The Wild Honey Pie's Top 30 Albums of 2019

JAIME I wrote this record as a process of healing. Every song, I confront something within me or beyond me. Things that are hard or impossible to change, words and music to describe what I’m not good at conveying to those I love, or a name that hurts to be said: Jaime. I dedicated the title of this record to my sister who passed away as a teenager. She was a musician too. I did this so her name would no longer bring me memories of sadness and as a way to thank her for passing on to me everything she loved: music, art, creativity. But, the record is not about her. It’s about me. It’s not as veiled as work I have done before. I’m pretty candid about myself and who I am and what I believe. Which, is why I needed to do it on my own. I wrote and arranged a lot of these songs on my laptop using Logic. Shawn Everett helped me make them worthy of listening to and players like Nate Smith, Robert Glasper, Zac Cockrell, Lloyd Buchanan, Lavinia Meijer, Paul Horton, Rob Moose and Larry Goldings provided the musicianship that was needed to share them with you. Some songs on this record are years old that were just sitting on my laptop, forgotten, waiting to come to life. Some of them I wrote in a tiny green house in Topanga, CA during a heatwave. I was inspired by traveling across the United States. I saw many beautiful things and many heartbreaking things: poverty, loneliness, discouraged people, empty and poor towns. And of course the great swathes of natural, untouched lands. Huge pink mountains, seemingly endless lakes, soaring redwoods and yellow plains that stretch for thousands of acres. There were these long moments of silence in the car when I could sit and reflect. I wondered what it was I wanted for myself next. I suppose all I want is to help others feel a bit better about being. All I can offer are my own stories in hopes of not only being seen and understood, but also to learn to love my own self as if it were an act of resistance. Resisting that annoying voice that exists in all of our heads that says we aren’t good enough, talented enough, beautiful enough, thin enough, rich enough or successful enough. The voice that amplifies when we turn on our TVs or scroll on our phones. It’s empowering to me to see someone be unapologetically themselves when they don’t fit within those images. That’s what I want for myself next and that’s why I share with you, “Jaime”. Brittany Howard

British music is fortunate to have Charlotte Aitchison. A restless collaborator and denier of pop borders with an unteachable ear for a hook, she’s one of the UK’s proudest exports. Her third studio LP serves as a blueprint for how a modern pop album should sound. Audacious but introspective, it’s straining with potential hits and subtler moments fans will hold close. And then there’s the cast list. If she tires of this pop star business, a sterling career in A&R probably awaits. She talked through some of the album’s standout moments on her Beats 1 show The Candy Shop. **“Next Level Charli”** “I wrote this track for the Angels—my fans. This is the Angel anthem. Everything in this song is about things that I imagine my fans doing: driving to a party, getting ready for a party, playing their music in their Prius, whatever it is. This song is for you guys. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for supporting me.” **“Gone” (with Christine and the Queens)** “This is the bop. The song of the summer, if I don’t say so myself. Me, Christine, dancing on a car, rain: What more do you want? We literally gave you everything.” **“Cross You Out” (feat. Sky Ferreira)** “I’m so happy that we got to make this song together. This was one of the first songs that kind of came to reality for this album. I sent this over to Sky, she felt it and came into this studio in LA with \[co-writer\] Linus Wiklund. She sounds so amazing and I’m so happy because Sky and I have known each other for quite a few years now. We kind of came up together in many ways, and we’ve shared a lot of the same producers. We’ve been on the same magazine covers together, and you know, I feel like we were on Myspace at the same time! I think her voice is really important and what she does is brilliant.” **“2099” (feat. Troye Sivan)** “My favorite dreamboat, my dream boy: Troye Sivan. I’m just in love with him. I just think he’s so brilliant. After we made \[the 2018 single\] ‘1999’, I kind of knew he wanted to get a little bit weirder than we got, as I’d heard him mention that he was into \[Charli’s 2017 mixtape\] *Pop 2*. So after ‘1999’ came out, I hit him up again and said, ‘Should we just go there? Should we just go out of space? Like, let’s do a weird moment.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” **“Click” (feat. Kim Petras & Tommy Cash)** “I’m not going to lie—and no shade to any of the other artists on the album— but I kind of think Kim’s verse might be my favorite on the whole album. I remember when I originally sent Kim this song, I did a verse and it was so bad. She sent me her demo back and her verse *killed*, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot put this song out with the verse I currently have.’ So I had to rerecord my thing, as Tommy had also sent me his and killed it, too. I was the weakest! It was bad! I love this song. It goes so hard. And Kim is still shining so bright on this song.” **“Warm” (feat. HAIM)** “This song is produced by A.G. Cook. He actually wrote a few of the melodies on this song, too. When we were making this song, we were working at \[Australian producer and DJ\] Flume’s studio in LA, and this was at the point where we thought we were still going to do a third mixtape. But then we had this song and a couple of ideas and were like, ‘Let’s just do the album. Now’s the time for the *Charli* album.’ When HAIM came to the studio house that I had rented in LA at the beginning of 2019, I had just had a lot of dental work done, so my whole mouth was super numb. I was dribbling; I couldn’t really speak. They were like, ‘What happened to you!’ It was a funny session, but the three of them came through. I’m so happy with the song.” **“White Mercedes”** “This is one of my favorite songs from the album. I guess it’s my version of a ballad.”

