Time Out's 30 Best Albums of 2023

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

“This is about me telling the stories I want to tell, in the order I want to tell them, through the sonic landscape I want to tell them,” RAYE tells Apple Music of her debut album, *My 21st Century Blues*. The South London singer-songwriter, born Rachel Keen, had to wait longer than most to do that. In June 2021, she claimed on social media that she hadn’t been “allowed” to release a debut LP, despite having signed a four-album deal seven years earlier, and that she was “sick of being slept on.” (She left her label shortly after and released this LP as an independent artist.) “There really did have to be quite a lot of soul searching and therapy and forgiveness and reflection,” says RAYE of the aftermath. “I wanted to go back to the songs that I was passionate about.” Those were tracks that RAYE had written years earlier, and which, revisited and reworked, make up half of *My 21st Century Blues*. Most of the others were written fresh, after she escaped to a cabin in Utah with producer and friend Mike Sabath, armed with a laundry list of topics to dig into (reflected in some of the album’s meatier song titles, such as “Body Dysmorphia.” and “Environmental Anxiety.”). *My 21st Century Blues* can sometimes be a difficult listen: RAYE unflinchingly processes traumatic experiences including sexual violence, substance abuse, disordered eating, and the suffocation she has felt as a woman in music, with embraces of everything from trip-hop to hypnotic dance, dancehall, cinematic pop, gospel, blues, and more. Getting to this point, she says, feels like “the most beautiful validation,” as well as something close to healing. “Everything for me on this is so medicinal,” she says. “I’m so excited for the artist now I get to become. This has set the tone for me, knowing how much potential there is in what I can say and what stories I can tell.” Read on as RAYE talks us through every track on her long-awaited debut. **“Introduction.”** “Before synths and electronic stuff, it was just a show. It was a real band. The singer would come on and sing for you in a nice dress or a nice suit. I really wanted listeners to feel like they’re in this little blues club or a jazz club, taking in all the songs as they go on a wild tangent far away from that.” **“Oscar Winning Tears.”** “The version you hear now has really taken on its own form since the original demo. When the situation with the spiking happened \[RAYE’s drink was spiked by a man she knew and trusted\], the man was just crying tears in my face. He was the victim. I was like, ‘Wow, I have a song for this.’ It was liberating. And when we finished it, I knew this had to be the start. I think the initial concept and then the story ended up just merging so perfectly into just a beautiful piece of medicine for me.” **“Hard Out Here.”** “When the story or feeling is burning at my chest, it has to force its way out. It was just rage and pain flowing out. For the line about CEOs and white privilege \[‘All the white men CEOs, fuck your privilege/Get your pink chubby hands off my mouth/Fuck you think this is?’\], my engineer turned and looked at me, but I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going there!’ This song was me promising myself that I will bounce back. It’s hard to put the story of what I’ve been through into words because it’s so much over so long. In my opinion, I really did such a good job of holding it down and in. Some of the things that were said and the way I was emotionally manipulated, it’s so dark. Coming out the other side of it, I just needed to remind myself that I will bounce back.” **“Black Mascara.”** “I’d just come back from where these assaults took place and was very much not good. It was just after ‘BED’ \[RAYE’s 2021 hit with Joel Corry and David Guetta\] came out, so I was having to sell the pop-girl image. At that time, I had the green light to do an album before they changed their mind for the last time. I played some chords, and they were very vampire-y and medieval. I had the phrase ‘Once you see my black mascara/Run from you’ on the way there, and so I was just building the lyrics. We had a session the next day, but I canceled it—I just wasn’t there—and didn’t listen to the song until maybe three weeks after I was sent it. I pressed play, and it sounds like what you hear now. I put it on repeat.” **“Escapism.” \[with 070 Shake\]** “I think when I was on my way out of the darker chapters in my life, I needed this song. It gives me hope. Mike played me this beat in the car, and I was rapping all this aggressive stuff. I knew exactly what story I wanted to tell on this. When we got to Utah, I went into the toilet and said a little prayer: ‘Dear God, help me find the best lyrics for the song.’ Then I got on the mic, and it came together so quickly—maybe in an hour and a half. I’m still processing the success of this song because I just did not expect it at all. I’m not doing this to gun for mainstream success. I’m not doing this to have the biggest chart records. These songs aren’t about that.” **“Mary Jane.”** “I’m an all-or-nothing person in every aspect of my life. So, when something dangerous is introduced \[substances\], it can get really bad—really, really bad. The lyrics in this song are dark, but substance abuse can really, really take you there. It’s a love song married with a slightly uneasy feeling behind the music. I wanted it to feel uncomfortable.” **“The Thrill Is Gone.”** “This song existed for years but was completely different in the beginning. I always wanted to take it back in time. We recorded it on tape and made it in the Valentine Studio in LA. It’s all carpeted walls, and it felt like a real taste of how music used to be created. Recording it was a beautiful experience. The story feels so classical, but the picture in my head is so distorted and modern and weird. I really love where we took it.” **“Ice Cream Man.”** “This is the hardest song on the album for me. There are so many layers of what’s taken and what’s affected and changed after trauma and sexual violence. So much is stolen. You battle so many minefields of, ‘Is this my fault? Did I put myself in the wrong position? Am I blowing something out of proportion?’ It just becomes this ugly thing that I’m having to deal with for the rest of my life because of someone else’s stupid, disgusting actions. And I think that, at the very least, this is me proclaiming what I am and that these things shouldn’t be allowed to define what we become. It’s as much for me as whoever might be listening who needs to hear it. I wanted it to just feel super intimate, with that hum that comes in at the beginning and these filtered drums. And at the end, you get this moment to feel beautiful with your tears, to stand up and walk out the room and continue with your day.” **“Flip a Switch.”** “I did this with Stephen McGregor \[aka producer Di Genius\], who’s a dancehall legend. He produced so many of the songs I grew up listening to, so he really brought his flair and flavors to the sound. I was in a budding relationship, and I had just decided to let my walls down. I felt it was safe, and then it was like, *bang*. I would have been fine if \[he\] hadn’t given me all this false hope. I was so angry, and it was like, ‘You know what! This song is going to be about you now. Let’s get all the drama out.’ It was very empowering and me saying all the things that I would love to say to his face. But instead, I just put it in the song and proceeded to listen to it all week.” **“Body Dysmorphia.”** “I’d been putting this one off for a while. It was the last day in Utah, and I felt I had to do it. I wanted it to feel sexy, in a weird way. So, we started with these scratchy, really uncomfortable strings, and then you have these smooth drums, which—if you were ignoring the lyrics—you’d probably have a little slow vibe to. It was a stream of consciousness. \[The things I talked about in this song\] can manifest in such ugly ways and hold really intense power over you. I think half of the power of this song is just saying them out loud.” **“Environmental Anxiety.”** “I’m a musician, but we know the state of the world, and you can see so clearly that things are just evidently flipping wrong. But \[the climate crisis\] is out of the control of an average citizen. It requires governments to pull their flipping pants up and put laws in place to better impact the climate. Banning plastic forks is all well and good, but you lot \[politicians\] are doing real serious damage. I thought I’d make a song about it, and I wanted to take the piss because that’s what the government does out of us. I wanted this eerie, childlike energy that brings you in, but also a punky, weird drum thing.” **“Five Star Hotels.” (feat. Mahalia)** “This song existed for a long time, and I always loved it. It was just a way of feeling sexy. We sent it to Mahalia, and when she sent me her verse, it was like, ‘Yes!’ We’re two girls who have dreams and have worked really hard from young ages. She just felt like the right person. Creating music to feel \[sexy\] has been empowering for me.” **“Worth It.”** “I wanted to release this a long time ago. Sometimes there are moments where it’s like, ‘Here comes someone—let’s make all of the shit things feel really cool. And all this work that I’m supposed to be doing on myself, I might pause for a section and start putting some work into this other thing because it feels really nice.’ I wanted to have this near the end of the album—a warm hug as you are leaving some of those darker earlier things. The irony is in putting it just before ‘Buss It Down.’ because it didn’t fucking work out!” **“Buss It Down.”** “It’s the juxtaposition between gospel feelings and a song about getting down. The choice to be single is empowering, and I think this is something for the single girls. It’s all right to be single and be joyous about it. It can be a good thing.” **“Fin.”** “I wanted to have the audience cheer at the end of ‘Buss It Down.’, and I want this thank-you moment. It’s a personal closing—I’m so proud of this album, I’m so grateful that people will even listen to this outro. I’m a human who’s put some stories together, and I’m excited for next time. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, but we’re here. And the joy of being able to share this moment is really exciting. It’s been a long time coming.”

