Under the Radar's Top 100 Albums of 2021

The indie artist gives his liquid psychedelic pop room to flow.

Deafheaven’s fifth album might seem like a drastic departure from the blackgaze sound they helped pioneer, but to anyone paying attention, it shouldn’t be. The foundation for *Infinite Granite*’s more traditional song structures, nearly metal-free shoegaze, and clean vocals was laid—or at least hinted strongly at—on the band’s 2018 album *Ordinary Corrupt Human Love*. The lyrics also reveal a new level of poetic nuance from frontman George Clarke, as he weaves a narrative marked both by family history and the time the songs were written in. “*Infinite Granite* was originally centered in my relationship with extended family, but because it was written during various social and environmental anxieties of 2020, more immediate reflections were included,” he tells Apple Music. “Throughout the album there is a double narrative: one that highlights familial issues and one that reflects the current world at large.” Below, he comments on each track that contains vocals. **“Shellstar”** “‘Shellstar’ deals with questioning one’s objective feelings toward emotional situations. That idea is coupled with allusions to California fires and Gulf floods.” **“In Blur”** “A song about futility. A nonbeliever, in the wake of having lost a child, reaches out to God for solace knowing nothing’s there.” **“Great Mass of Color”** “‘Great Mass of Color’ describes insomnia during the early-morning blue hour. The lyrics also reflect thoughts on boyhood—what it means to be a man, looking up to other men for a path and the constrictions and conflicts in that experience.” **“Lament for Wasps”** “A love song filled with direct references to insomnia. Blue represented a warm, safe feeling while making this album. It is also the favorite color of my partner, who I use as a character in this song—someone that represents benevolence. I exemplify this benevolence using wasps, as they\'re an irrational phobia of mine.” **“Villain”** “I thought about my family’s history with alcoholism and abuse, how that past affects future generations and what it means to share blood with cruel and violent people.” **“The Gnashing”** “‘The Gnashing’ looks at new parents, state violence, and an idea of taking care of who takes care of you. Like ‘In Blur,’ this song references losing a child, but focuses on a mother figure instead of a father.” **“Other Language”** “While recording ‘Mombasa,’ we were told a friend of ours had died. We stopped the session and went home. That night he was in my dream. We were in a large passenger van and I was sitting on a bench behind him as he told a story to people around us. I put my arm around the front of his chest, holding him by the shoulder while we laughed. When I woke up, I saw thick smoke from the wildfires had come in through the open windows. I laid until I had to leave for the day’s session, writing most of the lyrics in bed.” **“Mombasa”** “My grandfather lived with me for a few years while I helped take care of him. When it became too difficult, my father and I worked to get him into an assisted care hospital. He would speak about how he’d become a burden. He would apologize for having not died. This song is about the kindness and freedom of death, one in which an afterlife reveals itself to be aloneness in cosmic love.”

After the release of 2018’s *Wide Awake!*, Parquet Courts guitarist Austin Brown was feeling the effects of nearly a decade of touring and recording. “To be frank, I was a bit disillusioned with music in general,” he tells Apple Music. “There was this exhaustion. Maybe I was just a little bit bored with the state of rock music or indie music—it was a hard world to relate to, and I’m not sure we ever did. But I wanted to figure out a way to reject ideas of whatever was being pushed as culture, and I wanted to do it in a productive way by offering up something better.” That something is *Sympathy for Life*, his Brooklyn outfit’s seventh full-length. In an effort to branch out both musically and socially, Brown became a member of The Loft, New York’s longest-running (and most influential) underground dance party, ground zero for disco in the 1970s. While there is still plenty of rock to be found here (see: the hypnotic crunch of “Homo Sapien”), it’s often braided together with elements of dance music, in the spirit of Talking Heads, Happy Mondays, and Primal Scream. The emphasis was on rhythm, the goal to write songs a DJ could easily unfurl at a party. And to get there, they largely switched up their lyrics-first approach to writing, recording and editing together long stretches of improvisation. “We’ve been together for 10 years now,” Brown says. “One of the biggest influences on the sound of the record is us utilizing that. Our biggest asset and our best instrument is just us, playing together as a band.” Here, Brown guides us through songs from the album. **“Walking at a Downtown Pace”** “Every day in the mix session, we would spend a few hours just on this song, listening to the drums and moving stuff around, finding that sweet spot—what makes you move and what doesn\'t. We really wanted a song that a DJ can play at a party, and that\'s why we really needed to get the kick drum to hit, the snare drum to really be on that right beat. It was important for us to have that crossover feel, between rock and dance. But in trying to find what that would mean for us, it felt like a really important song for the band and for the record.” **“Black Widow Spider”** “A lot of the songs were cultivated from improvisations, and this is one of them. That guitar sound is super unique, and it\'s integral to this sound on this record. We fed Andrew\'s \[Savage\] rhythm guitar—and I think maybe the lead guitar as well—through the MS-20 synthesizer. I had this space station dub set up, where I had a 16-channel mixer, five synthesizers, but then also effects like tape echo and the harmonizer—the one that you would hear on David Bowie\'s *Low*. It\'s this vintage 8-bit digital pitch-shifting thing that I just am obsessed with.” **“Marathon of Anger”** “It\'s about living in quarantine during Black Lives Matter and just all of the things that were happening around that time, but also looking forward to what happens next. It\'s about getting to work to make the change that we need to see collectively in our personal lives and in our community. And right now, this is the marathon of anger, but what happens next? You can\'t just be angry, there has to be something that comes after this.” **“Just Shadows”** “Within the band there\'s been an ongoing conversation about recycling. And I guess this song is sort of summed up by that conversation for me: It just gets really frustrating when you\'re in your kitchen being like, ‘I\'m not really sure if this is recyclable, but I feel like if I don\'t do this right I\'m a bad person.’ And the rules about recycling are honestly so confusing, and they\'re put onto us as individuals, rather than the corporations which are literally making the products. The song lists the ways that we have these false choices about doing the right thing, how we find the things that are good for us, how do we know what\'s good for us or good for the world, and have these choices put in front of us that don\'t always make sense.” **“Plant Life”** “The word that \[producer\] Roddy \[McDonald\] used to describe it was ‘Balearic.’ It hit all these notes, and I had them build this up to be this Mediterranean island vibe, a Grace Jones ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ kind of groove—more of a feeling or a mood. It’s like a sunset or a sunrise, a song that you could play on the beach during that time, but at night or in the morning. That late-’80s rock-meets-dance in England vibe: It was never about hard acid house. It was just about this mellow groove. It helped these guys that were in rock bands understand that transition between what can we do to integrate ourselves into this new rave world, this dance world. ‘Plant Life’ is probably the most pure expression of that on this record.” **“Application/Apparatus”** “The lyrics are sort of about this conflict between a person versus the robot algorithm takeover. I feel like the music really matches that in quality—it’s very electronic, robotic, a really direct expression of the lyrics. That song is sort of this total package, a complete circle of aesthetic and lyrical content and deeper meaning.” **“Homo Sapien”** “This is a song that Andrew brought fully realized. At first, it was the kind of track I was trying to avoid on this record—just more of a rock song. But the more that we worked on it, the more I thought, ‘This is actually cool and it fits in aesthetically.’ It feels like one of our more accomplished high-energy tracks. It\'s not beating you over the head with speed or anything—it’s got a groove to it. But the sound of all the guitars and everything just feels like it actually expresses the energy in an intuitive way that we haven\'t always had. It growls and snarls and just feels very primitive and caveman. But in a way that\'s got swagger to it, which I can really appreciate, because I\'m just getting a little old for that finger-wagging kind of punk.” **“Sympathy for Life”** “I was really obsessed with the intersection between Afrobeat and dub when I was thinking about songs for this record—really into polyrhythm and really wanting to incorporate that. I worked really hard, ended up in some pretty funky zones that were really, really hard to recreate live in the studio.” **“Zoom Out”** “It was really inspired by being at some of these parties that I\'ve been going to—dance parties and disco parties, the experience at The Loft. That song is more about the joy that you can experience through community, what you have when you take materialism out of your relationships.” **“Trullo”** “I think this is maybe my favorite song on the record. It’s another one that was cut up from a long improvisation. It’s a very sample-heavy track. I put in a guitar solo that came off of the song \'Bodies Made Of,’ off \[2014’s\] *Sunbathing Animal*. And there\'s some other hidden samples in there as well that I can\'t even remember. It’s about living inside of a house in the shape of a head, kind of like living in a skull.” **“Pulcinella”** “Pulcinella is this creepy Italian clown, or a masked figure sometimes appearing as a clown. It’s playful, it\'s kind of scary, it\'s sort of like a visual or a metaphorical antagonist for themes that pop up throughout the album. The lyrics I always come back to are where it talks about carrying a chain, because I think that carrying around a relationship\'s worth of experiences or a life\'s worth of experiences can get quite heavy and burdensome when you\'re trying to connect with people. The thing that I love about this song is how naked it feels, especially considering the production on a lot of the other songs. It felt like a sensitive way to close out the album.”

Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums are typically accompanied by a collective ideological statement of intent from the Montreal instrumental ensemble. And coming in the midst of a pandemic that has greatly magnified the societal inequalities they’ve always railed against, the missive/press release that accompanies *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* practically reads like a ransom note, with calls to “take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise” and “tax the rich until they\'re impoverished,” among others. But where they were once the doomsday prophets of pre-millennium post-rock, the band\'s response to the intensifying turmoil of 21st-century life is to radiate an ever-greater degree of positivity through their music. Godspeed\'s seventh album adheres to a similar structure as their post-reunion releases (with two mammoth, multi-sectional movements each flanked by a shorter piece) while tapping into a similar spirit of hard-fought perseverance. However, *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* is distinguished by its heightened sense of clarity and levity. In contrast to the sustained, swelling drones of 2017’s *Luciferian Towers* and the defiant doom-metal behemoths of 2015’s *Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress*, this set’s opening four-track suite gradually blossoms from a minimalist, militaristic march into a delirious orchestral swirl, before entering an extended comedown jam that suggests ’70s Floyd jamming with Crazy Horse. The equally expansive companion piece (spread over tracks 6 and 7) likewise travels from desolate valleys to staggering peaks and back again, but rallies for a triumphant victory-lap gallop that could very well count as the most elating piece of music this band has ever produced. Even the brief meditative ambient symphony that closes the record is embedded with inspirational energy—it’s called “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN,” so consider *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* a sonic premonition of the better, more humane world that awaits us on the other side.

Way before King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard dropped this, their 18th studio album in less than a decade, it was clear that the Melbourne six-piece refuses to stay tethered to one idea for too long. So after completing a three-album experiment in microtonal tuning—playing notes that exist between the notes on standard Western scales—with February 2021’s *L.W.*, it’s no surprise to find them poking the reset button again. This time, they’re underscoring the pop in psych-pop with a song suite that funnels their wide-eyed ambition through satisfyingly direct melodies. All built from arpeggiated synth loops, the songs skip off in divergent directions, including the motorik rush of opener “Yours,” shimmering cosmic disco (“Catching Smoke”), and celestial synth-pop (“Interior People”). The scope of the band’s adventure would be dizzying if it weren’t for the smooth turns they forge in and out of each track. In a year marked by lockdowns and limited choices, trust The Giz to have created music that feels so boundless and upbeat.

