Ultimate Classic Rock's Top 30 Rock Albums of 2022

“Every time I go in, I\'m trying to do something I haven\'t done before,” Jack White tells Apple Music. “And it\'s not like something that *other* people have never done before. It’s whatever it is to get me to a different zone so I\'m not repeating myself.” On *Fear of the Dawn*—the first of two solo LPs White is releasing in 2022, and the first in over four years—that zone is the world of digital studio effects, new territory for an artist who’s long been an avatar and champion for all matters analog. Here, working in lockdown and playing most of the instruments himself as a result, White’s challenged himself to make a rock record that’s every bit as immediate and textured as what he’s made before. The guitars are scrambled and fried, blown out and buffed to an often blinding shine (see: the crispy title track; “The White Raven”). Keys squiggle and giggle (“Morning, Noon and Night”), drums stutter and skitter and hiccup (“That Was Then, This is Now,” “What’s the Trick?”). It’s a real studio record, saturated and collage-like—White flexing his muscles as a producer. “I don\'t know how many, but there\'s dozens and dozens of tracks,” he says of the recording process. “I never used to do that. I made mistakes—I would play drums last, which you\'re not supposed to do. But then I started to feed off of that. I liked that it was wrong. It\'s nice that time goes on and you get better at certain things in the studio.” And having been so dogmatic from the start—famously dedicated to tape, vinyl, and primary colors—White sounds free to experiment on *Fear of the Dawn*, whether he’s dusting off a Cab Calloway sample and joining forces with Q-Tip for “Hi-De-Ho” or pasting together shards of radioactive guitar and mutating vocals on “Into the Twilight.” But that doesn’t mean he’s any less disciplined. “It\'s delicate—when you have eight tracks only, there\'s not much you can do,” he says. “If someone says you can have as many tracks as you want, now you got to be your own boss. You got to be hard on yourself. All the years of the razor blade editing gets you to a point where I don\'t want to waste my energy on that when I could put that energy to this now.”

If The Smile ever seemed like a surprisingly upbeat name for a band containing two members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, joined by Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner), the trio used their debut gig to offer some clarification. Performing as part of Glastonbury Festival’s Live at Worthy Farm livestream in May 2021, Yorke announced, “We are called The Smile: not The Smile as in ‘Aaah!’—more the smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” To grasp the mood of their debut album, it’s instructive to go even deeper into a name that borrows the title of a 1970 Ted Hughes poem. In Hughes’ impressionist verse, some elemental force—compassion, humanity, love maybe—rises up to resist the deception and chicanery behind such disarming grins. And as much as the 13 songs on *A Light for Attracting Attention* sense crisis and dystopia looming, they also crackle with hope and insurrection. The pulsing electronics of opener “The Same” suggest the racing hearts and throbbing temples of our age of acute anxiety, and Yorke’s words feel like a call for unity and mobilization: “We don’t need to fight/Look towards the light/Grab it in with both hands/What you know is right.” Perennially contemplating the dynamics of power and thought, he surveys a world where “devastation has come” (“Speech Bubbles”) under the rule of “elected billionaires” (“The Opposite”), but it’s one where protest, however extreme, can still birth change (“The Smoke”). Amid scathing guitars and outbursts of free jazz, his invective zooms in on abuses of power (“You Will Never Work in Television Again”) before shaming inertia and blame-shifters on the scurrying beats and descending melodies of “A Hairdryer.” These aren’t exactly new themes for Yorke and it’s not a record that sits at an extreme outpost of Radiohead’s extended universe. Emboldened by Skinner’s fluid, intrepid rhythms, *A Light for Attracting Attention* draws frequently on various periods of Yorke and Greenwood’s past work. The emotional eloquence of Greenwood’s soundtrack projects resurfaces on “Speech Bubbles” and “Pana-Vision,” while Yorke’s fascination with digital reveries continues to be explored on “Open the Floodgates” and “The Same.” Elegantly cloaked in strings, “Free in the Knowledge” is a beautiful acoustic-guitar ballad in the lineage of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and the original live version of “True Love Waits.” Of course, lesser-trodden ground is visited, too: most intriguingly, math-rock (“Thin Thing”) and folk songs fit for a ’70s sci-fi drama (“Waving a White Flag”). The album closes with “Skrting on the Surface,” a song first aired at a 2009 show Yorke played with Atoms for Peace. With Greenwood’s guitar arpeggios and Yorke’s aching falsetto, it calls back even further to *The Bends*’ finale, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” However, its message about the fragility of existence—“When we realize we have only to die, then we’re out of here/We’re just skirting on the surface”—remains sharply resonant.

The Smile will release their highly anticipated debut album A Light For Attracting Attention on 13 May, 2022 on XL Recordings. The 13- track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contempoarary UK jazz players including Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde. The band, comprising Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, have previously released the singles You Will Never Work in Television Again, The Smoke, and Skrting On The Surface to critical acclaim.

