Upset's Albums of the Year 2022

When a DIY ethos is baked into your core, your intuition is always likely to guide you right. Since forming in 2014, Nova Twins have established themselves as alt-rock explorers constantly crossing genre boundaries to absorb ideas and recast them in their own vision. The London-based duo of Amy Love and Georgia South approached their second album by dialing up both the brightness and heaviness of their debut, 2020’s *Who Are the Girls?*, operating on gut feel. “We have label support now, but it’s all still about us,” Love tells Apple Music. “It’s the shit we’ve always done, but they’ve helped us to facilitate the things we need to make the sound even bigger. There was no pressure, no schedule; we were just writing because we wanted to.” Written broadly during the pandemic and from within the Black Lives Matter movement, *Supernova* centers on the duo’s experiences of grief, heartbreak, erasure, and the empowerment of self-owned sexuality, as they battle their way through darkness to find light. The result is an album of intensity, energy, and enough fighting spirit to share around. “Life isn’t perfect, and we all have shit times,” says South. “But with *Supernova*, we want to give people that extra skip in their step, to feel like they can push through. Whatever you have going on, there is always a way to come out as a winner.” Let Nova Twins guide you through the album, track by track. **“Power (Intro)”** Georgia South: “We wanted a word that set the precedent for how we wanted the album to make people feel, and that word was ‘power.’” Amy Love: “It feels like a new beginning, a new era for the Nova Twins world. By putting this as the beginning and then ending on ‘Sleep Paralysis,’ it’s a wake-up call, like being born again.” GS: “It was just a nice little way to introduce the album and bookend the world that we created. If you were to be transported through a vortex, this is what it would sound like.” **“Antagonist”** AL: “This one came after the heavy lockdown. It felt so good to be able to finally meet up in person, and that energy and sense of connection is audible. It was just us together in a room, having fun.” GS: “We worked with Jim Abbiss again on production for the record, but in lockdown, we got really into Logic, the nitty-gritty of making beats and doing vocal production and sound effects ourselves. We learnt so much more about quality this time that a lot of the demos were good enough to go right on the album, and then, with Jim’s production style and live drums, we could focus on building up that really big sound.” **“Cleopatra”** AL: “The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was a traumatic time. It was so dark and depressing and terrifying, but when we all started unifying and marching, it felt like there was some sort of hope. It spurred us on to write something that would make people feel good, to feel powerful and proud of where they’re from. ‘Cleopatra’ was written in that moment of feeling truly part of something; we’re confident Black women, but it’s only when you start talking with others that you shine light on areas even you didn’t understand properly. We wanted to have a song that reflected the times, but also something which would give hope in the future.” **“K.M.B.”** GS: “With ‘K.M.B.’ \[Kill My Boyfriend\], we homed in on the sassy ’90s R&B that we both love. We love groups like Destiny’s Child, and we also love heavy music, so we thought that if we paired the two, we’d have the sassiest, most badass thing ever.” AL: “So many people can relate to the idea of getting revenge on a ex. When we read the lyrics back in isolation, we were like, ‘Is this a bit much?’ But then we were like, ‘Nah, it’s a joke. Right?!’” GS: “That’s why we made the music video so bright and colorful, to really get the joke across. The day of filming was so fun; the woman who owned the house came in and was like, ‘Can we rename the song “Kill My Husband?”’” AL: “He had cheated on her 47 times! She was like, ‘This video is the perfect send-off.’ She definitely saw the sense of humor in it.” **“Fire & Ice”** GS: “‘I tend to start with drums and then write riffs on top of the beat, building up in layers. We didn’t use any synths on the album, just bass, guitar, drums, and a bunch of pedals, which will make it a lot of fun to play live. I’m going to need a third leg!” AL: “Conceptually, it’s about all our moods as human beings. People assume that we’re scary or we’re this and that, but we’re all those things and the opposite. As women, we’re never just one thing; we can be moody, upset, loving, happy, vulnerable, sweet. It’s just about being a normal girl today—it’s not always pretty, but that duality is always going to be something you love about us.” **“Puzzles”** GS: “‘Puzzles’ puts us back in our ’90-2000s era. When you’re in a club, there’s those classic sexy tracks that you just want to dance to, like Khia’s ‘My Neck, My Back’ or ‘Pony’ by Ginuwine. We all want to feel sexy, to feel good about ourselves. We wanted it to be heavy—something you can mosh to but get down to at the same time.” AL: “It’s a fun song, but it’s also there to challenge people who are still living in the dark ages. There’s no line with Nova; we might like wearing baggy tracksuits, but at the same time, we also know how to let loose and have fun with our sexuality. If people are still uncomfortable about that, then a song like this is needed.” **“A Dark Place for Somewhere Beautiful”** AL: “We don’t always share our personal home truths in our music. Time is the biggest healer, and if something is still quite fresh, you can only talk about it so much. People can read between the lines and take what they want from it, but we all experience grief in our lives at some point, and this song is just describing what it feels like to go through that. A part of you disappears, but you also grow so much. Loss really does change you.” **“Toolbox”** GS: “It’s all about flipping the script on all the social pressures and beauty ideals that are usually aimed at women—changing up the roles so we’re singing it to a man. We’ve had to say, ‘Fuck you’ to so many men all the way along our career, and it’s built us into these strong women as a result. I’m grateful for it because it comes across in tunes like this.” **“Choose Your Fighter”** GS: “This was the last song we finished; we only had 24 hours to do it because of vinyl lead time. We were in the home studio writing, really tired. Whenever one of us was lagging, we’d have a tea break, put ‘Work Bitch’ by Britney Spears on, and then be like, ‘OK, we can do this.’ We truly have to thank Britney for this one—without her, we would have just slept.” AL: “In lockdown, we were sending songs back and forth, and then, suddenly, this was one where we were like, ‘I guess we’re writing an album.’ Lockdown was terrible, but it really helped us to find our way to this body of work, to say all the things that we wanted to say.” **“Enemy”** AL: “‘Enemy’ is about the time in our career where people weren’t quite getting it. We’ve seen other people be able to walk through so much easier because they fit the mold of what people perceive to be a riot grrrl. This was our kick back to the people who said that we look like we should only be doing hip-hop.” GS: “It’s pure rage, but we were also laughing so much while making it, putting people on our imaginary hit list. Obviously, we’re not trying to promote violence, but people can relate to that feeling in the moment. They can listen on their headphones going to work with their horrible boss, or at school if somebody’s picking on them. It’s a song about standing up for yourself.” **“Sleep Paralysis”** GS: “We were playing with different dynamics. It feels like you’re on a crazy loop because it joins back with the intro, and it’s a bit trippy and chaotic. It was definitely reflective of where we were at the time. We were locked down, BLM was going on, there was so much loss, and it was just like, ‘This is a full-on nightmare.’” AL: “We created this world where it almost felt like *Stranger Things*, The Upside Down. Everything seems really peaceful and calm and then, suddenly, the chorus hits. That gnarly hellscape feeling truly felt like what we were living through. It shows that we’re not afraid to not be super loud, that we don’t put boundaries on ourselves. Everything we’ve done with this band, we don’t plan; we just jump and see what happens. It’s always worked for us, so we’re going to keep jumping.”