The view from the living room of Damon Albarn’s home near Reykjavik is striking. Beyond the black-sand beaches and North Atlantic water, Esja, a volcanic mountain range, cuts across the skyline. Around it, the Icelandic weather regularly puts on a show. “It’s always extreme there,” Albarn tells Apple Music. “It doesn’t exist in a meteorological platitude.” Toward the end of 2019, Albarn gathered an orchestral ensemble to sit at his window and chart the landscape, wildlife, and climate in music. Three sessions were recorded before the pandemic stalled the project. Relocating to his UK home in Devon, Albarn found he just couldn’t let those musical improvisations lie dormant until lockdown loosened. “They were such a strong thing,” he says. “It’s like a potion—I kept taking the cork top off to sip for a minute, maybe just smell it. At one point, I was like, ‘I’m just going to drink this now and use it to do something.’ So, I did like Asterix, and I made *The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows*.” Assisted by longtime collaborators Mike Smith and Simon Tong, Albarn transformed the music into his second solo album—11 unhurried reflections on loss and fragility. “The fragility is the humans’ place within nature,” he says. “And the loss is the transferal of everything. Nothing’s lost. The thing changes, it doesn’t actually disappear—it just has a different state or form.” With its vivid sense of place and transformation, the record recalls two of Albarn’s recent projects: Gorillaz’s *Meanwhile* EP and The Good, the Bad & the Queen’s *Merrie Land*. “The older you get, depending on your circumstance, the more acutely you feel these things,” he says. “I’m making music for young people at a rather advanced age for someone making music for young people. People of my own age, it’s kind of, ‘Yeah, well, that’s how I feel as well.’ Whereas for younger people, it’s like, ‘Well, that’s a strong flavor,’ but it’s not a bad thing.” Here, he takes us through the album, track by track. **“The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows”** “I’d had that phrase for a while and thought that was a good working title for the Icelandic project. It was only in Devon at the end of \[2020\] that I realized where it had come from fully—I’d obviously read the poem \[John Clare’s ‘Love and Memory,’ adapted here\] at some point. And that poem just felt like it worked weirdly with the nature. John Clare was a very natural poet, working-class. \[What I was getting from the poem\] was ‘the dark journey,’ and you can’t just wipe out the memory of somebody. It’s a very emotional negotiation you go on when someone’s left your life: You’ve lost something, but you retain what you choose to retain, and that can be a beautiful thing as well.” **“The Cormorant”** “For years, I was scared of swimming out into the bay \[in Devon\]. I sort of conquered that fear at the beginning of lockdown and started to do it as a daily meditation. Sometimes I got myself in quite a lot of trouble because it was too rough. I did have one point where I thought, ‘I’m going to drown.’ But I love doing it, because although the fear of being devoured by a shark or whatever has diminished, it’s still there a little bit, so it’s quite an edgy thing to do every day. That’s just the first two lines of that song. It’s a deep song, a whole novel in itself really. I was sitting on the beach, and I had my phone. I recorded the whole of the vocal line, music and words, without really anything in my head. It was more of a sung conversation with myself and the cormorant and the water and everything that’s taken place on that beach over 25 years. I love that about the beaches—I’m there on my own, I can just bring everyone who’s ever been there with me and all the thoughts I’ve got. It\'s important for all of us to have somewhere where you can somehow gather your thoughts.” **“Royal Morning Blue”** “\[When rain turns to snow\], suddenly everything goes in slow motion and beautiful geometric patterns start to appear and the world feels reborn in a way. Even the most desolate of landscapes after a big snowfall are perfect. It’s such an ephemeral thing though. It’s the same water but transformed for a moment.” **“Combustion”** “This is part of a much bigger thing. I think it’ll be developed more when I do it with the orchestra in February \[2022\] and I’m reunited with my musicians from Iceland. The record will transform again, the space in between the singing will be much greater, to return it more to its meditation on this perspective that musicians and myself were allowed by being there and playing in real time.” **“Daft Wader”** “\[It’s inspired by\] Zoroastrian sky burials. And the public mourning of martyrs. It’s a very big part of Shia religion, martyrdom. Problematic. And same with Sunni. It’s problematic, but it just struck me how it was very beautiful seeing communities all sitting together, drinking fruit juice and coffee, and being really peaceful publicly. Because it’s always kind of invested with such drama and violence, their religious festivals—we’re taught to fear them, and not understand it and not be sympathetic. I’m very lucky: I’ve been to Iran, and it has its issues, but it’s a very civilized place.” **“Darkness to Light”** “Dawn is so much later in the winter \[in Iceland\]. It’s like half-10, maybe even 11 o’clock. Dawn is in the working day. So, it’s a lot of time making this record in that state, which is something I grew to understand more about when I was doing *Dr Dee* \[a 2011 opera about Elizabethan polymath John Dee\] because the time between dusk and night, and night and dawn, was the favored time of the day to commit to magical practice. That’s where all the good spells are cast.” **“Esja”** “This is the outline of the mountain, and it moves with the contours around a certain harmonic destination. You’ve got to give \[the musicians\] some sort of harmonic destination. Once you start saying, ‘Play in a certain way,’ you’re missing the point. It’s how they feel once they start to tune in to just staring, and not thinking about what you’re playing. So, listening, being sensitive to each other. It’s like everyone’s got a paintbrush—and how do we keep moving but somehow inhabit our points of view? When I was writing over the top, it made it easier having this harmonic reasoning behind all of this abstract stuff.” **“The Tower of Montevideo”** “I’ve made it. I’ve swum past the buoy to the uncharted cruise ship \[first mentioned in ‘The Cormorant’\], and I’ve met fellow musicians, or stowaways or refugees, emotional refugees, and we’ve formed a band and we’re playing these songs to nobody. I’ve had a bit of an obsession about music in empty clubs for a long time. To make music for an audience is a true joy, but be careful, because modern consumption of music is killing us musicians slowly. It’s a long, protracted death, but it’s happening.” **“Giraffe Trumpet Sea”** “This is a song about flying back to London and looking down—there were a few clouds, a night city—and feeling like I was at the bottom of some ocean, that it was gold treasure. Giraffe trumpets are the cranes. When they’re resting, they look like they’re sort of giraffes. Half-giraffe, half-trumpet, sending out beautiful sounds to the universe. But I left out all the words. I think it was too distracting at that point in the record to go off on another tangent and another story, but I liked the music and I liked the title.” **“Polaris”** “‘Polaris’ reminds me of that anxiety I felt in the ’80s around Greenham Common \[RAF air base housing cruise missiles under Britain’s Polaris nuclear weapons program\]. That understanding that we had as kids of that age, that nuclear war was a very real thing, and we were quite scared. ‘Polaris/Watching the embers fall.’ That’s after a nuclear attack. And then the next bit—‘Joining the saline to start the inspection’—is me zoning in on the oystercatchers in Devon when the tide goes out. Seeing them in an *Animal Farm* kind of way: They’ve become the rulers. They’re black and white, and their red eyes—kind of this uniform. And waiting for the saline to clear so they can eat. And the other birds have to wait in their line before they’re allowed to go and do anything. So, ‘Polaris’ is an ominous word. But it’s the Polar Star as well, which is something that’s been used by anyone who’s gone to sea. It’s saved many people.” **“Particles”** “\[A rabbi Albarn met on a flight\] was fleeing certain particles. But she said the particles are looking for you in the universe. They are attracted to you. You cannot stop anything. We moved on to the conversation of Trump, and she said he’s a perfect example of a particle in that you can’t escape it, but it’s benign in a sense because it’s just going to come and cause great disruption and then disappear, and other things will come out of it. And that is true of the universe. Firstly, nothing disappears; it just changes. And secondly, there is no sadness because everything is evolving. And it’s only us who want to find some meaning to it. And that’s why we become sad—because when we can\'t find meaning to things, we’re sad. And that’s just being a good old-fashioned Homo sapien.”

