Variety's 20 Best Albums of 2024 (So Far)

Ariana Grande is used to being in the spotlight, but over time, she’s gotten savvy at playing it. The pop star’s seventh studio album *eternal sunshine*—a lightly conceptual riff on the head-spinning 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, of whom Grande has said she’s a lifelong fan—feels like a mind game itself, blurring the lines between real-life references and theatrical bits. It arrives in the middle of a whirlwind tabloid-packed stretch—Grande married, divorced, and scored a starring role in Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation of *Wicked*—and she knows fans have questions. What’s true? What’s real? Ari gives a lot of things on this album, but answers aren’t one of them, a cunning reminder of how little transparency celebrities actually owe us. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Grande leans into the project’s thematic murkiness. “true story,” she says, is “an untrue story based on all untrue events,” and when asked about her own experience with the Saturn return, an astrology milestone referenced in the album’s only interlude, she shrugs. “It was chill. Nothing changed. Pretty uneventful.” She says she finds freedom in art because “you can really pull from anywhere,” and she describes the film as another “lovely costume” to wear. Her answers have flickers of defiance that feel like power. Whoever said albums had to be tidy, or true? “It doesn’t have to be an everlasting love story,” she tells Lowe. “Love is complicated. Showcasing both sides of it is what I tried to \[do\].” If there’s one thing these tracks make clear, it’s that she’s still Ari on the mic—she’s still hitting those high highs (“eternal sunshine”); still finding release on the dance floor (“yes, and?”); still sifting gold out of ’90s R&B (“the boy is mine”), a sequel to the leaked 2023 track “fantasize.” Her favorite? “imperfect for you,” a tribute to the friends who make up her inner circle. “We’re so lucky to have loved ones who are accepting and real with us no matter what,” she says. “We live in a time where everything is boiled down, but that song demands room for nuance, humanness, and complexity.”

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.

Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”

It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”

On previous album covers for Lorely Rodriguez’s alt-pop project Empress Of, the musician assumed a straightforward pose, casually stunting if not smiling. For the cover of her fourth album, which shares a cheeky title with the awards season campaign slogan, the Honduran American singer-producer throws her hair back as she straddles a shooting star, Los Angeles sprawled out behind her. She’s described it as something of a Hollywood album in all its sordid glam; the aching title track reflects on the end of a relationship with a showbiz scenester (“You wrote the script; your words, not mine”). That sheen of glitzy fantasy shimmers gently over Rodriguez’s club-ready explorations on love’s fleeting nature, running the gamut between heartbreak and hedonism and switching seamlessly between Spanish and English. She longs for “*un hombre femenine, un latine, que baile pa\' mi y solo pa\' mi*” on thumping house jam “Femenine,” wonders about the owner of an unfamiliar pair of earrings on infidelity banger “Lorelei,” and finds redemption in a wild night out on “Cura.” Rodriguez’s lyricism is at times abstract and poetic (“The rumors there, the mirror shows, the cards don’t lie, the boys all know—what type of girl am I?”) and at others sharply seductive (“*Yo soy fácil, fácil de comer, fácil de amar*”). The small handful of guests are like-minded in their boundary-pushing, occasionally messy avant-pop: Rina Sawayama on the love-drunk “Kiss Me” and fellow Angelenos MUNA on the searching “What’s Love.”