“I don\'t really want to tell people stories,” Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. “I want to show them. I want them to feel.” At 28, the Australian artist has more than a few stories to pick from. In the years between 2018’s *Bloom* and this, his third full-length, he’s appeared in several films and series; collaborated with artists like Charli XCX, Lauv, Jónsi, and Tate McRae; and launched a luxury lifestyle brand. But beneath those headline-makers, he simply lived his life and experienced the experiences that laid the foundations for *Something to Give Each Other*. “There’s 10 stories, 10 moments,” he says of the album, which took around two and a half years to complete. Between COVID and filming the TV series *The Idol*, he was granted a “luxury of time” he’d never had before. “It ended up serving the album really well because it gave me time to see which songs stuck around.” “I\'ve felt very hopeful and joyous and connected, but there’s a lot of vulnerability as well,” Sivan says. There’s love, sex, and heartbreak, the thrill of reemerging feelings, fleeting yet vital moments of intimacy and communication. There’s a sweaty club moment (“Rush”), balmy dance pop (“Got Me Started”—which samples Bag Raiders’ definitive 2008 hit “Shooting Stars”), gentle confessionals (“Can’t Go Back, Baby”) and sensual house (“Silly”). And it’s all told through the lens of welcome self-discovery and unapologetic, undiluted queerness. Here, he talks through the stories of each song on *Something to Give Each Other*. **“Rush”** “In the moments between Melbourne lockdowns when we were able to go out, I had these nights that were so fun, they were almost emotional. There was this overwhelming joy and euphoria. I was sober and sweating and just so grateful to be with people. And grateful for music, for life, for youth and sex and connection. So I wanted to write that moment.” **“What\'s the Time Where You Are?”** “I felt pretty emotionally dead for a while after my last relationship, and my feelings didn\'t all come back in one go. There were these little sparks I started to feel, and I was so excited when I did. I was talking to this one guy and I had a little crush for the first time in ages. At one point he messaged me saying, ‘What\'s the time where you are?’ Maybe I over-romanticized, but it was so sweet. Because he could definitely google that. But I saw it for what it was, I think: It was an effort at connection and keeping the conversation going. It sparked this idea of two people separated by a great distance, both out there living their lives, having a great time, but looking for each other in music or nights out or little texts like that.” **“One of Your Girls”** “I think this is my favorite song I\'ve ever worked on. This thing kept happening where I was being approached by guys who’d previously or historically identified as straight. They were flirting with me, saying there was something in me that they were interested in. I just felt all these different things. Firstly, I was placing them on such a pedestal. I was like, why is this so hot? And also questioning myself because I’d always end up heartbroken. I think I knew I wasn’t treating myself with the respect I deserved by being the secret or the experiment. We wrote three different choruses and ended up coming to this sad robot thing, inspired by a movie I’d seen. Even that spoke to the way I’d felt: like I was expected to be there when they wanted me, then disappear when they freaked out, then be there again when they wanted. Like this emotionless object. And yet there I was time and time again. You don\'t want to rush them through the process of figuring shit out. This isn’t me making any sort of statement—I have patience for that experience. I’m just musing to myself about it.” **“In My Room” (feat. Guitarricadelafuente)** “I met Guitarricadelafuente \[Álvaro Lafuente Calvo\] and his boyfriend in Paris at a dinner, and they were so sweet. When I got back to the hotel, I started listening to his music and I was just really, really inspired. So I messaged him that we should write sometime. We wrote the song in one day. It\'s the only collaboration on the album, and I love that it\'s with a queer artist. In my head, I\'m lying on my bed, kicking my legs, daydreaming about someone like I’m a teenager. It was a really nice way to write rather than trying to make narrative: We were both just communicating our feelings.” **“Still Got It”** “It’s about a moment where I bumped into my ex-boyfriend and realized he still had all the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place. One of my favorite lyrics on the album is ‘Said hello like an old colleague.’ It was just that weird thing where you\'re like, wow, I lived with this person, I shared so much of my life with this person, and here we are greeting each other like old colleagues. It was a moment of reflection. I love collaboration and writing with people, but sometimes it\'s really nice to just do it by yourself, say exactly what you feel and worry less about the stuff I normally love worrying about, like, ‘How many syllables is it? Does it work from a pop point of view?’” **“Can’t Go Back, Baby”** “I was pretty angry, and I\'ve never really written from an angry place. I was hurt and felt betrayed. It’s a real journey throughout the song and by the end it\'s like, ‘In the morning, I wake up with the sun across my face/In the evening, there I lay with so much love to take your place.’ That\'s not love from other people, it\'s love I have for myself, being able to show up for yourself. But sonically there’s a softness, because I still have so much care for that person, that relationship. I knew I wanted this on the album, but I was dreading writing it. When I eventually did, I was like, ‘Let\'s just record this today and then I don\'t want to look at it.’” **“Got Me Started”** “It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It was one of those moments of a spark, where someone unlocks that side of you again and you\'re like, ‘Oh, I can feel.’ I love the lyric ‘Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body/Fuck it up just like this party did tonight.’ To me, it\'s just this house party: You\'ve met someone and for whatever reason you just can’t keep your hands off each other—and how exciting it is when that happens.” **“Silly”** “We had sexiness on the album in a few different ways, but one thing we didn\'t have was *icy, cool* sexy—something that just really simmers. I was surprised by the lyrics that came. It ended up being about how someone can get you back into your feelings for them in two seconds. It almost touches on the story of ‘Still Got It.’ I\'ve sung in falsetto as a layer a lot throughout my music, but never as a lead vocal. Here, we started off with that falsetto as a layer, and I was going to track under it, but we left it alone up there. So I essentially got to duet with myself, which was so cool.” **“Honey”** “‘Honey’ started in Melbourne with \[producer\] Styalz Fuego and the Serenity Prayer. My dad taught it to me when I was a kid. One of the lines is something like ‘Give me the courage to accept things I cannot change.’ I love the idea of having these really strong feelings for someone and not knowing how to express them, and almost saying a prayer—even though I\'m very irreligious. ‘Give me the courage to say all these things I feel about you.’ It just felt very joyous, like the confetti moment at the show.” **“How to Stay With You”** “It’s really cruisy and mellow, it’s got saxophone on it. It’s about someone I met who ended up leaving, and I was a bit lost on how to stay with them, because I wanted to, but it didn’t seem possible. There was something interesting to me about putting it at the end. Throughout all the experiences and people on the album, I still have this longing and desire to find a long-term relationship. When it fades out in the outro, the last lyrics on the album are these little background vocals: ‘Starting again when I got all I wanted/Starting to feel a little bit despondent.’ I still haven\'t found the thing I\'m looking for. It doesn\'t negate these prior experiences and how beautiful they are, but I\'m still looking. I thought it was a very real way to end it. I\'m on this journey, I’m really happy and I\'m enjoying every second of it, I\'m so grateful for all the connections, and I\'m curious to see what happens next. But I don’t know what that is yet.”

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

From the very beginning of his career, Burna Boy has always moved with the disposition of a misunderstood and underappreciated virtuoso. There was the statement-making 2013 debut *L.I.F.E - Leaving an Impact for Eternity*, controversy-addressing releases like 2015’s *On a Spaceship* and 2016’s *Redemption*, and the self-assured groove of 2018’s *Outside* that recentered his journey and set the stage for further success on 2019’s era-defining, self-mythologizing *African Giant*. By the time he won a Grammy for 2020’s *Twice as Tall*, Burna Boy was already at the forefront of popular African music, regularly being referenced as one of global pop’s most incisive acts. A left turn on 2022’s emotionally charged and personally reflective *Love, Damini* has done nothing to diminish Burna’s powers, while the resounding success of his Toni Braxton-sampling 2022 hit “Last Last” has only further propped up his international profile. All of these triumphs have left Burna Boy walking in rarified air and appreciative of sticking to his convictions. In keeping with his penchant for not holding back on his most cogent thoughts, it’s no surprise that the first words uttered on his new album *I Told Them…* is a cheeky reminder to longtime detractors and onlookers. “It\'s fun to tell people something is true, and they doubt—and then they end up seeing it. There\'s no greater feeling,” Burna Boy tells Apple Music. “You can go back to my old tweets and stuff. I basically predicted everything that\'s happening now. So this is basically that.” Where *Love, Damini* was primarily a revelatory, genre-bending immersion into Burna Boy’s world, *I Told Them…* is hip-hop inspired, cocksure, and blunt, offering a glimpse at Burna’s future with backstory from his past. Whether warning haters not to be surprised by his successes on “On Form” or reeling off said successes on glitzy cuts like “Big 7” and “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” Burna is keen to make it clear that he’s in a new place, and he taps J. Cole for a withering dress-down of his critics on “Thanks.” Still adept at pulling musical influences from all over into a fully realized musical vision, Burna Boy recruits newcomer Seyi Vibez for a cinematic reimagining of street pop on “Giza.” He barely breaks a sweat swapping verses with Byron Messia on “Talibans II,” but the emotional core of *I Told Them…* comes on “If I’m Lying,” a wispy ballad where he admits to losing control at times over an alluring instrumental by Steel Banglez.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