During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”

Saint Etienne’s 10th studio album wasn’t supposed to sound like this. By early 2020, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell had almost completed a different set of songs. But as lockdown took hold, there was no way to mix them and work paused. While they waited, the trio picked up an idea that was easier to explore from their own homes, one first investigated on 2018’s Christmas giveaway *Surrey North EP*. A few years earlier, Stanley had become drawn to vaporwave, a sound he’d found on YouTube. Bedroom producers were warping and tranquilizing ’80s R&B and setting it to images of abandoned buildings. The hazy sense of nostalgia intrigued Stanley. “The music that gets sampled and images that get used are American or Japanese,” he tells Apple Music. “So, we thought, ‘What if we use British imagery and samples to try to evoke a period in recent British history?’” They settled on 1997 to 2001, a period beginning with the installation of the Labour government and ending with 9/11. It felt like the last time Britain had been buoyed by widespread optimism and was an age that people were increasingly looking back on with yearning. “A lot of the problems we have at the moment, like social media, barely existed,” says Stanley. “The internet barely existed. The climate catastrophe—everyone knew it was possibly going to happen, but no one realized it would accelerate as fast as it has.” Exchanging files and thoughts across email and video calls, the trio foraged samples from the era’s R&B and pop, stretching and reshaping them into eight hypnotic pieces full of summery warmth and reflection. Melodies take hold slowly but doggedly, melancholy occasionally draws in like evening shade, and a gauzy sense of reverie acknowledges how nostalgia can blur details. “The whole point is memory is a very unreliable narrator,” says Stanley. “Every period has its grimness but, with the ’90s, it’s easy to see how people are focusing on the positivity. When we were teenagers, we really looked back at the ’60s and thought what an amazing period that was. But what we were looking at was The Monkees rather than people being lynched in the South.” Here, Stanley guides us along a journey through a half-remembered past, track by track. **“Music Again”** “It’s basically Pete’s work. We just found the samples together and he extended that and made it into a hypnotic, repetitive pattern, and Sarah wrote her lyric over the top. I like the fact that when I’ve mentioned that there’s a Honeyz sample \[‘Love of a Lifetime’\], people are like ‘obscure R&B band’ or whatever. But they obviously weren’t. At the time, they were all over Radio 2; I think they had a couple of Top 10 hits. We really wanted it to be something you might remember hearing, so it might actually jog a genuine memory from the time. So, the samples \[on the album\] were all from mainstream acts, just not the most obvious songs.” **“Pond House”** “\[The sampled track, Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Beauty on the Fire’\] got in the Top 30. With a lot of the samples, we were listening to albums from that period and just hearing if there was a snippet of something that we could use and expand. It’s almost like trying out a new instrument, trying out a guitar pedal, just seeing if there was something we could do with it. We were looking for good productions from the time, relatively smooth. I have playlists of all the ones that we never ended up using. There’s a song called ‘Sky’ by Sonique, a couple of Jamelia things—‘Antidote,’ ‘Life.’ Maybe we’ll use them in the future. Mel B’s solo stuff, Martine McCutcheon, Lutricia McNeal.” **“Fonteyn”** “\[The sample is\] a Lighthouse Family song, but it’s not the biggest hit, ‘Lifted’; it’s a relatively minor single \[‘Raincloud’\]. I remember hearing them on Radio 2 at the time, and I always really liked the bottom end of the piano working as a bassline, so that’s what we used.” **“Little K”** “We were just going back and forth, but basically Pete was sending us things that were essentially finished. It was like, ‘Well, this is terrific.’ Then Sarah would write lyrics and come up with the topline, then he’d fit them in and cut it up a bit like he did here on ‘Little K.’” **“Blue Kite”** “Pete did this in his studio at home. It was using bits of our own songs, from the early ’90s I think. That kind of abstraction reminds me of My Bloody Valentine, even though there’s no obvious guitars on it. I think it’s sad they never made another album 18 months after *Loveless*. Because I remember Colm, the drummer, was getting really into jungle, and I think they probably recorded stuff. I was thinking, ‘Wow, where’s this going to go?’ Then they just don’t make a record for 20-odd years instead. There were so many directions you could go in the early ’90s and so much music being made where you could take inspiration from it, from contemporary stuff. I think that really gave us a palette that we could use, as well as stuff from the past that we already liked—psychedelia, Northern Soul, or whatever.” **“I Remember It Well”** “I worked with a guy called Gus Bousfield, who does a lot of TV and film work. He’s an engineer, producer, and a multi-instrumentalist. That’s the kind of person I need to work with because I can barely play ‘Chopsticks.’ It’s great to have someone who can do everything you want. Gus recorded \[the sampled conversations here\] in an indoor market in Bradford. They’re heavily distorted and it sounds like human language, but you really can’t work out a single word. He plays guitar on this, which has a slight *Twin Peaks* feel.” **“Penlop”** “I think this probably had the most time spent on it. Pete did a version that was about eight minutes long. It got more distorted towards the end. I just love the way it has a part where it drops down, then comes crashing in. And then it goes up another level after that.” **“Broad River”** “The piano part is the intro to a Tasmin Archer song \[‘Ripped Inside’\]. That’s all we took from that, I think, a bar of piano or whatever, two bars. It’s funny because a lot of people have said, ‘Oh, this is the first time you did sampling since \[1993 album\] *So Tough*.’ And it isn’t. I suppose we’ve just not used it as obviously. There’s plenty of things we’ve recorded over the years which have samples on them, but you can take a bit of an existing song and make something completely new, with a completely new atmosphere. I think this is one of the cases, because I love the way it sounds on ‘Broad River’ and the Tasmin Archer song is obviously a fair bit darker.”