IDLES’ fifth album is a collection of love songs. For singer Joe Talbot, it couldn’t be anything else. “At the time of writing this album, I was quite lost,” he tells Apple Music. “Not musically, it was a beautiful time for music. But emotionally, my nervous system needed organizing, and I needed to sort my shit out. So I did. That came from me realizing that I needed love in my life, and that I had sometimes lost my narrative in the art, which is that love is all I’ve ever sung about.” From a band wearied by other people’s attempts to pin narrow labels like “punk” or “political” to their expansive, thoughtful music, that’s as concise a summary as you’ll get. It’s also an accurate one. The Bristol five-piece’s music has always viewed the world with an empathetic eye, processing the human effects and impulses around subjects as varied as grief, immigration, kindness, toxic masculinity, and anxiety. And on their fourth album, 2021’s *CRAWLER*, the aggression and sinew of earlier songs gave way to more space and restraint as Talbot turned inward to reckon with his experiences with addiction. For *TANGK*, that experimentation continued while the band’s initial ideas were developed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in London during late 2022, before the record was completed with *CRAWLER* co-producer Kenny Beats joining the team to record in the south of France. They’ve emerged with an album where an Afrobeat rhythm played out on an obscure drum machine (“Grace”) or a gentle piano melody recorded on an iPhone (“A Gospel”) hit with as much impact as a gale-force guitar riff (“Gift Horse”). Exploring the thrills and the scars of love in multiple forms, Talbot leans ever more into singing over firebrand fury. “I’ve got a kid now, and part of my learning is to have empathy when I parent,” he says. “And with that comes delicacy. To use empathy is a delicate and graceful act. And that’s coming out in my art, because I’m also being delicate and graceful with myself, forgiving myself, and giving myself time to learn. I don’t want to lie.” Discover more with Talbot’s track-by-track guide to *TANGK*. **“IDEA 01”** “It was the first thing \[guitarist and co-producer Mark\] Bowen worked on, and Bowen, being the egotistical maniac that he is, called it ‘IDEA 01’ because he forgot that it was actually idea seven. But, bless him, he does like attention. But, yes, it was the first song that was written in Nigel’s studio. Bowen sat at the piano and started playing, and it was beautiful. ‘IDEA 01’ is different vignettes around old friends that I haven’t seen since Devon \[where Talbot grew up\], and the relationships I had with them and their families, and how crazy certain people’s families are. Bowen’s beautiful piano part reminded me of this song we wrote on the last album, ‘Kelechi.’ Kelechi was a good friend of mine who sadly passed away, and I hadn’t seen him since I waved him off to move to Manchester with his family. I just had this feeling I was never going to see him again. Maybe I’m writing that in my head now, but he was a beautiful, beautiful man. I loved him. I think maybe if we were still friends, part of me could have helped him, but that’s, again, fantasy I think.” **“Gift Horse”** “I was trying to get this disco thing going, so I gave Jon \[Beavis, drummer\] a bunch of disco beats to work on. And Dev \[bassist Adam Devonshire\] is bang into The Rapture and !!! and LCD Soundsystem, and he turned out that bassline real quick. I wrote a song around it, and it felt great. It was what my intentions of the album were: to make people dance and not think, because love is a very complex thing that doesn’t need to be thought. It can just be acted, and worked on, and danced with. I just wanted to make people move, and get that physicality of the live experience in people’s bones. I had this concept of a gift horse as a theme of a song, and it sang to me. I like that grotesque phrase, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ It’s about my daughter, and I’m very grateful for her, and our relationship, and I wanted to write a beast of a tune around her.” **“POP POP POP”** “I read \[‘freudenfreude’\] online somewhere. It was like, words that don’t exist that should exist. Schadenfreude is such a dark thing, to enjoy other people’s misery, so the idea of someone enjoying someone else’s joy is great. Being a parent, you suddenly are entwined with someone else’s joys and lows. I love seeing her dance, and have a good time, and grow as a person, and learn, so I wanted to write a song about it.” **“Roy”** “It’s an allegorical story that sums up a lot of my behavior towards my partners over a 15-year period where I was in a cycle of absolute worship and then fear, jealousy and assholery. I wanted to dedicate it to my girlfriend, who I call Roy. She’s not called Roy. I wanted it to be about the idea of a man who is in love and then his fears take over, and he starts acting like a prick to push that person away. Then he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover, realizing what he’s done, and he apologizes. He is then forgiven in the chorus, and rejoicing ensues.” **“A Gospel”** “It’s a reflection on breakups, which I think are a learning curve. I think all my exes deserve a medal, and they’ve taught me a lot. It’s really a tender moment of a dream I used to have, then \[it\] dances between different tiny memories, tiny vignettes of what happened before, and me just giving a nod to those moments and saying goodbye, which is beautiful. No heartbreak, really. I’ve been through the heartbreak now. It’s just me smiling and being like, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you very much.’” **“Dancer” (with LCD Soundsystem)** “The best form of dance is to express yourself freely within a group who are also expressing themselves freely, the true embodiment of communion. The last time I had this sense of euphoria from that was an Oh Sees gig at the \[Sala\] Apolo in Barcelona. I closed my eyes and let the mosh push me from one side of the room to the other and back. I didn’t open my eyes once, I just smiled and was carried by this organism of beautiful rage. Dancing’s a really big part of my personality. I love it. My mum always danced. Even in her most ill days \[Talbot’s mother passed away during the recording of 2017 debut *Brutalism*\], she would always get up and dance, and enjoy herself. I dance with my daughter every day that I have her. I think it’s magic and important.” **“Grace”** “It all came out of nowhere. I had this beat in mind for a while—I was thinking of an aggro Afrobeat kind of track. But it didn’t come out like that. It came out like what happens when Nigel Godrich gets his hands on your Afrobeat stuff. I asked Nigel to make the beat, and he chose the LinnDrum \[’80s drum machine\]. The LinnDrum changes the sound of a beat, the tone of a drum, the cadence of a beat, it changed the beat completely. It’s a very, very delicate thing, a beat. It sounded like a different song to me. It sounded amazing. And that’s where the bassline came from. And then that’s where the vocals came from. It felt a bit uneasy for a long time because it came out of nowhere. Me and Bowen were like, ‘Is this right? Is this complete?’ I think it just has to feel like you, like it is part of you and what you mean at the moment, that’s all. An album’s an episode of where you’re at in the world in that point in time.” **“Hall & Oates”** “I wanted to write a glam-rock pounder about falling in love with your boys. My ex and I used to joke about this thing where you make love to someone for the first time, and then the next day, you’re walking on air, and it feels like Hall & Oates is playing. The birds are singing, you’re bouncing around and everything’s great. I wanted to use that analogy for when you make friends with someone for the first time, and they make you feel good, lighter, stronger, excited to see them again. And that’s what happened in lockdown: I made friends with \[Bristol-based singer-songwriter\] Willie J Healey and my mate Ben, and we went on bike rides whenever we could, getting out and feeling good post-lockdown. It gave me a sense of purpose again. It felt like I was falling in love.” **“Jungle”** “I was trying to write a jungle tune for ages. The guitar line was a jungle bassline that I had but it just never fit what we were writing. And then Bowen started playing the chords on the guitar and it transformed it into something completely different. It completely revitalized what I’d been dragging through the mud for five years. Bowen made it IDLES, made it real, made it believable, made it beautiful. And then it reminded me of getting nicked, so I wrote a song about different times that I’ve been in trouble.” **“Gratitude”** “This was a real struggle. Bowen was really obsessed about doing interesting counts with the beats. I just wanted to make people dance and create infectious beats. We were coming from very different angles, but we loved this song that Bowen had made. I was like, ‘I get it, Bowen. This is insane. I love it, but I can’t get it.’ We hung on to it for ages, and then Nigel really helped us out, he created spaces and bits here and there by turning things down and moving everything slightly. Then Kenny helped me out, and got rid of the stupid counts, I think, and helped me write it on a 4/4 beat. And then they changed it back. I just come in in weird places. Everyone chipped in, because everyone believed in the song.” **“Monolith”** “I was fascinated by films where four or five notes are repeated throughout and create this monolithic motif. There’s a sense of continuity but the mood changes depending on certain things like tone and instruments. I wanted to do that over a song, and we got our friend Colin \[Webster\] from \[London noise rock unit\] Sex Swing to do the sax, we did it on different instruments that Nigel had. Nigel went away and basically put it all through the hollow-body bass. It reminded me of a documentary from a series called *The Blues* that Martin Scorsese curated. *The Soul of a Man* \[directed by Wim Wenders\] is about a song \[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’\] getting sent into space. If any aliens get this capsule, they’ll hear this song being played from a blues artist. It created a really beautiful and deep picture in my mind. It felt like this monolith drifting in the ether. I started singing a blues riff behind it, a Skip James kind of thing. I think it’s a beautiful way to finish the album—us drifting in the ether.”

Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.

It was instant bromance when Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé met at a house party in early-2000s Paris: two young French graphic designers who loved good old American rock ’n’ roll. What they lacked in technical expertise, they made up for in taste—and not exactly the “good taste” of the French artists du jour. “When we started, French house music was really about precision, and we arrived and had no idea what we were doing,” de Rosnay tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. To the world of groovy French filter house, the duo known as Justice brought AC/DC energy, punishing distortion, and a giant neon cross that towered over Marshall speaker stacks at their famously wild live shows. Three studio albums, three live albums, and two Grammys later, the Justice boys have traded their skintight leather jackets for sharply tailored suits, but though the songs on their fourth album, *Hyperdrama*, are generally less punishing than early eardrum-destroyers like “Waters of Nazareth” or “Stress,” the duo have yet to lose their edge. Eight years after their last studio release, 2016’s unprecedentedly tender *Woman*, Augé and de Rosnay return to the tensions that animated their 2007 debut. “\[Contrast\] has been the motor of what we do since the beginning, because there is some kind of radicality and violence that we love in electronic music, and we are also blue-eyed soul and yacht rock fans.” On *Hyperdrama*, saccharine disco and blistering electronics don’t just coexist—they duke it out, often within the same track, as on “One Night/All Night,” whose stomping beat tugs against plaintive vocals from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. “Generator” nods to the brutalism of their early hits, the sax-forward “Moonlight Rendez-vous” evokes the camp of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” and “Dear Alan” (named for French electronic legend Alan Braxe) is the kind of blissful filter house they once stood out from like two leather-clad sore thumbs. The duo’s songwriting has aged like fine French wine, but as always, they lead with their gut. “Really often we find that decisions in production and engineering are on the side of style and sensation more than, ‘Does it sound perfect by the standards of hi-fi?’” Augé explains. “If the good thing is that thing that was ripped 10 times and is so downgraded that it has this sort of bitcrush and glow to it, then we should go for that.”

“My Saturn has returned,” the cosmic country singer-songwriter proclaimed to announce her fifth album (apologies to *A Very Kacey Christmas*), *Deeper Well*. If you’re reading this, odds are you know what that means: About every 30 years, the sixth planet from the sun comes back to the place in the sky where it was when you were born, and with it, ostensibly, comes growth. At 35, the chill princess of rule-breaking country/pop/what-have-you has caught up with Saturn and taken its lessons to heart. OUT: energy vampires, self-sabotaging habits, surface-level conversations. IN: jade stones, moon baths, long dinners with friends, listening closely to the whispered messages of the cosmos. (As for the wake-and-bake sessions she mentions on the title track—out, but wistfully so.) Musgraves followed her 2018 breakthrough album, the gently trippy *Golden Hour*, with 2021’s *star-crossed*, a divorce album billed as a “tragedy in three parts,” where electronic flourishes added to the drama. On *Deeper Well*, the songwriter’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, reflected in its warm, wooden, organic instrumentation—fingerpicked acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel. Here, Musgraves turns to nature for the answers to her ever-probing questions. “Heart of the Woods,” a campfire sing-along inspired by mycologist Paul Stamets and his *Fantastic Fungi* documentary, looks to mushroom networks beneath the forest floor for lessons on connectivity. And on “Cardinal,” a gorgeous ode to her late friend and mentor John Prine in the paisley mode of The Mamas & The Papas, potential dispatches from the beyond arrive as a bird outside her window in the morning. As Musgraves’ trust in herself and the universe deepens, so do her songwriting chops. On “Dinner With Friends,” a gratitude journal entry given the cosmic country treatment, she honors her roots in perfectly sly Musgravian fashion: “My home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs, but none of their laws.” And on the simple, searching “The Architect,” she condenses the big mysteries of human nature into one elegant, good-natured question: “Can I pray it away, am I shapeable clay/Or is this as good as it gets?”

Whether singing in Spanish or in English, Kali Uchis continually proves herself to be a versatile performer. Following 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios)* and its hit single “telepatía,” the Colombian American singer eventually boasted that she had two more albums, one in each language, more or less at the ready, the first being 2023’s soulful *Red Moon in Venus* and the next being *ORQUÍDEAS*. With lyrics primarily (though not exclusively) in Spanish, she delivers an exquisite pop-wise R&B set here, one replete with clubby highs and balladic depth. The dance floor is well served with cuts like “Me Pongo Loca” and “Pensamientos Intrusivos,” her ethereal vocals elevating them further. The collaborations reflect her journey as well as her status, as she links with superstar KAROL G on the polished perreo throwback “Labios Mordidos” and música mexicana sensation Peso Pluma for the romantic duet “Igual Que Un Ángel.” On “Muñekita,” she bridges her two worlds with the aid of Dominican dynamo El Alfa and City Girls rapper JT, who combine to produce an irresistible dembow moment.

The grace of Khruangbin’s dusty, evocative groove music is that it feels both totally effortless and impeccably put together. Arriving after the group spent a few years exploring collaboration (including 2022’s *Ali* with the Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré and the R&B-centric *Texas Sun* and *Texas Moon* EPs with singer Leon Bridges), *A La Sala* goes back to the bass/guitar/drum-and-occasional-distant-vocals setup they managed to get so much mileage out of in the first place. The collection conjures the psychedelia of spaghetti western soundtracks (“Ada Jean”), the pop of West African funk (“Pon Pón”), and the whispered intimacy of indie folk (“May Ninth“) in strokes so minimal it almost breezes by. Of course, breezing is what this band does by design, and in their range, they give you an album as varied as a mixtape and as gently communicative as a great lamp—you know, the kind of thing that can change the whole mood just by turning it on.

