Certainly, any Pulp fan who caught the long-dormant Britpop legends on their 2024 reunion tour would’ve been completely satisfied with just hearing the ’90s classics we never thought we’d get to hear performed live again. But the surprise inclusion of some new tunes on the set list made it clear Jarvis Cocker and co. were not interested in being a mere nostalgia act. And now, less than a year later, Pulp has gifted us with a new album—and while it arrives 24 years after their last one, *More* actually came together with unprecedented expedience. “The previous two Pulp records \[2001’s *We Love Life* and 1998’s *This Is Hardcore*\] had a bit of a concept for them, and that slowed everything down,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “And this time I just thought, let’s not think about it. Let’s do it. And then you’ve got a lot of time to think about it later. Like the rest of your life, for instance.” With *More*, Pulp carries on as if the first two decades of the 21st century never happened, restoring their singular balance of disco decadence (“Spike Island,” “Got to Have Love”) and string-swept elegance (“Tina,” “Farmers Market”). As the elder black sheep of Britpop, Pulp always possessed a self-deprecating wit and lived-in wisdom that distinguished them from their more brash, lager-swilling peers, and as such, they were always less interested in glorifying youthful hedonism than probing adult relationships. So they can effortlessly reclaim their role as Britain’s shrewdest observers of social manners and misbehavior even as Cocker has crossed the threshold into his sixties. *More* is imbued with the simmering anxieties of a singer who knows he’s not getting any younger: Echoing the streetwise strut of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” the urgent “Grown Ups” finds the guy who once sang “Help the Aged” starting to “stress about wrinkles instead of acne” himself, while the Spector-esque splendor of “Background Noise” closes the curtain on a long-term coupling where familiary has curdled into contempt. But even by the group’s sophisticated standards, piano ballad “The Hymn of the North” (featuring Chilly Gonzales) is a breathtaking display of melancholy and majesty that affirms Pulp is still in a different class all their own.
Each Stereolab album functions as a portal to a future we once imagined but never achieved: a world of flying cars, egg chairs, and space-age bachelor pads where the coolest Franco-pop, German psychedelic, and Brazilian jazz records are spinning 24/7. And so it remains on the indie icons’ first new album in 15 years, which begins with a minute-long flourish of oscillating synths that sounds like an old mainframe being rebooted back to life. *Instant Holograms on Metal Film* finds the Stereolab machine in perfect working order after an extended period of inactivity, and, if anything, the group sounds eager to make up for lost time with gloriously overstuffed songs that key in on familiar pleasure points while introducing all manner of shapeshifting surprises. “Immortal Hands” eases you into a laidback loungey groove before hitching itself to a funky drum-machine beat and coasting through a dizzying swirl of brass and flutes; “Electrified Teenybop!” plays like the theme music to some alternate-universe dance show where the kids get down to a frenetic fusion of ping-ponging Kraftwerkian electronics and lustrous disco orchestrations. But, as ever, Stereolab’s splendorous soundworld is built atop a foundation of pointed political commentary addressing our present-day struggles and inequalities: Embedded within the breezy kaleidoscopic pop of “Melodie Is a Wound” is a scathing indictment of social media disinformation and the oppressive elites that manipulate it to their advantage. And yet, when the band returns to their motorik hypno-rock roots for the song’s exhilarating second act, they reassure us that utopia is still within our reach.
Over the past few years, the North Carolina natives have carved out their own distinct (and influential) lane in indie rock: *Twin Plagues*, the band’s 2021 breakthrough, introduced fans to their noisy hybrid of shoegaze and country, while 2023’s *Rat Saw God* helped kick off a new generation’s alt-country revival. Wednesday’s sixth album, *Bleeds*, hones their signature sound—often gnarly, occasionally sublime—with lyrics by bandleader Karly Hartzman that play out like contemporary Southern gothic short stories unfolding inside of dusty dives or along the banks of creeks in her hometown of Greensboro. *Bleeds* arrives in the wake of a pivotal time for the five-piece band (singer/guitarist Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, bassist/pianist Ethan Baechtold, and drummer Alan Miller): Hartzman wrote much of the album during a grueling world tour, in the midst of which she and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship. But the songs of *Bleeds* are intimate in a different way entirely, built around strikingly detailed anecdotes picked up from conversations with friends or overheard bar wisdom. “Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline/You saw a pit bull puppy pissing off a balcony,” Hartzman sings on “Wound Up Here by Holdin On,” jointly inspired by a line from a friend’s poem and a story about a body pulled out of a West Virginia creek. A rerecorded version of “Phish Pepsi,” first released on Hartzman and Lenderman’s 2021 collab EP *Guttering*, recounts a weird, stoned teenage memory (“We watched a Phish concert and *Human Centipede*/Two things I now wish I had never seen”). And their small-town transcendentalism is at its best on “Elderberry Wine”—the prettiest they’ve ever sounded, though not without its ennui.