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith have been through a lot together in their 40-plus years as collaborators. They’ve toured the world countless times in Tears for Fears, the New Wave group they founded in 1981; bounced back from a breakup in the ’90s; and released their sixth album, *Everybody Loves a Happy Ending*, as well as a smattering of singles, in the 2000s. Their 1982 breakout single “Mad World,” “Head Over Heels,” “Shout,” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” remain timeless favorites for generations of listeners, and several chart-topping artists, from The Weeknd to Kanye West and Drake, have sampled their hits to elevate their own. With *The Tipping Point*, their seventh studio album and first LP in 18 years, they’re immensely satisfied with what they’ve written together—partly because they took their time to write their way back to each other, and largely because they did so on their own terms. “We spent a lot of time doing all these writing sessions over a bunch of years with a lot of what are considered more modern songwriters, and it didn\'t really work out for us because we felt it was slightly dishonest,” Smith tells Apple Music. “We were left with a lot of things that seemed like attempts at making a modern hit single, and I don\'t think that\'s what we do. We\'re really an album band. We made *The Hurting* before \'Mad World\' was released. We made *Songs From the Big Chair* before \'Everybody\' and \'Shout\' were released. We sat down, just the two of us, with two acoustic guitars, and tried to forge a path forward. It felt more honest, and the material at the end of it was far better, probably because it was more honest.” “No Small Thing,” *The Tipping Point*\'s first track, is a folk-tinged ballad that builds into a sweeping epic, and it\'s one Smith points to as an example of what they hoped to achieve when they reconnected and started writing: “This song is definitely a journey, and albums for us should be a journey.”

Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years –both in and out of lockdown –these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.

When Bonnie Raitt was dreaming up *Just Like That...*, her first album in six years, she had a very specific mission in mind: Record the songs she’s always wanted to, and especially the most soulful, funky ones she could find. “I always got my ear cocked for either old soul chestnuts or some obscure album cut off of an artist that I haven\'t listened to for a while,” she told Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I\'m just always hunting.” Some of the songs are covers or tributes inspired by other artists: She fell in love with The Bros. Landreth’s “Made Up Mind,” the album’s lead-off track, when the band opened for her on tour in 2014, while Al Anderson of NRBQ’s “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart” has been stuck in her head for three decades. Others, like the album’s title track, are new compositions inspired by the legendary singer-songwriter’s own favorite songs and songwriters. “I knew that this time when I wrote, I wanted to write from a third-person point of view,” Bonnie Raitt said. “Either a short story or something that moved me out in the world from somebody else\'s life story, because I\'d really mined a lot of my own personal life. I\'d pretty much covered all the members of my family, my relationships, and I just loved story songs, and I hadn\'t done one except for a song called \'All at Once\' that I did years ago. I love John Prine\'s \'Angel From Montgomery\' and \'Donald and Lydia,\' and I love the music of early Dylan, the first few albums where it\'s just him fingerpicking in a voice unadorned. I wanted a song to tell as a very simple story.” “Just Like That” is both simple and not, in that it touches on deep love, painful truth, and devastating loss—all things that Raitt felt acutely as she worked on the album over the course of the trauma and furious change she witnessed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “It\'s hard to separate the last couple of years\' COVID experience from the nightmare of the election cycle, and the polarity, hostility, and viciousness that\'s become what our country\'s climate is,” she says. “I just wasn\'t expecting that in this lifetime. It gave me a purpose. I knew that we eventually were going to either get back on the road or I was going to get in the studio, so it felt healing to have something to focus on and pull those songs together and know that people are hurting out there. And I can\'t wait to get on the road—not just to support my band and crew and the groups that I support, but to have some fun again and bring some light.”

The notion of The Black Keys as some kind of neo-primitive blues machine risen from the swamp to bring you what rock was supposed to be has always been a little overstated: Like The White Stripes, they’ve always been highly style-conscious, not to mention more occupied with simplicity in concept than in practice—they work at it. *Dropout Boogie* feels of a piece with 2019’s *“Let’s Rock”*: catchy, concise, stripped down but polished, with references to glam (“Wild Child”), psychedelia (“How Long”), and post-Stones blues (the Billy Gibbons co-write “Good Love”). With 20 years as a band behind them, they have their story and they’re sticking to it. And the more sophisticated they get, the easier they make it sound.

Over the course of 30 years, Eddie Vedder has evolved from wild-eyed spokesperson for a generation to spotlight-allergic grouch to, slowly but surely, one of rock’s elder statesmen—a guy who can comfortably share a stage with Bono, The Boss, and JAY-Z. And though his second solo outing (2011’s aptly titled *Ukulele Songs*) showcased his gentler side, its follow-up is more diverse: a panoramic sprint through blistering punk (“Power of Right”), classic pop (the Elton John-enriched “Picture”), road-ready anthems (“The Dark”), and the sort of tender ballads he’s penned for Pearl Jam this side of the ’90s (“The Haves”). Most of all, Vedder—long seen as self-serious by some—sounds like a kid in a garage here, calling out to ground control from the cockpit on “Invincible” or shooting himself out of a cannon on “Try.” It sounds like he’s having *fun*.

“When I work on music, I always feel like I’m trying to do something new,” Jack White tells Apple Music. “But I know quite often I’m taking things that worked in the past that I think are less well-known, or they’re interesting or idiosyncratic or whatever it is, and juxtaposing it with something I’ve never done before.” In the case of *Entering Heaven Alive*—his second album of 2022, after *Fear of the Dawn*—that might mean gothic folk with a reggae coda (“All Along the Way”) or a mellow, Neil Young-style jam overlaid with nursery-rhyme rapping (“A Madman From Manhattan”). But where *Fear of the Dawn* felt almost confrontationally eccentric, *Heaven* is rustic and restrained: the marital oath of “Help Me Along,” the Celtic waltz of “Please God, Don’t Tell Anyone.” Then there’s something like “A Tree on Fire From Within,” whose lyrics are as obscure and enigmatic as its music is robust—a mix that not only characterizes White’s best songs, but the early blues he often calls back to. But this is the dynamic with White, who, like Paul McCartney, is as equally capable of writing “Honey Pie” as he is “Let It Be,” and whose most interesting stuff tends to fall somewhere in between. He isn’t breaking tradition, nor is he perpetuating it—he’s building on it. Or, as he puts it, “jump\[ing\] in the river that’s already moving.”