When Luke Combs first burst onto the mainstream radar with his 2017 album *This One’s for You*, country fans found themselves wondering who this North Carolina kid with the big voice was. Four albums in, that young hopeful playing juke joints and vying for opening slots is now a full-blown country star, as well as a father. Following up 2022’s *Growin’ Up*, *Gettin’ Old* finds Combs leaning into both new roles, showing that he’s the kind of artist who isn’t content to stick with any tried-and-true formula. Accordingly, *Gettin’ Old* has a broader, bigger sound, one that incorporates more of the rock and soul Combs hinted at on earlier projects. Combs considers *Gettin’ Old* to be the start of a new era in his career, one that finds both his sound and songs maturing. “*Growin’ Up* was the last record of the tail end of my career, at that point of what my sound used to be and where it\'s evolving to,” Combs tells Apple Music. “We really did shift our focus, production-wise, as soon as that record came out. We knew we wanted this one to sound different.” The album’s centerpiece is “My Song Will Never Die,” on which Combs addresses his own mortality while celebrating the legacy and timelessness of great songs. Combs surprises with a stirring take on Tracy Chapman’s beloved “Fast Car,” which he describes as “probably \[his\] first favorite song ever.” And on standout “Fox in the Henhouse,” which he originally wrote as a bluegrass number, Combs flexes his rock muscles, for a tune that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser on the road. Below, Combs shares insight into several key tracks on *Gettin’ Old*. **“Joe”** “I was at the Opry, and it was during COVID when I was playing the Opry when nobody was there. It was empty. It was just me and Craig Morgan. And I sat down and my creative guy, Zach, was there, and they were like, ‘What\'s the name of this song or whatever?’ And he told him it was ‘The Bottle.’ And then when I played it, I said it was called ‘Joe’ because I just wanted it to jump off the page. And that was just the name that was in the song when Erik Dylan sent it to me. It was like, ‘I got a job. My name\'s Joe.’ That was the first line of the song. And so I just thought it would make people see the title and go, ‘Well, guys, what is that song about?’ I wanted people to listen to it and have to listen to it, because I think it does have a powerful message.” **“My Song Will Never Die”** “When I get onstage and sing these songs, I really want to sing with conviction. And I want people to believe what I\'m saying because it\'s the truth. And these songs are me, and I\'m very passionate about them and the way that they make me feel. I want people to know that they\'re really seeing me. I\'m not trying to sell you a crock of shit. I think if I can accomplish both those things at the same time—which is write, record, and release music that I love, and then have people listening to music that they love and that be the same thing—then we\'re doing the right thing.” **“Fast Car”** “You want to just be mega-respectful of the song. That\'s why, in that song, it\'s like, ‘Work in the market as a checkout girl.’ I didn\'t change that in my version. I really want to just do the original version of the song. It\'s weird, because you\'re doing a cover of it and you say, ‘I don\'t want to make it my own, because I just really want to shine a light on the original version.’ Because I think there\'s so many people that maybe know that song or it would be familiar to them, but they really don\'t know anything about it. When I recorded this, literally the engineer in there asked me who I wrote that song with.” **“5 Leaf Clover”** “That came to be at the tail end of COVID. And we were talking about trying to figure out how we were going to go back on tour. I was just riding around my place with my buddy Newdy, and I have a clover field up on this hill. I must have went and rode around on the Polaris twice a day, probably, just to have something to do. So we ended up in that clover field in the Polaris and turned it off. And we were just sitting out there bullshitting or whatever, talking about whatever. And I just started looking around for four-leaf clovers, and I found one. And I was like, ‘Oh man, that\'s cool. Find one.’ And then Newdy found a five-leaf clover. So I just wrote ‘five-leaf clover’ in my phone because I was like, ‘Man, how lucky do you have to be to find a five-leaf clover?’” **“Fox in the Henhouse”** “\[Dierks Bentley’s *Up on the Ridge*\], ever since I heard it, I was like, ‘Man, if I ever do get to make records one day, if I ever have the chance, I want to do a bluegrass record.’ And so I started writing that record over COVID in 2020, 2021. And that was actually one of the songs I wrote for the bluegrass record. The work tape is me and a guitar and dobro. When we went to cut this record, we just loved that song, and I was like, ‘Let\'s just see what we can do with it and not make it bluegrass at all.’ And it ended up kind of having this Black Crowes thing going on. I wouldn\'t really even call it a country song at all. I mean, it\'s just a rock song, really.”