After the release of PUP’s 2019 album, *Morbid Stuff*, vocalist and guitarist Stefan Babcock began to consider whether they should push and open up their sound without fundamentally altering it. “The line we’re always trying to straddle is, ‘How can we do something a bit weird without totally alienating our fans?’” Babcock tells Apple Music. “The goal with the guy who made the first three records, Dave Schiffman, was always like, ‘Here are the songs. Let’s try to make it sound like we’re literally playing the best live show we’ve ever played.’ We love what he brought to the table, but with this one, we wanted to push it and see what would happen if we had more time in the studio.” The Toronto punks stationed themselves for five weeks at producer/engineer Peter Katis’ residential Tarquin Studios in Connecticut to record their fourth full-length, *THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND*. Katis—whose credits include working with The National, Japandroids, and Interpol—distills the band’s essence with a little more kick. “It was a natural and unnatural fit at the same time,” Babcock says. “I think he was put in a position that he’s not used to—it was just a new challenge for him and that was an unnatural part, and the natural part was that we all think about music in the same way and appreciate the same types of qualities in music.” Here, Babcock guides us through songs from the album. **“Four Chords”** “It’s funny because there’s never been any piano on any PUP record, or keys or synthesizers of any kind, and we started this record with the stupidest piano ballad of all time. In one sense, it’s so un-PUP to have a piano ballad, but in another sense, it’s incredibly PUP to do something that dumb to start a record. I wrote the song as a joke after I bought a piano during the pandemic. I sent it to my bandmates, and we never talked about it again after. The last week in the studio, Nestor \[Chumak, PUP bassist/keyboardist\] was like, ‘You should record it and that should start the record.’ I slept on it, and the more that I thought about it, the more I thought he was really onto something. As soon as we embraced this idea that this was going to be the first song, the whole record started to make sense to me. It became more than just a collection of songs. I could almost see the forest for the trees.” **“Totally Fine”** “After ‘Four Chords,’ we had to go into a song that was very quintessentially PUP. It’s the same mentality we had on the second record when we started with a song called ‘If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will,’ which is a slow, mellow song, and then it goes into the most high-energy song on the record. So, there’s a little bit of not trying to recreate that, but a little bit of taking the elements that we liked—that dynamic between quiet and really ruckus—and shoving them together to start a record.” **“Robot Writes a Love Song”** “It’s a weird song for me because the vast majority of PUP songs are written from my first-person perspective. ‘Robot’ is not, but I was legitimately trying to see if I could write a really heartfelt love song, and it being just earnest, without any humor in it. So, this love song that I was trying to write, it just felt so yucky. It was so contrived, and it felt very not me and not PUP. When I decided to try and change the perspective, it worked so well. Suddenly, all of these things that I was saying, that I felt were so cheesy, were a little bit humorous and had more weight and impact to them. Hiding behind humor, for me, is a little bit of a crutch that I use, but I think that song turned out better because I was willing to take it to a place that wasn’t just entirely serious and super emotionally draining.” **“Matilda”** “This song is me trying to figure out why there’s such a strong emotional connection to an object, or what is it that ties you to this object? And usually, for me, it’s a very specific time in my life. On the first record, I wrote a song about my car, which I was very emotionally attached to. I did so much growing up in that car. I drove it across the country and I kissed a girl for the first time—all of these memories. So, this one is about my guitar, Matilda, and it’s the same sort of thing: Why am I so attached to this guitar? And it’s because it’s so connected to a time in my life that was so emotionally turbulent and also kind of wonderful. The first time that we ever went on tour, and we were trying to be a real band, everything was really new and exciting and weird. We were broke and loving it. That time in my life was almost like what I feel falling in love the first time, when everything is more vibrant. You feel every emotion so much harder than you normally would.” **“Relentless”** “Sarah \[Tudzin\], from the band illuminati hotties, sings on the chorus and in the bridge, and she’s awesome. There’s two sides to what I’m talking about here: One is trying to get ahead, being ambitious, pushing forward and trying to fight off the dread that comes with that, and the other side is this dread that you keep trying to get ahead of in life. I just feel like there’s always a demon over my shoulder and that’s how the world feels too. It’s so overwhelming; there’s no time or emotional or mental energy to look backwards or to look forward. You’re just dealing with what’s in front of you, and that’s a tough place for our world to be in.” **“Waiting”** “I asked Nestor to send me this running document of guitar riffs that he has. He sent me these five pretty heavy riffs, and from that we used one on ‘Waiting’ that I really love. I thought the best way to make it feel like a PUP song, rather than a metal song or a hardcore song, was the simplest, most uplifting chorus that I could write onto the really heavy guitar riff, and it worked in a very PUP way. There’s always this contrast in our music, the lyrics versus the actual music. If the lyrics are really serious, we try to make the music sound pretty fun and vice versa. I think we found that combination of heavy and joy that we’re always kind of looking for.” **“Habits”** “When I originally wrote the song, it was just guitar and voice, and it felt like a good PUP song. It wasn’t going to change the game for us, but we were like, ‘Yes, this sounds like us and it’s cool and it’s fun.’ But we kind of put it aside, and then one day Zack \[Mykula, PUP drummer\] came in and was like, ‘Hey, I made this thing for “Habits.” It’s kind of out there, but maybe it works.’ He was the one who crafted that synthy intro, which we also sprinkled elements of that throughout. I think we all really gravitated to what he did. For me, it took a song that we all liked and thought was pretty standard, but not in a bad way, into a new territory for us that made it so much more exciting.” **“Cutting Off the Corners”** “With most PUP songs—even when I’m writing the real dark and serious things—I’m always trying to find that little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, some silver lining or just some cathartic joy, and I very purposely avoided that as a crutch on this song. I don’t know how deep I want to get into it, but I wrote it three days after I lost an old friend. So, that was a song that poured out at me all at once, and it was very emotionally charged. We talked about adding some joy, some energy, some good vibes, and that felt like a disservice to what the song was about. So, it’s a strange one. That song is on the album for me and for her, and I just wanted to make something for them that didn\'t hide behind the humor.” **“Grim Reaping”** “I wouldn’t say we’re a traditionally political band, but the four of us all have very strong political convictions that we express in other ways—whether it’s through our social media or at live shows. It makes up for the fact that we don’t really talk politics too much in our songs, and the reason that we don’t is because I really struggle with making it sound genuine without it sounding super contrived. Like, ‘Fuck the man.’ I feel like every time I’ve tried to write those songs, I sound like a bad impersonation of OFF! or Bad Religion. I was trying to write about the state of the world but through a really personal lens, trying to express how myself and the band have been coping with those challenges. I’m pretty good at speaking eloquently about my emotions and less eloquently about other things, so I try to bring it into my universe.” **“PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing for Bankruptcy”** “This is truly an example of the unraveling of PUP, the band. This song is just so true to who we are as humans in terms of the lyrics, but also the way the music is arranged. It’s our version of being truly self-indulgent. If we were a prog-rock band, this would be our 14-minute epic. Also, part of the decisions that were made—the saxophone solo and then right after where there’s a room recording of me playing through the shitty PA that we found—came about because this was the last song that we recorded for the record. If it were during week one, we would’ve said, ‘No, that’s stupid. Let’s stay focused.’ And at that point, we’d been in the studio—where we were also living and sharing the same space together—for five weeks and were starting to get a little bit crazy. We were like, ‘That’s a great idea. What other stupid shit can we do?’”

All Songs by PUP Produced by Peter Katis and PUP Recorded by Peter Katis and Greg Giorgio Additional recording by Nestor Chumak and Kurt Leon Assistant engineers: Erik Paulson, Jake Gray Mixed by Peter Katis at Tarquin Studios Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound Additional keyboards by Thomas Bartlett and Peter Katis Additional Vocals by Sarah Tudzin (“Relentless”), Melanie Gail St-Pierre (“Totally Fine”), Kathryn Mccaughey (“Waiting”), and Erik Paulson (“Cutting Off The Corners” and “Grim Reaping”) Trumpet on “Four Chords” and “Grim Reaping” by Marie Goudy Trombone on “Grim Reaping” by Paul Tarussov Saxophone on “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy” by Colin Fisher PUP is: Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski

As frontman James Smith and bassist Ryan Needham were holed up in Leeds, writing the songs that make up Yard Act’s debut album, the pair weren’t thinking about a record until they almost had one in front of them. Instead, they were caught up in the sort of heady, creative whirl you get from a new group flexing their songwriting chops. “We knew we were writing a lot, but there was no form or structure to it; it was just loads of ideas,” Smith tells Apple Music. “It was when we started to realize how much material we had that we said, ‘All right, now is probably the time to go in and have a go at the album.’” That spirit of artistic delirium runs right through *The Overload*, where wiry post-punk grooves and buoyant indie anthems-in-waiting frame Smith’s wry, cutting observations on life in modern Britain. “We realized there was a theme running through the songs,” recalls Smith, “an anti-capitalist slant to the whole thing. We came up with this idea of an arc about this person’s journey trying to become a success and how that pans out.” *The Overload* is a thrilling snapshot of pre- and post-pandemic life, less a black mirror to the early 2020s and more a vivid, full-color one. Here, Smith and Needham guide us through it, track by track. **“The Overload”** James Smith: “The song was originally a really pounding house track that Ryan had sent, but I heard the beat differently and put this sped-up drum-and-bass loop over the top of Ryan’s bassline. As soon as I put that on it, the energy made more sense. There’s a chopped sample break running underneath the whole thing that really completed it and gave it that manic feel.” **“Dead Horse”** JS: “I was always pretty keen on this being early on in the album. It feels like the culmination of all the early singles, finally figuring out how to write in our own style.” Ryan Needham: “I think, lyrically, James had a little bit of extreme anger around the time of the Dominic Cummings \[a former Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister caught breaking public health restrictions during the first UK lockdown\] stuff.” JS: “Yeah, it did come from that little month of anger. The bass was on groove; it was really good. And the lyrics played well—there were some good lines in there. It represented where we had got to up until that point.” **“Payday”** JS: “This was written to fit in on the album to coax the narrative along. Originally, it was a really lo-fi demo and then we lost it. When we redid it, we built in all these 909 electronic drums and then Sam \[Shjipstone\] put this really mad funk guitar on it that was exactly what it needed. It is just one of the more straight-up songs, a vehicle to get onto some of the more creative stuff. I tried to be more abstract with the lyrics—didn’t want to do the overly talky thing, so I left a lot more space in the verses so that chorus can come through a bit.” **“Rich”** JS: “It’s a really simple bassline that I was hypnotized by. It was written when Yard Act had just started doing OK. As some of these crazier offers were coming in, I could see it maybe reaching a level where we became part of the culture and made a living off it. I pondered on this idea that music is one of those things where, if it *goes*, you don’t really have control over how much money you suddenly earn out of nowhere. For so long, you are on the bottom rung and money is tight, and then, all of a sudden, the floodgates open and you can make loads of money really easy. That was it, but applied to the narrative of anyone that has an idea that becomes popular.” **“The Incident”** RN: “This was loads of fun. It’s a bit of an outlier on the record—it’s what sounds most like us live. I had been listening to loads of stuff like Omni and stuff like Elastica—this wave of what everyone was calling post-punk bands at the time. I wrote guitars for this one, everything, I got carried away.” JS: “I think you came up with some really interesting, busy basslines for this one.” **“Witness (Can I Get A?)”