If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”
The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.
Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"
You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.
Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”
AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.
“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”
clipping.\'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019\'s *There Existed an Addiction to Blood* by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes\' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop (\"Say the Name\" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while \"Eaten Alive\" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of \"Make Them Dead\"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent \"Pain Everyday\"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs\' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today\'s modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the \"final girl\" cliché on its head on the uptempo \"’96 Neve Campbell,\" while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning \"Looking Like Meat.\" Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record\'s many horrors. **Say the Name** William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about *Candyman*. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it\'s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That\'s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there\'s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, *Candyman* already does that for you. It\'s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” **’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)** Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn\'t clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that\'s a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: \"We didn\'t have our *Halloween*, *Friday the 13th* slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed\'s lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There\'s a Benny the Butcher song called \'’97 Hov,\' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that\'s the vibe you\'re going for. So some of the suggestions were like, \'’79 Jamie Lee Curtis\' or \'’82 Heather Langenkamp.\' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a *Scream* reference, \'’96 Neve Campbell\' made more sense.” **Something Underneath** DD: “There\'s a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we\'d work all day and then I\'d go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn\'t stand the vocal performance on. It\'s obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” **Make Them Dead** WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let\'s do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let\'s try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There\'s something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it\'s ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” **She Bad** WH: “That\'s our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn\'t a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It\'s mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I\'ve been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I\'m just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” **Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)** WH: “It\'s a joke about Alvin Lucier\'s beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” **Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)** DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don\'t write whole rap songs in 7/8. It\'s not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it\'s all down, I can\'t hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it\'s in 7/8, it\'s about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” **Check the Lock** WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” **Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9)** DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn\'t going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don\'t work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” **Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)** DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey \[Hussle\] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it\'s like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn\'t know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That\'s why it\'s called \'Eaten Alive,\' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” **Body for the Pile (with Sickness)** WH: “It already came out \[in 2016\]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called *NOISE*. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren\'t going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it\'s out and it\'s done.’ We looked around and I don\'t know, that comp isn\'t really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” **Enlacing** WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on *Splendor & Misery*, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” **Secret Piece** WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended *midcity* with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended *CLPPNG* with a John Cage piece, and then *There Existed* ends with Annea Lockwood\'s \'Piano Burning.\' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it\'s dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you\'re safe, right? The end of *Friday the 13th* one, the sun comes up and she\'s in the little boat, but that doesn\'t end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like *Friday the 13th*.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”
“My music is not as collaborative as it’s been in the past,” Jeff Parker tells Apple Music. “I’m not inviting other people to write with me. I’m more interested in how people\'s instrumental voices can fit into the ideas I’m working on.” As his career has evolved, the jazz guitarist and member of post-rock band Tortoise has become more comfortable writing compositions as a solitary exercise. While 2016\'s *The New Breed* featured a host of contributors, *Suite for Max Brown* finds the Los Angeles-based player eager to move away from the delirious funk-jazz of earlier works and towards something more unified and focused on repetition and droning harmonies. “I used to ask my collaborators to bring as much of the songwriting to the compositions as I do. Now, I’m just trying to prove to myself that I can do it on my own.” Parker handles most of the instruments on *Max Brown*, but familiar faces pop up throughout. The opening track, “Build a Nest,” features vocals from Parker’s daughter, Ruby, and “Gnarciss” includes performances from Makaya McCraven on the drums, Rob Mazurek on trumpet, and Josh Johnson on alto saxophone. Other frequenters of Parker’s orbit, like drummer Jamire Williams, appear throughout. But *Max Brown* is Parker’s record first and foremost, and the LP finds him less willing to give in to jazz’s typical demands of dynamic improvisation and community-oriented song-building. Here, Parker asserts himself as an ecstatic solo voice, where on earlier albums the soft-spoken musician may have been more willing to give way to his fellow bandmates. *Suite for Max Brown* is an ambitious sonic experiment that succeeds in its moves both big and small. “I like when music is able to enhance the environment of everyday life,” Parker says. “I would like people to be able to find themselves within the music.” Above all, *Suite for Max Brown* pays homage to the most important figures in Parker’s life. *The New Breed*, which was finished shortly after Parker’s father passed away, took its title from a store his father owned; *Max Brown* is derived from his mother’s nickname, and Parker felt an urgent desire to honor her while she was still able to hear it. “My mother has always been really supportive and super proud of the work I’ve done,” he says. “I wanted to dedicate an album to her while she’s still alive to see the results. She loves it, which means so much.” It’s an ode to his mother’s ambition, and a record that stands in awe of her achievements, even though they’re quite different from Jeff’s. “She had a stable job and collected a 401(k). My career as a musician is 180 degrees the opposite of that, but I’m still inspired by her work ethic.”
“I’m always looking for ways to be surprised,” says composer and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Parker as he explains the process, and the thinking, behind his new album, Suite for Max Brown, released via a new partnership between the Chicago–based label International Anthem and Nonesuch Records. “If I sit down at the piano or with my guitar, with staff paper and a pencil, I’m eventually going to fall into writing patterns, into things I already know. So, when I make music, that’s what I’m trying to get away from—the things that I know.” Parker himself is known to many fans as the longtime guitarist for the Chicago–based quintet Tortoise, one of the most critically revered, sonically adventurous groups to emerge from the American indie scene of the early nineties. The band’s often hypnotic, largely instrumental sound eludes easy definition, drawing freely from rock, jazz, electronic, and avant-garde music, and it has garnered a large following over the course of nearly thirty years. Aside from recording and touring with Tortoise, Parker has worked as a side man with many jazz greats, including Nonesuch labelmate Joshua Redman on his 2005 Momentum album; as a studio collaborator with other composer-musicians, including Makaya McCraven, Brian Blade, Meshell N’Degeocello, his longtime friend (and Chicago Underground ensemble co-founder) Rob Mazurek; and as a solo artist. Suite for Max Brown is informally a companion piece to The New Breed, Parker’s 2016 album on International Anthem, which London’s Observer honored as the best jazz album of the year, declaring that “no other musician in the modern era has moved so seamlessly between rock and jazz like Jeff Parker. As guitarist for Chicago post-rock icons Tortoise, he’s taken the group in new and challenging directions that have kept them at the forefront of pop creativity for the last twenty years. As of late, however, Parker has established himself as one of the most formidable solo talents in modern jazz.” Though Parker collaborates with a coterie of musicians under the group name The New Breed, theirs is by no means a conventional “band” relationship. Parker is very much a solo artist on Suite for Max Brown. He constructs a digital bed of beats and samples; lays down tracks of his own on guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion, and occasionally voice; then invites his musician friends to play and improvise over his melodies. But unlike a traditional jazz session, Parker doesn’t assemble a full combo in the studio for a day or two of live takes. His accompanists are often working alone with Parker, reacting to what Parker has provided them, and then Parker uses those individual parts to layer and assemble into his final tracks. The process may be relatively solitary and cerebral, but the results feel like in-the-moment jams—warm-hearted, human, alive. Suite for Max Brown brims with personality, boasting the rhythmic flow of hip hop and the soulful swing of jazz. “In my own music I’ve always sought to deal with the intersection of improvisation and the digital era of making music, trying to merge these disparate elements into something cohesive,” Parker explains. “I became obsessed maybe ten or fifteen years ago with making music from samples. At first it was more an exercise in learning how to sample and edit audio. I was a big hip-hop fan all my life, but I never delved into the technical aspects of making that music. To keep myself busy, I started to sample music from my own library of recordings, to chop them up, make loops and beats. I would do it in my spare time. I could do it when I was on tour—in the van or on an airplane, at a soundcheck, whenever I had spare time I was working on this stuff. After a while, as you can imagine, I had hours and hours of samples I had made and I hadn’t really done anything with them “So I made The New Breed based off these old sample-based compositions and mixed them with improvising,” he continues. “There was a lot of editing, a lot of post-production work that went into that. That’s in a nutshell how I make a lot of my music; it’s a combination of sampling, editing, retriggering audio, and recording it, moving it around and trying to make it into something cohesive—and make it music that someone would enjoy listening to. With Max Brown, it’s evolved. I played a lot of the music myself. It’s me playing as many of the instruments as I could. I engineered most it myself at home or during a