Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”
When Miley Cyrus won her first Grammys in 2024 (Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance for “Flowers” from 2023’s *Endless Summer Vacation*), something shifted. “I think somewhere inside of me, I needed to hold a trophy and just feel for a moment that I have something that I can hold in my hands that feels like a true achievement,” the 32-year-old child star turned pop icon tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “After every album, I’ve been able to say, ‘Well, I made the album I set out to make, and that’s enough.’ Somewhere, I was avoiding the fact that it did matter to me.” Having finally achieved the validation she’d been longing to feel since childhood, Cyrus says she “felt free to make the album that I’ve really been craving my whole adult career to create.” The name of the resulting album, her ninth, emerged out of the ether while riffing in the studio with producer Max Taylor-Sheppard and Cyrus’ boyfriend/collaborator, Liily drummer Maxx Morando. “As soon as \[Taylor-Sheppard\] played the first chord, I just said, ‘Tell me something beautiful tonight.’ It was so easy, but I have no idea where it came from. The chord he played was so beautiful that what needed to be said had to be beautiful.” In the title track, a Sunday morning soul jam erupts with a “flash, bang, spark” into post-apocalyptic prog-rock distortion. That clash of sensuality and chaos extends through *Something Beautiful*, whose ’80s-inspired melodrama swings for the fences in sound and theme. The deceptively sparkly-sounding “End of the World” celebrates one last blowout bash before the sky falls. “This, to me, is pop music in its fullest form,” Cyrus says. “Pop gets given a bad name by manufactured label creations, and that’s just not what it is.” She’s thinking of legendary pop innovators who evolved with the times: David Bowie, Madonna, Elton John. The ultra-funky “Easy Lover” was intended for another such icon: Cyrus originally wrote it circa 2020’s *Plastic Hearts*, then refurbished it for placement on Beyoncé’s *COWBOY CARTER*. When Bey went with “II MOST WANTED” instead, Cyrus kept the slinky number for herself, recruiting Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard to play electric guitar—though the “Tell ’em, B!” ad-lib stays. Cyrus’ inimitable voice has never sounded more soulful, though that has not come without a price. She tells Apple Music she has Reinke’s edema, a rare condition which causes fluid to build up in the outer layer of the vocal folds—hence her trademark rasp. “So I have this very large polyp on my vocal cord, which has given me a lot of the tone and the texture that has made me who I am,” she says. “But it’s extremely difficult to perform with, because it’s like running a marathon with ankle weights on.” It could be removed surgically, but for Cyrus, the benefit isn’t worth the risk, “because the chance of waking up from surgery and not sounding like myself is a probability.” Throughout a career that’s spanned two-thirds of her life, Cyrus has felt lost in the static. “White noise is essentially everything happening all at the same time, and I feel like that was what the last 20 years of my career felt like,” she says. But while recording *Something Beautiful*, she found herself coming to terms with everything that’s come before. Over the heavy disco groove of “Reborn,” she delivers a mission statement: “If heaven exists/I’ve been there before/Kill my ego/Let’s be reborn.”
Introduced to the world as a bubbly TikTok influencer, the singer/dancer/actor spent 2024 pulling off what looked like a total reinvention—screaming over the remix of mentor Charli xcx’s “Von dutch” remix, then releasing the steamy “Diet Pepsi,” a single charming enough to seduce even the doubters. In fact, Addison Rae was just reintroducing herself. “I always knew that I wanted to make music, I knew I wanted to perform,” Rae tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “That was something that was really obvious to me since I was a little girl.” And TikTok was the best way for a teenager from Lafayette, Louisiana, to catapult herself into the seemingly inaccessible world of showbiz. Pursuing her pop-star dreams in LA studio sessions to write the songs that would become her first EP (2023’s polarizing *AR*), Rae found herself deferring to the professionals. “When I moved here and started doing sessions, I was like, ‘I need as much guidance as possible,’” she says. “Then, over time, I really started to lean on myself. I really started to lean on my abilities.” In February 2024, Rae met songwriter/producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (both part of the publishing camp of Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin) and wrote the effervescent hook of “Diet Pepsi” that same day. “\[‘Diet Pepsi’\] was such a natural beginning to all of this,” says Rae. “I think it was a perfect introduction in so many ways.” Cue a string of curveball singles, each one presenting an unexpected new facet, from the moody, minor-key “High Fashion” to the Björk-inspired “Headphones On.” It feels apt, then, that her debut album drops the “Rae” and simply goes by *Addison*—a collection of dreamy, intense pop songs that sound like self-discovery, tied together less by genre than by mood. Tracks like “Fame Is a Gun” and “Money Is Everything” expertly straddle camp and sincerity: “You’ve got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life!” she winks on the former, a dizzy synth-pop number on the perils of hitting the big time. The songs on *Addison* are not exactly club bangers, though they’re informed by Rae’s childhood as a dancer; nor are any of them obvious hits. But Rae relished the opportunity to let her creative instincts run wild. “Once you start playing it safe, feeling like, ‘Okay, I’m going to respond with what people want,’ you lose all your freedom,” she says. “You lose all desire for the whole purpose of starting it, and feeling like it’s a form of expression and a reflection. It’s more scary to let that go and give people exactly what they think they want.” As for what Rae learned in the process of writing the album? “Let yourself play. Let yourself have fun, let yourself mess up,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘All right, this is the real me now.’ No—it’s always been the real me, and those experiences have completely guided and shaped me to where I am now. It is about arrival—arrival to who I feel like I’ve become, and who has experienced all these ups and downs, to now land here, in this person that I am now.”