“I have to write about how I feel,” Rachel Chinouriri tells Apple Music. “If I don’t feel it or can’t relate to it, I can’t write about it.” Since breaking out in 2022 with viral track “So My Darling,” the South London singer-songwriter has done just that, penning bittersweet indie bops and devastating ballads that have been fueled, most often, by stories of heartache. You’ll find plenty of that on this debut album, but Chinouriri also goes deeper, with songs about self-contempt, loss, grief, and feeling like you don’t belong right when you’re supposed to be killing it (see “The Hills,” her cathartic exhale about a five-week songwriting trip to LA, which left her feeling lonely, under pressure, and creatively stumped). For Chinouriri, *What a Devastating Turn of Events* was shaped by “the journey of being in your early twenties. You finally leave home and then you are kind of becoming an adult, but you don’t really feel like an adult,” she says. “You’re still looking at the grown-ups to give you advice, but you are the grown-up. It is a weird journey of trying to discover yourself. Being able to feel and then turn it into song—it’s a privilege to have that as a gift.” But *What a Devastating Turn of Events* also feels rooted in much more than just a bumpy life transition, and Chinouriri’s lyricism is laced with far more wisdom than most people can apply to those chaotic early-twenties years. Either way, the singer-songwriter wanted her debut to capture what it’s like to be shattered by a sudden event. And so, the record opens with sharp-witted, mostly upbeat indie-pop moments (plus some “wonky” bits, as Chinouriri puts it), before the crushing title track—written after the singer-songwriter’s cousin tragically took her own life—shifts this album, and its creator, on its axis. What follows are some of Chinouriri’s most raw, arresting songs yet. “When death happens, it does turn your entire world upside down,” she says. “It might not even be death, it might just be something that happens. And sometimes you don’t realize how much you have until something major happens. Then you realize, ‘Damn, I’ve wasted so much time bothering about stuff that doesn’t matter.’ Turning points can either make or break people.” This album ends on Chinouriri’s own turning point: “Pocket,” a sweet song about new, better love that Chinouriri promised she’d give to the person who finally allowed her to feel it, followed by her acoustic version of “So My Darling,” the song that started this wild ride in the first place. Here, Chinouriri takes us through her debut, track by track. **“Garden of Eden”** “I wrote this after my big LA trip feeling like, ‘This \[the UK\] is home for me.’ I’m just adamant I want a house in the countryside. Where I grew up in Croydon isn’t that, but it was quiet, and I would always hear birds and see fields and grass. We were in a room \[in a studio in the UK countryside, where Chinouriri went after LA\] and would always have the recording on, and the birds were that loud. I was like, ‘Let’s just maybe make it a soundscape where you’re just falling into this situation.’ It’s setting the scene.” **“The Hills”** “We’ve left the Garden of Eden now and I’m like, ‘Right, I don’t belong here.’ The music video shows \[me\], a Black woman, walking across some flags, and people have said, ‘Oh, she’s talking about how she doesn’t belong in the UK,’ but I’m actually talking about how much I *do* belong. It’s almost seeing those street parties where they’ve got all the flags and being like, ‘I’m as English as you guys, so I belong here and I’ll be staying here whether you like it or not.’ The song is definitely a headbanging, screaming moment—it has a bit of an American-boy-band-in-a-basement, kids-in-a-garage vibe. It felt like a relief to have something after a trip where we didn’t have much, especially after five weeks.” **“Never Need Me”** “After I wrote this, I didn’t even send it to the label. A few days later, I was at a festival and my manager came to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you send us this song? Oli \[Bayston, one of the song’s co-writers\] sent it to us.’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, I think it’s a terrible song.’ I think it was because of its meaning. And in the session, I was just so angry and annoyed and in such an agitated mood. I felt uninspired. But later, I said, ‘If I can do it however I want, I’ll finish the song.’ So I went to \[songwriter\] Glen Roberts and changed all the production—I was thinking Kings of Leon and heavy guitars.” **“My Everything”** “This song is about giving your all to everyone. My project before this album, *Four° in Winter*, was very experimental and wonky. I knew I was hitting some pop territories with this album, but I think there are still wonky elements to me. I really love Ladysmith Black Mambazo and how they use their voice almost as the instruments. I just liked being in the studio and coming up with weird sounds with my voice. I don’t even want to know how many vocal tracks are on that—but it was a lot! I don’t know if people will like it, but I wanted to show all the different parts of who I am.” **“All I Ever Asked”** “Again, I didn’t want it on the album. But now I realize this song is important and a way people discovered me \[it was a single in 2022\]. I think I’m actually quite a dark person because I’m a Scorpio. Whether you believe in star signs or not, I’ve always gravitated towards dark lyrics to a point where I don’t think sad lyrics really hit me anymore. But there’s also a degree of making light of situations. Because as much as \[what inspired this song\] is sad, it’s also like, ‘You’ll live. He was an asshole. There are plenty more people you can meet in this world.’ There’s light that can come to those situations.” **“It Is What It Is”** “When I was doing \[the speak-singing here\], I was like, ‘Maybe I’m going to sound a bit like a loser.’ I’m not really rapping, I’m talking, and then obviously I have this English accent. I don’t want to say I have a boring voice, but when I’m speaking, I think I sound quite monotone. But what I’m saying is, ‘You are a fucking arsehole.’ This one’s for my girls and boys who have definitely felt this multiple times. Mae Muller is on this track. She is that person who will be like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I’ll go out and look at someone slightly questionable and be like, ‘I fancy him.’ She’ll go to the bathroom and be like, ‘Rachel, love you so much. No, no, you’re not doing that.’ And I’ll be like, ‘OK.’” **“Dumb Bitch Juice”** “This was very much Amy Winehouse-inspired—I know it’s not Amy Winehouse at all, but she had this ability to sing in quite a free and melodic way, but you can hear every single thing she says. When I wrote this, I was like, ‘I’m here to insult today.’ Not just insulting someone else—insulting myself too. Because sometimes men are terrible, but there’s also a degree of ‘You have allowed someone to treat you like that.’ Of course I’ve been heartbroken by an absolute idiot because I’m drinking dumb bitch juice!” **“What a Devastating Turn of Events”** “All my siblings were born in Africa, I’m the only one who was born in the UK. There’s a set of relatives who know I exist, but I’ve not met most of them—I have no clue who they are, but my siblings grew up with them. And when she \[Chinouriri’s cousin, the subject of this song\] died, my siblings were devastated. I was sad about someone I didn’t know. I constantly thought about it and wondered how it had happened. I had gone through something similar; being able to write about it has been kind of helpful for me to understand my own situation and stuff that I’ve gone through. Sonically, I never thought we needed a big chorus. It’s a different verse and different chorus every single time. Then there’s just this kind of chanting thing—I think that’s maybe where my African influence is coming, the marching and the pace of the drum and everyone singing as a group. We all sat in the studio with a mic and just screamed, ‘What a devastating turn of events.’ I think there’s a degree of sorrow that comes along, kind of trudging through this very sad story. This is a very important one.” **“My Blood”** “I wanted a song where there’s not necessarily continuation, but which speaks about things which people might do as a cry for help. You should always watch when things like that happen to people. I went through a phase where I was pulling out my own hair—it was a stress thing. It started making me think about when I was younger and there was self-harm things. It was visualizing looking in a mirror and being like, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ But it’s also these invisible wounds. The strings here add so much to the song—the cinematic-ness of it is definitely influenced by Daughter. I wanted to get people to feel. It sounds very sad from top to bottom, but I hope people listen to it and think, ‘Wow.’” **“Robbed”** “There was a baby in our family who passed away, and I felt like I was robbed of them. I was a bit more poetic in this song, but it’s almost considering people I’d not met that had such a massive effect on me. You can be robbed of time sometimes, with people or family. When stuff like that happens, the people around you are always like, ‘It’ll be OK. I’m sorry that happened.’ And actually, sometimes it’s OK to just be like, ‘That was fucking shit. That was horrible and this is unfair.’ That was the kind of emotion I wanted to translate in these songs.” **“Cold Call”** “I was really inspired by Coldplay’s ‘Politik.’ It’s just mind-blowing. I’m quite obsessed with Coldplay and I asked my team to show them the song. I know that they liked it—it meant a lot. They are my inspiration for a lot of things. I think it feels like a universal song. It’s kind of like, ‘I’ve had enough of this now, I’m not doing that anymore.’” **“I Hate Myself”** “I like how this ends with me reflecting on the positive. I’ve felt some very negative things, which I’ve been lucky enough to stop in their tracks. I mean, ‘a victim of your mind’ is one of the lyrics here. I wrote this with \[producer and songwriter\] Jonah Summerfield and he was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty deep.’ But sometimes when you put your thoughts on paper, you can read it back and think, ‘That was ridiculous.’ I looked back at this and thought, ‘That was a really stupid thing for me to even put myself through.’ You have to learn to love yourself—and hope that as a society we can really unlearn the treatment of people for being different sizes. Being able to write music has been a combination of me unlearning and learning so much about myself. And I think I can see how my self-esteem really skyrocketed the song in many ways.” **“Pocket”** “When I wrote this, I’d gone through all my phases of being like, ‘Men are trash, men are toxic.’ Then I was kind of like, ‘Well that’s just BS. I was just choosing terrible men. And there are actually nice ones if you allow yourself to be loved. So I’m going to write a song about how I would like to be loved.’ I thought, ‘When I find someone, I’m going to give them this song.’ And when I started dating my boyfriend, I said, ‘There’s this song I have.’” **“So My Darling (Acoustic)”** “The song is like six years old, so it’s a nostalgic way to end the album. You’ve gone through this journey of \[mostly\] new songs, and then you get thrown back into one that everyone knows. I wanted the whole album to sound and feel nostalgic for being a Black Brit, so to end on something nostalgic for the fans was really important. I think the whole album is very nostalgic of maybe my home life, but for the fans, it’s nostalgic for them.”