residency I did at the Headlands Center for the Arts [in Sausalito, California] about a year ago.” His New Breed band-mates and fellow travelers on Max Brown include pianist-saxophonist Josh Johnson; bassist Paul Bryan, who co-produced and mixed the album with Parker; piccolo trumpet player Rob Mazurek, his frequent duo partner; trumpeter Nate Walcott, a veteran of Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes; drummers Jamire Williams, Makaya McCraven, and Jay Bellerose, Parker’s Berklee School of Music classmate; cellist Katinka Klejin of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and even his seventeen-year-old daughter Ruby Parker, a student at the Chicago High School of the Arts, who contributes vocals to opening track, “Build A Nest.” Ruby’s presence at the start is fitting, since Suite for Max Brown is a kind of family affair: “That’s my mother’s maiden name. Maxine Brown. Everybody calls her Max. I decided to call it Suite for Max Brown. The New Breed became a kind of tribute to my father because he passed away while I was making the album. The New Breed was a clothing store he owned when I was a kid, a store in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I was born. I thought it would be nice this time to dedicate something to my mom while she’s still here to see it. I wish that my father could have been around to hear the tribute that I made for him. The picture on the cover of Max Brown is of my mom when she was nineteen.” There is a multi-generational vibe to the music too, as Parker balances his contemporary digital explorations with excursions into older jazz. Along with original compositions, Parker includes “Gnarciss,” an interpretation of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” and John Coltrane’s “After the Rain” (from his 1963 Impressions album). Parker recalls, “I was drawn to jazz music as a kid. That was the first music that really resonated with me once I got heavily into music. When I was nine or ten years old, I immediately gravitated to jazz because there were so many unexpected things. Jazz led me into improvising, which led me into experimenting in a general way, into an experimental process of making music.” Coltrane is a touchstone in Parker’s musical evolution. In fact, Parker recalls, he inadvertently found himself on a new musical path one night about fifteen years ago when he was deejaying at a Chicago bar and playing ‘Trane: “I used to deejay a lot when I lived in Chicago. This was before Serrato and people deejaying with computers. I had two records on two turntables and a mixer. I was spinning records one night and for about ten minutes I was able to perfectly synch up a Nobukazu Takemura record with the first movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and it had this free jazz, abstract jazz thing going on with a sequenced beat underneath. It sounded so good. That’s what I’m trying to do with Max Brown. It’s got a sequenced beat and there are musicians improvising on top or beneath the sequenced drum pattern. That’s what I was going for. Man vs machine. “It’s a lot of experimenting, a lot of trial and error,” he admits. “I like to pursue situations that take me outside myself, where the things I come up with are things I didn’t really know I could do. I always look at this process as patchwork quilting. You take this stuff and stitch it together until a tapestry forms.” —Michael Hill
Adrianne Lenker had an entire year of touring planned with her indie-folk band Big Thief before the pandemic hit. Once the tour got canceled, Lenker decided to go to Western Massachusetts to stay closer to her sister. After ideas began to take shape, she decided to rent a one-room cabin in the Massachusetts mountains to write in isolation over the course of one month. “The project came about in a really casual way,” Lenker tells Apple Music. “I later asked my friend Phil \[Weinrobe, engineer\] if he felt like getting out of the city to archive some stuff with me. I wasn\'t thinking that I wanted to make an album and share it with the world. It was more like, I just have these songs I want to try and record. My acoustic guitar sounds so warm and rich in the space, and I would just love to try and make something.” Having gone through an intense breakup, Lenker began to let her emotions flow through the therapy of writing. Her fourth solo LP, simply titled *songs* (released alongside a two-track companion piece called *instrumentals*), is modest in its choice of words, as this deeply intimate set highlights her distinct fingerpicking style over raw, soul-searching expressions and poignant storytelling motifs. “I can only write from the depths of my own experiences,” she says. “I put it all aside because the stuff that became super meaningful and present for me was starting to surface, and unexpectedly.” Let Lenker guide you through her cleansing journey, track by track. **two reverse** “I never would have imagined it being the first track, but then as I listened, I realized it’s got so much momentum and it also foreshadows the entire album. It\'s one of the more abstract ones on the record that I\'m just discovering the meaning of it as time goes on, because it is a little bit more cryptic. It\'s got my grandmother in there, asking the grandmother spirit to tell stories and being interested in the wisdom that\'s passed down. It\'s also about finding a path to home and whatever that means, and also feeling trapped in the jail of the body or of the mind. It\'s a multilayered one for me.” **ingydar** “I was imagining everything being swallowed by the mouth of time, and just the cyclical-ness of everything feeding off of everything else. It’s like the simple example of a body decomposing and going into the dirt, and then the worm eating the dirt, and the bird eating the worm, and then the hawk or the cat eating the bird. As something is dying, something is feeding off of that thing. We\'re simultaneously being born and decaying, and that is always so bewildering to me. The duality of sadness and joy make so much sense in that light. Feeling deep joy and laughter is similar to feeling like sadness in a way and crying. Like that Joni Mitchell line, \'Laughing and crying, it\'s the same release.\'” **anything** “It\'s a montage of many different images that I had stored in my mind from being with this person. I guess there\'s a thread of sweetness through it all, through things as intense as getting bit by a dog and having to go to the ER. It\'s like everything gets strung together like when you\'re falling in love; it feels like when you\'re in a relationship or in that space of getting to know someone. It doesn\'t matter what\'s happening, because you\'re just with them. I wanted to encapsulate something or internalize something of the beauty of that relationship.” **forwards beckon rebound** “That\'s actually one of my favorite songs on the album. I really enjoy playing it. It feels like a driving lullaby to me, like something that\'s uplifting and motivating. It feels like an acknowledgment of a very flawed part of humanness. It\'s like there\'s both sides, the shadow and the light, deciding to hold space for all of it as opposed to rejecting the shadow side or rejecting darkness but deciding to actually push into it. When we were in the studio recording that song, this magic thing happened because I did a lot of these rhythms with a paintbrush on my guitar. I\'m just playing the guitar strings with it. But it sounded like it was so much bigger, because the paintbrush would get all these overtones.” **heavy focus** “It\'s another love song on the album, I feel. It was one of the first songs that I wrote when I was with this person. The heavy focus of when you\'re super fixated on somebody, like when you\'re in the room with them and they\'re the only one in the room. The kind when you\'re taking a camera and you\'re focusing on a picture and you\'re really focusing on that image and the way it\'s framed. I was using the metaphor of the camera in the song, too. That one feels very bittersweet for me, like taking a portrait of the spirit of the energy of the moment because it\'s the only way it lasts; in a way, it\'s the only way I\'ll be able to see it again.” **half return** “There’s this weird crossover to returning home, being around my dad, and reverting back to my child self. Like when you go home and you\'re with your parents or with siblings, and suddenly you\'re in the role that you were in all throughout your life. But then it crosses into the way I felt when I had so much teenage angst with my 29-year-old angst.” **come** “This thing happened while we were out there recording, which is that a lot of people were experiencing deaths from far away because of the pandemic, and especially a lot of the elderly. It was hard for people to travel or be around each other because of COVID. And while we were recording, Phil\'s grandmother passed away. He was really close with her. I had already started this song, and a couple of days before she died, she got to hear the song.” **zombie girl** “There’s two tracks on the record that weren\'t written during the session, and this is one of them. It\'s been around for a little while. Actually, Big Thief has played it a couple of times at shows. It was written after this very intense nightmare I had. There was this zombie girl with this really scary energy that was coming for me. I had sleep paralysis, and there were these demons and translucent ghost hands fluttering around my throat. Every window and door in the house that I was staying in was open and the people had just become zombies, and there was this girl who was arched and like crouched next to my bed and looking at me. I woke up absolutely terrified. Then the next night, I had this dream that I was with this person and we were in bed together and essentially making love, but in a spirit-like way that was indescribable. It was like such a beautiful dream. I was like really close with this person, but we weren\'t together and I didn\'t even know why I was having that dream, but it was foreshadowing or foretelling what was to come. The verses kind of tell that story, and then the choruses are asking about emptiness. I feel like the zombie, the creature in the dream, represents that hollow emptiness, which may be the thing that I feel most avoidant of at times. Maybe being alone is one of the things that scares me most.” **not a lot, just forever** “The ‘not a lot’ in the title is the concept of something happening infinitely, but in a small quantity. I had never had that thought before until James \[Krivchenia, Big Thief drummer\] brought it up. We were talking about how something can happen forever, but not a lot of it, just forever. Just like a thin thread of something that goes eternally. So maybe something as small as like a bird shedding its feather, or like maybe how rocks are changed over time. Little by little, but endlessly.” **dragon eyes** “That one feels the most raw, undecorated, and purely simple. I want to feel a sense of belonging. I just want a home with you or I just want to feel that. It\'s another homage to love, tenderness, and grappling with my own shadows, but not wanting to control anyone and not wanting to blame anyone and wanting to see them and myself clearly.” **my angel** “There is this guardian angel feeling that I\'ve always had since I was a kid, where there\'s this person who\'s with me. But then also, ‘Who is my angel? Is it my lover, is it part of myself? Is it this material being that is truly from the heavens?’ I\'ve had some near-death experiences where I\'m like, \'Wow, I should have died.\' The song\'s telling this near-death experience of being pushed over the side of the cliff, and then the angel comes and kisses your eyelids and your wrists. It feels like a piercing thing, because you\'re in pain from having fallen, but you\'re still alive and returning to your oxygen. You expect to be dead, and then you somehow wake up and you\'ve been protected and you\'re still alive. It sounds dramatic, but sometimes things feel that dramatic.”
On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”
It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”
In her fourth album under her Half Waif moniker, Nandi Rose envisioned a fictional groundskeeper struggling to maintain the estate to which she’s been entrusted. But *The Caretaker* is less a concept album than it is a clear-eyed stock-taking of the songwriter and former Pinegrove member’s own life at the end of her twenties, recorded from her front porch in New York’s Hudson Valley: “Sitting in the dark, dreaming up a song, crying in my coffee, doing it all wrong,” she sings on “Ordinary Talk.” It’s deceptively straightforward chamber pop with quietly experimental production flairs, with Rose on a journey to the center of the self. As she puts it on “Blinking Light”: “If this doesn’t change me, nothing will.”
Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.
one long song recorded nowhere between May 2019 and May 2020 released Aug. 7th, 2020 as a 2xLP by P.W. Elverum & Sun box 1561 Anacortes, Wash. U.S.A. 98221
Hilary Woods’ Birthmarks has been a labor of intensity and intuition, written over the course of two years. Recorded whilst heavily pregnant between Galway and Oslo in the winter of 2019, Woods explores the oscillating and volatile processes of selfhood and becoming, hidden gestational growth, and the birthing of the Self, amidst continuous social and personal change. Birthmarks is a record that hunts for ways in which to revisit and caress wounds left by the memory of their scars. In its mystery and attentiveness to the art of alchemy and the world of the unseen, it is a journey through textural fog and feral density that gives way to passages of voracious sonic exorcism and poetic healing. Its eight songs traverse planes of visceral physicality, stark tender space, and breathtaking introspective beauty. Spurred on and crafted by the impulse to create a more corporeal sonic tendon for her songs to inhabit, Woods took her vision and home recordings to Norwegian experimental noise producer and filmmaker Lasse Marhaug. The collaboration proved rare and fruitful and lies at the heart of this record. Field recordings, analogue bass synthesizers, hushed vocals, and the breath are underpinned with heavy noise processing, fierce and wide cello, rich percussion, sable saxophone, and electronics. Birthmarks is inspired and informed by ideas of inner transmutation in the face of anxiety, post-war Japanese and wet-plate photography, early music, the secret life of trees, wolves, drone, the drawings of Francis Bacon, the images of Francesca Woodman, the films of Chris Marker, the experiential collapse of community, and the power of the lone human voice. It is a deeply powerful and enigmatic record that ultimately transcends its disquiet roots.
“This feels like \[2017’s\] *Crack-Up*’s friendly brother,” Robin Pecknold tells Apple Music of his fourth LP under the Fleet Foxes name. Written and recorded alongside producer-engineer Beatriz Artola (Adele, J Cole, The Kills) throughout much of 2019 and 2020, *Shore* is an album of gratitude—one that found its lyrical focus in quarantine, as Pecknold began taking day-long drives from his New York apartment up to Lake Minnewaska and into the Catskills and back, stopping only to get gas or jot down ideas as they came to him. “It was like the car was the safest place to be,” he says. “I had this optimistic music but I’d been writing these kind of downer lyrics and it just wasn\'t gelling. It was realizing that in the grand scheme of things, this music is pretty unimportant compared to what\'s going on.” At the album\'s heart is “Sunblind,” an opening statement that pays glimmering tribute to some of Pecknold’s late musical heroes—from Richard Swift to Elliott Smith to David Berman, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Judee Sill, and more. “I wanted the album to be for these people,” Pecknold says. “I’m trying to celebrate life in a time of death, trying to find something to hold on to that exists outside of time, something that feels solid or stable.” Here, Pecknold walks us through every song on the album. **Wading in Waist-High Water** “I would have a piece of music and then I would try and sing it, but I would always try and pitch my voice up an octave or manipulate my voice to make it match the calming, mourning tone of the music a little more. And then a friend of mine sent me a clip of Uwade Akhere covering \[2008’s\] ‘Mykonos’ on Instagram, and I was just in love with the texture of her voice and just how easy it was. That was a signal that this was going to be a different kind of album in some ways. It was like I finally found a song where I was like, ‘You know what? This is just going to be more of what I want it to be if someone else sings it.’ And that\'s been an awesome mindset to be in lately, just thinking more about writing for other voices and what other voices can naturally evoke without just trying to make my voice do a ton of different things to get to an emotional resonance.” **Sunblind** “I knew I wanted it to be kind of a mission statement for the record—kind of cite-your-sources energy a little bit. And then find a way to get from this list of names of dead musicians that I\'m inspired by—whose music has really helped me in my life—to somewhere that felt like you were taking the wheel and doing something with that feeling. Or trying to live in honor of that, at least in a way that they\'re no longer able to, or in a way that carries their point of view forward into the future. ‘Sunblind’ is like giving the record permission to go all these places or something. Once it felt like it was doing that, then the whole record kind of made more sense to me, or felt like it all tied into each other in a way that it hadn\'t when that song wasn\'t done.” **Can I Believe You** “That riff is the oldest thing on the album, because I wrote that in the middle of the *Crack-Up* tour and tried working on it then but never got anywhere with it really. Once I was thinking less about some second party that\'s untrustworthy and more just one person\'s own hang-ups with letting people in—like my own hang-ups with that—then the lyrics flowed a little better. Those choral voices are actually 400 or 500 people from Instagram that sent clips of them singing that line to me. And then we spent days editing them together and cleaning them up. There\'s this big hug of vocals around the lead vocal that’s talking about trust or believability.” **Jara** “I wanted ‘Can I Believe You’ to be kind of a higher-energy headbanger-type song, and then after that, have a more steady groove—a loop-based, almost builder-type song. That\'s the single-friend kind of placement on the record. Jara is a reference to Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer. A national hero there who was killed by Pinochet’s army. But it\'s not about Victor Jara— it\'s more like with ‘Sunblind,’ where you\'re trying to eulogize someone, to honor someone or place them in some kind of canon.” **Featherweight** “It\'s the first minor-key song, but it\'s also the first one that\'s without a super prominent drumbeat. It’s lighter on its feet. I thought it was following a train of thought—where with ‘Jara’ there is a bit of envy of a political engagement, in ‘Featherweight,’ I feel like it\'s kind of examining privilege a little bit more. This period of time accommodated that in a very real way for me, just making my problems seem smaller. Acknowledging that I\'ve made problems for myself sometimes in my life when there weren\'t really any.” **A Long Way Past the Past** “Everything I tried was either too Michael McDonald or too Sly Stone or too Stevie Wonder. At that tempo it was just hard to find the instrumentation that didn\'t feel too pastiche or something. While I was writing the lyrics to it, I was thinking, ‘How much am I living in the past? How much can I leave that behind? How much of my identity is wrapped up in memories?’ And asking for help from a friend to maybe fend through that or come on the other side of that. So I thought it was funny to have that be the lyric on the most maybe nostalgic piece of music on the record in terms of what it\'s referencing.” **For a Week or Two** “The first couple Fleet Foxes records, it was a rural vibe as opposed to an urban vibe. I think on the first album, that was just the music I liked, but it wasn\'t like the lyrics were talking about a bunch of personal experiences I had in nature, because I was just 20 years old making that album and I didn\'t have a lot to draw from. ‘For a Week or Two,’ that\'s really about a bunch of long backpacking trips that I was taking for a while. And just the feeling that you have when you\'re doing that, of not being anyone and just being this body in space and never catching your reflection in anything. Carrying very little, and finding some peace in that.” **Maestranza** “Musically, I think for a while it had something in it that had a disco or roller-skating kind of energy that I was trying to find a way out of, and then we found this other palette of instruments that felt less that way. I was trying to go for a Bill Withers-y thing. I feel like a lot of the people that get mentioned in ‘Sunblind,’ their resonance is there, influencing throughout the record. In the third verse, it’s about missing your friends, missing your people, but knowing that since we\'re all going through the same thing that we\'re kind of connected through that in a way that\'s really special and kind of unique to this period. I feel more distant from people but also closer in terms of my actual daily experience.” **Young Man’s Game** “I thought it would be funny if Hamilton \[Leithauser\]’s kids were on it. My original idea was to have it sung by a 10-year-old boy, and then that was just too gimmicky or something. But I wanted there to be kids on it because it\'s referencing immaturity or naivete—things about being young. Because people say ’a young man’s game’ in kind of a positive way. Sometimes they\'re sad they aged out or something. But in this song I use it more in the negative sense of ‘glad you\'ve moved on from some of these immature delusions’ or something. When I was younger I would be much too insecure to make a goofy song, needing everything to be perfect or dramatic or whatever mindset I was in.” **I’m Not My Season** “A friend of mine had been telling me about her experience helping a family member with addiction. As she was describing that, I was imagining this sailing lesson I had taken where we were learning how to rescue someone who had fallen overboard and you have to circle the boat around the right way and throw the ropes from the right place. Time is just something that\'s happening around us, but there\'s some kind of core idea that you\'re not what\'s happening to you. Like wind on a flag.” **Quiet Air / Gioia** “The chords had this kind of expectant feel or something, like an ominous quality, that\'s never really resolving. And I think that kind of led me to want to write about imagining someone, speaking to somebody who is courting danger. Some of the lyrics in the song come from talking to a friend of mine who is a climate scientist, and just her perspective on how screwed we are or aren’t. Just thinking about that whole issue hinges on particulate matter in air that is invisible. You can just be looking at the sky and looking at what will eventually turn into an enormous calamity, and it\'s quietly occurring, quietly accruing. It\'s happening on a time scale that we\'re not prepared to accept or deal with. The ending is this more ecstatic thing. Just imagining some weird pagan dance, like rite of spring or something, where it just kind of builds into this weird kind of joy. Like dancing while the world burns.” **Going-to-the-Sun Road** “The Sun Road is a place in Montana, a 60-mile stretch of road that’s only open for a couple months every year. It’s where they filmed the intro to *The Shining*, where they\'re driving to the lodge and it’s just very scenic. I grew up fairly close to there. A lot of the studios that I worked at on this record were places that I had always wanted to go and work, places where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, one day I\'ll make a record there.’ That song is about being tired of traveling, wanting to slow down a bit and wanting to not fight so hard personally against yourself. Or trying to have as many adventures as possible, but then having this one place—almost like a Rosebud kind of thing—where it\'s like going to the Sun Road is the last big adventure. The one that\'s always on the horizon that you have to look forward to that keeps you going.” **Thymia** “Getting back to work on the record \[after the pandemic hit\] was so rewarding. And I feel like if there was a relationship being discussed on the record, it\'s between me and my love affair with music. ‘Thymia’ I think means ‘boisterous spirit’ or something. The image and the lyrics to that song in my head were kind of me driving around with some camping gear in my back seat that\'s clanging out a rhythm of some kind. And that feeling of, even if I\'m driving alone, there\'s something. That sound is pulling me to the thought of music. It\'s kind of accompanying me. I\'ve known it for a long time. Even though it\'s ephemeral, it\'s the most solid thing that I have.” **Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman** “I wanted to use the sample of Brian Wilson because that clip meant a lot to me growing up, him layering vocals on ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).’ That song has the most stuff I\'ve ever put on a song, and it\'s the most overdubby—very much in that lineage of just layer after layer after layer. Emotionally, it’s similar to that idea of, like, ‘My clothes are torn but the air is clean.’ That feeling like it can be okay to be a little ragged and you can still feel good, like being exhausted at the end of a long run or something. That image of the maternal and feminine would again be a reference to music. Like my receiver, cradling me again. Kind of like being subsumed by music and comforted and consoled by it.” **Shore** “‘Cradling Mother’ could be the climax maybe, and ‘Shore’ felt like an epilogue. In the same way that ‘Wading in Waist-High Water’ is a prologue. Lyrically, it\'s tying up some loose ends, talking to the kin that you rely on—your family or your heroes—and thanking them. It references the shore as this stable place and questions whether you\'re really at the boundary between danger and safety when you\'re there. I\'d actually had a surfing accident where I snapped my leash and I really felt like I was going to drown. It took me 15 minutes to swim to shore and I kept getting pummeled by waves. I was so happy to make it back. I\'ve been pretty afraid since then to do that much surfing in bad conditions. But to me, that image was this comforting thing that then kind of dissolves. The vocals break apart and then it\'s like you\'re getting back in the water and you\'re catching one sound and your voices are blending together and falling apart. You\'re subsumed by water, and then the seas calm, but you\'re floating into the future.”