Close to a year before Kiwi Jr. recorded their second LP, vocalist/guitarist Jeremy Gaudet had figured out a system to get their songwriting done more efficiently. “I had this big binder, like a Five Star binder that you would have for school, and we called it the LP Two Bible,” Gaudet says. “Any time any of us at practice, or outside of practice even, had an idea, we would say, ‘Oh, yeah. Put it in the bible.’ Then by the end of it, before we go to record, we have this binder full of so many ideas and lyrics that we can just constantly reference.” With that plan in mind, the Toronto indie rockers wanted to return to the studio quickly after the full rollout for 2019\'s twice-released *Football Money*—even if unable to test many of the songs live due to lockdown restrictions. Despite the setbacks, the band carried through with another crafty blend of jangling hooks and effervescent melodies—and even a few guitar solos for good measure—alongside Gaudet’s witty, often humorous and highly specific narratives. “It wasn\'t the easiest environment, but the pandemic did allow us more time because we had to delay the initial sessions,” Gaudet says. “We\'re really trying to create something in the studio that sounds how we hope it will sound whenever we\'re able to play live again.” Here, Gaudet and guitarist Brian Murphy walk us through every song on the album. **Tyler** Jeremy Gaudet: “As soon as I had the demo for it, we all agreed this would be a wicked lead-off track for the second record. There\'s a lot of stuff going on that\'s packed into a two-minute song. I think I had the opening lines first and then I started thinking about writing from a character\'s perspective. I knew that if I was going to use someone\'s name, I wanted it to be a name that I couldn\'t think of any other songs that had that name used before. Tyler just popped out. It\'s one of those funny names like Kyle or something where, really, only in your life, you meet people with those names that were born in the \'80s onward, right? It\'s super limited to our generation, I feel like.” **Undecided Voters** Brian Murphy: “It’s probably the oldest song on *Cooler Returns* that wasn\'t around during *Football Money*. We got chances to play it live a lot, which was good to test it out and see what arrangement ideas were working and what wasn\'t and to see crowd reaction to a song that they\'ve never heard before. If they react well, then that\'s obviously a good sign.” JG: “I knew I wanted to write something set in a school. My friend was talking about how the Glasgow arts school burned down twice, and so I was looking into that and I was thinking how dramatic that is for a small place like Glasgow. Then I started to think this whole idea of school rivals within a school, like rival classmates, and I started to think about that movie *Election*, the Reese Witherspoon one. In this day and age where everyone is super woke, how could you possibly be undecided in 2020? That\'s kind of meant to be leveled as like an insult or something.” **Maid Marian’s Toast** JG: “The song is looking at people working restaurant jobs and half the people wanting to burn the place down. Musically, I was definitely thinking about two things. I specifically remember thinking about the Wallflowers, like *Bringing Down the Horse*-era The Wallflowers, and also there was like an Orange Juice or a Pastels vibe, some of that early-’80s or mid-’80s Scottish rock.” **Highlights of 100** JG: “This is the second song we\'ve had called \'Highlights of 100\' just because I really like the title. There\'s a lot about film in this song. Throughout the whole outro, you\'re getting this story about being on a film set and there being different mini universes everywhere. I was probably influenced by that Tarantino movie that came out \[*Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*\] where they\'re constantly on set and they\'re in Western gear.” **Only Here for a Haircut** JG: “This song is a true story about how I went to a friend\'s house to get a haircut from his girlfriend because she used to cut all of her friends\' and his friends\' hair for free. It was just a fun neighborhood thing that she did. I went over there and my friend, the boyfriend, was not home. I felt something really awkward was happening. The movie *Tomb Raider* was on TV. Then I found out via text, like mid-haircut, that they had broken up and I was just like, \'What am I doing here? This is a terrible feeling.\' That was the initial germ of the idea.” **Cooler Returns** JG: “This is one where we had the instrumental for a long time and I had no idea what I was going to write this song about. The lyrics really came together in piecemeal over a year. It wasn\'t one like \'Maid Marian\'s Toast\' where I just sat down and wrote it, or \'Dodger\' is another one that we\'ll get to where I just write that song. I had to pick at it for a while because the phrasing is a little bit off, because you\'ve got that stop-start-y main riff and rhythm that you have to follow in the verses.” **Guilty Party** BM: “This is one we played for probably over a year live and it always went over well at shows, which is a good sign. Like I was saying, if no one has heard it before and they react to it well, then it\'s usually a good sign. We had the arrangement pretty close. We didn\'t have to fight with it too much. We were really going for an XTC thing on the bridge. I don\'t know if we got it or not.” **Omaha** JG: “This one I wrote the lyrics first. Not all the lyrics, but a very specific idea of what they call the Woodstock of capitalism, this huge shareholders meeting in Omaha that they have in these coliseums or big arenas and people from all over America and Canada go to—and all these business people and investors attend meetings and have lanyards. I was thinking, like, ‘Wouldn\'t it be cool if there was a movie or a story about two people meeting at such a terrible-sounding event and having an affair or something? Almost like an \'80s Michael Douglas/Adrian Lyne kind of thing.” **Domino** JG: “This or ‘Nashville Wedding’ would be two of the oldest Kiwi Jr. songs, period. Nothing\'s changed really except for some of Brian\'s guitar flourishes, and the length of the intro and outro have been shortened a bit. There would probably be some people who have a demo MP3 of this somewhere from 2016, because it used to be on SoundCloud before we had any fans. Then we tracked it for *Football Money* and it just didn\'t quite work. And so we said, \'Okay, we finally have to nail it this time,\' because it\'s been a live fan favorite for a while. The lyric of this one has a little to do with listening to true-crime podcasts and the news and everything trying to scare you and living on a bad corner, which I do, and just the idea of an unknown and just learning to live with it.” **Nashville Wedding** JG: “The lyric is about as straightforward as you\'re going to get from me about just crashing somebody\'s wedding. It had a different title, and then in the studio we decided to call it as such because a) we use a lot of Nashville guitars on it and b) one of our friends got married in Tennessee recently and the chorus references Tennessee. I had to assure her that this song about having a miserable time at a wedding was not about her wedding. I had to write her an email before the album came out. I was like, \'Hey, you\'re going to hear something. It\'s not about you.\'” **Dodger** JG: “This song is not about sports at all, but I thought that somebody who is living in the past and somebody who is moving on to the future or the present could really be represented by somebody who is still wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers hat or waiting for the Dodgers to move back to Brooklyn compared to somebody who is not worried about living on the Pacific West Coast and loving life. It\'s as simple as it gets, really. Lyrically, there was so many sports references all the time. Like we\'re a total jock band. LP three is going to be called *Jock Jams*.” BM: “Hopefully, we get to open for AC/DC someday.” **Norma Jean’s Jacket** JG: “I\'m quite pleased with this one. This is about as throwback rock ’n’ roll, rootsy \'70s rock ’n’ roll as we get. Definitely a lot of Rolling Stones—attempted vibes. There\'s also something about this one that I think is funny. Every chorus starts out with me really over the top, sincerely singing the words \'heartache and sorrow\'—which is so off-brand for our band. Sometimes we try to go for laughs too much and then realize that not everyone is looking to laugh when we put on a record.” **Waiting in Line** BM: “I remember we had a team meeting over the Jesus shirt lyric on this one. There was a few different options for what kind of shirt is this person wearing. I do remember the four of us all huddled and you were like, ‘Okay, what\'s it going to be? We need to decide right now.’ I was picturing it as one of those sort of dumb T-shirts with Jesus giving the thumbs up or whatever that Urban Outfitters used to sell. That\'s how I pictured it.”

