*everything is a lot.* marks Wale’s first full-length since his 2021 album *Folarin II*, titled after his nickname. While *everything is a lot.* shares some of the joyful DNA that courses through the project named after his alter ego, Wale Folarin, it showcases another side of the D.C.-born rapper’s personality—more introspective, alone, and yearning than ever before. Throughout the album, Wale works through relationship struggles while readily admitting that he’s part of (if not all of) the problem. On opener “Conundrum,” he notes that his heart is colder than most, before explaining why it’s this way: “My ex, I was in love with her/Passionate sex but couldn’t cuddle her/Tell me, was it lust or did I love for her?/Her clothes off, I’m closed off, which one is worse?” On “Power and Problems,” Wale croons over live drums and gentle keyboard chords. He implores himself to slow down, noting that life in the fast lane can get bumpy. It’s no surprise that he saves his most ferocious bars for “Michael Fredo,” a towering, horn-driven track that finds Wale reflecting on the many ways he’s been betrayed in the rap game. Over a beat that sounds like old-school Just Blaze, Wale sounds invigorated and vengeful, noting that “this rich and famous shit ain’t sustainable.” Throughout *everything is a lot.*, Wale makes it clear that the weight of the world is on his shoulders. He’s deflecting jealous exes, dealing with greedy ops, making sure his crew is taken care of. Wouldn’t it be easier if everyone would just let him rap?

For ROSALÍA, her fourth full-length album *LUX* only has “little pieces” of her in the lyrics of its songs—and she prefers it that way. “I think the best fiction has this blurry line, the sweet spot between what’s personal and what’s universal, what’s detailed and what’s abstract, what’s implicit and what’s explicit,” the Spanish star tells Apple Music. “It’s both. Because I wrote it, there has to be some sort of truth for me in it. But at the same time, I think it’s much more about the other than about myself.” The “other,” in this case, is a group of saints—Saint Rose of Lima, Anandamayi Ma, Hildegard von Bingen, Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya, and other martyrs across cultures, centuries, and continents—that ROSALÍA voraciously studied in the wake of her third album, 2022’s *MOTOMAMI*. Instead of immediately writing about the emotional turmoil she’d weathered in its aftermath—a period that included the end of her engagement to former collaborator Rauw Alejandro—she found the muses of her next project in theology books. After immersing herself in the stories of these women of faith, ROSALÍA blended their experiences, and their tongues, with hers. “Where did they come from? What was the language that would be spoken there?” she says. “There were a lot of women that were extremely interesting to me that were nuns, they were poets. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to read what they actually wrote. I’m going to try to explain these stories.’” Across *LUX*, ROSALÍA sings in multiple languages—her native Spanish and Catalan, but also Arabic, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Italian, Ukrainian, and German, among others—to invoke these saints while telling stories of flower-strewn funerals, doomed romance, unrequited love, and crises of faith in multiple forms. If 2018’s *EL MAL QUERER* introduced her singular fusion of flamenco and pop to the world, and *MOTOMAMI* brought reggaetón into the mix, *LUX* builds on that work from a high-drama, operatic foundation, one that pairs her lyrical intensity with vocal prowess and orchestral flourish. A cajón and handclaps blend seamlessly with urbano bass, Auto-Tune, and somber strings, often with many or all of these elements weaving throughout the same track (as they do on “De Madrugá”). Her voice soars over each flamenco run with ease (“La Rumba Del Perdón”), only to growl over sinister cello (“Porcelana”), breathlessly trip through a softly strummed waltz (“La Perla”), or reach the rafters of any grand opera house (the exquisite “Reliquia”; her version of an aria, “Mio Cristo Piange Diamante”; the severe and surreal “Berghain,” which features Björk and Yves Tumor). ROSALÍA worked with the London Symphony Orchestra to give *LUX* the symphonic heft it deserves, and at times, the gravity of the undertaking felt insurmountable. “I definitely had chills so many times while recording vocals,” she says. “I don’t think I ever cried so much making an album. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much recording vocals. I think that I didn’t maybe want to go through this before. I was like, ‘I’m not ready.’ I know I had to do an album like this, but I wasn’t ready.” Whether or not she realized it at the time, she was, indeed, ready for *LUX* and all it entails. It’s the destination she’s been writing towards, uninhibited by instrumentation, devastation, or language. “*MOTOMAMI* was minimalist,” she says. “This is maximalism.”

