Vinyl Me, Please's Best Albums of 2019

In a lot of ways, you can map Alex Giannascoli’s story onto a broader story of music and art in the 2010s. Born outside Philadelphia in 1993, he started self-releasing albums online while still in high school, building a small but devoted cult that scrutinized his collage-like indie folk like it was scripture. His music got denser, more expressive, and more accomplished, he signed to venerated indie label Domino, and he worked with Frank Ocean, all—more or less—without leaving his bedroom. In other words, Giannascoli didn’t have to leave his dream-hive to find an audience; he brought his audience in, and on his terms, too. “Something I can never stress enough is I try and explain this stuff, but it never accurately reflects the process,” Giannascoli tells Apple Music, “because I’m not actually thinking that much when I’m doing it.” Recorded in the same building-block fashion as his previous albums (and with the same home studio setup), *House of Sugar* represents a new peak for Giannascoli—not just as a songwriter, but as a producer who can spin peculiar moods out of combinations that don’t make any immediate sense. It can be blissful (“Walk Away”), it can be ominous (“Sugar”), it can be grounded one minute (“Cow,” “Hope,” “Southern Sky”) and abstract the next (“Near,” “Project 2”)—a range that gives the overall experience the disjointed, saturated feeling of a half-remembered dream. Often, the prettier the music is, the bleaker the lives of the characters in the lyrics get, whether it’s the drug casualty of “Hope” or the gamblers of “SugarHouse,” who keep coming back to the tables no matter how often they lose—a contrast, Giannascoli says, that was inspired in part by the 2018 sci-fi film *Annihilation*. “From afar, everything looks bright and beautiful,” he says, “but the closer you get, the more violent it becomes.” Despite his rising profile, Giannascoli tries to remain intuitive, following inspiration whenever it shows up, keeping what he calls “that lens” on whenever possible. “I never say to myself, ‘This isn’t where I thought \[the music\] was going to go,’” he says. “Because usually I don’t have that thought in mind to begin with. And I never really end up getting surprised, because the music is unfolding before me as I make it.”

House of Sugar— Alex G’s ninth overall album and his third for Domino — emerges as his most meticulous, cohesive album yet: a statement of artistic purpose, showing off his ear for both persistent earworms and sonic adventurism.

What do you do when things fall apart? If you’re Ariana Grande, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and head for the studio. Her hopeful fourth album, *Sweetener*—written after the deadly attack at her concert in Manchester, England—encouraged fans to stay strong and open to love (at the time, the singer was newly engaged to Pete Davidson). Shortly after the album’s release in August 2018, things fell apart again: Grande’s ex-boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, died from an overdose in September, and she broke off her engagement a few weeks later. Again, Grande took solace from the intense, and intensely public, melodrama in songwriting, but this time things were different. *thank u, next*, mostly recorded over those tumultuous months, sees her turning inward in an effort to cope, grieve, heal, and let go. “Though I wish he were here instead/Don’t want that living in your head,” she confesses on “ghostin,” a gutting synth-and-strings ballad that hovers in your throat. “He just comes to visit me/When I’m dreaming every now and then.” Like many of the songs here, it was produced by Max Martin, who has a supernatural way of making pain and suffering sound like beams of light. The album doesn\'t arrive a minute too soon. As Grande wrestles with what she wants—distance (“NASA”) and affection (“needy”), anonymity (“fake smile\") and star power (“7 rings”), and sex without strings attached (“bloodline,” “make up”)—we learn more and more about the woman she’s becoming: complex, independent, tenacious, flawed. Surely embracing all of that is its own form of self-empowerment. But Grande also isn\'t in a rush to grow up. A week before the album’s release, she swapped out a particularly sentimental song called “Remember” with the provocative, NSYNC-sampling “break up with your girlfriend, i\'m bored.” As expected, it sent her fans into a frenzy. “I know it ain’t right/But I don’t care,” she sings. Maybe the ride is just starting.

The Vegas-born rapper is on the kind of hot streak that’ll make you wonder what you’ve been doing with your life: In the span of a couple years, the teenager collaborated with Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar (co-writing and co-producing “Nile” for Beyoncé‘s 2019 *The Lion King* tie-in album *The Gift*), nabbed writing and production credits on the *Black Panther* soundtrack, and had his own breakaway hit with the brash, minimalist “Orange Soda.” Keem’s low-key sing-raps aren’t exactly reinventing the form on *DIE FOR MY BITCH*, his second mixtape, but they’re weirdly catchy and occasionally hilarious. (“If they cancel me, then I retire,” he smirks on “TOP RAMEN.” Goals!) He even tries his hand at emo on the wonderfully salty “MY EX,” to surprisingly pleasant effect.

Let’s just state the obvious: BENNY THE BUTCHER can *rap*. He’s from Buffalo, not NYC, but *The Plugs I Met* boasts the kind of grimy, word-obsessed, kick-in-the-door New York gutter raps that old heads think went extinct in ’98. Well, not if Benny has anything to say about it. Over dusty Alchemist drums and menacing keys on “Dirty Harry,” the rapper crafts dense, writerly bars about all varieties of cinema-caliber gangster shit: “I wash the blood off the money that my daughters inherit/And kept the barrel so hot that it fog up the mirrors.” Name another current rapper who could invite Pusha T, Jadakiss, and Black Thought on their EP—and outpace all three.

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U.F.O.F., F standing for ‘Friend’, is the name of the highly anticipated third record by Big Thief, set to be released on 3rd May 2019 via 4AD. U.F.O.F. was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios.  In a large cabin-like room, the band set up their gear to track live with engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums.  Having already lived these songs on tour, they were relaxed and ready to experiment.  The raw material came quickly.  Some songs were written only hours before recording and stretched out instantly, first take, vocals and all. “Making friends with the unknown… All my songs are about this,” says Lenker; “If the nature of life is change and impermanence, I’d rather be uncomfortably awake in that truth than lost in denial.”

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

Hiding Places is a collaborative album from Brooklyn-based rapper billy woods and Los Angeles beat scene veteran Kenny Segal, set for release by Backwoodz Studioz on March 29, 2019. On its face, it seems an unlikely pairing; woods—who moonlights as ½ of dissonant rap duo Armand Hammer—is a chaotic force, the warped relic of an NY indie-rap wave that never happened. Meanwhile, Segal has been in L.A. for twenty years; from paying dues with Project Blowed to pushing the culture forward with Busdriver and Milo. All the while, his soulful, dreamlike production precariously tethered to earth by the right drums or rumbling bass. But look closer and it makes more sense. After all, Segal lent his production to a couple of songs on Paraffin, Armand Hammer’s critically-acclaimed opus, and the two veterans have more than a few shared collaborators: Open Mike Eagle, ELUCID, and Hemlock Ernst amongst them. Hiding Places finds both artists deep in the labyrinth. Segal’s lush soundscapes have a new edge, woods’ writing is, paradoxically, at its most direct. Hiding Places is a child’s game: funny and cruel, as brutal as a fairy tale. The album features contributions from both artists’ well of collaborators with ELUCID, Self-Jupiter, and MOTHERMARY making appearances.

