to point out the way a little bit more, and that voice inside you, you’re listening to, but you don’t totally trust. I think as I’ve gotten older, I’m like, you know what? I’m just going to listen to myself. I’m comfortable being, like, it’s on me today, and whether it fails or succeeds, I can trust myself to do it.” Call it a vibe shift or a reintroduction or, as Cabello cheekily called *C,XOXO*, her “hyper-femme villain arc,” with dreamy production from Spain’s El Guincho. There are odes to her tropical hometown, as she recruits City Girls to twerk out the sunroof on Collins Avenue for “Dade County Dreaming.” She’s covered in glitter and dressed for revenge on “pretty when i cry” and tempting an ex on the scorching “HOT UPTOWN,” which features Drake in peak *Honestly, Nevermind* form. Things get deeper on moody, wispy tracks like “June Gloom” and “Twentysomethings,” downcast odes to messy, complicated relationships: “Twentysomethings, gotta have a sense of humor/When it comes to us/Don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” she coos on the latter. But it’s the gorgeous and strange “Chanel No.5” that best represents Cabello as a songwriter. It’s an ethereal experiment she describes as having “pop melodies, but with rap structure,” with twinkly piano and lyrical nods to Haruki Murakami and Quentin Tarantino, spritzes of perfume, and chipped nail polish. “It is the thesis statement for the album,” she tells Lowe. “I was like, this is literally the voice of *C,XOXO*. It’s playful. She’s in control. She’s putting on her lip gloss. She’s toying with this guy. She’s magical. She’s sensitive.”

For their third album, Kentucky hardcore troupe Knocked Loose chose a title that resonated deeply with vocalist Bryan Garris. During an airplane takeoff that triggered Garris’ fear of flying, the woman seated next to him offered the comforting words, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” “The line struck him so strongly that it immediately occurred to him that it should be the title,” Knocked Loose guitarist Isaac Hale tells Apple Music. “It also became a lyric in the last song, ‘Sit & Mourn.’ Like the rest of our records, this is a collection of stuff from Bryan’s personal struggles dealing with anger and loss and depression and sadness. It’s a reminder to him—and all of us—that we’re still here. We made it through all the hardships that came with the past four years of writing this.” Musically speaking, Knocked Loose entered the writing sessions for *You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To* with a very different mindset than the one that drove their 2019 breakthrough *A Different Shade of Blue* and revered 2021 concept EP *A Tear in the Fabric of Life*. “There was just way more pressure, and we had way more experience,” Hale says. “Some people view the third album as a make-or-break record. We had pressure from the fans and the outside world, but more so pressure from ourselves. We thought, ‘How can we possibly outdo what we’ve done before?’ It was tough, but I think we were able to come up with a record where every song accomplishes something unique.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Thirst”** “This was written in the first session that we ever had for this record. It was written before *A Tear in the Fabric of Life* even came out. It came from a jam session we were having where we wanted to create a really difficult song on drums to challenge our drummer Pacsun. We wanted something super short, super intense, and we just made it as complex as we could. And to start the record, it’s something we’ve never done before—a super in-your-face jump scare.” **“Piece by Piece”** “This was our attempt at doing kind of a Hatebreed-esque banger. It has a hook to it, but the hook is one of the mosh parts in the song, akin to \[Hatebreed’s\] ‘Perseverance.’ One of the things we wanted to accomplish on this record was to create stuff that was hooky and catchy, but at the same time crazy heavy. In many ways, I think that it’s the most hardcore song on the record, and that’s what we love about it. It’s our version of a catchy hardcore track that can really connect with people.” **“Suffocate” (feat. Poppy)** “We wrote this song after we thought we had a finished record. Before we went to record, Poppy slid into Bryan’s DMs asking if we would be interested in collaborating on some music. Me and Bryan are huge Poppy fans, so of course we said yes automatically. That same day, Bryan called me like, ‘Hey, man—I’m coming over. We need to write another song.’ We wrote the track the next day, and it was one of the smoothest writing experiences on the record because we wrote it knowing Poppy was going to be a part of it. And because of that, we were able to do some sassy parts that maybe we wouldn’t put on a normal Knocked Loose song but that really work with her voice. I think it’s one of the most special songs we’ve ever written.” **“Don’t Reach for Me”** “This was our attempt at writing a song with a more rock- or pop-oriented structure. It’s different from stuff that we\'ve done before because it has a slightly melodic chorus with a hook. It has a soft bridge with a jam part and some cleaner guitar. And a lot of it is midtempo, besides the very beginning. It only gets fast very briefly. That’s very new for us. There’s like seven mosh parts, so we needed to balance those. It took a long time to figure out, but I think the final product really succeeds in that juxtaposition.” **“Moss Covers All”** “This was written in the second writing session that we did for this record, up in Michigan. We woke up one morning, started jamming, and we were just not coming up with a lot of stuff we liked. We were pretty much just throwing paint at the wall and