With powerhouse pipes, razor-sharp wit, and a tireless commitment to self-love and self-care, Lizzo is the fearless pop star we needed. Born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit, the singer and classically trained flautist discovered an early gift for music (“It chose me,” she tells Apple Music) and began recording in Minneapolis shortly after high school. But her trademark self-confidence came less naturally. “I had to look deep down inside myself to a really dark place to discover it,” she says. Perhaps that’s why her third album, *Cuz I Love You*, sounds so triumphant, with explosive horns (“Cuz I Love You”), club drums (“Tempo” featuring Missy Elliott), and swaggering diva attitude (“No, I\'m not a snack at all/Look, baby, I’m the whole damn meal,” she howls on the instant hit “Juice\"). But her brand is about more than mic-drop zingers and big-budget features. On songs like “Better in Color”—a stomping, woke plea for people of all stripes to get together—she offers an important message: It’s not enough to love ourselves, we also have to love each other. Read on for Lizzo’s thoughts on each of these blockbuster songs. **“Cuz I Love You”** \"I start every project I do with a big, brassy orchestral moment. And I do mean *moment*. It’s my way of saying, ‘Stand the fuck up, y’all, Lizzo’s here!’ This is just one of those songs that gets you amped from the jump. The moment you hear it, you’re like, ‘Okay, it’s on.’ It’s a great fucking way to start an album.\" **“Like a Girl”** \"We wanted take the old cliché and flip it on its head, shaking out all the negative connotations and replacing them with something empowering. Serena Williams plays like a girl and she’s the greatest athlete on the planet, you know? And what if crying was empowering instead of something that makes you weak? When we got to the bridge, I realized there was an important piece missing: What if you identify as female but aren\'t gender-assigned that at birth? Or what if you\'re male but in touch with your feminine side? What about my gay boys? What about my drag queens? So I decided to say, ‘If you feel like a girl/Then you real like a girl,\' and that\'s my favorite lyric on the whole album.\" **“Juice”** \"If you only listen to one song from *Cuz I Love You*, let it be this. It’s a banger, obviously, but it’s also a state of mind. At the end of the day, I want my music to make people feel good, I want it to help people love themselves. This song is about looking in the mirror, loving what you see, and letting everyone know. It was the second to last song that I wrote for the album, right before ‘Soulmate,\' but to me, this is everything I’m about. I wrote it with Ricky Reed, and he is a genius.” **“Soulmate”** \"I have a relationship with loneliness that is not very healthy, so I’ve been going to therapy to work on it. And I don’t mean loneliness in the \'Oh, I don\'t got a man\' type of loneliness, I mean it more on the depressive side, like an actual manic emotion that I struggle with. One day, I was like, \'I need a song to remind me that I\'m not lonely and to describe the type of person I *want* to be.\' I also wanted a New Orleans bounce song, \'cause you know I grew up listening to DJ Jubilee and twerking in the club. The fact that l got to combine both is wild.” **“Jerome”** \"This was my first song with the X Ambassadors, and \[lead singer\] Sam Harris is something else. It was one of those days where you walk into the studio with no expectations and leave glowing because you did the damn thing. The thing that I love about this song is that it’s modern. It’s about fuccboi love. There aren’t enough songs about that. There are so many songs about fairytale love and unrequited love, but there aren’t a lot of songs about fuccboi love. About when you’re in a situationship. That story needed to be told.” **“Cry Baby”** “This is one of the most musical moments on a very musical album, and it’s got that Minneapolis sound. Plus, it’s almost a power ballad, which I love. The lyrics are a direct anecdote from my life: I was sitting in a car with a guy—in a little red Corvette from the ’80s, and no, it wasn\'t Prince—and I was crying. But it wasn’t because I was sad, it was because I loved him. It was a different field of emotion. The song starts with \'Pull this car over, boy/Don\'t pretend like you don\'t know,’ and that really happened. He pulled the car over and I sat there and cried and told him everything I felt.” **“Tempo”** “‘Tempo\' almost didn\'t make the album, because for so long, I didn’t think it fit. The album has so much guitar and big, brassy instrumentation, but ‘Tempo’ was a club record. I kept it off. When the project was finished and we had a listening session with the label, I played the album straight through. Then, at the end, I asked my team if there were any honorable mentions they thought I should play—and mind you, I had my girls there, we were drinking and dancing—and they said, ‘Tempo! Just play it. Just see how people react.’ So I did. No joke, everybody in the room looked at me like, ‘Are you crazy? If you don\'t put this song on the album, you\'re insane.’ Then we got Missy and the rest is history.” **“Exactly How I Feel”** “Way back when I first started writing the song, I had a line that goes, ‘All my feelings is Gucci.’ I just thought it was funny. Months and months later, I played it at Atlantic \[Records\], and when that part came up, I joked, ‘Thanks for the Gucci feature, guys!\' And this executive says, ‘We can get Gucci if you want.\' And I was like, ‘Well, why the fuck not?\' I love Gucci Mane. In my book, he\'s unproblematic, he does a good job, he adds swag to it. It doesn’t go much deeper than that, to be honest. The rest of the song has plenty of meaning: It’s an ode to being proud of your emotions, not feeling like you have to hide them or fake them, all that. But the Gucci feature was just fun.” **“Better in Color”** “This is the nerdiest song I have ever written, for real. But I love it so much. I wanted to talk about love, attraction, and sex *without* talking about the boxes we put those things in—who we feel like we’re allowed to be in love with, you know? It shouldn’t be about that. It shouldn’t be about gender or sexual orientation or skin color or economic background, because who the fuck cares? Spice it up, man. Love *is* better in color. I don’t want to see love in black and white.\" **“Heaven Help Me”** \"When I made the album, I thought: If Aretha made a rap album, what would that sound like? ‘Heaven Help Me’ is the most Aretha to me. That piano? She would\'ve smashed that. The song is about a person who’s confident and does a good job of self-care—a.k.a. me—but who has a moment of being pissed the fuck off and goes back to their defensive ways. It’s a journey through the full spectrum of my romantic emotions. It starts out like, \'I\'m too cute for you, boo, get the fuck away from me,’ to \'What\'s wrong with me? Why do I drive boys away?’ And then, finally, vulnerability, like, \'I\'m crying and I\'ve been thinking about you.’ I always say, if anyone wants to date me, they just gotta listen to this song to know what they’re getting into.\" **“Lingerie”** “I’ve never really written sexy songs before, so this was new for me. The lyrics literally made me blush. I had to just let go and let God. It’s about one of my fantasies, and it has three different chord changes, so let me tell you, it was not easy to sing. It was very ‘Love On Top’ by Beyoncé of me. Plus, you don’t expect the album to end on this note. It leaves you wanting more.”

