Near the end of The Rolling Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years, Keith Richards takes the microphone to ask a series of emotional questions, pleading for honesty about what might lie ahead for him: “Is the future all in the past? Just tell me straight,” he asks. The answer is, remarkably, no: *Hackney Diamonds* is the band’s most energetic, effortless, and tightest record since 1981’s *Tattoo You*. Just play “Bite My Head Off,” a rowdy kiss-off where Mick Jagger tells off a bitter lover, complete with a fuzz-bass breakdown by...Paul McCartney. “At the end of it, I just said, ‘Well, that\'s just like the old days,’” Richards tells Apple Music of that recording session. *Hackney Diamonds* was indeed made like the old days—live, with no click tracks or glossy production tricks—yet still manages to sound fresh. After years of stalled sessions, and the death of their legendary drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, Jagger and Richards decided on a fresh start, traveling to Jamaica (the same place they wrote “Angie” in 1973) for a series of writing sessions. Based on a recommendation from McCartney, Jagger hired producer Andrew Watt, who’d also worked with Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ozzy Osbourne, Post Malone, and more, to help them finish the tracks. “He kicked us up the ass,” Jagger tells Apple Music. With Steve Jordan on drums, Watt kept it simple, bringing in vintage microphones and highlighting the interwoven guitars of Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The whole point is the band being very close, eyeball to eyeball, and looking at each other and feeding off of each other,” says Richards. In the spirit of 1978’s genre-spanning *Some Girls*, the album comprises sweeping riff-heavy anthems (“Angry,” “Driving Me Too Hard”), tortured relationship ballads (“Depending on You”), country-tinged stompers (“Dreamy Skies”), and even dance-floor grooves (“Mess it Up,” featuring a classic Jagger falsetto). The capstone of the album is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a stirring seven-minute gospel epic featuring Lady Gaga. Halfway through, the song goes quiet, Gaga laughs, and Stevie Wonder starts playing the Rhodes keyboard, and then Gaga and Jagger start improvising vocals together; it’s a spontaneous moment that’s perfectly imperfect, reminiscent of the loose *Exile on Main St.* sessions. “Playing with Stevie is always mind-blowing, and I thought that Lady Gaga did an incredible job, man,” says Richards. “She snaked her way in there and took it over and gave as good as she got with Mick, and it was great fun.” Richards didn’t expect to make an album this good as he approaches his 80th birthday. But he’s using it as a moment to take stock of his career with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. “The fact that our music has managed to become part of the fabric of life everywhere, I feel pretty proud about that, more than any one particular thing or one particular song,” he says. “It is nice to be accepted into this legendary piece of bullshit.”
Conceived of in a dream and sketched out during a series of pre-dawn sessions before the talons of logic took hold, *Seven Psalms* is a frankly mysterious album that nevertheless finds its way back to the same thematic wells Simon has drawn on for more than 50 years: loneliness (“Trail of Volcanoes”), aging (“Wait”), the existential questions of ordinary people (“The Sacred Harp”), and the sense of humor that keeps them gently at bay (“My Professional Opinion”). With an arsenal of rustling percussion and eerily resonant bells to back up a lone acoustic guitar, he plays the role of the solitary man haunted by a history of voices. And while the music is rarely catchy (at least for someone who wrote “Cecilia”), it continually refers back to itself with a subtle magic that honors the places from which it came. He’s always played it close to the vest; here, he’s deep inside it.
For his 19th solo album, punk godfather and infamous Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop teamed up with superproducer Andrew Watt and an all-star band. Featuring appearances from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, and blink-182 drummer Travis Barker—among others—the songs on *EVERY LOSER* are essentially played by famous musicians who grew up listening to Iggy Pop. “Andrew is very all-star-oriented in general,” Iggy says of the young producer. “It\'s like a fetish with him. Amusingly, he has an incredible collection of mint-condition rock star T-shirts. Once we started working together, he started wearing Iggy Pop T-shirts. Every day I got to see a new one.” Lyrically, *EVERY LOSER* sees Iggy seesawing from stream-of-consciousness bitch-fests (“Modern Day Ripoff,” “All the Way Down”) and love songs to Miami (“New Atlantis”) to reading the classifieds as a way to honor a decades-old suggestion from Andy Warhol (“The News for Andy”). The title of the album comes from a line in the social-media-inspired track “Comments” in which Pop says, “Every loser needs a bit of joy.” “Andrew suggested that whole line as the title,” he tells Apple Music. “If I was Pink Floyd, maybe I could get away with that. But I’m not, so I came back with *EVERY LOSER*.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Frenzy”** “There’s some name-calling there, but it’s just one particular dick and prick who gave me the ammo for those lines. No, you can’t ask who it is—but I’m sure he knows. It’s not a total rant, but it’s in the tradition of ‘Leader of the Pack’ or something like that. There’s some aggro there, but once it’s in motion you’re thinking about all sorts of things—the sharks in the sea that are out get you—but you’re also thinking about, ‘Shut up and love me, will you?’ Many things are ping-ponging in your mind. It’s a very tough little three minutes of rock music.” **“Strung Out Johnny”** “Andrew is a producer who’s also a top-flight musician and a good writer. When he sent me this song, he put a little provisional title on it—‘Strung Out Johnny.’ I thought, ‘I know something about that subject. I could sing on that.’ So we kept the title. I’m singing it to the archetypal Johnny, the universal young man. I wanted to sing to him about how it goes—step one, step two, step three, and then you’re fucked. But I wanted to put myself in there too, so the song would be a little warmer and more sincere.” **“New Atlantis”** “It\'s a love song to Miami and an homage to Donovan, who had a song called ‘Atlantis.’ Things are sinking here in Miami. I’ve experienced it because I’ve been here 24 years. But I do love this place. I’ve had the best years of my life here. I remember talking to Andrew about the song while he was on a boat in the Bahamas. I said, ‘You know Atlantis, the lost civilization, is right under you? Have you heard the song by Donovan?’ I don’t think he had. So he started blasting it out all over the sea on the boat speaker system.” **“Modern Day Ripoff”** “This came at a point in the record when I was starting to get cranky because I’m like 45 years older than Andrew and his energy doesn’t stop. I told him, ‘In The Stooges, we’d just do seven songs and an instrumental. Isn’t that enough?’ But no, he said we needed more, more, more. So, for the last three songs—starting with this one—I started writing bitchy lyrics. It’s just a standard middle-aged-white-guy-complaining song, but tongue-in-cheek. At one point it says, ‘Why can’t I do blow anymore? I can’t smoke a joint because I’m too paranoid? What the fuck?’” **“Morning Show”** “Andrew asked me if I was interested in doing a ballad, and I said yes. This was something he already had in his pocket. It’s like a Stones-type ballad. I never talked to him about it, but I’m guessing that was the inspiration. But I approached it more like a mature country singer would. A lot of people imagine it might be about, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to wake up and be Iggy Pop again,’ but it’s nothing to do with that. It’s just about feeling down and depressed but putting as good a face on it as you can. Kinda like ‘Tears of a Clown’ by Smokey Robinson.” **“The News for Andy (Interlude)”** “When I was making *Funhouse* with The Stooges, we shared a motel with Andy Warhol and his entourage, who were making the film *Heat* at the time. At one point, Andy suggested to me, ‘Why don’t you just read the newspaper and let that be the vocal of the song?’ I never did anything about it, but I told the story to Andrew and he was dying. He said we should do it. So what I’m saying here is from three different advertisements that were in the free handout paper that was laying around the studio that day. You know, the local spreadsheet that’s sponsored by strip bars and usually run by leftists.” **“Neo Punk”** “Travis Barker is playing on this, and I guess he walked right into that one. But he plays so well on it. The way he plays on the choruses sounds like he listened to ‘I Got a Right’ by The Stooges. I’ve been fascinated for a long time with the way that punk started out as one music and then became many musics and then ultimately seeped into the fashion world, into ethics, sexual orientations, all sorts of things. And suddenly people are making very quick, very large money out of doing things in a punky way. That’s kind of what it’s about.” **“All the Way Down”** “This is another one of the songs where I was getting crankier during the sessions. The guitarist in my band had posted a little footage of me from our last tour. I was dismantling the mic stand and she titled it ‘Full beast mode.’ I was quite proud that I could still manage the full beast mode. So, the song is basically saying, ‘I’m gonna go full on, and then complain a little bit.’ Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam plays on this one. I opened some shows for them many years ago, and their fans weren’t interested. They just wanna see Pearl Jam.” **“Comments”** “The music has a beautiful, lonely vibe to it, but then the chorus is so happy. What makes me happy these days is getting a giant check for doing something easy. And the loneliness part, that comes from Zuckerberg and Musk. I will look at the comments \[on social media\] until I get a general picture, but then I just sort of feel like I’m going to puke. Even if they’re positive—because it’s just one after the next after the next. And it’s always ‘You’re great!’ or ‘You’re a piece of shit!’ There’s not much in the middle, generally.” **“My Animus (Interlude)”** “What I\'m trying to say there is that I have a certain pride in the idea that my front, when I want to put it forward, is not dependent on being some kind of multimillionaire, or chart-topper, or stadium king, or any of that. It comes from me, and it comes from what I think is just a healthy ability I have—and I\'ve maintained—to be able to seek out the important pleasures in life. That’s how I’d put it.” **“The Regency”** “There’s a very interesting relationship between the parking business, the banks, and the stadium business. The real money is in that parking lot. It’s a really big business. That’s sort of what this song is talking about. And Taylor Hawkins played on this and ‘Comments.’ He really makes them come alive. I had met Taylor when I opened for the Foo Fighters, and then he played me in the CBGB movie. His abs were the movie poster, presumably as my abs.”
