The Ringer's Best Albums of 2021

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.

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.

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

“So when my brother died, probably like three days after, I hopped right back in the studio,” Maxo Kream tells Apple Music. “Not on no super rushing shit, but just tryna catch my vibe. Because he always told me, ‘Never stop this music shit.’ He always told me to keep going, so I was like, I gotta turn it up for bro.” This, in a nutshell, is the driving force behind Maxo Kream’s *WEIGHT OF THE WORLD* project. It comes to fans two years after 2019’s acclaimed *Brandon Banks* and after some serious soul-searching spurred by the murder of Maxo’s brother, an MC in his own right called Money Madu—and then the COVID-19 pandemic. Maxo will say that the pandemic did little to affect his day-to-day, but the time he had to reflect—coupled with the passing of one of the most important people in his life—wrenched from him his most honest and autobiographical work to date. The MC unfurls details about the life experiences that built him on songs like “11:59,” “FRFR,” and a particularly heavy late-album stretch that features “GREENER KNOTS,” “MAMA’S PURSE,” and “TRIPS.” He can be so open on record that you might assume it difficult for him to give more insight into his thought process, but he’s taken time below to talk us through some of the standout tracks on *WEIGHT OF THE WORLD*. **“CRIPSTIAN”** “‘CRIPSTIAN’ was a song I already had, but it felt like it was a good intro song. Very serious, very mature, very on topic. I felt like I needed to start my project with that because even though I got a big persona and shit and I be having fun, I still gotta cater to my core fanbase.” **“11:59”** “I just be wanting people to know that shit that they think they doing, I really did that shit. But ain’t nothing wrong with growing your standards, getting your mind right, getting your frame right. It’s life lessons.” **“BIG PERSONA”** “Persona is what we push. That’s like the clique, that’s like the gang. RIP my brother—after he passed away, we really started to embrace the persona shit. The song is actually—I don\'t want to say the only, but one of the few positive songs I did in a long time at that time. No killing, no robbing, no drug dealing, no trauma, just balling and being positive.” **“DON’T PLAY WITH SHAWTY ASS”** “When I heard that beat, I was like, this shit stupid, super crazy. I liked it ’cause ain’t nothing else like that on the tape. I’ll try new types of beats: soulful beats, real guitars, real piano—not just like acoustic, trap beats. Really experiment. And like, my whole process I brought in Dom, Teej, Reginald Helms, Monte Booker, Guru, Bankroll Gotti, I was having a workshop. Like producers working, all that shit. I had like a real camp, like a real workshop for the tape.” **“LOCAL JOKER”** “I felt like COVID humbled a n\*\*\*a so many ways. I ain\'t talking about financing—it stopped shows, it ain’t really nothing financially—but like accessibility, being around people. It really made me get more down to earth. At the same time I might be contradicting myself ’cause I am local. Like you can come to Houston and catch me at a sneaker store, a restaurant. I really just be outside.” **“WORTHLESS”** “So the zone I was in for this was the same zone I was in for every song because I took Adderall on every fucking song. Like I think I made this shit during a comedown. \[The title is\] probably like a little exaggeration, because I\'m not strung out on Adderall. I don\'t even take Adderall if I\'m not rapping. Like, how many people do you know that take Adderall to pass college tests or to finish papers? I just be using it to make music. Same thing.” **“GREENER KNOTS”** “I\'m just being real, I don\'t know what to tell you. I\'m different. I ain\'t like anybody else. If it’s anything I’m rapping about, that shit comes from the heart. Especially with this tape. I put blood, sweat, and tears in this. I ain’t gon\' say tears, but shit, it was some tears, though.” **“TRIPS”** “I was going through it when my brother passed away. I felt like I needed to get something off my chest. I felt like I wasn’t gonna be able to rap about it again. I don’t even listen to the song, for real. The only song I don\'t go back and jam is \'TRIPS.\'”

