For the follow-up to her harrowing 2019 album *Caligula*, Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) explores the physical and religious ruins of rural Pennsylvania as a metaphor for personal turmoil. “I think overall the record is about betrayal and consequences and facing the repercussions for your actions,” she tells Apple Music. “Looking at myself and the people close to me, it\'s about my most recent very turbulent relationship, and trying to love someone who cannot love you, and the resulting loneliness and isolation.” Because she was living in rural Pennsylvania to be in that relationship, she chose to detail the strange history of the area on *Sinner Get Ready*. “One of the major focuses of the record was to create darkness and intensity, and a very emotional soundscape,” she says, “but to do it without the trappings of extreme music and metal and noise, and to use a totally different palette to create the same vibe.” Below, she comments on each track. **“The Order of Spiritual Virgins”** “This track is a bridge between the last album, *Caligula*, and the rest of the record. The Order of Spiritual Virgins relates to the Cloisters at Ephrata, which was a small monastic society in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. They were hardcore ascetics, and I think a lot of it was based around totally repressing sexuality. I wanted to introduce a lot of the vocals that appear throughout the record—they’re congregational and not particularly refined, but they have real conviction. This song also has the only blatant synth aspect on the record, which is in the Morton Subotnick style.” **“I Who Bend the Tall Grasses”** “This song is inspired by a poem by my friend Blake Butler\'s late wife, who passed away around the time I was writing this record. She\'s a poet named Molly Brodak, and the poem is called ‘Jesus.’ I found it so striking and moving, and so the language of this track is very much indebted to that poem. It’s probably the most violent song on the record, and it also transitions out of the screaming stuff I’ve been doing for the last two years now. It’s like the last gasp of that for this record, and I believe we did it in one take.” **“Many Hands”** “With this one, I really wanted to focus on the repetition of the lyrics because I think they are fairly graphic. I also wanted to bring in part of the world that I\'ve been building previously and to reference ‘All Bitches Die’ by actually pulling the piano progression from that song and then repeating the lyrics and pulling that from the song as well. So that’s actually the first thing you hear, and then it transitions into this other song that is laid over it. They kind of talk to each other throughout the song. I think it has an Angels of Light vibe.” **“Pennsylvania Furnace”** “This is an actual place, a defunct community that’s about 20 minutes away from where I was living this past year. And now it\'s just a big ruin with a concrete slab and some crap laying around. ‘Pennsylvania Furnace’ was another contender for the record title, but I wanted to give it to the song. Musically, I wanted to create a very lonely feeling. We wanted to create something that sounded grand and huge but also extremely close to you. So there’s a very dry, close vocal. It’s a very sad song.” **“Repent Now Confess Now”** “The title for this is from a sign on I-70, which is an interstate that runs the length of Pennsylvania horizontally. About 45 minutes outside of Philly, there’s a barn by the side of the road on what looks like an Amish farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the phrase ‘Repent now, confess your sins and God will abundantly pardon.’ But the song is directly about the surgery I had to get this year. I had a massive disc herniation in my lower back that became an emergency situation that threatened total loss of my lower body.” **“The Sacred Linament of Judgment”** “A lot of the lyrics on this record are intended to emulate or are directly appropriated from Amish and Mennonite texts from the 1800s and 1700s. And this one comes from a book called *The Heart of Man: Either a Temple to God or the Habitation of Satan: Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, Calculated to Awaken and Promote a Christian Disposition*. Also appearing on this song is the confession of Jimmy Swaggart, an evangelist who was brought to accountability by one of the prostitutes he had been frequenting.” **Perpetual Flame of Centralia** “Centralia is an abandoned mining town 30 minutes outside Philly where there was a coal mining accident in 1962, and there’s been a fire burning underground ever since. This song was the first song I did in the studio, and I really wanted to focus on creating an intimate space. Vocally, the phrases are very long and there is a lot of breath taken. I wanted to focus on the quality of the voice as it\'s losing its ability to project or sustain itself. The song is about consequences and judgment.” **“Man Is Like a Spring Flower”** “This song was a wild ride. The title is from a piece of Mennonite fraktur, which is the illuminated manuscript that they would paint in their copious spare time. Again, it starts off with this polyphony, which is just me, but it\'s so grating and abrasive that every time I listen to the song, I start laughing because I think it sounds so gross. We brought in this really, really good banjo player and had him do this compositional technique called phasing, which affects the rhythm of the song. And then I did the most miserable vocal I could muster.” **“The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata”** “I wanted the emotional trajectory of the record to be a bit of an unraveling. It starts out with strength and confidence and virulence and ends in total despair, acceptance, and perhaps a wish for absolution. I kept trying to add all this crazy stuff to this one, but we kept taking it out until I was left with a very simple congruent harmony. It seems like a nice, traditional song, but the only curveball is the lyrical ugliness at the end. It really is about the acceptance of loneliness, I think.”
Where *KICK ii* delves into the lurching, snapping grooves of reggaetón, *KicK iii* applies an even more forceful touch to experimental beats that zigzag between futuristic club rhythms and vintage IDM. The strutting “Bruja” fires merciless ballroom salvos over car-crash drums and apocalyptic synth squeal; “Incendio” twists Arca’s perpetually morphing vocals over drums that punch like Brazilian funk carioca or Portuguese batida; and “Morbo” dissolves into a gooey morass of slow-motion techno. From there, things just get more unpredictable: The shuddering beats of “Fiera” and “Ripples” feel like they’re coming apart at the seams, while the shimmering melody of “Skullqueen” channels mid-’90s Aphex Twin, long a latent influence on Arca’s fractured syncopations. But the storm clouds part for the closing “Joya”: Over soft, feathery chimes, she sings sweetly, “I want to tell you/You are a jewel among men/I feel so much love.” After so much violent turmoil, to let us down so gently feels like an act of kindness.
The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.