getting aggravated. When we took a break, I had an idea and basically wrote this entire song in my head in about a minute. I voice memo’d it briefly on my phone and then immediately started putting it down without telling the guys. When they came back, I played it for them—and what I played is pretty much exactly what’s on the record. It’s short, sweet, and super heavy, with a breakdown and a spooky lead that goes directly into the next song.” **“Take Me Home”** “‘Moss Covers All’ and ‘Take Me Home’ are very much connected songs. ‘Moss Covers All’ was written first, but then we really felt the need to have a song on here that’s meant to scare you. We didn’t worry about a mosh part or any sort of heaviness. We just wanted a scary track that’s uncomfortable and throws the listener off guard. When we were thinking about what shape that could take, I immediately thought of that spooky lead from ‘Moss Covers All,’ which we ended up looping as the blueprint for this track.” **“Slaughterhouse 2” (feat. Chris Motionless)** “This song started as an inside joke because Motionless in White was kind enough to reach out to Bryan and have him collaborate on one of their songs, ’Slaughterhouse,’ a very heavy, politically charged track. We’re all huge Motionless in White fans, so of course he accepted. And then we were able to tour with them. As soon as Bryan did that track, we were joking that we should do a song called ‘Slaughterhouse 2.’ We were just kind of laughing about it for a while, but then we thought we were kind of shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t do it. Chris was down from the beginning, and his voice is amazing on this. It was a challenge to match the theme and vibe of the original song, but I think we were able to create something that’s not just a great sequel, but that really stands on its own as a highlight of the record.” **“The Calm That Keeps You Awake”** “The funny thing about this one is that the song totally revolves around the huge breakdown at the end. That part was written first, as part of another thing that was written before *A Tear in the Fabric* had even come out. So, like four years ago, we needed to write new parts because the rest of the song we’d written wasn’t up to par, but that breakdown was super necessary. In doing so, we created this really cool, Meshuggah-esque, kind of Sepultura-auxiliary-percussion vibe that’s one of the most unique parts of the record.” **“Blinding Faith”** “We definitely have some jabs at religious hypocrisy throughout the Knocked Loose discography, and this is just kind of an update on that situation. We hadn\'t done one in a while, and it was something that was feeling close to home for Bryan at the time. To me, this sounds like a mix of some of our greatest riffs that we’d written over the course of a year—it’s kind of a riff-salad song. In some ways, it’s one of the heaviest and scariest songs on the record, so we put it out as a single to say, ‘If you thought we were going to get any softer, absolutely not. And here’s proof.’” **“Sit & Mourn”** “This one revolves around the melodic lead and the kind of ambient post-rock breakdown at the end. We wrote that in the first writing session in Joshua Tree, and it took us a while to come up with more parts that we felt were that good. But the song is very, very anthemic. It sounds very dark and melancholic, but at the same time, the lyrics are positive in a way. Thematically, it’s kind of a title track in the way that the lyrics relate to the name of the record. I know it was a very cathartic song for Bryan. In many ways, it’s the saddest song on the record, but in other ways it’s the most positive. And it’s mentally exhausting from start to finish. It ends with a sound clip that I won’t disclose, but it’ll take you by surprise.”

Arooj Aftab’s star-making 2021 album *Vulture Prince* was marked by a distinct and undeniable sadness—a chronicle of grief following the death of Aftab’s younger brother Maher, whom the record was dedicated to. Despite its many contributors, *Vulture Prince* felt nearly monastic in sound and focus, conjuring images of someone processing pain alone and amidst the cosmos, and since its release, the Pakistani American singer and composer has opened up her sonic world to increasingly thrilling effect. *Love in Exile*, released in 2023, found Aftab expanding the jazz side of her sound in collaboration with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and now her fourth solo album *Night Reign* reflects her biggest leap yet. It’s the kind of record that makes you realize that Aftab can, when it comes to songwriting and style, do pretty much anything—from smoldering balladry à la the late Jeff Buckley and Sade’s endless-sounding quiet storm to trip-hop’s shadowy iridescence—without losing an ounce of raw emotion. Similar to *Vulture Prince*, *Night Reign* features a bevy of notable musicians pitching in throughout: Moor Mother delivers raw incantations over the foreboding structure of “Bolo Na,” while Iyer’s keystrokes are deeply felt across the patient tapestry of “Saaqi” and guitarist Kaki King lends her considerable talents to the refracted jazz-folk of “Last Night Reprise.” But it’s Aftab’s voice—rich, resonant, malleable, and instantly recognizable—that provides the true gravitational pull at the center of *Night Reign*’s universe, echoing through the sparse rustling of “Raat Ki Rani” and shimmering on the surface of the devastating closer “Zameen.” In the press materials for *Night Reign*, Aftab expresses a desire to “make music with and for everybody,” and this record is undoubtedly the fullest realization of those aims yet, revealing new contours in her songwriting and further cementing her as a singular talent in popular music.

