Variety: Jem Aswad's Top 10 Albums of 2023

In 2022, Faiyaz dropped his highly anticipated sophomore album *WASTELAND*, a 19-track LP that unfolds like an R&B Shakespearian tragedy exploring themes of relationships—love, infidelity, and betrayal. The rollercoaster ride through Faiyaz\'s emotions, portraying vulnerable thoughts that come with juggling newfound fame, is what made *WASTELAND* an instant hit. On follow-up *Larger Than Life*, Faiyaz ditches its predecessor\'s darker themes and leans back into the misadventures of the affluent ladies\' man from his earlier projects. The album\'s theme is set in the opener, \"Tim\'s Intro,\" which features legendary producer Timbaland and shows Faiyaz flirtatiously bragging about his larger-than-life lifestyle to a potential lover. Throughout the LP\'s 14 tracks, Faiyaz chronicles the ins and outs of his entanglements on his quest to find love, from developing an emotional attachment to his lover (\"Last One Left,\" \"Outside All Night\") to pledging his faithfulness (\"Forever Yours\"). However, it\'s not all love songs on *Larger Than Life*. It wouldn\'t be a Brent Faiyaz album without some toxicity. \"WY@\" showcases the unfiltered essence of love\'s complexities, namely the struggle to escape a bad relationship. \"Even I know you ain\'t no good for me/But you feel so good to me/Every time I come back, I try to leave/So how you end up back with me? Oh (I don\'t know),\" he croons. *Larger Than Life* forgoes the brooding basslines and synths from *WASTELAND* and draws inspiration from the ’90s-’00s era that has influenced Faiyaz. It\'s nostalgic without sounding outdated and pays homage to some of the biggest tracks from that period, with samples from Nicole Wray\'s 1998 hit \"Boy You Should Listen\" on the Coco Jones-assisted \"Moment of Your Life\" and Rome\'s 1997 classic \"I Belong to You (Every Time I See Your Face)\" on \"Belong to You.\"

“I never learned to superstar from a textbook,” Doja Cat snarls towards the end of “Attention,” a song that’s all at once a boom-bap showcase, an R&B slow-burner, and a canny summary of her against-the-odds success. Those who remember Doja’s breakthrough (a viral 2018 joke song, “Mooo!”, whose DIY video had her shoving french fries in her nose in front of a homemade green screen) probably wouldn’t have predicted that a few years later, the girl in the cow suit would be a household name. But for Doja, being an internet goofball and a multiplatinum pop star aren’t just compatible, they’re complementary—a duality attuned to her audience’s craving for realness. With her fourth album, *Scarlet*, the maverick adds “formidable rapper” to her growing list of distinctions. In since-deleted tweets from April 2023, Doja made a pledge: “no more pop,” she wrote, following up with a vow to prove wrong the naysayers doubting her rap skills. *Scarlet* makes good on that promise, particularly its first half, a far cry from the sugary bops on 2021’s star-making *Planet Her*. Instead she hops between hard-edged beats that evoke NYC in ’94 or Chicago in 2012, crowing over the spoils of her mainstream success while playfully rejecting its terms. “I’m a puppet, I’m a sheep, I’m a cash cow/I’m the fastest-growing bitch on all your apps now,” she deadpans on “Demons,” thumbing her nose at anyone who conflates glowing up with selling out. And on “97,” the album’s best pure rap performance, she embraces the troll’s mantra that all clicks are good clicks, spitting, “That’s a comment, that’s a view, and that’s a rating/That’s some hating, and that’s engagement I could use.” Behind the provocations, though, is an artist with the idiosyncratic chops to back them up. That’s as true in *Scarlet*’s lusty midsection as it is on its gulliest rap tracks: No one else would interrupt a dreamy love song (“Agora Hills”) to giggle in Valley Girl vocal fry, “Sorry, just taking a sip of my root beer!” (No one, that is, but Nicki Minaj, Doja’s clearest influence, who paved the way for women who juggle art-pop with hip-hop bona fides.) As catchy as it is contrarian, *Scarlet* offers a suggestion: Maybe it’s Doja’s willingness to reject the premise of being a pop star that makes her such a compelling one. On the album’s sweetest track, “Love Life,” she takes in her view from the top—still the weirdo her fans met in a cow suit but more confident in her contradictions. “They love when I embrace my flaws/I love it when they doin’ the same,” she raps softly. “I love it when my fans love change/That’s how we change the game.”