With over 50 hit singles and more than 100 million records sold, English synth-pop masters Depeche Mode could still play sold-out stadiums if they had stopped releasing music in the mid-’90s. “We could easily, if we wanted to, just go out and play the hits,” vocalist Dave Gahan tells Apple Music. “But that’s not what we’re about.” Depeche Mode’s 15th studio album is their first without co-founder and keyboardist Andy Fletcher, who passed away in 2022. This sad and hugely significant event in the band’s history is reflected in the album’s title. “*Memento Mori*—‘remember that you must die,’” Gahan says, translating the Latin phrase. “The music really will outlive all of us.” Main songwriter Martin Gore started working on the record early in the pandemic—well before Fletcher’s death—but recalls the moment when he played his demos for Gahan. “It’s always a tough moment when you have to present your songs for the first time to Dave,” he tells Apple Music. “I would’ve been presenting them to Andy as well, obviously. He passed away just days before I was about to send him the songs. And that’s one of the very sad parts about it, because he used to love getting the songs.” *Memento Mori* is notable for another big reason: It marks the first time Gore has worked with a songwriter outside of Depeche Mode. He teamed up with Psychedelic Furs vocalist Richard Butler on several tracks, including “Don’t Say You Love Me,” “Caroline’s Monkey,” and the pulsing lead single “Ghosts Again.” Surprisingly, the band tracked more than just the 12 songs that appear on the album. “We actually recorded 16 songs for this album, and it was very difficult to choose the 12 that made it,” Gore says. “That’s very unlike us, but we have four in the vault. It’s a very, very small vault. It’s like a thumb drive.” Despite the melancholy inherent in some of the songs, *Memento Mori* is ultimately life-affirming—and a testament to Depeche Mode’s commitment to the creative process. “It’s music, and it’s art, and it’s something that is incredibly informing,” Gahan says. “Without it, I don’t know where I would be.” Below, he and Gore comment on a few of the key tracks. **“My Cosmos Is Mine”** Dave Gahan: “It’s actually one of my favorites on the album. When Martin first sent me the demo, it didn\'t strike me. But quite often those are the ones that creep up on me later—that I most identify with for some reason—and that song was one of those. I remember going to Martin\'s house and singing it, and I knew we were capturing something. I feel like I found a meaning in the song that I identified with, and I don\'t often. When I found my place with that song, I knew it was going to be a great introduction to *Memento Mori*.” **“Ghosts Again”** Gahan: “When I first heard that song, I was like, ‘Okay. I\'m in.’ The demo made me feel instant joy. I remember dancing around my living room, and my daughter came in and she was looking at me weird, like, ‘What\'s going on?’ I was like, ‘Don\'t you love this?’ She kind of started bopping along with me and she was like, ‘I get it. It\'s a really good song.’” **“Don’t Say You Love Me”** Gahan: “It’s very Scott Walker. To me, it’s this beautiful torch, but I love those kinds of songs. I mean, it’s like a movie or something. Martin wrote that one with Richard Butler.” Martin Gore: “Which is something I’ve never done before, worked with somebody outside the band. He reached out to me around April 2020. The pandemic had hit, and he just texted and said, ‘We should write some songs together.’ And he actually said that once before, like 10 years ago or something, but nothing ever came of it. But because it was the pandemic, I thought, ‘If I’m going to do something different, now is a good time to experiment.’ So we did, and we ended up writing six songs that I really like.” **“Speak to Me”** Gahan: “Well, it\'s sort of metaphors. The loneliness, the emptiness, the void, the wanting to be with people and life—and at the same time, not wanting to be. The initial idea came to me, but the song was incredibly elevated by Martin and our producers, James \[Ford\] and Marta \[Salogni\], into a different place, another world. And that\'s exactly where I wanted the song to go as well. But it’s beyond what I could have put together myself. It’s a very simple song, but honest and real. For me, it was the key that opened the door for me to make another Depeche Mode record with Martin. It was an answer to that question for me.”