Today, on the Autumnal Equinox, Fleet Foxes released their fourth studio album Shore at 6:31 am PT/9:31 am ET. The bright and hopeful album, released via Anti-. Shore was recorded before and during quarantine in Hudson (NY), Paris, Los Angeles, Long Island City and New York City from September 2018 until September 2020 with the help of recording and production engineer Beatriz Artola.The fifteen song, fifty-five minute Shore was initially inspired by frontman Robin Pecknold’s musical heroes such as Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guebrou and more who, in his experience, celebrated life in the face of death. “I see “shore” as a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death,’” commented Pecknold. “Tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.” Pecknold continues: Since the unexpected success of the first Fleet Foxes album over a decade ago, I have spent more time than I’m happy to admit in a state of constant worry and anxiety. Worried about what I should make, how it will be received, worried about the moves of other artists, my place amongst them, worried about my singing voice and mental health on long tours. I’ve never let myself enjoy this process as much as I could, or as much as I should. I’ve been so lucky in so many ways in my life, so lucky to be born with the seeds of the talents I have cultivated and lucky to have had so many unreal experiences. Maybe with luck can come guilt sometimes. I know I’ve welcomed hardship wherever I could find it, real or imagined, as a way of subconsciously tempering all this unreal luck I’ve had. By February 2020, I was again consumed with worry and anxiety over this album and how I would finish it. But since March, with a pandemic spiraling out of control, living in a failed state, watching and participating in a rash of protests and marches against systemic injustice, most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together. In its place came a gratitude, a joy at having the time and resources to devote to making sound, and a different perspective on how important or not this music was in the grand scheme of things. Music is both the most inessential and the most essential thing. We don’t need music to live, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. It became a great gift to no longer carry any worry or anxiety around the album, in light of everything that is going on. A tour may not happen for a year, music careers may not be what they once were. So it may be, but music remains essential. This reframing was another stroke of unexpected luck I have been the undeserving recipient of. I was able to take the wheel completely and see the album through much better than I had imagined it, with help from so many incredible collaborators, safe and lucky in a new frame of mind.
Since her days fronting Moloko beginning in the mid-’90s, Róisín Murphy has been dancing around the edges of the club, and occasionally—for instance, on the 2012 single “Simulation” or 2015’s “Jealousy”—she has waded into the thick of the dance floor. But on *Róisín Machine*, the Irish singer-songwriter declares her unconditional love for the discotheque. Working with her longtime collaborator DJ Parrot—a Sheffield producer who once recorded primitive house music alongside Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk in the duo Sweet Exorcist—she summons a sound that is both classic and expansive, swirling together diverse styles and eras into an enveloping embrace of a groove. “We Got Together” invokes 1988’s Second Summer of Love in its bluesy, raving-in-a-muddy-field stomp; “Shellfish Mademoiselle” sneaks a squirrelly acid bassline under cover of Hammond-kissed R&B; “Kingdom of Ends” is part Pink Floyd, part “French Kiss.” The crisply stepping funk of “Incapable”—a dead ringer for classic Matthew Herbert, another of her onetime collaborators—is as timeless as house music gets. So are the pumping “Simulation” and “Jealousy,” which bookend the album, and which haven’t aged a day since they first burned up nightclubs as white-label 12-inches.
“We should try again to talk,” Frances Quinlan writes. It not just a lyric—it’s a suggestion, a warning, a plea, a wish. This request is woven throughout Likewise, their forthcoming solo album, amidst dramatically shifting motifs. Some are jubilant, some are dreamy and abstract, and a few are sinister, but within each dark void that Quinlan explores, there is a light peering back at them. Frances Quinlan has built an identity for themself over the past decade as the lead songwriter and front-person of the Philadelphia-based band Hop Along, and their distinct voice is among the most recognizable and inimitable in music. While the band began as Quinlan's solo project (originally titled Hop Along, Queen Ansleis), Likewise is Quinlan's debut under their own name. To make the record, they enlisted the virtuosic skills of their bandmate Joe Reinhart, and together they produced the album at his studio, The Headroom, recording in stints over the course of a year. With a renewed openness to explore different sounds, Quinlan supplements their typical guitar-based instrumentation with synthesizers, digital beats, harps, strings, and a wide variety of keyboards. The shifting and exploratory nature of these musical arrangements allow their lyrics and vocals—which have always been at the forefront of their music—to reach emotional depths like never before. Their vocal tones beckon a kaleidoscopic range of emotions across all nine songs on the album, from soft and ruminative to enraged and commanding; from conveying powerful messages to highlighting small, yet poignant, moments. Quinlan is a voyaging songwriter. Throughout Likewise, they confront what confounds them in the hopes that they will come out on the other side with a better sense of what it is to be human. They present listeners with a complicated, albeit spirited vision of what it could mean to truly engage with another person, to give a small piece of oneself over to someone else without expectation. Although such is likely to be a lifelong effort, these songs prove evident that light can still permeate from unsettling depths.
Alongside Londoners such as saxophonist Nubya Garcia, tuba player Theon Cross, and keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, Shabaka Hutchings is at the forefront of club jazz’s resurgence in the UK. The British-Barbadian artist’s various projects all work in Afro-political idioms, with each occupying a different philosophical realm: Sons of Kemet focuses on black displacement in royal Britain, The Comet Is Coming is influenced by Afrofuturism and progressive rock, and Shabaka and the Ancestors explores the African diaspora from the standpoint of Western culture’s erasure of black identity and communities. On *We Are Sent Here By History*, Hutchings and his South Africa-based band use history as a reflection point, but one that deeply informs the future. Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and Yusef Lateef are just a few of the musical-political touchstones that also influence the record, and you hear these icons in the powerful chants and spoken words of Siyabonga Mthembu, the phrasing of the woodwinds—chaotic, playful, spiritual—and the general status-quo-challenging vibe of the arrangement. Like his predecessors, Hutchings makes protest songs that make you feel alive, even when they are indictments of colonialism and toxic masculinity. But he also uses music as a corrective: Like its title suggests, “We Will Work (On Redefining Manhood)”—all looping chanted vocals around a multitude of percussive instruments—looks beyond a dark past towards brighter days.
