Variety's Best Albums of 2025 (So Far)

Introduced to the world as a bubbly TikTok influencer, the singer/dancer/actor spent 2024 pulling off what looked like a total reinvention—screaming over the remix of mentor Charli xcx’s “Von dutch” remix, then releasing the steamy “Diet Pepsi,” a single charming enough to seduce even the doubters. In fact, Addison Rae was just reintroducing herself. “I always knew that I wanted to make music, I knew I wanted to perform,” Rae tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “That was something that was really obvious to me since I was a little girl.” And TikTok was the best way for a teenager from Lafayette, Louisiana, to catapult herself into the seemingly inaccessible world of showbiz. Pursuing her pop-star dreams in LA studio sessions to write the songs that would become her first EP (2023’s polarizing *AR*), Rae found herself deferring to the professionals. “When I moved here and started doing sessions, I was like, ‘I need as much guidance as possible,’” she says. “Then, over time, I really started to lean on myself. I really started to lean on my abilities.” In February 2024, Rae met songwriter/producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (both part of the publishing camp of Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin) and wrote the effervescent hook of “Diet Pepsi” that same day. “\[‘Diet Pepsi’\] was such a natural beginning to all of this,” says Rae. “I think it was a perfect introduction in so many ways.” Cue a string of curveball singles, each one presenting an unexpected new facet, from the moody, minor-key “High Fashion” to the Björk-inspired “Headphones On.” It feels apt, then, that her debut album drops the “Rae” and simply goes by *Addison*—a collection of dreamy, intense pop songs that sound like self-discovery, tied together less by genre than by mood. Tracks like “Fame Is a Gun” and “Money Is Everything” expertly straddle camp and sincerity: “You’ve got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life!” she winks on the former, a dizzy synth-pop number on the perils of hitting the big time. The songs on *Addison* are not exactly club bangers, though they’re informed by Rae’s childhood as a dancer; nor are any of them obvious hits. But Rae relished the opportunity to let her creative instincts run wild. “Once you start playing it safe, feeling like, ‘Okay, I’m going to respond with what people want,’ you lose all your freedom,” she says. “You lose all desire for the whole purpose of starting it, and feeling like it’s a form of expression and a reflection. It’s more scary to let that go and give people exactly what they think they want.” As for what Rae learned in the process of writing the album? “Let yourself play. Let yourself have fun, let yourself mess up,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘All right, this is the real me now.’ No—it’s always been the real me, and those experiences have completely guided and shaped me to where I am now. It is about arrival—arrival to who I feel like I’ve become, and who has experienced all these ups and downs, to now land here, in this person that I am now.”

Scores of Puerto Rican artists have used their music to express love and pride in their island, but few do so with the same purposeful vigor as Bad Bunny. The superstar from Vega Baja is responsible for numerous songs that center his homeland, from unofficial national anthems like “Estamos Bien” and “El Apagón” to powerful posse cuts like “ACHO PR” with veteran reggaetón luminaries Arcángel, De La Ghetto, and Ñengo Flow. More recently, he’s been decidedly direct about his passions and concerns, expressed in vivid detail on 2024’s standalone single “Una Velita.” Positioned as his sixth proper studio album, *DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS* centers Puerto Rico in his work more so than before, celebrating various musical styles within its legacy. While 2023’s *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* validated his trapero past with a more modern take on the sound he emerged with in the 2010s, this follow-up largely diverges from hip-hop, demonstrating his apparent aversion to repeating himself from album to album. Instead, house music morphs into plena on “EL CLúB,” the latter genre resurfacing later in splendorous fashion on “CAFé CON RON” with Los Pleneros de la Cresta. Befitting its title, “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR” is set to a sleek reggaetón rhythm for prime-time perreo vibes, as is also the case for “KETU TeCRÉ” and the relatively more rugged “EoO.” A bold salsa statement, “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” pays apparent homage to some seminal Fania releases by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, with traces of the instrumental interplay of “Juanito Alimaña” and an irresistible coda reminiscent to that of “Periódico de Ayer.” Regardless of style, the political and the personal thematically blur throughout the album, a new year’s gloom hanging over “PIToRRO DE COCO” and a metaphorical wound left open after the poignant “TURISTA.” As before, Bad Bunny remains an excellent and inventive collaborator, linking here primarily with other Puerto Ricans as more than a mere symbolic gesture. Sociopolitically minded indie group Chuwi join for the eclectic and vibrant “WELTiTA,” its members providing melodic vocals that both complement and magnify those of their host. Carolina natives Dei V and Omar Courtz form a formidable trio for the thumping dancehall retrofuturism of “VeLDÁ,” while RaiNao proves an exceedingly worthy duet partner on “PERFuMITO NUEVO.”