Entering Heaven Alive is the fifth studio album from Jack White, founding member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather. True to his DIY roots, this record was recorded at White's Third Man Studio throughout 2021, mastered by Third Man Mastering, and released by Third Man Records. Coming summer 2022.

Drive-By Truckers nod once again to their Southern roots on their 14th studio album and the follow-up to 2020’s *The Unraveling* and *The New OK*. Club XIII refers to a real bar in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood cut their teeth before forming the band, with lyrical references to the Truckers’ early days peppered across the album. Highlights on the LP, which the band recorded at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens, include opening track “The Driver,” which chronicles memories from early days on the road, and the contemplative “Shake and Pine.” Margo Price, Schaefer Llana, and R.E.M.’s Mike Mills all guest on the album.

The fate of Earth and the infinite cruelty of man toward nature have been themes in Neil Young’s music as far back as 1970, when “After the Gold Rush” imagined a dystopian scene not too different from what we’re living through now. “We’re so terrified today, don’t you think? Look at people, they’re striking out at each other, worried about the other side,” he tells Apple Music. “We’re scared shitless, because at the bottom of everything, there’s another thing going on: They say the world might not be the same in 15 years. We might be really screwed.” Like 2021’s *Barn*, *World Record*—his 42nd album, and 13th with Crazy Horse—is a loose, folksy outing whose simplicity is backed by a lifetime of thought. There’s innocence (“Love Earth”), there’s anger (“The World \[Is In Trouble Now\]”), there’s nostalgia (“This Old Planet \[Changing Days\]”) and the kind of fortified naivete that has made Young a beacon to anyone sick of how things are but honest about what it might take to change them (“I Walk With You \[Earth Ringtone\]”). Most of the songs started as melodies Young whistled to himself while walking in the woods, and were written start to finish in two days. Producer Rick Rubin says it barely felt like they were making an album. “Most of what you hear on the record were things that, at the time that they were recorded, we were like, ‘Boy, I hope someday they’re going to learn the song,’” Rubin tells Apple Music. But Young’s looseness has always been central to his vitality, and his pessimism has always resolved into messages of hope, however tempered. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he says. “It’s probably the only time in the world that you could ever see where all the people of all the countries all around the world could have the same idea: ‘Wait a minute, we got to do something because this is no good.’ We’re all feeling it.”