*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”
On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”
Arriving in June 2020, into a world locked down by pandemic but rising up in anti-racist demonstrations, Special Interest’s second album reflects the turbulence of the age. Cloaked in the New Orleans band’s frenetic, galvanizing fusion of punk, glam, No Wave, and electronic, these songs examine injustice, violence, obsession, and change with honesty and wit. They’re stories of defiance and hope, expressions of autonomy and solidarity, a love song for a city and, as the four-piece’s Alli Logout tells Apple Music, “a love song from hell.” “There were a lot of feelings to sit with and unpack,” says the singer, guiding us through the album track by track. **Drama** “What can I say? We love drama. Often when we play this live, we loop a vocal sample from \[Club 69’s ‘Drama’\] over the beat that says, ‘My life is a drama, with a beginning, a middle, and no end...’” **Disco III** “From the first time we jammed it out in practice, we knew it had to be the third installment of our Disco Trilogy. The first ‘Disco’ \[from 2018’s *Spiraling* album\] was critiquing cis gay dude culture’s cliché complacency. ‘Disco II’ \[also from *Spiraling*\] is a beautiful anthem about that feeling of being free in your body despite the world around you. For ‘Disco III,’ the pulsating nature of the beat deeply threw me into that moment where you and the girls are going to carry by any means necessary. For the verses, I went out and decided to describe everything that was going on in our chase for rapture. A lot of the lines in the song come from that night. Fighting and sodomy on LSD were just destined to ensue. In these moments of rapture, the greatest pleasures came from our defiance. Our defiance against this world, this regime, and our bodies. So maybe ‘Disco III’ is a love song...but from hell.” **Don’t Kiss Me in Public** “Heartless cinema is what I use to describe films that have no passion and were made with the intention of turning a profit off of exploiting a subculture. These films are often emotionally manipulative with no real character development of their black or trans characters. I see this more in TV right now, by the way. Anyway, I used it in the song to describe the performative gestures people use to claim your body. In that way that hurts, in the way that rips you from your autonomy. So pretty much it’s a song about being used, but not in the hot way. But, alas, I\'m the one who is a titty baby in the end because I let myself be used again. Maybe there is some part of that darkness and sadness that gives me a thrill, but I think I\'ve learned my lesson though.” **All Tomorrow’s Carry** “In this song, I was writing about the nuances of being a daily witness to Black suffering but also Black joy while also experiencing both those things in my own body. I was sitting by the train tracks at a punk show, as tanks rode by on a train as the bands played. For a long time I have focused on partying rather than actually trying to build trust and connections in my community, and that is one of the most violent things a gentrifier can do. I\'m always thinking about violence and gentrification; we should all talk about it more, but it\'s just so easy to be complacent, especially when the world is a mess and your house is dilapidated and falling apart. You just want for everything to be easy and to escape, especially if no one has ever actually offered you concrete tools to heal yourself. I feel blessed I have people in my life supporting that growth and offering me those tools now, but I was writing about that feeling when you know you need to change but also don\'t know how—but actually you do, it just takes agonizing daily work. It\'s interesting now with the uprisings—I listen to this song and ‘Are we going out tonight?’ turns from a bratty, messy party girl inquiry to a commanding decree summoning us to go out and fight the police and YES WE ARE GOING OUT TONIGHT! That makes the song magic. That is exactly what New Orleans breeds, and I am proud to call it home.” **A Depravity Such As This...** “This was the only improvised song we made in the studio for this album. I asked Maria \[Elena, guitarist\] what it should be about and she was like, ‘Please, not another song about a girl! Maybe the city?’ And I was like, ‘What if I wrote a song about the city as if she was my lover?’ Everyone rolled their eyes, but it worked out and we all love it. I really just do love wet heat...” **Homogenized Milk** “I was in a whole mood when I wrote this. I think the final lyrics—‘You and I are not uniquely fucked’—sum it all up. I am frustrated with the state of things. Especially how I feel that most view violence on some hierarchical system, that some violence is more harmful than others. The psychological terror of white supremacy is just so maddening and everywhere. We need to talk about it.” **Passion** “Ruth Mascelli \[keyboards/electronics\] back at it again with her dreamy textured soundscapes. This marks the middle of the journey through *The Passion Of*. There were a lot of feelings to sit with and unpack, and these textured sounds give a sense of wonder and disillusionment (the number one survival mechanism) as we persist and move forward.” **Head** “We pop you out of your disillusionment straight into a whole-ass mess. A ticking time bomb of an explosion of obsession and suffering. This song was written years ago but didn’t get recorded in time to put on our last album, *Spiraling*, but still the song fits in the oeuvre of the Special Interest canon. I was battling with obsession, not being able to truly see myself or my actions. I wanted to be anywhere other than in my head with all my demons. It’s a fun song, but I feel the pain in my heart every time I sing it. There is nothing worse than the terror and illusions your mind can create when you are in pain.” **Tina** “This song is funny and fun. I love a lot of people struggling with substances and wanted to write a funny song acknowledging that struggle. I want everyone I know and love struggling with something to know that I am here for you always, sis! So yes, ‘Tina’ is another love song.” **Street Pulse Beat** “The street is alive, it has a pulse. It\'s the pulse that moves us forward towards liberation. When a love doesn\'t work, your street pulse weakens and you lose sight of who you are. It’s not a song of unrequited love—though at the time you couldn’t tell me otherwise—but about a love so pure it had to be let go. It\'s about wanting someone to save you when you know in the end you are the only one to save yourself. It is agonizing to love someone so. My heart rips open every time I hear or sing it. One thing I do know is that we will always be fighting in the streets side by side because our pulse now is strong within us both without each other. So in the end, this song is an ode to change. God is change.” **With Love** “Where are we now at the end of our journey? What have we faced, what have we learned? I had to end the album with this love letter directed at everyone who hears it. I wrote it over the course of five days as my friends kiki’d around me. It is a personal letter I wrote to you all, it is a spell. May we all keep transforming ourselves into the people we want to be. May we rise in the midst of all hope that has been co-opted by this regime. May we live our lives decadently, in splendor. May we learn to work with, understand, and struggle with everyone around us until we all taste the sweetness that is freedom. I look around the room and see nothing but black trans bodies laughing and smiling. My passion is our devotion to love and transformation. May all the mutants of the Mississippi River swim in clean water one day...”
But would you bat an eye waiting for war machines to pass you by? But aren’t we going out tonight? Aren’t we going out? Special Interest have returned with their sophomore LP. A dual release from Night School (EU) and Thrilling Living (US). The Passion Of... combines elements of glam rock and no wave pushed through a mangled filter of contemporary electronic forms. Special Interest present a precise and deranged vision of punk, an apocalyptic celebration, a step forward into a perverse and uncertain landscape. AVAILABLE ON VINYL: US: thrillingliving.bandcamp.com EU: night-school.bandcamp.com
Veterans from countless successful releases including a seminal split album (“Sol”, 2013) that cemented their friendship and earned them unconditioned esteem and love from the atmospheric black metal aficionados, SPECTRAL LORE's sole member Ayloss and Jacob Buczarski from MARE COGNITUM join forces once again for another mystical trip through the stars. Monumental and daring in its length and scope, "Wanderers: Astrology Of The Nine" is a thematic journey through our solar system, illustrating and anthropomorphizing it into mythology which parallels our own humanity with the science of these mysterious formations. “Inspired by Gustav Holst's Planets suite, we continue the exploration we began many years ago with 'Sol',” explain the artists; “we traverse outwards from the sun to each planet, weaving fables through a synthesis of their distinct physical features and a mythical personhood representing these features.” Graced with a wondrous cover painting by the inimitable Elijah Tamu, “Wanderers: Astrology Of The Nine” is nothing but a never ending quest for mankind's cosmic origins, a celestial and philosophical observation on the notes of MARE COGNITUM and SPECTRAL LORE's music, perfectly in the balance between progressive yet furious black metal, and moments of ecstatic, melodic beauty. “While we wish to capture the awe of the raw, natural beauty of our cosmic surroundings, we have also created our own cosmically inspired lore with each planet as our muse,” say Ayloss and Buczarski; ”therefore, each track is a narrative which represents our admiration for each cosmic entity: the psychic manifestations that were conjured through our own wonder of the majestic planetary system we call home.” --- Love Metal // Hate Fascism
A Bandcamp 'Essential' Release (March 6, 2020) "A veritable sonic Reese’s Cup" – Brooklyn Vegan "A caustic synthesis of art rock, no wave and electronic music" – Treble Zine (Album Of The Week) "A proper Chimera of a record... a Cronenberg movie turned into an electronic album" - Loud & Quiet (8/10) 'Person' is the debut from NYC's P.E., a band born of the city's art-punk underground and dedicated to freaky experimentation. Comprising Veronica Torres, Jonathan Campolo, and Benjamin Jaffe (all of the beloved and freshly defunct Pill) alongside Jonathan Schenke and Robert Jones of the electronic/art-rock favorite Eaters, P.E. features some of NYC's most notable experimental voices. Early shows were entirely improvisational, allowing the group to develop a collaborative chemistry that led to an equally free-form recording process. The resulting LP displays the group’s collective experience writing memorable songs, matched with a dedication to tearing them apart at the seams. Recorded at Schenke's Studio Windows, Person holds the spark of P.E.'s early improvisations in its clattering industrial percussion, zigzagging synths and sax, and colorful dystopian poetry. The group's natural language results in a sonic lexicon reflecting the unnatural surroundings of their adopted home in NYC—chaotic yet alluring, gnarly, and fun. Sold and packaged with a tender tone, this is music for fully-formed persons aware of their ideological discrepancies. Turn on the human music of the 21st century.
You don’t listen to KA albums so much as you sink into them: the hushed, laser-focused flow, the dense imagery and virtually drum-free production, the sense of darkness lurking quietly around every corner. Loosely organized as a metaphorical play between Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and KA’s own violent memories of youth in east Brooklyn, *Descendants of Cain* is, yes, deadly serious and noir to the marrow. But between the whiplash-worthy observations—“All our Santas carried them hammers/Our guidance counselors was talented scramblers” (“Patron Saints”), “The meek heard ‘turn the other cheek’/I got different advice” (“Solitude of Enoch”)—is a sense of almost meditative calm, the sort of resolve that comes not from the heat of youth but from the steadiness of middle age. The pace is measured, the tone is cool, but the past still haunts him.
Following up the dreamy mélange of string quartet, hip-hop, and abstract jazz that was 2018’s *Origami Harvest*, Oakland trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire returns with *on the tender spot of every calloused moment*, revisiting the hard-hitting acoustic sound of his working quartet with pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Justin Brown (the same lineup that recorded 2017’s *A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard*). In the confines of the studio, they’re not a bit less energized and audacious. There’s a certain loose and limber authority and turn-on-a-dime polish in such pieces as “Blues (We measure the heart with a fist),” “Tide of Hyacinth” (featuring percussionist/vocalist Jesus Diaz), and “An Interlude (that get’ more intense).” Akinmusire’s recent work with veteran Chicago avant-gardist Roscoe Mitchell inspired the busy and insistent “Mr. Roscoe (consider the simultaneous).” (It’s worth noting that Archie Shepp wrote the liner notes for this album, remarking of Akinmusire, “This is the cat!”) The guest vocal by Genevieve Artadi of KNOWER on “Cynical sideliners” finds Akinmusire playing gentle accompaniment on Rhodes, revealing new facets of his musicianship. “Roy” is a soulful ballad homage to the tragically departed Roy Hargrove, a dear friend and role model, while the closing “Hooded procession (read the names outloud),” with Akinmusire on solo Rhodes this time, alludes to the ongoing injustices that have catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a continuation of what has become a series, starting with “My Name Is Oscar,” “Rollcall for Those Absent,” and “Free, White and 21” from previous Akinmusire albums. The fact that he articulates no names, only a sequence of resonant sustaining Rhodes chords, lends a certain inscrutable mystery and gestural power to the track.