In an interview just after the release of 2020’s *Reunions*, Jason Isbell said the difference between a good songwriter and a great one was whether or not you could write about a subject beyond yourself without making it feel vague. Ten years out from the confessional rawness of *Southeastern*, not only are Isbell’s lyrics ever closer to his ideal, but he’s got a sense of musical nuance to match. *Reunions* and 2017’s *The Nashville Sound* all blend anecdotes and memories from Isbell’s past with fiction, but *Weathervanes* tells a broader story with these vignettes, one with a message that became painfully clear to him throughout the pandemic: You can’t fully appreciate and acknowledge the good in your life without experiencing, and holding space for, the bad. “When I went into writing these songs, it started sort of at the tail end of the lockdown period and continued through our reentry into society; it kind of feels like a new world, for better or worse,” Isbell tells Apple Music. “A lot of these stories came from that, because when you start adding up the things that you\'re grateful for as somebody who tells stories, then automatically I think your mind goes to the counterpoint of that or the inverse of that. And you start thinking, \'Well, where could I be if I hadn\'t made the choices that led me to here?\'” This led to a fundamental shift in his approach to songwriting. “The more specific and the more intense something is, the more likely I am to come at that through a character,” he tells Apple Music. “If I\'m writing about love or death or having kids, I will go from the first person and it\'ll be me. But if I\'m writing about something like a school shooting, it feels like I have to say, \'Okay, this is how this affects me, and this is how this makes me feel.\' The only way I can be honest with that stuff is come at it from a character\'s perspective when it\'s a very specific topic like that.” Sometimes, that means creating these characters—or even reflecting on a younger version of himself in a difficult situation, as he does in “White Beretta”—and trusting them to lead the song down the path it needs. “So many times I didn\'t know what I was talking about until I got to halfway through the song, and I like it best when it happens that way,” he says. “I\'ll just get started and I\'ll say to myself, \'If I make a real person here and actually watch them with an honest eye, then after a couple of verses, they\'ll tell me what I\'m writing about.\'” Below, Isbell tells the stories behind the songs of *Weathervanes*. **“Death Wish”** “This is the kind of song that I have wanted to write for a long time. It\'s expansive from the production, but also you can tell from Jack White doing the acoustic cover that he did, it still feels like a broad, expansive sort of thing. That\'s a modern type of songwriting that I\'m really drawn to, but it\'s also antithetical to the roots-music ideal. And after \'Death Wish\' is over, I feel like, you\'ve hung in there with me through this sort of experimental thing. Now I can give you something that is a little bit more comfortable for your palate, something you\'re a little more used to from me.” **“King of Oklahoma”** “I was out there filming in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. There was a project that I had been asked to be a part of with Darius Rucker, Sheryl Crow, and I think Mike Mills, and a couple of other people. For a minute there, I was like, ‘Well, if I can get home in time to record with you all, that sounds like a really fun time. So I will do that.’ But I was never home in time because they kept changing my filming schedule, so I just missed it. But I wrote that song thinking, ‘Well, maybe I need some songs for this; I don\'t know if this is going to work for them or not.’ Eventually I thought this should be just a song of my own.” **“Strawberry Woman”** “This one\'s probably the closest I come to nostalgia on this record, I think, because there are a lot of moments here that are things that Amanda \[Shires, Isbell\'s wife and frequent collaborator\] and I shared together early on in the relationship. There\'s an undercurrent of the beginning of a relationship when you really need each other in ways that, if everybody\'s progressing like they\'re supposed to, you might not wind up needing each other in the same way 10 years down the road. And there\'s loss in that. It\'s a beautiful thing to grow as a human being, and both of us have, I think a lot, but then all of a sudden, at the end of that, you start trying to figure out what you still have in common. Even though you might not have the codependent nature that the relationship had early on, it\'s still something worth doing and worth working on, worth fighting for. You have to adjust your expectations from each other.” **“Middle of the Morning”** “After the experience of *Reunions*, Amanda and I took a little bit of a break from doing that stuff together. For the most part, I just sat and worked on my own until I got all these done. ‘Middle of the Morning,’ I don\'t know if she likes that song or not, maybe she does. That one\'s very personal as far as the perspective goes. That was a tough one to write and a tough one to sing, because I know there\'s some assumptions in there, and there\'s this sort of feeling of living in under the same roof through the pandemic and feeling so disconnected from each other.” **“Save the World”** “It was right after the Uvalde school shooting, but I didn\'t know that that\'s what I was writing about when I started. When I started, I was writing about leaving my wallet behind, and then I was writing about a phone conversation, and then all of a sudden I was writing about a school shooting. Once I realized that\'s what I was writing about, I thought, \'Oh, shit. Now I\'ve got to do this and handle it correctly.\' It took a lot of work. I finished that song and played it for Amanda, and she was like, \'I think you should write this again. You\'re not saying what you want to say. And at this point, it doesn\'t have enough meat, doesn\'t have enough detail.\' And I was like, \'Yeah, but that\'s going to be really fucking hard. How do you write about this without it seeming exploitative?