“That is who Lady Gaga is to me,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of creating *MAYHEM*. “Maybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.” In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album—which she calls her “favorite record in a long time”—its own thing. “*ARTPOP* was a vibe. *Joanne* was a sound. *Chromatica* had a sound. All different. *The Fame Monster* was more chaotic. *The Fame* was theatrical pop. *Born This Way*, to me, had more of a metal/electro New York vibe to it,” she says. “I actually made the effort making *MAYHEM* to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.” Indeed, *MAYHEM* traverses—and oftentimes melds—the various flavors of Mother Monster’s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited “Garden of Eden” follows the trend of what she calls “2000 throwbacks.” With its sparkly synths, “LoveDrug” might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut “LoveGame.” She even specifically admits the “electro-grunge influence” seeps its way in—especially apparent in “Perfect Celebrity,” “Vanish into You,” and “The Beast.” The latter even shows shades of *Joanne*, but “Blade of Grass” and her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile” really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display. It’s also all incredibly personal to her. “The album is a series of gothic dreams,” she says. “I say it’s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.” Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks, in her own words. **“Abracadabra”** “I think I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think ‘Abracadabra’ is very much my sound—something that I honed in \[on\] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me. And it’s the thing that I’m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.” **“Perfect Celebrity”** “It’s super angry: ‘I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.’ It’s almost comical, this idea that any time I’m in the room with anyone, there’s me—Stefani—and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It’s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn’t feel honest to me on *MAYHEM* to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I’m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I’m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.” **“Shadow of a Man”** “That song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.” **“The Beast”** “In that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who’s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about \[my fiancé\] Michael \[Polansky\] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, ‘You can’t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart’s racing, you’re growling, and we both know why.’ It’s like somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.’” **“Blade of Grass”** “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn’t have as much life around me to inspire me.”
Jennie Kim debuted as a K-pop performer in BLACKPINK in 2016 and released her first solo song, the finger-snapping “Solo,” two years later. But it wasn’t until her debut solo album, 2025’s *Ruby*, that she got a more profound chance to self-reflect through her music. “The greatest part of this solo project for me was that I had time with myself,” JENNIE tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I really got to dig deep inside of who I am and what I am.” The 15-track, primarily English-language album was JENNIE’s first music release since leaving YG Entertainment as a soloist to launch her own label, Odd Atelier, and it’s a declaration of her musical identity as a solo singer and rapper. The album’s name, *Ruby*, is a reference to the alter ego (Jennie Ruby Jane) that the musician created for herself when she moved to New Zealand by herself as a child to learn English. “When I was like 11,” she says, “I knew that I wanted to create this identity for myself, like ‘Jennie’ wasn\'t doing justice for me, and I was like, ‘I want a longer name.’” The persona has carried over into adulthood and her creative expression on *Ruby*. From the hip-hop-driven swagger of tracks like “like JENNIE,” “ExtraL,” and “Damn Right” to confessional-style songs like “F.T.S.,” “twin,” and “start a war,” JENNIE opens up about fame, protecting the ones she loves, and staying true to herself. She taps an eclectic cadre of established and rising Western musicians for help, including Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis (“Damn Right”), Doechii (“ExtraL”), Dominic Fike (“Love Hangover”), FKJ (“JANE”), and Dua Lipa (“Handlebars”). “Now, I\'m not afraid to challenge myself,” JENNIE says of what she learned in the album-creation process. “Understanding my value was the biggest lesson.”
On their ninth album, Knoxville deathcore squad Whitechapel bring their triple-guitar onslaught to a concept album about religious extremism. As a thematic successor to 2008’s *This Is Exile*, *Hymns in Dissonance* examines evil through the eyes of a fanatic gathering followers for his cult. After the hellish introductory combo of “Prisoner 666” and the title track, parts of the remaining songs—minus tribal interlude “Ex Infernis”—are meant to be hymns sung by the cult’s members. Their goal? To open a portal for their leader’s unholy ascent. Lyrically, Whitechapel vocalist Phil Bozeman has written the hymns as representations of the seven deadly sins. Meanwhile, the band’s hyper-staccato attack fully embodies all the diabolic discord the title promises.