The idea of method acting is that you “become” the character you’re playing and the lines between self and acting dissolve. On Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, she’s been considering how that relates to her own work. “There’s a parallel between not acting anymore and my relationship with music and writing and performing,” the London singer-songwriter says. “I don’t really feel like I do a performance, so I don’t really feel like I’m trying to be someone else. That’s why I find performing quite challenging sometimes because I just have to be myself on stage; there’s no costume or masks that I put on.” Maybe that’s why on *My Method Actor* things are getting a bit existential. The excitement of her debut—2019’s *Miss Universe*—and the desire to push against it by doing something totally different with 2022 follow-up *PAINLESS* had left her in a jarring place when she and her collaborator, producer Wilma Archer, got into the studio. Writing music was not glamorous, it was simply her job and her life. “It’s a weird one making a third album, because it’s like: ‘What is pushing me to do this?’” she says. “Where is that desire coming from? Where am I going with this? Where am I going to be on the other side of this?” But this is an album that revels in ruminating on these heavy questions, and we hear an artist—and a person—growing as a result. Teeming with beautiful, accomplished melodies, the album waxes and wanes between scuzzier sounds of frustration and something far more polished and freeing. “It’s a journey, but you don’t really know where it’s going,” she says. “But it’s about not worrying too much about the outcome; it’s learning to trust myself, to really listen to myself.” Across *My Method Actor*, Yanya dredges through all the feelings and upheavals, realizing that there might not be a linear, clear-cut happy ending. “Maybe it’s about letting go. Maybe there’ll never be a point where I feel totally comfortable on stage—or even being a person,” she says, laughing. “These transformations and realizations will happen so often you can’t let it upturn your whole world every time. You have to take it as it comes.” Read on as she guides us through that journey, track by track. **“Keep on Dancing”** “It feels like an introduction. It nearly didn’t make it to the album—it was going really well but it kind of hit a wall towards the end where it wasn’t leveling up the way some of the other songs were, so we restructured it. It starts by asking lots of questions, it sets up the tone of the record. There’s a bit of anger, a bit of resentment. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to be clever, it’s more like a natural flow of ideas. It’s an energy.” **“Like I Say (I runaway)”** “I had a really fun time writing over the initial idea that Will \[Archer\] had sent me, making all the bits fall in the right place, picking up on the instinctive harmonies and the rhythm of it. The chorus took us both by surprise—it took a while, it felt like it was gonna be really instant but it kept falling on its face. It’s quite a simple structure but the phrasing of it makes it interesting.” **“Method Actor”** “I felt like I was definitely constructing a character in my head, imagining I was in someone else’s life. It was like you’re a flower on the wall, but you’re the narrator at the same time. Feelings of anxiety, social anxiety…it also feels a bit violent to me. There’s a lot of violent imagery and it sounds a bit aggressive. It’s kind of like a dance in the first verse and then the chorus hits you, the guitar wakes you up. It’s quite visceral. There’s always a kind of release that comes with writing something a bit more aggressive. I try not to be an aggressive person, so maybe this is a nice way of letting it out. It feels a bit cathartic.” **“Binding”** “It started with the guitar loop which you hear first. ‘Binding’ was actually the demo name for this, but it really stuck with us because it sounds like a constant loop, constant binding, something twisting and turning. It was really instantly very pretty, and it was enjoyable trying to come up with melodies. It feels like you’re needing something more, wanting something more—something strong to numb the pain, or something stronger to feel. Like you’re numbing yourself on this weird journey. I always imagine it like you’re in a car, and the road’s going on and on and on—and it’s not necessarily an enjoyable journey.” **“Mutations”** “This one, I always imagine a siren—there’s kind of a warning going out. You’re being told to take cover or escape. There’s an urgency in the music and the message. Before the sunset, before the end of the day, before the lights, you need to find a way to disappear or to hide. It’s dark, but in the song you’re either receiving or sending the message—so you’re trying to help somebody, or they’re trying to help you. So there’s something nice about that. But there’s something sinister about the reality the song is set in—it’s very rhythmic, there’s not very many breaks, it’s tight and enclosed.” **“Ready for Sun (touch)”** “The song itself is quite cinematic—it’s sonically quite different to what’s come before, it’s a bit more modern, less grungy. It’s about being ready to step outside again, ready to be less concealed, more exposed. You wanna feel sun on your skin when you’ve been in the shade too long. I say ‘exposed,’ but also it’s about feeling safe enough to come out into the open. It’s wanting to feel touch again, wanting to feel things again. It’s raw feeling, raw emotion.” **“Call It Love”** “I was thinking about a phoenix bursting into flames. Metamorphosis. There’s a lot of talk about flames and fire in this album, but this one definitely fits with the journey themes of the record too. There’s a deep knowing that it’s OK to trust yourself and what you know to be true. It’s being your own guide. You have a sense of self and, even if it’s blurry, you have a center. The overlap of desire and shame, too—how we sometimes feel ashamed of acting on our desires. So the phoenix comes to mind because it’s about allowing your calling to guide