Uproxx's Best Albums of 2021 So Far

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

“When I listen to it, it’s sort of a reminder that I am lovable,” Claud tells Apple Music of their sparkling debut LP, the first release on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label. “I deserve to feel love. Sometimes people forget that they\'re capable of giving and receiving it.” Deeply melodic and deeply felt, *Super Monster* is a set of genre-agnostic bedroom pop that surveys the entire spectrum of romantic feeling. “I wrote this record to be very visible, in the sense that I am a multifaceted human being and my story is not shown in coming-of-age movies or these huge shows that are always about straight cis couples,” the Brooklyn singer-songwriter says. “I\'ll write music for the rest of my life, but I don\'t have to put it out. The only reason why I want to put it out is because there\'s so little representation of queer and trans and nonbinary people falling in love and having well-rounded lives that don\'t just revolve around the hardships of being queer.” Here, they guide us through the album track by track. **Overnight** “I liked the idea of a warning as a first song. Like, ‘Here\'s a heads-up: A lot of these songs are love songs, and I tend to jump into things.’ It\'s about any time that I felt I was falling in love or starting something new.” **Gold** “I was really angry when I wrote this song. I felt super betrayed, not just by one person, but by a series of things that had happened. It’s almost recognizing and sort of breaking the news to myself that this person was not there for you when you needed them, or these people were not there for you when you need them. Sometimes I just need to get the anger out and then I can move on.” **Soft Spot** “I was at a party and I was thinking a lot about one specific person, and everywhere I looked, it felt like I was seeing them. But it wasn\'t them, and anytime somebody brought them up it felt I got all mushy and soft and I would blush. I approached the song as ‘This is sad and this sucks.’ But one thing that I came to terms with as the song was developing was that maybe it doesn’t suck—maybe it\'s nice to be able to just smile whenever you want because you can think of somebody.” **In or In-Between** “I\'m so bad at reading social cues, and I never believe that somebody is into me, just because I feel like I\'m conditioned to assume that they\'re not. It\'s a song about unachievable or unrequited love. Feeling like you\'re never going to know what this person is thinking, you\'re never going to know if they actually are into you the way that you\'re into them.” **Cuff Your Jeans** “I had a dream where I was trying to get on a train to go see a friend and the train kept getting delayed or the train wasn\'t showing up or my ticket would blow away in the wind. It felt like I would never be able to see this person again. Which was a real feeling that I was feeling in real life—like, what if I never get to see this person again? What if, by the time I see them again, they\'ve moved on or something?” **Ana (feat. Nick Hakim)** “I was at a point in my writing where I was getting sort of sick of writing about my own life. So I imagined myself as this 40-year-old man who decides that he needs to leave his wife to go find himself. The whole story is like a letter to his wife, who I named Ana. I think I was trying to say that if you really love somebody then you will work on yourself. Because if you love somebody then you know that they deserve the best.” **Guard Down** “When I get in a nervous situation or when I get protective of myself or my feelings, there\'s a voice in my head that says, ‘Don’t let your guard down, don\'t make yourself vulnerable.’ And this song is about that feeling, and confessing, ‘Holy shit, I’m going to be an adult in a few months. I\'m going to be turning 21, and what do I have figured out? And what do I not have figured out? And I\'ve been spending all this time alone—is isolating myself really helping me? Or is it just making it worse?’” **This Town** “I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and it felt like a small town because generations of the same families stay there. I think for the longest time I really wanted to leave, and I did it, and that was the best feeling ever. But this song isn’t talking about any town in particular—it’s more alluding to the fact that I want to run away from a problem, and right now.” **Jordan** “Growing up, my grandparents lived in the same town as I did and I lived in their house a few different times throughout my childhood. But the house behind theirs was Michael Jordan\'s, and it had 23 on the gate. My grandpa and I used to always walk the dog past and he’d always point out the gate because he thought it was so cool, but Michael Jordan was never there—the house always seemed empty. I think it turned into some type of love song, not for Michael Jordan, but for someone else. I don\'t want any headlines being like, ‘Claud writes a love song for Michael Jordan.’ It\'s just not true.” **That’s Mr. Bitch to You (feat. Melanie Faye)** “Somebody called me a bitch, and I was so offended that I responded, ‘That\'s Mr. Bitch to you.’ And then my friend overheard the conversation and he just jumped in to say, ‘Hi, sorry to interrupt this argument, but Claud, did you write that down? That\'s a really great song title.’ I just feel like one of the most offensive words that a man could call somebody who\'s essentially not a man is a bitch. So the song sort of turned into a fuck-the-patriarchy-type song.” **Pepsi** “It\'s pretty straightforward: I told somebody that I had feelings for them and she just responded in a really rude way. It was brutal. I think she was half joking, but we never talked about it ever again, so I\'m not really sure. I feel like I wrote so many songs about that person, but it wasn\'t capturing what actually happened, so I just decided to say it. I thought it was such a hilariously tragic thing that I had to write about it. Because it\'s just so ridiculous. I\'m hoping that she hears the song.” **Rocks at Your Window** “Maybe it was \[John Cusack\] with the boombox standing at somebody\'s window like, ‘I love you, come down here.’ I was thinking about that and how big and beautiful a romantic gesture that is, but also how annoying and invasive it is as well. It\'s like, \'Okay, get out of here. You\'re embarrassing me.’ I\'ve never actually thrown rocks at anybody\'s window, but I am the type of person to do that.” **Falling With the Rain (feat. Shelly)** “My mom was really sick last year. I found out that she had to get a big surgery, and it really scared me and I was just really, really, really sad. I was going through a really dark period. I wanted it to conclude the record because I like that sentiment: I’m feeling down right now, but I\'m going to bounce back.”

The title of DDG and OG Parker’s *Die 4 Respect* is likely an allusion to hip-hop’s increasingly outdated practice of dismissing the music-making aspirations of creatives who’ve already found success in another arenas. Here, the former YouTuber, also known as PontiacMadeDDG, links with Quality Control producer OG Parker—he of Migos’ “Walk It Talk It,” “Slippery,” et al.—to double down on his bid for music-world legitimacy. While OG Parker’s production is indeed a cheat code of sorts, DDG is able to pull his weight rapping about his struggles in love, the wealth he’s acquired following his dreams, and the creature comforts that define his lifestyle. With additional production from names like Hitmaka, G. Ry, and Devislit, along with guest appearances from NBA YoungBoy, Lil Yachty, PnB Rock, 42 Dugg, Coi Leray, and Blueface, *Die 4 Respect* functions dually as a declaration of DDG’s investment and a showcase of his music taste.