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

By her own admission, Olivia Dean is an “extreme perfectionist.” But, one day while making her debut album, the London singer-songwriter found herself mumbling the word “messy” over and over again while playing her guitar—and unlocked something lighter within herself. “I just loved the idea of flipping ‘messy’ from being a negative word into this beautiful thing,” she tells Apple Music. “I applied that to finishing the album and it was like, ‘We’re going to keep me laughing in there’ or, ‘The piano doesn’t have to exactly be in time on that part.’ I think in an age where everybody is pretending that their life is amazing, it’s really refreshing to be like, ‘My life’s a mess. And your life’s probably a mess too.’ But that’s fine: That’s the spice of life.” The aptly titled *Messy* is a sublime debut—that “messy approach” lending it a warm, immediate feeling that often makes listening feel like you’re right inside it. The album houses the soulful, jazz-inflected, old-soul songwriting and made-for-summer-days pop that Dean has built her name on: “In the studio I’d say, ‘Can you do this one a bit more like you just had the best day of your life, but suddenly the sun is setting?’” she says. There are sculptural, string-laden ballads (“No Man”), loose instrumental moments (such as on “Ladies Room” and “Getting There”), and intimate confessionals on her mental health (“Everybody’s Crazy”) or watching an ex thrive without her (“Dangerously Easy”). It’s all anchored by Dean’s effortless vocals, and the album presents as an irresistible series of vignettes set everywhere from the girls’ bathroom at a pub to her imaginary flower shop in South London (“I Could Be a Florist”) and home, on the exquisite “Carmen”—a jubilant tribute to her grandmother who came to the UK as part of the Windrush generation. Here, Dean takes us inside *Messy*, one track at a time. **“UFO”** “I thought it was the perfect opener because it’s like, ‘Hello, everyone. You’re about to go on a journey with this shy alien who is trying to find a place to land herself. Come along.’ This was one of the earliest songs we wrote for the record—it started out as a joke, as a lot of our songs tend to. \[Producer\] Matt \[Hales\] and I were having a cup of tea, and I said, ‘It’s a bit of a sexy problem.’ He thought it was hilarious. We went back to the studio, and I was talking about Nick Drake and how I liked the guitar style of his songs. The song was written really quickly and I listened to it 20 times that evening, like, ‘This is it.’” **“Dive”** “I love the drama, and my karaoke song is ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor so I knew I wanted to have \[an intro like that\] on my record. I wrote this on a really sunny day in London and was talking about how I was ready to fall in love again and feeling open to it. We were thinking about Aretha Franklin and Carole King and all the chords that they use to make your heart feel like you’re flying on a cloud. This one took the longest to finish—because I knew it was good, that it could be an important song, that it was special. It might sound carefree but a lot of work went into it. I was working on it for a year.” **“Ladies Room”** “I was in my local pub in the girls’ bathroom and this lady said something like, ‘Girls, never go out with a man 20 years your senior.’ Then he called her and she was like, ‘I don’t want to go home but I’ve got to leave.’ I thought that was a brilliant start to a song because I’ve had that before. When I was a little younger and not as independent as I am now, \[I\] was in, to put it frankly, more toxic relationships. I would have gone home if my boyfriend was like, ‘Stay in with me,’ so I needed to write a song that was like, ‘Do whatever you want to do.’ The rest of it was inspired by Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ and how that party sound goes throughout it.” **“No Man”** “Originally this had loads of instrumentation. It was dense, with crazy drums, and I realized I wasn’t doing justice to what I was singing about, which was quite sad and vulnerable. I wanted it to feel quite \[James\] Bond-y, but I was also listening to a lot of Mac Miller’s *Circles*. I don’t want to talk about the subject matter too intensely—I feel people can get the vibe of what it’s about.” **“Dangerously Easy”** “This one is about seeing somebody you loved doing really well without you and feeling like, ‘How are they making it look so easy? Why are you so fine without me?’ But it’s not an angry song—it’s very amicable. Some of my favorite lyrics on this record are in this song. It’s got this kind of ‘Redbone’-y bassline in the bridge and I love it. The one feels quite old school to me.” **“Getting There (Interlude)”** “This was always just on the end of ‘Dangerously Easy,’ but I thought, ‘She’s got legs. She can be her own song.’ When we were recording the last bits to the album, I said to the band \[Dean made the record with her live band\], ‘When we get to the end, just go for it.’ It was the first take of what we did.” **“Danger”** “At first I thought, ‘I can’t have two songs on the same album with “danger” in. That’s not allowed.’ And then I was like, ‘Anything’s allowed.’ I had been wanting to write something fun because I’d been writing a lot of sad music. I had this complex of, ‘If something’s fun and simple then it can’t be good.’ Actually, yes, it can. I think of some songs as Tangfastics—they’re just fun sweeties that you love. And other songs are like sad muesli. You’ve got to have it, it’s good for you, but it’s not the most exciting. I definitely wanted to play with lovers rock and bossa nova, because I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff. It’s also just a classic Olivia Dean song: I will fall in love with you, but not quite.” **“The Hardest Part”** “She’s an oldie but she had to be on the album because I think this song has been very defining for me. It was written at a time when I was very sad and was trying to process letting go of a relationship that I thought was it for me—as you do when you’re young and in love. I was so invested, but had this epiphany: ‘You are not a good person for me, and I’ve changed so much, and you are not able to love the person that I’ve changed into.’ Accepting that, that’s the hardest part. I’m so proud of the lyric: ‘I was only 18/You should’ve known that I was always gonna change.’ That concept of people telling you that you’ve changed like it’s a bad thing. It’s like, ‘Yes, I have and that’s fantastic.’” **“I Could Be a Florist”** “I went to the studio and was supposed to be finishing ‘Dive,’ but I was having a little bit of an existential moment—I felt I couldn’t turn off from music. I was fantasizing about how wonderful it would be to be a florist. You could make lovely bouquets for people and bring people joy and look at flowers all day and then put the closed sign on the shop door. It came super quickly—I left the demo how it was. Now, obviously when I listen to it, \[I realize\] it’s a love song and it’s about wanting to bring flowers to people as a metaphor for love.” **“Messy”** “The last track I wrote for the album. I had this guitar part that I kept playing over and I just kept saying the word ‘messy.’ I thought, ‘What is this song about? What am I trying to say?’ Maybe it was about a relationship being messy, but I had one of those epiphany moments, like, ‘No. It’s a song to myself. I’m writing a song to tell myself I’m allowed to be messy. Your album doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be you.’” **“Everybody’s Crazy”** “I love this song, but it does also terrify me. It really puts me out there. As in, my heart on the line. But you have got to be brave. It’s all well and good for me to have songs like ‘Ladies Room’ where I’m like, ‘I’m an independent lady, you can’t tell me what to do,’ but obviously I go home and cry into my pillow sometimes. Let’s be real. For me, this song is a warm hug, a bowl of tomato soup, but then at the end it’s like you’re on mushrooms and suddenly the world’s opening up.” **“Carmen”** “Out of everything I’ve made, this felt like the thing I made most for me. It feels so specific to my life. I knew that I wanted to immortalize my grandmother forever, even when I’m gone and my great-grandkids are gone. That’s what music can do for someone. It was something that was very private at the beginning. It’s a song about her coming to the UK from Guyana as part of the Windrush generation. She got on a plane in 1963 and came over with her baby sister and completely changed her life. Then she had four kids, and they had kids and one of them is me. “I wanted this to feel like a celebration because, at the time and now, there is a lot of negativity around Windrush. I thought, ‘They need a celebration.’ The way that people from that generation loved the Queen—they needed the love back and the lyric ‘Never got a jubilee’ was me giving her that. When I was writing this song, I pictured my granny sitting on a throne, steel pans are playing and everybody’s just having a great time and eating mac and cheese at her diamond jubilee. I cried when we had the steel pan player come in and record because I just think it’s the most beautiful sound in the world—for me, it’s nostalgic for a place I’ve actually never even been to, but to have that on the record was so important. I’m so proud of this song. My granny knows it exists, but she hasn’t heard it yet. I guess I’m just nervous.”