“Pain makes you more humane,” Shakira tells Apple Music. “Being able to take that pain and transform it into something else, that is an opportunity and a luxury that us artists have.” Assuredly, the Latin-pop superstar’s romantic and professional woes in recent years have been significant, often converted into cruel tabloid fodder that, no doubt, amplified the issues and surrounding emotions. Yet with *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran*, her first new album in nearly seven years, she transforms the numbingly dull lead of personal hardship into a glorious musical gold. “In a way, it’s kind of good not to have a husband,” Shakira says of the impact her breakup had on her creativity. “Now I feel like working. It’s a compulsive need of mine that I didn’t feel before.” Even before the album emerged, that compulsion came through clearly and eventfully with the release of singles like the award-winning “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” showing the world that she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind during trying times. “No one should tell any woman how she’s supposed to heal and lick her wounds.” *Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran* exemplifies that sentiment. As expected, given her prior hits, she retains a mastery of the dance floor with the benefit of autobiographical lyricism. Here, she provides such expertly executed versions as the Bizarrap-assisted “La Fuerte” and the emotionally potent “Tiempo Sin Verte.” One of many successors to Shakira’s bilingual pop lineage, Cardi B joins for the opener “Puntería,” a sweat-inducing track dripping with erotically charged metaphors. More than willing to branch out beyond what her legacy already holds, she also demonstrates just how integral she’s become to the modern reggaetón landscape, lending her cosign to Manuel Turizo on “Copa Vacía” and finding a kindred spirit in KAROL G on “TQG.” Far more surprising are her successful forays into other genres represented throughout the album, namely the música mexicana team-ups “(Entre Paréntesis)” with Grupo Frontera and “El Jefe” with Fuerza Regida, as well as the brisk bachata cut “Monotonía” with Ozuna. Still, Shakira hasn’t forgotten her long-standing rock listenership, bringing energy and grace to the cathartic “Cómo Dónde y Cuándo.” Similarly, her balladry remains exemplary, the revelatory messages of “Acróstico (Milan y Sasha)” and “Última” obviously driven by her experiences and in response to these challenges. Ultimately, against all odds, she emerges from this album with a sense of hope and optimism. “Love is the most amazing experience a human can live, and no one should take away that opinion from you,” she says. “It doesn’t matter the shitty experiences you go through in life; there’s always a lot more to look forward to.”