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s *New Threats from the Soul* is the kind of funny, rambling, junk-shop-scouring, bumper-sticker-talking, dollar-draft-guzzling daydream on which minor indie legends are born. The songs here unfurl with the workmanlike self-pity of ’90s country (“New Threats from the Soul”) or Springsteen anthems on salaries not yet adjusted for inflation (“Monte Carlo / No Limits”), dappled with Casio flutes and drum machines whose not-quite prime-time textures only go to fill in the blanks where Davis’ walls of lyrics drop off. His characters are hopeless wrecks redeemed only (and then only occasionally) by their insistence to get up off their dumb asses and try again, and yet reveal in that dumbass insistence something beautiful, or at least true. “The Spanish moss, it weeps in mourning of/Not only personal but also planetary loss/Not just for the bloodshed, but, by god, for what the Bloody Marys cost,” he sings on the opening of “Mutilation Springs.” Then there’s eight more minutes. Call it busy doin’ nothing.
Despite that Cass McCombs is one of the most enigmatic singer-songwriters of the 21st century, his 11th studio album *Interior Live Oak* is an uncommonly generous offering. With 16 tracks and over an hour in runtime, the record spans the many forms his music has taken across his career and pulls in impressive collaborators like indie rock journeyman Matt Sweeney, former Deerhoof member Chris Cohen, and Papercuts’ Jason Quever—the latter of whom collaborated with McCombs on 2024’s archival release *Seed Cake on Leap Year*. But it’s McCombs’ cryptic wit and preference for shaggy-dog melodies that takes center stage across *Interior Live Oak*, with a stylistic left turn or two to keep longtime listeners on their toes. Witness the spry and organ-led “Juvenile,” which takes on the classic New Zealand indie-pop sound while keeping his haunted, searching perspective intact. Few songwriters sound as uncomplicatedly plaintive as McCombs, and yet after more than 20 years of releasing records, he continues to draw listeners in with the type of lyrical musings and overcast melodies so stretched across the chassis of *Interior Live Oak*.
Justin Vernon has never been shy about bearing the weight of his instantly mythical origin story and his fast, unlikely trajectory into global stardom. Four albums and 18 years after *For Emma, Forever Ago*, *SABLE, fABLE* is a document of finding peace—joy, even—and a testament to the work it’s taken to get there. “This record, as much as that first record, if not more, was really just a keystone for healing and growing away from this time period where I felt trapped,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Once COVID wiped out the tour plans for 2019’s *i,i*, Vernon, like pretty much everyone, used the time to take stock, and he came to understand, among other things, that touring might not be the healthiest thing for him. So he made songs. “It really was like, ‘Okay, I’m not well and I won\'t make it if I don\'t do something to change this pretty drastically and stop the whole touring engine,” Vernon says. “There was a sense of relief and an incredible grief to say goodbye to the team that we built. I was like, ‘Let me just get these songs done and just sneak them out there so I can just get them off my chest,’ because that’s what I really needed: to finish them, to learn what was inside them.” The first of these songs, written at the beginning of lockdown, “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is a snapshot of that lonely, uncertain time, but it feels bigger and more hopeful than that to Vernon with five years of hindsight. “In the short term, it makes you feel better, but it’s also a way to lean into your grief and lean into your pain and lean into your guilt,” he says. “I think eventually when I hear that song now, I feel clean from everything that I was dealing with when I had to write it and after I wrote it. But it takes years for things to take shape and for internal things to budge.” From there, the album begins to let more light in with songs like the evidently more hopeful “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (“It’s just all about celebrating this moment right here and just sort of trying to express that heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest feeling”) and “If Only I Could Wait,” featuring vocals from Danielle Haim of HAIM, which Vernon considers nothing less than his favorite American rock band. The album splits the difference between the immediacy of *For Emma* and the often inscrutable maximalism of *22, A Million* and *i,i*. It was during the album’s long gestation that Vernon’s profile was boosted by his work with Taylor Swift, even as his own project remained in the shadows, Vernon exercising a patience and restraint and creating a healthier perspective that was nothing less than career-saving, if not life-saving. “We are insanely beautiful creatures,” he says. “And so I think where I’ve got to with the simplicity of this music, it was just like, I just want to give it to you. I just want to have it be my version of Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’—just boom, here it is. We’re not going to hide, we’re not going to put it behind any drapery. We’re going to just give it to you as much as humanly possible.”