In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”
“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.’”
Arriving seven years after his explosive debut album *Worlds*—which challenged formulaic, big-tent EDM with sensitive epics rooted in fantasy and escapism—Porter Robinson’s sophomore album *Nurture* turns, surprisingly, inward, reflecting the difficult period that followed. “After I released my first album, panic set in,” the North Carolina producer tells Apple Music. “Things got really dark.” Robinson found the pressure to prove himself overwhelming, and when his little brother was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, he retreated into isolation. “I stopped watching movies, seeing friends, even going outside,” he says. “First I felt guilty doing anything other than trying to break the creative slump. Then, suddenly I couldn’t see the point.” *Nurture* traces his gradual reemergence. “It’s me unraveling all the damage I had done to myself and finding, in its place, an appreciation for everyday things,” he says. Through billowing, earnest dance-lite tracks that relish texture, melody, and atmosphere, Robinson sketches the personal journeys—moving out of his parents’ house, visiting Japan, falling in love, helping his brother recover—that reignited his creative spark. “I didn’t want to keep writing about faraway dreamscapes,” he says. “I wanted the album to be about the beauty of the real world, because that’s what gets us through.” Below, he takes us behind the scenes into the creation of each track. **“Lifelike”** “I am obsessed with the idea of a window into nature, and this song is the window into the worldview of *Nurture*. As an artist, my vantage point into the beauty of the real world is so often, like, sitting in a recording studio, staring out my window, and feeling like I\'m in a forest. That’s what informed the creative direction of this album. To me, establishing a specific worldview was essential. It’s a lot like the process of omission. It’s saying, ‘These are the things that are worth showing here.’ ‘Lifelike’ is what takes you from the black void on the cover into all the things that I felt were worth showing.” **“Look at the Sky”** “My girlfriend Rika and I spent several months in Japan in 2016, and that’s what inspired the art direction for this album. I remember seeing this poster for Nagoya tourism that was a landscape with a blue sky and a white scribble that said something like ‘It’s still here.’ That lyric found its way into the song, and the white scribble found its way into the cover art. As for the chorus, I wanted it to serve as a mantra to myself—a message of hope and perseverance. There’s no shortage of terrible news and reasons to feel discouraged right now, but you have to maintain some sense that things can get meaningfully better.” **“Get Your Wish”** “When I started writing this album, I was wrestling with some heavy questions: Why am I killing myself over this? What do I hope is going to happen that hasn’t happened yet? Why do I need to prove myself again? The answer that I came to, which you can hear in this song, was inspired by Bon Iver’s album *22, A Million*. I found that album when my little brother had cancer. I really wasn’t able to make music at that time. But that album made me feel a few degrees brighter. More hopeful. And when I thought about how much that music meant to me, I realized that all that matters is making music that connects with people, that makes the world slightly less crappy. ‘Get Your Wish’ was the first time I was able to get back into the real state of play.” **“Wind Tempos”** “If there’s one artist who affected my worldview more than any other, it’s this Japanese pianist named Masakatsu Takagi. He’s my hero. He did the score for one of my favorite movies, *Wolf Children*. That helped me understand that all the beauty and emotion I was trying to create through music didn\'t need to come from these otherworldly dreamscapes; it could be intimate. Well, when we were in Japan, he invited me and my girlfriend to stay in his home in Hyogo. He lives in a village of like eight people and his house is covered in pianos. When he played for me, it was hard not to bawl. At the end of the trip, he gave me a disc file of Japanese ambient music from the early 2000s. I hadn’t heard of any of it, but he knew it’d be my thing. Not only did it inspire ‘Wind Tempos’ but I wound up throwing in this tiny sample of him playing a toy piano. It\'s super distorted, almost unrecognizable. I emailed him to see if I could give him credit on the song—just a little way of recognizing how much he’d influenced me. He agreed.” **“Musician”** “‘Musician’ is my favorite song on the album. It’s me when I\'m peaking on inspiration and creativity and I feel invincible. It came from a conflict between my heart and my mind: My mind told me I needed a chopped-up instrumental, kind of like ‘Flicker’ from my previous album, and my heart said it needed to be another big sing-along. At first, I followed my head and wrote the crazy instrumental; it had like ten key changes, no vocals, no repetition. But it didn’t feel right. Then I finally wrote the chorus, this huge, anthemic, vocal moment, and knew I’d hit something. It almost feels like a Justin Bieber moment, it’s so infectious and sugary and pop. But I can\'t think of anything that better captures what it feels like to be on stage. In the end, I wound up blending both versions, and the result is just boundless joy.” **“do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do”** “I wrote this song after listening to this artist Cornelius for the first time. It was one of those situations where people had told me over and over again how much I was going to love him, but it almost got overwhelming, so I sort of avoided it. Then I finally listened, and wrote this song in eight hours. It feels like rollerblading through my neighborhood—just feeling free and in this childlike state.” **“Mother”** “I wanted a song that expressed the love that I feel for my parents—as well as the grief of growing up. I felt like the minute I moved out, my youth would be over and I’d hardly ever see my family or dog again. In reality it wasn’t like that at all, I still see them all the time. But I wanted to capture the sad side of growing up—of realizing your parents aren’t infallible.” **“dullscythe”** “This is by far the most abstract and experimental song on the album, and it’s the one track that doesn’t have a standard tempo. I wanted it to feel really hard and chaotic—something at the midway point to keep people on their toes—and it makes me feel like I\'m getting smacked around in a thousand