Over the decade-plus since he arrived seemingly fully formed as the platonic ideal of indie DIY made good, Justin Vernon has pushed back against the notion that he and Bon Iver are synonymous. He is quick to deflect credit to core longtime collaborators like Chris Messina and Brad Cook, while April Base, the studio and headquarters he built just outside his native Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has become a cultural hub playing host to a variety of experimental projects. The fourth Bon Iver full-length album shines a brighter light on Bon Iver as a unit with many moving parts: Renovations to April Base sent operations to Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, for much of the production, but the spirit of improvisation and tinkering and revolving-door personnel that marked 2016’s out-there *22, A Million* remained intact. “This record in particular felt like a very outward record; Justin felt outward to me,” says Cook, who grew up with Vernon and has played with him through much of his career. “He felt like he was in a new place, and he was reaching out for new input in a different way. We\'re just more in the foreground inevitably because the process became just a little bit more transparent.” Vernon, Cook, and Messina talk through that process on each of *i,i*\'s 13 tracks. **“Yi”** Justin Vernon: “That was a phone recording of me and my friend Trevor screwing around in a barn, turning a radio on and off. We chopped it up for about five years, just a hundred times. There’s something in that ‘Are you recording? Are you recording?’ that felt like the spirit that flows into the next song.” **“iMi”** Brad Cook: “It was like an old friend that you didn\'t know what to do with for a long time. When we got to Texas, a lot of different people took a crack at trying to make something out of that song. And then Andrew Sarlo, who works with Big Thief and is just a badass young producer, he took the whack that broke through the wall. Once the band got their hands on it, Justin added some of the acoustic stuff to it, and it just totally blew it wide open.” **“We”** Vernon: “I was working on this idea one morning with this engineer, Josh Berg, who happened to be out with us. And this guy Bobby Raps from Minneapolis was also at my studio just kind of hanging around, and he brought this dude named Wheezy who does some Young Thug beats, some Future beats. So I had this little baritone-guitar bass loop thing, and Wheezy put his beat on there. All these songs had a life, or had a birth, before Texas, but Texas was like graduation for every single one. That\'s why we went for so long and allowed for so much perspective to sink into all the tunes. It\'s a fucking banger; I love that one.” **“Holyfields,”** Vernon: “The whole song is an improvised moment with barely any editing, and we just improv\'d moves. I sang some scratch vocals that day when we made it up, and they were weirdly close to what ended up being on the album. We didn\'t really chop away at that one—it kind of just was born with all its hair and everything.” **“Hey, Ma”** Vernon: “It just felt like a good strong song; we knew people would get it in their head. A couple of these tunes, and some of the tunes from the last album, I sort of peck around the studio with BJ Burton from time to time, and 90 percent of the stuff we make is death techno or something. So, there\'s another one that sort of just hung around with a stake in the ground, so to speak. And then our team—the three of us and the rest of everyone—just kept etching away at it, and it ended up becoming the song that felt emblematic of the record.” **\"U (Man Like)\"** Cook: “We had Bruce \[Hornsby\] come out to Justin\'s studio for a session for his *Absolute Zero* record. Bruce was playing a bunch of musical ideas that he had just sort of done at his house, and that piano figure in that song—I feel like we were tracking 15 seconds later. It was like, \'Wait, can we listen to this again?\'” Vernon: “I\'m not so good at coming up with full songs on the spot, but I can kind of map them out with my voice, or inflection. Then it takes a long time to chip away at them. Messina might have an idea for what that line should be, or Brad, or me. The melody that I sang that first day probably sounds remarkably like the melody that\'s on the album.” **“Naeem”** Vernon: “We did a collaboration with a dance group called TU Dance, and that was one of the songs. So we\'ve been performing \'Naeem\' as a part of this thing for a while. It\'s in a different state, but it\'s the finale of this big collaboration. And it just seemed very anthemic, and a very important part of whatever this record was going to be. It feels really nice to have a little bit more straightforward—not always bombastic, not always sonically trying to flip your lid or something.” **“Jelmore”** Vernon: “Basically an improvisation with me and this guy Buddy Ross. Again I probably didn\'t sing any final lyrics, but it\'s based on an improvisation, much like the song \'\_\_\_\_45\_\_\_\_\_\' from \[*22, A Million*\]. And when we were down outside El Paso, me and Chris were over on one part of this studio and Brad was with the band in a big studio across the property, and they sort of took \'Jelmore\' upon themselves and filled it in with all the lovely live-ness that\'s there. As the record goes on, it feels like there\'s a lot of these things that are sort of bare but have a lot of live energy to them.” **“Faith”** Vernon: “A basement improv that sat around for many years; maybe could have been on the last album, was for a while. I don\'t know, man—it\'s a song about having faith.” **“Marion”** Chris Messina: “I think that\'s one that Justin\'s been noodling around with for a while; for a few years, he would pick up that guitar and you would just kind of hear that riff. And we didn\'t really know what was going to happen to it. It\'s another one that exists in the TU Dance show. But what\'s cool about the version that\'s on the record is we did that as a live take with a six-piece ensemble that Rob Moose wrote for and conducted, and it was saxophone, trombone, trumpet, French horn, harmonica, and I think that\'s it that we did live. And then Justin was singing live and playing guitar live.” **“Salem”** Vernon: “OP-1 loop, weird Indigo Girls/Rickie Lee Jones vibes. I got really into acid and the Grateful Dead this year, so there\'s definitely some early psych vibes in there. The record really is supposed to be thought of as the fall record for this band, if you think of the other ones as seasons. Salem and burning leaves—these longings and these deaths, it\'s very much in there in that song, so it\'s a really autumn-y song.” **“Sh’Diah”** Vernon: “It stands for Shittiest Day in American History—the day after Trump got elected. It\'s another that sort of hung around as an improvised idea, and we finally got to figure out where we\'re going to land Mike Lewis, our favorite instrumentalist alive today in music. He gets to play over it, and the band got to do all this crazy layering over it. It\'s just one of my favorite moods on the album.” **“RABi”** Messina: “Justin\'s singing a cool thing on it, the guitar vibe is comforting and persistent, but we just weren\'t really sure where it needed to go. And then Brad and the rest of the dudes got their hands on it and it came back as just a dream sequence; it was so sick. We all kind of heard it and it was like, whoa, how can this not close out the record? This is definitely \'see you later.\'” Vernon: “Just some ‘life feels good now, don\'t it?\' There\'s a lot to be sad about, there\'s a lot to be confused about, there\'s a lot to be thankful for. And leaning on gratitude and appreciation of the people around you that make you who you are, make you feel safe, and provide that shelter so you can be who you want to be, there\'s still that impetus in life. We need that. It\'s a nice way to close the record, we all thought.”

What happens when the reigning queen of bubblegum pop goes through a breakup? Exactly what you’d think: She turns around and creates her most romantic, wholehearted, blissed-out work yet. Written with various pop producers in LA (Captain Cuts), New York (Jack Antonoff), and Sweden, as well as on a particularly formative soul-searching trip to the Italian coast, Jepsen’s fourth album *Dedicated* is poptimism at its finest: joyous and glitzy, rhythmic and euphoric, with an extra layer of kitsch. It’s never sad—that just isn’t Jepsen—but the “Call Me Maybe” star *does* get more in her feelings; songs like “No Drug Like Me” and “Right Words Wrong Time” aren\'t about fleeing pain so much as running to it. As Jepsen puts it on the synth ballad “Too Much,” she’d do anything to get the rush of being in love, even if it means risking heartache again and again. “Party for One,” the album’s standout single, is an infectious, shriek-worthy celebration of being alone that also acknowledges just how difficult that can be: “Tried to let it go and say I’m over you/I’m not over you/But I’m trying.”

British music is fortunate to have Charlotte Aitchison. A restless collaborator and denier of pop borders with an unteachable ear for a hook, she’s one of the UK’s proudest exports. Her third studio LP serves as a blueprint for how a modern pop album should sound. Audacious but introspective, it’s straining with potential hits and subtler moments fans will hold close. And then there’s the cast list. If she tires of this pop star business, a sterling career in A&R probably awaits. She talked through some of the album’s standout moments on her Beats 1 show The Candy Shop. **“Next Level Charli”** “I wrote this track for the Angels—my fans. This is the Angel anthem. Everything in this song is about things that I imagine my fans doing: driving to a party, getting ready for a party, playing their music in their Prius, whatever it is. This song is for you guys. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for supporting me.” **“Gone” (with Christine and the Queens)** “This is the bop. The song of the summer, if I don’t say so myself. Me, Christine, dancing on a car, rain: What more do you want? We literally gave you everything.” **“Cross You Out” (feat. Sky Ferreira)** “I’m so happy that we got to make this song together. This was one of the first songs that kind of came to reality for this album. I sent this over to Sky, she felt it and came into this studio in LA with \[co-writer\] Linus Wiklund. She sounds so amazing and I’m so happy because Sky and I have known each other for quite a few years now. We kind of came up together in many ways, and we’ve shared a lot of the same producers. We’ve been on the same magazine covers together, and you know, I feel like we were on Myspace at the same time! I think her voice is really important and what she does is brilliant.” **“2099” (feat. Troye Sivan)** “My favorite dreamboat, my dream boy: Troye Sivan. I’m just in love with him. I just think he’s so brilliant. After we made \[the 2018 single\] ‘1999’, I kind of knew he wanted to get a little bit weirder than we got, as I’d heard him mention that he was into \[Charli’s 2017 mixtape\] *Pop 2*. So after ‘1999’ came out, I hit him up again and said, ‘Should we just go there? Should we just go out of space? Like, let’s do a weird moment.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” **“Click” (feat. Kim Petras & Tommy Cash)** “I’m not going to lie—and no shade to any of the other artists on the album— but I kind of think Kim’s verse might be my favorite on the whole album. I remember when I originally sent Kim this song, I did a verse and it was so bad. She sent me her demo back and her verse *killed*, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot put this song out with the verse I currently have.’ So I had to rerecord my thing, as Tommy had also sent me his and killed it, too. I was the weakest! It was bad! I love this song. It goes so hard. And Kim is still shining so bright on this song.” **“Warm” (feat. HAIM)** “This song is produced by A.G. Cook. He actually wrote a few of the melodies on this song, too. When we were making this song, we were working at \[Australian producer and DJ\] Flume’s studio in LA, and this was at the point where we thought we were still going to do a third mixtape. But then we had this song and a couple of ideas and were like, ‘Let’s just do the album. Now’s the time for the *Charli* album.’ When HAIM came to the studio house that I had rented in LA at the beginning of 2019, I had just had a lot of dental work done, so my whole mouth was super numb. I was dribbling; I couldn’t really speak. They were like, ‘What happened to you!’ It was a funny session, but the three of them came through. I’m so happy with the song.” **“White Mercedes”** “This is one of my favorite songs from the album. I guess it’s my version of a ballad.”