If it wasn’t obvious, the title of Def Leppard’s 12th album—which steals a lyric from T. Rex’s 1971 glam-rock hit “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”—nods to the music the band grew up on. It’s also a long-running reference between singer Joe Elliott and guitarist Phil Collen. “We always referred to the era that we got baptized into music as ‘hubcap diamond star halo’ because it’s kind of a ludicrous line from that song,” Collen tells Apple Music. “We didn’t really know what it meant, but we also knew *exactly* what it meant.” As such, *Diamond Star Halos* harks back to England’s classic glitter-rock bands. “I remember seeing David Bowie on *Top of the Pops* when I was 14,” Collen recalls. “That was the moment that life went into technicolor. It changed everything.” Below, he comments on each song. **“Take What You Want”** “Because of the intro, it actually sounds like the start of an album, so it became an obvious track to open with. \[Bassist\] Rick Savage pretty much done all the music for this one, and I think had the title—and then Joe wrote the lyrics. It represents the rock side of Def Leppard that came a bit later. I want to say that I almost hear the New York Dolls in there as well.” **“Kick”** “I wrote this one with a friend of mine, David Bassett. It was influenced by The Glitter Band and T. Rex and Slade, but we originally wrote it with a female artist in mind. Then I played it for Joe, and he said, ‘Are you insane? This is obviously a Def Leppard song.’ We’d actually finished all the other songs for the record at that point, so this was the last one to come in. My demo guitars and demo backing vocals are on there, so there’s this rawness.” **“Fire It Up”** “I wrote this one with a guy called Sam Hollander, who’s the most amazing songwriter. He did ‘High Hopes’ by Panic! At the Disco. Again, it wasn’t originally meant to be a Def Leppard song, but we were trying to write fist-in-the-air stadium rock, somewhere between ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me,’ but they’re really hard to write. When I suggested it to the band, they felt it was obviously a Def Leppard song. Our producer, Ronan McHugh, really put his magic touch on this one.” **“This Guitar” (feat. Alison Krauss)** “My friend C.J. Vanston and I wrote this song 17 years ago. Every five years or so, we’d revisit it, but the general consensus—well, mainly from me—was that it sounds a bit country for Def Leppard. We’ve delved into that before, the way the Stones could do country or the Eagles could do country, and obviously we’ve worked with Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift, but this song was slightly different. This time, Joe asked me to make an acoustic demo for him to sing over, and I think his lead vocal is from the demo. Then Joe was talking to Robert Plant, and Alison come up. Robert knows she’s a huge fan, so Joe asked if she’d want to sing something on the album. Her duet with Joe is just beautiful. She’s a goddess on vocals and just an amazing person.” **“SOS Emergency”** “I started writing this one a few years ago, around 2014. I had the music and the chorus, and to me it sounded like a blend between latter-day Police and the Foo Fighters. That was the vibe, melodically. Then I sent it to Joe, and he just couldn’t stop writing lyrics. He took the chorus and made it something completely different. It’s got an energy that’s different to the rest of the album, and I just love that.” **“Liquid Dust”** “I’ve traveled to India a bunch of times, and I’ve always had melodies floating through my head. So, I kind of annexed this rough idea of a melody, and I wanted to have some almost Indian percussion and mix it with trap and hip-hop drum loops—which I did. It’s about coming towards the end of your life and realizing that you need more time. What happens after that? So, it’s about self-reflection and wondering whether there’s reincarnation.” **“U Rok Mi”** “The song is about being inspired—it’s not a reference to a person. The spelling could be from a text message, but it’s also something that Prince used to do all the time as well. My daughter wanted a ukulele a few years ago, so I got her one—and then we all got ukuleles on tour. So, I ended up playing one pretty much every day, and this idea came out. It starts as, like, a folky-type thing that sounds like it should be on *Zeppelin III*, but then I used these hip-hop drum loops, and it explodes into this big rock chorus.” **“Goodbye for Good This Time”** “Joe and me, our favorite Bowie album is *Aladdin Sane*. That’s where we first heard Mike Garson, who played piano with Bowie from that album until he died. Joe had been doing some birthday tribute celebrations for Bowie with Mike, so he knew him. Joe had written two great piano ballads that reminded me of early Elton John, like *Madman Across the Water* era, so he asked Mike, ‘Would you?’ The next thing you know, we’ve got our favorite pianist on the album! He really added another dimension to this song as well. In the middle, I play a Spanish acoustic guitar solo that’s a tribute to Bowie’s guitar player Mick Ronson.” **“All We Need”** “This is a real hopeful song, a kind of celebration. It was one of the first ones that me and Joe wrote during the pandemic, when we were sending ideas back and forth to each other and talking about the album as we went into lockdown. He was in Dublin, I’m in California, so we’d each wake up to the other’s new ideas. I really enjoyed that process of writing and recording. I done all my guitars and vocals on a laptop, and Joe did some of his vocals on his laptop with a real cheap little microphone. It sounds great, and I’d hate to go back to the other way of recording.” **“Open Your Eyes”** “This was the very first one that Joe and I did during lockdown, and we realized that working this way was a total energy-saver. I had ordered this Squier bass and wrote the opening riff straight out of the box. I sent it to Joe and before you knew it, we had a song. Rick Savage replaced my bass with a killer sound he had at home—a bass he pulled out of his closet—and boom! We sent our demo over to Ronan McHugh, our producer, engineer, and out-front live guy, and he put it all in a session and made it sound incredible.” **“Gimme a Kiss”** “This one’s got some Johnny Thunders and some Chuck Berry inspiration. All my demo guitars are on it, so it’s got a rawness that’s cool. It’s just a fun, smash-you-in-the-face rock song that’s not to be taken too seriously. It’s pretty hefty-sounding, I think, because we kept so much of the demo. We added to it, obviously, with proper drums and Sav playing bass and Vivian on guitar. We all sung on it, but we kept the original spirit of it, which was really important.” **“Angels (Can’t Help You Now)”** “Mike Garson is on this one as well, and it’s just a beautiful song. Joe wrote this and felt that, perhaps, it wasn’t a Def Leppard song because of the piano. But I said, ‘Why not? Why can’t we do what we want at this stage?’ And of course, when Mike played it, it took on a different dimension again. Songwriting-wise, it reminds me of Elton John again. But by the time we get to the last chorus, it sounds like Pink Floyd, from *Dark Side of the Moon*.” **“Lifeless” (feat. Alison Krauss)** “Again, I started this one almost like when the Stones do country, and I was trying to find a way where Def Leppard could do it. I think if U2 were country and Def Leppard was playing the song, it would sound something like this. I had the chorus and sent it to Joe. He came back the next day with the whole thing. We always say we can finish each other’s sentences, but we can also finish each other’s songs. Alison added all these harmonies and countermelodies that were just like, ‘Wow!’ It’s like a beautiful choir of one of our favorite singers.” **“Unbreakable”** “Joe had the idea for this one a while ago—I remember him playing bits of it when we were on tour last. We initially tried it like a rock thing—it almost sounded like AC/DC—but it wasn’t working. So, we shifted tracks and almost took on an element of INXS—not that we’re trying to copy Australian bands, but it sounds better with this vibe. We used a whole different palette of guitar tones because the standard ones weren’t working. Joe had already written the lyrics, but he then presented them in a different way, almost like an actor choosing a role.” **“From Here to Eternity”** “This is a Rick Savage song. It’s very different to everything else on the record, but we were working on the lyrics and the phrase ‘film noir’ came up. With that image, we were able to finish the lyrics and, all of a sudden, we knew what the song was going to be. It took on a little bit of a Queen direction. It’s the longest song, so it was obviously going to be at the end of the album, and it’s probably my favorite guitar solo that I’ve done on the record.”