Don’t tell Danny Brown he can rap over anything. Even if it’s true—the Detroit rapper has paired his dexterous rhymes and his stretchy, versatile voice on prog rock, EDM, boom-bap, and seemingly everything in between—he’s weary of people making more of his expansive tastes than they are. “I don’t want it to be a gimmick,” he tells Apple Music. “Is the music enjoyable or not?” From that perspective, it makes perfect sense that Brown chose to build his new album, *Stardust*, in the sounds of the hyperpop scene. Not only is it a natural progression sonically from previous albums like *XXX*, *Atrocity Exhibition*, and his *SCARING THE HOES* collaboration with JPEGMAFIA; it’s also the perfect soundtrack for this stage of his life. Brown’s previous solo album, 2023’s *Quaranta*, was largely somber and reflective: While its title was designed to commemorate him turning 40, the lyrics found him picking up the shattered pieces of his life after years of substance abuse, a messy breakup due to infidelity, and music feeling more like a job than a tool of creative expression. But on *Stardust*, he’s confident, excited, and having the time of his life. “Sleeping real good at night, ’cause I’m proud of myself,” he raps on album opener “Book of Daniel.” “Say a prayer when I wake up because that rehab helped.” He says that his drug-addled party raps in the 2010s and early 2020s were initially just a result of trying to rap about something different from the dope-dealing bars that populated his earlier work. “I don’t ever think I heard the word Adderall in a rap before I said it, and now it’s just normal,” he says. “But I’m not proud of that at all. ’Oh, I created drug culture in rap.’ That’s not how I want to be remembered. That’s why I’m off that shit.” A collection of beats and choruses by hyperpop heavy hitters like Quadeca, Holly, and underscores are bright, eccentric, dance-ready, and skittery. But Brown insists that upbeat instrumentals don’t mean the raps lack substance. “If the beats are going to be more poppy than normal, I gotta talk about something. I can’t let it be dumbed down,” he says. “I knew I wanted to say something, but I didn’t just want to repeat myself, And I didn’t want it to be the ‘I’m sober’ album. To me, that’s no different than me making a druggie album again.” These aren’t just mindless pop tunes, even if they go down easy. “Lift You Up” is a dance-ready number with Angel Prost (her Frost Children sister Lulu Prost also shows up on the album) about a toxic relationship, while “Flowers” features a chorus by vocalist 8485 and joyful, triumphant raps about how Brown has persevered through hard times. “Starburst” has Brown landing boastful punchline raps over a discordant, screeching beat, and “1999” pairs more confident bars with skittery synths and metal-heavy shrieks by JOHNNASCUS. “The End” is the most powerful of all, though: a nearly nine-minute journey in three parts, with Danny vulnerably revisiting his years of addiction with candor, clarity, and accountability before making a promise to himself to never go back. The ethereal drum ’n’ bass sound bed and dreamy vocals by Zheani make the song sound like the closing credits on a samurai video game from the 2000s. It’s a fitting conclusion for someone who’s crystal clear about his priorities for the first time in way too long. “50 Cent told me,” Brown says, “that if I just wanted to make music for myself, I might as well just stay in my basement.”

If the grim hallucinations of billy woods and E L U C I D’s second album with The Alchemist ever feel like too much, just remember the reality that inspired them, from the streets where the ambulance never comes (“Laraaji”) to the resegregated swimming pools where “bleach burn good like menthol” (“Scandinavia”). Is daily life really that relentless for Black America? That’s probably too much to answer in rap, not to mention too much to ask of rappers, which is why they take the time to remind you that despite their air of myth and mystery (not to mention the thickness of the smoke around The Alchemist’s beats), they remain ordinary guys. Unread novels on the nightstand, bacon grease by the stove, and bedtime routines for their kids—you know, the trivialities that make life so defiantly worth living (“Dogeared”).