With the DIY video for her 2017 track “Pretty Girl,” Clairo became the premier case study for how the internet can instantly blow up homespun artists. But with her full-length debut album, the Massachusetts indie-pop phenom betrays a bold artistic vision that can no longer be contained by her bedroom walls. Co-produced by the artist with ex-Vampire Weekender Rostam Batmanglij, *Immunity* achieves just the right balance of focus and fuzz, expanding Clairo’s sonic vocabulary with neo-soul vibes, jazzy piano lines, and boom-bapped drum breaks while framing her most brutally honest tracks—like the breakup lament “Bags” and same-sex-love anthem “Sofia”—with gritty intensity and blown-out distortion. Throughout the album, Clairo tries to reconcile her desire for independence with her need for intimacy, an emotional tug-of-war that reaches its zenith on the momentous closer “I Wouldn’t Ask You,” a stark, defiant piano ballad that cedes to the warm embrace of its ecstatic chillwave outro.

“We all get lost, but we all come back,” Crumb’s Lila Ramani sings on the title track to *Jinx*, providing a succinct mission statement for one of 2019’s most bewitching indie-rock debuts. The New York-via-Boston quartet douse their songs in luxuriant *Dark Side of the Moon Safari* atmosphere, but a taut, in-the-pocket rhythm section and Ramani’s velveteen voice serve as beacons that guide you through the haze. *Jinx* conjures the sensation of drifting through a dream that’s equally nostalgic and unnerving, with Ramani’s dazed delivery falling somewhere between resigned and restless. On “Ghostride,” she blithely details the ennui-inducing minutiae of a long road trip as a metaphor for being trapped in a dysfunctional relationship, sheepishly admitting, “The radio reminds me I’m alive.” But Crumb isn\'t afraid to disrupt their hypnotic reveries with abrupt shifts in course—\"Part III” begins as a blissfully narcotic Stereolab sway, before coming to a dead stop and free-falling into a psychedelic jazz abyss. “It’s just a feeling,” Ramani repeats just as she’s about to disappear into the void, but *Jinx*’s ambiguous beauty lies in the fact that you’re never exactly sure how you should be feeling.

“All anyone wants to be is what they can.” In an era when networked access to information is nearly universal and wearing influences on your sleeve is normalized, it often feels like everything’s been done. Which begs the questions: What’s the point of creating? Does the world need another still life of fruit? Another film about love? Does the world need another melody? On Raw Honey, his second album as Drugdealer, Michael Collins colors these existential conundrums with lush arrangements, memetic melodies, and a vulnerable tunefulness that tries to make sense of self-doubt and connected loneliness in our shared simulacra. Collins, who never played an instrument let alone received musical training in any formal capacity, began experimenting with sounds in 2009 after traversing the US on freight trains. After a few years crafting abstract sampledelia, he decided to forgo his experimental exercises in favor of teaching himself how to write a traditional song. In doing so, he made the decision to approach songwriting from the perspective of a listener, rather than a “musician.” In 2013, Collins headed west and enmeshed himself in the Los Angeles underground scene. It was there and then that he began collaborating with players in the orbit of Ariel Pink, over time crafting what would become Drugdealer’s debut album, The End of Comedy, a collection of sunlit songs as indebted to Laurel Canyon psych pop as it is Bacharachian orchestration. Raw Honey continues where The End of Comedy left off, with Collins leading an ace crew of collaborators to coalesce the spirit of Drugdealer’s classically modern pop. Built on the foundation of a creative partnership among Collins, Sasha Winn (vocals) and Shags Chamberlain (bass, production), Drugdealer is more a collective than band. Raw Honey features contributions of Josh Da Costa (drums), Jackson MacIntosh (guitar), Danny Garcia (guitar), Michael Long (lead guitar), and Benjamin Schwab (backing vocals, guitar, organ, piano, wurlitzer), as well as guest vocalists like country balladeer Dougie Poole (“Wild Motion”), Harley Hill-Richmond (“Lonely”), and frequent collaborator Natalie Mering (Weyes Blood) whose dulcet tones sing low before soaring on “Honey,” a track as silky as the nectar itself. Throughout Raw Honey, Collins and crew display their influences as a new tapestry, one woven with the fibers from thousands of tapestries that have colored our collective listening histories. As evidenced throughout Raw Honey, Collins ear for penning numbers that would sound as at home on Classic Rock radio as they would at Zebulon in Los Angeles, where any of the contributors to Raw Honey might likely be found on any night of the week, on stage, or in the audience supporting another Angelino’s modern pop aspirations. Rather than hiding behind a curtain or casually sidestepping AOR tropes, Raw Honey adheres to a modern kind of creation — one that cultivates influences and espouses reverence. An honest totem, Raw Honey isn’t tangled up in social norms, with Collins prefering to air his self-doubt as a northern star to guide like-minded people wherever they need to go.

Pitchfork Review: pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dua-saleh-nur-ep/

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

An eccentric like Madlib and a straightforward guy like Freddie Gibbs—how could it possibly work? If 2014’s *Piñata* proved that the pairing—offbeat producer, no-frills street rapper—sounded better and more natural than it looked on paper, *Bandana* proves *Piñata* wasn’t a fluke. The common ground is approachability: Even at their most cinematic (the noisy soul of “Flat Tummy Tea,” the horror-movie trap of “Half Manne Half Cocaine”), Madlib’s beats remain funny, strange, decidedly at human scale, while Gibbs prefers to keep things so real he barely uses metaphor. In other words, it’s remarkable music made by artists who never pretend to be anything other than ordinary. And even when the guest spots are good (Yasiin Bey and Black Thought on “Education” especially), the core of the album is the chemistry between Gibbs and Madlib: vivid, dreamy, serious, and just a little supernatural.

In 2018, Gunna was everywhere. Standout albums from Travis Scott, Lil Baby, 21 Savage, Torey Lanez, and even Mariah Carey, among others, featured verses from the Atlanta MC. Having spent the better part of a year rapping his way into the consciousness of his peers\' fans, Gunna has fashioned his *Drip or Drown 2* album—the sequel to his 2017 EP—as a coming-out party. “I feel like a lot of my new fans just know me from \[Travis Scott’s\] ‘Yosemite’ and *Drip Harder* and some of my recent activities,” the MC told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe. “But on this album, it\'s gonna put the icing on the cake and let them know what kind of artist I am.” Embracing a spotlight he once patiently stood just to the left of, *Drip or Drown 2* is a 16-track jaunt through Gunna’s world. As an orator, his voice is light—just a couple of registers above a whisper—and even when injected with melody, it can sound like he’s singing to himself. It makes you feel as if you’re privy to the MC’s innermost thoughts, which typically span a deep appreciation for luxury fashion and automobiles, how he would prefer women to act around him, and the things money has allowed him to do for his family. “Speed It Up,” one of the project’s standouts, is particularly interesting for the giant gaps of space he leaves between words. Frequent collaborators Wheezy and Turbo the Great (who both serve as executive producers) handle the bulk of the production. Despite his lengthy collaborative resume, Gunna saved the guest spots on *Drip or Drown 2* for hometown heroes Lil Baby, Young Thug, and Playboi Carti. His many industry relationships aside, the MC knows that he’s still on the come-up. “One thing I have learned from putting out music, and just growing, is to know even when you\'ve got good feedback and you\'re doing good, there\'s still another level to go to,” he told Zane Lowe. “It\'s never like, \'Oh, I\'m good, or I\'ll do what I need to do.\' There\'s still more to be done. I’m just getting started.”

There’s nothing all that subtle about Jamila Woods naming each of these all-caps tracks after a notable person of color. Still, that’s the point with *LEGACY! LEGACY!*—homage as overt as it is original. True to her own revolutionary spirit, the Chicago native takes this influential baker’s dozen of songs and masterfully transmutes their power for her purposes, delivering an engrossingly personal and deftly poetic follow-up to her formidable 2016 breakthrough *HEAVN*. She draws on African American icons like Miles Davis and Eartha Kitt as she coos and commands through each namesake cut, sparking flames for the bluesy rap groove of “MUDDY” and giving flowers to a legend on the electro-laced funk of “OCTAVIA.”