In the five years between Shelley FKA DRAM\'s debut album, *Big Baby DRAM*, and its follow-up, *Shelley FKA DRAM*, the singer ascended through music\'s ranks (and the charts, thanks to smash hit “Broccoli”) with a radiant smile and a preternatural knack for levity in song, and then seemingly left as quickly as he\'d arrived. His rise also set off his spiral as he battled through addiction, largely going quiet after 2018, before getting sober in 2020. His rebrand from DRAM to Shelley was, at least in part, an effort to separate the bubbly demeanor that became his staple from the sensual lover that steers *Shelley FKA DRAM*. To that end, much of what has always made Shelley compelling remains intact here: His vocals are agile and opulent, slipping easily between buttery tones (as on “Something About Us”) and soaring falsettos (as on “Married Woman”), while his personality shines in moments of playful flirtation and earnest romance that especially come to life on the album\'s duets. There\'s a lushness to the instrumentation and arrangements that allows him to shine as not only a singer but a showman. The pacing of songs like “Exposure” or “Beautiful” has the improvisational feel of both a pulpit and a jazz lounge; others have spoken intros and outros as if recorded straight from the stage. It all combines to create an at once modern yet old-school collection—little innuendo is shrouded in abstraction, but he has a winking charm that calls to mind male R&B singers of the \'80s, whose ways of melding genuine sex appeal and lighthearted banter captured the era. It\'s a niche that few of his peers are capable of inhabiting (and certainly not with such conviction), and on *Shelley FKA DRAM*, he emphasizes the sublime style that\'s always been behind the smile.

Towards the end of “Serotonin,” the opening track on girl in red’s debut album, some Norwegian dialogue emerges through the bracing alloy of indie rock and hip-hop. “That recording is where I’m talking to the doctor,” the singer-songwriter born Marie Ulven tells Apple Music. “My friend had to carry me out from a lobby in Bergen while I was making the album because I woke up, thought I had a blood clot in my brain, and was like, ‘I’m about to die.’ I’m like, ‘OK, it felt like my heart stopped beating.’” It’s a moment that exemplifies the album’s remarkable openness—manifested by Ulven’s emotional honesty and her anything-goes approach to making music. “Serotonin” details the Norwegian’s experiences with intrusive thoughts, and across the subsequent 10 tracks, she performs an unflinching internal audit, processing her feelings, anxieties, and behaviors and their effects on herself and her loved ones. It’s all cast in a free-spirited brand of alt-pop that dissolves genre boundaries and shreds the “bedroom indie” tag that accompanied her early DIY EPs. The result is something that she hopes will offer help to anyone who listens. “It would be really cool if I was able to say some shit about their lives, not just mine,” she says. “The best thing about music is when you hear a song where someone is explaining what you felt but you’re not able to say because you haven’t dared to try and figure it out, or haven’t had the time.” Let girl in red take you through the album, track by track. **“Serotonin”** “\[Intrusive thoughts\] can be really scary and make you feel really crazy if you don’t know what they are, where they’re coming from, and how to deal with them. It was so liberating, knowing that I’m not crazy and that I don’t want to do these things, and then I just felt like I was over it almost. Then I wrote the song. It was just a weird journey figuring out the rap parts, but they came really quick. It was not a hard time writing those lyrics. They poured out of me.” **“Did You Come?”** “There’s no proper chorus there. The entire thing is just like a vibe. It’s hooky, and that’s all you need. I started out with the lyrics first: ‘You should know better now to fuck it up and fuck around.’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is cheating. Someone is really fucking angry here, and this is a great way to get out this aggression.’ I started making really fast-paced drums and this guitar and this piano thing. It really made me see a lot of stuff in my head.” **“Body and Mind”** “I’ve experienced a lot of self-hatred this past year, which I’ve never really understood. Realizing that you are a person is really fucking weird. I think a lot of people struggle with accepting mortality. People fixing up their bodies, changing themselves because they just want to avoid the inevitable, which is dying and aging. This is me trying to comfort myself: ‘I’ve had my deepest cries for now/My heart’s out, my guard’s down.’ I’m accepting this shit, and I don’t want to beat myself up for being a person. I think aging as a concept is really beautiful because it just means that you’re alive still.” **“hornylovesickmess”** “It’s a fun, self-aware track about how my life led me to be a jerk to someone a little bit and also being really sad that touring had its toll on my relationship with this person. My favorite line is ‘Maybe on a bus for months straight, shit’s fun but I’m going insane/Like it’s been months since I’ve had sex, I’m just a horny little lovesick mess.’ Just this fun image of me being with 10 sweaty guys on the tour bus, and being in a bunk bed thinking about this one person that I just want to call right now.” **“midnight love”** “I had a friend that would always get a guy over late at night. Then he would leave in the morning and they would never hang out during daytime. It was really getting to her. I was like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of someone.’ I was that dude who would just call someone when I felt like ‘I need this and I know that you are able to give it to me, so therefore I will call you.’ I’d never had any bad intentions. But I was able to realize a few things about myself.” **“You Stupid Bitch”** “The story here is that I had to go and comfort someone because of their broken relationships with other people. But really: ‘I’m here, I could be yours right now and you wouldn’t be going through all of this if you just saw how present I am and how much I want to be with you.’ It’s about being so angry but still comforting someone: ‘I love you but you’re fucking stupid.’ It is a really intense song, but it’s going to go hard live.” **“Rue”** “I’m singing to my sister. I had to sleep in her bed for weeks straight because I’ve just been so scared. Every time I was about to fall asleep, I felt like my heart stopped beating, so I’d want to be in her bed in case I died. I’ve just been completely all over the place. This is singing to my family and loved ones that I want to get better. I’m trying to leave it all behind. I don’t want to make it worse for you guys. It’s also about realizing that you have to do the work. If you want to get better mentally, or if you struggle with depression or anxiety, it’s such a heavy realization figuring out that it’s you who has to do it.” **“Apartment 402”** “I live in Apartment 402. I’m imagining myself lying on the floor because I’ve lost every will to do anything. I’m singing about how shitty things have been for so long; I have a sense of hopelessness. But then I’m seeing the sun come in. You know when you see the sunlight hit dust? The room is opening up for me. I’m turning this place that I’ve had so many bad feelings towards into something beautiful and into a safe place and a good place—not just a place I could die in and nobody would know.” **“.”** “There’s something about the vocal performance that’s just like, ‘Oh, Marie, you really, really know what you’re saying right now.’ That song is really sad and I always want to cry thinking about it. It’s about the one that got away, really. A result of touring and being away a bit too long and not giving enough while being away. And how that can seem like you don’t care, but in reality, in my bubble, I was like, ‘I have absolutely no emotional capacity to be in another country and to give you what I think you need from me right now.’ It just ended up disappearing, and there wasn’t really anything more to say than to just have a full stop.” **“I’ll Call You Mine”** “It’s such a catchy, summery, driving song. It’s about letting someone in and hoping for the best, even though you’ve been fucked over a few times. I’ve had a tendency to think that nothing good could ever last. You know how sometimes you have fun but then we’re like, ‘Oh, something bad is going to happen.’ Two or three years ago, I’d have fun with my friends, and I’d be driving and I’d be like, ‘One of us is going to die first.’ That always happens, a real death element coming in, or ‘someone is going to get hurt’ element.” **“it would feel like this”** “\[The title\] *if i could make it go quiet* is all about the mental noise, all the feelings and thoughts that are so big they just take up your entire mental capacity and take over your entire body. This song feels like ‘If I could make it go quiet, it would feel like this.’ This place of quietness, this beautiful place where I’m able to be OK. I’m taking it all in. It feels like the credits to a movie because the album is so full, you could get to like, ‘Holy cow, what did I just listen to?’ There’s no words. You don’t need any. I’ve just poured my heart out in all of these songs.”

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.