“All anyone wants to be is what they can.” In an era when networked access to information is nearly universal and wearing influences on your sleeve is normalized, it often feels like everything’s been done. Which begs the questions: What’s the point of creating? Does the world need another still life of fruit? Another film about love? Does the world need another melody? On Raw Honey, his second album as Drugdealer, Michael Collins colors these existential conundrums with lush arrangements, memetic melodies, and a vulnerable tunefulness that tries to make sense of self-doubt and connected loneliness in our shared simulacra. Collins, who never played an instrument let alone received musical training in any formal capacity, began experimenting with sounds in 2009 after traversing the US on freight trains. After a few years crafting abstract sampledelia, he decided to forgo his experimental exercises in favor of teaching himself how to write a traditional song. In doing so, he made the decision to approach songwriting from the perspective of a listener, rather than a “musician.” In 2013, Collins headed west and enmeshed himself in the Los Angeles underground scene. It was there and then that he began collaborating with players in the orbit of Ariel Pink, over time crafting what would become Drugdealer’s debut album, The End of Comedy, a collection of sunlit songs as indebted to Laurel Canyon psych pop as it is Bacharachian orchestration. Raw Honey continues where The End of Comedy left off, with Collins leading an ace crew of collaborators to coalesce the spirit of Drugdealer’s classically modern pop. Built on the foundation of a creative partnership among Collins, Sasha Winn (vocals) and Shags Chamberlain (bass, production), Drugdealer is more a collective than band. Raw Honey features contributions of Josh Da Costa (drums), Jackson MacIntosh (guitar), Danny Garcia (guitar), Michael Long (lead guitar), and Benjamin Schwab (backing vocals, guitar, organ, piano, wurlitzer), as well as guest vocalists like country balladeer Dougie Poole (“Wild Motion”), Harley Hill-Richmond (“Lonely”), and frequent collaborator Natalie Mering (Weyes Blood) whose dulcet tones sing low before soaring on “Honey,” a track as silky as the nectar itself. Throughout Raw Honey, Collins and crew display their influences as a new tapestry, one woven with the fibers from thousands of tapestries that have colored our collective listening histories. As evidenced throughout Raw Honey, Collins ear for penning numbers that would sound as at home on Classic Rock radio as they would at Zebulon in Los Angeles, where any of the contributors to Raw Honey might likely be found on any night of the week, on stage, or in the audience supporting another Angelino’s modern pop aspirations. Rather than hiding behind a curtain or casually sidestepping AOR tropes, Raw Honey adheres to a modern kind of creation — one that cultivates influences and espouses reverence. An honest totem, Raw Honey isn’t tangled up in social norms, with Collins prefering to air his self-doubt as a northern star to guide like-minded people wherever they need to go.

For a project so shrouded in mystery in the run-up to its release, the origin story behind Better Oblivion Community Center isn\'t particularly enigmatic at all: Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst started writing some songs together in Los Angeles, unclear what their final destination would be until they had enough good ones that a proper album seemed inevitable. Plus, the anonymity and secrecy allowed them to subvert any expectations that might come from news of high-profile singer-songwriter types teaming up. “We just realized that the songs were their own style and they didn\'t sound like either of us,” Bridgers tells Apple Music. “I don\'t think that they would have felt comfortable on one of my records or one of Conor\'s records. And even the band name—Conor came up with it and we didn\'t think about it as a real thing, and then people were like, \'Whoa, clearly it\'s this elaborate concept,\' and we\'re like, \'Really? Cool.\'” Let Bridgers and Oberst guide you through each track of their no-longer-enigmatic debut. **“Didn\'t Know What I Was in For”** Oberst: “When you sit down and write a song with someone, you kind of find out pretty fast—even if you\'re friends with them—if you gel on a creative level.” Bridgers: “I think it\'s really important to be able to have bad ideas in front of someone to create with them, and realizing I could do that with him was really important to our dynamic. We were able to tell each other what we actually thought about style and all that stuff, starting with that song.” **“Sleepwalkin’”** Oberst: “That was one of the first ones we started recording with a rhythm section, and I knew it was gonna be fun and actually be rock music, and I got excited for that.” Bridgers: “We did mostly real live takes of the band stuff, which was really fun. When I record my records, I overdub into oblivion because I like deleting and reworking and rethinking halfway through, so it\'s pretty different for me.” **“Dylan Thomas”** Oberst: “That was the last one we wrote, so we kind of had our method a little more dialed. It immediately felt like a good thing to put out there first, as far as people getting the whole concept quickly: that it\'s two singers and maybe more upbeat than people would think. I guess \[Dylan Thomas\] is a kind of antiquated reference for 2019, but he\'s always been one of my favorite poets.” **“Service Road”** Oberst: “That one is kind of like a heavy song, lyrically. I don\'t know if I would have been able to get to all that stuff without Phoebe\'s help—she\'s very empathetic in her writing.” Bridgers: “It\'s funny, I didn\'t really think about it like, \'Oh, helping Conor write something heavy\'; it was just immediately pretty familiar territory and I didn\'t really have to think twice about it.” Oberst: “It\'s cool when you find someone to write songs with, where a lot of it can go unsaid and you can be automatically on the same page without having to explain a bunch of stuff up front. \'Cause I feel like other times when I\'ve been in co-writing situations, if you\'re coming from super-different places, it takes a bunch of legwork to even get to a starting point.” **“Exception to the Rule”** Oberst: “That one changed the most from the demo to the actual recording. It really came into its own in the recording, with all the pulsing keyboard—that was not at all the way the demo was. That\'s always fun, when something changes in the recording process.” **“Chesapeake”** Bridgers: “I kind of started it as my own song with my friend Christian helping me out. We were getting together, ranting about music, and we were like, \'What if we wrote a song about what we think is stupid in music?\' and kind of ranted for hours over those chords. And then Conor, who was tripping on mushrooms, wanders into the room, like, \'Are you guys gonna just talk about writing this song or when are you gonna actually write it?\' We were kind of brushing him off, and then he started writing with us and then it immediately became real. And yeah, he gave us a run for our money on mushrooms.” **“My City”** Bridgers: “I think it\'s funny when people call LA \'this town.\' It\'s fucking so corny and funny, and the amount that I hear it is really disturbing. Like, \'Yeah, this town spits you out in a heartbeat.\' We started talking about that and then it became a lyric, and then weirdly kind of started being about Los Angeles. One of my favorite ways to write with Conor is just to go on a rant about something and then he spits out beautiful lyrics with whatever I said.” **“Forest Lawn”** Oberst: “Yeah, I guess there are a lot of LA references on this record. Phoebe would talk about when she was a teenager they would hang out and party and smoke weed in Forest Lawn. Every teenager in every town ends up going to a cemetery. Youth and reckless abandon amongst dead bodies—there\'s something kind of nice about that image to me.” **“Big Black Heart”** Bridgers: “I feel like—well, I know—that I subliminally stole the riff from a Tigers Jaw song. An early 2000s emo band...” Oberst: “She\'s like, \'I wanna email them and ask them if we can use it.\' And I was like, \'Damn, Phoebe, you\'re extremely ethical. I really appreciate your ethics.\'\" Bridgers: “They were very sweet, and they were like, \'What the fuck are you talking about? That\'s not stealing it.\'” Oberst: “I think Phoebe has a great scream and she never uses it, so I convinced her to bring that in, which is cool.” **“Dominos”** Oberst: “That\'s a cover. Taylor Hollingsworth is a songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama, a guy I\'ve played with a lot, that we both love as a person and as a musician. We just love that song. I had called him and got him to record those little samples on the phone of him talking. I kind of lied a little bit, like, \'Yeah, Taylor, I\'m making this sound collage for a song I\'m working on.\' When we finally played it for him, he was totally floored and got a little teary-eyed. He\'s like, \'I can\'t believe you guys recorded my song.\' So, that was really sweet.”