In the clip of an older Eartha Kitt that everyone kicks around the internet, her cheekbones are still as pronounced as many would remember them from her glory days on Broadway, and her eyes are still piercing and inviting. She sips from a metal cup. The wind blows the flowers behind her until those flowers crane their stems toward her face, and the petals tilt upward, forcing out a smile. A dog barks in the background. In the best part of the clip, Kitt throws her head back and feigns a large, sky-rattling laugh upon being asked by her interviewer whether or not she’d compromise parts of herself if a man came into her life. When the laugh dies down, Kitt insists on the same, rhetorical statement. “Compromise!?!?” she flings. “For what?” She repeats “For what?” until it grows more fierce, more unanswerable. Until it holds the very answer itself. On the hook to the song “Eartha,” Jamila Woods sings “I don’t want to compromise / can we make it through the night” and as an album, Legacy! Legacy! stakes itself on the uncompromising nature of its creator, and the histories honored within its many layers. There is a lot of talk about black people in America and lineage, and who will tell the stories of our ancestors and their ancestors and the ones before them. But there is significantly less talk about the actions taken to uphold that lineage in a country obsessed with forgetting. There are hands who built the corners of ourselves we love most, and it is good to shout something sweet at those hands from time to time. Woods, a Chicago-born poet, organizer, and consistent glory merchant, seeks to honor black people first, always. And so, Legacy! Legacy! A song for Zora! Zora, who gave so much to a culture before she died alone and longing. A song for Octavia and her huge and savage conscience! A song for Miles! One for Jean-Michel and one for my man Jimmy Baldwin! More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. On “Sun Ra,” Woods sings “I just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the start” and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people. Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016’s HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Legacy! Legacy! is the logical conclusion to that looking. From the airy boom-bap of “Giovanni” to the psychedelic flourishes of “Sonia,” the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish: the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on “Sonia” and Saba on “Basquiat,” or the bloom of Nico Segal’s horns on “Baldwin.” Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Soul is all the things a country tries to force itself into forgetting. Soul is all of those things come back to claim what is theirs. Jamila Woods is a singular soul singer who, in voice, holds the rhetorical demand. The knowing that there is no compromise for someone with vision this endless. That the revolution must take many forms, and it sometimes starts with songs like these. Songs that feel like the sun on your face and the wind pushing flowers against your back while you kick your head to the heavens and laugh at how foolish the world seems.

Melina Duterte is a master of voice: Hers are dream pop songs that hint at a universe of her own creation. Recording as Jay Som since 2015, Duterte’s world of shy, swirling intimacies always contains a disarming ease, a sky-bent sparkle and a grounding indie-rock humility. In an era of burnout, the title track of her 2017 breakout, Everybody Works, remains a balm and an anthem. Duterte’s life became a whirlwind in the wake of Everybody Works. After spending her teen years and early 20s exploring an eclectic array of musical styles—studying jazz trumpet as a child, carrying on her Filipino family tradition of spirited karaoke, and quietly recording indie-pop songs in her bedroom alone—that accomplished album found her playing festivals around the world, sharing stages with the likes of Paramore, Death Cab for Cutie, and Mitski. In November of 2017, seeking a new environment, Duterte left her home of the Bay Area for Los Angeles. There, she demoed new songs, while also embracing opportunities to do session work and produce, engineer, and mix for other artists (like Sasami, Chastity Belt). Reckoning with the relative instability of musicianhood, Duterte turned inward, tuning ever deeper into her own emotions and desires as a way of staying centered through huge changes. She found a community; she fell in love. And for an artist whose career began after releasing her earliest collection of demos—2015's hazy but exquisitely crafted Turn Into—in a fit of drunken confidence on Thanksgiving night, she finally quit drinking for good. “I feel like a completely different person,” she reflects. Positivity was a way forward. The striking clarity of her new music reflects that shift. After months of poring over pools of demos, Duterte, now 25, essentially started over. She wrote most of her brilliant new album, Anak Ko—pronounced Anuhk-Ko—in a burst during a self-imposed week-long solo retreat to Joshua Tree. As in the past, Duterte recorded at home (in some songs, you can hear the washer/dryer near her bedroom) and remained the sole producer, engineer, and mixer. But for the first time, she recruited friends—including Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott, Justus Proffitt, Boy Scouts’ Taylor Vick, as well as bandmates Zachary Elasser, Oliver Pinnell and Dylan Allard—to contribute additional vocals, drums, guitars, strings, and pedal steel. Honing in on simplicity and groove, refining her skills as a producer, Duterte cracked her sound open subtly, highlighting its best parts: She’s bloomed. Inspired by the lush, poppy sounds of 80s bands such as Prefab Sprout, the Cure, and Cocteau Twins—as well as the ecstatic guitarwork of contemporary Vancouver band Weed—Anak Ko sounds dazzlingly tactile, and firmly present. The result is a refreshingly precise sound. On the subtly explosive “Superbike,” Duterte aimed for the genius combination of “Cocteau Twins and Alanis Morissette”—“letting loose,” she says, over swirling shoegaze. “Night Time Drive” is a restless road song, but one with a sense of contentedness and composure, which “basically encapsulated my entire life for the past two years,” she says—always moving, but “accepting it, being a little stronger from it.” (She sings, memorably, of “shoplifting at the Whole Foods.”) Duterte focused more on bass this time: “I just wanted to make a more groovy record,” she notes. The slow-burning highlight “Tenderness” begins minimally, like a slightly muffled phone call, before flowering into a bright, jazzy earworm. Duterte calls it “a feel-good, funky, kind of sexy song” in part about “the curse of social media” and how it complicates relationships. “That’s definitely about scrolling on your phone and seeing a person and it just haunts you, you can’t escape it,” Duterte says. “I have a weird relationship to social media and how people perceive me—as this person that has a platform, as a solo artist, and this marginalized person. That was really getting to me. I wanted to express those emotions, but I felt stifled. I feel like a lot of the themes of the songs stemmed from bottled up emotions, frustration with yourself, and acceptance.” The title, Anak Ko, means “my child" in Tagalog, one of the native dialects in the Philippines. It was inspired by an unassuming text message from Duterte’s mother, who has always addressed her as such: Hi anak ko, I love you anak ko. “It’s an endearing thing to say, it feels comfortable,” Duterte reflects, likening the process of creating and releasing an album, too, to “birthing a child.” That sense of care charges Anak Ko, as does another concept Duterte has found herself circling back to: the importance of patience and kindness. “In order to change, you’ve got to make so many mistakes,” Duterte says, reflecting on her recent growth as an artist with a zen-like calm. “What’s helped me is forcing myself to be even more peaceful and kind with myself and others. You can get so caught up in attention, and the monetary value of being a musician, that you can forget to be humble. You can learn more from humility than the flashy stuff. I want kindness in my life. Kindness is the most important thing for this job, and empathy.”

To anyone who saw Joel Ross play vibraphone as an up-and-coming sideman, soloing with such uncommon vitality and bringing heaps of tonal color to bands led by Marquis Hill, James Francies, Melissa Aldana, Makaya McCraven, and more, it was abundantly clear the young Chicago native was destined for something big—and soon. Indeed, he got signed to Blue Note, not long after appearing on *Flight*, Francies’ 2018 debut for the label. With *KingMaker*, Ross seizes his moment, leading a superb group of peers on a journey that is as emotionally rich and melodic as it is technically demanding. “Touched by an Angel” starts the album on a very slow build, establishing the sound of Ross’ vibes in tandem with Immanuel Wilkins\' alto saxophone, a distinctive unison texture that informs many of Ross’ tunes. Pianist Jeremy Corren emerges as a forceful soloist on “Prince Lynn’s Twin” and “The Grand Struggle Against Fear,” pieces that introduce another device prevalent in Ross’ music: trading, in which soloists pass the baton in quicker-than-normal succession, forming a loop and upping the music’s energy. This occurs also on “Yana” (which omits Wilkins) and “Ill Relations.” While trading is among the most traditional of jazz practices, Ross’ repeated use of it in the main body of a tune is striking and unexpected. Drummer Jeremy Dutton stamps the music with ceaseless rhythmic tension and flux, while bassist Benjamin Tiberio acts as the spinal column, unobtrusively making the asymmetric patterns and phrases line up and stay on track. The most electrifying display from the rhythm section comes on “Is It Love That Inspires You?”—a trio tour de force with just vibes and no alto or piano, the track that comes nearest to capturing the ferocious energy of Ross unleashed on the bandstand.