you somewhere, to let that consume you and destroy you so you are born out from the ashes. It’s a bit dramatic. But sonically, it’s a lot more chilled out, there’s a groove to the way the guitars intertwine.” **“Faith’s Late”** “I feel like a lot of the questions I ask are quite intense, so I almost want to avoid it. This one is talking about identity. Even the word ‘faith’ feels quite loaded. It’s about belonging, or not belonging, to somewhere—never feeling like you belong somewhere. Always feeling like you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s also about being disappointed in the state of the world, and sort of wanting to give up. But the string arrangement at the end is particularly beautiful, I think. In contrast to the themes, you’re trying to make something beautiful out of something you’d prefer to avoid. And so there’s still life, there’s still beauty, even continuing out of the mess.” **“Made Out of Memory”** “This has a lighter touch. It has an ’80s pop kind of feel production-wise, but the core lyric is based off someone saying how humans are just made up of memories of other people. So when you’re trying to leave somebody behind or breaking up with somebody, if you’re not seeing someone anymore—even a friend or a family member—it’s kind of hacking off a piece of yourself each time. How do you break up with somebody without breaking up with yourself? There’s an art to that.” **“Just a Western”** “I remember Will sent me the guitar ages ago and I really liked it, but nothing was automatically clicking. But I liked the unusual chord pattern. I was thinking of the old Western movies that would come on daytime TV when I was younger. They’d be black-and-white films, cowboys riding off into the sunset. This song has that imagery in it for me; the sunset, something ending. One of the lyrics that jumps out for me is ‘I won’t call in a favour/Won’t do it for free anymore.’ It’s saying you’re not going to do somebody else’s dirty work for them, you’re stating your own new boundaries.” **“Wingspan”** “We were originally trying to make a full song, and it wasn’t really working in a long-form way. Realizing that the song was maybe a condensed version makes it more impactful. I don’t really write short songs like this. A lot of the lyrics are based on this poetry attempt from a couple years ago—so it was like a puzzle coming together, finally having a place for these words to go. It’s about realizing that you’ve ended up somewhere but it’s a port for another place to take off—are arrivals and departures the same thing?”

As someone who invited fame and courted infamy, first with inflammatory albums like *Wolf* and later with his flamboyant fashion sense via GOLF WANG, Tyler Okonma is less knowable than most stars in the music world. While most celebrities of his caliber and notoriety either curate their public lives to near-plasticized extremes or become defined by tabloid exploits, the erstwhile Odd Futurian chiefly shares what he cares to via his art and the occasional yet ever-quotable interview. As his Tyler, The Creator albums pivoted away from persona-building and toward personal narrative, as on the acclaimed *IGOR* and *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, his mystique grew grandiose, with the undesirable side effect of greater speculation. The impact of fan fixation plays no small part on *CHROMAKOPIA*, his seventh studio album and first in more than three years. Reacting to the weirdness, opening track “St. Chroma” finds Tyler literally whispering the details of his upbringing, while lead single “Noid” more directly rages against outsiders who overstep both online and offline. As on his prior efforts, character work plays its part, particularly on “I Killed You” and the two-hander “Hey Jane.” Yet the veil between truth and fiction feels thinner than ever on family-oriented cuts like “Like Him” and “Tomorrow.” Lest things get too damn serious, Tyler provocatively leans into sexual proclivities on “Judge Judy” and “Rah Tah Tah,” both of which should satisfy those who’ve been around since the *Goblin* days. When monologue no longer suits, he calls upon others in the greater hip-hop pantheon. GloRilla, Lil Wayne, and Sexyy Red all bring their star power to “Sticky,” a bombastic number that evolves into a Young Buck interpolation. A kindred spirit, it seems, Doechii does the most on “Balloon,” amplifying Tyler’s energy with her boisterous and profane bars. Its title essentially distillable to “an abundance of color,” *CHROMAKOPIA* showcases several variants of Tyler’s artistry. Generally disinclined to cede the producer’s chair to anyone else, he and longtime studio cohort Vic Wainstein execute a musical vision that encompasses sounds as wide-ranging as jazz fusion and Zamrock. His influences worn on stylishly cuffed sleeves, Neptunes echoes ring loudly on the introspective “Darling, I” while retro R&B vibes swaddle the soapbox on “Take Your Mask Off.”

When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”

On Doechii’s 2024 release, the Tampa-born rapper showcases the blend of clever rhymes with deep, philosophical musings that have punctuated early releases like 2020’s *Oh the Places You\'ll Go* mixtape and 2022’s *she / her / black bitch* EP. Lead cut “STANKA POOH” finds the Top Dawg Entertainment artist wrestling with her artistic mortality and role as a Black woman in music. She raps: “Let’s start the story backwards/I’m dead, she’s dead, just another Black Lives Mattered/And if I die today I die a bastard/TikTok rapper, part-time YouTube actor.” Obviously, Doechii aims to be bigger than viral clips and TV shows so small they can fit on your computer screen. On *Alligator Bites Never Heal*, Doechii asserts herself as one of rap’s most impressive bar-for-bar MCs. “DENIAL IS A RIVER” is a classic narrative cut in the style of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” while “NISSAN ALTIMA” is an electro-rap thriller designed to keep the dance floor hot and heart rates up. She sums it up simply enough when she raps: “All beef gets smoked/I’m a real fly bitch, you in coach.”