As he was writing his second solo album, Hayden Thorpe began organizing what he called “salons,” a series of hybrid shows in which the former Wild Beasts frontman would improvise on piano and vocals, in the midst of a gong bath or breath workshop, his audience on their backs. “That was a really powerful experience to sing and play to people in rhythm to their response, their bodies, and their kind of surrender,” he tells Apple Music. “Everyone’s improvising—the breath practitioners and the people on the floor, too. Everyone’s like, ‘I don’t know where this is going.’ The main message of the record is to give yourself permission, to explore what real can be, to allow for the wonder of this.” It is, “if we’re being old-fashioned about it,” Thorpe says, a foray into “aspects of hippiedom” and the outright mystical. But *Moondust for My Diamond* is also a deep, synth-driven exploration of the ways in which we self-mythologize, crafting the story of who we are through a loose patchwork of ancient and modern signifiers—“a bit of that yoga, a bit of that rock ’n’ roll, a bit of that God-fearing sort of Catholic stuff,” he says. Though it was written mostly pre-pandemic, it was finished in Thorpe’s boyhood home, in the mountains of Northern England’s Lake District. “It’s made up of a lot of the stranger, more experimental aspects of my life over the past couple of years,” he says, “as I was dabbling in unknown practices. I had a rugged Northern upbringing, and for me, bringing in aspects of Eastern mysticism made me realize, ‘You know, maybe I don’t have to tell the story of myself quite in the same way that I thought I had.’ It feels like an adventure.” Here, Thorpe guides us through the entire album, track by track. **“Material World”** “A song that I’m really proud of because it was a grand experiment. I didn’t chase it down. We live under the culture of control where we deem ourselves the architects of whatever we want, and I didn’t want for that song. I went forth in faith that it would turn up for me, and in doing so, the words came. I had to be alert and together enough to allow them to come. One day, I just spat it out, that line: ‘It’s only real if I make it.’” **“The Universe Is Always Right”** “It’s a slogan song, which is kind of interesting because my greatest hero is Leonard Cohen, and he despised slogan songs. He criticized Lennon and ‘Give Peace a Chance’-type songs as being cheap and derivative of marketing music. I thought it was a bit dirty for me, but I was also interested in what a slogan is: a spell. And a spell is a spelling, an arrangement or alignment of letters and words that creates an emotional response. So, it kind of felt like casting a spell, that chord together with those words.” **“No Such Thing”** “The spoken-word aspect, it’s kind of like a pepper-and-salt situation. Clearly, my singing voice is kind of a committed one. And some words you disguise by singing—the singing gives them too much thrust, and actually, the purity and the beauty is in the words themselves rather than the delivery. There’s only so much of myself I can tolerate, and I probably found myself more tolerable in that moment. But a lot of craft, really, as a lifelong pursuit, is really removing all the performance and kind of doing more with less.” **“Parallel Kingdom”** “I think those salon gigs were definitely a prologue to the record. Some of the language is inferred in the record and the line in ‘Parallel Kingdom,’ when I sing, ’Allow for the wonder of this,’ came straight out of that. It’s to say, ‘Just let it come to be.’” **“Golden Ratio”** “A golden ratio is kind of a mathematical phenomenon, like a Fibonacci sequence, a shell, an arrangement of sunflower seeds. It’s a perfect equation where one thing fits within another. It explains the symmetry of the universe, from the smallest subjects to the grandest. My operatic moment here is that science is a grander force that we can live by, that will rescue our souls. Because it has revealed to us the miraculous—the miracle that we are.” **“Metafeeling”** “It’s the feeling you feel about what you’re feeling. I think we live in a society that leaves us stranded within our own emotions, because we’ve become beholden to them. In an individualistic society, you must hold your own emotions to be so crucially important, because all you have is yourself. But really, they’re just kind of passing weather systems. Through various lifelong ways of dissolving that relationship to my own emotions, I kind of realized maybe it wasn’t all that bad or wasn’t that serious. So, it’s a song about surrender, to say, ‘I don’t know what I think, and I don’t know everything anymore. Maybe I don’t have to.’” **“Supersensual”** “I like the line ‘808 upon my chakra.’ That, to me, summed up a lot of the record and came about from watching an interview Letterman did with Kanye, who spoke about the resonance of the 808 kick drum stimulating the sacral chakra—the sex chakra—and the hyper masculinity of hip-hop and R&B kind of hitting your sex organs simultaneously. It was a real enlightening moment for me. I just thought it was absolutely incredible, this meeting of the kind of corporate end of the music business with Eastern mysticism with, in my opinion, a visionary maker. I think that mysticism is entering our daily psyche—and we are more beholden to it than we dare realize or allow ourselves to believe.” **“Hotel November Tango”** “Hotel November Tango is HNT—Hayden Norman Thorpe. It’s a song I wrote to myself about myself. In some respects, incredibly indulgent. But the point being, we’re all alone in ourselves. We were born into this body, and we somehow have to make it work. And we get it wrong until we get it right. It’s a lifelong quest to get out of ourselves, to get out of our heads. That’s maybe a big part of desire and a big part of the miracle of sexuality, which, in ways, is the grand releaser of our own skin. To kind of become another, and for another to become us.” **“Rational Heartache”** “It’s coming from the fact that we medicalize sadness in our society. We deem it to be an un-useful state of being. So, we drug it, we ostracize it, we stigmatize it. And in doing so, we lose its value. That’s not to say that I disagree with forms of therapy and antidepressants. I don’t—I’ve been there, they work. But it’s to say, ‘Hey, maybe I feel like shit and it’s a really rational way to feel.’ We deem sadness as an experience of madness, and maybe it is. But I wanted this to be, in a strange way, a kind of Happy Mondays tune, imagining myself just grabbing the maracas and dancing the shit out of it until I felt better.” **“Spherical Time II”** “I think the record needed a breath—just to allow that last section to happen. It’s a kind of look beneath the hood of the record—it’s accidental music. Because you’re on such a mission when you’re making records, you pass through many spaces that are actually of real value and really beautiful work.” **“Suspended Animation”** “I think it started from that line, ‘Now that I got what I was asking for, I don’t want it so much anymore.’ It’s the lived experience of having won, having lived some dreams, and having achieved certain things—and not getting the transformation that I expected. I think we kind of associate success with virtue now, don’t we? Certainly, success in relationships, success in jobs and careers. But success doesn’t necessarily mean virtue. Success just means, literally, a succession of fortuitous events. I realized that when I didn’t quite go through the kind of awakenings I expected, it’s just like, ‘Oh man, no, that didn’t fix anything. That was just a different time.’” **“Runaway World”** “I would say it was a buzz when ‘LMAO’ came to my lips. That song was the only one that was written in lockdown, as it was the only one that wasn’t finished before the world changed. I guess it was kind of a beautiful moment: The cosmic joke has happened and the end of the world we’d all been preparing for was happening. Those of us who are occupying an inner landscape and make work out of it and kind of have to deal with ourselves a lot in that space were like, ‘Oh yeah, man, I’m ready for this. I’ve got the survival pack. Let’s go.’ But I ended up back in the bedroom that I grew up in as a boy, back in the town I grew up in. We all had various tricks played on us, and that was the one played on me.”

As Middle Kids were recording their second full-length in late 2019, they faced a serious deadline. “I was seven months pregnant,” guitarist-vocalist Hannah Joy tells Apple Music. “I was really on the clock. And it had quite a big impact on what I wrote because I was in a place of general anticipation and thoughtfulness about the next season. There was an urgency there—I felt very impassioned because it felt so important.” On *Today We’re the Greatest*, the Sydney rock outfit—including drummer Harry Day and bassist Tim Fitz, who is also Joy’s husband—dive headlong into difficult questions about who we are and what it is to be alive. Earnest and anthemic, it’s music that was meant to impart wisdom if not inspire—and Joy and Fitz’s son clearly responded to it in utero. “I\'ll be doing the vocal takes and he\'ll start kicking and it would actually trip me out because it wouldn\'t be to the beat,” she says. “I’d say, ‘Your father is a bass player and a drummer—you should have better rhythm.’” Here, Joy guides us through a few of the album’s key songs. **Bad Neighbours** “A lot of these songs are more vulnerable and more personal; and musically, they’re more dynamic and stripped back. That was something we were really excited about, but also a little bit nervous because it\'s something new. I think we were just like, ‘Fuck it, let\'s just really lean into that and have that sort of thing be the opener.’ When I\'m scared of something, I lean into that thing and just expose myself to it to try and get over it.” **Cellophane (Brain)** “It\'s dealing with my noisy brain and the things that are ticking away underneath it all. I remember when I was writing the chorus melody, I was just hitting random notes just to see how that sounded. I really ended up liking it and I didn\'t even think it was going to be the final melody because it really jumps around and I\'m swinging it like an elastic band. It\'s so fun to sing because it\'s loopy and different to usually how I would write.” R U 4 Me? “Tim and I wrote this one together from the ground up, which is a new thing for us. That bit where I laugh in the breakdown, that’s literally from the demo, because I\'m saying something wrong, and we just left it in there because it felt like the spirit of the song was in that. It’s intense but playful. It’s talking about trust issues or people trying to find their place and feeling lonely and not knowing where they belong, but also not taking yourself too seriously.” **Questions** “There\'s a lot of space in the music at the beginning—almost like when you\'re in a tense conversation it feels like there\'s too much space. It\'s painfully present and quiet except for the words. As it slowly builds and grows and then explodes: There\'s a great catharsis in that. I\'m not sure if that\'s symbolic—whether it\'s anger exploding or if it\'s the resolution of something or freedom from something—but musically, I think it really takes you on a journey of like awkwardly navigating intimacy.” **Some People Stay in Our Hearts Forever** “I still look back on experiences from when you were a kid and it\'s just crazy how they can really linger. Writing that chorus was just so from that place, almost like a wolf howling to the moon, ‘I’m sorry.’ I think part of the journey of growing up is learning how to accept who you are and what you\'ve done, and own those things and not let those ghosts haunt you. It’s not even necessarily doing anything that bad, but you\'re just dumb and don\'t know much.” **Stacking Chairs** “Tim really inspired this song. When I was growing up, I was more interested in having a good time and going to the party and then not being the person who stuck around and packed up the party after. Long-term friendship is learning how to walk with someone through life and being there in not just the fun moments, but all the messy moments. Marriage has really taught me about continually showing up every day. And that image of stacking chairs is being that person for other people who\'s going to be there when it\'s a bit shit and it\'s not the fun stuff, but it\'s part of life.” **Today We\'re the Greatest** “This song to me is a great summation of a lot of the things that I\'m singing about and wrestling with. Most of our lives, it\'s pretty mundane and you just do the same shit every day. In amongst that, we all have our pain and our loneliness, but we also have our moments of triumph and beauty. Sometimes they\'re small and sometimes they\'re big. And I feel like when we can hold all of that and live in that, that\'s when we are great—that’s living.”