Now well into his seventies, Ozzy Osbourne is metal’s unlikeliest survivor. After decades of hard living, tragic band member deaths, and numerous health scares, the Prince of Darkness delivers his 13th solo album fast on the heels of his 2020 mainstream smash *Ordinary Man*. Like its predecessor, *Patient Number 9* was produced by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Watt and boasts a head-spinning array of guest stars—including return appearances from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith alongside Metallica bassist (and Ozzy’s former sideman) Robert Trujillo and late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins (in one of his last recording sessions). But it’s stellar guitar cameos from the likes of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, and Ozzy’s longtime collaborators Tony Iommi and Zakk Wylde that really give the record a varied, multigenerational feel, as each guitarist lends his signature sound to the respective tracks. “Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck are megastars,” Ozzy tells Apple Music. “I didn’t think they’d want to play on my album. But they both did.” The tasteful tonal differences between singles “Degradation Rules” (featuring Iommi), “Nothing Feels Right” (featuring Wylde), and the title track (featuring Jeff Beck) help make *Patient Number 9* one of Ozzy’s most diverse albums yet. “I’ve been doing it 54 years,” he says. “If I don’t know what I’m doing now, I shouldn’t be doing it.”

When Ian Anderson began work on the first Jethro Tull album in over two decades, he started by writing a list of words that corresponded to strong human emotions. On the positive side, he listed love, compassion, and loyalty, among others. On the negative side, anger, rage, jealousy, etc. “I had 12 words for 12 songs, and it occurred to me that those words feature heavily in my memory of reading the Bible,” the renowned vocalist, guitarist, and flautist tells Apple Music. “So I reviewed some biblical text as a little reminder of where those words would’ve first appeared when the printing presses began to roll in Europe. It served as a useful reference point in writing the lyrics, but I never set out to illustrate the Bible as such. It’s really just taking those words and relating them to the present day.” Below, he discusses some key tracks on *The Zealot Gene*. **“Mrs Tibbets”** “One of the words that I wrote was ‘retribution,’ which was visited upon the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah by the angry God, Yahweh. Lot and his wife escaped, but she turned around to look at the destruction behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt, according to biblical tales. That brought up the inevitable comparison with someone turning to face a 2,000-foot air burst above Hiroshima. So I decided to write an analogous song based on the visitation of Little Boy, dropped by the air crew captain Paul Tibbets, son of Enola Gay Tibbets.” **“Jacob\'s Tales”** “Apart from the Jacob in the title, it\'s really a song about envy and jealousy in the sense of sibling rivalry, and the idea that brothers and sisters don\'t always get on. And when it comes to the inevitable passing on of family assets and treasures, things can get a little difficult. The fact of taking an element from the Bible as a parallel is not very evident in any of the lyrics, but that was among the references. So, I set out to write the song, but keep it well outside any biblical context.” **“The Zealot Gene”** “It’s about the polarization of opinion-making in contemporary society, largely through social media, but also through—quite rightly in a democratic world—freedom of speech, the right to express your opinion. But these days that opinion reaches further and faster and in more forcible terms as a result of social media—and can be used in a way that is often very hurtful, very cruel, very socially divisive. And whether it\'s at the hands of politicians or people in the world of sport, or media, or arts entertainment, it\'s heavy-handed. It often is, perhaps, a result of a spontaneous outburst that finds its way onto Twitter or Facebook—and then, the next morning, after the three glasses of chardonnay have worn off, people might think, ‘Whoops, did I really say that?’” **“Shoshana Sleeping”** “This is a slightly erotic observation of the human form, but in a respectful and hands-off kind of a way. Hopefully you would get the impression in the lyrics that the person singing the song is already in some kind of a relationship with the person that he\'s observing sleeping. In terms of biblical references, I read some verses from the Song of Solomon. In the original text, sometimes it takes on a pretty macho and unpleasant form—the biblical format is not terribly woke. Nonetheless, there are parts of the Song of Solomon which are very moving and spiritually generous.” **“Sad City Sisters”** “It has a parallel in biblical text, but more than anything it was conjured by visions I have often witnessed on a Friday or Saturday night, mostly in the UK, when I\'m walking from a concert hall back to a hotel somewhere after a show. Inevitably, you see late-night city life and the behavior of relatively young people going on a mindless bender to see how much they can consume in the way of drink and drugs wearing impossibly skimpy clothing and getting themselves into potential serious danger. As a father of a daughter—I also have one granddaughter—you tend to hope and pray that this danger won’t be part of your own family’s experience.” **“Where Did Saturday Go?”** “Again, it could be seen as a reference to waking up and not being able to remember what you did on a weekend. But there’s obviously the reference of the crucifixion of Jesus, and the Saturday following Good Friday—before Easter Sunday, the resurrection day. In this story, Saturday is very rarely mentioned. And in this 24-hour period you have to wonder what was happening in the minds of those followers of Jesus after his death but before his resurrection. But it\'s never discussed to any degree in the Bible, so I\'m just pondering that notion of a missing day in the narrative of Jesus.” **“The Fisherman of Ephesus”** “In that particular song I do stay more closely to the biblical stories of what happened to the disciples of Jesus. I\'m talking primarily about John, and he being the only one not to die a gory death. And so the song is about guilt survival, something I know from talking to veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, who lost their buddies, and who were scarred for life as a result of surviving when others around them died. And that happens, obviously, in car crashes, plane crashes, and probably in terms of COVID mortalities. There\'ll be people who survived alone in a family and the rest died from COVID before vaccination. So guilt survival is applicable right across the board. And that\'s essentially the message of the song.”