Portugal. The Man ringleader John Gourley has called Portland home since the mid-2000s, but his native Alaska is always on his mind. His psych-pop troupe’s 10th album is named for a remote fishing village on the state’s Seward Peninsula and it opens with two turbulent tracks—the cosmic-rock collage “Denali” and the mutant hardcore blitz “Pittman Ralliers”—inspired by the state’s infamous volcanic peak, Mt. McKinley. Fitting for a record that ruminates on our precarious relationship with the environment, *SHISH* can be as unpredictably calming and chaotic as nature itself, often within the span of a single song: “Tyonek” begins as a serene snapshot of life in the Arctic before triggering an avalanche of nu-metal riffage; the dulcet indie-pop groove of “Knik” erupts into a fuzzed-out out finale capped by a glammy, fretboard-busting guitar solo. *SHISH* is the sound of Portugal. The Man doubling down on their refusal to be pigeonholed as the feel-good hitmakers of the “Feel It Still” era, but the album rewards your endurance with the string-swept “Tanana,” an equally despairing and life-affirming anthem about finding strength and joy in the ones you love as the world burns.

After writing 2022’s *Giving the World Away* in lockdown with the live show firmly in mind, Harriette Pilbeam took a different approach for her third album as Hatchie. She put touring on the back burner to just let this set of songs develop naturally and gradually, finding more inspiration in books and movies than in other music and relocating from California back to her native Brisbane and then to Melbourne. Pilbeam immersed herself in such melancholic romance films as *Before Sunrise* and *Blue Valentine*, savoring the poignancy of extended longing. The warm, woozy songs on *Liquorice* capture that sensation nicely, with the title track especially echoing the heightened reality of experiencing intense new love. “We’re just getting to the good bit,” she sings, before the swooning refrain “Don’t need anything other than this.” Produced by Melina Duterte (aka Jay Som) in her LA home studio, the album also features Pilbeam’s trusty partner Joe Agius (RINSE) and Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa. Pilbeam thrives in those close collaborations, while still sounding entirely like herself: lead single “Lose It Again” is a co-write with Orchin’s Jeremy McLennan, yet it’s exactly the kind of sugared dream pop she has always done so well. And even when she slips darker lyrical undertones into “Only One Laughing,” her lilting voice and the rippling guitar effects provide comforting reassurance.

Whitney’s fourth album is a moment of rebirth for the Chicago duo. After making a hard pivot towards pop-influenced sounds on 2022’s *Spark*, Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek—who, at this point, are a million miles away sonically from the teenage-kicking garage rock of their previous band Smith Westerns—return to the pastoral folk rock they made their name on with *Small Talk*. The result is a gorgeous and warm affair, complete with lush instrumentation and feathery melodies that resemble a full realization of the sound they first gained notice with on their critically acclaimed debut *Light Upon the Lake* from 2016. Ehrlich and Kakacek’s distinctive vocals continue to complement each other perfectly, their self-produced arrangements taking on levels of complication that stretch far beyond the Simon & Garfunkel comparisons of their early work and more towards the velvety soft rock of the late 1970s, every horn stab and piano run possessing the effervescence of sipping champagne at dusk.

In form alone, *Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan* feels like a summation of John Darnielle’s ambitions across his 30-year-plus career. His work as The Mountain Goats, rich with storytelling and character study, has often approximated the trappings of musical theater, from the detailed scene-setting of his 2002 classic *Tallahassee* to the loosely structured rock opera of 2023’s *Jenny from Thebes*. But the project’s 23rd album feels practically made for the Broadway stage, right down to the sweeping orchestration of the album’s opening “Overture” (the first time an instrumental has been featured on a Mountain Goats album). Fittingly, the record features backing vocal contributions from *Hamilton* godhead and longtime Darnielle friend Lin-Manuel Miranda—but despite these slight shifts in sound, longtime fans will still recognize *Through This Fire* as carrying the same elements of Darnielle’s music that have been present throughout his career, every song a detailed revelation of an imaginary world that its creator adds glorious life to.