On her fifth proper full-length album, Sharon Van Etten pushes beyond vocals-and-guitar indie rock and dives headlong into spooky maximalism. With production help from John Congleton (St. Vincent), she layers haunting drones with heavy, percussive textures, giving songs like “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen” explosive urgency. Drawing from Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, and fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, *Remind Me Tomorrow* is full of electrifying anthems, with Van Etten voicing confessions of reckless, lost, and sentimental characters. The album challenges the popular image of Van Etten as *just* a singer-songwriter and illuminates her significant talent as composer and producer, as an artist making records that feel like a world of their own.

Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

Omoiyari is Kishi Bashi’s fourth album, following the acclaimed '151a' (2012), 'Lighght' (2014), and 'Sonderlust' (2016). Channeling the hard-learned lessons of history, 'Omoiyari' reflects the turbulent socio-political atmosphere of present day America. “I was shocked when I saw white supremacy really starting to show its teeth again in America,“ Kishi Bashi says. “My parents are immigrants, they came to the United States from Japan post–World War II. As a minority I felt very insecure for the first time in my adult life in this country. I think that was the real trigger for this project.” Kishi Bashi recognized parallels between the current U.S. administration’s constant talk of walls and bans, and the xenophobic anxieties that led to the forced internment of Japanese-Americans in the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. So he immersed himself in that period, visiting former prison sites and listening to the stories of survivors, while developing musical concepts along the way. The unique creative process behind 'Omoiyari' has been documented in a film scheduled for release in early 2020. “I didn’t want this project to be about history, but rather the importance of history, and the lessons we can learn,” Kishi Bashi reflects. “I gravitated toward themes of empathy, compassion, and understanding as a way to overcome fear and intolerance. But I had trouble finding an English title for the piece. Omoiyari is a Japanese word. It doesn't necessarily translate as empathy, but it refers to the idea of creating compassion towards other people by thinking about them. I think the idea of omoiyari is the single biggest thing that can help us overcome aggression and conflict.” The strong conceptual elements of 'Omoiyari' are driven by Kishi Bashi’s captivating musical score. Stepping away from his past loop-based production model, he embraced a more collaborative approach when recording, and for the first time included contributions from other musicians, such as Mike Savino (aka Tall Tall Trees) on banjo and bass, and Nick Ogawa (aka Takenobu) on cello. Kishi Bashi’s spectacular trademark violin soundscapes are still an essential component of his sound, but the focus of 'Omoiyari' is centered squarely on its songs. While the theme of 'Omoiyari' is rooted in 1940s America, the album’s message is timeless. In exploring the emotional lives of the innocent Japanese-Americans who were unjustly incarcerated, Kishi Bashi hopes to nurture a sense of empathy, or omoiyari, in all who hear the album.

More than a year after her breakout hit “1950,” King Princess delivers *Cheap Queen*, her soulful and reflective debut album. Balancing husky, vintage-sounding vocals with subtle flourishes (a vibraphone here, a chiming synth there), the project loosely traces a young relationship’s hopeful beginning and wounded end. Throughout, we get to see the emerging queer-pop icon, a 20-year-old Brooklyn native named Mikaela Straus, evolve: Meandering mind games (“Useless Phrases”) and self-deprecations (“Cheap Queen”) become earnest observations (\"Watching My Phone\") and confident tell-offs (“You Destroyed My Heart”). The final number—a breathtaking, pensive ballad that unfolds delicately—feels fragile and guarded: “And it might take a sec/My world’s become a mess/I’m second-guessing all the things I used to want to be,” she sings, a bit more measured than she was at the start. But she’s stronger, too, armed with the self-assurance of someone who has had their heart ripped apart and, to their own surprise, survived.