“One more time, for whatever reason, the universe saw fit to inject this band with another giant shot of plasma,” Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis tells Apple Music. “Left to our own devices, we probably would\'ve withered on the vine somewhere along the line, as we all do at some point. But it wasn\'t quite time for us to do that yet.” The shot of “plasma” that Kiedis is referring to is, in large part, the (second) return of guitarist John Frusciante, after roughly a decade away. You can immediately hear the difference—in the aqueous funk of “Poster Child,” the stadium-ready swings of “These Are the Ways,” or the acoustic phrasing of “Tangelo,” the album’s delicate closer. “It\'s so clear when he writes and when he plays,” Kiedis says of his bandmate, whose guitar work proved galvanizing on career highlights like 1991’s *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* and 1999’s *Californication*. “It\'s really fun to listen to because it’s sound and emotion and color. He\'s not trying to play the right notes—he\'s just trying to play the notes that are truly him.” Also back in the fold: producer and honorary fifth Chili Pepper Rick Rubin, who—absent on 2016’s *The Getaway*—accompanied Kiedis to Kauai for a songwriting retreat that was unexpectedly extended by lockdown. “Nobody could come, nobody could leave,” Kiedis says. “It was six months of being in the land that time forgot.” For the five of them, the aim was simple: Be together, play together, and, in Kiedis’ words, “write and write and write and write. Maybe we\'ll keep all of it, maybe we\'ll keep some of it. The process that it had to go through to become this record was very democratic in the sense that we all voted, including Rick.” The result is 17 songs that pay tribute to the veteran outfit’s chemistry and affection for one another, a magnetic coming-together that’s apparent anytime they play. “We\'re older and different, and enter *Unlimited Love*, a really fun and wild experience,” Kiedis says. “We accept each other and we love each other and there is an endless friendship going on there—which is not to say that we want to hang out every day. It\'s nice to go away from it and come back to it, go away from it and come back. But it never dies.” Here, Kiedis takes us inside a few highlights from the album. **“Not the One”** “This idea came out from ‘I think I know who you are, but maybe I don\'t. You think you know who I am, but maybe you don\'t.’ Especially in intimate relationships, we all present something and people always have an idea, but what would happen if we just showed each other our very worst from the very start? Like, not trying to impress each other, or just ‘I’m kind of a fuck-up and here\'s my weak suit and my flaws.’ And then we would never have to discover that down the line and go, ‘What?’” **“Poster Child”** “I didn\'t think that the music from ‘Poster Child’ was going to survive, because Flea brought in two painfully funky basslines on the same day, and they weren\'t similar, but the way I was hearing it was like, ‘I have to choose. My plate\'s too full.’ And so I chose the other one, which ended up becoming a song called ‘Peace and Love’ that didn\'t make the record. The one that I thought was the superior funk was not the superior funk, and then it just took me a long time of living with this music before I found my place. I can\'t say that any of them were really a struggle or a battle, but it’s the one that I was surprised came to life.” **“These Are the Ways”** “That\'s a song that John brought—the arrangement and a version of that melody. I’m never able to recreate his melodies perfectly—he\'s just on a different melodic level—so I usually put it through a simplification machine. I didn\'t overthink it. It was the first idea that came to my mind when I heard that arrangement, which is very bombastic and almost like a huge classical orchestra, exploding and then going way back. It was a reflection on life in America, but not a good or a bad reflection—just, this is it. We might be bloated, we might be overloaded with more than we can handle, and let\'s just take a step back and rethink it just a little bit. But it’s not ‘this is wrong and that\'s right.’ It\'s just ‘this is who we\'ve become.’”

Unlimited Love is Red Hot Chili Peppers' twelfth studio album, released on April 1, 2022 and coming six years after their previous full-length effort, The Getaway. The record also marks the return of two key figures in the band’s history: guitarist John Frusciante, who re-joined RHCP in 2019 and scores his first contributions since the band’s 2006 LP Stadium Arcadium, and long-time producer Rick Rubin, who returned to work with the group after a whopping eleven years (since I’m With You came out in 2011). RHCP started recording and working on the album in 2021, at Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu: a initial selection of around 100 tracks was trimmed down to slightly less than 50 recorded songs, 17 of which would eventually make the cut for the album’s final tracklist, while “Nerve Flip” would be the bonus track added to the Japanese Import of the album.

“It was nice to actually find something that we weren\'t good at, and actually try and get really good at it,” Muse singer Matt Bellamy tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Because metal, it turns out these metal players are absolute geniuses.” He is, of course, referring to “Kill or Be Killed,” arguably the heaviest track in the English rock band’s 28 years and nine studio albums. In many ways, it sets the tone for *Will of the People*, Muse’s ninth full-length and first LP in four years: They needed to sound louder and angrier than ever before, because they’re no longer writing about future anti-utopias—the struggles are here, now. “It feels a bit closer to reality this time,” Bellamy says. “I think in the past, a lot of our stuff\'s kind of delved into fictional dystopia, like George Orwell.” Now we’re in it, and so are the songs: The Queen-esque “Compliance” takes aim at a culture of bad-faith actors; “Liberation” is glam rock against disinformation. Frustration abounds, and the band has never sounded so large. “If I had to pick one thing that I\'m fighting for, it\'s can we create a revolution? Can we create change here, where it isn\'t violent and it doesn\'t lead to an authoritarian vision? We\'ve still got ideas and things we want to do that we haven\'t done yet. So we\'re excited for the future.” Below, Bellamy talks through some of the tracks on *Will of the People*. **“Will of the People”** “Our generation has seen this huge change. Something’s going on in the West—a kind of collapse, a kind of division has been emerging. And now we\'re dealing with real external threats. We just feel like we\'re a part of this generation where something\'s going to go down in a major way.” **“Liberation”** “It’s idealistic, but I always try to have some hope that these two schools of thought, which are opposing each other in the US right now, can come together. The question is, is there any common ground here that can be found to bring these people together? I think the common ground is that there\'s a need for systemic change, like in the way politics is done, potentially. I think the democratic structure is amazing in \[the US\], but as everyone knows, the lobbyists, there’s so much corruption there.” **“Ghosts (How Can I Move On)”** “That one is an unusual one for us. I was surprised that \[drummer\] Dom \[Howard\] and \[bassist\] Chris \[Wolstenholme\] even wanted that on the album. During the pandemic, I did a couple things on my own, just on the piano, acoustic. This song was in my mind in that world: me on the piano, singing alone. It really is a direct expression of that loneliness, and also the tragedy of what was happening for so many people.” **“Kill or Be Killed”** “It\'s the first death growl ever on a Muse record. Well, the \'ugh!\', it just came out like a high-pitched falsetto wail. Whenever I go loud, that’s where it goes. That is us going, \'Okay, if we\'re going to go heavy, let\'s go heavy.\' Dom had a different kit for everything, pretty much. But I was really pushing him on the double bass drum stuff.” **“We Are Fucking Fucked”** “That\'s the anxiety. Right there. There you go. That song literally sums them all up, I think. I don\'t have it very often, but if I did ever have a moment where, late at night, I can\'t sleep, and all those thoughts start going around, like, \'What\'s going on? All these natural disasters, all this stuff that\'s happening, civil unrest, blah, blah, blah.\' It puts you into a panic. That song was written literally at that moment.”