Sam Smith’s fourth album, *Gloria*, opens with the kind of music we’ve come to expect from the British singer-songwriter: “Love Me More” is a gospel-inflected ballad celebrating the power of self-acceptance. But after that, Smith goes off script. “I wanted it to be a patchwork of pop, it’s something that I was really passionate about,” they tell Apple Music. “I want to be flipping from genre to genre to genre to genre.” *Gloria*, then, brings us sensual R&B, dazzling dance floor moments (“Lose You” is perhaps Smith’s best sad banger yet), twisting hyperpop, a dancehall-indebted earworm, and even choral music, with embraces of sex, the power of community, and queer joy and history along the way. “My aim with this record was to make sure there is not one song on this album that I don\'t like,” adds Smith. “I\'ve put so much into this record in terms of the production and the time. I became obsessed. I lived inside the music. I\'ve never worked that hard before.” There’s a confidence present that most artists reach a few albums deep, but it’s more than just the gains of experience you can hear here. Made between Suffolk, LA, and Jamaica, *Gloria* is an album of rebellion, liberation, and letting go of the past, as one of modern pop’s biggest voices unveils their most assured music—and self—yet. “I don’t want to sound cheesy, but *Gloria* for me is like when a butterfly leaves a cocoon,” says Smith. “That’s what I wanted this record to feel like all the way through. I wanted there to be strength within every single song. I feel like my true artist self has arrived in a way.” Read on as Smith delves deep into every track on *Gloria*. **“Love Me More”** “I knew I wanted to write a song that said how I was feeling. I find the whole self-love thing quite cringey. Self-love sometimes feels like a destination; with self-acceptance, every day I have to try and accept myself and show myself love. That\'s what I was trying to put across in this song. I started this album like my old music. ‘Love Me More’ is the last opportunity I was giving my older fans to come into this next stage with me. This is a song written for my fans, and every song after it is written for me.” **“No God”** “This comes from a personal story about someone in my life who I’ve lost to drastic opinions. But as me, \[songwriters and producers\] Jimmy \[Napes\] and Stargate were writing it, it became a rhetoric on a certain type of person with a god complex. It’s about the ignoring of a human being and allowing someone’s drastic politics to get in the way of caring for someone else. The magic of this song came from the production: the live playing, the backing vocals. We just picked away at it until it sounded perfect. To me, it sounds super expensive.” **“Hurting Interlude”** “I found this amazing piece: a news anchor speaking at the first-ever Gay Pride in New York. What he says in this interlude broke my heart and took me back to ‘Lose You,’ a song written about a lesbian friend who had her first queer relationship with a woman. Someone\'s first heartbreak as a queer person can be very intense because of what we do go through when it comes to love. I felt like it was the perfect quote before ‘Lose You.’” **“Lose You”** “As a queer community, we love our sad dance songs. With this album, you could dedicate every song to a pop diva of mine. ‘Love Me More’ would be Whitney, ‘No God’ would be Brandy, and ‘Lose You’ would be Robyn or George Michael. I wrote this song with some of the most amazing pop writers and it felt like a mastering of a beautifully formed pop song. The production wasn’t taking me to Berlin, though, and I needed it to take me to a German gay club. The little things we did towards the end of this song really took it there—it gives me this really Euro, unashamed, gay, chic feel. It\'s drama, drama, drama.” **“Perfect” (feat. Jessie Reyez)** “This is where sex starts to come into the record. I feel like I’ve been a bit desexualized during my career, and I was very young when I started. Being 20 years old and moving onstage in the way I would in a gay bar was petrifying. Jessie really taught me to be brave: I would say things to her in the studio and she wouldn’t laugh or feel uncomfortable. The whole concept of the song is saying, ‘I’m a hot mess,’ and feeling yourself in a really imperfect way. This song is the Rihanna moment—we worked with Stargate on it, who worked on *Rated R*, one of my favorite Rihanna records. Stargate got hold of Nuno Bettencourt, who does guitar solos on *Rated R*, and he just ripped all over the song—I love it so much.” **“Unholy” \[with Kim Petras\]** “We were in Jamaica and \[producer\] Omer Fedi was fucking around on the guitar and playing this scale, which I started singing to. Everyone in the room was really confused; they didn’t know if they liked it or not. I had someone on my mind who was pissing me off and I just had to get it out. After we got back, everyone liked the song but said, ‘This is not on brand.’ But it kept prodding at me. I said everything I needed to in the first verse, and that’s when Kim came into the picture. There were about eight guys in the studio who were trying to push Kim’s verse in one direction. We spent all day doing it that way, but then something in my gut said, ‘This is shit.’ There’s a certain humor that only a queer person can understand because we’ve been through it and we live it. And that’s what the verse needed. We needed to tease the man, we needed to make him a ‘Balenciaga daddy.’ This is the most powerful part of the album and it\'s the most powerful piece of music I\'ve ever been a part of. It’s like an exorcism.” **“How to Cry”** “This is about the same person ‘Unholy’ is about. I wanted that breath, but I also only wanted one of these moments, because this isn’t the record for super organic, stripped music. In ‘Unholy’ I’m laughing and taking the piss. But at the heart of that emotion is a very sad story. It’s also about a relationship I was in, and about how I think being an emotional person is such a strong characteristic. I really do believe it’s a superpower. So it’s a love letter to me.” **“Six Shots”** “It’s a paragraph change—after ‘How to Cry,’ this is the pre-drinks to a night. But they’re intense pre-drinks, because we start having sex. This is the first proper sex song I wrote—I just felt really freed by it. At the time, I was insanely single and that’s where the lyric ‘There’s no loving me’ comes from. I was so single that I was almost taken. I wasn’t open to love.” **“Gimme” (feat. Koffee and Jessie Reyez)** “I’m obsessed with this song—it’s possibly my favorite on the album. It’s the most sexually intense lyrics I’ve ever written, and the verse lyric is actually filthy! The song is basically about wanting the dick so much you can cry. I love dancehall music and have tried many times to write songs that have a dancehall feel. I needed to be in Jamaica to do it in a way where it felt authentic, and I’m so proud that ‘Gimme’ did that. Like a lot of the record, this song is about sharing the moment—I didn’t want to be in the song too much.” **“Dorothy’s Interlude”** “The opening quote is Divine, which is just pure sass and fabulousness. Next is Judy Garland—there are so many queer connotations with Judy, namely the famous myth that when she died, everyone congregated in New York at Stonewall and the riots started the same night. Then after that you’ve got Sylvia Rivera. It’s quite a harrowing speech at Gay Pride in New York, talking about all of the awful things that are happening in the homeless hospitals to trans people, and her own community of gay men were booing her onstage. After that it goes into RuPaul saying one of the most incredible sayings we have out there. This interlude goes through the ages.” **“I’m Not Here to Make Friends”** “This song was made with Calvin Harris, Stargate, me, and Jessie Reyez. It was a joy to make. I went on a date the night before and I was just so sick of going on dates where people treated me like a friend or just wanted to meet me because I’m Sam Smith. Even though the song has nothing to do with it, the song title is also an attitude and spirit on the record that I have: I’m done trying to please people now.” **“Gloria”** “The sound of this song is one of the most beautiful sounds I\'ve ever created. And the reason I think it’s one of my favorite songs is that I’m not on it. \[Producer\] David Odlum helped convince me to actually sing on this song. At the beginning of my career, I remember everyone telling me I was a good singer, but no one ever really gave me credit for my songwriting. And what I love about this song is it\'s not about me, it\'s about something I wrote. This song is about opening your arms to the sky and singing your song as loud as you can. And I really think that my younger self needed it. I went with this idea of, I want this to be an album for a younger me that will give me joy and hope. The lyric is incredibly deep, but it\'s also playable like a lullaby.” **“Who We Love” \[with Ed Sheeran\]** “Ed sent me this song, and I was fearful to begin with because I don’t usually take songs and make them mine. Ed and I have been friends for a long time. I’m not interested in doing an Ed collab that sounds like a hit—I wanted it to mean something. And when I heard this, I felt truly touched. I felt like it was a queer ballad anthem written from a friend. There was something so poignant and beautiful about it. Ed has personally guided me through tough times and been a friend in a very cold industry. I wanted everything about this song to feel warm.”

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

Slowdive’s self-titled 2017 comeback album—their first since 1995’s *Pygmalion*—had been propelled by the sense of momentum generated by the band’s live reunion, which began at 2014’s Primavera Sound festival in Spain. But when it was time to make a follow-up, it felt very much like starting all over again for the shoegazing pioneers who formed in Reading in England’s Thames Valley during the late ’80s. “With this one, it was more like, ‘Well, do we want to do a record? Do we need to do a record?’” singer and guitarist Neil Halstead tells Apple Music. “We had to get the momentum going again and figure out what kind of record we wanted to make. The last one was a bit more instinctive. Part of the process on this one was trying to remain just the five of us and be in the moment with it and make something that we were all into. It took a while to get to that point.” Pieced together from a foundation of electronic demos that Halstead had in 2019 sent to his bandmates—co-vocalist and guitarist Rachel Goswell, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott—*everything is alive* feels both expansive and intimate at once, with chiming indie pop intertwining with hazy dream-pop ballads and atmospheric soundscapes. “It showcases some of the different sides to Slowdive,” says Halstead. “It’s very much like the first few EPs we put out, which would always have what we thought of as a pop song on the A-side and a much more experimental or instrumental track on the B-side, the two points between which the band operated.” Exploring themes of getting older, looking both back and forward, and relationships, *everything is alive* is a mesmeric listen. Read on for Halstead’s track-by-track guide. **“shanty”** “This is probably one of the first tunes we worked on. I sent a bunch of electronic music through and this was one of them. There was a eureka moment with this track, where I was trying to keep it very electronic and then we ended up just putting some very noisy guitars on and it was a bit like, ‘Oh, OK, that works.’ I remember Rachel saying when I sent her the demo that she was listening to it a lot, and she said she was getting really excited about going in and recording with the band again. It was the first tune in terms of thinking about getting into the studio and recording again.” **“prayer remembered”** “I wrote this three days after my son Albert was born. I came home from the hospital one night and sat down at a keyboard and started playing this thing. I ended up bringing it into the Slowdive sessions quite late on just because there was something I felt we needed on the record. I had Nick and Christian and Simon play along with my original synth part, and then I took the synth out of the equation altogether. We pulled it out of the mix and added a few more bits to what was left.” **“alife”** “This started off as a very krautrock, very electronic thing. We did a version with the band and I was playing it around the house and Ingrid, my partner, started singing along to part of the song and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good. We should record that.’ The first demo has Ingrid singing the part that Rachel sings now. She has a writing credit on this—it’s the only Slowdive song where someone outside the band has a writing credit. I always thought of it as like a proper pop song—as much as Slowdive ever do pop songs. We sent it to Shawn Everett to mix and basically said, ‘Look, if you could make this sound like a cross between The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac, that would be amazing.’ I don’t know if we got there, but he was really excited about that direction.” **“andalucia plays”** “I’d written this as an acoustic tune that I was going to put on a solo record back in 2012. It’s talking about a relationship and thinking about the things that were important in that first year of that relationship. I came back to it while we were working on the Slowdive record and replayed it on an organ and then we worked on it from that point. It has an element of The Cure about it with the keyboards. Rachel didn’t want to sing on it; she was like, ‘It’s too intimate, I feel like this is a real personal song.’ I had to ask her a few times. The vocals are treated slightly different on the recording than we would normally do, they’re much closer-sounding. I think it’s nice to have it as part of a Slowdive record.” **“kisses”** “I demoed this and shied away from it for a long time because it seemed very poppy and maybe not in our world. It was, again, much more electronic. It almost sounded like a Kraftwerk song. It had the lyric ‘kisses’ in it, the only recognizable lyric. Every time I tried to sit down and write lyrics for the song, I couldn’t get away from the ‘kisses’ part. I was thinking it was a bit too light, too frivolous, but the tune just stuck around. We did so many different versions of it that didn’t quite work, and in the end we did this version. We all ended up thinking it’s a really nice addition to the record. It’s got a shiny, pop, kind of New Order-y thing happening, which we don’t do very often.” **“skin in the game”** “This is kind of a Frankenstein. It’s got a bit of another song in there and then there’s another song welded onto it, so it was a few different ideas thrown together. I liked the lyric ‘Skin in the game.’ I don’t know where I read it, I was probably reading something about investing or something stupid. I like the slightly wobbly feel to this tune, which I think is partly because some of it was taken from a very badly recorded demo on a proper four-track tape machine. Old school. It gives it a nice wobbly character.” **“chained to a cloud”** “This was called ‘Chimey One’ for three years and was one that we struggled to make sense of for a long time. I think at some point we were like, ‘Let’s forget about the verse and just work on the chorus.’ It’s a really simple idea, this song, but it hangs together around this arpeggiating keyboard riff that I think is inspired by ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. It always reminded me of that.” **“the slab”** “This was always quite heavy and dense and it took a while for us to figure out how to mix it, and I think in the end Shawn did a really good job with it. Again, it’s got almost a Cure-type vibe to it. The drums came from a different song and it was originally just a big slab of keyboards, hence the title. It remains true to its roots; it’s still got that big slab-ish kind of feel to it. I always thought the record would open with ‘shanty’ and I always thought it would end with ‘the slab.’ They felt like good bookends for the rest of the tracks.”