It’s hard to think of another artist from the ’70s classic-rock era who’s aged more gracefully than Robert Plant. Rather than trying of relive past glories, the former Led Zeppelin shrieker has spent much of the 21st century recontextualizing his formative influences—American blues, English folk, early rock ’n’ roll, Middle Eastern classical—into more earthy and ethereal realms. He carries himself less as a rock star than as a student, seeking out players and inspiration from niche scenes—be it bluegrass or indie rock—to bring his roots-music reinventions to life. *Saving Grace* is named for the group of players who’ve supported Plant since 2019, but like his previous crews Band of Joy and The Sensational Shape Shifters, they’re no mere backing band but fully integrated collaborators, with singer Suzi Dian playing his spirited vocal foil. Together, they roam through a collection of covers that effectively serves as a road map to Plant’s lifelong musical journey, connecting the dots between early Zep influence Memphis Minnie (a rollicking “Chevrolet”), his perennial San Fran psych favorites Moby Grape (a delightfully dreamy “It’s a Beautiful Day Today”), and his more recent obsession with Minnesota slocore legends Low (an urgent, Eastern-inflected interpretation of *The Great Destroyer* fuzz bomb “Everybody’s Song”). But even if Plant is now far removed from the proto-metal bombast of Led Zeppelin, *Saving Grace*’s simmering renditions of traditional tunes like “As I Roved Out” and “Gospel Plough” show that he still abides by his former band’s formative philosophy, by reinvigorating age-old musical texts for the modern age.
In the two and a half years since 2022’s *NO THANK YOU*, Little Simz attempted to write its follow-up four times, to no avail. From the outside, the London native was at the top of her game. Since 2021’s game-changing fourth album, *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, she’d won a Mercury Prize, owned the Glastonbury stage, and earned a spot among the power players of UK rap. But privately, her personal life was imploding. In 2025, word spread of the lawsuit Simz had filed against Inflo, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator who’d produced her last three albums. The split left the rapper at a loss, as she recounts on “Lonely”: “Sitting in the studio with my head in my hands/Thinking what am I to do with this music I can’t write?” From this turmoil, the 31-year-old musician arrived at a breakthrough that manifests on her sixth album, *Lotus*—named for the flower that thrives in muddy waters. Here Simz pulls no punches on the topic of her former friend, snarling her way through the bluesy opener “Thief” (“This person I’ve known my whole life, coming like the devil in disguise”) and the eerie “Flood,” produced by Miles Clinton James with cameos from Nigerian British pop star Obongjayar and South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly. But the mood lifts on tracks like “Young,” a bit of post-punk method rapping on being dumb, broke, and alive (“A bottle of Rio and some chicken and chips/In my fuck-me-up pumps and my Winehouse quiff”), and on “Free,” a jazzy boom-bap meditation on love versus fear, on which Simz reaches a cathartic conclusion: “Love is every time I put pen to the page.”
William Tyler spent the first 15 years of his solo career bridging the fingerpicky intricacy of post-folk guitarists like John Fahey with the mellow, expansive qualities of ambient and New Age. *Time Indefinite* is both none of that and more. Built on loops made using an old cassette deck rescued from his late grandfather’s office in Jackson, Mississippi, the music here retains all the vernacular Americanness that made Tyler’s early albums feel approachable, but foregrounds texture instead of technique: the crumbling hymn of “Star of Hope,” the pastoral washes of “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” the creaking, almost horror-movie suspense of “Cabin Six” and “A Dream, a Flood.” The sum is music that has more in common with the sound manipulations of Jim O’Rourke or the late-’60s work of a composer like Gavin Bryars, whose stately, droning pieces captured the comfort of folk music within the frame of the avant-garde. He shifted gears—and he pulled it off.