What comes next for Johnny Marr? The celebrated English musician is one of the best-known guitar players in modern history, from The Smiths to contemporary work with Hans Zimmer and even Modest Mouse. On his fourth solo album and first in four years, Marr threads the needle through his exhaustive exploration of genre. “Spirit Power and Soul” is soulful electro in the vein of The Cure—night and day from the spacey spoken-word interlude “Rubicon,” or the album’s frequent psychedelic detouring (Primal Scream’s Simone Marie plays bass on three of its tracks). His idiosyncratic, Smiths-ian riffs—those signature lead-rhythm guitar tones—abound (“Night and Day,” “God’s Gift,” the rollicking “Tenement Time,” which divides the first half of the double LP from the second.) Moody, expansive, filtered through a deep understanding of guitar-pop melody, the project asks its listeners to have an open and patient mind.

Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge was in a Seattle bookstore in 2014 when he came across what would become the theme for the Swedish occult rockers’ fifth album, *IMPERA*. “I saw this book called *The Rule of Empires*,” he tells Apple Music. “I’ve always been quite interested in history and politics, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that every empire eventually ends. Right then and there, I knew that at some point I was going to make a record about the rise and fall of empires.” At the time, Forge was already planning to make a record about the bubonic plague, which became Ghost’s startlingly prescient 2018 album *Prequelle*. “I felt like those two subjects represented two completely different threats of annihilation,” he says. “One feels a little bit more divine, and the other a little more structured and fabricated. So I compartmentalized the two themes and made two different albums.” Below, Forge details some key tracks from *IMPERA*. **“Kaisarion”** “The story this song tells, or the perspective it shines light onto, is basically stupid people destroying something that they don\'t understand with a frantic smile on their face. This has happened many times and unfortunately will probably happen many times in the future, because unfortunately things that we don\'t understand or that we cannot control have a tendency to arouse those feelings. We want to kill it. We want to destroy it.” **“Spillways”** “In ‘Kaisarion,’ we have the en masse, frenetic, frantic buzz of being in a group. In ‘Spillways,’ we have a very internalized pressure that builds up to the next song, which is a distant call that ends up being a voice in your head—the insulated person who’s being communicated with from a higher power. That’s loosely how we move geographically between these three songs. If the leads remind you of Brian May, that’s because I like stacking solos and adding harmonies, which automatically puts you in Brian May territory.” **“Call Me Little Sunshine”** “This is similar to our song ‘Cirice’ in the sense that you have this betraying hand that leads you into the night pretending to have a torch in the other. Which is interesting, because we’ve placed ourselves in the devil’s corner, pop-culturally, so it becomes this paradox. Myself and other peddlers in the extreme metal world use a lot of biblical or diabolical references, and up until recently we felt we were doing it with a distance from history—like this was in the Old World, when people were stupid. But no—this is real. This is now.” **“Hunter’s Moon”** “This song was written specifically for the *Halloween Kills* soundtrack, which made it so much easier to write because I knew the context. If ‘Call Me Little Sunshine’ is a voice inside the head that’s actually coming from outside, ‘Hunter’s Moon’ is inside the empire of the brain of a maniac: ‘I’m coming to get you because you belong to me. Can’t you see I’m doing this as an act of love?’ It’s absolutely illogical, but if you place yourself inside the head of a maniac, it makes sense. It’s burning love.” **“Watcher in the Sky”** “This reverts back to the imperial world of Flat Earth Society members, basically. The narration is calling upon the scientific community to use whatever science we have here within this empire to stop looking at the stars and look for God instead. Can we reverse the tools that we have to watch the stars to communicate with the Lord? And is there any way to scientifically prove that the world is actually flat? Because it looks awfully flat from where we\'re standing. So it’s a song about regression.” **“Twenties”** “This is a machine disguised as a leader talking to liberal persons because we need their manpower, and without them there is no society. So it’s this cheer about the twenties, saying that it will lead to an even more hopeful thirties—but 1900s-style. It’s meant to give people hope, if you’re bent that way. It’s similar to our song ‘Mummy Dust’ in that both are more primally aggressive and have an element of greed.” **“Grift Wood”** “I love Hollywood rock like Van Halen and Mötley Crüe, and it just feels fitting to have an uplifting track towards the end of the record. Musically, one thing that inspired the more Sunset Strip elements of the song was knowing that it was going to throw you off with a really long curveball that felt like something no Sunset Strip band has ever done. And that enabled the more glossy bits to be even more in line with the traditional elements of an early-’80s Sunset Strip song.”