All tracks produced, mixed and mastered by JPEGMAFIA "Rap Grow Old & Die" contains additional production from Vegyn Album Artwork Design by Alec Marchant Recorded alone @ a space for me This album is really a thank you to my fans tbh. I started and finished it In 2018, mixed and mastered it in 2019 right after the Vince tour. I don’t usually work on something right after I release a project. But Veteran was the first time in my life I worked hard on something, and it was reciprocated back to me. So I wanted thank my people. And make an album that I put my my whole body into, as in all of me. All sides of Me baby. Not just a few. This the most ME album I’ve ever made in my life, Im trying to give y’all niggas a warm album you can live in and take a nap in maybe start a family and buy some Apple Jacks to. I’ve removed restrictions from my head and freed myself of doubt musically. I would have removed half this shit before but naw fuck it. Y’all catching every bit of this basic bitch tear gas. This is me, all me, in full form nigga, and this formless piece of audio is my punk musical . I hope it disappoints every last one of u. 💕💕

After Maren Morris released her blockbuster debut album *Hero* in 2016, she embarked on a series of unorthodox cross-genre collaborations that, at a different time in country music, could have easily ended her career. Instead, she scored near-simultaneous hits in dance, country, and pop, and established a new breed of Nashville superstar. “It’s a testament to how much the city has changed,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s become an exciting melting pot.” She is being modest: Much of that change is thanks to Morris. Her free-spirited sophomore effort continues to push the limits of contemporary country-pop, infusing it with energy and texture from hip-hop, R&B, and psychedelic rock. \"I wanted to be braver with production and get really weird with it,” she says. \"The lyrics were becoming really assertive and independent and sensual, all these empowering elements. I wanted the music to amplify that.” As the title suggests, womanhood is a theme, but the album steers clear of rallying cries and hear-me-roar tropes; these songs are more about learning to embrace all sides of yourself. By singing about her conflicting emotions and life experiences, she frames her complexity as a kind of power: She can be both romantic and in charge (**“The Bones\"**), pissed off and poised (**“Flavor”**), successful and uncertain (**\"To Hell & Back”**). The latter was the first song she wrote on *GIRL* after wrestling with the explosive success of *Hero*. “It was the bitter and the sweet going on in my head,” she says. “I opened up to this other person and felt like they accepted all my broken pieces. They didn’t try to fix me.” At some point, Morris’ independence and progressive point of view caught the attention of Brandi Carlile, a fellow disrupter in Americana and folk. “She wrote me a note about how she’s got two daughters and she’s proud to know they look up to me,” Morris says. The exchange led to their duet, **“Common”**—a pleading, impassioned ballad about setting aside our differences—and eventually, a supergroup with singer-songwriter Amanda Shires called the Highwomen. (Morris has gently tackled politics before, most notably on “Dear Hate”, her response to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.) The album’s other collaboration, **“All My Favorite People”** featuring the Brothers Osbourne, is Morris off duty. “It’s a slapping, trashy party song but has all these descriptive, intricate lyrics,” she says. “It’s my favorite kind of song to write: airtight and very country.” She co-wrote the song with her husband, musician Ryan Hurd, who gets a playful tribute on **“Make Out with Me,”** written to mimic a drunken voicemail. “That\'s one of my favorites,” she says, \"because it’s *so me*.\" Just when you think you’ve got Morris figured out, she serves up R&B curveballs (**“RSVP”**), pop-ified love songs (**“Gold Love”**), and lighters-in-the-air sing-alongs that hat-tip her influences, which include Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry (**“A Song for Everything”**). No song packs as much zing as **“Flavor,”** a growling send-up Morris has dubbed \"an F U to your haters.” In her case, they’re mostly online. “This is my middle finger to the trolls, the body-shamers, the slut-shamers, the women-haters, the people who rain on my parade,” she says, pointing out that despite her fame, she still manages her own social media accounts. \"I wanted to tell them: You know what, I\'m cooking up my own flavor, and you don\'t have to like it, but I promise you\'ve never tasted anything like it.\"

Houston\'s status as a fertile and influential rap mecca is still thriving as the rest of the world continues to catch up with the city\'s historically insular greatness. So consider Megan Thee Stallion an ambassador of what’s happening there now. From the blaxploitation vibes of its cover art to its loaded contents, her proper debut album builds upon the filthy flows that made her preceding *Tina Snow* project and its breakout single “Big Ole Freak” such an essential listen. Over live-wire beats informed less by purple drank and slab cars than by Cash Money and Hypnotize Minds, she doles out sex positivity and hustles wisdom about female empowerment in anthems like \"Dance\" and \"Money Good.\" Boasting a rare and deadly approach both lyrical and diabolical, she clowns hopeless imitators on “Realer” and provides ample ratchet motivation on the bassbin ruiner “Shake That.” Academy Award winner Juicy J, who produced three of *Fever*\'s cuts, doles out his legendary cosign with Southern pride, dropping a few raw bars himself on “Simon Says” alongside Megan’s characteristically raw ones.

“Members of the LGBT+ community that wouldn’t necessarily be at a country show. Mega-fans in Orville Peck masks. Couples in their 80s who are huge country fans. Drag queens. Five-year-olds!” Orville Peck is describing his average audience for Apple Music. “Maybe there are a million reasons for these people to be a room together,” he says. “But it’s lovely that I’m one of the reasons for them to be together.” It’s unsurprising that the fringe-masked, pseudonymous Toronto-based cowboy crooner’s debut album has attracted a broad church. *Pony* offers a very modern subversive spin on expertly informed country, tender torch songs of homoerotic desire and raw rock ’n’ roll decorated with his rich, sonorous voice. Peck may not want to show you his face, but here he’s happy to take you through his extraordinary debut, track by track. **Dead of Night** “This is a song about unrequited love. It\'s about being with somebody you know ultimately cannot give you what you want, and is only going to break your heart. But even just that is better than being without them, so you torture yourself with the inevitable demise. It was the first song I wrote for the album, and I wanted it to sound like something familiar, but something completely new as well. I wanted to provoke the kind of sensation of torturous nostalgia. I think we all go through somewhere where you remember a moment and you think that thinking about it is going to torture you, but you do it anyway, because we have this weird human nature of putting ourselves through emotional pain. That\'s kind of why I wanted the lonely guitar sound, and I wanted to go from very low to very high. I just wanted to give that same feeling sonically that the emotion is about in the song.” **Winds Change** “‘Winds Change’ is a song about traveling around not letting too much moss on your stone. I\'ve lived in many, many different countries, and I\'ve just felt like a drifter my entire life. The song is also about the things that you give up when you live that lifestyle. The benefits are adventure and freedom, but there are things—important things—that you have to leave behind.” **Turn to Hate** “I wrote the lyrics for this song about seven years ago when I was in a really low place. It\'s one of my favorite songs on the album. It\'s about the struggle I\'ve had feeling like an outsider and an outlaw my whole life and not letting that turn into resentment. Like I say in the song, ‘Don\'t let my sorrow turn to hate.’ Anyone who\'s ever felt like a weirdo should remember that is your power, and that\'s what makes you powerful and unique. This song is a mantra to remind myself not to let it go dark.” **Buffalo Run** “I’m not a very skilled technical musician, because I just teach myself everything I play. So I write all my music from a visual or emotive place. Here, I wanted to have my version of a driving train beat: I wanted it to feel like a stampede, essentially, so it needed to start peaceful and calm and slowly build and finally you get that release. I wanted it to feel cinematic. There’s a place in Alberta, Canada, I was thinking about called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which is this huge canyon where they would do buffalo runs. Canada’s indigenous people would essentially herd the buffalo off cliffs and then gather them. Every time we play it, I genuinely am picturing buffalo stampeding.” **Queen of the Rodeo** “This is about a Canadian drag queen friend of mine called Thanks Jem. It’s funny, because when we first met, we did not get along. But interestingly, she really taught me a lot about myself. She’s from a small town in Canada and moved to Vancouver to pursue her drag artistry. I wouldn’t want to speak on her behalf about her stories, but the general theme of the song is around pursuing something you love, and even if it’s maybe not as fruitful as you’d hoped, it’s the act of chasing what you love in the face of adversity that’s important.” **Kansas (Remembers Me Now)** “This is a tricky song to talk about, as it’s the only song on the record that isn’t connected to my own life. I don’t want to give it away because I’m always proud when someone figures it out and tells me their version. But I’ll give a couple hints: It’s a song about something pretty dastardly. It’s my murder ballad. They have a very long history in country music. It’s about a real-life murder story which also involves a very interesting kind of homoerotic romance. This is my ode to that.” **Old River** “I wrote this very shortly after the death of a family member. It’s a cathartic song for me that I wrote literally driving through the mountains in winter on the way to the studio. I wanted sonically for it to be what is known in Appalachian country as a field holler, which is a mix of the old haunting Appalachian mountain music with a gospel influence. The Carter Family would do it really well. I also wanted it to be just short enough to annoy people. It’s an uncomfortable song for me, and I wanted everyone listening to it to feel uncomfortable too.” **Big Sky** “I grew up a very chatty, outgoing person and I was always performing. I’ve never felt insecure, socially. But the older I’ve gotten, I’ve realized I’m a very closed person with regards to sharing things about myself—real things about myself. I never knew how closed I was for a long time. The song is about three relationships I’ve had, and the funny thing is people tend to think it’s about those people. It is, sort of, but all of the lyrics are actually me exposing my own shortcomings, exposing myself and my role in those relationships, rather than holding anyone else at fault. The second verse deals with a pretty tumultuous relationship that I was pretty fearful of and had never even talked to anybody about before. It’s a really liberating song, as somebody who internalizes a lot.” **Roses Are Falling** “A song about loving somebody so much that they drive you crazy. You know that being with them is not good for you, but at the same time maybe that’s what we all need every now and again. I wanted to give a nod to the era of Santo & Johnny—that pedal-steel Hawaiian influence which moved into country—with a cheeky twist.” **Take You Back (The Iron Hoof Cattle Call)** “There is a classic trope in country music that used to be known as hokum. It\'s funny, because I think it\'s—for people that don\'t really know country today—almost what gave country a stigma for being shallow. But there’s a long tradition in country to incorporate humor, wit, and Southern charm into the music. Dolly Parton is very famous for that, of course, and I love the very famous George Strait song called ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas.’ So this is my hokum song with gunshots, whip cracks, and yeehaws. It’s a rootin’-tootin’ song about leaving somebody and that great feeling of telling them you’ll never take that back.” **Hope to Die** “Although I sing a lot about relationships, this is the only song on the album that’s about true heartbreak. It took a long time to record and I kept making revisions lyrically and to the production because I really wanted to capture a feeling within it. It was that feeling when you’re so at a loss that something fell apart. For me, it was that I was so heartbroken and spent months walking in slow motion. So I wanted to capture that sensation of feeling numb and watching the world pass you but all you can do is think about whatever it may be. It’s strange, because it’s almost a divine, serene feeling, but it’s so negative. It’s very still and peaceful, but it’s so very lonely. That serene unhappiness is something that I imagine people could probably get stuck in.” **Nothing Fades Like the Light** “This song is about the feeling of knowing something is coming to an end, and how that feeling can be more painful than when it does actually end. Embarrassingly, I still really choke up and cry in this song when I perform it. Which sounds conceited, but it’s not because I’m so moved by my performance. It’s very funny, as like I said earlier, I didn’t realize how closed I was emotionally for a very long time. A friend of mine passed away when I was quite young, and I remember being at the funeral and being incapable of crying. It dawned on me, ‘You know, I don’t cry very often. What makes me cry? Should I be crying? Do I feel things? Am I crazy?’ It’s nuts, because after that moment something clicked in my brain and I didn’t cry for about five or six years, at all. I think it became a compulsion where I just could not seem to cry. I eventually did, and it was actually a moment of bliss. Now I cry all the time.”