After Joyce Wrice declares, “Let\'s talk about all of the things that women gotta endure just to get some love” on “Chandler,” she spends the next 40 minutes of her debut album making good on her word. *Overgrown* finds the singer dealing in matters of the heart with an eye on both the past and the future. She has a clear grasp on R&B styles of old—and her gorgeous voice, clean and brimming with soul, lends itself well to that—but she isn\'t completely given to nostalgia. There\'s something modern about the way she slides between sounds and genres. And lyrically, she is very much a product of the time. Her confessionals are plagued by the characteristic indecision and on-again, off-again tension of a generation who gave the world terms like “situationship” and “bread-crumbing.” The desire for love and companionship is palpable, as is her desire to not get hurt by someone who doesn\'t know her worth. The features that make up *Overgrown* (which was executive produced by D\'Mile) complement Wrice\'s style while also expanding it. Next to rapper Freddie Gibbs on the hip-hop-inflected “On One” or singer-instrumentalist Masego on the jazzy “Must Be Nice,” she navigates sonic spaces that are more suited to her collaborators but which she no less bends to her will. The “That\'s on You” remix, which features the singer UMI, spotlights her Japanese heritage to become a standout. On solo tracks—namely the simmering stunner “Addicted” and the piano ballad “Overgrown”—she showcases the best of her voice, letting it soar over production that allows her the space to shine. This collection was three years in the making, and it\'s evident Wrice tended to it with love and patience; with a veteran\'s poise and a newcomer\'s inquisitiveness, *Overgrown* serves as an arrival and as notice.

“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”

There’s a track on *Chemtrails Over the Country Club*—Lana Del Rey’s sixth full-length album and the follow-up to 2019’s *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!*—that should have been heard earlier. “Yosemite” was originally written for 2017’s *Lust for Life*, but, in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that year, Del Rey revealed the song was “too happy” to make the cut. Its appearance is a neat summation of where you can expect to find the singer here. Total serenity might not have been achieved just yet, but across these 11 tracks, Del Rey, along with returning producer Jack Antonoff, finds something close to peace of mind, reflected in a softer, more intimate and pared-back sound. “Wild at Heart,” “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” and “Yosemite,” for example, all brim with (self-)acceptance. Returning to ”Yosemite” hints at something else, too: an artist looking back to make her next step forward. *Chemtrails* is scattered with references to its predecessors, from the “Venice Bitch”-reminiscent outro of the title track to “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” which might be seen as a companion piece to 2012 single “Ride.” Then there are the tracks that could easily have appeared on previous albums (“Tulsa Jesus Freak” wouldn’t be out of place on 2014’s dark-edged *Ultraviolence*) and lyrics we’ve heard before (“Dance Till We Die,” for example, references “Off to the Races” from her debut album *Born to Die*, while “Yosemite” calls back to the “candle in the wind” of *NFR!*\'s “Mariners Apartment Complex”). Del Rey’s MO has always been to tweak and refine—rather than reinvent—her sound, bringing her ever closer to where she wants to be. *Chemtrails*, however, is the first time she’s brought so much of her past into that process. As for where this album takes her? Somewhat unexpectedly towards country and folk inspired by the Midwest, rather than Del Rey’s beloved California; on “Tulsa Jesus Freak,” Del Rey pines after Arkansas. *Chemtrails Over the Country Club* makes no reference to the global pandemic in which it was partly created and released. And yet, amid a year of isolation, it was perhaps logical that one of this generation’s best songwriters would look inward. Here, Del Rey’s panoramic examination of America is replaced with something altogether more personal. On opener “White Dress,” she reflects on “a simpler time” when she was “only 19… Listening to White Stripes/When they were white hot/Listening to rock all day long.” It’s a time, more specifically, before she was famous. Nostalgia for it ebbs and flows as Del Rey’s vocals crack and strain, but any regret is short-lived. “I would still go back/If I could do it all again… Because it made me feel/Made me feel like a god.” Fame—and its pitfalls—are things Del Rey is more intimately acquainted with than most, and are a constant source of conflict on *Chemtrails*. But, as on “White Dress,” disillusionment most often turns to defiance. This reaches its peak by the album’s midpoint, “Dark but Just a Game,” an outstanding exploration of just how dangerous fame can be—if you let it. Where Del Rey was once accused of glamorizing the deaths of young artists who came before her, here, she emancipates herself from that melancholic mythology. “We keep changing all the time/The best ones lost their minds/So I’m not gonna change/I’ll stay the same,” she sings in an uplifting major-chord chorus that seems to look ahead to a better future. That sunnier disposition doesn’t dispel Del Rey’s unease with fame altogether, but she’s only too aware of what it’s brought her. For starters, the women she’s met along the way—paid tribute on the album’s final three, country-inspired tracks. “Breaking Up Slowly,” a meditation on the tempestuous relationship between Tammy Wynette and George Jones, was written with country singer-songwriter Nikki Lane (who toured with Del Rey in 2019), and Weyes Blood and Zella Day join Del Rey on the final track to cover Joni Mitchell’s “For Free.” On “Dance Till We Die,” meanwhile, the singer celebrates women in music who have come before her—and acted as guiding lights. “I’m covering Joni and I’m dancing with Joan,” she sings. “Stevie’s calling on the telephone/Court almost burned down my home/But god, it feels good not to be alone.” That same track may see her revisit her woes (“Troubled by my circumstance/Burdened by the weight of fame”), but it also finds her returning to an old coping mechanism. Just as on *Lust for Life*’s “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing” and *NFR!*’s “Happiness is a butterfly,” it’s time to dance those woes away. “I\'ll keep walking on the sunny side/And we won\'t stop dancin\' till we die.”

Lil Tjay had a mission going into the release of his second album, *Destined 2 Win*. “A lot of people get to their first album and a lot of the esteem be off one song, or their new artist phase,” he tells Apple Music. “And I feel like now that I’m settling in, I just want to show that I’m here to stay.” *Destined 2 Win*, which follows 2020’s drill-focused *State of Emergency* EP, is 21 tracks of New York City slick talk, the Bronx-born MC giving us double-bicep flexing (“Gang Gang,” “Headshot”), warm-weather macking (“Move,” “Slow Down”), and, of course, the all-too-familiar pain of losing friends to the streets (“Nuf Said,” “Losses”). You can hear the progression from Tjay’s debut, 2019’s *True 2 Myself*, in *Destined 2 Win*’s content and melodies, something Tjay says likely came from waiting to release it until the time felt absolutely right. “I got a lot of music, \[*Destined 2 Win*\] coulda been done,” he says. “I just felt the energy in the air, like it was ready. It’s my time to come.” Below, Lil Tjay goes into detail about what was on his mind when he was cooking up the album’s key tracks. **“Born 2 Be Great”** “I just always felt like I was born to be great and born to be something special, so I just felt like to start it off with that just felt right.” **“Hood Rich”** “‘Hood Rich’ is me rapping about wanting to be bigger than what I am, or where I was. It is damn near like a Tjay classic, though, ’cause I had this song for a little while and I just never dropped it. I just wanted to hold it for a sec.” **“Headshot”** “This was just a turnt night, it was a little bit of liquor in the system, the beat was thumping, it was aggressive. So that’s just how we was feeling in the studio, together.” **“Move”** “Me and Tyga was in the studio that day and it was a little vibe. I had a little liquor in the system, a couple ladies there. I could imagine people listening to this on a yacht or a boat. It gave me that vibe from jump.” **“Love Hurts”** “It does! If that shit ain’t working right and it’s a lot of miscommunication and real feelings is in it, it could hurt.” **“Run It Up”** “I fuck with Moneybagg shit, he keeps the bitches moving. His shit got the clubs pumping and shit. That was the goal for ‘Run It Up,’ that vibe. Offset is on there, too.” **“Part of the Plan”** “I done been in some rough situations. And no matter what the situation was, I never folded. So I just feel like everybody should be the same \[way\].” **“Life Changed”** “I don’t really be in the same places too much. Where I’m popping out, everybody can’t get next to me. Life got more comfortable—my whole environment, my aura. I’m a different person right now. I leveled up.” **“Nuf Said”** “The calls I need to take, I take them. With people that’s locked up, I just try to speak to my guys and make sure they time goes by fast, hope they get into a better situation soon. I don’t be as available, but they understand that ’cause now I can do more for them.”