On their 2020 debut *925* and 2022 follow-up *Anywhere But Here*, London’s Sorry hammered together a sometimes jarring collision of sounds that took in everything from lo-fi bedroom pop and indie to glitch and drum ’n’ bass. On their third album, Sorry’s mutant hybrid holds together much more coherently. That’s in part due to core duo Louis O’Bryen and Asha Lorenz leaning into their more unsettling qualities, with the resulting atmosphere binding everything under its dark spell. With Lorenz’s childlike vocals shifting between panic-attack anxiety and creepy playground taunts, *COSPLAY* skips and lurches through a shadowy sonic underworld coloured by clanking industrial noise (“Jetplane”’s frenetic collision of beats), haunting gothic nightmares (the Cure-like miasma-swamping “Love Posture”), and desolate folk (the O’Bryen-fronted “Life in This Body”). While the album’s title might suggest dressing up in someone else’s style, on *COSPLAY*, Sorry have fashioned something truly unique.

A year after her 2024 synth-shocked opus *Girl with No Face*, LA-via-Toronto pop shapeshifter Allie X has reinvented herself once again. Composed largely on her first instrument, the piano, *Happiness Is Going to Get You* presents the more fantastical flip side to its dance-floor-driven predecessor, with the always glamboyant singer adopting a new persona she dubs the Infant Marie, whose retro-futurist look—part Marie Antoinette, part Klaus Nomi—serves as the album’s sonic mood board. The result is a set of cosmopolitan alt-pop earworms infused with a playfully baroque sensibility. The whistling hook and fleet-footed rhythms of “7th Floor” position it as a close cousin to Peter Bjorn and John’s mid-2000s touchstone “Young Folks,” while the bassy bounce of “Reunite” leads us into a sunshower of twinkling harpsichords. But Allie’s musical extravagance is always anchored by her self-analytical lyrics and devious sense of humor: “I Hope You Hear This Song” sees her dreaming of writing the sort of chart-topping hit that gets played everywhere out in the world—not for fame and fortune, but to haunt and taunt an ex-boyfriend while he’s “shopping at the mall, getting coffee at the stall.” And thanks to its insidious melody and buoyant “Bitter Sweet Symphony” strings, she just might get her wish.

On their third album, British mathcore trio Pupil Slicer cranks up the mechanized fury in a conceptual work the band insists is not in fact a concept album. Instead, *Fleshwork* explores the myriad ways in which society oppresses, degrades, and dehumanizes anyone who doesn’t fit the straight, white image of a model citizen. On singles “Heather” and “Black Scrawl,” vocalist/guitarist Kate Davies relates some of their own experiences as a nonbinary autistic person dealing with all the hate and political divisiveness that come with simply trying to exist. Elsewhere, scathing tracks spotlight the playing of new bassist Luke Booth while drawing inspiration from the anime *Chainsaw Man* and the video games *Mouthwashing* and *NieR*.