\' And so it took more than one stab.” **“If You Insist”** “This song is from the perspective of a woman, and I wrote it for a movie—I don\'t remember the name of the movie, and I wound up not using it for the movie. They had given me my own song \[\'Chaos and Clothes\' off *The Nashville Sound*\] as a reference, and so I wrote something very similar to that in feel. I just really liked the song, and whoever we were negotiating with for the situation with the movie, they didn\'t want us to own the master, but I said, \'Well, I\'ll just keep it.\' And so we just kept it and I put it on the record.” **“Cast Iron Skillet”** “I think for a lot of songwriters that are writing whatever ‘Southern song’ or outlaw country they feel like they\'re writing is to go into this idea of, \'This is all the stuff that my granddad told me, and it\'s this down-home wisdom.\' What I wanted to say was, \'There is an evil undercurrent to all these things that our granddads told us, and there is darkness in those woods.\' I don\'t mean to sound like I\'m better at it than anybody else. Sometimes people are aiming for a different target, but I get bored with songs that do the same thing over and over. I wanted to turn that on its head and say, \'Let\'s frame this with this nostalgic idea of our romanticized Southern childhoods—and then let\'s talk about a couple of things that really happened.\'” **“When We Were Close”** “This is about a friendship between two musicians, and a lot of people ask me who it\'s about, but that\'s not the point. It\'s about me and a whole fucking bunch of people, but it\'s fairly specific. I had a friend who I made a lot of music with and spent a lot of time with, and we had a falling-out, and it never got right. It was so severe, and then he was gone, and that was the end of that. There was no closure. I remember when John Prine died, I was very sad, but I was also very grateful that the grief that I felt for John was not complicated. You don\'t have to be angry and you don\'t have to feel like there are things left unsaid or unresolved. This story was really the inverse of that, because it was like, yes, I am grateful for a lot of the things that we did together and that person showed me and a lot of the kindnesses, but at the same time, it was complicated. I have to be able to hold those two things in my head at the same time. You could call that the theme of this whole album, honestly.” **“Volunteer”** “The connection that I have to my home is complicated, because I am critical of the place where I grew up, and also, I\'m very, very fortunate that I grew up there. But my heart breaks for small towns in Alabama, and those small Alabama towns are scattered all over America and all over the world. I go play music in a lot of them, and I feel welcome, but not entirely. I also feel like an interloper. This story is a narrative based on a character that is fictional, but it came from that idea of like the Steve Earle song, \'nothing brings you down like your hometown,\' that same thing. It\'s like, why can\'t I really feel like I have a strong emotional connection to this place where I grew up? And also, why can\'t they get it together? The older I get, the more I think I feel comfortable discussing that and discussing the place.” **“Vestavia Hills”** “It started as me writing about somebody else, but the joke was on me. I got about halfway through the song and I was like, ‘I see what I\'m doing. You asshole.’ Then I thought about, man, what would it be like to be an artist\'s crew member? Let\'s make our character the crew guy, the sound guy who has been doing this for a long time and really believes in the work and really cares about the artist, but he has had enough. Basically, this is him turning in his two-week notice and saying, \'I\'m going to do one last tour with you, and then I\'m going home, because my wife makes a lot of money. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and I don\'t have to put up with this shit anymore.\'” **“White Beretta”** “At this song’s heart there\'s this regret, and it\'s not shame, because I love the concept of extracting helpful emotions from shame. I feel like shame is kind of to protect you from really looking at what actually happened. I can look back and say, \'Well, yeah, it wasn\'t all my fault, because I was raised a certain way to believe a certain set of things.\' I didn\'t say, \'Don\'t do this.\' I didn\'t say, \'I don\'t want you to terminate this pregnancy.\' I was just kind of on the fence. But I was a teenager; I didn\'t know what to do, and I had been raised in a very conservative place, and there was a lot of conflicting emotions going on. A song like that is hard because you have to make an admission about yourself. You have to say, \'I haven\'t always been cool in this way.\' I don\'t think you can give an example to people of growing if you don\'t give an example of what you\'re growing from.” **“This Ain’t It”** “This is sort of post-Southern-rock, because it sounds very Southern rock, but the dad in this song is somebody who would completely, unironically love the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The perspective is he\'s basically trying to sneak back into his daughter\'s life at a very inopportune time. It\'s another one of those where the advice might not be very good, but he certainly believes it, and it\'s coming from his heart. I\'ve proven what I need to prove about my tastes and about serving the song, and sometimes the song just needs to have a bunch of guitar on it and rock, and maybe even some fucking congas.” **“Miles”** “I kept trying to shape it into something that was more like a four-minute Jason Isbell song, and then at one point I thought, ‘No. I think we could just play the way that I\'ve written it here.’ I would have a verse on one page and then that refrain written out on a different page, and I had to go back through the notebook and figure out what belonged to that song. The approach was kind of like if Neil Young was fronting Wings. It was like a McCartney song where it\'s got all these different segments and then it comes back around on itself at the end, but also sort of with Neil\'s guitar and backbeat. It felt like I had a little bit of a breakthrough in what I would allow myself to do, because I\'ve always loved songs like this, and I\'ve always sort of thought, \'Well, you need to stop.\' When Lennon was out of the picture, McCartney was making \'Band on the Run\' and all this stuff. It\'s just one big crazy song all tied together with little threads.”