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

When it’s all said and done, there’s no telling how COVID-19 will have affected the artistry of some of our favorite music-makers—except in the case of Moneybagg Yo, who tells Apple Music very plainly that it made him a more focused MC. “I just feel like a lot of my old music the fans didn\'t accept how I wanted them to accept it,” he says. “I just was in a different stage of my life and I was moving around a lot. The COVID situation had to happen, and by that happening, I sat down and thought about everything and I made the biggest songs of my career—of my life—in the pandemic.” Here, Yo might be referring to the lead single from his fourth album *A Gangsta’s Pain*, the Future collaboration and instantaneous smash hit “Hard for the Next.” Or maybe he’s referring to an altogether trippy exploration of relationships through the eyes of a lean addict called “Wockesha.” Maybe he’s just that proud of the hard-charging “Shottas,” where he debuts a completely new flow. But regardless of which songs he’s referring to, the M-town representer claims that the break in action the world was forced to observe showed him exactly who he is. “I feel like by me sitting down and just figuring it out, I\'m going to go back to the roots,” he says. “I\'m giving them everything they love about Moneybagg Yo.” Below, the Memphis MC breaks down how we got the best of him on his favorite tracks from *A Gangsta’s Pain*. **“Hard for the Next”** “Me and Future, every time we get in the kitchen, the chemistry is always there, so I feel like this kind of happened naturally. When he gets you in there, he\'s going to lock you in and play all of what he\'s been working on. So, he played me everything and he kept skipping by stuff. I’m like, \'Bruh, go back! Go back to that. You\'re trying to hide this joint from me.\' He was like, \'Nah, bruh, you can have whatever you want.\' So my engineer got the session, I went back and recorded it, sent it to him, and the rest was history.” **“GO!” feat. BIG30** “I felt like I got to do one of them songs on here to where like I\'m just giving it to them. I\'m just on it. I ain\'t let up off the beat, just tempo. I got to lace BIG30 up on it because that\'s my artist, I want to see him win.” **“Projects”** “I was going through like, ‘What am I missing?’ And then I get the call that Pharrell wants to lock in for two days straight, so I was a little— you know how it be. Then, I came to the studio and I just laced it.” **“Certified Neptunes” feat. Pharrell Williams** “Pharrell had the chorus already laced up when I walked in. And then he was like, ‘Look, this is how I do it. My stuff, when I cook up, it be like a skit, so this is where I want to go with it. Just go in and then we\'re going to draw around it.’ It\'s like the trap energy, gutter-type Pharrell on that one.” **“Change Da Subject”** “This the type of song, you go in the booth and you just close your eyes, and you think about everything. You think about everything like how it started, where you\'re trying to go, who you do it for; all your accomplishments. You probably heard me saying something like, \'No more pain and suffering.\' It\'s a good feeling to be there.” **“Wockesha”** “‘Wockesha’ was just was like one of them songs like, you rap about your habits, you rap about what you got going on in your personal life. Because you know, sometimes when you\'re in a relationship with a girl and you got stuff going on, it\'s like you be back and forth: You can say, ‘It\'s not gon\' be this,’ and it ends up being that again. It\'s like relapsing. And that\'s the same thing people do with drugs and other stuff. They\'ll say, \'I\'m through doing this, I\'m through doing that,\' but then they\'ll get back on it. So, I just went off the concept of that. I\'m just painting pictures.” **“One of Dem Nights”** “Jhené \[Aiko\] is one of my favorites. And then I was in the studio, the first beat that YC played, it was on point. I told him where I wanted to go, who I wanted to put on it. As soon as he went that way, it was crazy. I just started mumbling the words and I went in there and did it. I sent it to her, they sent it back. Real classic.” **“Shottas (Lala)”** “I was in the studio just joking around. It was me and the guys, we was just in there just kicking it and YC just comes in there playing beats. I was like, ‘Man, what the hell is this?’ This is one of them type of vibes you just—it don\'t matter what you say, just go in that joint and just say whatever comes to mind.”

On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”