Justin Vernon has never been shy about bearing the weight of his instantly mythical origin story and his fast, unlikely trajectory into global stardom. Four albums and 18 years after *For Emma, Forever Ago*, *SABLE, fABLE* is a document of finding peace—joy, even—and a testament to the work it’s taken to get there. “This record, as much as that first record, if not more, was really just a keystone for healing and growing away from this time period where I felt trapped,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Once COVID wiped out the tour plans for 2019’s *i,i*, Vernon, like pretty much everyone, used the time to take stock, and he came to understand, among other things, that touring might not be the healthiest thing for him. So he made songs. “It really was like, ‘Okay, I’m not well and I won\'t make it if I don\'t do something to change this pretty drastically and stop the whole touring engine,” Vernon says. “There was a sense of relief and an incredible grief to say goodbye to the team that we built. I was like, ‘Let me just get these songs done and just sneak them out there so I can just get them off my chest,’ because that’s what I really needed: to finish them, to learn what was inside them.” The first of these songs, written at the beginning of lockdown, “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is a snapshot of that lonely, uncertain time, but it feels bigger and more hopeful than that to Vernon with five years of hindsight. “In the short term, it makes you feel better, but it’s also a way to lean into your grief and lean into your pain and lean into your guilt,” he says. “I think eventually when I hear that song now, I feel clean from everything that I was dealing with when I had to write it and after I wrote it. But it takes years for things to take shape and for internal things to budge.” From there, the album begins to let more light in with songs like the evidently more hopeful “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (“It’s just all about celebrating this moment right here and just sort of trying to express that heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest feeling”) and “If Only I Could Wait,” featuring vocals from Danielle Haim of HAIM, which Vernon considers nothing less than his favorite American rock band. The album splits the difference between the immediacy of *For Emma* and the often inscrutable maximalism of *22, A Million* and *i,i*. It was during the album’s long gestation that Vernon’s profile was boosted by his work with Taylor Swift, even as his own project remained in the shadows, Vernon exercising a patience and restraint and creating a healthier perspective that was nothing less than career-saving, if not life-saving. “We are insanely beautiful creatures,” he says. “And so I think where I’ve got to with the simplicity of this music, it was just like, I just want to give it to you. I just want to have it be my version of Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’—just boom, here it is. We’re not going to hide, we’re not going to put it behind any drapery. We’re going to just give it to you as much as humanly possible.”

“I’ve been singing with Elton all my life—he just didn’t know it until about 10 or 20 years ago,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about working with the storied singer-songwriter Sir Elton John. Featuring compositions co-written by John and Carlile along with John’s longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin and producer Andrew Watt, their collaborative album *Who Believes in Angels?* is a triumphant collection that celebrates the eternal promise held by music. For John, after ending his touring career in 2023 on the highest note possible with performances at Dodger Stadium and Glastonbury, he was seeking a project that would be forward-looking and feel different from his usual collaboration with Taupin. “If I’d just made another Elton John record, I would’ve killed myself,” he says. “I needed her. I needed her talent, her energy, her humor, and her brilliant lyrics. I’ve got two of the greatest lyric writers in the world, Bernie Taupin and Brandi Carlile, and the lyrics in front of me. When we got going, it was like, *whoosh*—like an express train.” The album was done in three weeks, start to finish. *Who Believes in Angels?* opens with back-to-back salutes to two other titans of queer pop—the emotionally charged singer-songwriter Laura Nyro and the fiery soul-preacher Little Richard. While Carlile credits John as one of her heroes and biggest influences, the project is a true team effort, with cuts like the raucous “The River Man” and “Someone to Belong To” feeling inspired simultaneously by John’s carousing, hooky rock and Carlile’s meticulously crafted Americana. It is, as John notes, a proper “duet album,” with both their voices harmonizing through each song. The prospects of getting real and celebrating differences recur throughout; the questioning title track tackles the idea of true friendship where people “set the pleasantries aside,” while the joyful “Swing for the Fences” highlights those who resemble “a heartbeat cannon in a quiet spot.” *Who Believes in Angels?* is structured like an old-fashioned vinyl record even in its digital release, with definitive closing tracks for each five-song “side.” Both tracks—one by a solo Carlile, the other by John—have a sense of bittersweetness. Carlile’s hushed ballad “You Without Me” preemptively looks at how her life will change when her children leave the nest. John’s sweeping “When This Old World Is Done with Me” comes to terms with his mortality and looks back on his life—“I’ve had clouds with silver linings, complicated mornings,” he sings—with a brass band providing its mournful yet hopeful coda. Together, they make a resounding statement about life’s perpetual motion—one that began from a place of frustration and ended up in one of gratitude. I was in such a horrible mood when I started making this record,“ John says. ”I was really tired. I was irritable. The world was going crazy. I needed her to push me. I knew she could just go along with anything. She’s that talented.”

One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting *The Crow* reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). *EUSEXUA*, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, *Caprisongs*), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style. The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from *EUSEXUA*’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.

Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.