Throughout the late ’90s and 2000s, Destroyer was essentially a guitar band. Whether principal singer-songwriter (and erstwhile New Pornographer) Dan Bejar was exploring glam rock’s velvety contours (2001’s *Streethawk: A Seduction*), experimenting with drum- and bass-less baroque pop (2004’s *Your Blues*), or orchestrating a grand rock opus (2006’s *Destroyer’s Rubies*), six strings generally provided his songs their backbone. That changed with 2011’s *Kaputt*. “I cast down the guitar in disgust,” the Vancouver-based Bejar tells Apple Music, partly kidding, but mostly serious. *Kaputt*’s focus on atmosphere and mood (its soft-rock synths, fretless bass, ’80s jazz-pop saxophones) signaled a major shift in not only how Bejar would write songs (“I like to avoid writing on an instrument at all,” he says), but also how each of his subsequent albums would sound. The experiments with chamber strings and horns on 2015’s *Poison Season* and the apocalyptic New Wave of 2017’s *ken* were essentially a lead-up to the band’s 12th album, *Have We Met*, Bejar’s most self-aware, confident, and abstract work to date. It’s also his darkest, filled with scenes of violence, isolation, and existential dread, most of which Bejar wrote and sang into his laptop at his kitchen table at night. (He then sent those files to bandmates John Collins and Nicolas Bragg, who added everything from bass, drums, keys, and guitar to the glitchy bee-swarm textures that close out the LP.) But for all its excursions into the unknown, *Have We Met* is still very much a Destroyer album—those hyper-literate, self-referential lyrical flourishes and melodic arrangements that have become Bejar’s signature still fully intact. No matter how different things might feel this time around, \"You can see a Destroyer song coming a mile away,” Bejar says. Here, he deciphers his 10 latest. **Crimson Tide** \"It\'s composed of the style of writing which I usually call like \'old Destroyer.’ I don\'t see that kind of lyrical attack too much in any song I\'ve written since \[the 2009 EP\] *Bay of Pigs*. I had it in my special ‘this is for something else\' book, and finally wrote the song from disparate chunks of writing that struck me as kind of musical. But it was really all over the place, and I needed to tie it in together somehow. And for some reason I thought a good way to do that would be to constantly say \'crimson tide\' at the end of every stanza. It has specific connotations in America—like a college football team or a submarine movie, which are really dumb. And so I think that\'s important to point out, when there\'s dumb American things that take over language. It has an end-of-the-world ring to it, as like blood on the horizon, or some kind of apocalypse incoming. It was a loaded two words, and it felt good to sing it at the end of each verse and just see what the song ended up meaning.\" **Kinda Dark** \"As opposed to \'Crimson Tide,’ \'Kinda Dark\' I felt was some other kind of writing that I didn\'t really know—a kind of music, especially in the last half of the song, that I felt was a bit more violent-sounding than the band usually is. It\'s supposed to be the three stanzas, with the last one being particularly gnarly. The first one is kind of a cruising imagery, leading up to sitting on a park bench next to the Boston Strangler. The second one is more slightly eerie sci-fi. And the last one is just a dystopic kind of dogfight or something like that. Like a torture chamber with an audience.\" **It Just Doesn\'t Happen** \"That song was kind of different from the rest. I wrote it on the guitar, for one. And I sat down, and I just wrote it. When I do that, the songs always have kind of a ditty quality—a happy-go-lucky quality—as opposed to the song that comes before it, which has none of those qualities. I thought that the song titles themselves \[the lyrics name-check Primal Scream’s “You\'re Just Too Dark to Care,” Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” and The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”\] somehow reflect the vibe of being alone at night in a strange place. Which is something that happens to me a lot. And then wondering if that feeling of isolation is really so special or so specific to you, or is it maybe something that every single person is feeling on and off.\" **The Television Music Supervisor** \"For such specific subject matter, it came to me as if in a dream. It just came to me with the melody in this kind of lilting way. And it was just supposed to be this sad moment in someone\'s life, looking back on their life. It\'s either with perhaps some sense of regret or some sense of amazement. It really depends on what you get out of the words \'I can\'t believe what I\'ve done.\' I also thought the title was maybe such a specific phrase to the early 21st century, just because it\'s possible that in 20 years, no one will actually know what that means—the job that most specifically sums up our day and age. It really rolled off the tongue, too—for such a weird thing, it really feels so musical and melodious to sing it. I think that\'s why I wanted the music to be dreamlike and collapsing, like a fog that I sing through. John \[Collins, producer\] really nailed that one.\" **The Raven** \"I like art that talks about what it\'s going to do when it makes art—and then at the end, that\'s the piece of art. The art that\'s just like, ‘Here\'s my plan, it\'s going to be great,\' and then in the description of the plan, you get the plan, you don\'t get the thing. And that\'s kind of what \'The Raven\' is. The last line that repeats itself kind of alludes to that: \'That\'s what I\'ll write about when I write about The Raven.\' I think it\'s me—or it\'s the singer, because that\'s not me necessarily—talking about... In some ways it\'s kind of like \'When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ the Bob Dylan song. You know, when I get around to writing about the serious topics, this is what it\'s going to be.\" **Cue Synthesizer** \"I like that song a lot, for very different reasons. Part of it is that the production is just way more maniacal than I\'m used to, and extreme in its rhythm. It\'s kind of obliterated by guitar playing that\'s used as samples. I find it very groovy and also ominous at the same time, which is a combo that I like. I also really love stage direction as literature. It\'s maybe my favorite form of literature—the stuff in parentheses before there\'s any action in the play. Like, ‘Cue this, exit that.’ It\'s all a lead-up to the last verse, which is just unbridled dread. I don\'t normally let it loose like that. And when it\'s a song that\'s leading up to a portrait of a doomed world, it\'s interesting to me to see how musical words can be painted or darkened or made evil-sounding when you know what the last verse is. Or I guess before you even know, maybe the point *is* to make them sound terrible—to make the word ‘synthesizer\' or ‘guitar\' or ‘drum\' or \'fake drum\' sound like weapons.\" **University Hill** \"That\'s maybe my favorite song on the record. University Hill is a school in Vancouver in what is now a really nice part of town. When I was a kid, it was kind of a small school where fuck-ups would go. But the main thing that University Hill is is a description of some kind of force that comes and kills and puts people in camps. I mean, that\'s literally what the words describe. So there\'s very little room for interpretation, aside from the very end of the song that has this \'Come on, University Hill!’—like a school rallying cry. What I really needed, though—this will give you deep insights into how I work—the last verse goes, ‘Used to be so nice, used to be such a thrill.’ I needed something that rhymed with \'thrill.’ And I knew deep down it was going to be some kind of hill. And I was like, what hills have I known in my life? And out of nowhere, I was like, oh, there\'s University Hill, and that\'s kind of a big part of my childhood. It comes loaded with real imagery for me.\" **Have We Met** \"The original idea was for the record to be an attack on melody, to completely clamp down on that. But in the end, that\'s not what me and John like. I knew that Nick had been making these guitar pieces over the last couple of years, and I just wanted that one. There was a claustrophobic kind of Max Headroom vibe to the album, which was purposeful. But a moment of sighing, a moment of respite, would be really nice. I also just think it\'s kind of a really beautiful track. I wanted there to be a title track—and it made the most sense for that to be it. I knew the record would be called *Have We Met*. And I wanted that expression to be as open-ended or endless as it could possibly be. As far as the title, I realize I\'ve never heard that said in my entire life, even though I\'ve always heard it said in movies. So it automatically seemed strange to me, and it seemed really deceptively simple. I purposefully left the question mark out, so there could just be words. And there\'s something vaguely noir-ish to it, which I love in all things.\" **The Man in Black\'s Blues** \"I think that song was initially called ‘Death\' or \'Death Blues.’ It\'s just a song about death. One thing that I always seem to write about these days is the world disappearing or erasing itself. And I think that song is supposed to be on the more personal side of that, and it\'s just about what it looks like to be faced with utter loss. But also, it\'s supposed to be kind of like a balm. It\'s not like a dirge. And it\'s not wailing. I feel like it’s kind of a stroll through grief. The original demo was a lot like what you hear at an Italian ice cream parlor maybe, in the late \'80s. It had this kind of weird fairground midtempo disco. More than any other song on the record, I feel like there\'s a real disconnect between what I\'m singing and how I\'m singing it and the music around it, but I didn\'t want it to be a depressing song. I wanted it to be kind of danceable—a moment of levity—especially at the end, where it\'s pretty goofy, and it\'s like, \'Knock knock/Did you say who you come for?\' It\'s literally supposed to be the Grim Reaper at the door, but I kind of sing it in this British funk kind of way.\" **Foolssong** \"I wrote it around the same time that I wrote the *Kaputt* songs, but it didn\'t fit on that record, because there were no 6/8 or waltz-time songs allowed; if you didn\'t have a steady beat to it, then you got kicked off that album. But it was definitely written as a kind of lullaby. A lullaby\'s a vulnerable song, just purely because you sing it to a baby or a small child, which is a vulnerable headspace to be in. I feel like it\'s not a song I could write now. Maybe it\'s the only instance where I\'ve ever thought, like, I\'m serenading myself. And, you know, the lines are not comforting at all. The end refrain, \'Its figures all lit up/Nagasaki at night/At war with the devil\'—I guess maybe lullabies have a history of containing terrifying imagery. But maybe it\'s not so strange. I think there\'s a tradition of gothic horror in lullabies. This makes total sense.\"