“The idea of time when you\'re listening to certain songs, especially as a creator, it\'s like, \'Damn, are people going to still jam to this in 20 years?\'” Pink Sweat$ tells Apple Music of the inspiration behind *PINK PLANET*. He was thinking about time—or, rather, timelessness—as he created the music that would make up his debut album, which traverses both genre and era; there are hints of \'50s doo-wop alongside flashes of \'80s maximalist pop, contemporary R&B next to traditional soul. It\'s emblematic of the Philly-born producer and singer-songwriter\'s continued expansion of his sound and style. His early EPs, 2018\'s *Volume 1* and 2019\'s *Volume 2*, were built around stripped-back acoustic guitars, a sound he says felt like “barstool” or karaoke night. Here, there\'s a much more lush and full-bodied instrumentation—some of which he contributed himself, including drums, keys, and bass. “This album I wanted to feel like Vegas almost, how they got strings and you have people dancing and flying through the ceiling. It feels more like that to me,” he says. “When I say Vegas, I also mean when you want to see legendary artists, people who will just live forever.” **PINK CITY** “I started off with ‘PINK CITY’ because I wanted to set the premise of who I am and where I\'m from. When you\'re from the struggle, a lot of times people focus on the details, but for me, I wanted to articulate a feeling, because my lows might not be the same as somebody else. But it also doesn\'t matter, because at the end of the day we all have a pink planet that we\'re trying to reach. \'PINK CITY\' is that song that connects to the listener where it\'s like, whatever your struggles are, wherever you\'re from, that doesn\'t determine your success—that\'s just a beginning. It was super important for me to show people that, before we even dive all the way in. You don\'t have to become your circumstance.” **Heaven** “When I wrote ‘Heaven,’ I was just thinking about the lifestyle that I really want, especially in a relationship, and that I do have. Being with somebody and just truly—a lot of times, it can feel like hell for people, not because it\'s so bad but because they\'re always hiding. They\'ve always got pieces of themselves that they can\'t reveal. I feel like when you find love, that\'s essentially like heaven on earth because, no matter what, that person\'s going to accept and love you for who you are.” **Paradise** “With ‘Paradise,’ it doesn\'t sound like it, but it\'s my interpretation of \[Ne-Yo\'s\] \'So Sick.\' It\'s like the little percussion thing that they did—I just always liked it. I was inspired a lot by that song when it came to the production and how it made me feel. I wanted to make a song in my own way that wasn\'t necessarily the same but gave me the same feeling.” **Magic** “I loved making that song. When I was coming up with the idea, I actually did it live. I was on the drums, I was singing at the same time, and I recorded it. It was just fun—it was like a little jam session. I was telling the guitarist, I was like, ‘Yo, play this line.’ And then as I was singing it, I heard my voice over top of the guitar and I was like, \'I should keep my voice in there with that.\' Then I hopped on the bass, and after that, it just felt done in my head. There was a couple hands in the pot on that one, because I really wanted it to sound real lush. And that choir sound? I used Kanye\'s \[Sunday Service\] choir for that. They came in, and they was jamming.” **So Sweet** “I just wanted to make a song that I feel like Marvin Gaye would have sang. If I was to sell it to him like, ‘Yo, bro, I got the perfect record for you’—that\'s kind of how I was feeling. I was just talking out my life like how I\'d be talking to my girl and stuff, something that I\'m just joking around with her, being funny and cutesy or whatever.” **Chains** “That one was interesting. I went on tour, and I was kind of nervous because I was like, ‘Dang, I feel like me and my girl going to break up.’ We would just talk to each other, I would fly her to come out and she would come to the shows. She meshed so well with my whole band, and it just was fire. It was so fun. Then, we started having little disagreements, relationship stuff. But it wasn\'t the same as if I was dating somebody else, because I was just literally willing to work through whatever we got to work through. I just had this crazy idea about love—love is not self-serving. You don\'t do things with the hopes of a result back. Real love is when you just pour and empty yourself completely into something or someone. You got to become a slave to love.” **Interlude** “I wanted to put it in there to give context. This might be some people\'s first time hearing about me, and a lot of questions that people have, I want the answer to come just right in time. This is my existence. I had to create all of this stuff in my mind. I had to diversify my musical palette through the radio. If you didn\'t have a fancy enough radio, you really don\'t even know who or what you\'re listening to. I would flip through the stations, something would catch my ear, and I\'d listen to it. I didn\'t know who was singing.” **Beautiful Life** “The whole production was originally very different, but we went back in and changed it up because I wanted to tap into what I listened to as a kid. The whole album gradually is going from soul, R&B, a little bit of hint of gospel choir to slowly entering to pop. That\'s the wide range of music that I enjoy. The first song I ever heard on the radio that I remember was \'She Will Be Loved\' by Maroon 5. I didn\'t even know who Maroon 5 was—I just heard this song and it grabbed my attention.” **PINK MONEY** “James Brown inspired that song. I was just talking my shit on that one. I wanted to just talk about the good things in my life—not about a relationship. When you come from the inner cities and stuff, everybody hears the rapper\'s side. That\'s more common right now, but you don\'t really hear a lot of singers talking about coming from the struggle and pulling up on the block in a new whip. I named it \'PINK MONEY\' because I\'m owning my reality—I built this. Me and my friends and my team, we built this pink money right here.” **At My Worst** “That was inspired by my relationship and by my happiness. Like when life is going well, some people start anticipating the bad. I\'m that kind of person where I\'m so used to things going bad that when it\'s finally going well, it makes me nervous. I feel like I wrote that song out of that place where it\'s like my life is good, it\'s going well, but are you going to rock with me when it\'s not? If it ever gets to that point where it\'s not so great. Or even questioning myself—am I going to ride for this person? It\'s easy to love somebody at their best.” **17** “‘17’ was like my Black anthem. I wanted to revisit the time of the Black wedding songs. I\'m thinking about getting married one day, and the more I think about it, I\'m like, damn, if I want to use a wedding song that\'s widely known, in my mind, you gotta dig. Unless you\'re using somebody from the \'90s, there\'s really not that many new artists that are at the top when it comes to songs you\'re going to get married to. It was so many songs in the \'90s—Boyz II Men, they\'re from Philly, I\'m from Philly. I got to give my people a song that they\'ll feel like, \'I wouldn\'t mind walking down the aisle to this.\' I feel like the options today be so slim.” **Lows** “It was really a song that was like a diary almost. It was things that maybe I didn\'t say to my girl, that I didn\'t know how to say to her. Sometimes I can be a hard person, because I was raised hard. My parents always wanted the best for me, so sometimes I\'d take what was right for me and I\'d put that on somebody else. That song was me saying that despite how I feel, I\'m still going to be here for you. Despite if you wanted to leave because of how I am, I\'m still going to be there when you come back, because the love is just real like that. I feel like sometimes, as a man, you can be overbearing. You want everything your way, and if that person leaves, it\'s over. But for me, I was just so open.” **Not Alright** “‘Not Alright’ was my reality as a Black male. I felt like ever since I was young, I was always forced to grow up because of the world that I was living in. Especially because we grew up poor, so I was always raised to be like, ‘Oh, I got to be twice as better as the next person.’ In a way, it made me stronger, but at the same time it always made me feel a little bit alone. I wanted to make a song to show people the reality of the other side. I wanted to send that signal out there to a lot of people that I relate—even in my success, I still relate, I still feel alone a lot of times.” **Give It to Me** “I would say ‘Give It to Me’ is just Michael Jackson on repeat. I went on a trip with my friends, and we had a ball. We was in the hot tub for probably eight hours, in the pool just floating and letting all our problems go. Then we turned on Michael Jackson, and we just danced all night. I remember going to the studio and I was like, ‘Man, I want to make something that feels like that,’ just musically, something that made me feel fun and carefree.” **Icy** “I bought a chain; that\'s where it came from, really. That\'s like hood dreams stuff. I remember seeing dudes in my neighborhood that had a watch or cars, just diamonds or whatever. I was like, \'Man, one day I\'m going to have that.\' When I finally got it, it was an accomplishment. I didn\'t go to college. That was my reward, and it sounds bizarre, but it\'s a part of my culture, where I\'m from, that\'s what we do. I feel like a lot of people shame that and they demonize it like you\'re wasting money, and I\'m like, I\'m not wasting money—I\'m doing what I wanna do.” **PINK FAMILY** “That was the last song I added on the album, and I added that one during quarantine. I was able to be still and think a little bit more in depth. I was like, ‘Man, I got this whole album, and my whole family is my influence.’ I grew up in church. My whole family—we the band, we the praise and worship, we everything. So it\'s like, how can I put out my debut album and not have them a part of it? I was also mimicking that time and era where people did do stuff with their family. Where I\'m from, people did stuff together.” **At My Worst** “\[Kehlani\] is just a queen. Her voice is special, the way it sits on a track. As a songwriter, I\'ve always been a fan. Before I was an artist, I was a fan of hers. When we met two years ago, we always said we would end up doing something together. Back then, I was surprised she even knew who I am. We said, \'Yo, we got to work.\' Usually that\'s just industry talk—we just say that—but we actually ended up doing it.” **Honesty** “That\'s the one song everybody\'s probably already heard. They might have heard \'Honesty\' on a clip on Instagram, attached to a video, and they might not know it\'s me, but they may hear the whole album, get to the end, and be like, \'Oh, wait, I know this guy!\' It just adds a lot of texture and context to my growth in such a short period. I\'ve only been an artist since 2018, July. That\'s insane.”