“I’ve been realizing that I really made the album that I needed to heal myself,” Kali Uchis tells Apple Music about *Sincerely,* perhaps her most liberating work yet. The Colombian American singer-songwriter’s catalog has never felt slight or frivolous, whether in English or in Spanish. Yet this full-length follow-up to her 2024 *ORQUÍDEAS* dyad presents as something truly unique, arriving roughly a decade after her promising EP debut *Por Vida*. The majority of the songs here began simply as voice notes, fortuitously captured in inspired moments outside of the confines or pressures of a studio setting. “Messages would just feel like they were directly coming through me, and I just had to get them out,” she says. Given such natural creative origins, it should come as little surprise that the actual process behind the album eschewed industry norms altogether, favoring home recording and unconventional settings. And despite the demonstrated level of guest vocal talent at her fingertips, she opted out of features, too. “When you’re making emotional music, you have to actually dig into difficult subjects,” she says, marking a clear distinction between this piece and its star-powered predecessor. As a result, *Sincerely,* feels disarmingly intimate for what is ostensibly a pop album, even one from as consistently adventurous an artist as Uchis. The evocative moments of opener “Heaven Is a Home…” and closer “ILYSMIH” speak on love in grand and sweeping gestures, the passing of her mother and the birth of her son making understandably profound impacts on the work. Influences like Cocteau Twins and Fiona Apple can be felt in all that comes between those bookends. “There’s a lot of grief, but there’s a lot of joy,” she says, describing what seeps through the veil of “Silk Lingerie,” or the vamps of “Territorial.” Excess punctuation on titles like “Lose My Cool,” and “For: You” hint at the flowing prose of her lyrics as it contributes to an even greater whole. “I think it is a celebration of life in its own way,” she says, “in the sense of finding beauty in the pain and taking the good.”

With every album since 2017’s *Unstoppable*, KAROL G progressively moved beyond expectations. Clearly not content with being the top reggaetonera on the scene, the Colombian singer refined and repositioned herself with each new full-length, from the beach dreaminess of *OCEAN* through the diverse sides of her *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* era. Her unapologetic eagerness to cross genre lines while still building with longtime allies like Ovy On the Drums grew her global fanbase exponentially, outpacing just about everyone else in Latin music who emerged during the mid-2010s boom. “It’s amazing because it’s a dream come true to have all the genres that I touch, the musicians that I work with, producers, composers, the places that I went to get this album done—even the time that I had to talk to myself...and be really focused on the process,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Now fully vested in the trappings of megastardom, she offers what is easily her most ambitious album to date in *Tropicoqueta*, its titular portmanteau a marked pivot that reflects how reggaetón’s baddest bichota successfully evolved into one of the world’s biggest pop artists. Among the album’s triumphs is just how at ease KAROL sounds on these 20 shapeshifting tracks, adapting and thriving over different sounds in ways that even some of her famous peers could never. “I really wanted to go to the roots, and I went back to all the maestros in the music, like even the arrangement people, all of them in every genre,” she says. “More than new and fresh, it feels like home. It feels like roots. It feels like what we used to be, and now we’re kind of forgetting where we come from.” Aiming to genuinely connect with and honor Latin musical cultures more broadly, she faithfully plays to homegrown vallenato on the pleading “No Puedo Vivir Sin Él” and reaches for cumbia villera on “Cuando Me Muera Te Olvido.” Decidedly Caribbean forms like bachata and dembow feature on “Amiga Mía” with Greeicy and “Un Gatito Me Llamó,” respectively. Her fusions spark joy as well, combining New York City’s sexy drill with Brazilian baile funk on “Bandida Entrenada” and embracing tropical pop on bilingual standout “Papasito.” And while Latin Afrobeats is essentially its own active subgenre at this point, she holds space for herself within it on the somewhat mysterious “Verano Rosa” featuring Feid. None of this means that KAROL’s given up on reggaetón, of course. She sprinkles in a gratifying amount of it throughout, beginning with the poppy perreo of “LATINA FOREVA” and continuing on deeper cuts like “Tu Perfume” and the Mariah Angeliq reunion “FKN Movie.” Elsewhere, as on “Se Puso Linda,” that familiar polyrhythm operates more like a texture than a driver, leaving room for her femme-forward storytelling to shine. The sheer power of her relatable lyricism is hard to deny as well, from the character-driven world-building of “Ivonny Bonita” to the romantic mischievousness of “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido.” As for the album’s title, she explains the inspiration. “For this one, I was feeling like there’s a lot of congas in the songs,” she says. “A lot—like, I think the main character is the congas. That sound is super tropical. *Coqueta para nosotros* is this flirty girl that is, like, super secure of herself, so I just add ‘tropical’ at the beginning, and I got this new name for my album that, I think, expressed perfectly the world that we are in.”