Combining the lulling ambiance of shoegaze with the iconic melodies and vocal prowess of classic American country music, outlaw cowboy, Orville Peck croons about love and loss from the badlands of North America. The resulting sound is entirely his own. He takes the listener down desert highways, through a world where worn out gamblers, road-dogs, and lovesick hustlers drift in and out of his masked gaze. Orville’s debut album, Pony, delivers a diverse collection of stories that sing of heartbreak, revenge and the unrelenting tug of the cowboy ethos. Warm lap steel guitars and echoing drums move through dreamy ballads and sometimes near frantic buzzsaw tunes - all the while paying homage to his country music roots. Pony’s lead single “Dead of Night” is a torch song about two hustlers traveling through Nevada desert. Their whirlwind romance takes us on a dusty trail of memories - racing down canyon highways, hitchhiking through casino towns and ultimately, ending in tragedy. Orville recalls the adventures of his young love, as he watches the boys silently pass him on the strip, haunted by the happy memories of his past. On the campfire lullaby, “Big Sky,” Orville sings about his past lovers - an aloof biker, an abusive boxer and an overly protective jailor in the Florida Keys - and the inevitable demise of each one, as he leaves them for the wide open, big sky. Meanwhile “Turn To Hate” finds Orville struggling to keep his resentment from building into hatred. A continuous battle between embracing the strength and freedom of being an outsider, and the inevitable struggle of wanting normalcy and familiarity. It encapsulates Orville's dilemma as a cowboy. He sings about having to constantly repair situations in his wake, and fighting with himself over his decision making. To stay or go; to cry or not; whether to leave without saying goodbye in order to soften the blow; All the while wishing someone would tell him that they "can't stay," and to make the decision for him. And “Buffalo Run” acts as a warning, a song built around the imagery of stampeding buffalo in the badlands of the Northern Plains. It’s one that begins peacefully enough but soon transcends into a kinetic charge that crescendos as the buffalo are headed off the cliffside. Pony was produced by Orville Peck, recorded and mixed by Jordan Koop at The Noise Floor on Gabriola Island, British Columbia and mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering in Montreal, Quebec.

The cover of Polo G’s *Die a Legend* features pictures of dearly departed friends and relatives looking on from heaven, their legacies front and center as he embarks upon the next, largest step of his career. The album is a timestamp for the MC, who recently relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles to escape the tragic cycle of street violence he often sings about. He’s come a long way, refining the drill music sonics of his earliest work into the more melodic and playlist-friendly delivery of songs like “Finer Things,” released nearly a year before *Die a Legend*. The tow of his former life is ever-present, though, and celebrations of success are often inseparable from pain. “Couldn\'t leave my brother in them trenches, told him come and stay with me/We gon\' live like kings for all them nights ain\'t have no place to sleep/N\*ggas watched us starve and never offered us a plate to eat/Took off, now they mad, but I know that they won’t wait for me,” he raps on “Through da Storm.” His bars can come across as catharsis, but there are constant warnings that Polo is still very much of the environment he left. On “Lost Files” he talks about being anointed for success by God, and then, in the same verse, details a remorseless revenge killing. Songs like “A King’s Nightmare” serve as warnings to the generation behind him, while “Dyin Breed,” “Pop Out,” and “Last Strike” all paint him as someone not to be toyed with. On the whole, *Die a Legend* is a portrait of an artist trapped between the plight that informs a great deal of his work and what lies beyond the determination to escape that trauma. Fortunately for Polo G, he’s singing about the experiences he’s already had as opposed to the ones yet to come.

Where do you go after you’re nominated for a Grammy for what is only your second proper album? If you’re celebrated North Carolina MC Rapsody, you go only wherever your heart desires—for her, that was down a path forged by historic black women before her. “When I think of why I am who I am, it\'s because I\'m inspired by so many dope women,” Rapsody tells Apple Music. “Dope men, too, but mostly dope women.” The MC’s third album *Eve* (named for that biblical mother of humanity) is a series of dedications to these women—some literal, others figurative, and still others simply named for individuals who embody ideals the artist felt compelled to extol. “It was easy once I had a concept,” she says. “All these women have different energies and they represent different things to me. And the bars just connected on their own, to be honest. Once you have the idea, the basis of what you want to write, everything else is just freedom and truth.” Lead single “Ibtihaj” (as in Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics) features a sample of GZA’s “Liquid Swords” along with guest spots from D’Angelo and The Genius himself. Elsewhere, the voices of rising New York MC Leikeli47, Los Angeles singer K. Roosevelt, and the legendary Queen Latifah ring out to help Rapsody tell the tales of “Oprah,” “Maya,” and “Hatshepsut,” respectively. *Eve* also features fellow generational talent and early Rapsody supporter J. Cole, who, during the sessions for “Sojourner,” helped distill his and Rapsody’s shared purpose as educators. “That whole song came from a two-, three-hour conversation that myself, J. Cole, and Ninth Wonder had in the studio,” Rapsody explains. “We were talking about Ninth’s generation versus me and Cole\'s. Everything is on the internet; they don\'t have to go and talk to each other face to face. In school they don\'t learn about all our black heroes. Some of them don\'t even want to know who Malcolm X is, who Betty Shabazz is. So that turned into: What is our responsibility as artists? We teach through our music. We should have fun, we should vibe out, but we have a responsibility to be reporting and talk about what\'s going on.” What that means for *Eve* is that the MC gets to honor some of her biggest inspirations as she earns a place among them.

SASAMI (Sasami Ashworth) has been making music in almost every way possible for the last decade, and between playing keys, bass, guitar within Cherry Glazerr and Dirt Dress; contributing vocal, string, and horn arrangements to studio albums by the likes of Vagabon, Curtis Harding, Wild Nothing, and Hand Habits; arranging for films and commercials; and even playing French horn in an orchestra - she has gained a reputation as an all-around musical badass. Now taking a turn to focus on her own music, SASAMI's self-titled debut will be out March 2019 on Domino. pre-order the LP at www.dominomusic.com/releases/sasami/sasami-lp-mart-exclusive

Drop into the anonymous project Sault’s 2019 debut and you might mistake it for a compilation of ’70s soul/funk obscurities, the kind of tracks that don’t hit a commercial sweet spot but marshal their influences with such style that the particulars get subsumed into the big, intoxicating whole. Like post-punk? “Don’t Waste My Time.” The Chi-Lites vis-à-vis Erykah Badu? “Masterpiece.” Flower-crown funk? “We Are the Sun.” And so on. Vintage as the sound is, the sentiments—“Why Why Why Why Why,” “Foot on Necks”—are unnervingly current, a nod to the reality that while sounds change, state-sanctioned violence has long been ingrained in the American consciousness.