In the 18 months after Taylor Swift released *Midnights*, it often felt as though the universe had fully opened up to her. The Eras Tour was breaking records and blowing past the billion-dollar mark; its attendant concert film became the highest-grossing of all time. She generated interest and commerce and headlines everywhere she stepped foot, from tour stops to the tunnels of NFL stadiums. In 2023, she was named both *TIME* magazine’s Person of the Year and—just as iconic, tbh—Apple Music’s Artist of the Year. But do songs about that level of success speak to you? As the news broke that her highly private six-year relationship to Joe Alwyn had ended, Swifties started Swiftie-ing, quickly recirculating a clip on social media of Swift a few weeks earlier, onstage during an early Eras show, in tears as she sang “champagne problems”—a song she and Alwyn had written together. It was a reminder that, despite the superhero-like aura she now radiates, Swift, at her peak, still hurts like the rest of us. What sets her apart is her ability to sublimate that pain into pop. When she announced her 11th studio album in early 2024—while accepting another Grammy, as one does—we probably shouldn’t have been surprised. “I needed to make it,” she’d say of *THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT* a few weeks later, to a crowd of—\[rubs eyes\]—96,000 in Melbourne, Australia. “I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on *TORTURED POETS*.” Working again with trusted collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she returns to the soft, comfortable, bed-like sonics of *Midnights*. But the stakes feel noticeably higher here: This isn’t so much a breakup album as it is a deep-sea exploration of everything Swift has been feeling, a plunge through emotional debris. On “But Daddy I Love Him”—over strings and guitar that faintly recall her country roots—she lashes out at the crush of scrutiny and expectation she’s been subject to from the start. Naturally, catharsis comes after the chorus: “I’ll tell you something right now,” she sings. “I’d rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.” On “Florida!!!” she and Florence + the Machine team up for a pulpy escape fantasy wherein they Thelma and Louise their way down to the Sunshine State in hopes of starting over with new lives and identities: “Love left me like this,” they sing. “And I don’t want to exist.” At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, *TTPD* is a study in extremes, Swift leaning into heightened emotions with heightened, hyperbolic, ALL-CAPS language and imagery—how we think when we’re drunk on love or flattened by its sudden disappearance. Note the dark humor she weaves through the Post Malone-enriched opener “Fortnight” (“Your wife waters flowers/I wanna kill her”). Or the thrilling self-deprecation of “Down Bad,” a foray into science fiction wherein Swift likens the warmth of a relationship to being abducted by love-bombing extraterrestrials—only to be left “naked and alone, in a field in my same old town.” But this remains her most candid and unsparing work to date: As a listener, you frequently get the feeling that you’ve stumbled across emails she’d written but never sent, or into conversations you were never meant to hear. There’s a density and a specificity and a ferocity to her lyrical work here that makes 2012’s “All Too Well” feel sorta light by comparison. If you’re the kind of Swiftie who likes to live in the details, well, this one might be your Super Bowl. “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?” she asks on the devastating “So Long, London,” a high point. “I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” Alone at a piano on the haunting “loml,” she flips the script on someone who’d told her she was the love of their life, by telling them that they were the loss of hers: “I’ll still see it until I die.” The story, as you likely know, doesn’t end there. We get a glimpse of new beginnings in “The Alchemy” (“This happens once every few lifetimes/These chemicals hit me like white wine”) and something like triumph in the montage-ready synths of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” when Swift, shattered on the floor, “as the crowd was chanting, ‘More!’,” still finds the strength to deliver: “’Cause I’m a real tough kid and I can handle my shit.” But we also get a sense of acceptance, of newfound perspective. On “Clara Bow”—named after a 1920s movie star who was able to survive the jump from silent film to sound—Swift reflects on the journey of a small-town girl made good, sung from the vantage of an industry obsessed with the next big thing. She zooms out and out and out until, in the album’s closing seconds, she’s singing about herself in the third person, in past tense, acknowledging that nothing is forever. “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it,” she sings. “You’ve got edge she never did/The future’s bright, dazzling.”