Two decades into their career, UK metalcore stars Architects know that name recognition isn’t always an asset. “We’re aware that it takes a lot more to get people’s attention on your 11th album,” songwriter and drummer Dan Searle tells Apple Music. “We recognized that we had to aim really, really high if we wanted to grab people’s attention.” The result is *The Sky, the Earth & All Between*, an album that explodes with punishing breakdowns, bubbling electronics, and Sam Carter’s impressive scream/sing/scream acrobatics. “We felt strongly that there was another gear we had uncovered,” Searle says. “We experimented a lot on the last couple albums, and that had opened a lot of doors. Suddenly, I could see this world for us to head into. There was this prophecy in our heads about what we could achieve.” With kinetic singles that take on tribalism (“Whiplash”), mortality (“Blackhole”), and disgruntled fans (“Seeing Red”), Searle realized early on that the record didn’t have a unifying lyrical theme. “I spent five months trying to think of an album title that would put a nice little bow on it, that was memorable and poetic, so I ended up using a lyrical reference,” he says. “I just felt like it suited the mood and aesthetic of the album.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Elegy”** “I don’t think we’ve ever had a song like this before. Thematically, it’s about defiance. It’s about overcoming obstacles, overcoming doubt—other people’s doubt. I think this might not even have existed in reality, but we had created this mindset where people doubted us. So, it just felt like the right thing to open the album with a statement of defiance: ‘Fuck you if you doubted us. We’re still here.’ It’s complete bravado—a bit of a chest-out, standing-tall statement of belief and intent.” **“Whiplash”** “This song is about tribalism, the world we live in today. I don’t really gravitate towards writing songs that are political statements these days. Looking back at our previous work, we’ve become different people. So, I try not to do that anymore because I just don’t know how I’m going to feel next year. This song is a bit broader: It’s such a divided world right now, and there’s so many forces contributing towards that. So, it’s a bit of a cynical commentary on how we’re incapable of treating each other with respect when we have a difference of opinion and see the world a different way.” **“Blackhole”** “This one revisits some themes from our older stuff a little bit. It’s pondering mortality and the battles that we face day to day—and how those battles look when they’re silhouetted by the backdrop of dying, by how insignificant so much of our suffering is in the face of inevitability. Obviously, all of us see friends or family get sick, and this stirs up all sorts of thoughts and feelings within us. When we wrote that song, that had come up in our lives. I was asking myself, ‘What’s this all about? And why am I wasting my time suffering over nothing?’” **“Everything Ends”** “This is about acknowledging that no matter how much I’m suffering in a particular moment, that suffering will end. That could be dying, but it could also be when you’re in a bad space and it feels like it’s forever. And then you wake up one day, like, ‘Oh, I feel kind of better. And I don’t know when that started happening.’ A lot of it is conversational in the sense that I’m almost communicating with my partner in the song. There’s a little bit of excuse-making and apology. I’m aware that when I’m suffering, the person that has to bear the brunt of that is my wife. And that’s probably the same for everyone—their partner gets the worst of it. So, the song is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, the sun will rise again.” **“Brain Dead”** “This is a collaboration with House of Protection, and I feel like this is probably the most fun song on the record. It was definitely written in that spirit. I had this idea for a song called ‘Brain Dead’ for a while, and it suited this hardcore punk aesthetic that we delved into on this song. I was thinking about modern life and the way we anaesthetize ourselves, whether it’s through phone addiction or alcohol or weed or brainwashing ourselves with news media or whatever. So many of us are unconsciously just giving up our lives, and we kind of yearn to be numbed and not have to feel too much. Would we rather just be dumb and ignorant? There’s a part of me that would. So, it’s a tongue-in-cheek hardcore anthem for stupidity.” **“Evil Eyes”** “On this song, I’m anthropomorphizing my own inner dialogue of anxiety as something that’s outside of me. It’s sort of like me saying, ‘I’m going to overcome this; I’m overcoming this.’ But the verses are about me just being furious at the anxiety and trying to attack it and venting my frustration at dealing with these feelings all the time. But ultimately, the song is quite a positive one. There is some defiance, but it’s more about me overcoming myself and overcoming the self-destructive qualities that I have, so I can live another day.” **“Landmines”** “This is about me knowing that I need to do things to be a better person, a better husband, a better dad, a better human being—but ignoring those things, setting them aside, making excuses, and carrying on living in a less-than-desirable way. It’s about being self-destructive, and it’s about knowing you’re doing it and carrying on anyway. I feel as though I see that everywhere. It’s like when we know we’ve got to do something, but we don’t do it. And we all experience that. We know what’s good for us, but we so often don’t do it. And we make excuses all the time. We justify our apathy. It’s part of being human.” **“Judgement Day” (feat. Amira Elfeky)** “I think this is a bit of an old-man song in a way. It’s about digitally induced dread, this experience of living under the cloud of what the internet shows me and the way that it distills all the terrible things that are happening in the world into a neat little package for me every day. So, I’m asking, ‘How natural is that? Are we really wired to deal with that?’ I really feel for young people, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up under that cloud. I’ve got young kids, and I wonder what it’s doing to them. I’m not sure it’s a good thing.” **“Broken Mirror”** “I suppose this is a little bit like ‘Everything Ends’ in the sense that I think the song is me getting mad at myself about being a bad partner. I’m probably a little bit hard on myself at times, and when I feel that I’ve gone too far lyrically and I’m being too brutal on myself, Sam usually reads the lyrics and says, ‘No, that’s exactly what it should be like.’ So, I guess Sam probably experiences this maybe even more than me. But I was just trying to examine who I am and how I operate within the framework of a human relationship and how much I ask another person to tolerate.” **“Curse”** “Our producer told me, ‘You can only have one old-man song on this album,’ but I was freaking out about getting old. I’m going gray. I’m reaching that point in my life where the signs of aging are very clear. We can laugh about it, and we ought to just accept it, of course. But it’s weird because my brother died when he was 28, and for a long time, that fueled this total acceptance of aging. I had about eight years of not caring that I’m another year older because Tom died when he was 28. So, every year beyond that is a gift. And then, suddenly, that fuel just ran out. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. I’m going to be 40, 50, 60…’ But I know I should just make the best of it and enjoy the ride.” **“Seeing Red”** “Before this record, we did a couple of albums that were less heavy. The internet gave us a bit of a hard time about it, and we took it personally. So, I had this idea that we should write a heavy song about fans wanting us to be heavy, but we should make it fun and a bit of a joke. I think it’s probably one of the first songs we’ve ever written where I had lyrics before anything else. One of the first lines is, ‘I felt it when they said, “We only ever love you when you’re seeing red.”’ That very much set the tone. For all the heavy themes on this record, a lot of it was made in the spirit of fun—especially this song.” **“Chandelier”** “It’s hard to know how to end an album, but this was very much a purpose-built album-closer. It’s got a little bit of the same DNA as ‘Elegy,’ so it felt like a good way to bookend the album. At first, it felt like quite a bleak song lyrically, but after we finished it, I just had this complete 180 where, suddenly, the lyrics were speaking more of how beautiful life is and how it’ll still be beautiful without us. The world continues to evolve after our light goes out, so we’re just here to enjoy it as best we can and witness it and try to understand it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And that’s OK.”
For their first album in seven years, and first as a trio, the British folk-rockers Mumford & Sons went back to their roots. *RUSHMERE*, their fifth album, is named after the pub in southwest London where Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwane, and Ben Lovett first got to know each other as friends and eventual creative collaborators. They were humble days, coming years before tracks like “Little Lion Man” helped define a strand of optimistic folk pop that dominated the early 2010s and influenced 2020s stadium-fillers like Noah Kahan and Zach Bryan. *RUSHMERE* pulls back from the pomp and splendor of folk-rock stardom and gets back to basics: furiously played guitars and rousing vocal harmonies, with Marcus Mumford’s sincere, resolute burr leading the way. Produced by Nashville straight-shooter Dave Cobb, who’s known for his unfussy, song-forward approach to the studio, *RUSHMERE* places the powerful songwriting and strong musical chemistry of Mumford & Sons front and center. “Monochrome” is a hushed hymn to a long-gone muse, with Mumford rueful about time’s passage yet generous to someone who has faded to “monochrome out of sight.” The stirring “Surrender” is propelled by stomps and strummed strings, moving briskly forward even as Mumford sings of his world-weariness. “Blood on the Page,” a collaboration with next-generation folk-rocker Madison Cunningham, is delicate and ghostly in a way that amplifies the pain in its lyrics. “Time, don’t let us down again/’Cause I won’t wait,” the trio wails near the end of the title track, with ferocious banjos driving home the plea’s urgency. It’s a sly callback to “I Will Wait,” the 2012 song that cemented Mumford & Sons as leaders of the 2010s’ folk-rock vanguard. But it’s also a signal of the urgency and hope underpinning *RUSHMERE*, making it a taut, potent statement of reintroduction that doubles as a declaration of intent to stick around.
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