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

Disclosure’s *Alchemy* marks a double milestone. Not only does the Lawrence brothers’ fourth album arrive shortly after the 10th anniversary of their debut *Settle*, it also represents the UK duo’s first album with no features and no samples. That might seem like a major shift for an act that has offered a dance-pop platform to voices like Sam Smith, Lorde, and Miguel while mining classic R&B and 2-step garage for creative inspiration. But *Alchemy* proves Disclosure more than capable of holding their own as singers and songwriters at the same time that it takes them back to their roots in body-moving dance music. Newly liberated from their previous label contract, Disclosure began writing the album in 2022 after wrapping their *ENERGY* tour, and a distinct air of freedom permeates the record’s slippery rhythms and effervescent chords. They worked separately, with Guy newly married and living in Los Angeles and Howard nursing a breakup back in London—an experience of heartbreak that helps account for a pervading air of melancholy in songs like “Looking for Love” and “We Were in Love,” even while the grooves are as buoyant as anything in Disclosure’s career to date. Back in the early 2010s, Disclosure helped kick off the revival of UK garage—a fast-moving genre of underground dance that had taken the British charts by storm a decade earlier—and on *Alchemy*, they find fresh inspiration in its slinky, syncopated drum programming. But there’s nothing retro about these songs, which cast a wide stylistic net. “Looking for Love” opens the album with flickering drums and some of the most colorful chord changes in their entire discography, and “Simply Won’t Do” continues the giddy, uptempo vibe. “Higher Than Ever Before” shifts into chopped-up jungle breaks—a first for Disclosure—while the frictionless glide of “A Little Bit” draws on the uplifting spirit of Y2K-era trance. Topping it all off are some of the sharpest hooks they’ve ever written, the brothers’ voices running through a shimmering scrim of vocoder and other effects. Where once they foregrounded their featured guests, here, their voices dissolve back into the music, just one more vivid color in a dynamic album.

A decade into their career, London duo Jungle is determined to make up for lost time. Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland felt that they’d taken too long to follow up 2014’s self-titled Mercury-nominated debut, with second album *For Ever* arriving four years later. It injected their third album *Loving in Stereo*, released in 2021, with a creative restlessness, and that thrilling urgency continues on *Volcano*. “We’d just come off the road and went straight back into the studio,” Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “We got the record done between November and December 2022 and wrapped it up in January, which is one of the quickest turnarounds we’ve done. You can feel that in the music.” It’s a record that both sharpens the pair’s melodic hooks and hones their nu-disco, soulful pop swagger—pushing them further away from being a band and deeper into how they’ve always imagined themselves. “It’s going back to what is essentially a production duo,” says Lloyd-Watson. “It’s a collective—we wouldn’t be where we are without the dancers, without the incredible vocalists, without all the people that come together to make the full thing. But ultimately, it feels like bits of it are heading much more towards something like Justice or Daft Punk, more dance-y.” Exploring themes of love found, loss, heartbreak, and rediscovery, *Volcano* is also a record that insists you move to its rhythm. This is Jungle at their most vibrant and infectious. Lloyd-Watson talks us through it, track by track. **“Us Against the World”** “This starts in almost chaotic fashion. I think we like that because it bamboozles you a little bit and you can’t really work out what’s going on. It’s frantic and a bit crazy and then it settles in and takes a while to find some solid harmony that Jungle would be known for. We’re embedded deep in harmony. It’s like a breakbeat track, a little bit on edge. I suppose the track can be taken as, ‘We’re about to climb this mountain together, this volcano.’ It’s a setting-off track. It’s us against the world.” **“Holding On”** “This is one that wasn’t necessarily made for Jungle, we made it with \[Dublin DJ/producer\] Krystal Klear and \[Essex singer-songwriter/producer\] Lydia Kitto. It has a much more clubby touch to it, it’s got heavier kicks and it’s got 909 hats, which we’ve never really used. It continues that more aggy side of what we wanted to do, we wanted to have a bit more of the disco-punk element to it, à la \[the South Bronx’s early-’80s punk-funk pioneers\] ESG, something that was anti the soft, midtempo Jungle that we know and love. It’s a bit strobe-y and then eventually it releases to this refrain, which sounds like some old soul sample that we made. I suppose it’s the first time you’re like, ‘OK, this is a Jungle record. I know what’s going on here.’” **“Candle Flame” (feat. Erick the Architect)** “Track three has always been the big one for us—\[2014 breakthrough hit\] ‘Busy Earnin’’ was track three \[on their debut album\]. We had this hook for a long time. It had been sitting at 104 BPM and we eventually got a bit bored of it down at that tempo and ramped it up so you get those sped-up, soul-pitched vocals. We wanted to have something that was really fun and carefree and had this atmosphere of a party. I think ‘Candle Flame’ is about the fire and the passion in early love, essentially. Erick the Architect, of Flatbush Zombies fame, jumped on it and did a verse which reminded me of a young Snoop Dogg. It had that fiery energy and just set the thing on fire really…like a candle flame!” **“Dominoes”** “‘Dominoes’ is another song that had this old soul vibe—it was a lot slower originally, it was down at 85 BPM. ‘Dominoes’ is a metaphor for falling in love and the cataclysmic events that happen as you adapt to being deeper and deeper in love and you change your whole life. It has a sample of the \[US R&B singer\] Gloria Ann Taylor song ‘Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,’ which we took and then mixed with the vocals of our song, like this mashup thing. It’s got this cruising, The Avalanches vibe, a real summer jam. I suppose it’s the first time in the album when you get a little bit of respite and it’s not so explosive.” **“I’ve Been in Love” (feat. Channel Tres)** “This features Channel Tres and is from a session that we did a while back—basically before Channel Tres was even established as an artist. We wrote this over another song which was called ‘I’m Dying to Be in Your Arms,’ which you can hear in the middle of ‘I’ve Been in Love.’ We resampled the original track that he was on, which forms the middle eight. It tells the story of love past and the idea of coming out of that love.” **“Back on 74”** “The feeling of ‘Back on 74’ is a nostalgic one, it’s that feeling of having this place of your life where you grew up, where you had these really fond memories. 74 is a fictitious thing, but for us it’s like 74th Avenue or 74th Street or something, where, in your imagination or as a kid, you were playing out on the street. You’ve gone back to this place and it’s giving you this really nostalgic feeling but everything’s not quite the same. You’ve come out of something on ‘I’ve Been in Love’ and through ‘Back on 74,’ you have this desire to go home, back to a place that felt safe.” **“You Ain’t No Celebrity” (feat. Roots Manuva)** “This is probably the most raw and honest track on the record, a warning to people in your life that think they’re a bit of a princess or a bit of a diva—when they become demanding or a little bit self-righteous or a little bit expectant of certain things to fall their way. Roots Manuva was maybe relating to that feeling. He had these lyrics which were originally on another track, something we did with him way back in 2016 or something. He had these almost like nursery-rhyme, Mr Motivator-style hooks that weren’t even a verse, almost like this mantra. It explains the compromise that you have to have in a relationship with somebody, the push and pull, over easy and easy over, a constant back and forth.” **“Coming Back”** “This is a continuation of ‘You Ain’t No Celebrity’ but it’s a little bit more of a celebration. It takes the resentment and the anger and turns it into this more cheeky, throwaway, carnival vibe. It starts off with these shouted vocals, like, ‘I don’t miss you,’ these realizations about yourself, and the chorus goes on to say you keep coming back for more—once you’ve let go of somebody, somebody keeps wanting more from you. It explores the idea of expectation in relationships, but we end up with this almost carnival ending where everybody’s joining in, getting through it through fun.” **“Don’t Play” (feat. Mood Talk)** “‘Don’t Play’ is a sample from ‘Faith Is the Key,’ a really rare record by Enlightment, a Washington soul and gospel outfit. They put this record out in ’84 but then the record plant basically went under and their distributor went under, which made this record quite valuable, a holy grail for collectors. It surfaced again in 2000 and now copies are going for about £800. It had this amazing little hook in it and my cousin, who is Mood Talk, put this beat together and sampled it. We featured him on the record and we sang over the sample. ‘Don’t Play’ is, ‘Stop playing these games, I’m not bothered.’ That message can be applied at the beginning and it can be applied at the end of a relationship. There are always games on the in and the out…” **“Every Night”** “This is fun and guitar-based. We really wanted to make a song without a snare drum. It’s a fun song, a positive message about love, and it’s got gospel influences to some extent. It’s a bit of a party.” **“PROBLEMZ”** “This came out originally in 2022 and I suppose in some way, with \[its double A-side\] ‘GOOD TIMES,’ was the blueprint for the sound of the record. We left ‘GOOD TIMES’ off the record because it didn’t feel like it was right, it didn’t really feel like the production or the vibe was quite where this record was. But ‘PROBLEMZ’ is one of our favorite bits of music we’ve ever made and we didn’t want to leave it as some B-side. It’s got Latin American vibes and feels to it, especially in the flutes and the swing of the music, a classic disco feel. At the end, it goes to this place that’s almost like musical theater with the strings.” **“Good at Breaking Hearts”** “This is the first traditional ballad of the record. It’s like, ‘I’m only good at making mistakes—a bit of a juxtaposition in that you are only good at breaking hearts.’ It features \[London singer-songwriter\] JNR Williams and 33.3—which is mine and Lydia’s new project. JNR has an amazing voice and I’ve been working with him for two or three years, writing loads of songs with him. This is a song that we made for his album but he was like, ‘I don’t want it,’ and then as soon as it was done, he was like, ‘Oh, I wish I’d taken this!’ I said, ‘You should have trusted me, man!’ It’s a beautiful song. His voice has got touches of Nina Simone and Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder to him. He’s got an amazing voice.” **“Palm Trees”** “We made this out in LA originally. It was about this idea that you could escape to this place, like holiday-themed, ‘Here we come, palm trees!’ That feeling of ‘I’m just going to escape this and I want to go somewhere hot and I want to go somewhere where my troubles don’t affect me and I can leave all this stuff behind.’ It’s told through this story of a girl going to a club and taking a drug that sends her on this wild space disco trip.” **“Pretty Little Thing” (feat. Bas)** “This was something that got made in the same chunk of time in which ‘PROBLEMZ’ and ‘GOOD TIMES’ were made, and fans would know that it’s actually on the end of the video for ‘GOOD TIMES/PROBLEMZ’—on the credits we ran a little snippet of ‘Pretty Little Thing.’ It’s a ballad, a chance to reflect on moments and reflect on the old experience. \[Queens-via-Paris rapper\] Bas jumped on this and told his own story, which weirdly made sense of the whole thing anyway. It was serendipity.”