Almost six years after releasing her breakout single, 2018’s “Mr Rebel,” Nigerian superstar Tems delivers her debut LP, *Born in the Wild*. Of course, that interim has been characterized by a trajectory that’s trended upward at almost every turn. From her acclaimed 2020 debut EP *For Broken Ears* to global megahit collaborations with Wizkid (and later Justin Bieber) on “Essence” and Drake on “Fountains” to 2021’s sophomore EP, *If Orange Was a Place*, to appearances on 2022’s *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* soundtrack (including songwriting credits for Rihanna’s “Lift Me Up”) and Beyoncé’s *RENAISSANCE* and a Grammy win for Future and Drake’s “Wait for U” in 2023—the alté-R&B star has experienced an almost exponential rise. That kind of journey is part of what makes *Born in the Wild* all the more captivating. Over 18 tracks, Tems cracks open her journal through those career highs, and reveals how the person behind them grappled with it all. “I had to step back a bit, to check in with myself,” Tems (Temilade Openiyi) tells Apple Music, “and also just find healing from all the trauma and everything I experienced before ‘Tems.’ I think I had to unlearn a lot of things. This album is just a new way of me expressing myself, while still centering who I am in it.” Here, she works through moments of feeling like an impostor, of rebuilding her self-confidence, of learning the ins and outs of relationships, and of learning to trust herself. Don’t read that as insecure, however—this is the journal of someone who’s done the work, and who’s fully ready to embrace the next chapter. It’s all brought to life through Tems’ usual brand of honest, mature storytelling—and here, as ever, the centerpiece remains a distinctive voice that simultaneously balances multiple layers of raw, delicate emotion and a natural, unforced ease. That reflective songwriting shows a sonic maturity that’s unrestricted by genre: She traverses from R&B (“Burning”) to fusions of Afrobeats and amapiano (“Get It Right”), balanced with celebrations of culture and heritage, like her reimagined version of Seyi Sodimu’s 1997 hit, the breezy “Love Me JeJe.” Below, Tems talks through these and more key tracks from *Born in the Wild*. **“Born in the Wild”** “‘Born in the Wild’ is a story of transformation from a cocoon to a butterfly. It speaks on surviving a mental wilderness that comes with life, and coming to a place where one can thrive. It\'s about accepting oneself, and embodying the woman I was born to be. It shows the different dimensions of who Tems is, and her journey from a cub to a lioness.” **“Burning”** “‘Burning’ is about the feelings I felt when I first started getting popular as Tems. I didn\'t really understand what was happening, and everything was happening so fast. And it\'s about me looking back on that time and realizing that we are all going through something. We all have our internal battles. We all have the things that we struggle with, our triggers. And ‘Burning’ is really about understanding that I have my triggers too, and now I know that I\'m not alone. And there\'s many people that have felt the way I do about not wanting to be seen, not really being used to attention, and people trying to take advantage of you in many different ways.” **“Love Me JeJe”** “‘Love Me JeJe’ is a sweet, happy song about finding unconditional love. The joy of finding a love that doesn\'t run out and not settling for anything else. Just basking in the sun, basking in that unconditional type of love.” **“Get It Right” (feat. Asake)** “This is just about a conversation between two people and one is saying, ‘I know you\'re scared, but if you do me right, I always got your back, because that\'s who I am.’ And it\'s just about two people feeling each other and wanting to explore more.” **“Unfortunate”** “‘Unfortunate’ is about realizing that the person that you put your trust in isn\'t worth your time. And also being thankful that the person showed themselves early, and the person disappointed you. And it\'s basically finding the good in the bad. This was a disappointment, but it is actually great that it was, because it means that I\'m winning, and I\'m going to overcome this, and I don\'t need to be with you anymore. It is a blessing that I\'m not obligated by any means to stay with you, and it\'s a blessing that I\'m not with you.” **“Forever”** “Forever is about the aftermath of a breakup, when the guy comes circling back, and it\'s coming from a place of healing, it\'s coming from a place of ‘I’ve moved on already, but it\'s interesting to see you scramble because I\'m moving on. It\'s the desperation for me from you. I love that you are so desperate to get me back you\'re always checking for me, stalking me, checking for what I\'m doing, and it\'s really intriguing and fascinating to see.’” **“Free Fall” (feat. J. Cole)** “This is about, after you fell in love with someone, they fell in love too. It was great until you realize that you both were new to it, and they didn\'t really know what to do in the relationship. It\'s about knowing, ‘If I stay, I\'m going to be drained,’ and knowing your limits and setting your boundaries. It\'s basically reflecting on all of that. Reflecting on the fact that I had to go, because if I didn\'t go, it would have been detrimental.” **“Me & U”** “‘Me & U’ is about reconnecting with God. It\'s a new conversation. It\'s about reconnecting with your inner child and the truth. It\'s about now being honest with yourself about who you are, and about having faith that everything is going to be okay, as long as you believe.” **“You in My Face”** “‘You in My Face’ is a conversation with the inner me, the inner child, and it\'s about finding peace within, and also hoping that I don\'t get lost again.”