The title of DRAIN’s third album has been a mantra for the Santa Cruz hardcore band ever since they played a certain festival a few years ago. “They made this backdrop for the whole show that said, ‘California Is Your Enemy,’ so all the bands had go up there and play in front of it,” vocalist Sammy Ciaramitaro tells Apple Music. “But I was like, ‘DRAIN is the opposite. DRAIN is your friend.’” The sentiment fits perfectly with DRAIN’s infectious enthusiasm and feel-good California vibes, both of which seem to ooze from Ciaramitaro’s every pore. “When we play, it feels like I’m kind of hanging out and having a little party with people,” he says. “Maybe I don’t know them, but we’ve got enough common ground. And even now, as our band has been able to accomplish so many things, we still hold on to the fact that we’re friends that are in a band. We’re not that far apart from your friends that are just playing down the street.” After the success of their 2023 album *LIVING PROOF*, DRAIN made the leap to full-time band. On *…IS YOUR FRIEND*, they incorporate even more of guitarist Cody Chavez’s heavy metal influences while Ciaramitaro holds it down on bass and Tim Flegal handles drums. “Cody lives and breathes Dokken, thrash metal, and hair metal,” the singer says. “At one point, Tim and I didn’t want to go too far in that direction, but on this album, we really thought about ‘how can we throw all of our stuff in a blender and have it not get lost?’ But we realize there’s a fine line. Hopefully the hardcore kids that know us will enjoy this, and we can bring in some of the metal guys, too.” Below, he comments on each track. **“Stealing Happiness from Tomorrow”** “We felt this would make a great opener because it starts with one instrument at a time, and when those guitars come in, dude, it’s just these huge chords with the whammy, and I love it. It’s got some New York hardcore in it, with a big mosh outro. Lyrically, I got married between this record and the last one, and I wrote these lyrics shortly after the wedding. I love in hip-hop songs when they’ll take half a line from another song as like a nod or paying homage. On this song, I took a couple lyrics from the Daniel Johnston song ‘True Love Will Find You in the End,’ which was our first dance at the wedding, and reworked them a bit.” **“Living in a Memory”** “I wrote this one about how I’ll run into people I knew from way back, people I used to party with. I think sometimes they’ll look back fondly at that part of life for themselves, but when I look back at that part of my life, they’re not my proudest or happiest moments. I’ve written about being straight edge before, but this isn’t really a straight edge song because you can apply it to just about anything. I can acknowledge fun times and fun memories, but I never wish I was back there still doing that.” **“Scared of Everything and Nothing”** “I wrote this one on my honeymoon in Jamaica. We just got off this huge tour, the biggest we had ever done, and a month later I got married. I was thinking about how I have everything I’ve ever wanted in life, so what’s next? Where do you go when you finally have everything you want? It’s really cool, but it’s also kind of a scary thing. In a movie, there’s the problem and they beat it and then the movie’s over. But what happens next? You make these goals and you check them off, and then you’re just done? Is it over? No, you make another goal, and you keep chasing it.” **“Nothing but Love”** “We’re very fortunate—we don’t really have many haters. But that saying ‘more money, more problems’ is a real thing, dude. The better you’re doing, the more people there are out there who don’t like it, and it’s not even because they necessarily dislike you. But they take success personally or something. It’s a jealousy thing, and it sucks. But instead of ‘fuck you if you don’t like me,’ it’s ‘I love you, man. There’s room for all of us to succeed and excel.’” **“Can’t Be Bothered”** “We all play a lot of instruments, so our drummer, Tim, came up with this song on guitar. I heard one of our British homies say, ‘I can’t be bothered today.’ Like when it’s a really nice day, I can’t be bothered to do some of the shit I’m supposed to do, like emails or phone calls or any kind of paperwork. I don’t want to do anything except what I want to do, and most of the time that involves me being outside. I absolutely love where I live in Santa Cruz, and in the song, I name-drop a lot of the places I like to hang out, kinda like what Sublime did on ‘Paddle Out.’” **“Loudest in the Room”** “The beginning starts with these wild animals, but it’s actually just all of our little dogs. We recorded them barking and kind of fucked their voices up to make them sound crazy. Guitar-wise, the opening riff is one of my favorites on the whole record. We don’t ever get political, really, but the lyrics are my commentary on some aspects of the world. I feel like sometimes the loudest people, the ones who preach this or that, end up being the worst people. The person that’s the first to jump on anybody and bring them to the witch trial, they’re always the loudest. They’re overcompensating for having a lack of rational thought.” **“Nights Like These”** “It’s got a nasty East Coast kind of groove on top of fucking pulverizing guitar riffing. I wrote a good amount of the lyrics while we were on tour and feeling lucky that we get to do what we do. I get to spend time with some of my closest friends, and we get to play music and spread our wings a bit. And we get to share that feeling with new people and watch them have fun every night. It’s really fulfilling.” **“Who’s Having Fun?”** “I think that everybody thought that this was what the whole record was going to sound like. I love this song, but we only wrote one because that’s all we wanted to do. The guitar gets to open up and kind of tap into some heavy metal shred moments with a fuck-ton of pinches on this one. I feel like we dipped our toe into this world when we did the Descendents cover on the last record, and while some people maybe thought we were going to ditch our sound for this, we feel like we just unlocked a new door.” **“Darkest Days”** “This is one of the first songs where I needed help trying to figure out cadences and stuff. When the music was done, it was just me and the producer in the studio, and he was laying on the floor, and we were just kind of freestyling and trying to figure out a cool little flow. We just kind of let it happen, and I ended up writing about the yin and yang of life. If you’ve never experienced really dark and tough moments in life, you might not appreciate the other end of it. People who come from a more fortunate background sometimes don’t appreciate what they have because they’ve never experienced the other side.” **“Until Next Time...”** “This started off as a guitar riff that was really heavy-metal-sounding, and I wasn’t sure how to make it work. But then we wrote this dope, kind of groovy Madball-type chorus and it got really fun. I didn’t have lyrics for it until we got into the studio, and it became kind of like breaking the fourth wall. I was thinking of the end of an old TV show, where it’s like, ‘OK, signing off here. Until next time!’ It’s almost kind of like parting advice, so we all contributed. In one verse, we paid homage to ‘We’re Coming Back’ by Cock Sparrer, which has a lyric that goes, ‘Remember, you’ve got a friend. You’ll never walk alone again.’ That’s a song I’d want playing if I was going into battle.”