In the period following the 2022 death of his longtime creative and matrimonial partner Mimi Parker, Low founder Alan Sparhawk sought comfort in the company of friends, as many of us do in times of unimaginable loss. In his case, those friends were fellow Duluth musicians and chart-topping bluegrass crew Trampled By Turtles, who invited Sparhawk to ride shotgun on their 2023 tour and join them onstage whenever the mood struck. That act of kindness spawned Sparhawk’s second post-Low release, whose earthy Americana arrangements and naked vocal performances contrast sharply with the electronic experimentation and vocoderized mutations of 2024’s *White Roses, My God*. Yet the two records are united through a yin-yang relationship: If its predecessor captured Sparhawk working his way through the fog and confusion of grief, *With Trampled by Turtles* sees him ready to face the world and open his heart without obfuscation. The two albums even share two songs—“Get Still” and “Heaven”—that are liberated from their DIY digital dimensions and reborn as cathartic choral hymns. The appearance of Sparhawk and Parker’s daughter Hollis on the wistful chorus of “Not Broken” is especially moving, as it highlights both the absence at the core of the record and the optimistic life-goes-on spirit that radiates from it. But even that poignant performance won’t prepare you for the emotional wallop delivered by the Dylan-esque hymn “Screaming Song,” where Sparhawk’s most pointed expressions of sorrow are washed away by a rising tide of humming harmonies and screeching violins.
After the stylistic sprawl of 2022’s *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You*, Big Thief’s sixth album finds the group bringing their increasingly distinctive sound closer to the vest in a literal sense: *Double Infinity* is their first album as a proper trio, following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik. As a result, these nine songs—woolly, warm, and with frissons of electricity coursing through their veins—capture Big Thief in a state of ragged intimacy, every melodic turn and shift in instrumentation expanding and contracting like a pair of lungs. The rumbling drum fills and strummy framework of “Words” seemingly stretch for miles on end, while the nearly seven-minute “No Fear” carries a faint gothiness in its inky guitar lines that drip around Adrianne Lenker’s bruising vocals. More so than on any other Big Thief album to date, rock music is the name of the game here; even “Grandmother,” which features ambient legend Laraaji lending vocal incantations, bursts and blooms in a manner not unlike what was coming out of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene. Wild-eyed and positively hot-blooded, *Double Infinity* is the work of a band that never stops evolving, even as they continue to sound singularly like themselves.
Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.
The remarkable thing about Mike Hadreas’ music is how he manages to fit such big feelings into such small, confined spaces. Like 2020’s *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately*, 2025’s *Glory* (also produced by the ever-subtle but ever-engaging Blake Mills) channels the kind of gothic Americana that might soundtrack a David Lynch diner or the atmospheric opening credits of a show about hot werewolves: a little campy, a little dark, a lot of passions deeply felt. The bold moments here are easy to grasp (“It’s a Mirror,” “Me & Angel”), but it’s the quieter ones that make you sit up and listen (“Capezio,” “In a Row”). Once he found beauty in letting go, now he finds it in restraint.
Nine years after 2016’s *The Catastrophist*, Tortoise’s eighth album captures the legendary post-rock outfit operating in literally unfamiliar territory: *Touch* is the first record the quintet—whose members were once resolutely Chicago-based but are now spread across the US—has conceived in multiple settings, its 10 songs resulting from sessions in Los Angeles and Portland as well as their hometown. Despite the new approach, *Touch* showcases the near-mystical interplay and ingenuity that Tortoise has built a reputation on across the last three decades. There’s also a few surprises in tow—the pounding techno of “Elka” and the micro-odyssey of closing track “Night Gang,” which sounds like a lost Beach Boys instrumental from their post-*Pet Sounds* days—alongside moments of blissed-out, vibraphone-laden jazz harmonics that wouldn’t be a hair out of place on their seminal 1998 album *TNT*, driving home the timelessness of Tortoise’s approach, which still feels fresh to this very day.
Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”
Geese—a band of four 23-year-old longtime pals from Brooklyn and Manhattan—represent such an exciting jolt of rock ’n’ roll possibility that they successfully convinced marquee producer Kenny Beats to change his name in order to work with them. When the members of Geese were still in elementary school, Beats was showing up on increasingly big hip-hop records by Smoke DZA, ScHoolboy Q, Freddie Gibbs, and Vince Staples. But as he doggedly pursued Geese through 2024 and convinced them to give his new Los Angeles digs a try, they offered a caveat: He should drop the Beats once and for all and just be Kenny Blume. The swap proved worth it. Together, Geese and Blume made one of this year’s truly great rock records, finding an often-hidden seam between old-school indie-rock idiosyncrasy and the mainstream’s explosive power. *Getting Killed* feels like a burst of new life. Geese signed a pandemic-era deal for their high-school debut, *Projector*, before raising the stakes with their indulgent, discursive, and beguiling *3D Country*. But their flock unexpectedly grew early in 2025, when *Heavy Metal*—the brilliant solo debut of singer and leader Cameron Winter, actually released late in 2024—became an unexpected and uncanny breakthrough. Fans of that album may recognize its tunefulness at the start of Geese’s “Cobra,” where lilting keyboards indeed conjure “Love Takes Miles.” Aside from Winter’s singular voice and barbarically blunt lyrics, though, the similarities stop there: *Getting Killed*is a savage and beautiful thing, anchored by the athletic rhythm section of bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin and given a serrated edge by guitarist Emily Green. Where “Islands of Men” moves from a warped Rolling Stones strut into art-rock transcendence, “Bow Down” is nervous and mean start to finish, Winter howling about lost love over an instrumental that feels like heart palpitations. Hinging around howled lines about bombs in cars, opener “Trinidad” indeed lands like a piece of twisted scrap metal. Geese, though, can be tender and exquisite. “Half Real” is an anthem for holding love close as the world tries to chip away at it, while the climactic soul stunner “Au Pays du Cocaine” is a let’s-stay-together update for our era of shared discontent. Geese have recently flamed the eternal embers of rock-savior dialogues, their imaginative but relentless approach suggesting for many talk about the next Strokes or Radiohead. And, sure, that might happen. But more importantly, Geese have simply done what so many great rock bands in the past have done—they’ve learned the lessons of their forebears, ripped them apart, and reordered them in a way that sounds as thrilling to them as to us. “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” Winter warbles on the title track, echoing Neil Young a half-century on. Whether you’re in heaven or hell, it’s hard not to nod at least a little bit of assent to one of rock’s most electrifying new crews and gripping new voices.
Tamara Lindeman’s music as The Weather Station seems to expand and contract with every movement. The long-running project broke through in 2021 as fifth album *Ignorance* grew her folk-rock milieu to encompass the sounds of sophisti-pop acts like The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout, while 2022’s companion record *How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars* pared back her arrangements to nearly nothing. On her seventh album, *Humanhood*, Lindeman has blown up her sound yet again: Alongside the nocturnal vibe she so expertly cultivated across *Ignorance*, these 13 tracks—initially recorded straight to tape over the course of two improvisational sessions in late 2023—encompass freewheeling ’60s psychedelic pop, darkly shaded jazz, and flurries of spoken-word sound collage. Joining her trusty supporting players from the *Ignorance* sessions is a who’s who of left-field sounds, including orchestral-folk auteur Sam Amidon and ambient-saxophone jazz sensation Sam Gendel. At the center of it all, Lindeman’s ability to pull back and let silence briefly reign remains as breathtaking as her most acrobatic vocal moments. Her lyrical focus picks up from where she left off on the previous two Weather Station records, pivoting specifically from the encroaching threat of climate change towards an episode of depersonalization she experienced while contemplating the world’s ever-evolving ills. What results is an album that’s contemplative and soul-searching, as Lindeman avoids finding easy answers and instead seems to channel her thought process in real time. “I don’t know quite where to begin,” she sings over the brushed drums and elegiac piano of *Humanhood*’s quietly devastating closer, “Sewing.” “I know it don’t look like I’m doing anything.” Quite the opposite, in fact.