The most accurate distillation of Pooh Shiesty’s mission on debut mixtape *Shiesty Season* comes from one of the project’s guests. “I don’t wanna rap about nothing but gunplay,” 21 Savage deadpans on “Box of Churches.” Savage appears on the tape alongside fellow street-rap heavyweights Gucci Mane and Lil Durk, as well as a handful of lesser-known MCs like BIG30, Choppa Wop, and Lil Hank. If they have a single thing in common, it’s an affinity for high-powered weaponry. But it is Pooh Shiesty, of course, who set the tone. Across *Shiesty Season*’s 17 tracks, the MC consistently details, in that readily identifiable Memphis drawl, the importance of guns in his life on songs like “Back in Blood,” “50 Shots,” “Take a Life,” and “Choppa Way.” Deviations from the theme are few and far between, even on songs like the one named for pioneering musical entrepreneur and Dirty South hip-hop legend Master P (“One shot to the head, may he rest in peace/I’m the reason doctors hooked him up, I feel like Master P”). And lest you think a song called “Twerksum” was an attempt at appeasing the fairer sex, Shiesty is simply offering fair warning that the “choppa get to shaking like it twerk or something.”

“This album for me was one of those experiences that helped shape me as a person,” Rico Nasty tells Apple Music of the creation of her debut album, *Nightmare Vacation*. “I feel like I haven\'t gone through something like this since my son.” All the best qualities of the DMV-born and -bred rapper are perfected and blown out to make for some of her most punk yet polished work—a fully formed vision that took a bit of self-reflection and self-assurance to create. “I feel like when you\'re working on music and makeup and merch and all these other different avenues, you get swamped; I think that\'s the reason why I chose to name it *Nightmare Vacation*, too,” she says. “I was overwhelmed and I caught myself several times letting other people set goals for me and tell me where I should be going instead of just following the path that I was already on.” Songs like “Candy” and “No Debate” reflect a more assured Rico, confident of her abilities and her place as one of rap\'s most unique talents. Her willingness to experiment across *Nightmare Vacation*, and how, each time, she emerges with a result that fits her well, is further proof of the magic of gift meeting grit. “I didn\'t rush myself to complete a song or to catch a certain wave of music. I didn\'t try to blend into whatever was out,” she shares. “Being your own person can be scary sometimes because you don\'t know if people are going to love it or hate it, but I feel the way I dress prepared me for this as well. I don\'t care about the naysayers.” **Candy** “I feel like a lot of times when I rap, it\'s over crazy beats. Even though this is also a super sick beat, it\'s usually either a rock beat or some type of super hard bass-swamping shit. A lot of times I\'m just vibing, trying to be as humble as I can, but I feel I\'ve been humble for too long. This is my shit, and I just wanted to own it.” **Don’t Like Me** “That collab flew out of the sky, but I feel like that\'s how a lot of great songs happen, and I\'m very happy to have \[Don Toliver and Gucci Mane\] on the song. They\'re both very talented, legendary people. But yeah, these bitches don\'t fucking like me. They really don\'t. That\'s what\'s crazy. I don\'t know if I scare them or what, but they\'re not fucking with me.” **Check Me Out** “‘Check Me Out’ is for the bitches who get double takes everywhere we go, like you break necks everywhere you go, people asking you where you got that. It\'s all about feeling yourself. For this song in particular, I don\'t want people to think about Rico Nasty—when you sing along to it, it\'s more so for you. You could have been in the bed all day, but you hear this song and you want to get up, you want to do something, you want to feel like a bad bitch, aggressively.” **IPHONE** “The mindset was the future, which oddly enough came true. It was a little bit of the future and the past, because I have Myspace references, but I talk about smoking so much gas, I forgot to put my mask on. I wrote that in 2019 and everybody in 2020 had to wear a mask, and I just find that super creepy, but we\'re just going to rock with that.” **STFU** “I just want people to shut the fuck up, honestly. I feel like, due to the internet, people give their opinion where it\'s really not needed, wanted, asked for, and it gets a little uncomfortable sometimes as an artist. Obviously, you can\'t respond back to everybody individually and tell them \'shut the fuck up,\' so I tried to make my haters feel special and I gave them their own personal song.” **Back & Forth** “Yo, every time I fucking think about this song, I just think about Aminé doing his verse and my verse not having anything to do with what he\'s talking about. It was just very hilarious. I love Aminé. He helped me come out of my box a little bit, because I was never comfortable talking about shit like that. He helped pick the beat, and that night, we was with CashMoneyAp and stuff. He\'s fucking fire. I love Aminé. That\'s one of my top three favorite rappers of this generation.” **Girl Scouts** “The inspiration behind that was I was sitting back, going through my DMs, going through my mentions, and in my text photos, there\'s always girls dressing up like me, recreating my makeup looks and just going full-out Rico Nasty. I will call them Sugar Soldiers and the Nasty Mob—I think of them like Girl Scouts now, because there was a point in time where I was doing things and when I would see people do them, I would get offended or I\'d be super territorial. I remember somebody got the same exact tattoo as me, and I was just pissed off. I feel that\'s another thing that comes with growing up and this being a really big turning point in my life because I learned how to take my power back. We are an army. We are Girl Scouts. We at your fucking door. You come for one, you gotta deal with all of us. I love them so much.” **Let It Out** “It kinda tells the story of just my whole career. I love this verse because I just feel like I was having the most fun with that. It be the craziest beats that I just get on it and I feel the most lit for some reason. On the melodic ones, I\'d be a little bit scared, but on this one—I think I made this song super fast, and I didn\'t really like it at first. And everybody on my team and my manager leaked it on Twitter to see if they would like it, and they were like, \'Please drop this,\' and I was like, \'Damn, they fuck with it.\' That was one of the fun ones.” **Loser** “I wouldn\'t call myself the queen of surprises, but I never like to give people what they expect. Trippie \[Redd\]\'s amazing. Hopefully we get to work again. He was really fast giving me my song back, and he even came to the studio when I did his song—he\'s really awesome. I\'m looking forward to that punk shit, that crazy rock-screaming shit. We both have haters. We both have people who, I guess, call us weird or say we dress weird, and then we have the other half who dress like us. I just thought about this like *Mean Girls*. \'Everybody\'s going to want to be like us, but they can\'t sit with us\' type vibe. We\'re going to call Trippie \'Trippie Lohan.\' He\'s got the red hair like Lindsay Lohan, so it\'s really funny. It\'s hella flowy, hella melodic but also heavy-hitting.” **No Debate** “I talk about giving energy and power back to my fans with this album, and I just want to give them shit that puts them in a good mood and just makes them feel real bouncy. This song, I will say, was definitely inspired by the *Nasty* era. When I made this song, I was listening to a lot of my *Nasty* mixtape, and I feel this is a flavor from that era that was missed on the album.” **Pussy Poppin** “People don\'t really know, but I\'m very shy about talking about stuff like that. Whenever I make a song about that type of shit prior to this, I\'m like, \'Get out of the studio. Please leave.\' I\'m nervous as fuck, palms sweating, trying to rap about sex. And this night, bro, I don\'t know what had got into me. I wanted to have some fun. Obviously we talk about how these n\*\*\*as ain\'t shit, but I feel some of the best songs are the ones where it\'s like we\'re celebrating how our n\*\*\*a actually is fire. I feel we don\'t have that many songs like that, and I just wanted to make that song for all the girls with boyfriends out there who don\'t really talk about that shit but want to.” **OHFR?** “It was just one of those days where I remember it was hella gloomy and the song was made very fast. Dylan \[Brady\] was there, and the exhausting part with this song was the fucking beat. When we had tried to set it up, there was something wrong with the BPM. It was weird, like people were like, \'I don\'t know if you can even get on it because of the way that the beat is set up\' or whatever. But I still got on it. We still went crazy. \'OHFR?\' is definitely an anthem for people to put they middle fingers up, and it\'s just in your face.” **T0Fo** “It\'s like I\'m talking to myself on that song. I feel like that\'s the devil on your shoulder doing reckless-ass shit. Obviously, I\'m not trying to make people go out and fuck shit up, but when I wrote the song, it was definitely in a time where I was angry, and I wanted to get my power back so I just talked my shit. I was a little bit hesitant about really releasing the song, because I don\'t ever want nobody to do no wild-ass shit listening to me. But this one of the ones—it just made me feel like breaking shit, going out, whoever did me wrong, fucking they shit up. I don\'t care. It\'s the soundtrack to beating a n\*\*\*a\'s ass. We were smacking bitches before, but I feel like this song in particular is definitely about getting back at a guy.” **Own It** “I feel like with ‘Own It,’ I was trying to hone that vacation vibe but still Rico Nasty type of vacation—very glamorous, spooky, weird, still out there in its own way. I feel ‘Own It’ is also about owning your shit, owning my island. And it\'s also for bitches to be feeling they need to own it and that they\'re that bitch, because we need one big room full of bad bitches. Shout-out Kreayshawn.” **Smack a Bitch (Remix)** “Well, I felt like all of the girls that I put on this song are very avid people that are great contenders for smacking bitches. Sukihana will smack a bitch in an instant, ppcocaine will smack a bitch in an instant, and I definitely feel like Rubi Rose would smack a bitch or a n\*\*\*a in an instant. I also put them on the song because I feel one way or another, they\'ve inspired me to go hard just by the shit they go through on a daily basis. Suki\'s a mom. ppcocaine is a rising TikTok star and shit, and it\'s hectic on TikTok because they be hella rude on there. And then Rubi Rose is somebody who has been a beautiful girl that was well-known, and so many people try to underplay her as a rapper, and I fucking hate when people do that. I feel like the female rap scene right now is hella punk. We don\'t give a fuck. We showing ass, showing titties. We talk about what we want. Obviously, this has always been hip-hop, but in my head, we just look like a bunch of rock stars.” **Smack a Bitch (Bonus)** “I don\'t know what it is about that song. Obviously, I would like to think just because of the circumstance and how it came out, that\'s why people gravitate to it. It probably makes people feel like fighting and all that really goofy-ass shit. But I feel over time, it\'s just become one of those songs. It\'s a fun song. It\'s fun to put on. It\'s probably the fastest song I ever made, the most fun I had in the studio. I\'m very thankful for everybody that was a part of it, because I feel like it pushed me to do my own thing even more.”