“That is who Lady Gaga is to me,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of creating *MAYHEM*. “Maybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.” In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album—which she calls her “favorite record in a long time”—its own thing. “*ARTPOP* was a vibe. *Joanne* was a sound. *Chromatica* had a sound. All different. *The Fame Monster* was more chaotic. *The Fame* was theatrical pop. *Born This Way*, to me, had more of a metal/electro New York vibe to it,” she says. “I actually made the effort making *MAYHEM* to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.” Indeed, *MAYHEM* traverses—and oftentimes melds—the various flavors of Mother Monster’s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited “Garden of Eden” follows the trend of what she calls “2000 throwbacks.” With its sparkly synths, “LoveDrug” might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut “LoveGame.” She even specifically admits the “electro-grunge influence” seeps its way in—especially apparent in “Perfect Celebrity,” “Vanish into You,” and “The Beast.” The latter even shows shades of *Joanne*, but “Blade of Grass” and her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile” really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display. It’s also all incredibly personal to her. “The album is a series of gothic dreams,” she says. “I say it’s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.” Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks, in her own words. **“Abracadabra”** “I think I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think ‘Abracadabra’ is very much my sound—something that I honed in \[on\] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me. And it’s the thing that I’m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.” **“Perfect Celebrity”** “It’s super angry: ‘I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.’ It’s almost comical, this idea that any time I’m in the room with anyone, there’s me—Stefani—and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It’s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn’t feel honest to me on *MAYHEM* to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I’m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I’m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.” **“Shadow of a Man”** “That song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.” **“The Beast”** “In that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who’s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about \[my fiancé\] Michael \[Polansky\] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, ‘You can’t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart’s racing, you’re growling, and we both know why.’ It’s like somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.’” **“Blade of Grass”** “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn’t have as much life around me to inspire me.”

The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”