How does brokenness walk? Or move through the world?” says guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein about The Center Won’t Hold, Sleater-Kinney’s tenth studio album. “We’re always mixing the personal and the political but on this record, despite obviously thinking so much about politics, we were really thinking about the person – ourselves or versions of ourselves or iterations of depression or loneliness – in the middle of the chaos.” The Center Won’t Hold is Sleater-Kinney’s midnight record on the doomsday clock. After twenty-five years of legendary collaboration, rock’n’roll giants Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss rise to meet the moment by digging deeper and sounding bigger than we’ve heard them yet. Here are intimate battle cries. Here are shattered songs for the shattered survivors. “The Center Won’t Hold drops you into the world of catastrophe that touches on the election,” says guitarist/vocalist Tucker of the title track. “We’re not taking it easy on the audience. That song is meant to be really heavy and dark. And almost like a mission statement, at the end of that song, it’s like we’re finding our way out of that space by becoming a rock band.

slowthai knew the title of his album long before he wrote a single bar of it. He knew he wanted the record to speak candidly about his upbringing on the council estates of Northampton, and for it to advocate for community in a country increasingly mired in fear and insularity. Three years since the phrase first appeared in his breakout track ‘Jiggle’, Tyron Frampton presents his incendiary debut ‘Nothing Great About Britain’. Harnessing the experiences of his challenging upbringing, slowthai doesn’t dwell in self-pity. From the album’s title track he sets about systematically dismantling the stereotypes of British culture, bating the Royals and lampooning the jingoistic bluster that has ultimately led to Brexit and a surge in nationalism. “Tea, biscuits, the roads: everything we associate with being British isn’t British,” he cries today. “What’s so great about Britain? The fact we were an empire based off of raping and pillaging and killing, and taking other people’s culture and making it our own?” ‘Nothing Great About Britain’ serves up a succession of candid snapshots of modern day British life; drugs, disaffection, depression and the threat of violence all loom in slowthai’s visceral verses, but so too does hope, love and defiance. Standing alongside righteous anger and hard truths, it’s this willingness to appear vulnerable that makes slowthai such a compelling storyteller, and this debut a vital cultural document, testament to the healing power of music. As slowthai himself explains, “Music to me is the biggest connector of people. It don’t matter what social circle you’re from, it bonds people across divides. And that’s why I do music: to bridge the gap and bring people together.”

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

The title of this group’s second album may suggest a mystical journey, but what you hear across these nine tracks is a thrilling and direct collaboration that speaks to the mastery of the individual members: London jazz supremo Shabaka Hutchings delivers commanding saxophone parts, keyboardist Dan Leavers supplies immersive electronic textures, and drummer Max Hallett provides a welter of galvanizing rhythms. The trio records under pseudonyms—“King Shabaka,” “Danalogue,” and “Betamax” respectively—and that fantastical edge is also part of their music, which looks to update the cosmic jazz legacy of 1970s outliers such as Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. With the only vocals a spoken-word poem on the grinding “Blood of the Past,” the lead is easily taken by Hutchings’ urgent riffs. Tracks such as “Summon the Fire” have a delirious velocity that builds and peaks repeatedly, while the skittering beat on “Super Zodiac” imports the production techniques of Britain’s grime scene. There’s a science-fiction sheen to slower jams like “Astral Flying,” which makes sense—this is evocative time-travel music, after all. Even as you pick out the reference points, which also include drum \'n\' bass and psychedelic rock, they all interlock to chart a sound for the future.

In the 1980s, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson came together to record as The Highwaymen, one of the most successful supergroups in country music history. Now, like the Pistol Annies before them, four of the genre’s most powerful women—Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires—grab the torch. Their name is more than a play on words: “\[The men\] were able to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other as equals,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music’s Brooke Reese. “This is a difficult time for women to do that because there are so few spaces for us on country radio, and in the industry in general, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we form a straight line? A shoulder-to-shoulder women’s country group?’” Their eponymous debut album puts female stories front and center—mothers, daughters, witches, lesbians, cowgirls, and more—in a celebration of American women who refuse to choose between success and family, power and love. “Making bank/Shaking hands/Driving 80/Trying to get home just to feed the baby,” they sing on lead single “Redesigning Women,” a toast to ambitious ladies “breaking every Jell-O mold.” But underneath those winking lyrics and warm, absorbing harmonies is a serious message aimed directly at Nashville’s old guard: *Hear us*. “I want to get in the door, and I want our band to get played on country radio,” Shires says. “And once we get in the door, I want to hold it open.” The songs here are daringly vulnerable (“Old Soul”), tough (“Don’t Call Me,\" “Loose Change”), and, at their core, unifying. The album standout “Crowded Table” calls for a more inclusive world: “If we want a garden/We’re gonna have to sow the seeds,” they sing in unison. “Plant a little happiness/Let the roots run deep.”

Twentysomething East Kentuckian Tyler Childers is the latest standout in a lineage of serious-minded singer-songwriters who’ve chafed at portrayals of their native Appalachia as a boorish, backward place. The nine vignettes on *Country Squire* continue the plainspoken but keenly perceptive storytelling from his 2017 breakthrough *Purgatory*, offering humanizing sketches of struggle, disappointment, and resilience. Some of his loosely autobiographical numbers wryly measure the distance between the modest aspirations he harbored back when his following was merely regional and the more encumbered reality he’s living now. In the title track, he recalls splitting his time between poor-paying road gigs and renovating an old camper trailer: “And when I ain\'t out playing on my six-string/With the nickels I acquire/I’m trying to fix her up a castle/It\'s called the Country Squire.” Childers’ wiry mountain wail and sparing use of keyed-up country vocal curlicues lend songs like “House Fire,” “Creeker,” and “Peace of Mind” a focused emotional intensity. Though this album marks his first partnership with a major label, he kept the producers who steered *Purgatory*—kindred spirit Sturgill Simpson and storied Nashville engineer David Ferguson—and they’ve once again framed Childers with lean, loping performances from bluegrass and country session vets. It suits a searching mind like Childers’ that some of the most down-home grooves melt into mildly psychedelic transitions between tracks.

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.

When asked what gets under her skin, Brooklyn-based singer Laetitia Tamko has an answer: “The categories that people have for who deserves to be treated with humanity,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “and who doesn’t.” It’s just one of the recurring topics that the singer—who goes by Vagabon—has examined since her 2014 debut EP *Persian Garden* and its 2017 follow-up LP, *Infinite Worlds*. “Naturally, it comes up in my music,” she adds. “To have the lines be less rigid about who deserves to be treated what way, and who deserves the space to feel safe in one room versus another.” With her second full-length, *Vagabon*, the singer’s mission is clear: to document her triumph over self-doubt, and to create an empowering space for others. Originally from Cameroon, Tamko honors the hard work of all the women who paved the way for her while simultaneously offering a hand to the next generation on “Every Women” with the line “All the women I meet are tired/They just kick up their feet prior/To my sittin’ down.” This theme of fellowship also connects to “Wits About You,” with Tamko rejecting any offer of success that doesn’t include her community. Amidst the calls for togetherness, the singer recalls some of the arduous experiences that helped her realize her self-worth, like the toll relationships have taken on her (“Water Me Down”) and ruminating on what could have been (“In a Bind”). The album opens and closes with “Full Moon in Gemini,” but on the reprise, the Montreal band Monako regenerates Tamko’s reflective anecdotes into an eager declaration about the singer’s future.

“Break the rules you think you are bound by.” That’s the recurring sentiment Lætitia Tamko carried with her through the writing and recording of her second album under the Vagabon moniker. Her first, 2017’s Infinite Worlds, was an indie breakthrough that put her on the map, prompting Tamko to tour around the world and quit her job in electrical/computer engineering to pursue a career in music full-time. Tamko’s self-titled Nonesuch Records debut finds her in a state of creative expansion, leaning fully into some of the experimental instincts she flirted with on the previous album. This time around, she’s throwing genre to the wind. Vagabon is a vibrant culmination of influences, emotional landscapes, and moods; a colorful and masterful statement by an artist and producer stepping into her own.