Sam Smith’s fourth album, *Gloria*, opens with the kind of music we’ve come to expect from the British singer-songwriter: “Love Me More” is a gospel-inflected ballad celebrating the power of self-acceptance. But after that, Smith goes off script. “I wanted it to be a patchwork of pop, it’s something that I was really passionate about,” they tell Apple Music. “I want to be flipping from genre to genre to genre to genre.” *Gloria*, then, brings us sensual R&B, dazzling dance floor moments (“Lose You” is perhaps Smith’s best sad banger yet), twisting hyperpop, a dancehall-indebted earworm, and even choral music, with embraces of sex, the power of community, and queer joy and history along the way. “My aim with this record was to make sure there is not one song on this album that I don\'t like,” adds Smith. “I\'ve put so much into this record in terms of the production and the time. I became obsessed. I lived inside the music. I\'ve never worked that hard before.” There’s a confidence present that most artists reach a few albums deep, but it’s more than just the gains of experience you can hear here. Made between Suffolk, LA, and Jamaica, *Gloria* is an album of rebellion, liberation, and letting go of the past, as one of modern pop’s biggest voices unveils their most assured music—and self—yet. “I don’t want to sound cheesy, but *Gloria* for me is like when a butterfly leaves a cocoon,” says Smith. “That’s what I wanted this record to feel like all the way through. I wanted there to be strength within every single song. I feel like my true artist self has arrived in a way.” Read on as Smith delves deep into every track on *Gloria*. **“Love Me More”** “I knew I wanted to write a song that said how I was feeling. I find the whole self-love thing quite cringey. Self-love sometimes feels like a destination; with self-acceptance, every day I have to try and accept myself and show myself love. That\'s what I was trying to put across in this song. I started this album like my old music. ‘Love Me More’ is the last opportunity I was giving my older fans to come into this next stage with me. This is a song written for my fans, and every song after it is written for me.” **“No God”** “This comes from a personal story about someone in my life who I’ve lost to drastic opinions. But as me, \[songwriters and producers\] Jimmy \[Napes\] and Stargate were writing it, it became a rhetoric on a certain type of person with a god complex. It’s about the ignoring of a human being and allowing someone’s drastic politics to get in the way of caring for someone else. The magic of this song came from the production: the live playing, the backing vocals. We just picked away at it until it sounded perfect. To me, it sounds super expensive.” **“Hurting Interlude”** “I found this amazing piece: a news anchor speaking at the first-ever Gay Pride in New York. What he says in this interlude broke my heart and took me back to ‘Lose You,’ a song written about a lesbian friend who had her first queer relationship with a woman. Someone\'s first heartbreak as a queer person can be very intense because of what we do go through when it comes to love. I felt like it was the perfect quote before ‘Lose You.’” **“Lose You”** “As a queer community, we love our sad dance songs. With this album, you could dedicate every song to a pop diva of mine. ‘Love Me More’ would be Whitney, ‘No God’ would be Brandy, and ‘Lose You’ would be Robyn or George Michael. I wrote this song with some of the most amazing pop writers and it felt like a mastering of a beautifully formed pop song. The production wasn’t taking me to Berlin, though, and I needed it to take me to a German gay club. The little things we did towards the end of this song really took it there—it gives me this really Euro, unashamed, gay, chic feel. It\'s drama, drama, drama.” **“Perfect” (feat. Jessie Reyez)** “This is where sex starts to come into the record. I feel like I’ve been a bit desexualized during my career, and I was very young when I started. Being 20 years old and moving onstage in the way I would in a gay bar was petrifying. Jessie really taught me to be brave: I would say things to her in the studio and she wouldn’t laugh or feel uncomfortable. The whole concept of the song is saying, ‘I’m a hot mess,’ and feeling yourself in a really imperfect way. This song is the Rihanna moment—we worked with Stargate on it, who worked on *Rated R*, one of my favorite Rihanna records. Stargate got hold of Nuno Bettencourt, who does guitar solos on *Rated R*, and he just ripped all over the song—I love it so much.” **“Unholy” \[with Kim Petras\]** “We were in Jamaica and \[producer\] Omer Fedi was fucking around on the guitar and playing this scale, which I started singing to. Everyone in the room was really confused; they didn’t know if they liked it or not. I had someone on my mind who was pissing me off and I just had to get it out. After we got back, everyone liked the song but said, ‘This is not on brand.’ But it kept prodding at me. I said everything I needed to in the first verse, and that’s when Kim came into the picture. There were about eight guys in the studio who were trying to push Kim’s verse in one direction. We spent all day doing it that way, but then something in my gut said, ‘This is shit.’ There’s a certain humor that only a queer person can understand because we’ve been through it and we live it. And that’s what the verse needed. We needed to tease the man, we needed to make him a ‘Balenciaga daddy.’ This is the most powerful part of the album and it\'s the most powerful piece of music I\'ve ever been a part of. It’s like an exorcism.” **“How to Cry”** “This is about the same person ‘Unholy’ is about. I wanted that breath, but I also only wanted one of these moments, because this isn’t the record for super organic, stripped music. In ‘Unholy’ I’m laughing and taking the piss. But at the heart of that emotion is a very sad story. It’s also about a relationship I was in, and about how I think being an emotional person is such a strong characteristic. I really do believe it’s a superpower. So it’s a love letter to me.” **“Six Shots”** “It’s a paragraph change—after ‘How to Cry,’ this is the pre-drinks to a night. But they’re intense pre-drinks, because we start having sex. This is the first proper sex song I wrote—I just felt really freed by it. At the time, I was insanely single and that’s where the lyric ‘There’s no loving me’ comes from. I was so single that I was almost taken. I wasn’t open to love.” **“Gimme” (feat. Koffee and Jessie Reyez)** “I’m obsessed with this song—it’s possibly my favorite on the album. It’s the most sexually intense lyrics I’ve ever written, and the verse lyric is actually filthy! The song is basically about wanting the dick so much you can cry. I love dancehall music and have tried many times to write songs that have a dancehall feel. I needed to be in Jamaica to do it in a way where it felt authentic, and I’m so proud that ‘Gimme’ did that. Like a lot of the record, this song is about sharing the moment—I didn’t want to be in the song too much.” **“Dorothy’s Interlude”** “The opening quote is Divine, which is just pure sass and fabulousness. Next is Judy Garland—there are so many queer connotations with Judy, namely the famous myth that when she died, everyone congregated in New York at Stonewall and the riots started the same night. Then after that you’ve got Sylvia Rivera. It’s quite a harrowing speech at Gay Pride in New York, talking about all of the awful things that are happening in the homeless hospitals to trans people, and her own community of gay men were booing her onstage. After that it goes into RuPaul saying one of the most incredible sayings we have out there. This interlude goes through the ages.” **“I’m Not Here to Make Friends”** “This song was made with Calvin Harris, Stargate, me, and Jessie Reyez. It was a joy to make. I went on a date the night before and I was just so sick of going on dates where people treated me like a friend or just wanted to meet me because I’m Sam Smith. Even though the song has nothing to do with it, the song title is also an attitude and spirit on the record that I have: I’m done trying to please people now.” **“Gloria”** “The sound of this song is one of the most beautiful sounds I\'ve ever created. And the reason I think it’s one of my favorite songs is that I’m not on it. \[Producer\] David Odlum helped convince me to actually sing on this song. At the beginning of my career, I remember everyone telling me I was a good singer, but no one ever really gave me credit for my songwriting. And what I love about this song is it\'s not about me, it\'s about something I wrote. This song is about opening your arms to the sky and singing your song as loud as you can. And I really think that my younger self needed it. I went with this idea of, I want this to be an album for a younger me that will give me joy and hope. The lyric is incredibly deep, but it\'s also playable like a lullaby.” **“Who We Love” \[with Ed Sheeran\]** “Ed sent me this song, and I was fearful to begin with because I don’t usually take songs and make them mine. Ed and I have been friends for a long time. I’m not interested in doing an Ed collab that sounds like a hit—I wanted it to mean something. And when I heard this, I felt truly touched. I felt like it was a queer ballad anthem written from a friend. There was something so poignant and beautiful about it. Ed has personally guided me through tough times and been a friend in a very cold industry. I wanted everything about this song to feel warm.”