Sam Gellaitry has spent most of his life thinking about what his debut should sound like. “I’ve been making this album for pretty much 28 years,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. It’s not far from the truth: Since uploading his first tracks as a teenager from Stirling, the Scottish producer, singer, and songwriter has experimented across future beats, house, funk, and pop—a jazz record was even considered at one point—following his creative impulses wherever (and whenever) they called. “I guess that’s why it kind of took this long, because I was jumping around,” he admits. “I have that kind of creative scatterbrain. This is the first time I’ve been very thematic and calculated about the sonics. My other projects have not stuck to one genre. The challenge of this album was to stick to one.” *ANYWHERE HERE IS PERFECT* feels like Gellaitry expanded the bright, prismatic world of his 2021 hit “Assumptions” (which, serendipitously, resurfaced in a viral moment just months before the project announcement) into an album. It pairs funky dance-floor grooves with sparkling synth-pop and runs them through a retro filter. Songs like “START UP A RUMOUR” and “CURIOUS” beam with the French-house sheen of Daft Punk, while “LOVE ON ME” recalls George Michael in its earnest, exuberant sparkle. Elsewhere, swirling synths, noodly guitar riffs, and digitized vocal harmonies add playful hues and textures. And yes, there are even a few beat switch-ups to scratch that scatterbrain itch. The album is as much a personal evolution as it is creative. Across 12 songs, Gellaitry navigates the highs and lows of love with the kind of directness that makes every feeling hit harder. “LIGHTNING,” with its walloping drums and marching-band fervor, captures the intense rush of infatuation when meeting someone new, while “DANGER!” reignites the spark of an old flame. Pushing through relationship paranoia (“ON&ON”), quiet reckoning (“CLOUDS”), and the jagged wounds of past pain (“SCAR / A NEW VOID”), he finds euphoric catharsis in “YOU MIGHT FIND THE ONE.” Gellaitry’s rainbow palette is informed in part by his synesthesia, but he also sees it as a reflection of his Scottish roots, nodding to the country’s cultural exports like happy hardcore and Calvin Harris. “We’ve got so much beautiful nature, but if you’re in a city, like Glasgow, it is a bit gray,” he says. “I feel like a lot of the sounds that come from there are basically painting over the gray. Maybe we’re filling that void that we’re not getting enough sunlight.”

There are just four songs featured on the second-ever EP from Kings of Leon, aptly titled *EP #2*, but the family Followill still manages to cover a lot of ground in a short space of time. Thematically, “To Space” finds the alt-rock group flirting with the idea of taking a political stance, and “The Wolf” tiptoes even closer to the line, but with lyrics couched in trademark nebulosity, the listener’s invited to extract (or indeed, project) their own meaning. Sonically, however, the Grammy-winning four-piece is more comfortable making a statement: distorted chords muddy the jaunty rhythm of opening track “All the Little Sheep,” while “Pit to the Rind” makes sparing use of instrumentation, punctuating singer/guitarist Caleb Followill’s plaintive vocals with reverberating guitar. As the first step down a wholly new road for Kings of Leon—self-produced, independently released—*EP #2* serves as an intriguing glimpse ahead at their future direction.