“I\'ve always wanted to be a pop star, but beyond that, I wanted to be an African pop star,” Tyla tells Apple Music. “The roots of my sound are in amapiano music, in South African and African music.” Though the megaviral 2023 single “Water” may have put the South African singer-songwriter on the proverbial map—first as a social media sensation, then as the highest-charting African female soloist ever on Billboard’s Hot 100, earning her the inaugural Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance—she’s been carefully plotting her path to the top for years. “Since I started experimenting with amapiano, I just feel like it\'s really helped me get to this point where I created something that is fresh and new, but still familiar and comes from home,” she says. “It\'s a sound of Africa, and it\'s something that I couldn\'t be more proud about.” She weaves through a blend of pop, R&B, amapiano, and Afrobeats (“pop-piano sounds cute,” she admits) across *TYLA*, a coming-of-age chronicle through love, heartbreak, and self-discovery. “I’m speaking about the things that I\'ve gone through while creating the album—basically three years in the making,” she explains. “I was becoming a woman. So it was a lot of growing that happened, and me realizing my worth, and realizing how I want to be treated—and how basically, I\'m that girl, and people need to know I\'m that girl.” While the project was brought to life with the help of global producers including Sammy Soso, Mocha, Believve, Rayo, and Sir Nolan, Tyla made sure they all had a taste of her homeland. “\[It was important\] to bring some to South Africa,” she explains, “so when we get in the studio, they have context. Some people that try amapiano sound so watered down, it\'s cringey. So even though I am mixing it with pop and R&B, I didn\'t want it to sound watered down. Music is our everything in Africa. The way we speak, the way we dance, literally, our dance moves—they come so naturally. It\'s just in us. It’s our essence.” Below, Tyla talks us through her debut album. **“Intro” (Tyla & Kelvin Momo)** “I wanted to start off my album with something that was truly South African, something that showed people the root of where I started, before ‘Water,’ before all of these mixtures. I secretly recorded a voice note when I was in a session with Kelvin Momo. I loved hearing the people in the session, speaking, hearing the language, the accents. It was so raw and real. Kelvin Momo is my favorite amapiano producer—his music and his sound is my heart.” **“Safer”** “The message of the song is something that I feel like a lot of people could relate to. And the energy of the song I feel like is a strong intro to open an album.” **“Water”** “‘Water’ surpassed all expectations. I could\'ve never expected all of these accolades—a Grammy, the Billboard Hot 100, people all over the world dancing and pouring water down their back. From the time I finished recording the song, it was all that I was listening to. It was also like a step away from what I was used to, because I \[had been\] *very* PG. And with this one, I was more grown up and I was experimenting more. And even though I don\'t enjoy vulgar music, I feel like we were able to make the song speak about what it speaks about, but in a way that\'s friendly.” **“Truth or Dare”** “This was the song where I was playing more house-y with it. It’s me calling out people, being like, ‘Hey, *now* you care.’ I\'m not that type of person, but these are feelings that I felt around the time where I\'m like, ‘Where did this person come from? Out of nowhere, you want to now talk to me?’ and I literally hate it. I\'m sure a lot of people have felt that.” **“No.1” (feat. Tems)** “Tems and I had been wanting to make a song for long now. We ended up making it work, and Tems\' voice alone is so amazing, so unique. The song is for everyone, but when I had it in mind, it was really for the girls—me and Tems, girl power, African girls—and we were just really pushing that message of ‘I\'m leaving. I don\'t need anybody. If this is not serving me anymore, I’m gone, and I\'m going to be okay.’ Always put yourself before anything.” **“Breathe Me”** “It\'s a song that\'s so emotional and so real. It\'s just about love, of how strong love is, and how you don\'t even need anything else. I don\'t need anything else. You don\'t need anything else—just me, and you; just breathe me and we\'ll be fine.” **“Butterflies”** “With ‘Butterflies,’ I was in a session with \[producer and songwriter Ari PenSmith\] and he was playing me some stuff that he\'s worked on, and I was like, \'Cool, cool, cool.\' And then he played this, and I fell in love with it. It sat so perfectly with my voice. I connected with the song instantly, and it was too specific to what I was going through to not do anything with it.” **“On and On”** “This was \[an initial\] version of my sound, before ‘Water’ and everything. I made this with Corey Marlon Lindsay-Keay in South Africa. We were supposed to go out, and we didn\'t end up going out, so I was dressed up in a whole outfit in the studio session, and he was producing. I love the song so much because it\'s so nostalgic but new. I love that it feels like old-school R&B. I love that it has hints of Aaliyah\'s influence, but it\'s new, and fresh, and African—all things that are Tyla. The messaging is not so serious—it’s literally about not wanting a party to end.” **“Jump” (Tyla, Gunna & Skillibeng)** “‘Jump’ is a very different vibe. I really just wanted to tell people who I am, and I had to show my confidence through the song. And the opening line, with Skilli being like, \'Original girl, you want a replica? No.\' There\'s no replica. That intro was already perfect, and it segues to that line of me saying, \'They\'ve never had a pretty girl from Joburg/They see me now and that\'s what they prefer.\' That line is just—it’s too iconic for me, and I\'m just so excited to hear all the girls sing it, all the Joburg girls sing it, all the girls from home. And having Gunna on it, I really feel like it took me into that world further, making it even more raw and cool.” **“ART”** “When I\'m with someone that treats me so good, treats me well, treats me like art, treats me like a princess, I will be there for them. I will be their art piece. We also played with that wording where it can be ‘art piece,’ but also your peace and your comfort. As a woman, that\'s how I want to be treated, and that\'s how I would treat you if you treat me that way. It’s about being treasured.” **“On My Body” (Tyla & Becky G)** “This was such a fun one because it’s in my world, but also I played a bit with the Latin vibes. The feature came so organically—I was in studio, and she was in a session next door. She loved it, and she recorded a verse, and I absolutely died. I died. I just love her touch, and how it just broadened the audience, because now it\'s just bringing everybody into this experience. It\'s a melting pot with all these genres, and I love that I was able to expand it even further.” **“Priorities”** “This song was probably the most difficult to share, because it\'s really letting people into my heart and mind, and how I feel I\'ve been with myself. I feel like people would resonate with it, and it speaks about what a lot of people feel and may not express. \[The idea of having spread yourself too thin\] is something that\'s so raw and real, that not even just women, men, everybody feels.” **“To Last”** “I love this song with all my heart. I was in the Vaal with LuuDadeejay, and I literally finished this song in five minutes. It was based off an experience that my friend was going through at the time. About a year prior, I wrote the lines ‘You never gave us a chance, it\'s like you never wanted to last.’ And that note just came to mind, and the song just flowed out of me. I ended up going through something that made me feel that way. It was like I told the future, which is not good—but I fell in love with the song again. It’s so South African: It’s amapiano, it\'s house-y, it\'s our sound.” **“Water (Remix)” (Tyla & Travis Scott)** “Travis reached out—he loved ‘Water,’ and around the time, I was like, \'I don\'t want a remix, I\'m cool.\' But Travis Scott was so unexpected that I wanted to do it so bad, and he absolutely killed it. He added some South African shout-outs in his verse, and I just knew that people from home were going to love it—he acknowledged us, and he mentioned \[the South African telephone country code\] +27 and all those things. And I also love that he brought a different energy to the song. Everyone knows ‘Water’ to be that summer banger, and now Travis made it still the summer banger, but also more gritty. Putting him on an African-sounding song was just the perfect collab.”

“It’s definitely different,” Young Miko tells Apple Music about *att.* “You’ll feel the evolution in the music.” For anyone who thought her full-length debut would be merely an extension of 2022’s *TRAP KITTY*, the Puerto Rican rapper offers a multi-pronged, genre-mashing rebuke. Expanding well beyond prior hits like “Riri” and the Feid team-up “Classy 101,” as well as high-profile collabs with Bad Bunny and KAROL G, her album boldly engages with sounds and styles that help solidify her status as one of Latin music’s most compelling young artists. The nostalgic charms of “arcoiris” and “wiggy” speak to an era in hip-hop from well before trap music’s global dominance. An irresistible highlight, “princess peach” reframes a mid-2000s electro-meets-crunk style to tell a love story from a queer perspective. That freedom is even more prominent on “MADRE,” a house music jam that centers the genre’s LGBTQ+ foundations. “I definitely can’t die without me being able to just say whatever I want to say and express myself,” she says proudly. “Hiding yourself sounds so exhausting.” Naturally, Miko retains many of the familiar elements and touchpoints that pushed her deservedly into the spotlight. Her trap and reggaetón bona fides remain very much intact, evident on opener “rookie of the year” and late standout “curita,” among others of note. She reunites with Feid on the thumping “offline” and cultivates a dancehall reggae vibe with her “COLMILLO” collaborators Jowell & Randy on the inspired “ID.” But mostly, *att.* is an expression of a singular talent seizing her moment and standing out in the best of ways. “At the end of the day, that’s what every artist tries to be: unique.”