blink-182’s ninth album—and first in 12 years with guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge in the lineup—is far from a self-satisfied victory lap. Even after all these years, the band’s irrepressible cheekiness animates their insouciant riffs, whirlwind drums, and yelped vocals. They may be elder statesmen of punk rock at this point, but they’re still kicking against anyone who might get in their way. The reunion of DeLonge with bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker (who produced *ONE MORE TIME...*) grew out of the members dropping their past differences in the wake of Hoppus’ cancer diagnosis. “I feel like there’s a real sense of brotherhood with us,” DeLonge told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe during a full-band interview. “Like any brothers, you have your little spats over the years, and you grow apart. You come back together. You’ve always got a foundation, you’re connected. You’re still inseparable energetically.” That connection is apparent throughout *ONE MORE TIME...*, which Barker calls “very collaborative.” It calls back to blink’s past at its outset, opening with the speedy “ANTHEM PART 3”—the third part of a trilogy that dates back to the band’s *Enema of the State* era, although this time out, things are more optimistic than the angst-filled first two installments: “If I fall, on some nails/If I win or set sail/I won’t fail, I won’t fail,” DeLonge wails as the song comes crashing to an end. *ONE MORE TIME...* has other moments of introspection: The title track is a very blink-182 take on a power ballad, with DeLonge and Hoppus musing about life being too short to not get over past differences. The anthemic “WHEN WE WERE YOUNG” turns the old phrase about youth being wasted on the young into fuel for one last trip to the mosh pit and closing track “CHILDHOOD” pivots on the always pertinent question, “What’s going on with me?” Not that *ONE MORE TIME...* is exclusively built on self-affirmations and serious business. “DANCE WITH ME” opens with a gag about self-pleasure before jumping off into a peppy chronicle of lust, while the bouncy “EDGING” channels love-’em-leave-’em brashness into a giddy power-pop jam. The brief interlude “TURN THIS OFF!” manages to channel gags about bad sex and old scolds into 23 seconds of blissful riffing. *ONE MORE TIME...* represents a new era of blink-182, although the most important aspect of the music Barker, DeLonge, and Hoppus make remains the same: “Every single time that we’ve just put our heads down and done our own thing,” said Hoppus, “and write music that the three of us love, that’s important to us—it has served us well.”

“No, I\'m not the same/I think I done changed,” Janelle Monáe raps with a swagger on “Float,” the opener for her fourth LP, *The Age of Pleasure*. Over powerful brass—courtesy of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80—and heavy-lidded 808s, the singer-songwriter introduces listeners to another side of herself where she embraces the present. “Those lyrics for \'Float,\' I was like, I have to put this out now,” she tells Apple Music. “This is exactly, how do I honor how I\'m feeling and who I am now. I\'m not thinking about the future, but right now, because this is all we have right now.” Where Monáe\'s previous records were character-driven—set in a complex futuristic world filled with androids—and explored themes about power, race, and humanity, *The Age of Pleasure* highlights a new era of liberation that sheds her Afrofuturist persona in favor of an unmasked exploration of her own sensuality and deservedness to feel good above all else. Monáe creates a safe space within the album\'s 14 tracks where people can relax into themselves and express their queer identities, sexuality, and unapologetic Blackness. “We had an Everyday People Wondaland party, and I was like, *Oh, this is who I want to make music for*,” she says. “This moment right here, I want to make the soundtrack to this lifestyle. They get it. This is what we fight to protect. All of my work that centers around protecting my communities that I\'m a part of, from the LGBTQIA+ communities to being Black to all of that.” *The Age of Pleasure* is a love letter to the Pan-African diaspora. Monáe trades in her previous albums\' New Wave indie-electronic beats for an effortless fusion of jazz, dancehall, reggae, trap, and Afrobeats. The first half features tightly produced jazz- and funk-inspired tempos and rhythms over which she flexes her accomplishments (“Champagne Shit”) and proudly celebrates herself (“Float,” “Phenomenal,” “Haute”). The album\'s second half switches gears with midtempo, reggae-influenced sounds and Monáe indulging her carnal desires. “I like lipstick on my neck/Hands around my waist so you know what\'s coming next/I wanna feel your lips on mine/I just wanna feel/A little tongue, we don\'t have a long time,” she sings on “Lipstick Lover,” a seductive, summery groove that is a joyous celebration of queer Black sexual liberation. She uses water metaphors to underscore her euphoric pleasure-seeking on “The Rush” and “Water Slide,” while “Only Have Eyes 42” is an ode to polyamory, with more than one lover at the center of Monáe\'s affections. Ultimately, on *The Age of Pleasure*, Monáe taps into her “free-ass motherfucking spirit,” as she calls it, and delivers an album that honors the space that she\'s currently in—unabashed and proud of who she is. “My friends have gotten an opportunity to see a different side of me that nobody gets to see, and this album, this moment that I\'m having, I\'m allowing myself to show that version of Janelle that friends get to see all the time,” she says. “I want to own all of me and be all of me.”