“It feels right that our fourth album is not 10, 11 songs,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig explains on his Beats 1 show *Time Crisis*, laying out the reasoning behind the 18-track breadth of his band\'s first album in six years. “It felt like it needed more room.” The double album—which Koenig considers less akin to the stylistic variety of The Beatles\' White Album and closer to the narrative and thematic cohesion of Bruce Springsteen\'s *The River*—also introduces some personnel changes. Founding member Rostam Batmanglij contributes to a couple of tracks but is no longer in the band, while Haim\'s Danielle Haim and The Internet\'s Steve Lacy are among the guests who play on multiple songs here. The result is decidedly looser and more sprawling than previous Vampire Weekend records, which Koenig feels is an apt way to return after a long hiatus. “After six years gone, it\'s a bigger statement.” Here Koenig unpacks some of *Father of the Bride*\'s key tracks. **\"Hold You Now\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “From pretty early on, I had a feeling that\'d be a good track one. I like that it opens with just acoustic guitar and vocals, which I thought is such a weird way to open a Vampire Weekend record. I always knew that there should be three duets spread out around the album, and I always knew I wanted them to be with the same person. Thank God it ended up being with Danielle. I wouldn\'t really call them country, but clearly they\'re indebted to classic country-duet songwriting.” **\"Rich Man\"** “I actually remember when I first started writing that; it was when we were at the Grammys for \[2013\'s\] *Modern Vampires of the City*. Sometimes you work so hard to come up with ideas, and you\'re down in the mines just trying to come up with stuff. Then other times you\'re just about to leave, you listen to something, you come up with a little idea. On this long album, with songs like this and \'Big Blue,\' they\'re like these short-story songs—they\'re moments. I just thought there\'s something funny about the narrator of the song being like, \'It\'s so hard to find one rich man in town with a satisfied mind. But I am the one.\' It\'s the trippiest song on the album.” **\"Married in a Gold Rush\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “I played this song for a couple of people, and some were like, \'Oh, that\'s your country song?\' And I swear, we pulled our hair out trying to make sure the song didn\'t sound too country. Once you get past some of the imagery—midnight train, whatever—that\'s not really what it\'s about. The story is underneath it.” **\"Sympathy”** “That\'s the most metal Vampire Weekend\'s ever gotten with the double bass drum pedal.” **\"Sunflower\" (feat. Steve Lacy)** “I\'ve been critical of certain references people throw at this record. But if people want to say this sounds a little like Phish, I\'m with that.” **\"We Belong Together\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “That\'s kind of two different songs that came together, as is often the case of Vampire Weekend. We had this old demo that started with programmed drums and Rostam having that 12-string. I always wanted to do a song that was insanely simple, that was just listing things that go together. So I\'d sit at the piano and go, \'We go together like pots and pans, surf and sand, bottles and cans.\' Then we mashed them up. It\'s probably the most wholesome Vampire Weekend song.”

Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering’s fourth album as Weyes Blood conjures the feeling of a beautiful object on a shelf just out of reach: You want to touch it, but you can’t, and so you do the next best thing—you dream about it, ache for it, and then you ache some more. Grand, melodramatic, but keenly self-aware, the music here pushes Mering’s \'70s-style chamber pop to its cinematic brink, suffusing stories of everything from fumbled romance (the McCartney-esque “Everyday”) to environmental apocalypse (“Wild Time”) with a dreamy, foggy almost-thereness both gorgeous and profoundly unsettling. A self-described “nostalgic futurist,” Mering doesn’t recreate the past so much as demonstrate how the past is more or less a fiction to begin with, a story we love hearing no matter how sad its unreachability makes us. Hence the album’s centerpiece, “Movies,” which wonders—gorgeously, almost religiously—why life feels so messy by comparison. As to the thematic undercurrent of apocalypse, well, if extinction is as close as science says it is, we might as well have something pretty to play us out.

The phantom zone, the parallax, the upside down—there is a rich cultural history of exploring in-between places. Through her latest, Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) has, too, designed her own universe to soulfully navigate life’s mysteries. Maneuvering through a space-time continuum, she intriguingly plays the role of melodic, sometimes melancholic, anthropologist. Tellingly, Mering classifies Titanic Rising as the Kinks meet WWII or Bob Seger meets Enya. The latter captures the album’s willful expansiveness (“You can tell there’s not a guy pulling the strings in Enya’s studio,” she notes, admiringly). The former relays her imperative to connect with listeners. “The clarity of Bob Seger is unmistakable. I’m a big fan of conversational songwriting,” she adds. “I just try to do that in a way that uses abstract imagery as well.” “An album is like a Rubik’s Cube,” she says. “Sometimes you get all the dimensions—the lyrics, the melody, the production—to line up. I try to be futuristic and ancient at once, which is a difficult alchemy. It’s taken a lot of different tries to get it right.” As concept-album as it may sound, it’s also a devoted exercise in realism, albeit occasionally magical. Here, the throwback-cinema grandeur of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” gracefully coexists with the otherworldly title track, an ominous instrumental. Titanic Rising, written and recorded during the first half of 2018, is the culmination of three albums and years of touring: stronger chops and ballsier decisions. It’s an achievement in transcendent vocals and levitating arrangements—one she could reach only by flying under the radar for so many years. “I used to want to belong,” says the L.A. based musician. “I realized I had to forge my own path. Nobody was going to do that for me. That was liberating. I became a Joan of Arc solo musician.” The Weyes Blood frontwoman grew up singing in gospel and madrigal choirs. “Classical and Renaissance music really influenced me,” says Mering, who first picked up a guitar at age 8. (Listen closely to Titanic Rising, and you’ll also hear the jazz of Hoagy Carmichael mingle with the artful mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the monomyth of scholar Joseph Campbell.) “Something to Believe,” a confessional that makes judicious use of the slide guitar, touches on that cosmological upbringing. “Belief is something all humans need. Shared myths are part of our psychology and survival,” she says. “Now we have a weird mishmash of capitalism and movies and science. There have been moments where I felt very existential and lost.” As a kid, she filled that void with Titanic. (Yes, the movie.) “It was engineered for little girls and had its own mythology,” she explains. Mering also noticed that the blockbuster romance actually offered a story about loss born of man’s hubris. “It’s so symbolic that The Titanic would crash into an iceberg, and now that iceberg is melting, sinking civilization.” Today, this hubris also extends to the relentless adoption of technology, at the expense of both happiness and attention spans. The track “Movies” marks another Titanic-related epiphany, “that movies had been brainwashing people and their ideas about romantic love.” To that end, Mering has become an expert at deconstructing intimacy. Sweeping and string-laden, “Andromeda” seems engineered to fibrillate hearts. “It’s about losing your interest in trying to be in love,” she says. “Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity. There is a feeling of needing to be saved, and that’s a lot to ask of people.” Its companion track, “Everyday,” “is about the chaos of modern dating,” she says, “the idea of sailing off onto your ships to nowhere to deal with all your baggage.” But Weyes Blood isn’t one to stew. Her observations play out in an ethereal saunter: far more meditative than cynical. “I experience reality on a slower, more hypnotic level,” she says. “I’m a more contemplative kind of writer.” To Mering, listening and thinking are concurrent experiences. “There are complicated influences mixed in with more relatable nostalgic melodies,” she says. “In my mind my music feels so big, a true production. I’m not a huge, popular artist, but I feel like one when I’m in the studio. But it’s never taking away from the music. I’m just making a bigger space for myself.”

There aren’t many rappers who can claim to have the stylistic influence that Young Thug has had—a fact that may or may not have slowed the once prolific artist’s rate of output. Never lacking in feature work, the majority of Thug’s career saw him release multiple projects annually before dropping the Future collaboration *SUPER SLIMEY* and the YSL Records showcase *Slime Language* in 2017 and 2018, respectively. A little more than halfway through 2019, Thugger awards his fans’ patience with *So Much Fun*, an album that not only reminds us what we’d been missing, but one whose title seems to speak directly to the experience of creating it. Thug sounds elated to be making music across *So Much Fun*, unloading quirky stream-of-consciousness bars like rounds from one of the many guns he so often cites. “I put on my brothers, I put on my bitch/Had to wear the dress, ’cause I had a stick,” he raps on “Just How It Is.” He gets explicit on “Lil Baby,” telling us, “She put my cum in her cup like it was shake/I’ll never fuck this bitch again, it was a mistake,” but also proclaims via “Ecstasy,” “I don’t wanna talk about no hoes with my dad.” Fair. The production on *So Much Fun*, along with the way Thug processes it, is based in trap but equally indebted to video game scoring and some unplaceable fantasy world. Frequent collaborators like Wheezy and Southside, as well as friend and former tourmate J. Cole, have pushed themselves to their weirdest in attempts to keep up with Thug’s vocal experiments. Here, they include playing with British slang (“Sup Mate”), aping Louis Armstrong’s singing voice (“Cartier Gucci Scarf”), and punctuating bars with Michael Jackson-reminiscent ad-libs (“Light It Up”). The MC is very clearly in his bag on *So Much Fun*, something that we might attribute to the peace he may have found as one of rap’s most revered innovators. He alludes to this himself on “Jumped Out the Window,” rapping, “I been in the top room at Tootsie’s, they ain’t stunt me/They know I got money, and I don’t want nothing.”