** JS: “This predates this lineup and lockdown in terms of the lyrics and the bassline. It was sounding quite generic, a post-punk sort of tune from the really early days where we had a couple of jams in late 2019.” RN: “Then, we tried it like the Beastie Boys.” JS: “We wanted to do a hardcore song, but that wasn’t really working either. Then, we did that sort of Suicide drum thing with it. As soon as it went like that, it always reminded me of the start of ‘Doorman’ by slowthai \[and Mura Masa\]. We just wanted a really fun song to close the first side. There’s something about one-minute songs—they are underrated.” **“Land of the Blind”** JS: “Ryan sent this drum-and-bass groove, and I was instantly really smitten with it, and I wrote the lyrics really fast. It’s one which has most of the demo vocals on it. We were in lockdown and Ryan got his girlfriend—who clearly can sing, but she doesn’t consider herself a singer and doesn’t perform or anything—to do all the backing vocals. They just come out so human. If a proper singer had done them, it wouldn’t have sounded right. It really shaped the song.” **“Quarantine the Sticks”** JS: “This was one of the last songs written for the record, another one that joins the narrative. The basslines are really good on this—they dance between different keys, which makes it really unnerving, and it’s got Billy Nomates \[post-punk singer-songwriter Tor Maries\] doing backing vocals on it as well. It’s quite melodic and quite a strange melody, and my voice wasn’t really holding it on \[its\] own. But there was a hint of something there, so we asked Tor to sing on it.” **“Tall Poppies”** RN: “It started with that simple bassline and then it just went on—I looped that bassline. I would send James a loop and then, about an hour later, I would get back something fucking epic, like ‘Tall Poppies.’ There was no craftsmanship on my part; it was basically like handing James a trowel and some bricks and he comes back with a finished wall.” JS: “There was something about the motor of the bassline. The first thing I got from it was that it felt quite reflective and suspensive. Off the back of that, I had that spark for telling the story of this person’s whole life, from cradle to grave.” **“Pour Another”** JS: “This was one of the harder ones. Ali \[Chant, producer\] didn’t really like this one. He kept pushing it away, but we were adamant it was good and there was something in it. ” RN: “I wanted to have a bit of a Happy Mondays sort of thing. The lyrics are funny, and the humor carried it in that way.” **“100% Endurance”** JS: “We thought the album was probably going to end on ‘Tall Poppies,’ and then, at the last-minute, Ryan sent this new demo over and it became ‘100% Endurance.’ I wrote all the lyrics to a WhatsApp video loop of it playing on Ryan’s speaker in the studio. That is the audio we used on the recording. The first take I recorded on my computer that I sent to Ryan. It felt like we had finally figured out the album, which was interesting because when we went in that first week, we thought we might come away with four or five tracks and then see where we were at later in the year. We didn’t expect to finish the album in a week.”

In May 2021, amidst a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US stemming from the pandemic, the Los Angeles Public Library posted a video of four young girls from Los Angeles playing a song called “Racist, Sexist Boy” for AAPI Heritage Month—two minutes of wonderfully sludgy outrage inspired by an interaction that drummer Mila de la Garza had with a classmate just before lockdown began. The song quickly went viral, creating an audience for The Linda Lindas before they’d ever had a chance to launch a proper tour. “In a way, I felt like we kind of had something to prove, to show for ourselves that we\'re actual musicians,” Mila tells Apple Music. “We\'ve been around for three years, and it\'s not just that we had one viral moment then we were going to go away.” While most teenagers spent the pandemic fumbling through remote school and social isolation, The Linda Lindas seized the opportunity to record their debut album. (They released a self-titled EP in 2020.) Written and rehearsed almost entirely through Zoom while all of its members—Mila and her sister Lucia, their cousin Eloise Wong, and Bela Salazar—were also feeling their way through the chaos of high school and middle school from home, *Growing Up* is a set of blistering, deeply felt pop-punk that meets the moment head on, whether they’re grappling with solitude (“Why”), self-care (“Remember”), spirals of thought (“Talking to Myself”), or disgruntled house cats (“Nino”). Here, the band takes us inside every song on the album. **“Oh!”** Mila de la Garza: “‘Oh!’ was actually written all together on our front porch.” Lucia de la Garza: “We had amps inside and we had cords running out the screen door to Bela and Eloise on opposite sides of the porch. The neighbors didn\'t like it, but it\'s okay.” Eloise Wong: “There was a situation at school where I tried to help someone who was being bullied, but then it kind of just blew up in my face. I wasn\'t really sure what to do and I was kind of angry at stuff. That\'s how the lyrics came about.” **“Growing Up”** Lucia: “It was hard being at home and feeling at this age that I had to figure out who I was. I felt like I was supposed to know what I want to do with my life. We were all apart from each other, and I didn\'t want to grow up in a way, and I realized you can\'t make growing up happen. You can\'t stop it from happening either. I was really, really nostalgic and sentimental about all the times that we had, because I didn\'t realize how much the band meant to me until it wasn\'t really in full swing anymore. I think I was realizing that music is special to me, too. All the parts of my life