Baroque flourishes, fingerpicking arrangements, complex instrumental parts: These are some of the elements that characterize Ryley Walker’s crafty songwriting on *Course in Fable*, his fifth solo album. For an artist who’s regularly summoned the spirit of \'70s British folk rock while peppering in just a dash of rootsy flair—from 2015’s *Primrose Green* to his Dave Matthews Band covers album *The Lillywhite Sessions*—Walker builds on these foundations as he pushes further into improvisational jazz and prog rock. The native Illinois musician enlisted some of the major players in Chicago\'s experimental music scene to flesh out his vision, embracing virtuosic guitar tapping (“Clad With Bunk”), dub-tinged grooves (“Pond Scum Ocean”), and rough-edged jamming (“Rang Dizzy”) to bring his high-flying sound to life. And even if his city-dwelling observations are just as free-flowing, they capture the everyday essence of going on aimless strolls past nail salons and fluorescent-lit corner stores: “If only I gave to charity more often/The city streets would have a spit shine that is glowing.”

Steve Gunn thought he was ready to begin recording his sixth solo LP in early 2020. “In retrospect,” the Brooklyn singer-songwriter tells Apple Music, “I wasn’t. I was trying to force it.” As the pandemic scuttled all plans to record and tour, he began “immersing” himself in his demos, refining his work, trading ideas with longtime collaborator Justin Tripp, a key player on 2014’s *Way Out Weather*. “It was transformative,” Gunn says of the experience, which saw him embrace writing on piano and classical guitar. “We talked a lot about how we wanted to make the music more melodic, to give the music more space, to not overdo it, to let the songs live and breathe in a more simple way. I think I cracked through a certain shell of myself or something. I just calmed down.” You can certainly hear that in *Other You*, an iridescent set of bottomless folk and gentle rock that Gunn eventually recorded in a bubble, in LA, with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck, Guided By Voices) later that year. It’s a record that’s rooted in empathy, in stepping outside of yourself. And following the loss of a close friend to COVID in the early stages of the pandemic, it came at a crucial moment for Gunn. “It was a shock,” he says of his friend’s death. “I went through a really hard time in the beginning. But I did a lot of work to pull myself out of it, really relying on this record, on the process of making it. It was a real letting-go period for me—I started accepting a lot of things and I started feeling a lot better. Partially, I think that’s what it’s about.” Here, Gunn tells us the stories behind some of the album’s songs. **“Other You”** “I was doing a lot of harmonizing, which was new to me. I couldn’t get this one note and Rob was trying to help me, playing the note on the piano. He opened this program and replicated my voice to sing the note, and he played it back to me through headphones. It was pretty incredible—it was me, but it sounded like a robot. He was like, ‘Do you hear that? Sing to that. Sing to the other you.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God. The other you: That’s the title of the record.’ It just made so much sense. That’s essentially what the song is—finding a different space, different sorts of inspirations, a different sound.” **“Fulton”** “Walking is very important to me, in particular when I was writing this record. I was wandering around my neighborhood, thinking about the people that are near and dear to me, how supportive they’ve been, and how sometimes joy and happiness can be just tapping you on the shoulder. I was thinking of me, shutting down and sitting in silence, letting a lot of things go, releasing a lot of stuff that I was holding onto really tightly. There was a particular moment that I reference in the song where I was listening to news radio, and the station just shut off. It represented what I’d been trying to achieve in enjoying silence and realizing how powerful that can be.” **“Circuit Rider”** “I came up with this riff, and it’s circular—goes backwards and then it goes the other way. It’s a reel or, in modern terms, a loop. It came from a British folk style that I learned how to play a lot of and, lyrically, I feel like we’re living in a time of real science fiction. I was trying to write a song from the perspective of a cyborg, the circuit rider, who’s observing someone in modern times, who’s in a current situation, and being super distraught as they’re observing. I feel like there are a lot of detriments to the way that people interact and socialize, and the way that people perceive reality and ego. It’s dangerous territory. I was imagining this creaky robot telling us, ‘You don’t have to submit yourself to this.’” **“Protection”** “In 2019, I was all over the world, and I just came back completely empty, feeling like I needed a break to figure out a lot of things in my life. I was thinking about how you can rely on a lighthouse to get back to where you’re going if you’re lost. It’s a hopeful song about trying to find your path and it’s not just about myself—it’s an empathetic song for others as well. And I have to say, it coincided with the heightened level of anxiety that we’ve been in—how unprotected we’ve all felt. There’s a new sense of vulnerability with everything.” **“Reflection”** “Originally, it was just this super-simple piano thing, and it helped me sing differently, in a more emphatic way, and really use my voice. I was thinking a lot about Robert Wyatt: It almost sounds like he’s visualizing certain things, playing these chords, almost doing some free-associative language. He’s very playful with his words, and it almost feels like he’s being spontaneous as he’s composing. I just did this off-the-cuff, in a style that, perhaps, Robert Wyatt would. It feels really free and not precious. It paints a picture.” **“Ever Feel That Way”** “There was this incident that happened in Atlanta—this young man, Rayshard Brooks, was murdered by the police. I was so heartbroken to read about it. He basically asked them for help. He was driving home to see his family, and he was drunk in a parking lot, trying to sober up. There’s this Tibetan exercise called Tonglen, which is where you sit and meditate and you think about others—the people you love, but also everyone that’s surrounding you and what they’re going through. This guy, he just needed a little bit of help. I was thinking about him, and turning it back on the cop to say, ‘Hey, man. Have you ever felt this way? You definitely have.’ I was just trying to convey the fact that I’ve certainly been there, and everyone I know has been there. Everyone needs help.”