directions.” **“Sweet Time”** “This song is about being so in love with someone that, for the first time in your life, you’re scared of dying. You realize you aren’t guaranteed an eternity together. In the lyrics, I talk about going to find God to make sure she\'s okay, and it makes me cry every time. I was bawling my eyes out in the studio, I could barely get the words out. In the end, though, it’s also an expression of gratitude, because the world is lucky to have her. Rika and I have been together four years, and honestly it\'s really time for me to propose. But I wanted to wait until after the pandemic.” **“Mirror”** “This song is about my critical inner voice and how much it was affecting me. I realized I had these inner demons that were represented by the nastiest things somebody might say to me on Twitter, or the meanest things music critics might say. And they got in my head. They affected me creatively, because every time I’d write something, it was really easy to imagine someone dissing it. But if you’re just trying to avoid something mean being said about your work, that’s the least vulnerable place you could possibly be in. You’re living in fear and shrinking yourself to avoid getting hurt. ‘Mirror’ is about my confrontation with that inner voice.” **“Something Comforting”** “I wrote the main melody for this song in the back of a cab in New York in 2016. I remember listening to it over and over and over and over, feeling like, ‘All right, I need to make this into something real.’ Emotionally and lyrically, I feel like this song captures the essence of the album. It was the first thing I wrote that became the seed for everything that followed.” **“Blossom”** “I made this ballad for my girlfriend, and I remember bawling as I wrote it. It all came together very quickly and sprang from the idea of well-wishing: How much joy does it fill you with to imagine somebody you love and care about really happy? Getting everything that they want, and being surrounded by loved ones? I was imagining that for my girlfriend and picturing her as happy as she could possibly be.” **“Unfold”** “This is the only true collaboration on the album, and it came about because I’ve always loved TEED’s music. When we got into the studio to write and record, he started telling me how much he loved ‘Sea of Voices’ from my last album, *Worlds*, and how he wished he’d written it, so I started sketching a soundscape that evoked it a little bit. Then, to make the song a good fit for *Nurture*, we decided to have him sing on it—actually we sort of sing together. It was a whirlwind. For a while, I had this song early on in the tracklist because it presented some variety, but as I kept working on it, I was like, ‘No, this is an end-of-album moment. If I’m going to have this epic wall-of-sound thing, it needs to come towards the end.’” **“Trying to Feel Alive”** “This song was me trying to make sense of the whole journey, trying to figure out what has changed. What did I learn? Am I any better? Am I satisfied? It was enormously difficult to write, but ultimately, the answer I came to is that satisfaction isn’t the real goal. If you accomplish everything you’re striving for, you’ll stop looking forward. There\'s nowhere to go. This is another one where I was crying while writing it because I guess it was sort of a personal epiphany. Here I am on the other side of this, still struggling with making music, still not necessarily feeling whole, but beginning to understand that maybe that\'s a good thing. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe making music is my way of trying to feel alive, over and over again.”
A few years removed from his Oscar-nominated work on 2017’s *Call Me by Your Name*, Sufjan Stevens turns to film for inspiration on this collaborative concept LP with LA singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine. Working together in upstate New York, the two would watch a movie in the evening, then write a song in response the next morning, employing the sort of quiet arrangements and pristine melodies that mark their work as solo artists. It’s an ode to maintaining an open mind (or *shoshin*, the Zen Buddhist term whose English translation is the album’s title), Stevens and De Augustine as eager to engage with horror films and commercial blockbusters as they would artier fare—from *All About Eve* to *Hellraiser III*, *Bring It On Again* to *Point Break* and *Wings of Desire*. But whether they’re giving voice to *The Silence of the Lambs*’ Buffalo Bill (“Cimmerian Shade,” sung from the perspective of said serial killer) or exploring the power dynamics of Spike Lee’s *She’s Gotta Have It* (“It’s Your Own Body and Mind”), every song here sparkles and stands on its own. You don’t need to have seen any of the source material to fully appreciate it.
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.
“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.”
When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.
“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”
In 2019, BROCKHAMPTON delivered one of their most commercially successful singles in “SUGAR,” a cut from their fifth album, *GINGER*. They were riding high on the wave of its momentum when the pandemic hit, sending the band\'s members into their own bubbles of isolation even as they remained productive, releasing a handful of singles and video content. The fruits of their labor culminate with *ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE*, which brims with both the political and personal tension of the time and stands out as their most clear-eyed and collaborative release to date. In addition to consulting with legendary producers RZA and Rick Rubin, the band finds complementary counterparts in rappers like Danny Brown (“BUZZCUT”) and JPEGMAFIA (“CHAIN ON”), with whom they share a similar kind of eccentric creativity. On their own, though, the sprawling group is flush with a multitude of talent that they thoughtfully showcase without sacrificing cohesion. Decidedly roused and rap-oriented tracks like “WINDOWS” and “DON\'T SHOOT UP THE PARTY” slot nicely alongside more soulful, R&B-leaning songs like “I\'LL TAKE YOU ON” and the gorgeously somber “DEAR LORD.” Together, they make a multihued collage that embodies the spirited fluidity of BROCKHAMPTON. Ahead of its release, Kevin Abstract announced on Twitter that *ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE* would be the band\'s penultimate album. If that proves true, with this release, they will exit having left few stones unturned—evolution is an infinite process, but BROCKHAMPTON\'s (near) final form still resembles actualization.