“It’s crazy how me and the music have always helped each other out,” Moonchild Sanelly tells Apple Music. The South African phenomenon, who first made waves in 2015 with her debut album *Rabulapha!*, has transcended geographical borders, establishing her own original genre (“future ghetto funk”) her own, distinctive image—her signature blue “Moonmop” hairstyle is literally trademarked—and counts Beyoncé, Damon Albarn, Wizkid, and Fred again.. among her fans. *Full Moon*, produced by Johan Hugo (Self Esteem, Bruno Mars), is Sanelly’s third studio album. When work began on the record, the only plan in place was for Hugo to helm the entire project. “Everything else came out of me. I just let it happen,” she says. The results combine all the key elements of Sanelly’s artistry—neoteric beats, instantly memorable hooks, bold messages of self-determination, queer pride, and sexual liberation—with a new ingredient: raw vulnerability. Two songs in particular, the penultimate track “Mntanami” and album closer “I Was the Biggest Curse,” find Sanelly addressing universal human experiences (absentee fathers, abortion) through exploration of her own difficult history. “Everything that happened—however great, however dark—feels like it was for this moment where the music wasn’t focused on a relationship or how other people made me feel,” she says. “It’s about me. I wasn’t in a rush. I allowed my emotions to come out. There’s things you don’t even remember because you’ve had to fight a lot and you don’t remember because there was no time for tears. You just had to make a plan and figure it out.” For all that *Full Moon* tackles heavy topics, the album is an undeniably joyous listen, packed full of brain-tickling production flourishes and innumerable flashes of playful humor, sharp wisdom, and unshakable self-confidence. It’s Sanelly’s most fearless work yet, but, she says, “I didn’t question it. I wasn’t even scared recording it. I used to write the songs that I should have heard on the radio, to know that there should be a difference between being violated and actual pleasure. Songs that would’ve made me question the things that were being done to me—that were sexual—that I hid. But these songs, I think it’s the songs that I needed when I was a kid. It’s not in the age or experience that you’ve had. It doesn’t matter what I’m saying, but what I’m able to touch in you, which is the emotion. The feeling of love, feeling of joy, feeling of freedom.” Here, Sanelly shares more insight into the songs on *Full Moon*, track by track. **“Scrambled Eggs”** “I was in Sweden making the album and I was making avo scrambled eggs. I was like, ‘I eat avo scrambled eggs. I love bagels, I love bread, I eat avo…’ I was like, ‘Wait, that’s a hook.’ The beat is funny. Johan had this beat for a very long time. It was very close to his heart. He played and he played and he played it. It was played every day. I was like, ‘You know, I’m going to write for this song, but I need to sit with it’—because now I’ve got to the place of knowing that he’s been holding onto to this beat forever. When I think about \[the lyric\] ‘I’m a walking billboard, bunny,’ I’m very chilled, you don’t know how I move. I’m not a Gucci flex girl, so when I make money I’m not wasting it like that. I flex cute, I’m not loud. Eating avo scrambled eggs every day is really a flex for me, I love it.” **“Big Booty”** “‘Big Booty’ is literally a love letter to my ass, because it’s had my back through thick and thin, and it helps me shake the world. I was curvy growing up and I got teased about my booty, because our examples \[of ideal beauty standards\] were people like Britney Spears. My mom was the one person who’d give me shorts and say, ‘Own it, own that body.’ And I guess studying fashion helped me to express myself in general. My body became part of my whole thing, because even in fashion school, my models would always be curvy—I just wanted a different example from what was on the screen. So I just wanted to say, ‘Shout out, girl, you’ve had me forever. From when you were a problem because I was teased about you, you stuck by me even though I didn’t appreciate you. And you’re still with me now, and I love you even more. So thank you.’” **“In My Kitchen”** “Basically, in the kitchen, I cook great sex. I cook penis. I chop it. My sex is banging, so I chop it. I don’t chop veggies, I chop ‘pipi.’” **“To Kill a Single Girl (Tequila)”** “I had to quit tequila. It came with a lot of regrets. I am pretty much open and honest and ‘the truth hurts’ anyway, but on tequila, my words had thorns, unnecessary thorns. And having to apologize for something you don’t even remember—and you can hear hints of it having some truth, but the way you delivered it, you don’t even know what the fuck came over you—was the problem. I just got tired of fucking up with the ones that choose to love me, because my family is chosen people, not blood. So I was like, ‘OK, instead of dropping the truth, I’ll drop tequila.’ I don’t miss it because I don’t miss what it came with. Pissing yourself! I never thought I’d live piss-drunk. That’s not my story. I’m a stoner.” **“Do My Dance”** “I don’t need \[men\]. I want them, I choose them. And I don’t tolerate them because I don’t need them. My 16-year-old daughter’s friend said that her dream is to be a housewife. My daughter was like, ‘I don’t know that. I know hyper-independence. I know my mom dates who she wants when she wants, and she leaves who she wants when she wants. She’s always traveling for work. I’ve never seen a man run my household. I want the freedom I know exists, the freedom my mom has. She speaks her mind, answers to nobody, chooses who she wants, can do whatever she wants, and doesn’t need a man.’ Girls are not supposed to be free and liberated and on their own, but I’m a head in my house. There’s nothing you can bring to me that’s going to change how I move. You can join my dance or leave.” **“Falling”** “My family didn’t support me when I ran away from home after my mum died. I was already different and they thought I was probably going to be on drugs, because I’m forward, I just speak my mind. They attached my freedom to weakness. I felt alone, but that was my fuel. It doesn’t matter what you’re served with, it’s what you do with it. When you know how to find the silver lining in any situation, you become untouchable. Whatever you give me, I will find the lesson in it, and I’ll grow. So in this song, I’m having conversations with myself in the mirror. ‘I’m scared of falling, scared of losing/Bitch, I know my family looking’ and I’m not going to give them the satisfaction. It’s for everyone who is motivated by anyone they need to make proud, they want to make proud. \[It’s\] that conversation you have with yourself before you leave the house: ‘I’m going to win. Let’s go get it.’” **“Gwara Gwara”** “This song is a manual on how to dangle pussy when they think you’re just a vagina beyond your worth. Dangle that pussy and get what you want, because they already see you as a vagina they need to get into. Let them. Dangle, dangle, dangle. I flip everything in my power. I don’t recognize victimized women. I’m not that woman. I didn’t come from those women. I knew fucked-up women who took matters into their own hands. So I was always shaking any space I was in. Whenever I had to write, they were shook. No one else sounded like me. That’s how my signature was carved out at the beginning and I was very clear that I wanted to have my own identity, because that license means you can create any world. I created one where I liberate the bad bitches and we keep fucking shit up. I represent anyone that shakes society—the black sheep and the women.” **“Boom”** “\[When I write a song\] the subject matter comes—or pictures come into my head—and then I start seeing the story and then I get the narrative. This one got me thinking about rich n\*\*\*as. They’re so busy making money they forgot their sexual skill. I’ve met ones that have both, but it’s rare. The most common is the broke n\*\*\*a who compensates for the zeroes in the bank and fucks so good—you’re buying the condom. Rich n\*\*\*as do everything, but damn…stamina in is little.” **“Sweet & Savage”** “The lyric used to be ‘I like boys, I nibble on girls now and then.’ It was such a good hook, but it didn’t hit in that project at the time. So I was like, ‘I’m not wasting this hook. I’m going to do it again.’ I hadn’t dated girls at the time, I’d just been playing with girls. Then I had a real relationship with a girl and I think I also had more experience, so even the sound is completely different from when I first used the hook—it was more hip-hop when I was just playing around. I never thought about my sexuality or anything. In the home that I grew up in, we were exposed to queer people. My cousin was queer as a kid, she’s a lesbian. When I fell in love with my girlfriend, I just fell in love with my girlfriend. No announcing. What’s coming out? There’s no coming out to anything. Whenever I write a song, I always imagine my audience being able to sing along to the hook. That’s how I see the crowd. The world can learn what it wants, but this one is for us. For us, by us. We’re celebrating it.” **“I Love People”** “This was my first poem after losing my virginity. I got horny and I wrote that bitch. 2006. I was 17. I was ready, first of all. All the girls \[I knew\] that had already lost their virginity said they regretted it and I knew I wasn’t going to have regrets. I was at school in Durban, but I wasn’t fascinated with the boys there, so I went back home for the holidays and lost it to my older brother’s friend. I knew I loved sex from then. Then I went back to Durban for school and wrote exactly what I went through, what it felt like. No regrets.” **“Mntanami”** “I wrote this song as an apology letter from my kids’ fathers to them, and my father to me. ‘Mntanami’ means ‘my child.’ I’m giving a voice to fathers who want to take accountability but don’t have the words because they weren’t taught to speak, to use words to express their emotions. I played the role of those people, so instead of men feeling attacked, feeling hurt, I gave them a voice so they can be heard. I was intentional about writing it in Xhosa, because I played it to maybe five, six people and they all cried, because they don’t have fathers. Two different people that didn’t understand \[the language\], they were still touched by the subject matter and how I approached the song. I think they got the feeling. It made me think, ‘I’m going to have to write it in English.’ It’s the first time I feel like the subject matter is so broad that it needs to be bigger than how I think it’s going to be. It’s bigger than how I’ve written it.” **“I Was the Biggest Curse”** “This one just came out. It’s about my experience running away from home, because back then, my baby daddy was a couch potato. He was busy with meetings, but I never saw the money. I didn’t even know girls could stand by the bar and get free drinks because I was out there tucking my tummy in, six months pregnant, paying for two rents. We’d go to his gig, he hasn’t organized how we’re going to get home to our house that I’ve organized for us to live in, because I pay the rent. I get him a job, he gets fired. I had to go through four abortions—I had to change hospitals so they wouldn’t know my face— and the last one, he made me wash my pants. He used to fuck me on my period, but that night he said, ‘A Zulu man doesn’t wipe blood.’ It was dark in that house I found for us. People were in the lounge, there was no light, and I had to guess where the blood was while I was terminating. It was the last time. This is a song about the sacrifices I made, but it’s also a shout out to him for being lazy because I grew up to be a baddie very fast. I had to fight for myself in general. And I won. So thank you for being a lazy cunt. I left you where I left you and I’m gone.”

Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”

For Rose Gray, the club has always represented freedom. “If you’re going to the right places, all inhibitions are dropped and no one cares what you do,” the East London-born singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “There’s something primal about lots of people in a room listening to heavy drums.” Gray would know. Ever since her late teens, she’s spent every available moment immersed in nightlife, building a community of go-go dancers, promoters, and DJs who not only love clubbing but respect it, too. The music she makes is similarly reverent: scooping into the vast melting pot of dance music, she welds together everything from *Screamadelica*-inspired acid house, delectable nu-disco, subterranean future garage, and psychedelic trance. “I think there’s a real bond with anyone that makes dance music that means you’re allowed to take and borrow sounds and melodies and it’s celebrated,” she says. With this debut album, though, Gray set out to refine a sound that felt her own. Inspired by pop icons such as Kylie Minogue, Robyn, and *Ray of Light*-era Madonna, she recruited some best-in-biz collaborators, including songwriting master Justin Tranter, who signed Gray to their publishing house, Sega Bodega, Sam Homaee, Zhone, Sur Back, Uffie, and Alex Metric. The result is *Louder, Please*, a euphoric and chest-achingly candid distillation of British club culture and turn-of-the-millennium pop. “I had to really grab that sound by the horns,” Gray says. “I think this record is the most pop out of anything that I’ve done. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to do this.’” The album title itself is another representation of Gray’s personality. “I’ve probably grown up being dangerously obsessed with loud music,” she says. “But the ‘please’ at the end is very me. I’m quite maximalist and I can be brash, but I will always be polite, which I think feels like some of the record. It’s heavy, but there’s a sweetness to it.” Read on for Rose Gray’s track-by-track guide to *Louder, Please*. **“Damn”** “I was writing with \[The Blessed Madonna collaborator\] Pat Alvarez and Caitlin Stubbs \[Dom Dolla, Bebe Rexha\]. We’d actually written a completely different song, but it went into this quite industrial techno record. The song is basically a stream of consciousness of me just blurting out all the things I do to keep myself sane. It has this introduction energy, to me. It feels like, ‘I have arrived.’ It’s maximalist and in your face. Also, if you pick apart the lyrics, there are Easter eggs to other songs on the album.” **“Free”** “I don’t like the word ‘spiritual,’ but this song feels connected. I was in LA when I wrote it and, lyrically, I definitely wanted to play on this idea that you might have everything, but really what matters is how you feel in yourself. I used to get goosebumps when I listened to it. It feels a bit more grounded than the rest of the album. I like that it comes after ‘Damn’ because it’s like the devil and then the angel as I bring in the sweet-summer, window-down, sun-kissing-your-skin vibes.” **“Wet & Wild”** “I’ve had moments, more so when I was a little bit younger, of leaving the club in a drunken state in a bit of a mic-drop moment. Maybe you’ve had a row or maybe the guy you’re with is flirting with someone else. So you’re just out the club, maybe you’re crying and sort of expecting your group of friends to know that you’ve left and want them to follow you. But that doesn’t happen because everyone’s having a great night and just thinks you’ve gone to the toilet or something. That’s what ‘Wet & Wild’ means. It’s a bit of an eff you! I’m going to run in the streets of the city, feel myself, and have a little cry.” **“Just Two”** “I worked on this song with Uffie, who has become a very good friend. I think she’s the coolest human ever. I’m in awe of her. I had actually written the chorus of the melody and had that on my phone, but I wanted to do something upbeat and have really ’90s chords. Having Uffie in the room just shaped it to become a little bit more underground. Lyrically, the song is about how, when you’ve found your person, there’s nothing better than being with them and sharing a life with them and all the things that you do just for a kiss. It’s quite cheeky.” **“Tectonic”** “I’m in a relationship with someone who is away a lot, and I wanted to use nature to describe that feeling of separation. I feel like we are connected, but when we’re away from each other, there’s a crashing of tectonic plates. I really enjoy the soundscape. Alex Metric, who I wrote it with, is such a little tech wizard that he has a lot of these synths from the ’90s. I think he actually bought some stuff off of William Orbit, who produced *Ray of Light*, which is one of my favorite albums ever. I could make a whole album in the world of this song.” **“Party People”** “Writing this song was a whirlwind. I met Sega Bodega a few times and he said I should come to Paris to write with him. People say they want to work with you, and it’s like, ‘Is it actually happening?’ We wrote three songs, including ‘Party People.’ It’s kind of a nursery rhyme. I feel like I am surrounded by party people and I’m fascinated by them, honestly. I have this group of friends, and if they were living in the late ’80s and ’90s, they would’ve been at every rave. I based the song on them and how they’re all very free. I think ‘Party People’ feels like I’m sat on the edges of a club or at some warehouse and I’m watching everything that’s happening. I’m obsessed with people that party.” **“Angel of Satisfaction”** “For the last couple of years, I’ve seen real success happen to friends. I’ve been at these industry things and you see the people that you grew up idolizing and who, in my eyes, have made it. And then I just always think, ‘Is that really what I want?’ There are a lot of questions I’m always asking myself. I definitely think that there are very healthy ways of doing it. But it’s quite a scary world out there. I wanted to create a song that was my debate on that subject, and I did have some sort of visualization of it in a dream. I explained that to Justin Tranter, and they were able to help make it digestible. In the end, we wrote it very quickly.” **“Switch”** “This song was written the first time I worked with Justin. It felt like things were aligning for me, and I felt a sort of switch personally that I had become the artist I envisioned I’d become as a 17-year-old. I just said, ‘I feel like things are really switching up for me.’ I knew that ‘switch’ was a great lyric. Justin and I talked for quite a while about what switch can mean, and we formed the song. I remember when I first wrote it, I thought it sounded like a game: bouncy, fun, candyfloss pop, but also quite sexy and hot if you look at the lyrics.” **“Hackney Wick”** “With this song, we had made the instrumental kind of roughly what it is now. I was trying lots of different vocal things on it and they just weren’t working. Then I said, ‘Can I just talk about some nights out on the mic?’ I used to go to these mad parties in Hackney Wick. We’d go from one party to the next, and then you’re on the canal and you’re having a beer and then you’re cuddling someone and the sun’s coming up. It was just such a fun time. I just felt the music really captures the energy of Hackney Wick. Then Caroline Sur Back \[Caroline Sans, aka experimental pop artist Sur Back\] created this beautiful string section, and I was like, ‘Why not? Why can it not now go into something really ethereal and romantic?’ That’s kind of how I feel about that whole time in my life, really.” **“First”** “I’m a very competitive person. Painfully competitive, in fact. I’ve got so much Capricorn in me and I’m working on it, but I’m always at the starting line, ready to go, and that kind of falls into relationships as well. It’s not a personal thing and I notice it with couples where they’re often competing with each other. I wanted to try and capture that in a song. I really enjoy the production. It’s another sprinkle of drum ’n’ bass. It’s a bit garage-y. I feel like the middle eight goes a bit dubstep.” **“Everything Changes (But I Won’t)”** “Obviously, I absolutely love the club, but there’s a whole side of me that’s very alternative and listens to lots of different music. I wanted to have at least one song that was bringing you down. I have probably been in love with the same person for most of my adult life. It’s very interesting growing up with someone and seeing us both change so much, yet still kind of remain the same. I would say that this is the only complete love song on the album. I wanted to create the feeling of me being in the middle of a storm where so much is happening around me, but I’m still very much grounded. I remember when Sean Wasabi, the producer, played the synth loop. I was like, ‘Wow, that really captures that feeling.’” **“Louder, Please”** “I created this with Caroline. I had written a song called ‘Louder’ that I really enjoyed the chorus for, and then I sung it through on a vocoder, just with piano. We sent it to Caroline with a few references, and, honestly, she sent back basically what the song is now. Similar to how ‘Damn’ was like an introduction, this feels like a closing. It’s like a warm hug. I got my little cousin, who, bless her, is just like a fairy, to say, ‘Can you play it a little louder, please?’ It felt cathartic to finish the album with a child’s voice. I think underneath it all, I just remember being little and asking my dad to play music louder.”