“We have to be friends”—the first song written for *PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE*—had a profound impact on its author. “I was like, ‘What the hell is going to be this record? This is going to be my awakening,” Chris tells Apple Music’s Proud Radio. “The song was all-knowing of something and admonishing me finally to stop being blind or something. So I started to take music even more seriously and more spiritually.” Even before that track, the French alt-pop talent had begun to embrace spirituality and prayer following the death of his mother in 2019—a loss that also colored much of 2022’s *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*. But letting it into his music took him to deeper places than ever before. “This journey of music has been very extreme because I wanted to devote myself and I went to extreme places that changed me forever,” adds Chris. “An awakening is just the beginning of a spiritual journey, so I wouldn\'t say I\'m there, it would be arrogant. But it\'s definitely the opening of a clear path of spirituality through music.” After the high-concept, operatic *Redcar*, this album—a three-part epic lasting almost two hours that’s rooted in (and whose name nods to) Tony Kushner’s 1991 play *Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes*, an exploration of AIDS in 1980s America—confirms our arrival into the most ambitious Christine and the Queens era yet. The songs here will demand more of you than the smart pop that made Christine and the Queens famous—but they will also richly reward your attention, with sprawling, synth-led outpourings that reveal something new with every listen. Here, Chris (who collaborated with talent including superproducer MIKE DEAN and 070 Shake) reaches for trip-hop (the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears can be so soft”), classical music (the sublime “Full of life,” which layers Chris’ reverbed vocals over the instantly recognizable Pachelbel’s Canon), ’80s-style drums (“We have to be friends”), and the kind of haunting, atmospheric ballads this artist excels at (“To be honest”). Oh, and the album’s narrator? Madonna. “I was like, ‘If Madonna was just like a stage character, it would be brilliant,’” says Chris. “I pitch it like fast, quite intensely: ‘I need you to be the voice of everything. You need to be this voice of, maybe it\'s my mom, maybe it\'s the Queen Mary, maybe it\'s a computer, maybe it\'s everything.’ And she was like, ‘You\'re crazy, I\'ll do it.’” Chris gave the narrator a name: Big Eye. “The whole thing was insane, which is the best thing,” he says. “The record itself solidified itself in maybe less than a month. I was writing a new song every day. It was quite consistent and a wild journey. And as I was singing the song, the character was surfacing in the words. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a character.’ Big Eye was the name I gave the character because it\'s this very all-encompassing, slightly worrying angel voice, could be dystopian.” For Chris, this album was a teacher and a healer—even a “shaman.” “I discovered so much more of myself and rediscovered why I loved music so hard,” he says. “And it\'s this great light journey of healing I adore.” It also cracked open his heart. “This record for me is a message of love,” he adds. “It comes from me, but it comes from the invisible as well. Honestly, I felt a bit cradled by extra strength. Even the collaboration I had, this whole journey was about friendship, finding meaning in pain too. It opened my heart.”