After Yola signed with Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye recordings and released *Walk Through Fire*, her genre-melding full-length debut that earned her four Grammy nominations (including a 2020 nod for Best New Artist), she found herself facing a stubborn foe: writer’s block. Her increasingly demanding career yielded accolades and an ever-growing fanbase that included artists like The Highwomen and director Baz Luhrmann, but she found herself struggling to write at the height of it. “I had ideas right the way through, from 2013, when I was learning to play guitar, through to when I first started doing shows in late 2015,” she tells Apple Music. “But I hadn\'t had a single idea from 2019 into the pandemic—just nothing. That level of being busy just completely poached my ability to write. I started deconstructing my process of how my brain likes to function when I\'m creating.” If she started humming a tune while straightening up the house, she wouldn\'t immediately try to interrogate it. She sought out stillness and space, a contrast to what she calls the “excessively conscious” state she often found herself in. “When that part of my brain was off, ideas would appear almost instantly,” she says. “I clearly had inspiration, but there were situations that stopped the ideas coming to the fore, stopped me being able to access them.” Eventually, Yola wrote her way out of writer’s block and into *Stand for Myself*, an album that meets the high standard she set with *Walk Through Fire* while drawing in new sounds (namely disco, which drives the groove of “Dancing Away in Tears”) and doubling down on vintage vibes (notably the ’70s soul of “Starlight”) and declarations of self-empowerment. New collaborators came along for the soulful journey, too: Joy Oladokun, Ruby Amanfu, and Natalie Hemby co-wrote songs for the album (as did Auerbach, who produced the album, along with *Walk Through Fire*), and Brandi Carlile lends her voice to “Be My Friend,” an all-too-timely celebration of allyship. Below, Yola talks through a few of the songs on the album and how they helped get her back on track. **“Barely Alive”** “The first song on the record, ‘Barely Alive,’ is co-written by Joy Oladokun. We were talking about what it\'s like to be Africans and isolated, and playing guitar, and singing songs, and being into a very broad spectrum of music—and growing up having to explain our existence, and ourselves. You are so often called on to minimize yourself. It can be that your life experience is uncomfortable to somebody and it\'s triggering their white fragility, so they\'re encouraging you to speak less on it, or better still, not at all, and to suffer in silence. If you can\'t speak on your life, then you can\'t address what\'s right and wrong with it. That\'s where the album jumps off from: It\'s a very concise narrative on my journey, from that place of being a doormat to having some agency over my own life.” **“Break the Bough”** “‘Break the Bough’ dates back to 2013, and was started on the evening of my mother\'s funeral. It doesn\'t sound like a song that was written on the horns of a funeral; it\'s a real party song. In that moment I realized that none of us are getting out of this thing called life alive, and so whatever we think we\'re doing with our lives, we better do a better job of it—just manifest the things that you want to manifest, and be the you that you most want to be. I\'d been in a writing block up until that point, and that sparked me to decide to learn to play guitar and inexorably start writing songs again—and that led me here.” **“Be My Friend”** “‘Be My Friend’ was one of the songs to arrive in my mind almost complete. That was a real moment, when I was able to come up with something that felt really real, really true, really about the time I was in, but also about my journey. It was as much about allyship \[as\] it was the idea of what I needed to get to this point in the first place. I thought it was important to call Brandi to sing with me: She\'d had the same conversation with me pertaining to queerness, and the pursuit of not being a token, and to manifest your most true self in your art so you don\'t feel like you\'re apologizing for yourself or hiding yourself in your art.” **“Stand for Myself”** “The song ‘Stand for Myself’ is the ultimate conclusion of a concept. It starts with referencing the \'Barely Alive\' version of myself: \'I understand why you\'re essentially burying your head in the sand: You want to feel nothing.\' But also, it can speak on people that are experiencing white fragility. It\'s like, I get it, it makes you feel uncomfortable. You don\'t want to have to feel empathy for people that aren\'t like you, because it feels like work. But then it\'s saying, \'I was like that, I was an absolute parrot, and I didn\'t have any sets of perspective of what I might stand to gain from not being such an anxious twonk.\' That\'s really where we get to: But I did do it, because I was left without choice. Now I feel like I\'m actually alive, and it\'s really great. You can have this, too, if you\'re actually willing to do the work—go and take the implicit test, find out what your biases are, work on them, feel things for other people that aren\'t clones of you—and that\'s really everything. When someone goes, \'Hey, this album should be called *Don\'t Mess With Yola!*,\' I\'m like, you\'ve missed the point of this record. It\'s not a *don\'t mess with*. It\'s not *I\'m a strong Black woman*. It\'s the deserving of softness and a measure of kindness and of support and friendship and love. And that\'s really all encapsulated in \'Stand for Myself.\'”
\"I knew this day was coming,\" Rivers Cuomo tells Apple Music. \"I\'ve always been such a fan of classical music and opera. And yet, I feel like it\'s overdue, like I just kind of got stuck in this pattern of, \'Okay, we\'re a rock band. This is what we do. We don\'t want to get soft too soon.\' But really getting encouragement from \[producer\] Jake \[Sinclair\], and then just a light went off like, \'Oh, this is going to be great.\'\" After delaying the release of their long-promised shred opus *Van Weezer*, Weezer instead dove into *OK Human*, a 12-track change of pace that features a 38-piece orchestra, no click tracks, no computers, and, most surprisingly, no electric guitar. And the tonal shift matched the pandemic neuroses that fueled Cuomo\'s lyric writing. \"I\'m so anxious about looking around my house and seeing, okay, there\'s one child on that device, there\'s the other child on that device, my wife\'s over there on that device,\" Cuomo says. \"Everyone\'s looking in a different direction at a different device, and that\'s the way things are going. Nothing I can do about it, but I just can\'t help but feel a sense of loss and anxiety about it.\" Those worries take center stage on whimsical tracks like \"All My Favorite Songs,\" \"Playing My Piano,\" and \"Screens,\" while the sprawling orchestration adds drama to \"Numbers\" and \"Bird With a Broken Wing\" as Cuomo stares down his inadequacies. \"I was just feeling pretty irrelevant and passed over and past my prime,\" says the 50-year-old singer-songwriter. \"I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.\" It\'s not all dark clouds, however—Weezer fashions a sliver of optimism with the triumphant \"Here Comes the Rain\" and luscious closer \"La Brea Tar Pits.\" \"Hearing it back for the first time with the orchestra, it\'s like, yeah, those are the chords I wrote, and that\'s the melody I wrote,\" Cuomo says. \"But man, it\'s like seeing in three dimensions for the first time or something. It\'s just gorgeous. And I can\'t believe we haven\'t done it before.\"
“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.’”