that were suddenly gone.” **“Talking to Myself”** Mila: “It\'s basically about needing someone else to talk to. Because being by yourself can be a blessing, and it\'s like you need that sometimes, but you also, you can\'t be by yourself forever. The song is about having someone else to take you out of a spiral, having someone else to bring you back up when you push yourself down so much.” **“Fine”** Eloise: “I think that a lot of oppression in society is just so normalized. In the words that we say and the things that happen, I feel like we\'re just taught to see it and just not blink an eye. It happens all the time, but no one does anything about it, because, you know, it\'s fine. But sometimes it gets to a point where it\'s not fine, where it\'s hard to take. Because some of these things that are just normal shouldn\'t be normal, and they push other people down, and it\'s not okay. I was kind of fed up about that and wrote that song.” **“Nino”** Bela Salazar: “On our EP, I wrote a song called ‘Monica,’ and that was about my other cat. I would play ‘Monica’ and my cat Nino would get really pissed. I don\'t know how he understood, but he would just start yelling. So I was like, ‘Okay, I have to write you a song now, because it\'s not fair.’” Mila: “I feel like I was most nervous for Nino\'s reaction to ‘Nino.’ Like, what if Nino doesn\'t like it?” Bela: “He was purring when he heard it, so that\'s a good sign.” **“Why”** Mila: “It\'s just pandemic stuff, missing people. I feel like during the pandemic we all kind of figured out more of who we are.” Lucia: “Isolation brings up a lot of emotions that you didn\'t know were there. I feel like being by yourself for that long kind of takes a toll on your mental health. Eloise\'s lyrics are very poetic on that one, I just have to say.” **“Cuantas Veces”** Bela: “I grew up listening to a lot of bossa nova, and I wanted to mix some of the stuff that I listened to into what we\'re doing. I chose to do a song in Spanish because I\'m not very good at sharing my emotions and this felt like a way that I could do it, but also have it still be a little bit more intimate and personal. I wasn\'t completely ready.” **“Remember”** Lucia: “There was a lot of feeling like every day is the same during the pandemic. There was a lot of feeling like I could have been doing so much more with my day. I didn\'t learn anything in school; I didn\'t pay attention; I was just lounging around watching Netflix all day. I was trying to find a way to forgive myself for not doing anything during my pandemic, and I think this song is just about forgiving yourself for that. Kind of remembering that it\'s okay to make mistakes and it\'s okay to regret and it\'s okay to not be okay sometimes.” **“Magic”** Lucia: “Teenagers complain—that\'s just how it is. I\'m around them every day. It’s a thing. But I always remember that I\'m super fortunate—to have discovered music and discovered a passion for it at my age. And obviously the world needs to be better and the world needs to change. Magic is always treated as like a curse and a gift—it depends on who is wielding it. But what if it’s this fantastical thing that might could save us all? What if *we* are the magic?” **“Racist, Sexist Boy”** Mila: “Before, it was more of an angry song, directed at one person. But now it\'s more a prideful song about bringing people together. Telling people that they\'re not alone, because other people go through that stuff too.” Eloise: “You write that song and it\'s made for blowback—you expect all the racist, sexist boys out there to be like, ‘What? Racism doesn\'t exist. Sexism doesn\'t exist.’ But instead we got all these positive comments. It was so cool just to see. There is good in this world, you know?”

Since completing their farewell tour in 2012, Southern Ontario post-hardcore heroes Alexisonfire have done a pretty terrible job of staying apart. Even as its members committed themselves to other bands—singer/guitarist Dallas Green with City and Colour, resident screamer George Pettit with Dead Tired, guitarist/vocalist Wade MacNeil with Gallows, drummer Jordan Hastings with Billy Talent—the everlasting power of what they created as Alexisonfire kept pulling them back together. Festival reunion dates in 2015 had, by decade’s end, given way to a string of stand-alone singles. Still, the prospect of a new full-length Alexisonfire album—following 2009’s *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*—was never a sure thing. That is, until COVID shutdowns presented them with a rare opportunity to make music without deadline pressures or looming tour dates. “This was just a bunch of guys getting back together and just creating for the sake of it,” Pettit tells Apple Music. “We\'re all very different people than when we wrote *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*, but I think that benefited us in a lot of ways, because there\'s been 10 years of us consuming different music and being inspired by different things.” Arriving 20 years after their self-titled debut album, *Otherness* reintroduces a band that’s lost none of its intensity, and shortens the aesthetic distance between Alexisonfire’s circle-pit strikes and the graceful balladry of City and Colour. And that’s not just Green’s doing—for the first time, Pettit eases up on the throat-shredding to actually sing a handful of verses and harmonize with his bandmates. “This album came to us without a lot of struggles,” Pettit says proudly. “On *Otherness*, we\'re all pulling in the same direction.” Here, Pettit gives us the track-by-track rundown of Alexisonfire’s new beginning. **“Commited to the Con”** “The con is conservatism. It\'s this notion that if we dismantle government for the sake of giving tax breaks or funneling money into billionaires’ pockets without regulation, that\'s somehow going to deliver us to some new utopia of freedom. That\'s just horseshit, and a lot of people are buying it. There are people out there that are committed to this con, this thing with no working models in the world. But when we band together, our tax dollars can prop up the cornerstone of civilized society—they pay for hospitals and schools and emergency services and infrastructure. So when we ask, ‘Which side are you on?’ it\'s like: Are you on the side of working together as people to make things better for everyone, or are you on the side of every-man-for-himself libertarian hypothetical nonsense?” **“Sweet Dreams of Otherness”** “The idea of \'otherness\' can be interpreted in any sort of way. The way that it applies to Alexisonfire is that we were all kids who grew up trying to find the secret corners of