Rod Wave knows exactly who he is. “I got skills in other things, but rich off rapping pain,” he admits in the title track from his third album, *SoulFly*. That title contains multitudes in that Wave’s music obviously comes from his soul, and he is objectively fly, and then there is the fact that he’s continuously singing about the time after his eventual passing when his soul can *actually* fly free. In fact, Wave is remarkably productive for someone who’d have you believe he’s constantly in the throes of anguish. (The singer has released at least one project a year since 2016’s *Hunger Games*, amassing a fanbase whose penchant for making jokes about the glumness of his music is dwarfed only by their dedication to streaming it.) “If you can’t feel my pain, this ain’t for you anyways,” Wave sings on “Don’t Forget.” You’d think that the hard times he saw as a child, the constant betrayals he’d know as an adult, or the pressure he’s under as his family’s breadwinner might actually come close to breaking him, but Wave sounds like he is in a better space than he’s been in a long time. “I just be telling ’bout my pain,” he says on “Calling.” “I just be thinking, reminiscing ’bout that shit/I numb the pain with the money/I don’t feel pain, too much money.”

“I’ve had a lot of controversies in my short period being an artist,” slowthai tells Apple Music. “But I always try making a statement.” In 2019, there was the Northampton rapper’s establishment-rattling appearance at the Mercury Prize ceremony, hoisting of an effigy of Boris Johnson’s severed head. A few months later, sexualized comments he made to comedian Katherine Ryan at the 2020 NME Awards caused a fierce Twitter backlash and prompted the Record Store Day 2020 campaign to withdraw an invitation for slowthai to be its UK ambassador. Ryan labeled their exchange “pantomime” but it led to a confrontation with an audience member and slowthai’s apology for his “shameful actions.” Since releasing his 2019 debut *Nothing Great About Britain*, then, the artist born Tyron Frampton has known the unforgiving heat of public judgment. It’s helped forge *TYRON*, a follow-up demarcated into two seven-track sides. The first is brash, incendiary, and energized, continuing to draw a through line between punk and UK rap. The second is vulnerable and introspective, its beats more contemplative and searching. The overarching message is that there are two sides to every story, and even more to every human being. “We all have the side that we don’t show, and the side we show,” he says. “Living up to expectations—and then not giving a fuck and just being honest with yourself.” Featuring guests including Skepta, A$AP Rocky, James Blake, and Denzel Curry, these songs, he hopes, will offer help to others feeling penned in by judgment, stereotypes, or a lack of self-confidence. “I just want them to realize they’re not alone and can be themselves,” he says. “I know that when shit gets dark, you need a little bit of light.” Explore all of slowthai’s sides with his track-by-track guide. **45 SMOKE** “‘Rise and shine, let’s get it/Bumbaclart dickhead/Bumbaclart dickhead.’ It’s like the wake-up call for myself. It’s how you feel when you’re making constant mistakes, or you’re in a rut and you wake up like, ‘I really don’t want to wake up, I’d rather just sleep all day.’ It’s explaining where I’m from, and the same routine of doing this bullshit life that I don’t want to do—but I’m doing it just for the sake of doing it or because this is what’s expected of me.” **CANCELLED** “This song’s a fuck-you to the cancel culture, to people trying to tear you down and make it like you’re a bad person—because all I’ve done my whole life is try and escape that stereotype, and try and better myself. You can call me what you want, you can say what you think happened, but most of all I know myself. Through doing this, I’ve figured it out on a deeper level. When we made this, I was in a dark place because of everything going on. And Skep \[Skepta, co-MC on this track\] was guiding me out. He was saying, ‘Yo, man, this isn’t your defining moment. If anything, it pushes you to prove your point even more.’” **MAZZA** “Mazza is ‘mazzalean,’ which is my own word... It\'s just a mad thing. It’s for the people that have mad ADHD \[slowthai lives with the disorder\], ADD, and can’t focus on something—like how everything comes and it’s so quick, and it’s a rush. It’s where my head was at—be it that I was drinking a lot, or traveling a lot, and seeing a lot of things and doing a lot of dumb shit. Mad time. As soon as I made it, I FaceTimed \[A$AP\] Rocky because I was that gassed. We’d been working here and there, doing little bits. He was like, ‘This is hard. Come link up.’ He was in London and I went down there and \[we\] just patterned it out.” **VEX** “It’s just about being angry at social media, at the fakeness, how everyone’s trying to be someone they’re not and showing the good parts of their lives. You just end up feeling shit, because even if your life’s the best it could be, it just puts in your head that, ‘Ah, it could always be better.’ Most of these people aren’t even happy—that’s why they\'re looking for validation on the internet.” **WOT** “I met Pop Smoke, and that night I recorded this song. It was the night he passed. The next morning, I woke up at 6 am to go to the Disclosure video shoot \[for ‘My High’\] and saw the news. I was just mad overwhelmed. Initially, I’d linked up with Rocky, making another tune, but he didn’t finish his bit. \[slowthai’s part\] felt like it summed it up the energies—it was like \[Pop Smoke’s\] energy, just good vibes. I felt like I wouldn\'t make it any longer because it’s straight to the point. As soon as it starts, you know that it’s on.” **DEAD** “We say ‘That’s dead’ as in it’s not good, it’s shit. So I was like, ‘Yo, every one of these things is dead to me.’ There’s a line, ‘People change for money/What’s money with no time?’ That’s aimed at people saying I changed because I gained success. It’s not that I’ve changed, but I’ve grown or grown out of certain things. It’s not the money that changed me, it’s understanding that doing certain things is not making me any better. If I’m spending all my time working on bettering myself and trying to better my craft, the money’s irrelevant. I don’t even have the time to spend it. So it’s just like saying everything’s dead. I’m focusing on living forever through my music and my art.” **PLAY WITH FIRE** “Even though we want to move far away from situations and circumstances, we keep toying with the idea \[of them\]. It plays on your mind that you want to be in that position. ‘PLAY WITH FIRE’ is the letting go as well as trying to hold on to these things. When it goes into \[next track\] ‘i tried,’ it’s like, ‘I tried to do all these things, live up to these expectations and be this person, but it wasn’t working for me.’ And on the other foot, I *tried* all these things. I can’t die saying I didn’t. You have to love everything for how it is to understand it, and try and move on. You’ve got to understand something for the negative before you can really understand the positive.” **i tried** “‘Long road/Tumble down this black hole/Stuck in Sunday league/But I’m on levels with Ronaldo.’ It’s saying it’s been a struggle to get here. And even still, I feel like I’m traveling into a void. You feel like you’re sinking into yourself—be it through taking too many drugs or drinking too much and burying yourself in a hole, just being on autopilot. It’s coming to that understanding, and dealing with those problems. It’s \[about\] boosting my confidence and my true self: ‘Yo, man, you’re the best. If this was football, you’d be the Ballon d’Or winner.’ We always look at what we think we should be like. We never actually look at who we are, and what our qualities are. ‘I’ve got a sickness/And I’m dealing with it.’ I’m trying. I\'m trying every avenue, and with a bit of hope and a bit of luck, I can become who I want to be.” **focus** “From the beginning, even though I’m in this pocket of people and this way of life, I’ve always known to go against that grain. I didn’t ever want to end up in jail. You either get a trade or you end doing shit and potentially you end in jail. A lot of people around me, they’re still in that cycle. And this is me saying, ‘Focus on some other shit.’ I come from the shit, and I pushed and I got there. And it was through maintaining that focus.” **terms** “It’s the terms and conditions that come with popularity and...fame. I don’t like that word. I hate words like ‘fad’ and ‘fame.’ They make me cringe so much. Maybe I’ve got something against words that begin with F. But it’s just dealing with what comes with it and how it’s not what you expected it to be. The headache of being judged for being a human being. Once you get any recognition for your art, you’re no longer a human—you’re a product. Dominic \[Fike, guest vocalist\] sums it up beautifully in the hook.” **push** “‘Push’ is an acronym for ‘praying until something happens.’ When you’re in a corner, you’ve got to keep pushing. Even when you’re at your lowest. That’s all life is, right? It’s a push. Being pulled is the easy route, but when you’re pushing for something, the hard work conditions your mind, strengthens you physically and spiritually, and you come out on top. I used to be religious—when my brother passed, when I was young. I asked for a Bible for my birthday, which was some weird shit. Through this project…it’s not faith in God, but my faith in people, it’s been kind of restored, my faith in myself. Everyone I work with on this, they’re my friends, and they’re all people that have helped me through something. And Deb \[Never, guest vocalist\]—we call each other twins. She’s my sister that I’ve known my whole life but I haven’t known my whole life.” **nhs** “It’s all about appreciation. The NHS—something that’s been doing work for generations, to save people—it’s been so taken for granted. It’s a place where everyone’s equal and everyone’s treated the same. It takes this \[pandemic\] for us to applaud people who have been giving their lives to help others. They should have constant applause at the end of every shift. We’re out here complaining and always wanting more. I don’t know if it’s a human defect or just consumerism, but you get one thing and then you always want the next best thing. I do it a lot. And there’s never a best one, because there’s always another one. Just be happy with what you’ve got. You\'ll end up having an aneurysm.” **feel away** “Dom \[Maker, co-producer and one half of Mount Kimbie\] works with James \[Blake\] a lot. They record a bunch of stuff, chop it up and create loops. I was going through all these loops, and I was like, ‘This one’s the one.’ As soon as we played it, I had lyrics and recorded my bit. I’ve loved James from when I was a kid at school and was like, ‘We should get James.’ We sent it to him, and in my head, I was like, ‘Ah, he’s not going to record on it.’ But the next day, we had the tune. I was just so gassed. I dedicated it to my brother passing. But it’s about putting yourself in your partner’s shoes, because through experiences, be it from my mum or friends, I’ve learnt that in a lot of relationships, when a woman’s pregnant, the man tends to leave the woman. The woman usually is all alone to deal with all these problems. I wanted it to be the other way around—the woman leaves the man. He’s got to go through all that pain to get to the better side, the beauty of it.” **adhd** “When I was really young, my mum and people around me didn’t really believe in \[ADHD\]—like, ‘It’s a hyperactive kid, they just want attention.’ They didn’t ever see it as a disorder. And I think this is my way of summarizing the whole album: This is something that I’ve dealt with, and people around me have dealt with. It’s hard for people to understand because they don’t get why it’s the impulses, or how it might just be a reaction to something that you can’t control. You try to, but it’s embedded in you. It’s just my conclusion—like at the end of the book, when you get to the bit where everything starts making sense. I feel like this is the most connected I’ve been to a song. It’s the clearest depiction of what my voice naturally sounds like, without me pushing it out, or projecting it in any way, or being aggressive. It’s just softly spoken, and then it gets to that anger at the end. And then a kiss—just to sweeten it all up.”

In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”

Surprise-dropping a career-redefining album in the midst of a paralyzing global pandemic is an admirable flex; doing it *again* barely five months later is a display of confidence and concentration so audacious that you’re within your rights to feel personally chastised. Like *folklore*, *evermore* is a team-up with Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Justin Vernon, making the most of cozy home-studio vibes for more bare-bones arrangements and bared-soul lyrics, casually intimate and narratively rich. There is an expanded guest roster here—HAIM appears on “no body, no crime,” which seems to place Este Haim in the center of a small-town murder mystery, while Dessner’s bandmates in The National are on “coney island”—but they fit themselves into the mood rather than distract from it. (The percussive “long story short” sounds like it could have been on any National album in the past decade.) Elsewhere, “\'tis the damn season” is the elegaic home-for-the-holidays ballad this busted year didn’t realize it needed. But while so much of *folklore*’s appeal involved marveling at how this setting seemed to have unlocked something in Swift, the only real shock here is the timing of the release itself. Beyond that, it’s an extension and confirmation of its predecessor’s promises and charms, less a novelty driven by unprecedented circumstances and instead simply a thing she happens to do and do well.

“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”