Soon after The National singer Matt Berninger released his solo debut, *Serpentine Prison*, in the fall of 2020, its name seemed to backfire. After two decades as one of indie rock’s most magnetic lyricists and vocalists, he was trapped inside writer’s block, stuck in a cycle where anything that resembled work or even input induced despair. That trap slowly broke as he and his band began work on 2023’s *First Two Pages of Frankenstein* and its surprise follow-up, *Laugh Track*; their rebuilt rapport slowly revived his lexicon. That same year, Berninger and his family left Los Angeles after a decade, with their country escape to Connecticut recalling scenes of his Ohio childhood. He settled into new rhythms and modes, writing lyrics between the seams of baseballs. *Get Sunk*—a reference to that earlier depressive period and, implicitly, springing out of it—steadily took shape. To make *Get Sunk*, Berninger and longtime engineering partner and producer Sean O’Brien bounced around a Los Angeles studio, building beats and sequences for six hours at a time until Berninger finally found the words that fit. They recruited a sterling support cast, including Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, session ace Booker T. Jones, and Ronboy leader Julia Laws. They called their dozen or so helpers the “Saturday Musicians.” Berninger’s voice has always been The National’s calling card, the athletic baritone at its center. Wouldn’t a solo album, especially a second, just feel redundant or reductive, an imitation of its more famous setting? But *Get Sunk* is marked by an unexpected versatility. Where he cannily mumbles his way through the textural maze of “Nowhere Special,” he becomes ultimately approachable on “Junk,” a gorgeous and gothic love song that suggests Nick Cave. Where “Frozen Oranges” is a Middle American fever dream about searching for contentment, “No Love” documents the end of personal chemistry, of a relationship that once held meaning now corroding into, at best, niceties. The linchpin, though, is closer “Times of Difficulty,” where that whole big band gathers together to offer an anthem for interdependence, to reaching out for a lift when you get sunk. “Feels like we missed another summer/If we’re not dying, then what are we?” he moans. Getting on, best we can.
Though they disbanded over a decade ago, Carolina Chocolate Drops remain an important touchstone in American old-time and roots music. The launching pad for multi-hyphenate Rhiannon Giddens—whose mile-long list of accolades includes not just a Pulitzer Prize but a MacArthur Genius Grant and a string of Grammys—the band found vital intersection points between the Americana music of the day and African American traditions. This reunion between Giddens and fellow former Chocolate Drop Justin Robinson picks up some of the conversational threads left at the band’s hiatus, while showcasing how both artists have evolved and expanded their perspectives in the intervening years. A mix of instrumental and vocal tunes, *What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow* was inspired in large part by Piedmont fiddler and Black string-band pioneer Joe Thompson, who mentored the Carolina Chocolate Drops until his passing in 2012. With Giddens on banjo and Robinson on fiddle, there is no shortage of virtuosity on display, though the pair favors the narrative and thematic needs of each song, particularly the traditional numbers, which were arranged by Thompson. Highlights include a rousing take on “John Henry,” which crackles with an electricity typically only heard in live performances (the pair recorded much of the LP live and outdoors), and “Marching Jaybird,” an Etta Baker tune the pair was able to record at the late Baker’s own home.
Country firebrand Margo Price has never pulled a punch, a quality that likely inspired the title of this fifth studio album and follow-up to the two-part *Strays*. Known for her fiery lyrics and even more electric live performances, Price, now nearly a decade out from her groundbreaking debut album *Midwest Farmer’s Daughter*, is a pillar of left-of-center country, paving the way for like-minded artists like Sierra Ferrell and Tyler Childers, the latter of whom appears on this album. Though she’s a longtime Nashville resident, *Hard Headed Woman* marks the first time Price has recorded a project in Music City, setting up shop with Grammy-winning producer Matt Ross-Spang (Old Crow Medicine Show, Jason Isbell) at famed Music Row outpost RCA Studio A. Sonically, the record doesn’t deviate far from Price’s previous output, though there’s a confident ease in these performances that is more palpable here than on older projects. It opens with a prelude, harmony vocals setting the stage for lead single “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” a keep-your-head-up anthem Price co-wrote with Rodney Crowell, the late Kris Kristofferson, and her husband/frequent collaborator Jeremy Ivey. Singer-songwriter Jesse Welles joins Price on “Don’t Wake Me Up,” an off-kilter rocker that eschews the chaos of the modern world in favor of dreamy idealism. The Childers collaboration “Love Me Like You Used to Do” is another high point, bringing the pair of beloved artists together for a last-call ballad about keeping the spark alive.