No band could ever prepare for what the Foo Fighters went through after the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, but in a way, it’s hard to imagine a band that could handle it better. From the beginning, their music captured a sense of perseverance that felt superheroic without losing the workaday quality that made them so approachable and appealing. These were guys you could imagine clocking into the studio with lunchpails and thermoses in hand—a post-grunge AC/DC who grew into rock-pantheon standard-bearers, treating their art not as rarified personal expression but the potential for a universal good time. The mere existence of *But Here We Are*, arriving with relatively little fanfare a mere 15 months after Hawkins’ death, tells you what you need to know: Foo Fighters are a rock band, rock bands make records. That’s just what rock bands do. And while this steadiness has been key to Dave Grohl’s identity and longevity, there is a fire beneath it here that he surely would have preferred to find some other way. Grief presents here in every form—the shock of opening track “Rescued” (“Is this happening now?!”), the melancholy of “Show Me How” (on which Grohl duets with his daughter Violet), the anger of 10-minute centerpiece “The Teacher,” and the fragile acceptance of the almost slowcore finale “Rest.” “Under You” processes all the stages in defiantly jubilant style. And after more than 20 years as one of the most polished arena-rock bands in the world, they play with a rawness that borders on ugly. Just listen to the discord of “The Teacher” or the frayed vocals of the title track or the sweet-and-sour chorus of “Nothing at All,” which sound more like Hüsker Dü or Fugazi than “Learn to Fly.” The temptation is to suggest that trauma forced them back to basics. The reality is that they sound like a band with a lot of life behind them trying to pave the road ahead.
“The one thing I wanted to do is avoid a sophomore slump,” Wolfgang Van Halen tells Apple Music. “That was literally all that was on my mind. Other than that, I think I came into the process with a bit more confidence in comparison to the first album. We’ve got two years of playing live shows now, so we know how the crowd reacts to stuff.” That confidence has clearly extended to his vocal performances on his second album under the name Mammoth WVH, prime examples of which can be heard on the singles “Like a Pastime,” “Another Celebration at the End of the World,” and “Take a Bow.” “On the first album, I was trying to figure out if I could be a singer,” he says. “But for the past two years, I *have* been a singer. I think you can hear that confidence in my guitar playing as well.” In fact, *II* is much more solo-forward than its predecessor. Standouts include Wolfgang’s melodic turn on “Miles Above Me,” the finger-tapping on “Erase Me,” and the 90-second twister on “Take a Bow,” which he played on his late father’s famous “Frankenstein” guitar through the rig used on the early Van Halen albums. “Everyone thinks the first album was me working through everything that had been happening, like losing my father,” Van Halen says. “But that’s not true. I finished recording that album in 2018. This is the album where I’m working though everything that happened in my life since 2019, and that’s a lot. I think that’s why it ended up being a darker, heavier album.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Right?”** “I think this is a really great example of my mission statement as a songwriter in that it\'s incredibly heavy, at least from the perspective of Mammoth in comparison to the first album. There\'s practically a djent part after the solo, which is very different from anything we\'ve done, but that doesn\'t get in the way of the melody. And I think that blend of heaviness and melody can coexist and not override each other. The title came from when I was joking around with the engineer, and I ended up saying ‘right?’ so loudly that the drum mics picked it up. We decided to keep it because it was right on beat.” **“Like a Pastime”** “I thought this was an important one to \[release as a single\] because I think it shows a sense of maturity and a different sound in comparison to the first album. The whole birth of the song came from me trying to explain to my girlfriend, now fiancée, what a polyrhythm was, because I really like Meshuggah. There’s that looping rhythm that\'s locked with the tempo at the start with the guitar and the bass, and then the drums come in doing this sort of triplet-esque thing on top of it. That was my way of attempting to teach her, and she got it, but before I knew it, I had written a song.” **“Another Celebration at the End of the World”** “This was the very first song that we released. With the first album, there was always a question of what should be the first song everybody should hear. With this album, unanimously, everybody was like, ‘Oh, it\'s this song. This is the perfect song to come back with.’ This one really kind of set the pace for the record, because I feel like there weren’t too many super uptempo, upbeat songs on the first album. They were more kind of groovy. With this one, I just wanted to write a punky, fast song, and that started the path of this album being heavier and more aggressive.” **“Miles Above Me”** “This is sort of the pop-punk comfort song of the album. I haven\'t really talked about the solos yet, but I really enjoy this one because it\'s more of a song within a song, and it kind of just takes you on a little melodic journey. I think that\'s really an important part about solos—it\'s not always about shredding balls and showing off. My dad said the solo for ‘Think It Over’ on the first album was my George Harrison solo, which was such a huge compliment, because that’s just playing the perfect melody for what the music is providing. I kind of took this solo in that same vein.” **“Take a Bow”** “I think this is the longest song we\'ve ever released, but I think the most important part is the solo. It\'s way