culture. I grew up in Southern Ontario, a third-generation Canadian with no ties to any sort of real culture from my ancestry. So you have to make it yourself and figure out the things that you want to represent your generation. And the things that were being presented to us through major media didn\'t appeal to us—we had to go and find those weird spaces. It could have been a CAW \[Canadian Auto Workers\] union hall where there was a punk show happening, or an independent record store, or the indie cinema that was coming out at the time. So the song is kind of about that, but it also has all sorts of implications for people who are nonbinary, or people who are LGBTQ. It\'s about finding strength in the fact that you\'re very different.” **“Sans Soleil”** “I\'m kind of a key component to Alexisonfire with all my screaming, but there have been times where we\'ve shoehorned that into songs just to kind of keep me in the band. But this is a beautiful song, and there\'d be no point in trying to have me scream for the purposes of keeping that in. So I took a back seat—I was just doing backup vocals with Dallas on this one. It\'s the type of song that we might not have put on one of our earlier records, but we felt like it was an Alexis song, for sure.” **“Conditional Love”** “This is about love as a choice, as opposed to it being some uncontrollable thing. And in some ways, that, to me, is better: the idea of being an active participant in my love and not have it be something that I\'m being dragged around by. That\'s the sentiment of the lyrics—but they just kind of fell into this ripper kind of rock song.” **“Blue Spade”** “\[Bassist\] Chris Steele started contributing lyrics on this record. Chris is a very remarkable individual who has been through a considerable amount, so having his perspective on a song felt right. Dallas took a section of his lyrics and found a way to turn it into a chorus. We have demos of the song where I’m screaming the verses, but when we got into the studio, I thought, \'I\'m gonna attempt to sing this.\' I\'m not quite confident in my ability as a singer, so I was like, \'Is this good?\' And then Wade walked in the room and was like, \'That\'s it! That\'s what this song needs.\' We had a really intense moment where we were just like, \'Okay, well, now there\'s nothing that we can\'t do!\' It just felt like we had unlocked a new gear within the band and found a new way to inject me into a song.” **“Dark Night of the Soul”** “The lyrical content is about Wade having a psychedelic experience on DMT, and the song matches the lyrics. We were really expanding this song, and there\'s that moment in the bridge—where it goes to that shuffle beat—and I thought, \'Let\'s do something jazzy here.\' We found a way to really make that song unique—it goes full Goblin. There were grand designs at one point to approach the remaining members of Rush to do like a 15-minute bridge for the song.” **“Mistaken Information”** “Dallas is the best singer that I\'ve ever known, so it was nice to actually sing \[harmonies\] on a track with him. After I was done recording my vocals for this, I was almost sad, because I was enjoying it so much. I think this song was actually in play for City and Colour’s new record, but Dallas was discussing it with his wife, and she was like, \'I feel like this is an Alexisonfire song.\' It\'s about the war on the truth, and how it\'s hard to understand what the truth is now because there\'s so much misinformation out there. But when we were recording it, I remember Dallas saying, \'Are people just going to think this is a breakup song?\' And I said, \'If they interpret it that way, it\'s valid.’ I feel like it works that way as well.” **“Survivor’s Guilt”** “I work in emergency services, and this song is naming a phenomenon that I see, where you see something horrible and then you go about the rest of your day like nothing happened. You have the ability to kind of detach, and it\'s not a particularly heroic quality, but it is, in some ways, a very necessary quality. I\'m not sure that necessarily comes through in the lyrics—I purposely tried to make it a bit more open for interpretation, but that\'s where the ‘survivor’s guilt’ sentiment came from.” **“Reverse the Curse”** \"We had a version of this \[for *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*\] that was extremely Kyuss-heavy, and at the time, we were uncomfortable with that—we felt like we were doing something that wasn\'t us. As a group of people who have great respect for the stoner-rock world, we didn’t want to disrespect it. It\'s the same reason why I would never make a reggae album, even though I love Jamaican music. But now, in the \'Dark Night of the Soul\' era of Alexisonfire, things are a little more open and we can kind of do whatever we feel like now. \[City and Colour touring member\] Matt Kelly got to play Hammond on it, and that really leveled the song up in a way that we hadn\'t been anticipating.” **“World Stops Turning”** “This is a love song Dallas wrote about his band, Alexisonfire. We had the most beautiful moment where he brought us up to his cottage and we sat at his dining room table and for three hours, we just talked, and discussed the history of the band. He let us in on things that had been going on in his life, and it was just a very introspective moment for all of us. And at the end of it, he presented us with a demo he\'d been working on of this song, and we just knew that this is going to be the new set-closer. We’ve always ended our set with \[2004\'s\] \'Happiness by the Kilowatt,\' and we turn it into this 12-minute version. And this song felt like the new version of that—we\'re gonna have this big sprawling epic, and I could envision it just blowing everyone’s hair back. It\'s a perfect album-ender—we went full Floyd on this one.”

On their third full-length, the Sydney quartet Stand Atlantic keep redefining the boundaries of pop-punk, using their guitar-bass-drums-vocals setup as a launching point for maximalist misfit anthems. Tracks like the speedy poison-pen letter to anxiety “van gogh” and the self-loathing “don’t talk \[to me\]” operate in classic pop-punk mode, using the “three chords and the truth” ideal to tackle heavy problems with bravado and wit. Elsewhere, *f.e.a.r.* gets lyrically meta and musically grandiose: “dumb,” a collaboration with Atlanta genre bender Tom The Mail Man, takes on the frustrations of being musically pigeonholed with funk bass and f-bombs, while the larger-than-life “cabin fever” throws in trap drums, strings, and even a cameo from vocalist Bonnie Fraser’s mum as it rages against the major-label machine.