The retro-futuristic duo (Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin) hails from LA by way of the uncanny Valley, churning out trippy DIY videos made from random VHS footage and mailing weird brochures to fans like a secretive cult. But on debut full-length *Mercurial World*, their polished synth-pop demands to be taken seriously, though their playful spirit abides—emulating the effects of a VOCALOID with their mouths, kicking off the album with a track called “The End.” Tenenbaum and Lewin blend the nostalgic with the contemporary, combining Y2K-era bubblegum, the disco grooves of mid-aughts indie-dance crossovers, and the space-age sheen of hyperpop for a 45-minute sugar rush; don’t miss “Chaeri,” 2021’s best pop song about being a bad friend.
www.mercurialworld.com
All rippers, no skippers, Sarah Tudzin’s second album as Illuminati Hotties imbues hooky Y2K-era pop-punk with an attitude that feels distinctly contemporary. Stretching her sweet-and-sour voice like taffy, Tudzin sings from the perspective of a millennial slacker who isn’t quite buying what society’s selling, be it marketing scams (“Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism”) or too-cool-for-school socialites (“Joni: LA’s No. 1 Health Goth”). She’s referred to her scrappy, bruised songs as “tenderpunk,” and beneath all the pool-hopping and kick-flipping, there’s a woman trying to pull off this adulting thing in what feels like end times. But in the meantime, why not try and have some fun?
“I’ve had a lot of controversies in my short period being an artist,” slowthai tells Apple Music. “But I always try making a statement.” In 2019, there was the Northampton rapper’s establishment-rattling appearance at the Mercury Prize ceremony, hoisting of an effigy of Boris Johnson’s severed head. A few months later, sexualized comments he made to comedian Katherine Ryan at the 2020 NME Awards caused a fierce Twitter backlash and prompted the Record Store Day 2020 campaign to withdraw an invitation for slowthai to be its UK ambassador. Ryan labeled their exchange “pantomime” but it led to a confrontation with an audience member and slowthai’s apology for his “shameful actions.” Since releasing his 2019 debut *Nothing Great About Britain*, then, the artist born Tyron Frampton has known the unforgiving heat of public judgment. It’s helped forge *TYRON*, a follow-up demarcated into two seven-track sides. The first is brash, incendiary, and energized, continuing to draw a through line between punk and UK rap. The second is vulnerable and introspective, its beats more contemplative and searching. The overarching message is that there are two sides to every story, and even more to every human being. “We all have the side that we don’t show, and the side we show,” he says. “Living up to expectations—and then not giving a fuck and just being honest with yourself.” Featuring guests including Skepta, A$AP Rocky, James Blake, and Denzel Curry, these songs, he hopes, will offer help to others feeling penned in by judgment, stereotypes, or a lack of self-confidence. “I just want them to realize they’re not alone and can be themselves,” he says. “I know that when shit gets dark, you need a little bit of light.” Explore all of slowthai’s sides with his track-by-track guide. **45 SMOKE** “‘Rise and shine, let’s get it/Bumbaclart dickhead/Bumbaclart dickhead.’ It’s like the wake-up call for myself. It’s how you feel when you’re making constant mistakes, or you’re in a rut and you wake up like, ‘I really don’t want to wake up, I’d rather just sleep all day.’ It’s explaining where I’m from, and the same routine of doing this bullshit life that I don’t want to do—but I’m doing it just for the sake of doing it or because this is what’s expected of me.” **CANCELLED** “This song’s a fuck-you to the cancel culture, to people trying to tear you down and make it like you’re a bad person—because all I’ve done my whole life is try and escape that stereotype, and try and better myself. You can call me what you want, you can say what you think happened, but most of all I know myself. Through doing this, I’ve figured it out on a deeper level. When we made this, I was in a dark place because of everything going on. And Skep \[Skepta, co-MC on this track\] was guiding me out. He was saying, ‘Yo, man, this isn’t your defining moment. If anything, it pushes you to prove your point even more.’” **MAZZA** “Mazza is ‘mazzalean,’ which is my own word... It\'s just a mad thing. It’s for the people that have mad ADHD \[slowthai lives with the disorder\], ADD, and can’t focus on something—like how everything comes and it’s so quick, and it’s a rush. It’s where my head was at—be it that I was drinking a lot, or traveling a lot, and seeing a lot of things and doing a lot of dumb shit. Mad time. As soon as I made it, I FaceTimed \[A$AP\] Rocky because I was that gassed. We’d been working here and there, doing little bits. He was like, ‘This is hard. Come link up.’ He was in London and I went down there and \[we\] just patterned it out.” **VEX** “It’s just about being angry at social media, at the fakeness, how everyone’s trying to be someone they’re not and showing the good parts of their lives. You just end up feeling shit, because even if your life’s the best it could be, it just puts in your head that, ‘Ah, it could always be better.’ Most of these people aren’t even happy—that’s why they\'re looking for validation on the internet.” **WOT** “I met Pop Smoke, and that night I recorded this song. It was the night he passed. The next morning, I woke up at 6 am to go to the Disclosure video shoot \[for ‘My High’\] and saw the news. I was just mad overwhelmed. Initially, I’d linked up with Rocky, making another tune, but he didn’t finish his bit. \[slowthai’s part\] felt like it summed it up the energies—it was like \[Pop Smoke’s\] energy, just good vibes. I felt like I wouldn\'t make it any longer because it’s straight to the point. As soon as it starts, you know that it’s on.” **DEAD** “We say ‘That’s dead’ as in it’s not good, it’s shit. So I was like, ‘Yo, every one of these things is dead to me.’ There’s a line, ‘People change for money/What’s money with no time?’ That’s aimed at people saying I changed because I gained success. It’s not that I’ve changed, but I’ve grown or grown out of certain things. It’s not the money that changed me, it’s understanding that doing certain things is not making me any better. If I’m spending all my time working on bettering myself and trying to better my craft, the money’s irrelevant. I don’t even have the time to spend it. So it’s just like saying everything’s dead. I’m focusing on living forever through my music and my art.” **PLAY WITH FIRE** “Even though we want to move far away from situations and circumstances, we keep toying with the idea \[of them\]. It plays on your mind that you want to be in that position. ‘PLAY WITH FIRE’ is the letting go as well as trying to hold on to these things. When it goes into \[next track\] ‘i tried,’ it’s like, ‘I tried to do all these things, live up to these expectations and be this person, but it wasn’t working for me.’ And on the other foot, I *tried* all these things. I can’t die saying I didn’t. You have to love everything for how it is to understand it, and try and move on. You’ve got to understand something for the negative before you can really understand the positive.” **i tried** “‘Long road/Tumble down this black hole/Stuck in Sunday league/But I’m on levels with Ronaldo.’ It’s saying it’s been a struggle to get here. And even still, I feel like I’m traveling into a void. You feel like you’re sinking into yourself—be it through taking too many drugs or drinking too much and burying yourself in a hole, just being on autopilot. It’s coming to that understanding, and dealing with those problems. It’s \[about\] boosting my confidence and my true self: ‘Yo, man, you’re the best. If this was football, you’d be the Ballon d’Or winner.’ We always look at what we think we should be like. We never actually look at who we are, and what our qualities are. ‘I’ve got a sickness/And I’m dealing with it.’ I’m trying. I\'m trying every avenue, and with a bit of hope and a bit of luck, I can become who I want to be.” **focus** “From the beginning, even though I’m in this pocket of people and this way of life, I’ve always known to go against that grain. I didn’t ever want to end up in jail. You either get a trade or you end doing shit and potentially you end in jail. A lot of people around me, they’re still in that cycle. And this is me saying, ‘Focus on some other shit.’ I come from the shit, and I pushed and I got there. And it was through maintaining that focus.” **terms** “It’s the terms and conditions that come with popularity and...fame. I don’t like that word. I hate words like ‘fad’ and ‘fame.’ They make me cringe so much. Maybe I’ve got something against words that begin with F. But it’s just dealing with what comes with it and how it’s not what you expected it to be. The headache of being judged for being a human being. Once you get any recognition for your art, you’re no longer a human—you’re a product. Dominic \[Fike, guest vocalist\] sums it up beautifully in the hook.” **push** “‘Push’ is an acronym for ‘praying until something happens.’ When you’re in a corner, you’ve got to keep pushing. Even when you’re at your lowest. That’s all life is, right? It’s a push. Being pulled is the easy route, but when you’re pushing for something, the hard work conditions your mind, strengthens you physically and spiritually, and you come out on top. I used to be religious—when my brother passed, when I was young. I asked for a Bible for my birthday, which was some weird shit. Through this project…it’s not faith in God, but my faith in people, it’s been kind of restored, my faith in myself. Everyone I work with on this, they’re my friends, and they’re all people that have helped me through something. And Deb \[Never, guest vocalist\]—we call each other twins. She’s my sister that I’ve known my whole life but I haven’t known my whole life.” **nhs** “It’s all about appreciation. The NHS—something that’s been doing work for generations, to save people—it’s been so taken for granted. It’s a place where everyone’s equal and everyone’s treated the same. It takes this \[pandemic\] for us to applaud people who have been giving their lives to help others. They should have constant applause at the end of every shift. We’re out here complaining and always wanting more. I don’t know if it’s a human defect or just consumerism, but you get one thing and then you always want the next best thing. I do it a lot. And there’s never a best one, because there’s always another one. Just be happy with what you’ve got. You\'ll end up having an aneurysm.” **feel away** “Dom \[Maker, co-producer and one half of Mount Kimbie\] works with James \[Blake\] a lot. They record a bunch of stuff, chop it up and create loops. I was going through all these loops, and I was like, ‘This one’s the one.’ As soon as we played it, I had lyrics and recorded my bit. I’ve loved James from when I was a kid at school and was like, ‘We should get James.’ We sent it to him, and in my head, I was like, ‘Ah, he’s not going to record on it.’ But the next day, we had the tune. I was just so gassed. I dedicated it to my brother passing. But it’s about putting yourself in your partner’s shoes, because through experiences, be it from my mum or friends, I’ve learnt that in a lot of relationships, when a woman’s pregnant, the man tends to leave the woman. The woman usually is all alone to deal with all these problems. I wanted it to be the other way around—the woman leaves the man. He’s got to go through all that pain to get to the better side, the beauty of it.” **adhd** “When I was really young, my mum and people around me didn’t really believe in \[ADHD\]—like, ‘It’s a hyperactive kid, they just want attention.’ They didn’t ever see it as a disorder. And I think this is my way of summarizing the whole album: This is something that I’ve dealt with, and people around me have dealt with. It’s hard for people to understand because they don’t get why it’s the impulses, or how it might just be a reaction to something that you can’t control. You try to, but it’s embedded in you. It’s just my conclusion—like at the end of the book, when you get to the bit where everything starts making sense. I feel like this is the most connected I’ve been to a song. It’s the clearest depiction of what my voice naturally sounds like, without me pushing it out, or projecting it in any way, or being aggressive. It’s just softly spoken, and then it gets to that anger at the end. And then a kiss—just to sweeten it all up.”