“*IRL* is such a broad album title,” Mahalia says of her second studio album. “I can go anywhere, essentially, and write anything, because it’s all about being present in real life. And it was nice to be able to create in different rooms again for this album, because I get inspired differently by my surroundings—especially what’s outside the window.” On 2020 EP *Isolation Tapes*, the singer displayed her central coping mechanism for all issues: penning revealingly emotive songs. “I think I have a great tone and I love my singing voice, but I’ve never been able to do all of the tricks and flips a lot of other R&B artists can do,” she says. “So songwriting always felt like my superpower. But I was being put into rooms with different co-writers at an age when I was still developing creatively. I think, eventually, I just lost confidence in my ability.” Mahalia celebrates the team that restored her confidence on *IRL*. Executive producer JD. Reid and songwriters Max Pope and Ben Hart—the latter becoming her partner during the summer 2020 lockdown—have helped add an edge to Mahalia’s poetic songwriting. Beyond this core team, the album’s 13 tracks look to something bigger as Mahalia’s most collaborative release to date. Linkups with rappers Kojey Radical and Stormzy enthrall on the ’90s-inspired “Wassup” and slow-burning ballad “November” respectively, while childhood hero JoJo jumps on breakup anthem (it’s not a Mahalia album without one) “Cheat.” But perhaps the most important person on Team Mahalia? That’s easy. “In real life, I’m now most myself around my therapist,” she says, of the professional she started meeting regularly in 2020 as the effects of a music career that began at 13 started to weigh heavy. “That makes me sound really problematic—but I think that’s the truth. I probably don’t make this album without her.” Here, Mahalia takes us through each track on *IRL*. **“Ready”** “This is really a letter to myself to say: ‘No matter what happens, I’m ready for this. I chose this.’ I was trying to figure out the intro for ages. I still remember the feeling of ‘Yep, this is it’ on my first record \[*Love and Compromise*\], when we wrote ‘Hide Out,’ but I just couldn’t figure it out here until I was playing Frank Ocean’s ‘Seigfried’ a lot. Frank is really fantastic at creating atmosphere and placing a really incredible, catchy lyric and melody on top of it. I wanted something like that to express this feeling of being here now with all the information I need. I’m ready.” **“In My Bag”** “This was the moment of the process where I genuinely felt locked in. When you start writing a record you can feel lost for a good few months; trying to figure out what’s next, or what’s the string that ties everything together? But when I came to this song, I realized, ‘I’m here, and I’ve worked hard for this.’” **“Terms and Conditions”** “In the past, I’ve always made music from the angle of a single woman figuring out the \[dating\] world. For this record, I’ve been in a long-term relationship for three years, and it’s almost refreshing that I can talk about it now. This is the perfect way to state where I’m at right now. It’s the last song we wrote for the album. Before this, I genuinely thought we were finished, until I got into a session with \[London production duo\] The Elements and RAYE. In a way, we almost wrote this song backwards. RAYE came in with just a title, and we decided to brainstorm ideas and the whole concept from there. Working with her was great because we’re also \[good friends\]. It’s a bit like playing tennis: knocking it back and forth, seeing where we’ll both end up eventually.” **“In My Head” (feat. Joyce Wrice)** “The reference that \[London producer and DJ\] JD. Reid and I had down for this one was \[Drake’s 2011 track\] ‘Marvins Room.’ There’s something about the soft \[drum\] beat of this track that reminds me of that *Take Care*-era Drake. I wrote this with my boyfriend \[Ben Hart\] and it was really easy as we both rooted this in our past relationships—when you’re with someone you desperately want to be with but you just can’t anymore. This is about making that tough decision to leave.” **“Cheat” (feat. JoJo)** “This is the only record I’ve ever put out that I haven’t written. And, initially, I was fearful of putting it out \[as a single\]. I definitely didn’t want to tell my parents, who are both songwriters and have always taken *huge* pride in the fact that I write my own music. But it was nice for me to let go of my stubbornness and allow others to create for me. This was written by \[London singer-songwriter\] Ryan Ashley and MNEK, who I’ve known since I was about 14. When I played \[his reference track\], I was just obsessed with it. I could not get the song out of my head, and it just felt like the perfect addition to this pool of music.” **“November” (feat. Stormzy)** “I wrote this with my partner, and it came to us pretty easily. It’s a love song about one another. I remember looking at each other with this giddy look of excitement in our eyes when we decided to send it to Stormzy. There’s a song on his second album \[*Heavy Is the Head*\] called ‘Lessons’ that I love. And when \[2023 album\] *This Is What I Mean* dropped at the time of writing this, we got to hear him singing on so many of the songs—and we felt like, why not? He’s deep in his singing bag right now.” **“Hey Stranger”** “This one’s very personal. I literally wrote this on my bed—about people that hit you up every few months just to say, ‘Hey stranger.’ There was a guy, I suppose he was my high school sweetheart, and for years after we left school, every few months he would message me just that. It became this ongoing joke. Each time he’d do it, I would feel this flutter in my stomach because we were the two kids that never got to be together. This is a song that I should have written years ago, because that’s when it all happened. But I feel like I never knew how to write it, as he was always quite a special person for me. So this is the right time to get it out.” **“Isn’t It Strange?”** “One day I said to my therapist, ‘I still don’t know how I got here.’ I was this kid who grew up in a tiny town \[in Leicestershire\], who used to go to the park on Fridays and sip on a bottle of Glen’s \[vodka\] with my mates, smoke roll-ups, and watch the football. When my friends would finish work, we’d hang out in the Midland pub and sink pints. I was a really normal kid. Sometimes being in a city like London, going to expensive restaurants and big events, drinking nice cocktails…all of that stuff, it just feels so far removed from where I’m from and how I grew up. Writing this track made me really think about how being this person now instead of that person *really* makes me feel.” **“It’s Not Me, It’s You” (feat. DESTIN CONRAD)** “As soon as I wrote this record, I knew this is the one I wanted to ask Destin to be on. The first time that I came across him was actually on \[defunct video platform\] Vine, back when I was in sixth form. He was a famous Viner, I guess. He posted a little bit of him singing online, and everybody went crazy for it. After that he went quiet. I became completely obsessed in lockdown when he put out his debut EP \[in 2021\], *COLORWAY*. This track feels much more in the kind of traditional R&B world than stuff here, and I just knew he was going to ride it exactly how I wanted.” **“Wassup” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “I can just hear it blasting over the speakers at the barbecue. It’s a song that makes me feel quite happy, even though the subject matter is essentially me saying to a guy, ‘If you don’t fix stuff, I’m going to let every man in this room say hello to me!’” **“Lose Lose”** “I just find this song really sad. I’ve always written breakup songs or sad songs because a situation hasn’t ended in the way I want it to. But going through this process with a partner means different topics and different stories. This track is about questioning if we we’re going to stay together. We actually wrote half of it together, and I finished the rest on my own. Which I probably needed to do so that I could get out everything that I wanted to say.” **“Goodbyes”** “This song started as an acoustic track, which made it feel desperately upsetting. So I said to JD, ‘How would you feel about turning it into a soft dance record? I’m not talking “oontz, oontz,” just give me something that makes me feel like I could move my head.’ Then we created that little moment where the guitar fades and it drops into the beat. It’s the reason why I love this song because that for me explains the ups and downs of heartbreak. One minute you’re crying. Next minute you’re dancing. Then you’re sipping a glass of wine. Next minute you’re dancing and then crying again.” **“IRL”** “This is a very reflective song. On my career, my family, and everything that I want out of life. But I just didn’t know where it was going to fit on the record, because that’s not really what I usually talk about. So I held it back for a while. Then I made the *Letter to Ur Ex* EP \[in 2022\] and it didn’t fit, so I saved the track. Soon after, my manager hit me on WhatsApp asking if we could save ‘IRL’ for the album? And I replied, ‘Maybe we should we call the album *IRL*?’”

The band might not actually exist, but *AURORA* is a very real ’70s-inspired classic-rock record. This soundtrack to the television adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 best-selling novel features original songs performed by the show\'s titular band (which includes Elvis Presley’s granddaughter and Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter Riley Keough). Blake Mills recruited contemporary artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford, and actual ’70s California-rock icon Jackson Browne to craft the songs, stacked with vocal harmonies and choral melodies. The similarities to Fleetwood Mac are not meant to be subtle in the plot or the music—“Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)” even kicks off with a riff that recalls “The Chain.” There’s the rocking kiss-off “More Fun to Miss,” which would feel at home on the Los Angeles strip in that particular era. “The River” offers a more Laurel Canyon approach.