In sharply differing ways, thoughts of place and identity run through Fontaines D.C.’s music. Where 2019 debut *Dogrel* delivered a rich and raw portrait of the band’s home city, Dublin, 2020 follow-up *A Hero’s Death* was the sound of dislocation, a set of songs drawing on the introspection, exhaustion, and yearning of an anchorless life on the road. When the five-piece moved to London midway through the pandemic, the experiences of being outsiders in a new city, often facing xenophobia and prejudice, provided creative fuel for third album *Skinty Fia*. The music that emerged weaves folk, electronic, and melodic indie pop into their post-punk foundations, while contemplating Irishness and how it transforms in a different country. “That’s the lens through which all of the subjects that we explore are seen through anyway,” singer Grian Chatten tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “There are definitely themes of jealousy, corruption, and stuff like that, but it’s all seen through the eyes of someone who’s at odds with their own identity, culturally speaking.” Recording the album after dark helped breed feelings of discomfort that Chatten says are “necessary to us,” and it continued a nocturnal schedule that had originally countered the claustrophobia of a locked-down city. “We wrote a lot of it at night as well,” says Chatten. “We went into the rehearsal space just as something different to do. When pubs and all that kind of thing were closed, it was a way of us feeling like the world was sort of open.” Here, Chatten and guitarist Carlos O’Connell talk us through a number of *Skinty Fia*’s key moments. **“In ár gCroíthe go deo”** Grian Chatten: “An Irish woman who lived in Coventry \[Margaret Keane\] passed away. Her family wanted the words ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo,’ which means ‘in our hearts forever,’ on her gravestone as a respectful and beautiful ode to her Irishness, but they weren’t allowed without an English translation. Essentially the Church of England decreed that it would be potentially seen as a political slogan. The Irish language is apparently, according to these people, an inflammatory thing in and of itself, which is a very base level of xenophobia. It’s a basic expression of a culture, is the language. If you’re considering that to be related to terrorism, which is what they’re implying, I think. That sounds like it’s something out of the ’70s, but this is two and a half years ago.” Carlos O’Connell: “About a year ago, it got turned around and \[the family\] won this case.” GC: “The family were made aware \[of the song\] and asked if they could listen to it. Apparently they really loved it, and they played it at the gravestone. So, that’s 100,000 Grammys worth of validation.” **“Big Shot”** CO: “When you’ve got used to living with what you have and then all these dreams happen to you, it’s always going to overshadow what you had before. The only impact that \[Fontaines’ success\] was having in my life was that it just made anything that I had before quite meaningless for a while, and I felt quite lost in that. That’s that lyric, ‘I traveled to space and found the moon too small’—it’s like, go up there and actually it’s smaller than the Earth.” GC: “We’ve all experienced it very differently and that’s made us grow in different ways. But that song just sounded like a very true expression of Carlos. Perhaps more honest than he always is with himself or other people. All the honesty was balled up into that tune.” **“Jackie Down the Line”** GC: “It’s an expression of misanthropy. And there’s toxicity there. There’s erosion of each other’s characters. It’s a very un-beneficial, unglamorous relationship that isn’t necessarily about two people. I like the idea of it being about Irishness, fighting to not be eroded as it exists in a different country. The name is Jackie because a Dubliner would be called, in a pejorative sense, a Jackeen by people from other parts of Ireland. That’s probably in reference to the Union Jack as well—it’s like the Pale \[an area of Ireland, including Dublin, that was under English governmental control during the late Middle Ages\]. So it’s this kind of mutation of Irishness or loss of Irishness as it exists, or fails to exist, in a different environment.” **“Roman Holiday”** GC: “The whole thing was colored by my experience in London. I moved to London to be with my fiancée, and as an Irish person living in London, as one of a gang of Irish people, there was that kind of searching energy, there was this excitement, there was a kind of adventure—but also this very, very tight-knit, rigorously upkept group energy. I think that’s what influenced the tune.” **“The Couple Across the Way”** GC: “I lived on Caledonian Road \[in North London\] and our gaff backed onto another house. There was a couple that lived there, they were probably mid-seventies, and they had really loud arguments. The kind of arguments where you’d see London on a map getting further, further away and hear the shout resounding. Something like *The Simpsons*. And the man would come out and take a big breath. He’d stand on his balcony and look left and right and exhale all the drama. And then he’d just turn around and go back in to his gaff to do the same thing the next day. The absurdity of that, of what we put ourselves through, to be in a relationship that causes you such daily pain, to just always turn around and go back in. I couldn’t really help but write about that physical mirror that was there. Am I seeing myself and my girlfriend in these two people, and vice versa? So I tried to tie it in to it being from both perspectives at some point.” **“Skinty Fia”** GC: “The line ‘There is a track beneath the wheel and it’s there ’til we die’ is about being your dad’s son. There are many ways in which we explore doom on this record. One of them is following in the footsteps of your ancestors, or your predecessors, no matter how immediate or far away they might have been. I’m interested in the inescapability of genetics, the idea that your fate is written. I do, on some level, believe in that. That is doom, even if your faith is leading you to a positive place. Freedom is probably the main pursuit of a lot of our music. I think that that is probably a link that ties all of the stuff that we’ve done together—autonomy.” **“I Love You”** GC: “It’s most ostensibly a love letter to Ireland, but has in it the corruption and the sadness and the grief with the ever-changing Dublin and Ireland. The reason that I wanted to call it ‘I Love You’ is because I found its cliché very attractive. It meant that there was a lot of work to be done in order to justify such a basic song and not have it be a clichéd tune. It’s a song with two heads, because you’ve got the slow, melodic verses that are a little bit more straightforward and then the lid is lifted off energetically. I think that the friction between those two things encapsulates the double-edged sword that is love.” **“Nabokov”** GC: “I think there’s a different arc to this album. The first two, I think, achieve a sense of happiness and hope halfway through, and end on a note of hope. I think this one does actually achieve hope halfway through—and then slides back into a hellish, doomy thing with the last track and stuff. I think that was probably one of the more conscious decisions that we made while making this album.”

"2020’s A Hero’s Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London’s iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as “the damnation of the deer”; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer."

When Melbourne indie rock trio Camp Cope first emerged on the alt-rock scene with their self-titled debut LP, guitarist/vocalist Georgia Maq, bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, and drummer Sarah Thompson were celebrated for taking down the inherent misogyny in the independent music scene. (“The Opener” from 2018’s *How to Socialise and Make Friends* tackled the subject directly and memorably.) Now on their third LP, the band has ventured into folkier territory: The midtempo “Blue” is a depressed confessional supported by ascendent, Chicks-style pop harmonies, while “Jealous” mirrors the oppressive sentimentality that follows a breakup, with Maq’s voice feeling out all the contours of her fractured refrain, a weeping “Oh, no.” The title track, “Running With the Hurricane,” is a fierce surprise: a bluesy, emo-adjacent shout-along single stuffed to the brim with the oppressive rush of a crush: “I get so bored thinking about anyone else!” Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like it.

This album was made entirely on Wurundjeri & Boonwurrung country, which we are grateful to live and work upon, we pay our respects to elders past & present.