Growth with no reward. Finding strength in your less desirable traits. Coming up with the perfect comeback hours later in bed, glaring at the ceiling. Asking yourself: am I improving, or am I just changing into something unrecognizable? Chicago quartet Ganser probe the futility of striving for self-growth during the chaos of our times for dark comedy and jagged sounds on their potent new album Just Look at That Sky, out July 31st on Felte. Equal parts Space Odyssey and Ghost World, Ganser released their debut LP Odd Talk in 2018 to favorable coverage from The New York Times, Billboard, and Stereogum. Building on their dissociative disorder namesake, the album’s tone vacillated between frenzied and contemplative, probing on questions of communication, intimacy, and avoidance. On Just Look at That Sky, Ganser further explores the personal inner climate of uncertain times. Opening track “Lucky” announces an explosive energy that evokes the Midwest noise-rock legacy of bands like Jesus Lizard and Shellac, while embracing a more colorful palette of post-punk and art rock influences. Nadia Garofalo and Alicia Gaines, a self-described two-headed monster who share lead vocal duties, can bring both a recalcitrant cool worthy of Kim Gordon and a booming sneer that recalls Poly Styrene; the discordant interplay of Charlie Landsman’s guitar and Brian Cundiff’s drums on standouts “Self Service” and “Bad Form” build to blistering climaxes that wouldn’t feel out of place on Red Medicine-era Fugazi. And then there’s Ganser’s lyrics: manic explorations of worry and dread mark this record, the epic messiness of daily life in our damaged times attacked with sardonic specificity as often as generalized doom. Just Look at That Sky isn’t afraid to acknowledge that we’re all Extremely Online all the time, but rather explicitly owns it. These songs chart inner monologues of emphatic confusion, emotions already deeply felt further ratcheted up by the anxiety of always having too much information about other people, and always being just one tweet or status update away from knowing what everyone really thinks about us. This culminates in closing track “Bags for Life,” which imagines how online discourse might tackle a front-row seat for the end of the world. Nadia Garofalo (keyboards/vocals) and Alicia Gaines (bass/vocals) met in art school, bonding over their shared love of The Residents, outsider communities, and transgressive filmmakers like John Waters and David Lynch. The hands-on, DIY craftsmanship honed in those years has carried over into a group that shares writing duties, collaborates closely on music videos and album art, and crafts Brechtian visuals to accompany their maximalist live show. Having shared stages with the likes of Daughters, Oh Sees, Algiers, as well as Modern English, Ganser is a band that refuses to be pinned down, four individuals of diverse backgrounds functioning with the collective consciousness of four people in uncertain times. These are songs that never shy away from ugliness and confusion, that believe embracing the totality of the self sometimes means leaning into our dickish behavior. In the past, some listeners have had trouble reconciling non-male voices with the sorts of topics Ganser writes about, but that comes to an end with Just Look at That Sky. Co-produced with Electrelane's Mia Clarke and engineer Brian Fox, this is an assured, fully realized triumph of a record from an art-punk band that’s figured out how to focus on making great art, even if everything else around them falls apart.
Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.
The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.
Young Jesus doesn\'t follow any sort of indie-rock blueprint, instead reveling in that genre\'s eccentricities while broadening their musical palette. Guitarist John Rossiter\'s vocals shift between high and low registers akin to Thom Yorke and Justin Vernon so that tracks like the dynamic \"Faith\" can equally explore both the calming and unnerving elements. The patience and space presented throughout the Los Angeles quartet\'s fifth full-length allows for fuzzed-out jam sessions and jazzy interludes, pushing tracks like \"Lark\" and \"Magicians\" to swell past the 10-minute mark. The record\'s unpredictable nature leads to songs like \"Pattern Doubt\" ditching guitars for saxophone solos and lighthearted keyboard flourishes, and the guitar tones from \"(un)knowing\" reverberate while Rossiter reexamines and cherishes all of life\'s imperfections.
Imagine a shoreline alone, carved from the continent, without land or water to border it, a rind of possibility, a moon-colored border between land and sea, knowing and unknowing. This is Conceptual Beach, a place John Rossiter, vocalist/guitarist of Los Angeles-based Young Jesus, describes as his long-time mental refuge, where he imagines himself living—like a medieval, stigmata-wrought hermit—all his needs for okay-ness finally met. Their new album, Welcome to Conceptual Beach, first took form as a physical zine in 2016, when the four members of the band were on their first tour together. At that time, it was still somewhere Rossiter inhabited alone, protective of his solitude. Now, he is allowing others to join him there. "The reason it's called Welcome to… [Conceptual Beach] is because I'm inviting other inner landscapes into it," Rossiter explains as he describes the transformation of the beach's terrain into a whole varied emotional world. Indeed, Welcome to Conceptual Beach elucidates the balance between many contrasting forces: the individual and the collective, the rational and the emotive, the tame and wild. It transforms the complex musicality of much post- and math-rock into a radical, crystalline practice, vibrant and light-casting. The band's members––including Marcel Borbon (bass), Eric Shevrin (keys), and Kern Haug (drums) in addition to Rossiter himself––refract and reconnect throughout the record, experimenting with new kinds of sounds and composition. They artfully balance the wandering riffs of previous records with irresistible hooks, woven into their characteristic swathes of improvisation to create a shimmering, molten tapestry. "Faith," the opening track, runs parallel to the album as a whole: dynamic and groovy and psychedelic and emotional. Each musician has a moment to shine and to speak. Opening with Kern's version of the Purdie Shuffle, to Marcel's polyrhythmic bass, to Eric's organ solo, and held together by John's whispered prayer that, "we just might grow," Young Jesus offer a music uniquely in service to emotion. "(un)knowing" is a "meditation celebration," a song about the confusion and pain of re-examining a life—of committing to a life of experience and curiosity. Mixing the spirit and experimentation of OK Computer with the sincerity of Bon Iver, "Root and Crown" is the first song that offers a way out of the traps and patterns of a life. A commitment to grieving, listening, and growing. A devotion to spring, sung from the depths of winter. Whether it's a bank-vault-turned-concert-hall in San Francisco, a Brooklyn artists' collective, a house show in central Connecticut, or a recording studio, a Young Jesus performance is unique and unrepeatable. Recordings are only snapshots of their songs in a given moment. Over dozens of shows, a single song will metamorphosize each time it's played, taking on infinite new geometries. When they play live, their jamming—a self-selected, unaffected and doggedly genuine term for their complex improvisations—is a visceral, communal experience. They render sound an instinct, filling the space with urgency and joy. The intensity of feeling and connection between the band members and to their music is a thick, palpable force that sweeps audiences up, propelling them into uncharted territories. On Welcome to Conceptual Beach, Young Jesus pries our sobs from parentheticals and wields them with a brutal but tender force. They take these elements and translate them into a spacious ground for growth, for ourselves, our communities, our world. They affirm that change starts with how we reckon with ourselves as individuals, that we are all magicians, as the closing track of Welcome to Conceptual Beach suggests, "making love and doing dishes," capable of conjuring new worlds for ourselves, and to live in others'.
After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”
Stay on it! This is the future! This is the spectral dreaming, the reshaped soundwaves of post-Katrina, post-Osage Avenue, post-Obamacare that we borrow from to do this work, so stay on it. Who Sent You? they said from their liquid cryo-chamber, from a low-light induction field cobbled together with lithium rods, with melted down Romare Bearden and Howardena Pindell paintings, stitched with chaos fibers and placed in the center of the carrion husk of a burnt out shanty town. They took time to scrape ashen samples of what was, their souls the residue thick and caked on, that still climbs those new high-rise condominiums like moss—the only evidence that they were once there, that they were baked into the fabric of this planet—they were there fixing elevators and tossing wrenches into quantum fields until they were stopped! frisked! and turned into weird, 100-foot martyr murals on the backside, the north side, of supermarket walls—Who Sent You? is how the matrix modulation works. Dig it: Who Sent You? is the punk-rocking of jazz and the mystification of the avant-garde, a sci-fi sound from that out-soul-fire jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements. Who Sent You? they asked and tried to lock us in their distress chambers, and yet here it is: an album that functions as a heat-sealed care package for the modern Afrofuturist’s pre-flight machinations. This record weaves kinetic soul fusion, dreamy yet harrowing spectral poetry, and intricate force-field-tight rhythms into wild, warmth-giving tapestries that comfort and conceal, confront and coerce all at once, with the dark matter of the deep, black all-consuming universe as its thread. Where the band’s self-titled debut was all explosive noisy anthems and glorious cosmic bluster, Who Sent You? is a focused and patient ritual. Irreversible Entanglements take their time in between these grooves, stalking the war-torn streets of the Deep South and post-Columbian apocalypses—taking their time to add our DNA to the centrifuge, to dream up an alchemical amalgamation that sounds truly euphoric, drenched in the epic star-flung fallout of a nova only they can conjure. More than the sum of its parts—Luke Stewart’s war-like basslines, Keir Neuringer’s haunting saxophone, Aquiles Navarro’s cyberpunk brass, the unwieldy storm of Tcheser Holmes’ drums, and the oracular phyletic incantations of Camae Ayewa—Who Sent You? is an entire holistic jam of “infinite possibilities coming back around,” a sprawling meditation for afro-cosmonauts, a reminder of the forms and traumas of the past, and the shape and vision of Afrotopian sounds to come.