different from anything I\'ve done before, and it really represents an elevation in my skills. I was never too confident with guitar solos, but on this one I just went for it. The thing I was stoked about is that I played my father\'s original Frankenstein guitar through his original Marshall cab and head, so it’s basically what he used for the early Van Halen albums. He’s not around anymore, so I think it was really cool to be able to involve him in a way when he’s not here.” **“Optimist”** “I\'m a big TOOL fan, and I think that sort of came out without me realizing it on this song. It’s our first song in a really weird time signature—it’s in 7/4—and it\'s just very dark and angry and heavy. My favorite part is the bridge. I love how the drum fills lead into this droning sort of march, just this wall of sound. I wrote it going, ‘Oh, man—I can’t wait to play this live.’” **“I\'m Alright”** “This song is really funny because it almost has a throwback vibe in a way, at least through the lens of Mammoth, but the lyrics are very from the heart. It’s definitely a little bit angry. If I ever personally had an anthem for telling people to fuck off, this is it—because I literally say that in the song. It’s about rejecting everyone\'s expectations of me and about how I’m doing what I want to do. And I think there\'s something really funny about layering that message in a song that echoes the vibe of a more classic rock song.” **“Erase Me”** “This was an idea that fell off from the first album because it just wasn\'t ready. But I revisited it, and man, I really loved the solo more than anything. It’s kind of an aggressive pop-rock song, and certainly a breakup song if ever there was one. This was another one that made me realize this album was going to be more solo-heavy than the first. For this song, the entire solo is tapped, but it’s melodic. I think that’s a funny duality because when you think of tapping, you think of shredding. But in this context, it’s almost pretty and kind of fun.” **“Waiting”** “Lyrically, this is almost a thematic sequel to ‘Distance,’ which was the very first song we ever released. That song was dedicated to my father, and it’s sort of that conversation between you and that person or thing that you miss. But it almost shifts perspective through the song. It\'s a method of storytelling I haven\'t really attempted yet until this song, and it was kind of exploring more of the vibes of ‘Distance,’ and I\'m really happy with how it turned out. It\'s a very emotional song for sure.” **“Better Than You”** “I think this is the perfect album closer. In the studio we were calling it ‘Meshuggah Beatles’ because there\'s sort of that mix at the ending, and also in the bridge there\'s this descending riff, but at the same time it gets really, really heavy. It’s similar to ‘Right?’ in that it has that representation of heaviness and melody living together in harmony in a really fun way. Lyrically, I’m talking about how everyone on the internet thinks they’re better than everyone else, but really they’re just as miserable as everybody else, and we’re all just kind of talking to ourselves.”
The deskbound among us might first interpret the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album as a reference to the font, but a few minutes with the music and you’ll realize that what Josh Homme refers to is a sense of decadence so total it ends with the city on fire. They remain, as ever, the hardest hard-rock band for listeners who don’t necessarily subscribe to the culture or traditions of hard rock, channeling Bowie (“Emotion Sickness”), cabaret (“Made to Parade”), and the collars-up slickness of British synth-pop (“Time & Place”) alongside the motorcycle-ready stuff you might you might expect—which they still do with more style than most (“Obscenery”). And like ZZ Top, they can rip and wink at the same time. But *In Times New Roman...* plumbs deeper personal territory than prior records. Homme has weathered the deaths of friends, the dissolution of his marriage, and other painful developments since the release of 2017’s Villains, and the album touches on all that—but he also wants to be clear about assumptions listeners could make from his lyrics. “I would never say anything about the mother of my kids or anything like that,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also, by the same token, you must write about your life, and I think I\'m soundtracking my life. These songs and the words that go with them are an emotional snapshot where you stop the film, you pull out one frame. One song it\'s like, \'I\'m lost.\' And another one, \'I\'m angry.\' They need to be these distilled versions of that, because one drop of true reality is enough flavor. I think the hatred and adoration of strangers is like the flip side of a coin. But when you\'re not doing it for the money, that currency is worthless. I can\'t get involved in what the people say. In a way, it\'s none of my fucking business.” For Homme, the breakthrough of *In Times New Roman...* came *because* he was unflinchingly honest with himself while he was writing through some of his darkest moments. “At the end of the day, the record is completely about acceptance,” Homme says. “That\'s the key. My friends have passed. Relationships have ended. Difficult situations have arisen. I\'ve had my own physical and health things go on and things like that, but I\'m okay now. I\'m 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of what\'s going on, you know what I mean? But in the last seven years, I\'ve been through a lot of situations where it doesn\'t matter if you like it or not, it\'s happening to you. And so I\'ve been forced to say, yeah, I don\'t like this, I need to figure out where I\'m at fault here or I\'m responsible here or accountable here. And also, I need to also accept it for what it is. This is the reality. Even if I don\'t like it, it would be a shame to hold on too tight to something that\'s slipping through your hands and not just accept it for what it is.”