Cate Le Bon’s gently surrealistic art-pop has a way of conjuring scenes that feel both unreachably distant and archetypically close at the same time: a mirrored palace on a rocky outcropping, a cryptic ritual conducted by robed figures on a freezing beach—the kind of stuff you wake up from thinking, “It must mean something,” without quite knowing what. *Michelangelo Dying* forms a kind of triptych with 2019’s *Reward* and 2022’s *Pompeii*, channeling the dreamy stiffness of late-’70s Bowie (“Mothers of Riches,” “Body as a River”) and late-’80s Cocteau Twins (“Jerome”) into a sound that feels totally—and at this point, almost inescapably—her own. And should you wonder if an artist so heady and poised would deign to write a love song, there’s six aching minutes of “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”
In the seven years since Dev Hynes last released an album as Blood Orange, the English musician wasn’t exactly twiddling his thumbs. After 2018’s searching *Negro Swan*, the scene veteran released a mixtape (*Angel’s Pulse*) and an EP (*Four Songs*), composed soundtracks for film and TV, and hopped on records with Lorde, Turnstile, and Vampire Weekend. All the while, he contemplated the future of Blood Orange. “I’m always making music,” Hynes tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. But before he could release it, he had to answer his own questions: “Why should it exist? What’s the point?” Then Hynes’ mother died in 2023, and the direction for the fifth Blood Orange album, *Essex Honey*, became clear. Set in the county outside London that Hynes once called home, it’s a sublime examination of what “home” even means, refracted in the prism of his elegant hybrid of hazy pop, feather-light funk, and ghosts of post-punk and New Wave. Echoes of distant music memories forge pathways into the past: “Regressing back to times you know/Playing songs you forgot you owned/Change a memory, make it 4/3,” Hynes sings on “Westerberg,” its title a nod to The Replacements’ lead singer and its hook a play on the band’s 1987 track “Alex Chilton.” More Easter eggs are buried in the bass grooves, sax solos, distorted guitars, and orchestral swoons—a Durutti Column sample on “The Field,” an Elliott Smith interpolation sung by Lorde on “Mind Loaded,” a line about writer’s block delivered by Zadie Smith on “Vivid Light.” The prevailing mood is liminal, surrendered between past and present, though in Hynes’ hands, purgatory sounds heavenly.
Love, Davina McCall, and making more tunes to play live: Wet Leg’s inspiration for their second album sounds like it came easily, but they had to shift into new territory on *moisturizer*. Their debut—2022’s *Wet Leg*—provided 36 minutes of lo-fi hooks, wit, and twentysomething confessions to catapult them into a BRIT- and Grammy-winning swirl of well-deserved hype. After a relentless but enjoyable touring schedule, they decided to escape to a seaside town for two weeks at a time to turn their attention to album number two. “I think we’re really fortunate we can write in that traditional band setup,” Rhian Teasdale tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “When we stopped touring, we were like, ‘OK, what are we going to play when we go on tour again? Let’s make some tunes.’” So the band decamped to a house in Southwold, Suffolk and got to work. “There was a kid’s playroom with some LEGO around, so we took the majority of the stuff out and put all of our gear in it,” says guitarist Joshua Mobaraki. “Some days we were like, ‘OK, let’s start at this time and put a shift in.’ And then other times, it was 1 am and all of a sudden we were writing again. It was really cool.” *moisturizer* finds the band once again teaming up with producer Dan Carey and repeatedly nailing the perfect three-minute song on 12 tight tracks. They admit they give away more of themselves than they did on *Wet Leg*. While “catch these fists” has a strong message about reclaiming personal space, they stray into more romantic territory elsewhere. Hester Chambers wrote “don’t speak” for Mobaraki, who’s also her partner, but she subverted the idea. “She wrote me a song from me to her, which is really cheeky,” he says. “CPR” captures the feeling of infatuation, while “davina mccall” and “11: 21” sum up more secure, longer-term love, which are themes Teasdale had avoided before this album. “I’d never even attempted writing any kind of lyrics that were to do with love,” she says. “I had this rule when I was younger to just not even use the word ‘love.’ I was really hesitant because I felt like there were so many love songs out there. Also, it didn’t feel very authentic. When I was younger, I don’t think I really did know love, so I was just pulling out cliche after cliche.” On *moisturizer*, Wet Leg sound as vital and adventurous as they did on their debut—but there’s a new assurance creeping in too. “Our position as a band is to just constantly be surprised that people still want to listen to it,” says Mobaraki. “I don’t know if the imposter syndrome goes or it’s like you turn it into something else. It’s a way of not being like, ‘Everyone’s telling us that we’re amazing. That means that we are amazing.’ Instead, it’s just like, ‘Huh, let’s do another song. I like that one. Let’s do another one.’ I think we’ve developed and grown and we’re different now. We’re giving ourselves permission to take up space.”