“The album represents a journey through the darkness,” Parkway Drive lead vocalist Winston McCall tells Apple Music about the Aussie metalcore band’s seventh record. “It was never designed to be a concept album, but the way we make music is always album-based. We’re not a singles band. We write a cohesive piece of art, and this one happened to be centralized around the concept of the dark night of the soul.” Considering that the pandemic lockdown in which the album was written was essentially a global dark night of the soul, McCall’s lyrics on *Darker Still* will likely resonate far and wide. From Parkway Drive’s perspective, it’s also their pinnacle achievement. “This is the album where our ability and experience finally caught up to the imagination that we’ve had for 20 years of being a band,” he says. “This is the kind of music that always inspired us, but we’ve never had the ability—or the time—to actually create it until this record.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Ground Zero”** “We wanted to write an album opener that was anthemic and had those big riffs that you’ve come to expect from Parkway, and really captured that live energy and that bombastic feel. The choruses are lifted up in a way that we’ve probably never even hit before, in terms of it being accessible and something that will get stuck in people’s heads. The idea for this was to give people something that they would feel is a safe, expected Parkway sound—but improved. This is the safe space before the twist around the corner.” **“Like Napalm”** “This is where the rage begins. It’s the beginning of the spiraling process of this album. We wanted something that just smashed from start to finish. This is when the groove and the rhythms of this album really start to kick in. It just goes the entire time—bang, bang, bang—and then you get about four bars of bass reprieve before it smashes you in the outro as well. But the choruses still have that melody which really lifts it through the roof with Jeff \[Ling\]’s signature lead guitar accents, which are a real staple of the entire album.” **“Glitch”** “This was one of the first songs we started working on. For such an accessible chorus and an accessible song, the layering that we put under it is quite creepy and unnerving. When you put headphones on, you pick out different chants and whispers and strange stuff going on, because essentially the song is about dealing with sleep paralysis and nightmares and insomnia. That\'s a very strange, dark, creepy concept, so weaving all of that stuff into something which was so palatable—and which was going to be a single—was another step down the spiral.” **“The Greatest Fear”** “The song is about death, plain and simple. It’s about redefining the greatest fear that we all share. It\'s the element of every person\'s life on this planet which unites us. Every single person that you know and love will one day die. And the fear of losing someone we care about was omnipresent through all our lives during COVID. But the idea of this song, lyrically, was to frame death as not a bad or evil force in itself—it simply marks a time of transition into a point of unknowing.” **“Darker Still”** “This is possibly the most different song we\'ve ever written. It took us three albums to be able to execute this song. We wanted to do a ballad for quite a long time, and we couldn\'t figure out how to actually do it. But Jeff came to us with an acoustic version of the main refrain, the main riff in the song, with a whistle attached to the front of it. And we knew immediately that it was too epic to just be a rock song. It had to be this massive ballad, which we\'ve never done before. For us, this is really the marker of how far we’ve come as a band, because I think it’s one of our biggest achievements to be able to execute a large, intricate composition like this.” **“Imperial Heretic”** “This one is an anthem for the times we live in. It was written mid-COVID, when it became quite apparent that we were going through something that was uniting everyone worldwide in fear and desperation. We watched the wheels come off our perceptions of the world we live in, in terms of equality and democracy and civil rights and everything going up in flames. We were realizing how fragile everything is, and how powerful the people in power actually are. So, this is an anthem written for the billions of people around the world who had the blinders lifted off them for probably the first time.” **“If a God Can Bleed”** “You’re definitely very far down the dark rabbit hole by the time this track comes along. If ‘unnerving’ has been the word to set the tone so far, you can couple the word ‘menacing’ along with it on this song. The idea for this one is based around the concept of complacency and becoming soft. It\'s kind of a rallying cry to us as artists to continue pushing. At this point, you can’t look away from the dark place where the album is trying to take you, but this song has these jagged little edges that will hook in your brain, and a narrative that will set your skin crawling a little bit.” **“Soul Bleach”** “This one is unrelenting, unbridled rage based around the concept of trust broken and positioning of a person as the embodiment of a villain in someone else’s eyes. This is taking all of the misunderstanding and the hurt and the reality that sometimes you are the villain to someone, no matter how good you are. Sometimes you have to embody that just to be the person that you are. And this song is spat out as hard and viciously as possible. This is the point in the album where everything goes to 11. There’s nothing subtle about this one, and that’s the entire point.” **“Stranger”** “This is one of the most peculiar little pieces that we\'ve ever put on a record. It\'s as minuscule and isolating as possible. It’s another one of those moments where we wanted to wrong-foot people, especially after something like ‘Soul Bleach.’ We wanted to give a moment to breathe and reflect. And it is a real reflection because the lyrics represent where we were at that point in time and where everyone was—which was completely isolated from every point in society and reduced to communicating on screens. All of a sudden, we all became strangers and the world became a strange place to live in.” **“Land of the Lost”** “The first riff we had for this has an industrial edge to it, so we chose to lean into that. The song plays off between the engine of that industrialized riff running at 100% capacity in the choruses with that chain-gang chant of ‘keep digging’ over the top of it. And the verses are played off with a triple layer of a computerized voice, which we programmed to sing the verse lines with a distorted human voice and then a real human voice. The concept is that you go from being a computer representation of a human to a real human full of emotion by the time you get to the last chorus.” **“From the Heart of the Darkness”** “This song represents the closest thing that there is to light at the end of the journey. It’s basically built around one powerful riff, one powerful refrain, which drives that rhythm so hard. It builds from a place of subtlety to a place of incredible complexity based around that one riff. Lyrically, it represents the acknowledgment of what the journey through the darkness provides—the reemergence of self and the repositioning of self within a world that was confused and destroyed.”

With their follow-up to 2019’s *We Are Not Your Kind*, masked metal battalion Slipknot keeps pushing the limits of what the mainstream can withstand. You can hear bristling chunks of death metal, black metal, and funk metal on singles “The Chapeltown Rag,” “The Dying Song (Time to Sing),” and “Yen” as the band continues to transcend the nu-metal genre they’re often lumped in with. “After *We Are Not Your Kind*, we looked at each other like, ‘Man, did we push too far? Did we not push it far enough?’” vocalist Corey Taylor tells Apple Music. “So this album is another extension of boundaries, into territory the listener has never been before. How much further can we take them, but that we feel totally comfortable doing?” As for the album’s semi-apocalyptic title? “There\'s nothing I hate worse than a typical clichéd album title,” Taylor says. “For me it was like, ‘Where are we right now? What\'s happening?’ It felt like this was the second stage of our career and we were coming to the end of the tone of the albums that took us out of the original run.”