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

Big Thief had only just finished work on their 3rd album, U.F.O.F. – “the celestial twin” – days before in a cabin studio in the woods of Washington State. Now it was time to birth U.F.O.F.’s sister album – “the earth twin” – Two Hands. 30 miles west of El Paso, surrounded by 3,000 acres of pecan orchards and only a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, Big Thief (a.k.a. Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia) set up their instruments as close together as possible to capture their most important collection of songs yet. Where U.F.O.F.layered mysterious sounds and effects for levitation, Two Hands grounds itself on dried-out, cracked desert dirt. In sharp contrast to the wet environment of the U.F.O.F. session, the southwestern Sonic Ranch studio was chosen for its vast desert location. The 105-degree weather boiled away any clinging memories of the green trees and wet air of the previous session. Two Hands had to be completely different — an album about the Earth and the bones beneath it. The songs were recorded live with almost no overdubs. All but two songs feature entirely live vocal takes, leaving Adrianne’s voice suspended above the mix in dry air, raw and vulnerable as ever. “Two Hands has the songs that I’m the most proud of; I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old,” says Adrianne. “Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this. It’s already bare-bones.” Lyrically this can be felt in the poetic blur of the internal and external. These are political songs without political language. They explore the collective wounds of our Earth. Abstractions of the personal hint at war, environmental destruction, and the traumas that fuel it. Across the album, there are genuine attempts to point the listener towards the very real dangers that face our planet. When Adrianne sings “Please wake up,” she’s talking directly to the audience. Engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who were both behind U.F.O.F., capture the live energy as instinctually and honestly as possible. Sarlo teamed up with James Krivchenia to mix the album, where they sought to emphasize raw power and direct energy inherent in the takes. The journey of a song from the stage to the record is often a difficult one. Big Thief’s advantage is their bond and loving centre as a chosen family. They spend almost 100% of their lives together working towards a sound that they all agree upon. A band with this level of togetherness is increasingly uncommon. If you ask drummer James Krivchenia, bassist Max Oleartchik or guitarist Buck Meek how they write their parts, they will describe — passionately — the experience of hearing Adrianne present a new song, listening intently for hints of parts that already exist in the ether and the undertones to draw out with their respective instruments. With raw power and intimacy, Two Hands folds itself gracefully into Big Thief’s impressive discography. This body of work grows deeper and more inspiring with each new album.

Meg Duffy grew up in a small town in Upstate New York and they cut their teeth as a session guitarist and touring member of Kevin Morby’s band. The Hand Habits project emerged after Meg moved to Los Angeles; it started as a private songwriting outlet but soon evolved into a fully-fledged band with Meg at the helm. Hand Habits’ debut album, Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void), was released by Woodsist Records in 2017. The LP was entirely self-produced and recorded in Meg’s home during spare moments when they weren’t touring. Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void) is a lush, homespun collection of folk songs that found Meg in an exploratory state as an artist moving out on their own for the first time. Two years later, Hand Habits has returned with their sophomore album, placeholder. To make this album, Meg chose to work in a studio and bring in collaborators, entrusting them with what had previously been a very personal creative process. Over the course of 12 tracks, Meg emerges with new confidence as both a bandleader and singer. This album is as tender and immediate as anything Meg’s ever written, but it’s also intensely focused and refined, the work of a meticulous musician ready to share their singular vision with the world. The name placeholder stems from Meg’s fascination with the undefinable. Their songs serve as openings -- carved-out spaces waiting to be endowed with meaning. As a lyricist, Meg is drawn to the in-between, and the songs on this new album primarily confront the ways in which certain experiences can serve as a stepping stone on the road to self-discovery. “A big aspect of my songwriting and the way I move through the world depends on my relationships with people. The songs on placeholder are about accountability and forgiveness,” Meg says. “These are all real stories. I don’t fictionalize much.” Meg describes these songs as their most direct to date, crafted with clear intention, and unlike Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void), placeholder doesn’t meander. “It’s less of a submerged landscape and more a concise series of thoughts,” Meg explains. Instrumentally, placeholder can be situated alongside some of Meg’s folk-adjacent contemporaries like Angel Olsen or Big Thief, and the guitar work on this album proves that Meg continues to be one of the finest young musicians working today. placeholder is another entry in the Hand Habits songbook, but it’s also a valuable testament of our time. While placeholder inspires a sense of ease, simple questions rarely beget easy answers and Meg honors the indescribable joy and profound sorrow that comes with figuring things out, one step at a time.

When you listen to the love songs of LA-based Bedouine, you will be reminded of Karen Dalton’s world-wise voice or the breathy seduction of Minnie Riperton's vocals, the easy cool of French ye-ye singers, and the poetry of Joan Baez. Her folk is nomadic, wandering across time and space. On first discovery you may ask whether they're dated to 2019, or whether you've uncovered some forgotten classic. It makes sense that singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian's arrival – both musically and personally – on her second record has been influenced by her own wanderlust, displacement, and curiosity. Bird Songs of a Killjoy is a soundtrack to Spring blossom, to warm air on skin, to the concept of possibility. Some of the songs on this sophomore effort were from that same time period of fruitful creativity as her self-titled debut, which came out in June 2017. She continued her creative partnership with Gus Seyffert (Beck, Norah Jones) who produced them in his studio. For Bedouine, these songs have already served their healing purpose. Now it's time for them to move others.

“There was no road map for this whatsoever,” Karen O told Beats 1 about her far-out collaboration with Brian Burton, the Grammy-winning producer known as Danger Mouse (Beck, Gorillaz, Broken Bells). Such stylistic freedom may have felt new for the singer, who has spent the past two decades fronting the New York rock trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But after concluding her label contract and, in 2015, giving birth to her first child, she suddenly faced a blank canvas—a fresh start that pushed her in a new direction: “Brian and I realized that we had a similar love for \'90s R&B dance music.” Colorful, funky, and experimental, *Lux Prima* is a vision quest of distorted synths and lo-fi atmospheres littered with left turns: the spoken-word mutterings on “Drown,” the combative chants and howls on “Woman,” the disco-fied seduction of “Leopard’s Tongue.” On the gauzy, groovy “Turn the Light,” she mixes Donna Summer escapism with off-kilter soul. “Starry, starry night/This is how I want to live,” she sings in a weightless whisper. “Gonna lay me down in love/I got so much more to give.” “We were making an album we were trying to listen to as opposed to making an album that we wanted to play,” Burton said. “So that\'s kind of how we made the record.”