“It’s about broken lives becoming something better,” Counting Crows founder Adam Duritz has said of “Spaceman in Tulsa,” the seesaw between despair and aspiration that arrives early on his band’s first album in a decade, *Butter Miracle, the Complete Sweets!*. Duritz has undergone a personal transformation of his own during the interim. Not only did he lop off his trademark dreadlocks, but several years into his fifties, he also started the longest romantic relationship of his life. He’s managing lifelong mental illness perhaps better than he ever has too. And so, *Butter Miracle* radiates urgency and vibrancy, as if Duritz has returned to his mid-’90s prime with the wisdom of a renewed perspective. Duritz composed *Butter Miracle* during separate stints on a friend’s remote farm in the English countryside. After flirting with long-form composition on 2014’s “Palisades Park,” he submitted to that ambition by building four interconnected pieces that feel like a summary of the band’s enduring strengths. Where the heroic climax of “The Tall Grass” summons the power and yearning of 1996’s *Recovering the Satellites*, “Bobby and the Rat-Kings” has the summertime essence of 2002’s *Hard Candy*. These are, like the best Crows songs, statements of possibility and belief, of peering out of darkness. The band originally released that material in 2021 as an EP but remixed it to match Duritz’s next batch, which includes his most direct and winning songs in decades. Opener “With Love, from A-Z” is an intellectually sprawling celebration of his new romance, while the moody piano epic “Virginia Through the Rain” documents the soft sting of lingering regret, even as broken lives indeed become something better. “We are evolving/In night to morning,” Duritz opines during “Under the Aurora,” the sort of emotional epic that’s forever been this band’s calling card. “And I want to believe in something/Spun out of darkness/Somewhere under the aurora.”
Cautious Clay’s discography is charmingly unpredictable. The Cleveland-born songwriter introduced a hybrid pop-R&B style on early releases like 2021’s *Deadpan Love* before fully embracing jazz on 2023’s *KARPEH*. His 2025 album *The Hours (Morning)* finds the artist born Joshua Karpeh trying to sonically encapsulate the morning hours of the day, expanding his palette to include indie rock, soul, and electronic music. “Traffic (7am)” features Karpeh trying his hand at alt-pop, crooning over jangly percussion and soaring guitar solos. Elsewhere, on “Father Time (10am)” he again favors an uptempo rhythm, placing his confident vocals against pulsing drums and synths that fly above his words. Cautious Clay’s mood, perspective, and disposition change with each tick of the clock, offering the perfect platform for his constantly shifting approach to songwriting.
One of the artists at the forefront of the so-called sad sierreño scene, DannyLux cemented his star status with albums like *Limerencia* and *DLUX* as well as the occasional Eslabon Armado team-up. Roughly a year after 2024’s extensive *EVOLUXION* dropped, the California native’s robust follow-up *LEYENDA* finds the now 21-year-old singer-songwriter augmenting and, at times, intensifying his signature sound. Those eager for more of his lush, moody compositions have plenty to revel and/or wallow in, including “SIRENA” and “MELANCOLÍA:(.” He makes heartbreak so deeply relatable on the crushing “YA NO ESTÁS” yet makes a hopeful cast for the promise of true love on the Jasiel Nuñez team-up “Cielo Eterno.” In line with the emotional messiness of crashing out, some of the titles suggest incomplete status or otherwise intentional rawness, with potent yet spare cuts like “no\_pasa\_nada\_demo.wav” and “instinto\_natural\_demo.wav” conveying a certain intimacy. More fleshed-out takes like “TEN PIEDAD” and the trip-hop-inflected “2025” demonstrate just how large he can make these personal pieces.
“I’m the girl with crystals in her hair,” begins “Outside,” the opening track of *Stay Alta*, the first Estelle album since 2018’s *Lovers Rock*. “Diamond is the life that’s in her head/Everything is just a little rare,” she continues. “Outside” is a declaration of the overwhelming joy and self-assurance the singer is hoping to spread with the album. She dabbles mostly in disco, house, and funk, effectively throwing a dance party in the name of hope and perseverance. And what good is a party without a few guests? *Stay Alta*’s title track features Compton producer and MC Channel Tres, while Cleveland-hailing singer Durand Bernarr brings a bit of ballroom flair to “Let It Drop.” In a nod to the pandemic-defining DJ sets that kept the world sane, legendary producer and DJ D-Nice brings his master of ceremonies ability to “Love on Love,” proclaiming “Now’s the time to celebrate each other”—which is all Estelle is really asking, for us to appreciate one another. That, and as she instructs on the Teedra Moses and LaRussell collab “Grateful,” to “just stay grateful.”