A Top Dawg Entertainment fixture since the early 2010s, ScHoolboy Q played no small role in elevating the label to hip-hop’s upper echelon. With his Black Hippy cohorts Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock, the tremendously talented Los Angeles native made a compelling case for continuing the West Coast’s rap legacy well beyond the G-funk era or the days of Death Row dominance. Even still, his relative absence from the game after *CrasH Talk* dropped in 2019 has been hard to ignore, particularly as the most prominent member of his group departed TDE while SZA became the roster’s most undeniable hitmaker. Indeed, it’s been nearly five years since he gave us more than a loosie, which makes the arrival of his sixth full-length *BLUE LIPS* all the more auspicious. His concerns as a lyricist draw upon the micro as well as the macro level, as a parent decrying mass school shootings on “Cooties” or as a rap star operating on his own terms on “Nunu.” Elevating the drama, the *Saw* soundtrack cue nods of “THank god 4 me” accent his emboldened bars targeting snitches, haters, and fakes. Q’s guest selection reflects a more curatorial ear at work than the gratifying star-power flexes found on *CrasH Talk*. Rico Nasty righteously snarls through her portion of the menacing “Pop,” while Freddie Gibbs glides across the slow funk groove of “oHio” with scene-stealing punchlines. A producer behind TDE records by Isaiah Rashad and REASON, Devin Malik steps out from behind the boards to touch the mic on a handful of cuts, namely “Love Birds” and the booming paean “Back n Love.”

Hana Vu’s 2024 album *Romanticism* finds the singer stuck between two worlds, eager to embrace maturity and adulthood while wishing the relative simplicity of childhood was still available to her. It‘s a thread that weaves throughout her guitar-driven fourth album, which is built around infectious melodies, incisive lyrics, and moments of solace and triumph that comfortably intermingle. On the project’s first single “Care,” Vu’s opening refrain is an almost audible sigh. She sings: “I\'m waking up to the sun and I find it all too much/Oh, here we go, another day, another name I can\'t bring up.” On “22,” acoustic guitars build against Vu’s powerful voice as she yearns for simpler times. The nostalgia is nearly palpable, but it’s never saccharine. She croons: “At the bar and they\'re playing our song/It sounds like summer and white guitars.” The chorus is deceptively emblematic of the entire album, stuck between the joy of growing and the lingering impostor syndrome that comes with it. “I\'m just getting old/I\'m just 22,” she adds.

IDLES’ fifth album is a collection of love songs. For singer Joe Talbot, it couldn’t be anything else. “At the time of writing this album, I was quite lost,” he tells Apple Music. “Not musically, it was a beautiful time for music. But emotionally, my nervous system needed organizing, and I needed to sort my shit out. So I did. That came from me realizing that I needed love in my life, and that I had sometimes lost my narrative in the art, which is that love is all I’ve ever sung about.” From a band wearied by other people’s attempts to pin narrow labels like “punk” or “political” to their expansive, thoughtful music, that’s as concise a summary as you’ll get. It’s also an accurate one. The Bristol five-piece’s music has always viewed the world with an empathetic eye, processing the human effects and impulses around subjects as varied as grief, immigration, kindness, toxic masculinity, and anxiety. And on their fourth album, 2021’s *CRAWLER*, the aggression and sinew of earlier songs gave way to more space and restraint as Talbot turned inward to reckon with his experiences with addiction. For *TANGK*, that experimentation continued while the band’s initial ideas were developed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in London during late 2022, before the record was completed with *CRAWLER* co-producer Kenny Beats joining the team to record in the south of France. They’ve emerged with an album where an Afrobeat rhythm played out on an obscure drum machine (“Grace”) or a gentle piano melody recorded on an iPhone (“A Gospel”) hit with as much impact as a gale-force guitar riff (“Gift Horse”). Exploring the thrills and the scars of love in multiple forms, Talbot leans ever more into singing over firebrand fury. “I’ve got a kid now, and part of my learning is to have empathy when I parent,” he says. “And with that comes delicacy. To use empathy is a delicate and graceful act. And that’s coming out in my art, because I’m also being delicate and graceful with myself, forgiving myself, and giving myself time to learn. I don’t want to lie.” Discover more with Talbot’s track-by-track guide to *TANGK*. **“IDEA 01”** “It was the first thing \[guitarist and co-producer Mark\] Bowen worked on, and Bowen, being the egotistical maniac that he is, called it ‘IDEA 01’ because he forgot that it was actually idea seven. But, bless him, he does like attention. But, yes, it was the first song that was written in Nigel’s studio. Bowen sat at the piano and started playing, and it was beautiful. ‘IDEA 01’ is different vignettes around old friends that I haven’t seen since Devon \[where Talbot grew up\], and the relationships I had with them and their families, and how crazy certain people’s families are. Bowen’s beautiful piano part reminded me of this song we wrote on the last album, ‘Kelechi.’ Kelechi was a good friend of mine who sadly passed away, and I hadn’t seen him since I waved him off to move to Manchester with his family. I just had this feeling I was never going to see him again. Maybe I’m writing that in my head now, but he was a beautiful, beautiful man. I loved him. I think maybe if we were still friends, part of me could have helped him, but that’s, again, fantasy I think.” **“Gift Horse”** “I was trying to get this disco thing going, so I gave Jon \[Beavis, drummer\] a bunch of disco beats to work on. And Dev \[bassist Adam Devonshire\] is bang into The Rapture and !!! and LCD Soundsystem, and he turned out that bassline real quick. I wrote a song around it, and it felt great. It was what my intentions of the album were: to make people dance and not think, because love is a very complex thing that doesn’t need to be thought. It can just be acted, and worked on, and danced with. I just wanted to make people move, and get that physicality of the live experience in people’s bones. I had this concept of a gift horse as a theme of a song, and it sang to me. I like that grotesque phrase, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ It’s about my daughter, and I’m very grateful for her, and our relationship, and I wanted to write a beast of a tune around her.” **“POP POP POP”** “I read \[‘freudenfreude’\] online somewhere. It was like, words that don’t exist that should exist. Schadenfreude is such a dark thing, to enjoy other people’s misery, so the idea of someone enjoying someone else’s joy is great. Being a parent, you suddenly are entwined with someone else’s joys and lows. I love seeing her dance, and have a good time, and grow as a person, and learn, so I wanted to write a song about it.” **“Roy”** “It’s an allegorical story that sums up a lot of my behavior towards my partners over a 15-year period where I was in a cycle of absolute worship and then fear, jealousy and assholery. I wanted to dedicate it to my girlfriend, who I call Roy. She’s not called Roy. I wanted it to be about the idea of a man who is in love and then his fears take over, and he starts acting like a prick to push that person away. Then he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover, realizing what he’s done, and he apologizes. He is then forgiven in the chorus, and rejoicing ensues.” **“A Gospel”** “It’s a reflection on breakups, which I think are a learning curve. I think all my exes deserve a medal, and they’ve taught me a lot. It’s really a tender moment of a dream I used to have, then \[it\] dances between different tiny memories, tiny vignettes of what happened before, and me just giving a nod to those moments and saying goodbye, which is beautiful. No heartbreak, really. I’ve been through the heartbreak now. It’s just me smiling and being like, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you very much.’” **“Dancer” (with LCD Soundsystem)** “The best form of dance is to express yourself freely within a group who are also expressing themselves freely, the true embodiment of communion. The last time I had this sense of euphoria from that was an Oh Sees gig at the \[Sala\] Apolo in Barcelona. I closed my eyes and let the mosh push me from one side of the room to the other and back. I didn’t open my eyes once, I just smiled and was carried by this organism of beautiful rage. Dancing’s a really big part of my personality. I love it. My mum always danced. Even in her most ill days \[Talbot’s mother passed away during the recording of 2017 debut *Brutalism*\], she would always get up and dance, and enjoy herself. I dance with my daughter every day that I have her. I think it’s magic and important.” **“Grace”** “It all came out of nowhere. I had this beat in mind for a while—I was thinking of an aggro Afrobeat kind of track. But it didn’t come out like that. It came out like what happens when Nigel Godrich gets his hands on your Afrobeat stuff. I asked Nigel to make the beat, and he chose the LinnDrum \[’80s drum machine\]. The LinnDrum changes the sound of a beat, the tone of a drum, the cadence of a beat, it changed the beat completely. It’s a very, very delicate thing, a beat. It sounded like a different song to me. It sounded amazing. And that’s where the bassline came from. And then that’s where the vocals came from. It felt a bit uneasy for a long time because it came out of nowhere. Me and Bowen were like, ‘Is this right? Is this complete?’ I think it just has to feel like you, like it is part of you and what you mean at the moment, that’s all. An album’s an episode of where you’re at in the world in that point in time.” **“Hall & Oates”** “I wanted to write a glam-rock pounder about falling in love with your boys. My ex and I used to joke about this thing where you make love to someone for the first time, and then the next day, you’re walking on air, and it feels like Hall & Oates is playing. The birds are singing, you’re bouncing around and everything’s great. I wanted to use that analogy for when you make friends with someone for the first time, and they make you feel good, lighter, stronger, excited to see them again. And that’s what happened in lockdown: I made friends with \[Bristol-based singer-songwriter\] Willie J Healey and my mate Ben, and we went on bike rides whenever we could, getting out and feeling good post-lockdown. It gave me a sense of purpose again. It felt like I was falling in love.” **“Jungle”** “I was trying to write a jungle tune for ages. The guitar line was a jungle bassline that I had but it just never fit what we were writing. And then Bowen started playing the chords on the guitar and it transformed it into something completely different. It completely revitalized what I’d been dragging through the mud for five years. Bowen made it IDLES, made it real, made it believable, made it beautiful. And then it reminded me of getting nicked, so I wrote a song about different times that I’ve been in trouble.” **“Gratitude”** “This was a real struggle. Bowen was really obsessed about doing interesting counts with the beats. I just wanted to make people dance and create infectious beats. We were coming from very different angles, but we loved this song that Bowen had made. I was like, ‘I get it, Bowen. This is insane. I love it, but I can’t get it.’ We hung on to it for ages, and then Nigel really helped us out, he created spaces and bits here and there by turning things down and moving everything slightly. Then Kenny helped me out, and got rid of the stupid counts, I think, and helped me write it on a 4/4 beat. And then they changed it back. I just come in in weird places. Everyone chipped in, because everyone believed in the song.” **“Monolith”** “I was fascinated by films where four or five notes are repeated throughout and create this monolithic motif. There’s a sense of continuity but the mood changes depending on certain things like tone and instruments. I wanted to do that over a song, and we got our friend Colin \[Webster\] from \[London noise rock unit\] Sex Swing to do the sax, we did it on different instruments that Nigel had. Nigel went away and basically put it all through the hollow-body bass. It reminded me of a documentary from a series called *The Blues* that Martin Scorsese curated. *The Soul of a Man* \[directed by Wim Wenders\] is about a song \[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’\] getting sent into space. If any aliens get this capsule, they’ll hear this song being played from a blues artist. It created a really beautiful and deep picture in my mind. It felt like this monolith drifting in the ether. I started singing a blues riff behind it, a Skip James kind of thing. I think it’s a beautiful way to finish the album—us drifting in the ether.”

In January 2021, news broke that the pioneering pop producer SOPHIE had died, aged only 34, after a tragic fall when she was attempting to glimpse the moon. The outpouring of grief was instantaneous and the tributes heartfelt, as artists including Rihanna, Flying Lotus, Sam Smith, Christine and the Queens, Rina Sawayama, and Nile Rodgers honored a visionary talent who had touched—and forever changed—pop with her restlessly inventive and, eventually, mainstream-conquering sound. As Jack Antonoff put it on social media at the time, “she’s been at the forefront for a long time and we see her influence in every corner of music…an artist who truly had the ideas first and the guts to put it out there.” Almost four years later arrives *SOPHIE*, the follow-up to SOPHIE’s 2017 debut *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides* and the album the artist had been working on—and almost finished—before her death. Promised as her only posthumous album, it was completed by SOPHIE’s brother and studio engineer Ben Long, who’d been working closely with her on the record, and who intimately understood her vision for it. Despite the artist’s undeniable impact on radio-friendly pop, this being SOPHIE, the record isn’t always an accessible, straightforward listen. *SOPHIE* is split into four sections of four songs, each exploring different moods, and each one arriving like a thrillingly abrupt left turn. The record almost feels like a voyaging DJ set through her musical world. There’s ambient music (“Intro (The Full Horror)”), frenetic, crunchy production and late-night club sounds to raise anxiety levels (there’s a song called “Berlin Nightmare”). But then there’s also ebullient and expertly crafted pop moments that will make you want to turn the volume right up, from the summer-ready “Reason Why” with Kim Petras and BC Kingdom to “Why Lies,” also with BC Kingdom and LIZ. Later come softer, often yearning tracks, the kind of songs that showcase what always made SOPHIE’s music—and the hyperpop sound she helped pioneer—so special: its heart. See “Always and Forever,” which features PC Music talent Hannah Diamond’s wispy vocals against softer, yet still bouncing, production and lyrics about transcending time and moving towards the light. Indeed, unlike on *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides*, there are guests on every song on *SOPHIE*, including Petras and Diamond, as well as Cecile Believe, Jozzy, Bibi Bourelly, and artist, writer, and DJ Juliana Huxtable. And that roster feels poignant for SOPHIE’s final album: This is an artist who has always been synonymous with community, collaboration, and friendship. Her chosen guests here deliver spoken word (on the racing yet strangely addictive “Plunging Asymptote” and the spacey “The Dome’s Protection”), pitched-up vocals (“Live in My Truth”), and lonely, heartbreak-fueled lyricism, as on the gorgeous, ’80s-referencing “My Forever” with Cecile Believe, one of the album’s standout moments. “I want to go back to forever,” she sings. “You’ll always be my forever.” Listening to *SOPHIE* is often an exhilarating experience, but it’s also a bittersweet one, a reminder of the producer’s extraordinary ambition and boundless experimentation—and of how much she still had to give.