What happens when the reigning queen of bubblegum pop goes through a breakup? Exactly what you’d think: She turns around and creates her most romantic, wholehearted, blissed-out work yet. Written with various pop producers in LA (Captain Cuts), New York (Jack Antonoff), and Sweden, as well as on a particularly formative soul-searching trip to the Italian coast, Jepsen’s fourth album *Dedicated* is poptimism at its finest: joyous and glitzy, rhythmic and euphoric, with an extra layer of kitsch. It’s never sad—that just isn’t Jepsen—but the “Call Me Maybe” star *does* get more in her feelings; songs like “No Drug Like Me” and “Right Words Wrong Time” aren\'t about fleeing pain so much as running to it. As Jepsen puts it on the synth ballad “Too Much,” she’d do anything to get the rush of being in love, even if it means risking heartache again and again. “Party for One,” the album’s standout single, is an infectious, shriek-worthy celebration of being alone that also acknowledges just how difficult that can be: “Tried to let it go and say I’m over you/I’m not over you/But I’m trying.”

“Honesty, heartbreak, love, lust, elation: Those concepts are in a lot of music that I love, but it\'s just never been something I\'ve attempted on my own records,” DJ-turned-superproducer Mark Ronson tells Apple Music about the genesis of his fifth album. “When I dip into other people\'s worlds—whether it\'s Queens of the Stone Age or Gaga, whoever—that\'s when I get to work on deep shit, but my own records should just be either record collector-y or for the dance floor.” But on the heels of a breakup, Ronson rallied a typically star-studded cast of collaborators, including Miley Cyrus, Lykke Li, and Alicia Keys, for sessions in New York and Los Angeles that plumbed personal topics previous albums would have danced right past. “It was the first time I couldn\'t really hide behind a concept,” he says. “It was like, \'No, no, you have to put yourself into the music this time.\'” Here Ronson puts himself into telling the stories behind each track on *Late Night Feelings*. **“Late Night Prelude”** “Just for my own sanity, when I start off a record, it has to be a little bit of a statement—something that\'s a little grand and foreshadows the rest of the record. David Campbell, the string arranger, came up with this beautiful, slightly Barry White Love Unlimited Orchestra-inspired arrangement—a little slowed down and psychedelic. Then that kicks off right into...” **“Late Night Feelings” (feat. Lykke Li)** “This was the first song that we came up with that really felt like it was pointing the way for the record. I started working with this writer named Ilsey Juber, who I met through Diplo. She came up with the first verse, this melodic idea. Then, when we were thinking who should sing this, she was like, \'Well, Lykke would be perfect.\' She was just wrapping up Lykke\'s album *So Sad So Sexy*. Actually, Lykke came up with that lyric; I loved it for the name of the album because, instead of calling it *Club Heartbreak* or some of the other things we were throwing around, late-night feelings can be anything really that keeps you up at night. It could be heartbreak, it could be lust, it could be love, it could be Brexit, it could be whatever.” **“Find U Again” (feat. Camila Cabello)** “Two years ago, when I was working with Kevin Parker and we were doing some DJ dates, we were messing around with some ideas, and he had this melodic idea and these chords. When we really didn\'t get to finish our stuff, because he was going back to Perth and starting the Tame Impala record, I asked him, \'Can I finish that song and use it for my record?\' It\'s such a great, strong idea that I\'m not gonna waste it until I really have the perfect person whose voice is just gonna cut through, and it\'s gonna be the right person to write the lyrics—Camila Cabello. She\'s such a huge pop star, I sometimes just think like, \'Oh, those people aren\'t gonna want to fuck with me.\' Then I sent her the track and she loved it. She came in and she wrote it. I was just really in awe of how serious she takes the stuff, each take. A lot of pop music, people sing the chorus once and they just fly it over three times.” **“Pieces of Us”** “King Princess, she\'s on \[Ronson\'s label Zelig\] and she pretty much does everything. I jump in and give my two cents every now and then, but she\'s super self-contained. She has such a special thing that she does: music that\'s slightly moody, dreamy, ethereal, not always super aggressive with the drums and the tempo. I wanted to preserve that; it\'s probably the longest I\'ve ever waited to bring in the drum and bass arrangement on a song. She kept bringing me songs \'cause she\'s very smart and prolific—she can write a good song in like seven minutes. I\'d have to keep being like an annoying dad: \'It\'s not good enough, go back, bring me something else.\' Everything on this record needed to tug at the heartstrings just a little bit, you know?” **“Knock Knock Knock”/“Don\'t Leave Me Lonely”/“When U Went Away”** “These are all YEBBA tunes. In the next two years when everyone discovers her stuff, it\'s gonna be insane. I loved the idea of giving YEBBA her own suite on the album: \'Don\'t Leave Me Lonely,\' which is maybe the emotional core of the record, sandwiched between these two interludes. And it sort of tells a story: \'Knock Knock Knock\' is the hookup song, a little flirty. Then \'Don\'t Leave Me Lonely\' is this \'Don\'t leave me lonely tonight/\'Cause I can\'t forget you\'—it\'s almost like a Whitney/Tina Turner vibe. And then the third part, \'When You Went Away,\' is kinda despondent-but-I\'m-gonna-be-all-right. It\'s the entire relationship process: the hookup, the loneliness, and the healing in this three-song run.” **“Truth”** “Dodgr\'s part was this really great rap, but it was unconventional where it fell on the beat. Sometimes my super pop brain was like, \'Well, I don\'t know. Do we need more stuff? What\'s the verse?\' Diana Gordon just came in and she was like, \'You guys are crazy. This sounds like a fucking movement. Don\'t worry about what\'s what, it just feels good.\' She came up with the melody for part of the chorus, which was great. And then Alicia Keys helped us finish it.” **“Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” (feat. Miley Cyrus)** “Miley was somebody I\'ve wanted to work with for ages. And for maybe four years, I\'d been sending ideas. Occasionally I would hear back, occasionally not. Ilsey had this little seed of this idea. I was like, \'The perfect person for this would really be Miley. I mean, she kind of writes me back 50 percent of the time, let\'s just try one Hail Mary.\' Miley came in and wrote the rest of the song.” **“True Blue” (feat. Angel Olsen)** “Angel Olsen: Her last album, I probably played it to death. I actually heard it through the wall at this Pilates class that I went to, and I had to go next door and ask this dance instructor what that song was. Angel sent me this little voicemail, this melody. It was incredible. She was singing at an organ, I think in her house, and it sounded like it could\'ve been a little aria or some kind of mermaid in the \'30s. I just remember thinking, \'Goddamn, if she lets me put a drum beat behind this, this is gonna be like ABBA on quaaludes or something.\' So she came in the studio and the first day I think she was probably looking at me like, \'Who is this guy, this pop dude, some pretender?\' It kinda is a little bit like ABBA produced by Nick Lowe on quaaludes.” **“Why Hide”** “This was the last thing that we got on the record. Diana Gordon has been part of this whole creative process and is this kind of lovely person. Her voice has just got this wonderful, ethereal, bewitching thing to it—so broken and powerful at the same time. It\'s sort of Aaliyah, Massive Attack, some kind of thing in between those two, sort of downtempo.” **“2 AM”** “This is sort of the counterpoint to \'Late Night Feelings,\' another song with Lykke that we wrote when we were in \[Rick Rubin\'s Los Angeles studio\] Shangri-La. \'I\'m not your lover but we\'re making love/Why are you only calling me at 2 a.m.?\' I don\'t usually put ballads on my records—I\'m a DJ, who wants to hear a fucking ballad? But I wanna hear ballads on records. I never wanna hear if it\'s oppressively fun from start to end. It was good and felt like it belonged.” **“Spinning”** “There\'s certainly a lot of uptempo songs and stuff you can dance to, but heartbreak is really the prevailing theme, and I just thought it would be nice to have something that felt a tiny bit like the light at the end of the tunnel. Lykke sings on it—the end—and she brings back the refrain from the opening song. YEBBA heard it and she was kinda moved, and she was like, \'You gotta let me sing something on this,\' so she does these beautiful choir-type harmonies like she did for Chance the Rapper. It\'s really nice that this last record goes out with Ilsey, Lykke, and YEBBA on it \'cause they\'re all such a big part of the record.”