If the first *King’s Disease* project was Nas reveling in the legacy he’d sown over three-plus decades in the game, its sequel—arriving just short of a year later—is the legendary MC settling that much further into what he thinks great rap should sound like in 2021. In this case, that’s another full-length project co-executive-produced by celebrated Fontana, California-hailing beatsmith Hit-Boy, this time featuring a handful of eyebrow-raising moments like the pairing of hip-hop legends EPMD and Eminem (“EPMD 2”), a revisitation of the static—and eventual reconciliation—he shared with 2Pac (“Death Row East”), and a brand-new rap verse from the illustrious Ms. Lauryn Hill (“Nobody”). Not unlike its predecessor, *King’s Disease II* features a small handful of guests, something Nas saw fit to acknowledge in rhyme on “Moments”: “My whole career I steered away from features/But I figured it’s perfect timing to embrace the leaders.” While that first statement is a bit of revisionist history, we won’t pretend that sharing airspace with the don hasn’t always been—and isn’t still—something of an honor, one he’s chosen to bestow here upon A Boogie wit da Hoodie, YG, and Hit-Boy. He contextualizes this particularly well toward that same song’s end, reminding us of his impact when he cites “moments you can’t relive/Like your first time bugging from something that Nas said.”
On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.
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.
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.
When The Killers couldn’t tour their 2020 album *Imploding the Mirage* because of the pandemic, lead singer Brandon Flowers didn’t sit around waiting for a chance to get back on the road. Instead, he came up with an idea during quarantine that would eventually become the band’s seventh studio album, where he also reunited with founding member Dave Keuning on guitar. For Flowers, the introspection that came from lockdown kept leading him to the town of Nephi, Utah, where he grew up. “There was some trepidation at first,” he tells Apple Music. “Because it’s such a small town, and you wonder how that’s going to resonate with people all over the world. And it’s such a specific place in the Southwest. But then I couldn’t escape it. Every time I went to the keyboard, these ideas kept coming out, all based on characters that I grew up observing, or experiences that I had in town, or memories. So I went with it.” *Pressure Machine* is unlike anything in The Killers’ repertoire. From the use of instruments like harmonica and fiddle to the deeply personal storytelling and interviews with people who still live in the town, the album is a love letter to the places you grew up and the people you left behind—anchored in melancholy and dotted with hope. “Tragedy and religious disenchantment were the launchpads,” Flowers explains. “When you’re a kid, you’re getting new experiences all the time, so when something shocking or tragic happens, it really resonates. Those experiences are the things I was gravitating towards.” Flowers explains more about those experiences and how they influenced each track on *Pressure Machine* below. **“West Hills”** “There\'s a whole subculture in Utah, in my experience, because we associate Utah with Mormonism. Having grown up there, a lot of people \[outside of Utah\] aren\'t aware of people that don\'t adhere to religion. There’s this whole thing of dirt bikes and four-wheelers and beer and finding different ways to find your salvation, other than in a church pew on Sunday. I took some liberties on the song, but it\'s based on a real story.” **“Quiet Town”** “I was in eighth grade when two seniors got hit by a train. Their names were Raymond and Tiffany. I was surprised to find 25 years later how much I was still affected by it. I felt like it was the end of an innocence for me and for the town, because afterwards I noticed things started to happen. It was almost like opening this door of darkness. A lot of times we talk about stagnation with snarky terms, and I think it’s one of the things that\'s associated with towns like Nephi, but it can also be a beautiful thing, because it\'s these people that are holding on to ideals and traditions. I hope that it never changes in that respect.” **“Terrible Thing”** “Years after high school, you hear about a kid you went to school with that was gay and nobody knew. It\'s just such a cowboy, football, hunting country town. I tried to work through this person\'s experience in town and how hard it must be to be in a culture like that. To not even feel safe to tell anyone who you are. Because when you were a kid or you\'re in high school, you don\'t have that courage, and I don\'t blame them.” **“Cody”** “‘Cody’ is a culmination of a bunch of my friends\' big brothers. I had two friends that had older brothers that seemed particularly dangerous. And so, again, those memories stand out, that you might\'ve been afraid of them, or you hear stories about what they\'re doing, or getting arrested, or whatever it is. And so I was able to sort of melt them into this one character.” **“Sleepwalker”** “The first line that I knew was good in that song was ‘It doesn\'t come from without/It comes from within.’ So I built all the rest of the lyrics around that. I had just recently moved back to Utah and was experiencing seasons again. Because in Vegas, it gets hot and then it gets cold, that’s it. You don\'t get to go through the beauty and the sometimes stark changes of the weather. I was caught up in that, the anticipation for spring and new life. I was able to use that sort of analogy for a person becoming a new creature and coming back to life.” **“Runaway Horses” (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)** “Life\'s going to be hard for whatever choice or whatever road you take. There\'s going to be obstacles and hurdles. In this case, it\'s about two people that think that they\'re going to finish the race together, and then they end up sort of going in different paths. It’s also about coming home. No matter where you go, how far you drift, you’re always trying to get home.” **“In the Car Outside”** “This song started really quickly, and it was one of those moments that you\'re always waiting for. One of the reasons why you get in the garage in the first place is just this communal experience that you can share with people. And it was born really fast, and it was really exciting to be a part of it.” **“In Another Life”** “I think everyone goes through things like wondering what life would\'ve been like if we\'d done things differently. Or if not, at least you wonder if your significant other is going through that. And I think this guy\'s just questioning the choices that he\'s made and wondering if he\'s measuring up to what his wife had hoped that he would be. It’s definitely a sad song, seeped in melancholy.” **“Desperate Things”** “This was a little scandal that took place \[in Nephi\] that I took some liberties with in the third verse, where I take it off the rails. I like telling stories, and there\'s people like Nick Cave and Johnny Cash and people that are great storytellers who are really influential to me. You don\'t get a lot of third verses in pop songs, and it\'s not something you associate with a typical Killers song, but I needed that third verse to tell the story. This is probably as dark as I\'ve ever gotten.” **“Pressure Machine”** “I think there\'s a sadness to how quickly we grow up, and being a parent and watching that. Everybody tells you when you have a kid, ‘Make the most of it. They\'re going to grow up before you know it.’ And it sort of gets redundant, and then it really is true and it\'s kind of a heartbreaker.” **“The Getting By”** “Even though there is struggle, and even though there is strife and toiling, there\'s still hope. That\'s what makes these people who they are. They get up and go to work every day. I have a lot of respect for them, and I don\'t feel that far removed from them. And I thought about people like my uncles and my dad and my nephews and my cousins. And really wanted to capture what I saw in their lives.”
Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak were already hard at work on what would become *An Evening With Silk Sonic* when the pandemic shut down live music in early 2020, but they weren’t going to let that stop them from delivering a concert experience to their fans. “All of a sudden, my shows get canceled, Andy\'s shows get canceled,” Mars told Ebro Darden during their R&B Now interview. “This fear of ‘we’ll never be able to play live again’ comes into play. And to take that away from guys like us, that\'s all we know. So we\'re thinking, all right, let\'s put an album together that sounds like a show.” It began with the project’s lead single, “Leave the Door Open,” a syrupy-sweet piece of retro soul that Mars considers something of a backbone for the project. After its completion, he and .Paak began building out the nine songs of *An Evening With Silk Sonic*, soliciting help, in the few instances where they needed it, from friends like Bootsy Collins, Thundercat, and even Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Their access to HOF-worthy firepower notwithstanding, the pair always understood that their own combined musicality was the real draw. “We just wanted it to feel special,” Mars says. “Instead of trying to get too cute with the concept, it\'s like, what\'s more special than Anderson .Paak behind a drum set singing a song and me having his back when it\'s my turn, you know? And the band moving in the same direction? It was just like a musician\'s dream.” Below, the pair talk through some of the tracks that make *An Evening With Silk Sonic* an experience fans won’t soon forget. **“Leave the Door Open”** Bruno Mars: “Me and Andy come from the school of performing and playing live instruments. We wrote ‘Leave the Door Open’ and it was just one of those songs like, dang, I can’t believe we a part of this, and we don\'t know what it\'s gonna do, we don\'t care that it\'s a ballad or a whatever you wanna call it—to us, this just feels right and it\'s important. So no matter what, if it hit No. 1 or it didn\'t, me and Andy both know that that was the best we could do. And we were cool with that.” **“Fly as Me”** Anderson .Paak: “‘Fly as Me’ is a joint hook \[Mars\] had for a minute. He was trying to figure out some verses for it, trying to figure out the groove, and we spent some time on that.” Mars: “Andy goes behind the drum set one day and says, ‘The groove gotta be like this,’ and starts playing his groove. D’Mile is on the bass, I\'m on the guitar. After all the grooves we tried, I don\'t know what it is, there\'s something about someone in the studio, someone that you trust, saying, \'It\'s gotta be like this.’ And the groove you hear him playing, which is not an easy groove to play, was what he showed me and D. And we just followed suit.” **“After Last Night” (with Thundercat & Bootsy Collins)** Mars: “That one got a lot of Bootsy on it. And my boy Thundercat came in and blessed us. It’s just one of them songs—everything was built to be played live, so that song is one of those we can keep going for 10 minutes.” **“Smokin Out the Window”** Mars: “‘Smokin Out the Window’ was an idea we started four or five years ago on tour. It didn\'t sound nothing like how it does now, but we just had the idea. On \[.Paak’s\] birthday, I called him over. He was hysterical that night. After every take he was like, \'I\'m the king of R&B! I’m the best! Tell me I’m not the hottest in the game!\' We were going back and forth with the lines and who can make who laugh, and we end up finishing that song and he was like, \'I’m out, what we doing tomorrow?\'” **“Put On a Smile”** Mars: “I had a song that I played for Andy and I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ and he said, ‘It sucks.’ I start singing it again and he gets behind the drums and that\'s when the magic happens. So we come up with this hook and these chords and that\'s when we start cooking, when everything starts moving in the studio. The song\'s starting to sound real good now. I don’t wanna mess it up, so I call Babyface. I only call Face to know if I got something good, you know, ’cause he’ll tell me too, \'This is wack.\' For all of us to finish that record together, that was one of my favorite experiences on this album.” **“Skate”** Mars: “It\'s hard to be mad on some rollerskates. So really, that\'s kinda the essence of this album: If me and Andy were to host a party, what would that feel like? Summertime. Outside. Set up the congas and the drums and amplifiers, and what would that sound like? And this is what our best effort was: \'Skate.\'”
Across a decade and a half of aliases and side-projects, Dean Blunt’s been known as an enigma. With a penchant for trolling and a disdain for genre boundaries, the Londoner is hard to pin down—from the masked post-punk of his Hype Williams duo to the weirdo noise-rap of Babyfather. But the sequel to 2014’s *BLACK METAL*, released under his own name, is mostly just…pretty. A pared-down collection of downcast avant-pop, *BLACK METAL 2* blurs acoustic strums, MIDI strings, and Blunt’s deadpan half-raps, telling fascinatingly unresolved stories—a gun on the beach, a mother without a son. These are lush, delicate songs that still feel profoundly unhappy: “Daddy’s broke/What a joke/Future’s bleak,” he sing-songs on folk downer “NIL BY MOUTH.” Even at its most accessible, Blunt’s work remains a bit of a mystery.
One of the first albums the teenage producer bought on iTunes (or, rather, that their mom bought for them) was Childish Gambino’s *Because the Internet*; that title is also a pretty spot-on description of digicore, the genre pioneered by Gen Z bedroom artists that sounds like the internet feels. Still, there’s a realness to *Frailty*, the second album from dltzk, that transcends the digital. With its fuzzy guitar chords and yearning high school poetry (like “Time passed with a slap to the back of my head,” from the hyper-catchy unrequited-love ballad “Your Clothes”), this is emo music rigged with the pyrotechnics of EDM and the absurdity of meme culture, minus the irony. There’s a sweetness to the youthful chaos, something to relate to even if you didn’t spend your adolescence scrolling.