Brimming with astrological fervor and unbridled emotionality, *Red Moon in Venus* finds the Colombian American sensation zeroing in on love. From the proud promises behind “Endlessly” to the sweet little profundities of “Love Between...,” the album plays with genre without losing cohesion or connection. On the guest front, Don Toliver matches her R&B potency amid the polyrhythmic blur of “Fantasy,” while Omar Apollo brings his own certain charm to the sumptuous duet “Worth the Wait.” Yet most of the album keeps the spotlight rightfully on her, leading to breathtaking moments like “I Wish You Roses” and the Sade-esque “Blue.” And while *Red Moon in Venus* returns the artist to a primarily English-language mode, she hasn’t dispatched entirely with the approach taken on 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞*. She brings bilingual lyricism alongside orchestral accents for “Como Te Quiero Yo” and retro grooves for “Hasta Cuando.”

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

The Icelandic avant-rock outfit Sigur Rós has been making music, in various arrangements, for nearly 30 years. Their debut full-length *Von* came out in 1997, and their breakthrough album *Ágætis byrjun* arrived two years later. The second project was the first to feature multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson, who, despite departing the group 15 years later, has always been seen as a critical piece of the magic. After their surprisingly dark and dissonant 2013 album *Kveikur*, the band took a break, focusing on personal projects and personal lives. But a series of casual jam sessions—from Iceland’s Sundlaugin to London’s Abbey Road—reignited their creative spark and resulted in *ÁTTA*, their first album in 10 years. The project, a collaboration with conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra, is full of sweeping, mystical soundscapes that mirror the majestic vistas of the group’s home country. Although there is a lingering sense of apocalyptic foreboding—very likely a nod to climate-disaster-related doom—most of these songs are imbued with hope. “Gold,” a meditative vocal number bathed in pastel tones, seems to surround you, wide and warm, like arms in an embrace. “Andrá,” glacial and glowing, is practically a hymnal. Even the more mournful songs (“Skel,” “Mór,” and “Fall” are three) feel affectionate and tender—more like bittersweet love songs than sounds of alarm. For a band that has long been openly weary about the state of the world—a rage captured vividly on their last studio record—this project feels like a deep, cathartic breath, a tribute to the magnificent beauty that remains.

After a celebratory first instalment, *Asylum*, characterised its by up-tempo amapiano songs, the Eswatini-born breakout superstar Uncle Waffles slows things down a little on *Solace*, the second chapter of her *Asylum of Solace* project. Here, Uncle Waffles leans towards “private school amapiano”,  a version of the genre that is more soulful and heavily vocalised. Manana and Lusanda’s duet on the soothing R&B-flavoured “Echoes” kickstarts the journey, while the serene “Peace & Happiness” lives up to its name with lush production and a synergic relationship between vocals and instrumentation.  A vocal interpolation of bubblegum group Splash’s 1986 hit, “Peacock”, is drenched in reverb and underscored by a deep bassline and bacardi’s hard, sharp and dry snares on “Peacock Revisit”, while Murumba Pitch’s trademark low-register vocals swim in a pool of synths alongside a swirling saxophone solo. “Khula” is just as rich, and “Solace”, the scintillating instrumental title-track, closes the project on a jazzy note.