Woodland Studios is the cultural anchor of East Nashville’s Five Points, a bustling district of restaurants, bars, and vintage shops that some consider the heart of the greater artistic enclave found east of downtown Music City. Woodland is the home studio of musical and life partners David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, as well as the headquarters for the duo’s Acony Records. Nearly destroyed by the deadly March 2020 tornadoes that devastated much of Nashville (the pair actually rushed out mid-storm to rescue master recordings), Woodland is still standing, though only after substantial repairs. That close call inspired Welch and Rawlings to celebrate their musical home with this album, which also notably bears both artists’ names. (The pair has a tendency to alternate album billing for their always-collaborative projects, like Rawlings’ credit for 2017’s *Poor David’s Almanack* and Welch’s for 2011’s celebrated *The Harrow & The Harvest*.) Accordingly, *Woodland* is as crackling and alive an album as the pair has made, leaning into the warmth of its homey origins and the ease of the duo’s fruitful and supportive creative partnership. Production is lusher and more complex, though never distractingly so—as always, the pair’s ultimate reverence is for songcraft, as heard on the evocatively titled opening track “Empty Trainload of Sky,” which could hint at the awestruck horror wrought by a tornado, or “The Day the Mississippi Died,” a clever bit of social commentary that also breaks the fourth wall (“I’m thinking that this melody has lasted long enough/The subject’s entertaining but the rhymes are pretty rough”). Other highlights include “Hashtag,” which avoids hollow social media commentary in favor of acknowledging the plight of artists whose names only become media fodder in death, and closer “Howdy Howdy,” a sweet encapsulation of the pair’s unbreakable connection.

Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.

“I’m a bit of a disgrace,” Mabe Fratti tells Apple Music. “People see me performing and they think that I’m a very solemn person, but I’m not elegant at all in real life. You may find me wiping the snot off my nose in the street.” The Guatamala-born, Mexico City-based singer and cellist recorded *Sentir Que No Sabes* in collaboration with her romantic partner, producer and guitarist Héctor Tosta, combining passages of dissonance and experimentation with avant-pop, all inspired by Brian Eno, Talk Talk, and the modern jazz albums released by the ECM label. Lead single “Kravitz” pays loving tribute to Lenny Kravitz with a hallucinogenic mood enriched by brass instrumentation and jazz accents. Fratti talked with Apple Music about the album and the emotional risks involved in her artistic process. **Her songwriting process** “We tried many different processes on this album. Normally I start playing something, searching for ideas, then a melody develops and I build up an arrangement for it. On ‘Kravitz,’ for instance, Héctor took care of the guitar and keyboards, and he asked me to play on top of the beat. We were on a Lenny Kravitz kick at the time, and we became rabid fans. Héctor told me to think of Peter Gabriel, the *Scratch My Back* album, and I ended up playing a riff with an awesome modal richness to it. There were so many pizzicato songs on this record that I wanted to play the cello with a bow on one and add a delay, an echo. Finding the melody for that one was hard—and the lyrics, even worse. It’s part of my creative exorcism. Every song has its own process.” **The role of dissonance on the album** “I love to generate feelings of tension and release. I’m going to share my formula here—even though I hope to expand it as I grow in life. I’m very melodic with my voice, and consequently employ the cello as an agent to get those melodies a bit dirtier—to build up tension, stretch the sounds that listeners may identify with or not. I play with the limits of what is acceptable. I push in order to see how far I can expand myself in that respect.” **Her singing voice** “That technique is used in pop music, having the voice really up front. I want to reach a point where my vocals sound raw, because that’s what makes me happy. When you hear yourself singing or talking, you start paying attention to your flaws. As you make more records, the sound tends to become cleaner, with less reverb. I love seeing rawness and imperfection everywhere—in art, the streets, and people’s faces. Those are the things that I’m attracted to, and this album was an intense dive into that world. Héctor has the same vision, a common aesthetic that we share.” **Taking risks and experimenting with new sounds** “I see this as one of the most accessible things I’ve ever done. There’s a lot of groove in these songs. I listen to tons of new music that’s really amazing and highly adventurous. Clearly, those bands are being brave to put their music out there, because they run the risk of being misunderstood, or ignored. It’s abstract music, requiring so much sensitivity that many listeners won’t connect with it. So, from my personal perspective, my reaction would be: Are you kidding me? I made a record steeped in grooves. At least in the realm of my imagination.”

On Mustafa’s 2024 debut album, the Sudanese Canadian songwriter moves from topic to topic with the deft narrative craft of a seasoned wordsmith. “Dunya,” which translates from Arabic to “the world in all its flaws,” perfectly encapsulates Mustafa’s approach to songwriting: It\'s raw and unfiltered but totally in awe of the planet on which we find ourselves. On opener “Name of God,” Mustafa surrounds himself with little outside of an acoustic guitar melody, letting his powerful voice carry the song’s emotional heft. He blends the personal and universal on the song, asking, “Whose Lord are you naming/When you start to break things?” Elsewhere, on the percussive “Old Life,” he looks back with mixed feelings on a relationship long in the rearview. He croons, “I\'m not yours/But there\'s a part of your life that is mine.” All we are, Mustafa asserts, is the experiences we have.