It takes less than a second for Wilco’s 13th album to make its intentions known. Opening track “Infinite Surprise” begins in medias res, with an abrupt wash of dissonance and a metronome that sounds purposefully not on purpose. On the heels of 2022’s what-it-says-on-the-tin throwback to the band’s y’alternative roots, *Cruel Country*—and, really, most of the band’s work for the prior decade or so—this jarring introduction announces a welcome sense of mischief. *Cruel Country* arrived as Wilco was celebrating the 20th anniversary of their defining opus, *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot*, complete with valedictory mini-tour and lush box set recounting and relitigating the album’s famously tense personal/personnel drama. If there’s anything that defines Wilco’s career since, it’s Jeff Tweedy’s reluctance to replicate those conditions; no amount of creative energy and friction could be worth the psychic cost. Wilco has had the same lineup since 2005, they write and record in a cozy Chicago home base, they are a fully thriving and self-sufficient entity like few bands would dare to dream of. So the moment of noise and unease feels like a recentering, even if no one will mistake *Cousin* for *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* or the winding krautrock freakouts of 2004’s *A Ghost Is Born*. Produced by Cate Le Bon—the first time the band has worked with an outside producer since Jim Scott co-produced 2009’s *Wilco (The Album)*—the album is the sound of a band wriggling out of that comfort zone in small but meaningful ways. “Sunlight Ends” is an atmospheric twinkle of a song driven by a hushed digital (or consciously digital-seeming) drum track that feels uniquely Wilco, yet not quite like anything the band has made in a long time. The title track has a similar skitter to it that lends just the right amount of wooziness. But the goal, beyond that opening second, is not to disorient or misdirect. While the album title can’t help but suggest *The Bear*, which leans heavily on Wilco syncs to shore up its Chicago bona fides, “cousin” as a concept also feels familial and familiar and sometimes maybe just a little bit weird.
Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”
Anyone familiar with *Hitchhiker* or *Homegrown* or the dustier corners of the *Archives* series knows Neil Young has never subscribed to the idea of a permanent and enduring studio version of his songs. Part of what’s interesting about the sparse rerecordings on 2023’s *Before and After* is the relative obscurity of the source material, which reaches as far back as Buffalo Springfield (“Burned”) and as near as 2021’s *Barn* (“Don’t Forget Love”). The frailty of “Birds” has never sounded more beautiful, and nobody should take issue with a “Mr. Soul” stripped so bitterly bare. But the grace of the album isn’t in any single performance so much as the way it blurs the beginnings and ends of songs into each other to create a seamless ribbon of sound. Call it a “montage” (Young’s word), call it a dream (ours)—this is the sound of a 78-year-old man briefly glimpsing a life’s work from somewhere just outside himself.
When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame extended an invitation to Dolly Parton in early 2022, the preternaturally unshy megastar demurred. While Parton knows she’s forever changed the country music genre with her historic career, she admitted that she didn’t feel it was appropriate for her to accept one of the biggest honors in rock music, as she’d never made rock music of her own. With a little convincing, Parton eventually accepted the honor—but she wanted to put out an actual rock ’n’ roll album to prove her bona fides and make her enshrinement feel more legit. With *Rockstar* she does just that, enlisting the help of some of the genre’s biggest artists for creative reimaginings of classics. Guests include Elton John, Ann Wilson, Stevie Nicks, Lizzo, Paul McCartney, and many more—proof that Parton’s Rolodex alone justified her Hall induction. John, a true rock star if there ever was one, tells Apple Music he had a remarkable time joining Parton on “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” an updated version of the song John originally made famous on his 1974 album *Caribou* and which later grew more popular as a duet with the late George Michael. “She\'s always led by example,” John tells Apple Music of Parton. “I duet with her, and it\'s the first time I\'ve really ever sang with her. It was just the most incredible experience. So I think she\'s quite a remarkable woman. She\'s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, thank god.” Parton tackles a number of eras and styles of rock music—and hosts a number of legendary guests—across *Rockstar*’s ambitious 30 tracks. Among the other luminaries are none other than Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (“Let It Be”), Stevie Nicks (“What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You,” a previously unreleased cut from Nicks’ 1985 solo album *Rock a Little*), Heart’s Ann Wilson (“Magic Man”), and former Journey singer Steve Perry (“Open Arms”). Miley Cyrus and Chris Stapleton are also on hand to represent the current class of stars with Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” and a version of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” respectively. Though the Rock Hall induction is certainly a prominent new feather in Parton’s cap, she tells Apple Music’s Kelleigh Bannen that she hopes her legacy extends beyond her musical accomplishments to include the philanthropic efforts she’s spent so much of her life pursuing. “I do hope, more than anything, that I\'ve been an inspiration, that I can be an inspiration for all the days that I\'m living and even long after I\'m gone, that I can leave something behind, maybe something I\'ve said or something I\'ve done that might make some difference, maybe sometimes big difference,” she says. “And just to say, ‘Well, if she did it, I can do it. She was just a poor girl from the mountains.’”