“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”
Since forming in 2014, the Ontarian sludge/doom duo Vile Creature has railed against oppression of all stripes while promoting a pro-LGBTQ and pro-vegan stance. The band’s third album, *Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!*, sees drummer/vocalist Vic and guitarist/vocalist KW sawing off a trio of sprawling, crawling, and abrasive salvos before enlisting the angelic choir of Laurel Minnes and Minuscule alongside pianist Tanya Byrne (of Bismuth) for the alternately ethereal and caustic two-part title track.
Featuring guitarist/vocalist Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, ex-Isis), bassist Brian Cook (Russian Circles, ex-Botch), and drummer Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists), Sumac is a metallic supergroup that specializes in bone-rattling riffs, lengthy compositions, and general uneasy listening. They’re also incredibly prolific: Since debuting in 2015, they’ve released four albums and an EP. *May You Be Held* is very much a continuation of the trio’s last album, 2018’s *Love in Shadow*. “Some of the foundation of this record was built off things that were recorded during the *Love in Shadow* sessions,” Turner tells Apple Music. “And there were lyrical themes I was working on with the last record that I felt didn’t cover the full extent of what I was trying to express. That record really came together right around the time of our last presidential election, which was, in my view, a turning point in our American culture. Everything that kind of started there has only grown and become more exacerbated in the intervening years, so I felt like there was more to say.” Below, Turner takes us through the twists and turns of *May You Be Held*. **A Prayer for Your Path** “This was the very last thing that was recorded when we were in the studio, and even before we mixed it I immediately felt like this had to be the opening to the album. Luckily, Brian and Nick agreed. It’s got an enveloping atmosphere but also this kind of peripheral tension to it. It seemed like a gentle opening into the world of this record, which is actually pretty tumultuous and even pretty caustic at a number of points. So we wanted to ease people into what is overall a pretty rough ride at times.” **May You Be Held** “The opening riff for the song just kind of sounds like an AC/DC riff, and I wasn’t sure how that fit into the parameters of what we do as Sumac. Yet the more I played it and the more I thought about the impactful simplicity of it, the more I felt that my discomfort with it was an indicator that it needed to be pursued. And by the time we had fleshed it out as a band, the AC/DC comparison had diminished quite considerably. Lyrically speaking, the song is kind of divided into two halves. The first half is centered around my fear of the future on an existential level, but also on an individual level, as it pertains to being a parent. After having brought a child into this world and looking at what the world is like at the moment, I can\'t help but think forward to what the future is going to be like for his generation. The second half of the song addresses the idea that regardless of what does happen, I have zero control over the path that we take collectively, and that my son has his own path before him.” **The Iron Chair** “Thrill Jockey suggested this song as a ‘single,’ and even though we are in no way a singles band, we agreed that offering this tangled piece as an introduction to the album felt like the right move. Given the climate that we’re all in currently, it also seemed appropriate because \[this song\] is a way of kind of harmonizing the inner state with our external world. Things are confusing right now, and nothing is familiar in the sense of what we\'ve been accustomed to up to this point. And for me, there\'s no immediately obvious emotional signifiers for this song. It covers a wide range in terms of the emotional directives in it, so I felt like that was a good way to sort of lay the groundwork for the record emerging into the world.” **Consumed** “Brian pointed out something interesting about the contrast of the two kind of pillars of the record, ‘May You Be Held’ and ‘Consumed,’ in that ‘May You Be Held’ starts off kind of frantic and then diminishes into this very bleak and almost barren anti-structure by the end, and this song is kind of the opposite—it starts out slowly and very minimal but by the end kind of escalates into this blown-out frenzy. That wasn\'t intentional, but when we look back on the record as a whole, it\'s kind of neat to see that arc having happened again on a totally subconscious level.” **Laughter and Silence** “It’s interesting to try to title instrumental tracks. This may seem like a trivial example, but there is something that I\'ve observed in children, and this was even before having a child of my own: The moment of greatest exhilaration and laughter and energy and exuberance is often immediately followed by a violent accident and tears. And I feel like that speaks to the human experience in a lot of ways—and also the present moment we’re in, which of course means different things for many people. But I just feel like we have had to take a prolonged silence and breath to look at where we are and more deeply consider the result of being thrust into isolation and separation—and also upheaval.”
“As an artist in this time of significant upheaval, society seemingly having reached the end of its current iteration, it’s of critical importance to absorb and interpret this process of dissolution - and of the transformation that hopefully follows it” says Aaron Turner, guitarist and vocalist for the expressionistic metal ensemble SUMAC. “While I don’t believe we’re on the brink of collective destruction precisely now, this is clearly a pivotal stage in the story of humankind - and there is something that feels right about this music at this exact and very uncertain moment.” In this case, the music in discussion is May You Be Held, the latest album for the American-Canadian trio. Picking up where the band left off with 2018’s Love in Shadow, SUMAC push further into the extreme polarity of their sound with their latest collection of long-form composition and free-form exploration. Meticulously detailed and complex one moment, rudimentary and repetitive the next, and completely untethered and unscripted at seemingly random intervals—it’s an album that fluctuates between extreme discipline and control on one end and an almost feral energy on the other. SUMAC’s work has always been about transition between different states of being. Our sense of normal, and indeed our sense of life, is now being shaken. We don’t know what is coming next. We are looking for pointers towards the future, as well as things to hold onto in the moment. This is a fundamental aspect of May You Be Held’s larger theme. Musically, it’s about continual unification and divergence—and is imbued with the uncertainty inherent in that cycle. In that uncertainty there is also hope, frustration, madness, and a desire for connection. All this too is part of this moment in our history—everything happening at once, the simultaneous emergence of humanity's best and worst characteristics. Lyrically, May You Be Held follows the humanistic themes explored on Love in Shadow, partially informed by Turner’s navigation of fatherhood and family life. “It’s clear humans have figured out many ways over the centuries to acclimate to adverse circumstances, and even to thrive in them,” Turner says. “My hope for our family, humanity and future generations, is that we find our way by doing what we have always done—invent, adapt, band together, and ideally, hold each other up through love and kindness.” This compassionate tone stands in stark contrast to the misanthropic and death-obsessed nature of most heavy metal music, and perhaps even seems diametric to the caustic and aggravated tone of May You Be Held. It may make more sense to approach the album as if it were a free jazz record or an abstract noise piece, where the emotional resonance isn’t bound up in melody as much as it is in performance. Here, Turner’s bellows and howls seem less threatening than wounded, primal, and mammalian. On guitar, his subversion of melody and penchant for noise seems less like aural punishment and more like an open horizon for frequencies and timbre. In a traditional metal context, drummer Nick Yacyshyn’s dexterous beats, exhilarating fills, and creative flourishes might seem like the pinnacle of rhythmic ferocity, but on May You Be Held there’s a kind of ecstasy in his performance, a fluidity and ability that conveys both urgency in purpose and joy in execution. Bassist Brian Cook glues it together with a heavy handedness that could be seen as hostile or malicious if it didn’t also provide the clearest path to navigating the band’s thorny arrangements. May You Be Held opens with “A Prayer for Your Path,” a composition culled from improvisational exercises centered on the interplay between Turner’s guitar drones and Yacyshyn’s bowing of a vibraphone. Threaded together with warming bass swells, it serves as the entry point for the album’s increasingly tumultuous and unpredictable strategies. The album’s title track is more in line with SUMAC’s established tactics: fusing heavy riffage, knotty structures, and expressionistic forays into an epic narrative arc that winds and weaves through so many peaks and valleys that it spills across two sides of an LP. The band’s free moments hit their apex with “The Iron Chair,” a fully unscripted spontaneous moment in the studio that sounds both completely uninhibited while also locking into some kind of alien logic. From there SUMAC launches into their second long-form orchestrated composition—the imposing “Consumed.” The track is perhaps their most ambitious work yet, morphing and evolving across multiple recording sessions at different locations over the course of several years until reaching its final form where SUMAC’s troglodyte force slowly ramps it up over its twenty-minute run time to a near panic-inducing frenzy. The album is bookended with a final improvisation exercise, the somber and subdued “Laughter and Silence.” While past SUMAC records have been concentrated efforts churned out in short flurries of activity, May You Be Held is a record that came from seemingly out of nowhere. Pieced together from vestiges of the Love in Shadow session with Kurt Ballou at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline WA, a session at The Unknown recording studio in Anacortes with Matt Bayles at the engineering helm (where the band’s sophomore album What One Becomes was tracked), and supplementary work at House of Low Culture out on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound, May You Be Held reflects the temporal shifts and protracted scope of its genesis. It’s a record that feels more human than anything else—at times flawed and wounded, at others, triumphant, purposeful, and pensive. The music is by no means a salve or anodyne, but neither is it nihilistic. Rather, its forceful approach and challenging timbres are like a confrontation, a baptism by fire, a therapeutic razing. Ultimately, May You Be Held is a reminder of the life force that binds us together and a clarion call to be an active participant in an evolving world.
As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”
Midwestern by birth and temperament, Freddie Gibbs has always seemed a little wary of talking himself up—he’s more show than tell. But between 2019’s Madlib collaboration (*Bandana*) and the Alchemist-led *Alfredo*, what wasn’t clear 10 years ago is crystal now: Gibbs is in his own class. The wild, shape-shifting flow of “God Is Perfect,” the chilling lament of “Skinny Suge” (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked-up part of that is I know I supplied the n\*\*\*a that sold it”), a mind that flickers with street violence and half-remembered Arabic, and beats that don’t bang so much as twinkle, glide, and go up like smoke. *Alfredo* is seamless, seductive, but effortless, the work of two guys who don’t run to catch planes. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs claims, “God made me sell crack so I had something to rap about.” But the way he flows now, you get the sense he would’ve found his way to the mic one way or the other.