When you have a voice as pure as Cleo Sol’s, you can sing about nearly anything and have it sound otherworldly. Sol, however, doesn’t take lightly the responsibility of her instrument, treating each opportunity—both in and outside of her role as lead vocalist for Sault—as an opportunity to spread joy, foster hope, and offer up praise to the most high. Sault’s mission across *10*—actually their 12th full-length project—lies squarely inside those ramparts, with Sol working alongside the group’s production engine, Inflo, alongside a slew of other collaborators (dancehall singjay Chronixx, legendary bassist Pino Palladino, rising pianist NIJE) to offer a balm for increasingly trying times. The titles alone—“The Healing,” “Know That You Will Survive,” “We Are Living”—telegraph their psalmic intention. So does Sol’s voice, which sails over Ohio funk in “Power,” recalls the radiance of disco queen Donna Summer on “Real Love,” and anchors uptempo jazz on “The Sound of Healing,” breathing life into relentless optimism. Sault has been nothing if not celebrated over the course of their elusive career, but that adulation notwithstanding, *10* reminds us there’s still hope for us all.

The 21-year-old Canadian multi-hyphenate has barely stopped to take a breath since kindergarten: She began intensive dance training at age six, scored a record deal at 16, and tied for top nominee for the 2025 JUNO Awards. Her third studio album arrives just a few months after the end of her 2024 world tour in support of her sophomore album, 2023’s *THINK LATER*. “Being on tour for a year feels like a million years—you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I have been gone for a lifetime,’” McRae tells Apple Music, though naturally she used the time as a learning opportunity. “Being onstage every night and analyzing yourself that much, you become uber-aware of yourself and what’s going on.” She began paying closer attention to exactly what kind of songs inspired her to move, what beats triggered her dancers to get—in a word—“nasty.” *So Close to What* is not exactly a club record—more like a pop record you can viscerally feel, conducive to the kind of choreo that makes a killer stage show. Prominent on McRae’s mood board were Timbaland and The Neptunes, whose kinetic productions made the aughts feel like the future. Echoes of sparkly, club-friendly 2000s R&B abound: “bloodonmyhands” recruits Flo Milli for a Miami bass throwback, while “Purple lace bra” lands somewhere between The-Dream’s *Love vs. Money* and Lana Del Rey’s *Born to Die* (which checks out, given the latter album’s producer, Emile Haynie, among the credits). And on “Sports car,” McRae and co-writer Julia Michaels found unlikely inspiration in a 2005 crunk classic. “\[Michaels\] had been dying to reference the Ying Yang Twins’ ‘The Whisper Song,’ and I was like, ‘That’s crazy,’” she says. Sure enough, the concept worked. The secret to writing her most grown-up album to date, as McRae explains, was a writer’s room that skewed heavily towards women (including Michaels and songwriter Amy Allen). “With music and finding perspective on situations, no one quite understands like another girl,” McRae explains. “You need another girl to know exactly what we’ve gone through and to know what it actually feels like in order to write a song. When you’re in a writing session, you have to be one brain together, and if it’s not that, that’s when chaos happens,” she went on. “It is so liberating to be with other girls and talk about things that are so frustrating and then feel so satisfied and accomplished after.”

On what was meant to be the last date of his 2022 tour, The Weeknd took the stage at Inglewood, California’s SoFi Stadium, but when he opened his mouth to sing for 80,000 screaming fans, nothing came out. Over the past 14 years, Abel Tesfaye has experienced what you might call pop’s glow-up of the century: When he emerged from obscurity as the faceless voice behind 2011’s noir-ish *House of Balloons* mixtape, nobody could have guessed that he’d be headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show a decade later. But that moment onstage triggered what Tesfaye has since described as a breakdown, inspiring a period of intense reflection on his life and career—and *Hurry Up Tomorrow*, his sixth studio album. Tesfaye has called *Tomorrow* the final chapter in the trilogy he began with 2020’s *After Hours*, the album that launched him into a new stratosphere of pop success, and continued with 2022’s high-concept *Dawn FM*. Continuing the narrative of its semi-autobiographical narrator’s journey through a dark night of the soul, *Tomorrow* doubles as an allegory about fame’s power to destroy: The curtain rises, and it’s all downhill from there. He longs for a time “when my blood never tasted like wine,” he wails over the night-drive synth-pop of “Take Me Back to LA,” and diagnoses fame as a disease on the glittering “Drive.” He’s ready to leave it all behind on “Wake Me Up,” a collaboration with French duo Justice: “No afterlife, no other side,” he sings, sounding entranced by the thought. Its 22 tracks play out like the swan song to end all swan songs, joined by a murderer’s row of guests: Future lends a layer of scuzz to the deceptively sweet R&B slow-burner “Enjoy the Show,” Anitta taps in for the nocturnal baile funk of “São Paulo,” and frequent collaborator Lana Del Rey makes an appearance on “The Abyss,” where ominous lyrics like, “What’s the point of staying? It’s going up in flames” hit even harder after LA’s devastating fires in January 2025. Tesfaye has dropped repeated hints that this album won’t just close out the trilogy, but also his existence as The Weeknd. If that’s the case, “Without a Warning” encapsulates the arc of an artist who never let success get in the way of his ambition: “Take me to a time/When I was young/And my heart could take the drugs and heartache without loss/But now my bones are frail/And my voice fails/And my tears fall without a warning/Either way, the crowd will scream my name.”