On his fourth album with Alter Bridge vocalist Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators, Slash delivers what he describes as their most spontaneous collaboration yet. The perpetually top-hatted guitarist brings some of his inimitable Guns N’ Roses grit to lead single “The River Is Rising” while unleashing hooky, soaring hard rock on “Call Off the Dogs.” Elsewhere, the sentimental “Fill My World” might seem like it’s about a romantic relationship between humans, but Kennedy actually wrote the lyrics from the perspective of his beloved Shih Tzu, Mozart.

“It was never my intention to put out a solo album, ever,” Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett tells Apple Music. “As I keep telling people, I don’t take myself that seriously, and I’m not that clever. But these things just happen.” The thing that happened, specifically, is *Portals*, the cinema-inspired instrumental EP he wrote with keyboard and production assistance from composer Edwin Outwater, who conducted the San Francisco Symphony on Metallica’s 2019 orchestral collaboration, *S&M2*. Hammett says *Portals* was born out of a Peabody Museum exhibition of his extensive collection of horror movie posters. “Rather than the usual canned music they play for all the exhibits, I thought maybe it’d be cool if I came up with some background music,” he explains. “So, it all came from my attempt to compose something very simplistic and kind of blasé and not very attention-grabbing, but I failed miserably. Instead, it ended up being like four separate soundtracks for four separate movies.” Below, he details each track. **“Maiden and the Monster”** “This was the first thing I wrote for all of this. The intention was to try to capture the feel and the atmosphere of the movies from the silent era, particularly the German Expressionist cinema and the horror movies that were coming out of Universal Studios in the 1920s. The films that were going through my mind at that time were *Nosferatu*, *Der Golem*, *The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari*, as well as Lon Chaney\'s *Phantom of the Opera*, *The Hunchback of Notre Dame*, films like *Häxan* and *The Wizard*—abstract, silent horror films. Back then, there was a real connection between black-and-white movies and Baroque music, so I tried to give it that kind of feel.” **“The Jinn”** “In my mind, this one represents the late-’40s, post-World War II cinema, when it was not so romantic. There was a good deal of realism in the horror movies of the ’40s because people had actually seen the horrors of war on a mass basis, and that was a real influence on American culture. That war paranoia pervaded the movies, so you’ve got these films with invaders coming from somewhere and wreaking havoc, making all your familiar places seemingly unfamiliar overnight. I was really trying to capture that desperation from the movies of the late ’40s into the ’50s and early ’60s. They were basically trying to relieve everyone’s paranoia about the bomb, the Cold War, Communist invasion, and whatnot.” **“High Plains Drifter”** “I saw the Clint Eastwood movie *High Plains Drifter* when I was a kid. I remember walking out of the theater thinking, ‘Did I just see a horror movie wrapped up in western clothing?’ That’s what the movie has always felt like to me. This was a piece that I originally wrote on flamenco guitar. It didn’t really find a place in Metallica’s music, but I thought it still had merit. So, I played it for Edwin—he got it instantly, and we worked on it together. The music reminded me of the movie. It has that haunting, western, Ennio Morricone feel that I thought really captured what the movie was about.” **“The Incantation”** “This came from a piece of music that I became totally obsessed about and ended up rewriting seven different times. I even named it ‘The Insanity Suite’ at first because of that. I worked so much on it that I lost perspective. So, again, I played it for Edwin and then we worked on it together. He wrote the middle part, which is what the track needed—a break from all the dark, moody stuff. To me, it sounds like a ritual. Listening to it is so demanding that it feels like you’ve given a part of yourself or paid some sort of price just to hear it. It has this big, orchestral climax where we used a six-piece chamber orchestra comprised of Edwin and members from the LA Philharmonic. They’re on ‘High Plains Drifter’ as well. I think the results are just fantastic.”

When Foo Fighters came up with the idea for their 2022 comedic horror film, *Studio 666*, the script envisioned a fictional and ill-fated metal band called Dream Widow. In the movie, Dream Widow’s frontman becomes possessed by a demon and murders the rest of the band. Decades later, Foo Fighters—playing themselves—rent the mansion where the murders took place, and frontman Dave Grohl becomes a victim of the same curse. When it came time to create Dream Widow’s music for the film, Grohl took on the task himself, resulting in a full-length ripper that touches on thrash (“March of the Insane”), doom (“Cold”), and Southern-fried metal (“Come All Ye Faithful”).

Neil Young said he didn’t initially release 2001’s *Toast* because he thought it was too sad—a funny explanation coming from an artist whose stoicism has always made feelings like happiness and sadness seem beside the point. Still, you can sense where he’s coming from: With the exception of “Standing in the Light of Love,” *Toast* is a moody, reflective album, as hairy around the edges as any Crazy Horse project but less forthright. “Goin’ Home” (one of two tracks here rerecorded for 2002’s *Are You Passionate?*) is classic, but the character of the album lies in the 20-minute one-two of “How Ya Doin’?” and “Boom Boom Boom,” the former of which conjures the strange, exhausted comforts of heartache, the latter of which is the closest Crazy Horse ever gets to jazz.