Maggie Rogers spent the first three years of her career retracing one chance encounter: In 2016, a video of her singing a song that moved Pharrell to tears during a master class at NYU went viral, earning her a record deal, magazine features, and headlining tours (watch it and you’ll understand). But the Maryland native, then 22, was still figuring out who she was, and this sudden flood of fame was a lot to bear. Determined to take control of her own narrative, she assembled a debut album powerful enough to shift the conversation. Measured, subtle, and wise beyond her years, it feels like the introduction she always wanted to make. Like her 2017 EP, *Now That the Light Is Fading*, *Heard It In A Past Life* is a thoughtfully sewn patchwork of anthemic synth-pop, brooding acoustic folk, and soft-lit electronica, the latter of which was inspired by a year spent dancing through Berlin’s nightclub scene. But here, her vision feels both more daring and more polished. On “Retrograde,” long stretches of propulsive synths are punctuated by high-pitched *hah-hah-hah*s; “Say It” blends R&B with light, breathy indie-pop; and “The Knife” could be a sultry come-on or a daring confession. On the Greg Kurstin-produced “Light On,” Rogers seems to make peace with her surreal story. “And I am findin’ out/There’s just no other way/And I’m still dancin’ at the end of the day,” she sings, a bittersweet hat-tip to the moment that got her here. And to her fans, a promise: “If you leave the light on/Then I’ll leave the light on.”