“Things should change and evolve, and music is an extension of that, of the continuity of life,” Hiatus Kaiyote leader Nai Palm tells Apple Music. The Melbourne jazz/R&B/future-soul ensemble began writing their third album, *Mood Valiant*, in 2018, three years after the Grammy-nominated *Choose Your Weapon*, which featured tracks that were later sampled by artists including Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Anderson .Paak. The process was halted when Nai Palm (Naomi Saalfield) was diagnosed with breast cancer—the same illness which had led to her mother’s death when she was 11. It changed everything about Nai Palm’s approach to life, herself, and her music—and the band began writing again from a different perspective. “All the little voices of self-doubt or validation just went away,” she says. “I didn\'t really care about the mundane things anymore, so it felt really liberating to be in a vocal booth and find joy in capturing who I am, as opposed to psychoanalyzing it. When you have nothing is when you really experience gratitude for what you have.” The album had largely been written before the pandemic hit, but when it did, they used the extra time to write even more and create something even more intricate. There are songs about unusual mating rituals in the animal kingdom, the healing power of music, the beauty and comfort of home, and the relationships we have with ourselves, those around us, and the world at large. “The whole album is about relationships without me really meaning to do that,” she says. Below, Nai Palm breaks down select lyrics from *Mood Valiant*. **“Chivalry Is Not Dead”** *“Electrons in the air on fire/Lightning kissing metal/Whisper to the tiny hairs/Battery on my tongue/Meteor that greets Sahara/We could get lost in static power”* “The first couple of verses are relating to bizarre mating rituals in the animal kingdom. It’s about reproduction and creating life, but I wanted to expand on that. Where else is this happening in nature that isn’t necessarily two animals? The way that lightning is attracted to metal, a conductor for electricity. When meteors hit the sand, it\'s so hot that it melts the sand and it creates this crazy kryptonite-looking glass. So it\'s about the relationship of life forces engaging with each other and creating something new, whether that\'s babies or space glass.” **“Get Sun”** *“Ghost, hidden eggshell, no rebel yell/Comfort in vacant waters/And I awake, purging of fear/A task that you wear/Dormant valiance, it falls”* “‘Get Sun’ is my tribute to music and what I feel it\'s supposed to do. Even when you’re closed off from the world, music can still find its way to you. ‘Ghost, hidden eggshell’ is a reference to *Ghost in the Shell*, an anime about a human soul captured in a cyborg\'s body. I feel that within the entertainment industry, but the opposite—there are people who are empty. There’s no rebellion. They’re comfortable in this vacant pool of superficial expression. I feel like there\'s a massive responsibility as a musician and as an artist to be sincere and transparent and expressive. And it takes a lot of courage but it also takes a lot of vulnerability. And ‘Dormant valiance, it falls’—from the outside, something might look quite valiant and put together, but if it\'s dormant and has no substance, it will fall, or be impermanent. And that\'s not how you make timeless art. Maybe it\'ll entertain people for three seconds but it will be gone.” **“Hush Rattle”** *“Iwêi, Rona”* “When I was in Brazil, I spent 10 days with the Varinawa tribe in the Amazon and it changed my life. On my last day there, all the women got together and sang for me in their language, Varinawa, and let me record it. There were about 20 women; they\'ll sing a phrase and when they get to the last note, they hold it for as long as they can and they all drop off at different points. It was just so magical. So we\'ve got little samples of that throughout the song, but the lyrics that I\'m singing were taught to me: ‘Iwêi,’ which means ‘I love you,’ and ‘Rona,’ which means ‘I will always miss you.’ It’s a love letter to the people that I met there.” **“Rose Water”** *“My hayati, leopard pearl in the arms of my lover/I draw your outline with the scent of amber”* “There’s an Arabic word here: *hayati*. The word *habibi* is like ‘You’re my love,’ but to say ‘my hayati’ means you\'re *more* than my love—you\'re my life. One of my dear friends is Lebanese. He’s 60, but maybe he\'s 400, we don\'t know. He’s the closest thing to a father that I\'ve had since being an orphan. He makes me this beautiful amber perfume; it’s like a resin, made with beeswax. There’s musk and oils he imports from Dubai and Syria. So it’s essentially a lullaby love song that uses these opulent, elegant elements from Middle Eastern culture that I\'ve been exposed to through the people that I love.” **“Red Room”** *“I got a red room, it is the red hour/When the sun sets in my bedroom/It feels like I\'m inside a flower/It feels like I\'m inside my eyelids/And I don\'t want to be anywhere but here”* “I used to live in an old house; the windows were colored red, like leadlight windows. And whenever the sun set, the whole room would glow for an hour. It\'s such a simple thing, but it was so magic to me. This one, for me, is about when you close your eyes and you look at the sun and it\'s red. You feel like you\'re looking at something, but really it\'s just your skin. It’s one of those childlike quirks everyone can relate to.” **“Sparkle Tape Break Up”** *“No, I can’t keep on breaking apart/Grow like waratah”* “It’s a mantra. I’m not going to let little things get to me. I\'m not going to start self-loathing. I\'m going to grow like this resilient, beautiful fucking flower. I\'ve made it a life goal to try to at least be peaceful with most people, for selfish reasons—so that I don\'t have to carry that weight. Songs like this have really helped me to formulate healthy coping mechanisms.” **“Stone or Lavender”** *“Belong to love/Please don’t bury us unless we’re seeds/Learn to forgive/You know very well it’s not easy/Who are they when they meet?/Stone or lavender/Before the word is ever uttered/Was your leap deeper?”* “‘Please don\'t bury us unless we\'re seeds’ is a reference to a quote: ‘They tried to bury us, they didn\'t know we were seeds.’ That visual is so fucking powerful. It’s saying, ‘Please don\'t try to crush the human spirit, because all life has the potential to grow, belong to love.’ This song is the closest to my breast cancer diagnosis stuff; it’s saying, ‘All right, who are you? What do you want from life? Who do you want to be?’ Do you emit a beautiful scent and you\'re soft and you\'re healing or are you stone? Before anyone\'s even exchanged anything, before a word is ever uttered, your energy introduces you.” **“Blood and Marrow”** *“Not a speck of dust on chrysanthemum/Feather on the breath of the mother tongue”* “I think is one of the most poetic things I\'ve ever written; it\'s maybe the thing I\'m most proud of lyric-wise. The first lyric is a reference to a Japanese poet called Bashō. I wanted to use this reference because when my bird Charlie died—I had him for 10 years, he was a rescue and he was my best friend—we were watching *Bambi* on my laptop. He was sitting on my computer, and we got halfway through and he died. The song is my ode to Charlie and to beauty in the world.”

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

There’s a liquid, surreal feeling that runs through *Pray for Haiti*, a sense of touching solid ground only to leave it just as fast. Between the bars of Newark rapper Mach-Hommy\'s dusty, fragmented beats (many courtesy of the production regulars of Griselda Records), he glimpses thousand-dollar brunches (“Au Revoir”), bloodshed (“Folie Á Deux”), and the ghosts of his ancestors (“Kriminel”) with spectral detachment—not uncaring so much as stoic, the oracle at the outskirts who moves silently through a crowd. He likes it grimy (“Magnum Band,” “Makrel Jaxon”) and isn’t above materialism or punchlines (“Watch out, I ain’t pulling no punches/So real I make Meghan Markle hop out and get the Dutches”), but is, above all, a spiritualist, driven by history (like a lot of his albums, this one is peppered with Haitian Creole), feel, and a quiet ability to turn street rap into meditation. “It’s crazy what y’all can do with some old Polo and Ebonics,” he raps on “The 26th Letter”—a joke because he knows it’s not that simple, and a flex because, for him, it is.

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