After releasing 2016’s *The Colour in Anything*, James Blake moved from London to Los Angeles, where he found himself busier than ever. “I’ve been doing a lot of production work, a lot of writing for other people and projects,” he tells Apple Music. “I think the constant process of having a mirror held up to your music in the form of other people’s music, and other people, helped me cross something. A shiny new thing.” That thing—his fourth album, *Assume Form*—is his least abstract and most grounded, revealing and romantic album to date. Here, Blake pulls back the curtain and explains the themes, stories and collaborations behind each track. **“Assume Form”** “I\'m saying, ‘The plan is to become reachable, to assume material form, to leave my head and join the world.’ It seems like quite a modern, Western idea that you just get lost. These slight feelings of repression lead to this feeling of *I’m not in my body, I’m not really experiencing life through first-person. It’s like I’m looking at it from above*. Which is a phenomenon a lot of people describe when they talk about depression.” **“Mile High” (feat. Metro Boomin & Travis Scott)** “Travis is just exceptionally talented at melodies; the ones he wrote on that track are brilliant. And it was made possible by Metro—the beat is a huge part of why that track feels the way it does.” **“Tell Them” (feat. Metro Boomin & Moses Sumney)** “Moses came on tour with me a couple years ago. I watched him get a standing ovation every night, and that was when he was a support act. For me, it’s a monologue on a one-night stand: There’s fear, there’s not wanting to be too close to anybody. Just sort of a self-analysis, really.” **“Into the Red”** “‘Into the Red’ is about a woman in my life who was very giving—someone who put me before themselves, and spent the last of their money on something for me. It was just a really beautiful sentiment—especially the antithesis of the idea that the man pays. I just liked that idea of equal footing.” **“Barefoot in the Park” (feat. ROSALÍA)** “My manager played me \[ROSALÍA’s 2017 debut\] *Los Ángeles*, and I honestly hadn’t heard anything so vulnerable and raw and devastating in quite a while. She came to the studio, and within a day we’d made two or three things. I loved the sound of our voices together.” **“Can’t Believe the Way We Flow”** “It’s a pure love song, really. It’s just about the ease of coexisting that I feel with my girlfriend. It’s fairly simple in its message and in its delivery, hopefully. Romance is a very commercialized subject, but sometimes it can just be a peaceful moment of ease and something even mundane—just the flow between days and somebody making it feel like the days are just going by, and that’s a great thing.” **“Are You in Love?”** “I like the idea of that moment where neither of you know whether you’re in love yet, but there’s this need for someone to just say they are: ‘Give me assurance that this is good and that we’re good, and that you’re in love with me. I’m in love with you.’ The words might mean more in that moment, but that’s not necessarily gonna make it okay.” **“Where’s the Catch?” (feat. André 3000)** “I was, and remain, inspired by Outkast. Catching him now is maybe even *more* special to me, because the way he writes is just so good! I love the way he balances slight abstraction with this feeling of paranoia. The line ‘Like I know I’m eight, and I know I ain’t’—anxiety bringing you back to being a child, but knowing that you’re supposed to feel strong and stable because you’re an adult now. That’s just so beautifully put.” **“I’ll Come Too”** “It’s a real story: When you fall in love, the practical things go out the window, a little bit. And you just want to go to wherever they are.” **“Power On”** “It’s about being in a relationship, and being someone who gets something wrong. If you can swallow your ego a little bit and accept that you aren’t always to know everything, that this person can actually teach you a lot, the better it is for everyone. Once I’ve taken accountability, it’s time to power on—that’s the only way I can be worthy of somebody’s love and affection and time.” **“Don’t Miss It”** “Coming at the end of the album was a choice. I think it kind of sums up the mission statement in some ways: Yes, there are millions of things that I could fixate on, and I have lost years and years and years to anxiety. There are big chunks of my life I can’t remember—moments I didn’t enjoy when I should have. Loves I wasn’t a part of. Heroes I met that I can’t really remember the feeling of meeting. Because I was so wrapped up in myself. And I think that’s what this is—the inner monologue of an egomaniac.” **“Lullaby for My Insomniac”** “I literally wrote it to help someone sleep. This is just me trying to calm the waters so you can just drift off. It does what it says on the tin.”

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.

“It feels right that our fourth album is not 10, 11 songs,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig explains on his Beats 1 show *Time Crisis*, laying out the reasoning behind the 18-track breadth of his band\'s first album in six years. “It felt like it needed more room.” The double album—which Koenig considers less akin to the stylistic variety of The Beatles\' White Album and closer to the narrative and thematic cohesion of Bruce Springsteen\'s *The River*—also introduces some personnel changes. Founding member Rostam Batmanglij contributes to a couple of tracks but is no longer in the band, while Haim\'s Danielle Haim and The Internet\'s Steve Lacy are among the guests who play on multiple songs here. The result is decidedly looser and more sprawling than previous Vampire Weekend records, which Koenig feels is an apt way to return after a long hiatus. “After six years gone, it\'s a bigger statement.” Here Koenig unpacks some of *Father of the Bride*\'s key tracks. **\"Hold You Now\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “From pretty early on, I had a feeling that\'d be a good track one. I like that it opens with just acoustic guitar and vocals, which I thought is such a weird way to open a Vampire Weekend record. I always knew that there should be three duets spread out around the album, and I always knew I wanted them to be with the same person. Thank God it ended up being with Danielle. I wouldn\'t really call them country, but clearly they\'re indebted to classic country-duet songwriting.” **\"Rich Man\"** “I actually remember when I first started writing that; it was when we were at the Grammys for \[2013\'s\] *Modern Vampires of the City*. Sometimes you work so hard to come up with ideas, and you\'re down in the mines just trying to come up with stuff. Then other times you\'re just about to leave, you listen to something, you come up with a little idea. On this long album, with songs like this and \'Big Blue,\' they\'re like these short-story songs—they\'re moments. I just thought there\'s something funny about the narrator of the song being like, \'It\'s so hard to find one rich man in town with a satisfied mind. But I am the one.\' It\'s the trippiest song on the album.” **\"Married in a Gold Rush\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “I played this song for a couple of people, and some were like, \'Oh, that\'s your country song?\' And I swear, we pulled our hair out trying to make sure the song didn\'t sound too country. Once you get past some of the imagery—midnight train, whatever—that\'s not really what it\'s about. The story is underneath it.” **\"Sympathy”** “That\'s the most metal Vampire Weekend\'s ever gotten with the double bass drum pedal.” **\"Sunflower\" (feat. Steve Lacy)** “I\'ve been critical of certain references people throw at this record. But if people want to say this sounds a little like Phish, I\'m with that.” **\"We Belong Together\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “That\'s kind of two different songs that came together, as is often the case of Vampire Weekend. We had this old demo that started with programmed drums and Rostam having that 12-string. I always wanted to do a song that was insanely simple, that was just listing things that go together. So I\'d sit at the piano and go, \'We go together like pots and pans, surf and sand, bottles and cans.\' Then we mashed them up. It\'s probably the most wholesome Vampire Weekend song.”

SASAMI (Sasami Ashworth) has been making music in almost every way possible for the last decade, and between playing keys, bass, guitar within Cherry Glazerr and Dirt Dress; contributing vocal, string, and horn arrangements to studio albums by the likes of Vagabon, Curtis Harding, Wild Nothing, and Hand Habits; arranging for films and commercials; and even playing French horn in an orchestra - she has gained a reputation as an all-around musical badass. Now taking a turn to focus on her own music, SASAMI's self-titled debut will be out March 2019 on Domino. pre-order the LP at www.dominomusic.com/releases/sasami/sasami-lp-mart-exclusive